The Assembly terrorizes the Tuileries. The Jacobin Club terrorizes the Assembly. Close beside the Hall of the Manège, on the site to be occupied afterward by the market of Saint-Honoré, the revolutionary club holds its tumultuous sessions in the former convent founded in 1611 by the Jacobin, or Dominican, friars. The club meets three times a week, at seven in the evening. The hall is a long rectangle with a vaulted roof. Four rows of stalls occupy the longer sides, while the two ends serve as public galleries. Nearly in the middle of the hall, the speaker's platform and the president's writing-table stand opposite each other. Hither come all ambitious revolutionists who desire to talk, to agitate, to make themselves conspicuous. Here Robespierre lords it, not being a deputy in consequence of the law forbidding members of the { 6} Constituent Assembly to belong to the legislative body. Those who love disorder come here to seek emotions. Some find lucrative employment, applause being paid for, and the different parties having each its _claque_ in the galleries. Since April, 1791, the Jacobin Club has affiliations in two thousand French towns and villages. At its orders and in its pay is an army of agents whose business it is to make stump speeches, to sing in the streets, to make propositions in cafés, to applaud or to hiss in the galleries of the National Assembly. These hirelings usually receive about five francs a day, but as the number of the chevaliers of the revolutionary lustrum increases, the pay diminishes, until it is finally reduced to forty sous. Deserters and soldiers dismissed from their regiments for misconduct are admitted by preference.
For some days past, the Club of Moderate Revolutionists, friends of Lafayette, who might have closed the old clubs after the sanguinary repression of the riot in the Champ-de-Mars, and who contented themselves with opening a new one, have been meeting in the convent of the Feuillants, rue Saint-Honoré. But this new club has not been a great success; moderation is not the order of the day; the Jacobins have regained their empire, and on December 26, 1791, seals are placed on the door of the Club of the Feuillants.