200 BAILLY. 
To decide after the blow, with so little hesitation or 
eonsideration, that Bailly ought not to have absented him- 
self from the House of the Commune, we must forget 
that, under such circumstances, the obligations of the first 
magistrate of the city were quite imperious and very 
numerous; it is requisite, above all, not to remember 
that each day, the provision of flour required for the 
nourishment of seven or eight hundred thousand inhabit- 
ants, depended on the measures adopted on the previous 
evening. M. de Crosne, who on quitting the post of 
Lieutenant of Police, had not ceased to be a citizen, was 
during some days a very enlightened and zealous coun- 
cillor for Bailly; but on the day that Foulon was ar- 
rested, this dismissed magistrate thought himself lost. 
He and his family made an appeal to the gratitude and 
humanity of our colleague. It was to procure a refuge 
for them, that Bailly employed the few hours of absence 
with which he was so much reproached: those hours dur- 
ing which that catastrophe happened which the Mayor 
could not.:have-prevented, since even the superhuman 
efforts of General Lafayette, commanding an armed force, 
proved futile. I will add, that to spare M. de Crosne an 
arbitrary arrest, the imminent danger of which alas! was 
too evident in the death of Berthier, Bailly absented him- 
self again from the Hotel de Ville on the night of the 
22d to the 23d of July, to accompany the former Lieuten- 
ant of Police to a great distance from Paris. 
There is not a more distressing spectacle than that of 
one honest man wrongfully attacking another honest man. 
Gentlemen, let us never willingly leave the satisfaction 
and the advantage of it to the wicked. 
To appreciate the actions of our predecessors with im- 
partiality and justice, it would be indispensable to keep 
