22	THE REGENT.
	men and detectives were liberally scattered about the place in the interest of national probity. After the bloody days of the second and third of September when the ferocious mob of Paris broke into the prisons and massacred the un­fortunate inmates, the Government imagined that the people should no longer be trusted with the custody of the Regent. Accordingly they locked up all the crown jewels as securely as they could in the cupboards of the Garde Meu-ble and affixed the seals of the Commune most visibly thereto. Notwithstanding their precau­tions, however, the result does not seem to have justified their conclusions. On the seventeenth of the same month it fell to M. Roland, then Minister of the Interior, to make a grievous statement to the Assembly. He informed the deputies that in the course of the preceding night some desperate ruffians had broken into the Garde Meuble Nationale between two and three o'clock in the morning and had stolen