Let us then bid him adieu! La Fayette, to consummate the greatest revolution that a nation ever attempted, we required a leader, whose mind was on an equality with so great an event.

We accepted you; the pliability of your features, your studied orations, your premeditated axioms--all those productions of art that nature disavows, seemed suspicious to the more clear-sighted patriots.

The boldest of them followed you, tore the mask from your visage, and cried--Citizens, this hero is but a courtier, this sage but an impostor.

Now, thanks to you, the Revolution can no longer bite, you have cut the lion's claws; the people is more formidable to its conductors; they have reassumed the whip and spur, and you fly.

Let civic crowns strew your paths, though we remain; but where shall we find a Brutus ?" XXII.
Bailly, mayor of Paris, withdrew at the same time, abandoned by that party of whom he had been the idol, and whose victim he began to be; but his philosophic mind rated more highly the good done to the people than its favour, and more ambitious of being useful than of governing it, he already testified that heroic contempt for the calumnies of his enemies he afterwards displayed for death.
His voice was, however, lost in the tumult of the approaching municipal elections; two men already disputed the dignity of mayor of Paris, for in proportion as the royal authority declined, and that of the constitution was absorbed in the troubles of the kingdom, the mayor of Paris would become the real dictator of the capital.
These two men were La Fayette and Petion.