Meeting of the Estates-General, 1789. 123 
fever had seized them. This public inclination toward revolt 
was pushed to the point that two or three days of such madness 
would have produced, without fail, a violent crisis, the effects of 
which necessarily would have been fatal to the royal authority. 
In the squares and on the streets, one sees only crowds of people 
assembled, talking of the Estates-general; the words Third Estate 
and the Nation are heard constantly and form everywhere a 
deafening echo. Baggage carriers, shopboys, fishwives even 
take part in these conversations; in all the stores, clerks neglect 
customers to concern themselves with public affairs; finally the 
words ‘Third Estate’ become a war cry and all the speeches 
that are heard are those of men capable of anything, if the 
nobility and clergy persist in their determinations.” 
A member of the nobility who evidently spent much time in 
Paris, said that he would not be surprised to see a St. Bartholo- 
mew of the nobility and clergy; that he had heard with his own 
ears, an orator in the Palais Royal advise this.!2. Other con- 
temporaries made reference to the fear of a wholesale massacre 
of the upper orders." Ferriéres, writing, to be sure, long after- 
ward, said it was current rumor that the members of the majority 
of the nobility were to be murdered, and that the day for the 
massacre had been designated. 
Maleissye, an officer of the French guards, in speaking of 
conditions at the Palais Royal, evidently at this time, states 
that he heard a man, mounted upon a table at the doorway of 
the Café du Caveau say: “‘My opinion is that the king should be 
shut up in a convent, the queen at the Salpetriére; as to Monsieur 
and the Comte d’Artois, since they are badly educated children, 
it is necessary to send them to Bicétre and if, at the end of six 
months, they have not reformed, we will see then what it will 
12 Correspondance d’un député ... avec la Marquise de Crequy. Docu- 
ments tnédits, Revue de la rév., II, 35. 
13 Mercy to Joseph II, Letter of July 4, 1789 published by Arneth and 
Flammermont, Correspondance secréte du Comte de Mercy-Argenteau avec 
L’empereur Joseph II et le Prince de Kaunitz, 11, 252; Bulletin d’un agent secret, 
La révolution frangaise, XIII, 546; Mounier, II, 5. The latter states: ‘‘ Les 
factieux faisaient proposer, au milieu des attroupemens qui se formaient au 
Palais Royal, l’assassinat de ceux qu’ils appelaient les ennemis de la liberté.” 
14 Ferriéres, I, 6. 
237 
