are united and make a noise, should
constrain you to do their pleasure, by telling you it is your own, and
by amusing your puerile curiosity by unworthy spectacles? In a city that
respected itself, such a _fete_ would find before it silence and
solitude, the streets and public places abandoned, the houses shut up,
the windows deserted, and the flight and scorn of the passers-by would
tell history what share honest and well-disposed men took in this
scandalous and bacchanalian procession."

XVIII.

Collot d'Herbois insulted Andre Chenier and Roucher in his reply.
Roucher replied by a letter full of sarcasm, in which he reminded Collot
d'Herbois of his falls on the stage and his misadventures as an actor.
"This personage of comic romance," said he, "who has leapt from the
trestles of Punch to the tribune of the Jacobins, rushes at me, as
though to strike me with the oar the Swiss have brought him from the
galleys."

Placards for or against the _fete_ covered the walls of the Palais
Royal, and were alternately torn down by groups of young men or
Jacobins.

Dupont de Nemours, the friend and master of Mirabeau, laid aside his
philosophical calm, to address a letter on the same subject to Petion,
in which his conscience, as an honest man, braved the popularity of the
tribune. "When the danger is imminent, it is the duty of all honest men
to warn the magistrates of it. More particularly, when the magistrates
themselves create it. You told a falsehood when you asserted that these
soldiers had aided the Revolution on the 14th of July, and that they had
refused to combat against the people of Paris. It is untrue that the
Swiss refused to combat against the people of Paris, and it is true that
they assassinated the national guards of Nancy. You have the audacity to
term those men patriots who dare command the legislative body to send a
deputation to the _fete_ prepared for these rebels; these are the men
whom you adopt as your friends; it is with them that you dine at _la
Rapee_, so that the general of the national guard is obliged to gallop
about for two hours to receive your orders before he can find you, and
you seek in vain to conceal your embarrassment by high-flown phrases.
You seek in vain to conceal this banquet given to assassins beneath the
pretext of a banquet in honour of liberty. But these subterfuges are no
longer available; the moment is urgent, and you will no longer deceive
the sections, the army, or the e