Thus, although law by now,
it was a law that no one troubled just yet to enforce.
That, however, is by the way. The time, as I have said, was
September, the day dull and showery, and some of the damp and gloom
of it seemed to have penetrated the long Hall of the Manege, where
on their eight rows of green benches elliptically arranged in
ascending tiers about the space known as La Piste, sat some eight
or nine hundred of the representatives of the three orders that
composed the nation.
The matter under debate by the constitution-builders was whether
the deliberating body to succeed the Constituent Assembly should
work in conjunction with the King, whether it should be periodic
or permanent, whether it should govern by two chambers or by one.
The Abbe Maury, son of a cobbler, and therefore in these days of
antitheses orator-in-chief of the party of the Right - the Blacks,
as those who fought Privilege's losing battles were known - was in
the tribune. He appeared to be urging the adoption of a
two-chambers system framed on the English model.
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