Eighty deputies set out from Versailles to announce the making of peace to the Capital; illuminations followed. M. de La Fayette[335] was made Commandant of the National Guard, M. Bailly[336], Mayor of Paris: I never knew the poor but respectable scholar, save through his misfortunes. Revolutions possess men for each of their several periods; some follow these revolutions to their finish, others commence but do not complete them. A general dispersal ensued; the courtiers left for Bâle, Lausanne, Luxemburg, and Brussels. Madame de Polignac[337] in her flight met M. Necker returning. The Comte d'Artois, his sons[338], the three Condés[339] emigrated, drawing after them the higher clergy and a portion of the nobility. The officers of the army, threatened by their mutinous soldiers, yielded to the torrent which drifted them down its stream. Louis XVI. alone remained behind to face the nation with his two children and a few women: the Queen, "Mesdames[340]," and Madame Élisabeth[341]. "Monsieur[342]," who stayed until the flight to Varennes, was of no great assistance to his brother: although, by declaring himself in the Assembly of Notables in favour of the vote by heads, he had decided the fate of the Revolution, the Revolution distrusted him; he, Monsieur, disliked the King, did not understand the Queen, and was not loved by them. Louis XVI. went to the Hôtel de Ville on the 17th: a hundred thousand men, armed like the monks of the League, received him. He was harangued by Messrs. Bailly, Moreau de Saint-Méry[343], and Lally-Tolendal[344], all of whom wept: the last has remained subject to tears. The King broke down in his turn; he fixed an enormous tricolour cockade on his hat; he was then and there declared to be "an honest man, Father of the French, King of a free people," while the said people was preparing, by virtue of its liberty, to lay low the head of that honest man, its father and its King. [Sidenote: First revolutionary horrors.] A few days after this reconciliation, I was at the windows of my lodgings with my sisters and some Bretons; we heard cries of "Shut the doors, shut the doors!" A troop of tatterdemalions approached from one end of the street; from the midst of this troop rose two standards which we could not see clearly at that distance. As they came nearer, we distinguished two dishevelled and disfigured heads, which the forerunners of Marat[345] were carrying, each at the end of a pike: they were the heads of Messrs. Foullon and Bertier[346]. The others all drew back from the windows; I remained. The assassins stopped in front of me, stretched the pikes towards me, singing, capering, jumping up in order to bring the pale effigies nearer to my face. One eye in one of these heads had started from its socket, and fell upon the dead man's lurid face; the pike projected through the open mouth, the teeth of which bit upon the iron.