1 6 Fred Morrow Fling 



of the Feuillants — have not been preserved, Bailly's account of 

 the meeting is valuable. 



The general assembly of the representatives of the districts 

 for the election of the representatives of the Third Estate for 

 Paris is dealt with in the pages 13-68. Pages 13-17, inclusive, 

 contain a brief account of the meeting of the electors of the 

 Third Estate at the Hotel de Ville for the purpose of ascertain- 

 ing if the districts had all elected representatives and for the 

 additional purpose of depositing the records of the elections, and 

 an account of the meeting of the three estates in the great hall 

 of the archbishopric for the opening ceremonies. These pages 

 are evidently written from memory and contain several inter- 

 esting episodes that might well be useful to the historian of the 

 elections of Paris. The account of the proceedings of the elect- 

 ors of the Third Estate is full of detail, contains much quoted 

 matter, and clearly could not have been written from memory. 

 A hint of the source is found in the footnote on page 23 re- 

 ferring to the Proccs-verhal dcs clcctcurs. A comparison of 

 Bailly's narrative with the original record shows that his fifty 

 pages are a condensation of the first eighty-four pages of the 

 Proccs-verbal, together with extracts from the cahier^ of- the 

 Third Estate, one incident drawn from the Journal de Paris of 

 May 20, and some important personal recollections. The work 

 is very carefully done, and the account that Bailly gives, al- 

 though briefer, is thoroughly reliable. The dependence of his 

 text upon the Proccs-verhal is much closer than would be im- 

 agined from the reading of the Menioires; he frequently uses 

 the exact language of the original without indicating it in any 

 way.^ Perhaps he felt justified in doing so as he was the secre- 

 tary of the assembly and was only utilizing the record that he 

 himself had made. It would be a mistake to suppose, however, 

 .that the existence of the original Proccs-verhal renders the use 



iThe cahier was easily accessible to him, having been printed among the 

 documents in the third volume of the Proces-verbal d s eiecteurs. 



'''Quotation marks, as a rule, are used when a speech or document is in- 

 troduced into the text. The only way to appreciate the dependence of 



30 



