Cazales was one of those men who are themselves ignorant of their own powers until the hour arrives when circumstances call forth their genius, and assign to them a duty.  An obscure officer in the ranks of the army, chance, which cast him into the tribune, revealed the orator.  He did not inquire which side he should defend; noble, the noblesse; royalist, the king; a subject, the throne.  His position made his creed; he bore in the Assembly the character and qualities of his uniform.  Language to him was only another sword, and in all the spirit of chivalry, he devoted it to the cause of Monarchy.  Indolent and ill-educated, his natural good sense supplied the place of study.  His monarchical faith was by no means fanaticism of the past:  it admitted the modifications conceded by the king himself, and which were compatible with the inviolability of the throne and the working of the executive power.  From Mirabeau to him the difference of the first principle was not wide apart, only one decried it as an aristocrat, and the other as a democrat.  The one flung himself headlong into the midst of the people, the other attached himself to the steps of the throne.  The characteristic of Cazales’ eloquence was that of a desperate cause.  He protested more than he discussed, and opposed to the triumphs of violence on the cote gauche, his ironic defiance, his bursts of bitter indignation, which for the moment acquired admiration, but never led to victory.  To him the noblesse owed that it fell with glory; the throne, with majesty:  and his eloquence attained something that was heroic.

Behind these two men there was only a party, soured by ill-fortune, discouraged by its isolation from the nation, odious to the people, useless to the throne, feeding on vain illusions, and only preserving of its fallen power the resentment of injuries, and that insolence which was perpetually provoking fresh humiliations.  The hopes of this party were entirely sustained by their reliance on the armed intervention of foreign powers.  Louis XVI. was in their eyes a prisoner king, whom Europe would come and deliver from his thraldom.  With them, patriotism and honour were at Coblentz.  Overcome by numbers, without skilful leaders who understood how to gain immortal names by timely retreats; with no strength to contend against the spirit of the age and refusing to move with it, the cote droit could only call for vengeance, its political power was now confined to an imprecation.

The left side lost at one blow its leader and controller; in Mirabeau the national man had ceased to exist, and only the men of party remained, and they were Barnave and the two Lameths.  These men humbled, rebuked, before the ascendency of Mirabeau, had attempted, long before his death, to balance the sovereignty of his genius by the exaggeration of their doctrines and harangues.  Mirabeau was but the apostle—­they would fain have been the faction-leaders of the time.