— 
Meeting of the Estates-General, 1789. 193 
[June 30] they will recommence business, voting by persons on 
all questions; and whatever difficulties may be opposed in debate 
by the malcontents of the clergy and nobility, everything must 
finally be settled at the will of the Tiers. It remains to be seen 
whether they will leave to the nobility anything but their titulary 
appellations.’’>* 
The day after flies reunion, June 28, Dorset stressed the un- 
happy position of the French nobility:*! ‘Nothing can equal 
the despondency of the nobility upon this occasion, forced as they 
have been, by an extraordinary and unexpected impulse to sacri- 
fice in one moment every hope they had formed and the very 
principles from which they had resolved and flattered themselves 
that no consideration whatever should oblige them to depart.’ 
Arthur Young, who clearly comprehended what the ultimate 
result of this union was to be, states of the attitude of the upper 
orders: ‘I have today had conversation with many persons on 
this business; and to my amazement, there is an idea, and even 
among many of the nobility, that this union of the orders is 
only for the verification of their powers and for making the 
constitution, which is a new term they have adopted; and which 
they use as if a constitution was a pudding to be made by a 
receipt.’’=2 In general, the indications are that the deputies of 
the upper orders regarded the union or, perhaps, pretended to 
regard it, as but a a expedient to facilitate matters of 
procedure. 
On the other hand, some of the deputies of the third estate 
themselves feared that the union might prove disastrous to 
them. Biauzat saw in it the possibility of various difficulties 
for the national assembly. He suspected that those hostile to 
the public welfare wished the orders to be organized as an estates- 
general that ‘‘they might with facility interrupt all work by the 
disunion of a single one of the orders,’ thereby plunging the 
third estate anew into all the difficulties from which their or- 
ganization as national assembly had rescued them. He feared 
also that the statement in the king’s letter, touching imperative 
80 Jefferson, II, 489. : 
31 Dorset, I, 227. 
22 Young, 183. 
397 
