The principal object of Marat’s tirades was the moderate town council, and especially Bailly. Moreover, the worthy astronomer was an admirable butt. He assumed a livery, and put a fine coat-of-arms on his carriage, and, while he weakly opposed the rising democracy of Paris, he was very strong in the matter of pomposity. Marat was called to the bar of the Commune to answer for these attacks upon the mayor on the 28th of September. A warrant for his arrest was made out by the Châtelet on the 6th of October, but the day was too critical for an action of police against an individual. On the 8th another warrant was sent out, and Marat fled to a hiding-place up on Montmartre, from which, like a mad prophet on a hill-top, he pamphleteered the city at his feet. His quarrels, therefore (though very different in kind) were contemporaneous with the important struggle between the Cordeliers and the Municipality which are detailed above. The two attacks began to merge in December. Marat, on the 12th of that month, was hunted out of his retreat, and brought before a lower court, but so confused were the powers of the Châtelet in this period of its reform and extinction that the prosecution was dropped. Emboldened by this failure on the part of his opponents, he came to live and print his sheet openly in the Rue des Fossés St. Germains—that is, in the midst of the district of the Cordeliers. What followed is well known. At a moment when the struggle between the district and the Hotel de Ville is at its height, just after the scene in which Danton’s deputation had protested against the mayor’s commission to the militia officers, while the insulting irony of the term “my lord” was still ringing in Bailly’s ears, and when Danton himself had been actually elected for the district, and was present in the Municipality on the point of taking the oath—when all these causes of quarrel were, so to speak, met in one date, the Moderates determined to strike. Marat was pouring out his impossible diatribes from the territory of the rebellious district, and no opportunity could be more favourable. The Châtelet issued once more the warrant for his arrest, and this time it was supported by Lafayette, who promised to lend four thousand of the National Guard.