The reference to the King reminds us of the other great event of 1791 that prepared the way for the Terror. With religious conscientiousness, but political folly, the King had tried to leave the Tuileries for the purpose of making his Pâques at Saint-Cloud. Lafayette was willing; but the Jacobins saw, in long perspective, a flight over the frontier and an Austrian invasion. There was another fatal conflict of mob and authority, and victory for the mob. On the following day the Department of Paris sent a letter of censure to the King for his impolitic attempt. M. Belloc says the letter has been imputed to Danton, but was really written by Talleyrand. He is quite right, as Talleyrand says in his letter to the Convention from London (December 12th, 1792), that he “redacted this famous address of the Department,” and, in fact, took it himself to the King: not impossibly using the opportunity to gild the pill. But the brain of Louis XVI was not likely to be the only one to remain unintoxicated in such times. Indeed, calm political wisdom, looking back now from placid studies, is at a loss to determine the move he ought to have taken. A royalist plot, an unguarded door, and he was off on the night of June 20th for Metz.[19] On the evening of the 26th Talleyrand saw the sad return again through the lane of some hundred thousand faces, not now cheering, not frigidly silent, but surly and menacing. For a time the increased danger rallied the constitutionalists. They had left the Jacobin club, and met at the Feuillants, where all that was left of moderation and constitutionalism now gathered. But the ancient homes of the Dominicans (Jacobins) and the Franciscans (Cordeliers) had become furnaces, heating Paris. The party on the extreme Left had found a “new fact” to proceed on. Talleyrand’s speech of May 7th had been loudly applauded and placarded[20] over Paris and the provinces. Evidently the situation was then far from hopeless. But this pardonable madness—unpardonable only in its stupid details and blunders—of the King had wrought terrible mischief. Paris rose, and Lafayette crushed it, and made it a more bitter enemy than ever of constitutionalism, more accessible to the new Dominicans and Franciscans—Danton, Marat, Desmoulins, Pétion, Robespierre, and the rest.