For even the Assembly itself was a prey to tumult and violence. From the time of its assuming that title admission had been given to every one who could force his way into the chamber, whether he was a member or not; nor was any order preserved among those who thus obtained admission; but they were allowed to express their opinion of every speaker and of every speech by friendly or unfriendly clamor: a practice which, as may well be supposed, materially influenced many votes. And presently attendance for that purpose became a trade; some of the most violent deputies hiring a regularly appointed troop to take their station in the galleries, and paying them daily wages to applaud or hiss in accordance with the signs which they themselves made from the body of the hall.[1] And if the populace was thus the master of the Assembly while at Versailles, this was far more the case after its removal to Paris, where the number of the idle portion of the population furnished the Jacobins with far greater means of intimidating their adversaries. It was remarkable that La Marck himself, as has been already intimated, did not fully share the hopes which the king and queen founded on the adhesion of Mirabeau. It was not only that on one point he had sounder views than Mirabeau himself--doubting, as he did, whether the mischief which his vehement friend had formerly done could now be undone by the same person, merely because he had changed his mind--but he also felt doubts of Mirabeau's steadiness in his new path, and feared lest eagerness for popularity, or an innate levity of disposition, might still lead him astray. As he described him in a letter to Mercy, "he was sometimes very great and sometimes very little; he could be very useful, and he could be very mischievous: in a word, he was often above, and sometimes greatly below, any other man." At another time he speaks of him as "by turns imprudent through excess of confidence, and lukewarm from distrust;" and this estimate of the great demagogue, which was not very incorrect, shows, too, how high an opinion La Marck had formed of the queen's ability and force of character, for he looks to her "to put a curb on his inconstancy,[2]" trusting for that result not so much to her power of fascination as to her clearness of view and resolution.