Never had the National Assembly presented a spectacle so imposing and so calm as during the five days which had succeeded the king’s departure.  It would appear as though it felt the weight of the whole empire resting on it, and it sustained its attitude in order to bear it with dignity.  It accepted the power without desiring either to usurp or to retain it.  It covered with a respectful fiction the king’s desertion—­called the flight a carrying off, and sought for the guilty around the throne—­regarding the throne itself as inviolable.  The man disappeared, for it, in Louis XVI.:—­in the irresponsible chief of the state.  These three months may be considered as an interregnum, during which public reason was her sole constitution.  There was no longer a king, for he was a captive, and his sanction was taken from him:  there was no longer law, for the constitution was incomplete:  there was no longer a minister, for the executive power was suspended; and yet the kingdom was standing erect, was acting, organising, defending itself, preserving itself—­and what is still more marvellous, controlled itself.  It held in reserve in a palace the principal machinery of the constitution,—­Royalty; and the day when the work is accomplished, it puts the king in his place, and says to him, “Be free and reign.”

II.

One thing only dishonours this majestic interregnum of the nation—­the temporary captivity of the king and his family.  But we must remember that the nation had the right to say to its chief; “If thou wilt reign over us, thou shalt not quit the kingdom, thou shalt not convey the royalty of France amongst our enemies.”  And as to the forms of that captivity in the Tuileries, we must remember too that the National Assembly had not prescribed them,—­that in fact it had risen with indignation at the word imprisonment,—­that it had commanded a political resistance and nothing more, and that the severity and odium of the precautionary measures used were occasioned by the zealous responsibility of the national guard, more than to the irreverence of the Assembly.  La Fayette guarded, in the person of the king, the dynasty, its proper head, and the constitution—­a hostage against the republic and royalty at the same time. Maire du palais, he intimidated by the presence of a weak and degraded monarch, the discouraged royalists and the restrained republicans.  Louis XVI. was his pledge.

Barnave and the Lameths had within the Assembly the attitude of La Fayette without.  They required the king, in order to defend themselves from their enemies.  So long as there was a man (Mirabeau) between the throne and themselves, they had played with the republic and sapped the throne in order to crush a rival.  But Mirabeau dead and the throne shaken, they felt themselves weak against the very impulse they had given.  They sustained, therefore, this wreck of monarchy in order to be sustained in