This letter of Lafayette’s fell at the very moment when the king, having dismissed his liberal ministry, chose to oppose his formal veto to the two measures wherein the parliament was most in sympathy with the populace--the decree against the non-juring clergy and the decree for forming a great camp of volunteers. The reply of Paris to both was the huge and peaceable, but very menacing, rising which is called “the Day of the twentieth of June.” For hour after hour the radical masses poured through the king’s palace; blood was not shed, and no actual insult was offered, but, to use a military metaphor, Paris had proved itself capable of mobilization in those hours, and armed conflict between it and the court seemed as near and as inevitable as would armed conflict between two regular forces mobilized and in contact upon the field. A courier to the frontier, leaving Paris upon the morning of the twenty-first, would normally reach the ultimate posts of the army late upon the twenty-second; but Lafayette, at this moment always an active and even officious commanding officer, was passing from post to post. The news of the insurrection did not reach him in the camp outside Maubeuge, where was for the moment his station, but at Bavay, an hour or two off to the west. Lafayette never acted with a Gallic fugue, though often with a reasonable promptitude. He did not, as legend will have it, take horse and make for Paris, booted and spurred. He communed with himself for some hours before arriving at any decision, and then took, with no particular rapidity, the road for Paris. He did not, as legend will again have it, dash into the Assembly, splashed and sweating, at the end of a hot ride; on the contrary, he first carefully visited and sounded those authorities in the capital who were in sympathy with his views, and not until the twenty-eighth did he present himself at the bar of the Assembly; the excitement was already a week old. When he did appear before the parliament thus in person, it was with singular effect. A majority, challenged by Guadet, refused to condemn him for leaving the army without permission; he again urged the parliament by voice and presence, as he had formerly urged it by letter, to suppress the popular societies and especially the democratic focus of the Jacobins. He was applauded as he walked past the members after his speech; and it seemed for a moment as though this dramatic, but not theatrical, intervention had achieved something.