diatribes against forestallers, and with scurrilous attacks on Necker. He is said to have declared that within four days his own head or Necker's should roll from the scaffold, and he promised the bakers a loan of two or three millions on easier terms than those offered by the municipality. A prosecution for lèse-nation in simulating a commission from the Assembly to treat with the bakers was instituted. Rutledge applied for protection from arrest to the Cordeliers district, which afterwards sheltered Marat, but in this case it declined to interfere. The prosecution was, however, dropped, and in February 1790 he was released. In 1792 or 1793, with the same mania of delation, he was one of the persecutors of the hapless assignat superintendent Delamarche, the nervous man whom Madame Roland showed how to die by changing places with him on the scaffold. Rutledge, like other assailants of Delamarche, had been employed in numbering the assignats, and revenged the abolition of this formality by charging him with malversation. He died in March 1794, at the supposed age of forty-four.
