ing against the avowed enterprises of the
anarchists, of inspiring the National Assembly with the firmness
required to repress the intended attacks, and foretold the inevitable
calamities which would result from the weakness and disunion of honest
men. He wanted to march against the Jacobin Club and close it. But,
in consequence of the instructions issued by the court, the royalists
of the National Guard were indisposed to second him in this measure.
Lafayette, having no one on his side but the constitutionals, an {238}
honest but scanty group who were suspected by both of the extreme
parties, gave up the struggle. The next day, June 30, he beat a hasty
retreat to the army, after writing to the Assembly another letter which
was merely an echo of the first one. A moment since, the Jacobins were
trembling. Now, they are reassured, they triumph. In his _Chronique
des Cinquante Jours_, Roederer says: "If M. de Lafayette had had the
will and ability to make a bold stroke and seize the dictatorship,
reserving the power to relinquish it after the re-establishment of
order, one could comprehend his coming to the Assembly with the sword
of a dictator at his side; but, to show it only, without resolving to
draw it from the scabbard, was a fatal imprudence. In civil commotions
it will not answer to dare by halves."

{239}

XXIII.

THE LAMOURETTE KISS.

France had still its moments of enthusiasm and illusion before plunging
into the abyss of woes. It seemed under an hallucination, or suffering
from a sort of vertigo. A nameless frenzy, both in good and evil,
agitated and disturbed it beyond measure in 1792, that year so fertile
in surprises and dramas of every kind. Strange and bizarre epoch, full
of love and hatred, launching itself from one extreme to the other with
frightful inconstancy, now weeping with tenderness, and now howling
with rage! Society resembled a drunken man who is sometimes amiable in
his cups, and sometimes cruel. There were sudden halts on the road of
fury, oases in the midst of scorching sands, beneath a sun whose fire
consumed. But the caravan does not rest long beneath the shady trees.
Quickly it resumes its course as if urged by a mysterious force, and
soon the terrible simoom overwhelms and destroys it.

Madame Elisabeth wrote to Madame de Raigecourt, July 8, 1792: "It would
need all Madame de Sevigne's eloquence to describe properly what {240}
happened yesterday; for it was certa