incesses. But in the first days of April all the hopes of success
which had been founded on his cooperation and support were suddenly
extinguished by his death. Though he had hardly entered upon middle age, a
constant course of excess had made him an old man before his time. In the
latter part of March he was attacked by an illness which his physicians
soon pronounced mortal, and on the 2d of April he died. He had borne the
approach of death with firmness, professing to regret it more for the sake
of his country than for his own. He was leaving behind him no one, as he
affirmed, who would he able to arrest the Revolution as he could have
done; and there can be no doubt that the great bulk of the nation did
place confidence in his power to offer effectual resistance to the designs
of the Jacobins. The various parties in the State showed this feeling
equally by the different manner in which they received the intelligence.
The court and the Royalists openly lamented him. The Jacobins, the
followers of Lameth, and the partisans of the Duke of Orleans, exhibited
the most indecent exultation.[4] But the citizens of Paris mourned for
him, apparently, without reference to party views. They took no heed of
the opposition with which he had of late often defeated the plots of the
leaders whom they had followed to riot and treason. They cast aside all
recollection of the denunciations of him as a friend to the court with
which the streets had lately rung. In their eyes he was the
personification of the Revolution as a whole; to him, as they viewed his
career for the last two years, they owed the independence of the Assembly,
the destruction of the Bastile, and of all other abuses; and through him
they doubted not still to obtain every thing that was necessary for the
completion of their freedom.

His remains were treated with honors never before paid to a subject. He
lay in state; he had a public funeral. His body was laid in the great
Church of St. Genevieve, which, the very day before, had been renamed the
Pantheon, and appropriated as a cemetery for such of her illustrious sons
as France might hereafter think worthy of the national gratitude. Yet,
though his great confidant and panegyrist, M. Dumont,[5] has devoted an
elaborate argument to prove that he had not overestimated his power to
influence the future; and though the Russian embassador, M. Simolin, a
diplomatist of extreme acuteness, seems to imply the same opinion by his