2 Fred Morrozv Fling 



be rejected as a whole on the ground that they were written 

 a longer or shorter time after the events described, and, as the 

 writer relied upon his memory and as his memory after such a 

 lapse of time would certainly play him false, little that he wrote 

 could be trustworthy. It is true that these conditions are not 

 favorable to the making of the best kind of a historical record, 

 but what effect the conditions have had upon the making of a 

 particular record can not be told until it has been carefully criti- 

 cised. The results of the criticism may be negative, but at least 

 we shall know definitely why the record is worthless. 



Of all the contemporary accounts of the first months of the 

 revolution no one has been more frequently used by historians 

 than the Memoires de Bailly, and yet no detailed criticism of 

 this work has ever been published. In its most common form, 

 it is in three volumes, only the first two, however, having been 

 written by Bailly. The third volume, bearing the title Extrait 

 des notes inedites de feu M. . . . inembre de I'Assemhlee 

 constituante, is anonymous, but was attributed by M. Tourneux 

 to Camus. I have shown elsewhere^ that the volume is a for- 

 gery, being a composite of extracts taken from the Courrier de 

 Provence, the Point du jour, and Les revolutions de Paris. 



The first two volumes were undoubtedly written by Bailly. 

 Some years ago, M. Brette advanced the theory that the work 

 as we have it now was not entirely written by Bailly. "It can 

 not be doubted," he said, "that Bailly left notes, perhaps a jour- 

 nal; disrespectful editors have reduced what was a reliable rec- 

 ord to the form of a historical romance. The Memoires de Bailly, 

 in our opinion, do not constitute a foundation for serious inves- 

 tigations ; we shall cite them only to show, by incontestable tes- 

 timony, the errors that they contain."^ The unsoundness of this 

 criticism was pointed out. by M. Flammermont, who called at- 

 tention to the fact that "the printed text conforms to the original 

 manuscript that still exists."^ The manuscript is in the library 



^La revolution frangaise, Nov. 14, 1902, (/ne pi^ce fabt'iqute: le troisi- 

 ime volume des Mhnoires de Bailly. 



^Ibid., XX, p. 13, La stance royale du 22 juin i^Sg. 



* Flammermont, J. La jourti^e du i^juillet i^Sg, -p, CISK. 



332 



