He had been
hunting on the day of the fall of the Bastille and he had shot
several deer and felt very much pleased.
The National Assembly now set to work and on the 4th of
August, with the noise of the Parisian multitude in their ears,
they abolished all privileges. This was followed on the 27th
of August by the ``Declaration of the Rights of Man,'' the
famous preamble to the first French constitution. So far so
good, but the court had apparently not yet learned its lesson.
There was a wide-spread suspicion that the king was again
trying to interfere with these reforms and as a result, on the
5th of October, there was a second riot in Paris. It spread to
Versailles and the people were not pacified until they had
brought the king back to his palace in Paris. They did not
trust him in Versailles. They liked to have him where they
could watch him and control his correspondence with his relatives
in Vienna and Madrid and the other courts of Europe.
In the Assembly meanwhile, Mirabeau, a nobleman who
had become leader of the Third Estate, was beginning to put
order into chaos. But before he could save the position of the
king he died, on the 2nd of April of the year 1791. The king,
who now began to fear for his own life, tried to escape on the
21st of June. He was recognised from his picture on a coin,
was stopped near the village of Varennes by members of the
National Guard, and was brought back to Paris,
In September of 1791, the first constitution of France was
accepted, and the members of the National Assembly went
home.
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