doubting that he should be able to bring over the majority of the members to his view of that subject, as he had before prevailed upon them to sanction the journey of the princesses.  But in the first days of April all the hopes of success which had been founded on his cooperation and support were suddenly extinguished by his death.  Though he had hardly entered upon middle age, a constant course of excess had made him an old man before his time.  In the latter part of March he was attacked by an illness which his physicians soon pronounced mortal, and on the 2d of April he died.  He had borne the approach of death with firmness, professing to regret it more for the sake of his country than for his own.  He was leaving behind him no one, as he affirmed, who would he able to arrest the Revolution as he could have done; and there can be no doubt that the great bulk of the nation did place confidence in his power to offer effectual resistance to the designs of the Jacobins.  The various parties in the State showed this feeling equally by the different manner in which they received the intelligence.  The court and the Royalists openly lamented him.  The Jacobins, the followers of Lameth, and the partisans of the Duke of Orleans, exhibited the most indecent exultation.[4] But the citizens of Paris mourned for him, apparently, without reference to party views.  They took no heed of the opposition with which he had of late often defeated the plots of the leaders whom they had followed to riot and treason.  They cast aside all recollection of the denunciations of him as a friend to the court with which the streets had lately rung.  In their eyes he was the personification of the Revolution as a whole; to him, as they viewed his career for the last two years, they owed the independence of the Assembly, the destruction of the Bastile, and of all other abuses; and through him they doubted not still to obtain every thing that was necessary for the completion of their freedom.

His remains were treated with honors never before paid to a subject.  He lay in state; he had a public funeral.  His body was laid in the great Church of St. Genevieve, which, the very day before, had been renamed the Pantheon, and appropriated as a cemetery for such of her illustrious sons as France might hereafter think worthy of the national gratitude.  Yet, though his great confidant and panegyrist, M. Dumont,[5] has devoted an elaborate argument to prove that he had not overestimated his power to influence the future; and though the Russian embassador, M. Simolin, a diplomatist of extreme acuteness, seems to imply the same opinion by his pithy saying that “he ought to have lived two years longer, or died two years earlier,” we can hardly agree with them.  La Marck, as has been seen, even when first opening the negotiation for his connection with the court, doubted whether he would be able to undo the mischief which he had acquiesced in, measures not of reform nor of reconstruction, but of total abolition and