the time for it. Necker had not the acuteness to
understand that he would be dismissed as soon as his enemies felt
strong enough to do without him. A king who deserted his friends and
reversed his accepted policy because there was no force he could
depend on, was a king with a short shrift before him. He became the
tool of men who did not love him, and who now despised him.

The resources wanting at the critical moment were, however, within
reach, and the scheme proposed to the Count d'Artois by the wily
bishop a few nights before was revived by less accomplished plotters.
On July 1 it became known that a camp of 25,000 men was to be formed
near Versailles under Marshal de Broglie, a veteran who gathered his
laurels in the Seven Years' War, and soon the Terrace was crowded with
officers from the north and east, who boasted that they had sharpened
their sabres, and meant to make short work of the ambitious lawyers,
the profligate noblemen, and unfrocked priests who were ruining the
country.

In adopting these measures the king did not regard himself as the
originator of violence. There had been disturbances in Paris, and at
Versailles the archbishop of Paris had been assaulted, and compelled
to promise that he would go over to the Assembly. The leader on the
other side, Champion de Cice, archbishop of Bordeaux, came to him, and
entreated him not to yield to faction, not to keep a promise extorted
by threats. He replied that he had given his word and meant to keep
it.

Forty years later Charles X. declared that his brother had mounted the
scaffold because, at this juncture, he would not mount his horse. In
truth Lewis believed that the deputies, cut off from Paris by visible
battalions, would be overawed, that the army of waverers would be
accessible to influence, to promises, remonstrances, and rewards, that
it would be safer to coerce the Assembly by intimidation than to
dissolve it. He had refused to listen to Talleyrand; he still rejected
the stronger part of his scheme. By judicious management he hoped that
the Assembly might be brought to undo its own usurping and unwarranted
work, and that he would be able to recover the position he had taken
up on June 23, the last day on which his policy had been that of a
free agent.

Necker knew no more than everybody else of the warlike array. On July
7 thirty regiments were concentrated; more were within a few days'
march, and the marshal, surrounded by an eager and hur