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 The First French Republic 429 to the hall where the National Assembly met, declaring that their king was in there and that Louis XVI might go where he pleased. Then the people became curious to visit the apartments vacated by the royal family; they traversed them all, and we questioned the sentinels we found there, " Where, and how, could he have escaped? How could this fat royal per- son, who complained of the meanness of his lodging, manage to make himself invisible to the sentries, — he whose girth would stop up any passage? " The soldiers of the guard had nothing to say to this. We insisted : " This flight is not natural ; your commanders must have been in the plot, . . . for while you were at your post Louis XVI left his with- out your knowing it and yet passing close to you." These reflections, which naturally suggested themselves, account for the reception which made Lafayette pale when he appeared in the Place de Greve and passed along the quays. He took refuge in the National Assembly, where he made some confessions that did little to restore him to popu- lar favor. Far from being "famished for a glimpse of the king," the people proved, by the way in which they took the escape of Louis XVI, that they were sick of the throne and tired of paying for it. If they had known, moreover, that Louis XVI, in his message, which was just then being read in the National Assembly, complained " that he had not been able to find in the palace of the Tuileries the most simple con- veniences of life," the people might have been roused to some excess ; but they knew their own strength and did not permit themselves any of those little exhibitions of ven- geance which are natural to irritated weakness. They contented themselves with making sport, in their Conduct of own way, of royalty and of the man who was invested with the P°P ulac e Til. / t 1. r i m the royal it. I he portrait of the king was taken down from its place apartments. of honor and hung on the door. A fruit woman took pos- session of Antoinette's bed and used it to display her cher- ries, saying, " It 's the nation's turn now to be comfortable." A young girl refused to let them put the queen's bonnet on