self--he set off, saying, "I will arrest the king." But Drouet
would not have had this decisive impulse if, at this moment, as it were,
he had not personified in himself all the agitation and all the
suspicions of the people. It was the fanaticism of his country which
impelled him, unknown to himself, to Varennes, and which urged him to
sacrifice a whole family of fugitives to what he believed to be the
safety of the nation.

He had not received instructions from anyone; he took upon himself alone
the arrest and the death that ensued. His devotion to his country was
cruel: his silence and commiseration would have drawn down minor
calamities.

As to the king himself, this flight was in him a fault if not a crime:
it was too soon or too late. Too late--for the king had already too far
sanctioned the Revolution, to turn suddenly against it without appearing
to betray his people and give himself the lie; too soon--for the
constitution which the National Assembly was drawing up was not yet
completed, the government was not yet pronounced powerless; and the foes
of the king and his family were not yet so decidedly menaced that the
care of his safety as a man should surpass his duties as a king. In case
of success, Louis XVI. had none but foreign forces to recover his
kingdom; in case of arrest, he found only a prison in his palace. On
which side soever we view it, flight was fatal--it was the road to shame
or to the scaffold. There is but one route by which to flee a throne and
not to die--abdication. On his return from Varennes, the king should
have abdicated. The Revolution would have adopted his son, and have
educated it in its own image. He did not abdicate--he consented to
accept the pardon of his people; he swore to execute a constitution from
which he had fled. He was a king in a state of amnesty. Europe beheld in
him but a fugitive from his throne led back to his punishment, the
nation but a traitor, and the Revolution but a plaything.

BOOK III

I.

There is for a people, as for individuals, an instinct of conservation
which warns and "gives them pause," even under the impulses of the most
blind passions, before the dangers into which they are about to fling
themselves headlong. They seem suddenly to recede at the aspect of this
abyss, into which but now they were hastening precipitately. The
intermissions of human passions are short and fugitive, but they give
time to events, returns to wisdom, and opp