The contrast of this nature and of this part, this court favourite casting himself into the crowd to serve the nation, this aristocratic elegance, masked in patriotism of the tribune, pleased public opinion for the moment.  They applauded this transformation as a difficulty overcome.  The people was flattered by having great lords with it.  It was a testimony of its power.  It felt itself king, by seeing courtiers bowing to it, and excused their rank by reason of their complaisance.

Madame de Staeel was seduced as much by the heart as the intellect of M. de Narbonne.  Her masculine and sensitive imagination invested the young soldier with all she desired to find in him.  He was but a brilliant, active, high-couraged man; she pictured him a politician and a hero.  She magnified him with all the endowments of her dreams, in order to bring him up to her ideal standard.  She found patrons for him; surrounded him with a prestige; created a name for him, marked him out a course.  She made him the living type of her politics.  To disdain the court, gain over the people, command the army, intimidate Europe, carry away the Assembly by his eloquence, to struggle for liberty, to save the nation, and become, by his popularity alone, the arbiter between the throne and the people, to reconcile them by a constitution, at once liberal and monarchical; such was the perspective that she opened for herself and M. de Narbonne.

She but awakened his ambition, yet he believed himself capable of the destinies which she dreamed of for him.  The drama of the constitution was concentrated in these two minds, and their conspiracy was for some time the entire policy of Europe.

Madame de Staeel, M. de Narbonne, and the constitutional party were for war; but theirs was to be a partial and not a desperate war which, shaking nationality to its foundations, would carry away the throne and throw France into a Republic.  They contrived by their influence to renew all the personal staff of the diplomacy, exclusively devoted to the emigrants or the king.  They filled foreign courts with their adherents, M. de Marbois was sent to the Diet of Ratisbon, M. Barthelemy to Switzerland, M. de Talleyrand to London, M. de Segur to Berlin.  The mission of M. de Talleyrand was to endeavour to fraternise the aristocratic principle of the English constitution with the democratic principle of the French constitution, which they believed they could effect and control by an Upper Chamber.  They hoped to interest the statesmen of Great Britain in a Revolution, imitated from their own, which, after having convulsed the people, was now becoming moulded in the hands of an intelligent aristocracy.  This mission would be easy, if the Revolution were in regular train for some months in Paris.  French ideas were popular in London.  The opposition was revolutionary.  Fox and Burke, then friends, were most earnest in their desire for the liberty of the Continent[9].  We must render this justice to England, that the moral and popular principle concealed in the foundation of its constitution, has never stultified itself by combating the efforts of other nations to acquire a free government.  It has everywhere accorded the liberty similar to its own.