The French do things themselves, a point in which they differ from the more practical nations. For instance, Macmahon, the soldier and president, used to brush his own coat every morning. Barentin, the keeper of the seals, followed all this business, but he followed it in person. From the window of a house just across the narrow way he himself overlooked through the upper windows of the tennis-court the swarm of the Commons within, and the public audience that thronged the galleries or climbed to the sills of the windows. He saw the eagerness and the resolve. He scribbled a rough note to be sent at once to Marly--a note that has come to light only in the last few years, “_Il faut couper court_.” That is, “End things up at once, or it will be too late.” * * * * * The royal session and the king’s declaration were postponed. They did not take place upon the Monday for which they were planned; they were put forward to the Tuesday, the twenty-third of June. What passed during those two days men will debate according as they are biased upon one side or the other of this great quarrel. Necker would have it in his memoirs that he was overborne by Barentin, and, as one may say, by the queen’s party; that his original compromise was made a little stronger in favour of the crown. To this change, like the weak and false man he was, he ascribed all the breakdown that followed. I do [Illustration: JEAN-SYLVAIN BAILLY, PRESIDENT OF THE COMMONS IN 1789 _To face p. 27_ ] not believe him. I think he lied. We know how he made his fortune, and we know how to contrast the whole being of a man like Necker with the whole being of a man like Barentin. Read Barentin’s notes on those same two days, and you will have little doubt that Necker lied. That he muddled things worse through the delay and through the increasing gravity of the menace to the throne is probable enough. That he showed any vision or determination or propounded any strict policy is not morally credible. The foolish document which the king was to read was drawn up wholly in Necker’s own hand, and he was wholly responsible. Now turn to Versailles upon the morning of that Tuesday, the twenty-third of June, 1789, the court having come in from Marly, and all being ready for the great occasion. Remember that in the interval the Commons had met again; the mass of the lower clergy had joined them, not by vote this time, but in person, and two archbishops and three bishops with them, and even from the nobles two men had come. It was therefore to be a set issue between the National Assembly now rapidly forming, that is, the Commons triumphant, and the awful antique authority of the crown.