It was on the thirteenth of June, I say, that this grave act was accomplished and that the final resistance of Louis and his wife to the Revolution was undertaken. This premature act on the part of the monarchy, of itself a rupture with the popular forces of Paris, was suddenly given a new and much more violent complexion, by the decision which Lafayette, at the head of his frontier army, awaiting the invader, took when he heard of it. It was on the thirteenth of June, I say, that the king so acted; the news of it reached the army on the fifteenth; on the sixteenth Lafayette wrote his famous letter to the parliament, denouncing the Jacobin Club, which was, so to speak, the Headquarters-staff of the new popular movement against the foreign intrigues of the crown. Parliament was seized of that letter and debated it on the eighteenth, and parliament, as “constitutional” in its mediocre and null professional mediocrity as the parliaments of a time of peace must always be, approved of Lafayette’s intervention. Here let the reader pause to appreciate how decisive Lafayette’s move was bound to be. Let him remember that the future, known to us, was unknown to the men of that time; that their past alone was known to them. Let him recall how widely circulated--more circulated than the name of any other man at that moment--was the name [Illustration: CARTOON OF THE THREE ORDERS (THE CLERGY, NOBILITY, AND COMMONS) IN THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY FORGING THE NEW CONSTITUTION _To face p. 139_ ] of Lafayette; let him appreciate the reputation for integrity which he had enjoyed with the mass of the nation, and the consequent trust which they had therefore justly placed in his liberal principles; let him further see the foreign forces, a hundred thousand strong, marching, at last, against the French, and the nominal head of the French state in league with them; let him retain the master-point that Lafayette was the military chief; finally let him not forget that a French army is to the French, as a Roman army was to the Romans, the most living thing in the nation, the most vital of its organs,--it is an essential point,--and he will perceive what an enormous business must have arisen, and did arise, about this letter. It was virtually a pronunciamento. Lafayette talked of “his brave soldiers.” A note of menace ran throughout the document, and it was this which kept the parliament, despite its sympathy with the constitutional policy and its dread of a popular rebellion, doubtful as to its vote. At first it decreed the printing of the letter and its distribution; then Guadet, eloquent and merciless, changed that attitude by a speech. The Assembly referred the letter to a committee, and Robespierre that night roused the Jacobins.