importance was ever decided by circumstances so trifling.  “There is but one step from triumph to a fall.  I have seen that in the greatest affairs a little thing has always decided important events”—­so wrote Bonaparte three years before his triumph at St. Cloud:  he might have written it of that event.  It is equally questionable whether it can be regarded as saving France from anarchy.  His admirers, it is true, have striven to depict France as trodden down by invaders, dissolved by anarchy, and saved only by the stroke of Brumaire.  But she was already triumphant:  it was quite possible that she would peacefully adjust her governmental difficulties:  they were certainly no greater than they had been in and since the year 1797:  Fouche had closed the club of the Jacobins:  the Councils had recovered their rightful influence, and, but for the plotters of Brumaire, might have effected a return to ordinary government of the type of 1795-7.  This was the real blow; that the vigorous trunk, the Legislature, was struck down along with the withering Directorial branch.

The friends of liberty might well be dismayed when they saw how tamely France accepted this astounding stroke.  Some allowance was naturally to be made, at first, for the popular apathy:  the Jacobins, already discouraged by past repression, were partly dazed by the suddenness of the blow, and were also ignorant of the aims of the men who dealt it; and while they were waiting to see the import of events, power passed rapidly into the hands of Bonaparte and his coadjutors.  Such is an explanation, in part at least, of the strange docility now shown by a populace which still vaunted its loyalty to the democratic republic.  But there is another explanation, which goes far deeper.  The revolutionary strifes had wearied the brain of France and had predisposed it to accept accomplished facts.  Distracted by the talk about royalist plots and Jacobin plots, cowering away from the white ogre and the red spectre, the more credulous part of the populace was fain to take shelter under the cloak of a great soldier, who at least promised order.  Everything favoured the drill-sergeant theory of government.  The instincts developed by a thousand years of monarchy had not been rooted out in the last decade.  They now prompted France to rally round her able man; and, abandoning political liberty as a hopeless quest, she obeyed the imperious call which promised to revivify the order and brilliance of her old existence with the throbbing blood of her new life.

The French constitution was now to be reconstructed by a self-appointed commission which sat with closed doors.  This strange ending to all the constitution-building of a decade was due to the adroitness of Lucien Bonaparte.  At the close of that eventful day, the 19th of Brumaire, he gathered about him in the deserted hall at St. Cloud some score or so of the dispersed deputies known to be favourable to his brother, declaimed against