Jealous of his influence, they would have crushed his talents beneath the superiority of their popularity.  Mediocrity thinks to equal genius by outraging reason.  A diminution of thirty or forty votes had taken place in the left side.  This was the work of Barnave and the Lameths.  The club of the friends of the constitution become the Jacobin Club, responded to them from without.  The popular agitation excited by them was restrained by Mirabeau, who rallied against them the left, the centre, and the intelligent members of the right side.  They conspired, they caballed, they fomented divisions in opinion all the more that they had not control in the Assembly.

Mirabeau was dead, and now the field was open to them.  The Lameths—­courtiers, educated by the kindness of the royal family, overwhelmed by the favours and pensions of the king, had the conspicuous defection of Mirabeau without having the excuse of his wrongs against the monarchy:  this defection was one of their titles to popular favour.  Clever men, they carried with them into the national cause the conduct of Courts in which they had been brought up:  still their love of the Revolution was disinterested and sincere.  Their eminent talents did not equal their ambition.  Crushed by Mirabeau, they stirred up against him all those whom the shadow of that great man eclipsed in common with themselves.  They sought for a rival to oppose to him, and found only men who envied him.  Barnave presented himself, and they surrounded him, applauded him, intoxicated him with his self-importance.  They persuaded him for a moment that phrases were politics, and that a rhetorician was a statesman.

Mirabeau was great enough not to fear, and just enough not to despise him.  Barnave, a young barrister of Dauphine, had made his debut with much effect in the struggles between the parliament and the throne which had agitated his province, and displayed on small theatres the eloquence of men of the bar.  Sent at thirty years of age to the States General, with Mounier his patron and master, he had soon quitted Mounier and the monarchical party, and made himself conspicuous amongst the democratic division.  A word of sinister import which escaped not from his heart, but from his lips, weighed on his conscience with remorse.  “Is then the blood that flows so pure?” he exclaimed at the first murder of the Revolution.  This phrase had branded him on the brow with the mark of a ringleader of faction.  Barnave was not this, or only as much so as was necessary for the success of his discourses; nothing in him was extreme but the orator:  the man was by no means so, neither was he at all cruel.  Studious, but without imagination; copious, but without warmth, his intellect was mediocre, his mind honest, his will variable, his heart in the right place.  His talent, which they affected to compare with Mirabeau’s, was nothing more than a power of skilfully rivetting public attention.  His habit of pleading gave him, with its power of extempore speaking, an apparent superiority which vanished before reflection, Mirabeau’s enemies had created him a pedestal on their hatred, and magnified his importance to make the comparison closer.  When reduced to his actual stature, it was easy to recognise the distance that existed between the man of the nation, and the man of the bar.