All was true in its work except
royalty, which had but one wrong, which was making the monarchy the
depository of its code.

We have seen that this very fault was an excess of virtue. It receded
before the deposing from the throne the family of its kings; it had the
superstition of the past without having its faith, and desired to
reconcile the republic and the monarchy. It was a virtue in its
intentions; it was a mistake in its results; for it is an error in
politics to attempt the impossible. Louis XVI. was the only man in the
nation to whom the constituent royalty could not be confided, since it
was he from whom the absolute monarchy had just been snatched: the
constitution was a shared royalty, and but a few days previously, and he
had possessed it entire. With any other person this royalty would have
been a gift, for him alone it was an insult. If Louis XVI. had been
capable of this abnegation of supreme power which makes disinterested
heroes (and he was one), the deposed party, of which he was the natural
head, was not like him; we may expect an act of sublime
disinterestedness from a virtuous man, never from a party _en masse_.
Party is never magnanimous; they never abdicate, they are extirpated.
Heroic acts come from the heart, and party has no heart; they have only
interests and ambition. A body is a thing of unvarying selfishness.

Clergy, nobility, court, magistracy, all abuses, all falsehoods, all
contumelies, every injustice of a monarchy, are personified, in spite of
Louis XVI., in the king. Degraded with him, they must desire to rise
with him. The nation, which well perceived this fatal connection between
the king and the counter-revolution, could not confide in the king,
however it might venerate the man; it saw, in him, of necessity, the
accomplice of every conspiracy against itself. The _parvenus_ of liberty
are as thinskinned as the _parvenus_ of fortune. Jealousies must arise,
suspicions would produce insults, insults resentments, resentments
factions, factions shocks and overthrows: the momentary enthusiasm of
the people, the sincere concessions of the king, avert nothing. The
situations were false on both sides.

If there were in the Constituent Assembly more statesmen than
philosophers, it must have perceived that an intermediate state was
impossible, under the guardianship of a half-dethroned king. We do not
confide to the vanquished the care and management of the conquests. To
act as she acts