that evening before the door of a cottage, decided the fate of a monarchy.  He took the advice of no one but himself—­he set off, saying, “I will arrest the king.”  But Drouet would not have had this decisive impulse if, at this moment, as it were, he had not personified in himself all the agitation and all the suspicions of the people.  It was the fanaticism of his country which impelled him, unknown to himself, to Varennes, and which urged him to sacrifice a whole family of fugitives to what he believed to be the safety of the nation.

He had not received instructions from anyone; he took upon himself alone the arrest and the death that ensued.  His devotion to his country was cruel:  his silence and commiseration would have drawn down minor calamities.

As to the king himself, this flight was in him a fault if not a crime:  it was too soon or too late.  Too late—­for the king had already too far sanctioned the Revolution, to turn suddenly against it without appearing to betray his people and give himself the lie; too soon—­for the constitution which the National Assembly was drawing up was not yet completed, the government was not yet pronounced powerless; and the foes of the king and his family were not yet so decidedly menaced that the care of his safety as a man should surpass his duties as a king.  In case of success, Louis XVI. had none but foreign forces to recover his kingdom; in case of arrest, he found only a prison in his palace.  On which side soever we view it, flight was fatal—­it was the road to shame or to the scaffold.  There is but one route by which to flee a throne and not to die—­abdication.  On his return from Varennes, the king should have abdicated.  The Revolution would have adopted his son, and have educated it in its own image.  He did not abdicate—­he consented to accept the pardon of his people; he swore to execute a constitution from which he had fled.  He was a king in a state of amnesty.  Europe beheld in him but a fugitive from his throne led back to his punishment, the nation but a traitor, and the Revolution but a plaything.

BOOK III

I.

There is for a people, as for individuals, an instinct of conservation which warns and “gives them pause,” even under the impulses of the most blind passions, before the dangers into which they are about to fling themselves headlong.  They seem suddenly to recede at the aspect of this abyss, into which but now they were hastening precipitately.  The intermissions of human passions are short and fugitive, but they give time to events, returns to wisdom, and opportunities to statesmen.  These are moments in which they seize the hesitating and intimidated spirit of the people, in order to make them create a reaction against their own excesses, and to lead them back by the very revulsion of the passions that have already urged them too far.  The day after the 25th of June, 1791, France experienced one of those throes of repentance which save a people.  There was only the statesman wanting.