Already discredited by all parties, this prince, henceforth incapable of serving the throne, was equally incapable of serving the republic.  Odious to the royalists, put aside by the demagogues, suspected by the constitutionalists, there only remained to him the stoical attitude in which he took refuge.  He had abdicated his rank, abdicated his own faction; he had abdicated the favour of the people.  His life was all that remained to him.

At the same moment Camille Desmoulins was thus satirically apostrophising La Fayette, the first idol of the Revolution:—­“Liberator of two worlds, flower of Janissaries, phoenix of Alguazils-major, Don Quixotte of Capet and the two chambers, constellation of the white horse[2], my voice is too weak to raise itself above the clamour of your thirty thousand spies, and as many more your satellites, above the noise of your four hundred drums, and your cannons loaded with grape.  I had until now misrepresented your—­more than—­royal highness through the allusions of Barnave, Lameth, and Duport.  It was after them that I denounced you to the eighty-three departments as an ambitious man who only cared for parade, a slave of the court similar to those marshals of the league to whom revolt had given the baton, and who, looking upon themselves as bastards, were desirous of becoming legitimate; but all of a sudden you embrace each other, and proclaim yourselves mutually fathers of your country!  You say to the nation, ’Confide in us; we are the Cincinnati, the Washingtons, the Aristides.’  Which of these two testimonies are we to believe?  Foolish people!  The Parisians are like those Athenians to whom Demosthenes said, ’Shall you always resemble those athletes who struck in one place cover it with their hand,—­struck in another place they place their hand there, and thus always occupied with the blows they receive, do not know either how to strike or defend themselves!’ They are beginning to doubt whether Louis XVI. could be perjured since he is at Varennes.  I think I see the same great eyes open when they shall see La Fayette open the gates of the capital to despotism and aristocracy.  May I be deceived in my conjectures, for I am going from Paris, as Camillus my patron departed from an ungrateful country, wishing it every kind of prosperity.  I have no occasion to have been an emperor like Diocletian to know that the fine lettuces of Salernum, which are far superior to the empire of the East, are quite equal to the gay scarf which a municipal authority wears, and the uneasiness with which a Jacobin journalist returns to his home in the evening, fearing always lest he should fall into an ambuscade of the cut-throats of the general.  For me it was not to establish two chambers that I first mounted the tricolour cockade!”

X.

Such was the general tone of the press, such the exhaustless laughter which this young man diffused, like the Aristophanes of an irritated people.  He accustomed it to revile men, majesty, misfortune, and worth.  The day came when he required for himself and for the young and lovely woman whom he adored, that pity which he had destroyed in the people.  He found, in his turn, only the brutal derision of the multitude, and he himself then became sad and sorry for the first and last time.