Such were they, afterwards to be known respectively as "the pock-marked Thunderer" and the "sea-green Incorruptible" of the Revolution. The slight, fox-like man had got himself elected to the States-General which in May, 1789, convened at Versailles to take up the troubled state of the country, whilst the lion-like and fiery Danton was the president of the Cordeliers electoral district of Paris--the head of a popular faubourg faction, not yet of power in the State. The new helmsmen of the State, headed by Mirabeau, steered with considerable success among waters as yet but partly roiled. At Versailles an outward and visible Liberalism triumphed. The Third Estate or Commons, consolidating its authority as a permanent assembly, took measures to end the national bankruptcy and tried to cope with the awful menace of starvation. It was a bourgeois body, thinly sprinkled with members of the nobility and clergy; its aim, to abolish the worst seigniorial abuses, restore prosperity, and support the throne by a system of constitutional guarantees. But when the Storm broke, it was not at Versailles where these lawgiving Six Hundred debated the state of the Nation, but at Paris that the group known as "Friends of the People" lashed the popular discontents to unmeasured and ungovernable fury. It begins in the Palais Royal where "there has been erected, apparently by subscription, a kind of Wooden Tent, most convenient--where select Patriotism can now redact resolutions, deliver harangues, with comfort, let the weather be as it will. Lively is that Satan-at-Home! On his table, on his chair, in every cafe, stands a patriotic orator; a crowd round him within; a crowd listening from without, open-mouthed, through open door and window; with 'thunders of applause for every sentiment of more than common hardiness.'" Strange that in a Royalist garden should sprout the seeds of a great Revolution! Stranger the crowds that gathered there, and the leaders both popular and Royalist--among the former, our fiery friend Danton, our cautious, snuffling Robespierre, and the boy of genius Camille Desmoulins, Danton's "slight-built comrade and craft-brother, he with the long curling locks, with the face of dingy blackguardism, wondrously irradiated with genius!" General Lafayette and Minister from America Thomas Jefferson came there too now and again, to watch the crowds and hear the speeches. Symbols of America's newly won freedom, they were objects of almost superstitious veneration to the agitators for an enfranchised France. Danton, Desmoulins and the rest crowded around them, eager to shake their hands and listen to their comments. In particular, Lafayette's sword--the gift of the American Congress a decade before, excited their admiration.