The first step adopted by the factions of Girondists and Jacobins, who moved towards the same object side by side, though not hand in hand, was to deprive the King of a guard, assigned him by the Constitution, in lieu of his disbanded _gardes du corps_. It was, indeed, of doubtful loyalty, being partly levied from soldiers of the line, partly from the citizens, and imbued in many cases with the revolutionary spirit of the day; but they were officered by persons selected for their attachment to the King, and even their name of Guards expressed and inspired an _esprit de corps_, which might be formidable. Various causes of suspicion were alleged against this guard--that they kept in their barracks a white flag (which proved to be the ornament of a cake presented to them by the Dauphin)--that their sword-hilts were formed into the fashion of a cock, which announced some anti-revolutionary enigma--that attempts were made to alienate them from the Assembly, and fix their affections on the King. The guard contained several spies, who had taken that service for the purpose of betraying its secrets to the Jacobins. Three or four of these men, produced at the bar, affirmed much that was, and much that was not true; and amid the causes they had for distrusting the King, and their reasons for desiring to weaken him, the Assembly decreed the reduction of the Constitutional Guard. The King was with difficulty persuaded not to oppose his _veto_, and was thus left almost totally undefended to the next blast of the revolutionary tempest.[202] Every successive proceeding of the factions tended to show more strongly that the storm was speedily to arise. The invention of the Jacobins exhausted itself in proposing and adopting revolutionary measures so extravagant, that very shame prevented the Girondists from becoming parties to them. Such was the carrying the atrocious cut-throat Jourdan in triumph through the streets of Avignon, where he had piled eighty carcasses into a glacière in the course of one night.[203] A less atrocious, but no less insolent proceeding, was the feast given in honour of the regiment of Chateauvieux, whose mutiny had been put down at Nancy by M. de Bouillé, acting under the express decree of the first National Assembly.[204] In a word, understanding much better than the Brissotins the taste of the vulgar for what was most violent, gross, and exaggerated, the Jacobins purveyed for them accordingly, filled their ears with the most incredible reports, and gulled their eyes by the most absurd pageants. [Sidenote: ALARM OF THE GIRONDISTS.]