such festivals as these often. Repeat this one every year on April 15;
let the feast of Liberty be our spring festival; and let other civic
solemnities signalize the return of the other seasons. In former days
the people had none but those of their masters, and all that was
accomplished by them was their depravity and abasement. Give them some
that shall be their own, and that will elevate their souls, develop
their sensibilities, and fortify their courage. They {122} will
create, or, better, they have already created, a new people. Popular
festivals are the best education for the people."

Optimists, how will your illusions terminate? You who see nothing but
an idyl in all this, can not you perceive that such ceremonies are the
prelude to massacres, and that an odor of blood mingles with their
perfumes? All who took part on either side of the heated controversy
which preceded the ovation to the Swiss of Chateauvieux, will be
pursued by fate. Gouvion, who had sworn never again to set foot within
the precincts of the Assembly where the murderers of his brother
triumphed, kept his word. On the very day of that shameful session he
asked to be sent to the Army of the North, and three months later was
to be carried off by a cannon-ball. Still more melancholy was to be
the fate of Petion, who showed such complaisance toward the Swiss on
this occasion. He, once so popular that in 1791 he was asked to allow
the ninth child, which a citizeness had just presented to her country,
"to be baptized in his name, revered almost as much as that of the
Divinity"; he of whom some one said at that time, "For the same reason
which would have made Jesus a suitable mayor of Jerusalem, Petion is a
suitable mayor of Paris; there is too striking a resemblance between
them to be overlooked," was sadly to exclaim some months later: "I am
one of the most notable examples of popular inconsistency.... For a
long time I have said to myself and to my {123} friends: The people
will hate me still more than they have loved me. I can no longer
either enter or depart from the place where we hold our sessions
without being exposed to the grossest insults and the most seditious
threats. How often have I not heard them say as I was passing:
'Scoundrel! we will have your head!'"

Proscribed with the Girondins, May 31, 1793, he fled at first to
Normandy, and afterwards into the Gironde, wandering from town to town,
from field to field, and hiding