The assembly, on hearing of the king's arrest, sent to him, as commissioners, three of its members, Pétion, Latour-Maubourg, and Barnave. They met the royal family at Epernay and returned with them. It was during this journey, that Barnave, touched by the good sense of Louis XVI., the fascinations of Marie Antoinette, and the fate of this fallen family, conceived for it an earnest interest. From that day he gave it his assiduous counsel and support. On reaching Paris the royal party passed through an immense crowd, which expressed neither applause nor murmurs, but observed a reproachful silence. The king was provisionally suspended: he had had a guard set over him, as had the queen; and commissioners were appointed to question him. Agitation pervaded all parties. Some desired to retain the king on the throne, notwithstanding his flight; others maintained, that he had abdicated by condemning, in a manifesto addressed to the French on his departure, both the revolution, and the acts which had emanated from him during that period, which he termed a time of captivity. The republican party now began to appear. Hitherto it had remained either dependent or hidden, because it had been without any existence of its own, or because it wanted a pretext for displaying itself. The struggle, which lay at first between the assembly and the court, then between the constitutionalists and the aristocrats, and latterly among the constitutionalists themselves, was now about to commence between the constitutionalists and the republicans. In times of revolution such is the inevitable course of events. The partisans of the order newly established then met and renounced differences of opinion which were detrimental to their cause, even while the assembly was all powerful, but which had become highly perilous, now that the emigration party threatened it on the one hand, and the multitude on the other. Mirabeau was no more. The Centre, on which this powerful man had relied, and which constituted the least ambitious portion of the assembly, the most attached to principles, might by joining the Lameths, re-establish Louis XVI. and constitutional monarchy, and present a formidable opposition to the popular ebullition.