184 BAILLY. 
hundred sacks of flour had arrived at Poissy, I imme- 
diately despatched a hundred wagons from Paris to 
fetch them. And behold, in the evening, an officer with- 
out powers and without orders, related before me, that 
having met some wagons on the Poissy road, he made 
them go back, because he did not think that there was a 
wharf for any loaded barge on the Seine. It would be 
difficult for me to describe the despair and the anger 
into which this recital threw me. We were obliged to 
put sentinels at the bakers’ doors!” 
The despair and the anger of Bailly were very natural. 
Even now, after more than half a century, no one thinks 
without a shudder of that obscure individual who, from 
not believing that a loaded barge could get up to Poissy, 
was going, on the 21st August, 1789, to plunge the capi- 
tal into bloody disorders. 
By means of perseverance, devotedness, and courage, 
Bailly succeeded in overcoming all the difficulties that — 
the real scarcity, and the fictitious one, which was still 
more redoubtable, caused daily to arise. He succeeded, 
but his health from that epoch was deeply injured; his 
mind had undergone several of those severe shocks that 
we can never entirely recover from. Our colleague 
said, “when I used to pass the bakers’ shops during the 
scarcity, and saw them besieged by a crowd, my heart 
sunk within me; and even now that abundance has been 
restored to us, the sight of one of those shops strikes me 
with a deep emotion.” 
The administrative conflicts, the source of which lay 
in the very bosom of the Council of the Commune, daily 
drew from Bailly the following exclamation, a faithful 
image of his mind: J have ceased to be happy. The 
embarrassments that proceeded from external sources 
