repentance had led him to join this party, remained at Paris, and had secret interviews with Louis XVI.; but his counsels, like those of Mirabeau in his latter days, were but vain regrets, for the Revolution was beyond their power to control, and no longer obeyed them.  They yet, however, maintained some influence over the constituted bodies of Paris, and the resolutions of the king, who could not bring himself to believe that these men, who yesterday were so powerful against it, were to-day destitute of influence; and they formed his last hope against the new enemies he saw in the Girondists.

The national guard, the directory of the department of Paris! the mayor of Paris himself, Bailly, and all that party in the nation who wished to maintain order, still supported them—­theirs was the party of repentance and terror.  M. de La Fayette, Madame de Staeel, and M. de Narbonne, had a secret understanding with the Feuillants, and a part of the press was on their side.  These papers sought to render M. de Narbonne popular, and to obtain for him the post of minister of war.  The Girondist papers already excited the anger of the people against this party.  Brissot sowed the seeds of calumny and suspicion:  he denounced them to the hatred of the nation.  “Number them—­name them,” said he; “their names denounce them; they are the relics of the dethroned aristocracy, who would fain resuscitate a constitutional nobility, establish a second legislative chamber and a senate of nobles, and who implore, in order to gain their ends, the armed intervention of the powers.  They have sold themselves to the Chateau de Tuileries, and sell there a great portion of the members of the Assembly; they have amongst them neither men of genius nor men of resolution; their talent is but treason, their genius but intrigue.”

It was thus that the Girondists and the Jacobins, though at this moment beaten, prepared those enmities against the Feuillants that, at no remote period, were destined to disperse the club.  Whilst the Girondists followed this course, the royalists continually urged the people to excesses through the medium of their papers, in order, as they said, to find a remedy for the evil in the evil itself.  Thus they encouraged the Jacobins against the Feuillants, and heaped ridicule and insult on those leaders of the constitutional party who sought to save a remnant of the monarchy; for that which they detested most was the success of the revolution.  Their doctrine of absolute power was less humiliatingly contradicted in their eyes by the overthrow of the empire and throne, than in the constitutional monarchy that preserved at once the king and liberty.  Since the aristocracy lost the possession of the supreme power, its sole ambition—­its only aim—­was to see it fall into the hands of those most unworthy to hold it.  Incapable of again rising by its own force, it sought to find in disorder the means of so doing; and from the first day of the Revolution to the last, this party had no other instinct, and it was thus that it ruined itself whilst it ruined the monarchy.  It carried the hatred of the Revolution even to posterity; and though they did not take an active part in the crimes of the Revolution, yet their best wishes were with it.  Every fresh excess of the people gave a new ray of hope to its enemies:  such is the policy of despair, blind and criminal as herself.