He had been laid in the grave only a fortnight, when, as if on purpose to show how utterly defenseless the king now was, the Jacobins excited the mob and the assembly to inflict greater insults on him than had been offered even by the attack on Versailles, or by any previous vote. As Easter, which was unusually late this year, approached, Louis became anxious to spend a short time in tranquillity and holy meditation; and, since the tumultuousness of the city was not very favorable for such a purpose, he resolved to pass a fortnight at St. Cloud. But when he was preparing to set out, a furious mob seized the horses and unharnessed them; the National Guards united with the rioters, refusing to obey La Fayette's orders to clear the way for the royal carriage, and the king and queen were compelled to dismount and to return to their apartments; while, a day or two afterward, the Assembly came to a vote which seemed as if designed for an express sanction of this outrage, and which ordained that the king should not be permitted ever to move more than twenty leagues from Paris. Of all the decrees which it had yet enacted, this, in some sense, may be regarded as the most monstrous. It was not only passing a penal sentence on the royal family such as in no country or age any but convicted criminals had even been subjected to, but it was an insult and an injury to every part of the kingdom except the capital, which, by an intolerable assumption, it treated as if it were the whole of France. Joseph, as has been seen, had wisely pointed out to his brother-in-law that it was one, and no unimportant part, of a sovereign's duty to visit the different provinces and chief cities of his kingdom, and Louis had in one instance acted on his advice. We have seen how gladly he was received by the citizens of Cherbourg, and what advantages they promised themselves from his having thus made himself personally acquainted with their situation and wants and prospects; and we can not doubt that other towns and cities shared this feeling, nor that it was well founded, and that the acquisition by a king of a personal knowledge of the resources and capabilities and interests of the great cities, of agriculture, manufactures, and commerce, is a benefit to the whole community; but of this every province and every city but Paris was now to be deprived. It was to be an offense to visit Rouen, or Lyons, or Bordeaux; to examine Riquet's canal or Vauban's fortifications. The king was the only person in the kingdom to whom liberty of movement was to be denied; and the peasants of every province, and the citizens of every other town, were to be refused for a single day the presence of their sovereign, whom the Parisians thus claimed a right to keep as a prisoner in their own district.