ortunities to statesmen. These
are moments in which they seize the hesitating and intimidated spirit of
the people, in order to make them create a reaction against their own
excesses, and to lead them back by the very revulsion of the passions
that have already urged them too far. The day after the 25th of June,
1791, France experienced one of those throes of repentance which save a
people. There was only the statesman wanting.

Never had the National Assembly presented a spectacle so imposing and so
calm as during the five days which had succeeded the king's departure.
It would appear as though it felt the weight of the whole empire resting
on it, and it sustained its attitude in order to bear it with dignity.
It accepted the power without desiring either to usurp or to retain it.
It covered with a respectful fiction the king's desertion--called the
flight a carrying off, and sought for the guilty around the
throne--regarding the throne itself as inviolable. The man disappeared,
for it, in Louis XVI.:--in the irresponsible chief of the state. These
three months may be considered as an interregnum, during which public
reason was her sole constitution. There was no longer a king, for he was
a captive, and his sanction was taken from him: there was no longer law,
for the constitution was incomplete: there was no longer a minister, for
the executive power was suspended; and yet the kingdom was standing
erect, was acting, organising, defending itself, preserving itself--and
what is still more marvellous, controlled itself. It held in reserve in
a palace the principal machinery of the constitution,--Royalty; and the
day when the work is accomplished, it puts the king in his place, and
says to him, "Be free and reign."

II.

One thing only dishonours this majestic interregnum of the nation--the
temporary captivity of the king and his family. But we must remember
that the nation had the right to say to its chief; "If thou wilt reign
over us, thou shalt not quit the kingdom, thou shalt not convey the
royalty of France amongst our enemies." And as to the forms of that
captivity in the Tuileries, we must remember too that the National
Assembly had not prescribed them,--that in fact it had risen with
indignation at the word imprisonment,--that it had commanded a political
resistance and nothing more, and that the severity and odium of the
precautionary measures used were occasioned by the zealous
responsibility of the nationa