I certainly meant to show, to the best of my power, that the existence of such an executive officer in such a system of republic as theirs is absurd in the highest degree.  But in demonstrating this, to them, at least, I can have made no discovery.  They only held out the royal name to catch those Frenchmen to whom the name of king is still venerable.  They calculate the duration of that sentiment; and when they find it nearly expiring, they will not trouble themselves with excuses for extinguishing the name, as they have the thing.  They used it as a sort of navel-string to nourish their unnatural offspring from the bowels of royalty itself.  Now that the monster can purvey for its own subsistence, it will only carry the mark about it, as a token of its having torn the womb it came from.  Tyrants seldom want pretexts.  Fraud is the ready minister of injustice; and whilst the currency of false pretence and sophistic reasoning was expedient to their designs, they were under no necessity of drawing upon me to furnish them with that coin.  But pretexts and sophisms have had their day, and have done their work.  The usurpation no longer seeks plausibility:  it trusts to power.

Nothing that I can say, or that you can say, will hasten them, by a single hour, in the execution of a design which they have long since entertained.  In spite of their solemn declarations, their soothing addresses, and the multiplied oaths which they have taken and forced others to take, they will assassinate the king when his name will no longer be necessary to their designs,—­but not a moment sooner.  They will probably first assassinate the queen, whenever the renewed menace of such an assassination loses its effect upon the anxious mind of an affectionate husband.  At present, the advantage which they derive from the daily threats against her life is her only security for preserving it.  They keep their sovereign alive for the purpose of exhibiting him, like some wild beast at a fair,—­as if they had a Bajazet in a cage.  They choose to make monarchy contemptible by exposing it to derision in the person of the most benevolent of their kings.

In my opinion their insolence appears more odious even than their crimes.  The horrors of the fifth and sixth of October were less detestable than the festival of the fourteenth of July.  There are situations (God forbid I should think that of the 5th and 6th of October one of them!) in which the best men may be confounded with the worst, and in the darkness and confusion, in the press and medley of such extremities, it may not be so easy to discriminate the one from the other.  Tho necessities created even by ill designs have their excuse.  They may be forgotten by others, when the guilty themselves do not choose to cherish their recollection, and, by ruminating their offences, nourish themselves, through the example of their past, to the perpetration of future crimes.  It is in the relaxation of security, it is in the