ged neither men nor things
aright; to have heard distressed passengers saying that a pilot without
experience or prudence is responsible for the shipwreck; to have
promised the age of gold and suddenly found one's self in the age of
iron, is a veritable torture for the pride and the conscience of a
statesman. And this torture is still more cruel when to disappointment
is added the loss of a popularity laboriously acquired; when, having
been accustomed to excite nothing but enthusiasm and applause, one is
all at once greeted with criticism, howls, and curses, and when, having
long strutted about triumphantly on the summits of the Capitol, one
sees yawning before him the gulf at the foot of the Tarpeian rock.

{230}

Such was the fate of Lafayette. A few months had sufficed to throw
down the popular idol from his pedestal, and the same persons who had
once almost burned incense before him, now thought of nothing but
flinging him into the gutter. Stunned by his fall, Lafayette could not
believe it. To familiarize himself with the fickleness, the caprices,
and the inconsequence of the multitude was impossible. For him the
Constitution was the sacred ark, and he did not believe that the very
men who had constructed this edifice at such a cost had now nothing so
much at heart as to destroy it. He would not admit that the
predictions of the royalists were about to be accomplished in every
point, and still desired to hold aloof from the complicities into which
revolutions drag the most upright minds and the most honest characters.
He who, in July, 1789, had not been able to prevent the assassination
of Foulon and Berthier; who, on October 5, had marched, despite
himself, against Versailles; who, on April 18, 1791, had been unable to
protect the departure of the royal family to Saint Cloud; who, on the
following June 21, had thought himself obliged to say to the Jacobins
in their club: "I have come to rejoin you, because I think the true
patriots are here," nevertheless imagined that just a year later, all
that was necessary to vanquish the same Jacobins was for him to show
himself and say like Caesar: "_Veni, vidi, vici_."

It was only a later illusion of the generous but imprudent man who had
already dreamed many {231} dreams. He thought the popular tiger could
be muzzled by persuasion. He was going to make a _coup d'etat_, not in
deeds, but in words, forgetting that the Revolution neither esteems nor
fears anything