Do you not blush that a handful of turbulent men, who appear numerous because they are united and make a noise, should constrain you to do their pleasure, by telling you it is your own, and by amusing your puerile curiosity by unworthy spectacles?  In a city that respected itself, such a fete would find before it silence and solitude, the streets and public places abandoned, the houses shut up, the windows deserted, and the flight and scorn of the passers-by would tell history what share honest and well-disposed men took in this scandalous and bacchanalian procession.”

XVIII.

Collot d’Herbois insulted Andre Chenier and Roucher in his reply.  Roucher replied by a letter full of sarcasm, in which he reminded Collot d’Herbois of his falls on the stage and his misadventures as an actor.  “This personage of comic romance,” said he, “who has leapt from the trestles of Punch to the tribune of the Jacobins, rushes at me, as though to strike me with the oar the Swiss have brought him from the galleys.”

Placards for or against the fete covered the walls of the Palais Royal, and were alternately torn down by groups of young men or Jacobins.

Dupont de Nemours, the friend and master of Mirabeau, laid aside his philosophical calm, to address a letter on the same subject to Petion, in which his conscience, as an honest man, braved the popularity of the tribune.  “When the danger is imminent, it is the duty of all honest men to warn the magistrates of it.  More particularly, when the magistrates themselves create it.  You told a falsehood when you asserted that these soldiers had aided the Revolution on the 14th of July, and that they had refused to combat against the people of Paris.  It is untrue that the Swiss refused to combat against the people of Paris, and it is true that they assassinated the national guards of Nancy.  You have the audacity to term those men patriots who dare command the legislative body to send a deputation to the fete prepared for these rebels; these are the men whom you adopt as your friends; it is with them that you dine at la Rapee, so that the general of the national guard is obliged to gallop about for two hours to receive your orders before he can find you, and you seek in vain to conceal your embarrassment by high-flown phrases.  You seek in vain to conceal this banquet given to assassins beneath the pretext of a banquet in honour of liberty.  But these subterfuges are no longer available; the moment is urgent, and you will no longer deceive the sections, the army, or the eighty-three departments.  Those who rule you, as they would a child, have agreed to surrender Paris to ten thousand pikes, to whom the bar of the Assembly will be thrown open the day the national guard is disarmed; the men destined to bear them arrive every day, and Paris receives an accession of twelve or fifteen hundred bandits every twenty-four hours, and beg, until the day of pillage