Herault de Sechelles demanded the repeal of the decree, and Champion, deputy of the Jura, reproached his colleagues for employing their meetings in such puerile debates.  “I do not fear that the people will worship a gilded chair,” said he, “but I dread a struggle between the two powers.  You will not permit that the words sire and majesty be used, you will not even permit us to applaud the king; as if it were possible to forbid the people from manifesting their gratitude when the king has merited it.  Do not let us dishonour ourselves, gentlemen, by a culpable ingratitude towards the National Assembly, who has retained these marks of respect for the king.  The founders of liberty were not slaves; and previous to fixing the prerogatives of royalty, they established the rights of the people.  It is the nation that is honoured in the person of its hereditary representative.  It is the nation who, after having created royalty, has invested it with a splendour that remounts to the source from whence it sprung, and gives it a double lustre.”

Ducastel, the president of the deputation sent to the king, spoke on the same side, but having inadvertently used the expression sovereign, in speaking of the king, and that the legislative power was vested in the Assembly and the king, this blasphemy and involuntary heresy raised a terrible storm in the chamber.  Every word of this nature seemed to them to threaten a counter-revolution; for they were still so near despotism, that they feared at each step again to fall into its toils.  The people was a slave, freed but yesterday, and who still trembled at the clank of his chains.  However, the offensive decree was repealed, and this retraction was rapturously hailed by the royalists and the national guard.  The constitutionalists saw in it the augury of renewed harmony between the ruling powers of the state; the king saw in it the triumph of a fidelity that had been deadened, but which blazed forth again on the least appearance of outrage to his person.

They were all deceived:  it was but a movement of generosity, succeeding one of brutality; the hesitation of a nation that dares not, at one stroke, destroy the idol before which it has so long bowed the knee.

The royalists, however, attacked this return to moderation in their journals.  “See,” they cried, “how contemptible is this revolution—­how conscious of its own weakness!  This feeling of its own feebleness is a defeat already anticipated; see in two days how often it has given itself the lie.  The authority that concedes is lost unless it possess the art of masking its retreat, of retreating by slow and imperceptible steps, and of causing its laws to be rather forgotten than repealed.  Obedience arises from two causes, respect and fear.  And both have been alike snapped asunder by the sudden and violent retrograde movement of the Assembly; for how can we respect or dread that power that trembles at its own audacity?  The Assembly has abdicated by not completing that which it had dared to commence:  the revolution that does not advance, retreats; and the king has conquered without striking a blow.”