Bailly, one of the grand agents of paper
circulation, lets you into the nature of this relief. His speech to the
National Assembly contained a high and labored panegyric on the
inhabitants of Paris, for the constancy and unbroken resolution with
which they have borne their distress and misery. A fine picture of
public felicity! What! great courage and unconquerable firmness of mind
to endure benefits and sustain redress? One would think, from the speech
of this learned lord mayor, that the Parisians, for this twelvemonth
past, had been suffering the straits of some dreadful blockade,--that
Henry the Fourth had been stopping up the avenues to their supply, and
Sully thundering with his ordnance at the gates of Paris,--when in
reality they are besieged by no other enemies than their own madness and
folly, their own credulity and perverseness. But M. Bailly will sooner
thaw the eternal ice of his Atlantic regions than restore the central
heat to Paris, whilst it remains "smitten with the cold, dry, petrific
mace" of a false and unfeeling philosophy. Some time after this speech,
that is, on the thirteenth of last August, the same magistrate, giving
an account of his government at the bar of the same Assembly, expresses
himself as follows:--"In the month of July, 1789," (the period of
everlasting commemoration,) "the finances of the city of Paris were
_yet_ in good order; the expenditure was counterbalanced by the receipt,
and she had at that time a million [forty thousand pounds sterling] in
bank.
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