themselves in the secret, one would suppose that it was all over
with the republic.--The Convention seconded, impelled even, by the
good citizens, has gained a victory over the Terrorists and the
successors of Robespierre, and now it should seem that nothing
remained to be done by to proclaim royalty--what particularly gives
rise to these absurdities, which exist more or less in the minds of
all, is the approach of the 25th Prairial."
_Moniteur,_ June 6, 1795.

Perhaps the majority of the Convention, under the hope of securing
impunity for their past crimes, might have yielded to the popular
impulse; but the government is no longer in the hands of those men who,
having shared the power of Robespierre before they succeeded him, might,
as Rabaut St. Etienne expressed himself, "be wearied of their portion of
tyranny."*

* -"Je suis las de la portion de tyrannie que j'exerce."---"I am
weary of the portion of tyranny which I exercise."
Rabaut de St. Etienne

--The remains of the Brissotins, with their newly-acquired authority,
have vanity, interest, and revenge, to satiate; and there is no reason to
suppose that a crime, which should favour these views, would, in their
estimation, be considered otherwise than venial. To these are added
Sieyes, Louvet, &c. men not only eager to retain their power, but known
to have been of the Orleans faction, and who, if they are royalists, are
not loyalists, and the last persons to whose care a son of Louis the
Sixteenth ought to have been intrusted.

At this crisis, then, when the Convention could no longer temporize with
the expectations it raised--when the government was divided between one
party who had deposed the King to gratify their own ambition, and another
who had lent their assistance in order to facilitate the pretensions of
an usurper--and when the hopes of the country were anxiously fixed on
him, died Louis the Seventeenth. At an age which, in common life, is
perhaps the only portion of our existence unalloyed by misery, this
innocent child had suffered more than is often the lot of extended years
and mature guilt. He lived to see his father sent to the scaffold--to be
torn from his mother and family--to drudge in the service of brutality
and insolence--and to want those cares and necessaries which are not
refused even to the infant mendicant, whose wretchedness