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
Mr. 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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