He found himself strangely out of his element when he took his seat in the National Assembly. Perhaps no more reactionary body had ever met in France. The majority of the members were thorough-going Conservatives who at heart were eager to restore the monarchy. They were royalists but slightly disguised, dug up out of their seclusion, from all parts of the country, who thought their time had come to revenge themselves not so much upon the Buonapartists who had governed France for twenty years as upon Paris and the Parisians who had chased Charles X and Louis Philippe out of France. They well knew that the capital would never consent to the restoration of the candidate of either of the Bourbon factions. These fitting champions of a worn-out Legitimism or Orleanism were old men in a hurry to resuscitate the dead and galvanise the past into fresh life. Their very heads betrayed their own antiquity. So much so that a favourite pastime of young ladies of pleasure in the Galleries, who had flocked to Bordeaux, was what was irreverently called "bald-headed loo." This consisted in betting upon the number of flies that would settle within a given period upon a devoted deputy's hairless occiput. Unfortunately these ancient gentlemen found in M. Thiers a leader who could scarcely have been surpassed for ingenuity and unscrupulousness. He deliberately traded upon prejudices, and his main political assets were the fear and distrust which he awakened in one set of his countrymen against another. In modern as in ancient society there is an economic and almost a personal antagonism between country and town.