From this condition he was to be relieved, and the arrangements for the discharge of his debts, and the securing to him the enjoyment of a sufficient though by no means excessive income, were intrusted to Marie Antoinette by the king, and by her to her almoner, M.de Fontanges, who, when Lomenie de Brienne was promoted to the archbishopric of Sens, had succeeded him at Toulouse.

The archbishop, who was sincerely devoted to his royal mistress, carried out the necessary arrangements with great skill, but they could not be managed with such secrecy as entirely to escape notice.

Among the clubs which had been set on foot at the beginning of the previous year the most violent had been that known as the Breton Club, from being founded by some of the deputies from the great province of Brittany; but, when the court removed to Paris, and the Assembly was established in a large building close to the garden of the Tuileries, the Bretons obtained the use of an apartment in an old convent of Dominican or Jacobin friars (as they were called), the same which two centuries before had been the council-room of the League, and they changed their own designation also, and called themselves the Jacobins; and, canceling the rule which limited the right of membership to deputies, they now admitted every one who, by application for election, avowed his adherence to their principles.

Their leaders at this time were Barnave; a young noble named Alexander Lameth, whose mother, having been left in necessitous circumstances, owed to the bounty of the king and queen the means of educating her children, a benefit which they repaid with the most unremitting hostility to the whole royal family; and a lawyer named Duport.

Mirabeau was in the habit of ridiculing them as the triumvirate; but they were crafty and unscrupulous men, skillful in procuring information; and, having obtained intelligence of his negotiations with the court, they retaliated on him by hiring pamphleteers and journalists to attack him, and narratives of the treason of the Count de Mirabeau were hawked about the streets.
To apply such language to the adherence of a French noble to the crown was the most open avowal of disloyalty on which the revolutionary party had yet ventured; and in the next four weeks it received a practical development in a series of measures, some of which were so ridiculous as only to deserve notice from the additional evidence which they furnished of the extreme folly of those who now had the lead in the Assembly, and of the strange excitement in which the whole nation, or at least the whole population of Paris, must have been wrought up before they could mistake their acts for those of sagacity or patriotism; but others of which, though not less unwise, were of greater importance as being irrevocable steps in the downward course of destruction along which the whole country was being dragged.
The leaders of the revolutionary party had already selected two days in the past year as especially memorable for the triumphs won over the crown: one was the 20th of June, on which, in the Tennis Court at Versailles, the members of the Assembly had bound themselves to effect the regeneration of the kingdom; the other the 14th of July, on which, as they boasted, they had forever established freedom by the destruction of the Bastile; and they determined this year to celebrate both these anniversaries in a becoming manner.