Meeting of the Estates-General, 178 9. 159 
The remainder of the Récit is devoted to the proof of three things: 
(1) that the deliberation of Friday, June 19, which, the majority 
claimed, had never been concluded, was a perfectly regular 
procedure, in which verification of credentials by order, received 
the plurality of the vote; (2) that this deliberation had not been 
retracted by any subsequent action of the chamber of clergy; 
(3) that the assembly was justified in taking up the king’s decla- 
ration of June 23 instead of resuming the deliberation of June 19, 
which had been legally completed. 
In support of the first contention, certain fundamental laws 
of parliamentary procedure were reviewed and then applied 
to the deliberation of June 19, to show that each had been duly 
observed. In accordance with these principles, the vote had 
been legal, the count had been made in an exact manner, and the 
result had been checked by a roll-call, during which each member 
Was given an opportunity to confirm or change his vote. Minor 
changes did occur, but these were recorded exactly, since several 
members favoring verification in common had charge of this 
work. Nevertheless, the plurality still lay with the adherents 
of separate verification. Hence, the president proclaimed this 
result, thus concluding a legal deliberation which could be 
invalidated only by subsequent action of the same regularly 
convoked chamber. 
_ That no such action occurred was the next proposition demon- 
strated in the Récit. In the first place, nullification of the 
decree of June 19 could not have occurred before June 24, because 
no session of the chamber had been held between those dates. 
During that interval, the government suspended the sessions of 
all the orders to prepare the hall for the royal session. It was 
true that those who had opposed verification by order had held 
a meeting in the meantime. Such a meeting, however, was 
irregular, its decrees illegal and of no effect upon the action of the 
legitimate chamber of the clergy. In the second place, no 
deliberation contrary to that of June 19 occurred on June 24, 
when the next regular session of the clergy met. The minutes 
of the meeting quoted in the Récit clearly proved that fact. A 
large number did request that the result of the action of the 
previous Friday be stated again, before the king’s declarations 
273 
