ingue._ 1789. ix.
469-485.

[22] _Lettres d'un Gentilhomme aux Messieurs du Tiers Etat_, ix.
255-259.

[23] _Reflexions sur les Pouvoirs et Instructions a donner par les
Provinces a leurs Deputes aux Etats-Generaux_, ix. 263, 283.

[24] _Ib._ ix. 266.

[25] _Reflexions sur les Pouvoirs et Instructions a donner par les
Provinces a leurs Deputes aux Etats-Generaux_, ix. 264.

[26] _Reflexions sur les Pouvoirs et Instructions a donner par les
Provinces a leurs Deputes aux Etats-Generaux_, xii. 228, 229, 234.

[27] _Oeuv._ iii. 533. As this was written in 1777, Condorcet was
perhaps thinking of Turgot and Necker. Of the latter, his daughter tells
us repeatedly, without any consciousness that she is recording a most
ignominious trait, that public approbation was the very breath of his
nostrils, the thing for which he lived, the thing without which he was
wretched.--See vol. i. of _Madame de Stael's Considerations_.

[28] _Oeuv._ iii. 227. It was followed by a letter, nominally by a young
mechanic, offering to construct an automaton sovereign, like Kempel's
chess-player, who would answer all constitutional purposes
perfectly.--_Ib._ 239-241.

[29] _Oeuv._ xii. 236.

III.

When the Constitution was accepted and the Legislative Assembly came to
be chosen, Condorcet proved to have made so good an impression as a
municipal officer, that the Parisians returned him for one of their
deputies. The Declaration of Pilnitz in August 1791 had mitigated the
loyalty that had even withstood the trial of the king's flight. When the
Legislative Assembly met, it was found to contain an unmistakable
element of republicanism of marked strength. Condorcet was chosen one of
the secretaries, and he composed most of those multitudinous addresses
in which this most unfortunate and least honoured of all parliamentary
chambers tried to prove to the French people that it was actually in
existence and at work. Condorcet was officially to the Legislative what
Barere afterwards was to the Convention. But his addresses are turgid,
labouring, and not effective for their purpose. They have neither the
hard force of Napoleon's proclamations, nor the flowery eloquence of
the Anacreon of the Guillotine. To compose such pieces well under such
circumstances as those of the Assembly, a man must have much imagination
and perhaps a slightly elastic conscience. Condorcet had neither one nor
the other, but only reason--a hard anvil, out of which he