The Châtelet October Days Inquest had opened, it will be recalled, in December 1789 with a long deposition in which the journalist Pelletier previewed most of the charges that would eventually be made against Orléans, Mirabeau, and the Duport faction. However, Pelletier was only the first of almost 400 witnesses in an investigation that would grind on for seven and a half months. Thus, at the same time the Châtelet was listlessly pursuing counter-revolutionaries like Besenval, Favras, Augeard, and Saint-Priest, it was also investigating some of the most prominent leaders of the Revolution. Barring a dramatic shift in the balance of power within a National Assembly that always insisted on having final jurisdiction over its own members, there was probably never any real possibility that the Châtelet would actually be able to punish or even arrest any of these leaders. But until the Assembly finally took action to definitively quash the Châtelet's pretensions in October 1790, the October Days Inquest was always hovering in the background, posing a certain threat, and serving, as we will see, as a kind of bargaining chip that would ultimately be handed over in return for lenient treatment for those implicated in the Maillebois case.

Although its denunciation of the October 6 attack on the Versailles Château had officially triggered the Châtelet probe, the Comité des Recherches was, as we have seen, never very enthusiastic about this investigation.