Parliament continued to send deputies to Saint Germain, but the Queen was obdurate. All business was suspended; people slept in their clothes; the bourgeois hid their money. The courtiers, who had remained in their palaces, hurried away followed by their furniture; and the evil faces which appear in Paris on the eve of a revolution were seen all over the city. The wains carrying the courtiers' furniture were pillaged, and the pillagers sacked the bakeries. Parliament had seized the reins of State, but the Parliamentary sessions resembled the stormy meetings of the existing Chamber. Personal interests and the interests of the coteries had entered politics. After a deplorable day in Parliament Olivier d'Ormesson noted sadly in his journal: "The public welfare is now used only as a pretext for avenging private wrongs." Mademoiselle's feelings in regard to the events of the day were varied; they could not be wholly pleasant, for there was nothing in the revolt of the people to tempt the imagination of a personage fully convinced that the King was the deputy of God. The first Fronde was an outburst of despair provoked by an excess of public anguish. Yet Mademoiselle considered it the adventure of a party of agitators. The preceding century France had been an exceedingly rich country. Under Richelieu Monsieur had depicted it in a state of famine, and in the early days of the Regency, and later, when foreign nations were lauding Mazarin's diplomacy, the people of Paris were perishing from every form of squalid misery. The State paid out its moneys without counting them, lent at usurious interest, and gave the notes of its creditors to its note-holders, the bankers; the note-holders fell upon the debtors like brigands; the taxes were collected by armed men. Wherever the tax-gatherer had passed the land was bare, cattle, tools, carts, household furniture, and all the personal property of the victims of the State had been seized; the farmers had nothing to eat, nothing to sleep on, no shelter; they were homeless and hopeless; they had but one alternative: to go out upon the highways, and, in their turn, force a living from the passers-by at the point of the knife. Through the brigandage of the note-holders every year added a strip of abandoned ground to the waste lands of France. The nation had turned honest men into thieves and pariahs. Barillon raised his voice and the grave opened to receive him. Broussel was saved, but his salvation precipitated the catastrophe. The Queen had fled, abducting the King. The national Treasury was empty; affairs were desperate, and Parliament, its honour menaced, decided upon a measure which, had it been successfully effected, would have changed the course of French history.