pending (July 11th) that a declaration of rights was brought forward
by M. de la Fayette, and is the same which is alluded to earlier. It
was hastily drawn up, and makes only a part of the more extensive
declaration of rights agreed upon and adopted afterwards by the
National Assembly. The particular reason for bringing it forward at
this moment (M. de la Fayette has since informed me) was that, if the
National Assembly should fall in the threatened destruction that then
surrounded it, some trace of its principles might have the chance of
surviving the wreck.

Everything now was drawing to a crisis. The event was freedom or
slavery. On one side, an army of nearly thirty thousand men; on the
other, an unarmed body of citizens- for the citizens of Paris, on
whom the National Assembly must then immediately depend, were as
unarmed and as undisciplined as the citizens of London are now. The
French guards had given strong symptoms of their being attached to
the national cause; but their numbers were small, not a tenth part of
the force that Broglio commanded, and their officers were in the
interest of Broglio.

Matters being now ripe for execution, the new ministry made their
appearance in office. The reader will carry in his mind that the
Bastille was taken the 14th July; the point of time I am now speaking
of is the 12th. Immediately on the news of the change of ministry
reaching Paris, in the afternoon, all the playhouses and places of
entertainment, shops and houses, were shut up. The change of ministry
was considered as the prelude of hostilities, and the opinion was
rightly founded.

The foreign troops began to advance towards the city. The Prince de