is at all events the King we want. We
ought to thank Heaven for having given him to us. We ought to pray
that he may be spared to us." Marat praying, {385} Marat thanking
Heaven! and for whom? For the King. Does not that prove what deep
root royalty had taken in France? April 20, 1792, the same Marat
bitterly reproached Condorcet with "shamelessly calumniating the
Jacobin Club, and perfidiously accusing it of wishing to destroy the
monarchy" (_L' Ami du Peuple_, No. 434). June 13, he attacked those
who violated the oath taken at the time of the Federation, and said:
"To defend the Constitution is the same thing as to be faithful to the
nation, the law, and the King" (_L' Ami du Peuple_, No. 448).

During the entire continuance of the Legislative Assembly, when
Robespierre, having left the tribune, was pretending to educate the
people by means of his journal, what he defended to the utmost was the
royal Constitution. Madame Roland relates that after the flight to
Varennes, when the prospect of a republic loomed up, possibly for the
first time, at a secret meeting, Robespierre, grinning as usual, and
biting his nails, asked ironically what a republic might be. In June,
1792, the entire Jacobin Club was royalist still. It proposed to drop
Billaud-Varennes, because Billaud-Varennes had dared to put the
monarchical principle in question. On the 7th of July following, two
months and a half, that is, before the opening of the Convention, at
the time of the famous Lamourette Kiss, all the members of the Assembly
swore to execrate the Republic forever. Three weeks after September 2,
Danton alleged the paucity and the weakness of the republicans,
compared with the royalists, as {386} motives for the massacres.
Petion has said: "When the insurrection of August 10 was undertaken,
there were but five men in France who desired a republic."

Buzot, Madame Roland's idol, has written: "A wretched mob,
unintelligent and unenlightened, vomited forth insults against royalty;
the rest neither desired nor willed anything but the Constitution of
1791, and spoke of the republicans just as one speaks of extremely
honest fools. This people is republican only through force of the
guillotine." And yet, September 21, 1792, the Convention, holding its
first sitting in the Hall of the Manege, began by proclaiming the
Republic.

Buzot, in his Memoirs, has thus described the deputations that were
sent to the bar, and the public that o