of the primary meetings, the king has fled to
Varennes, the Revolution seems compromised, civil war and a foreign
war loom up on the horizon like two ghosts; the National Guard had
everywhere taken up arms, and the Jacobins were making the most of the
universal panic for their own advantage. To dispute their votes is
no longer the question; it is not well to be visible: among so many
turbulent gatherings a popular execution is soon over. The best thing
now for royalists, constitutionalists, conservatives and moderates of
every kind, for the friends of law and of order, is to stay at home--too
happy if they may be allowed to remain there, to which the armed rabble
agrees; on the condition of frequently paying them visits.

Consider their situation during the whole of the electoral period, in a
calm district, and judge of the rest of France by this corner of it. At
Mortagne,[2126] a small town of 6,000 souls, the laudable spirit of 1789
still existed up to the journey to Varennes. Among the forty or fifty
noble families were a good many liberals. Here, as elsewhere among the
gentry, the clergy and the middle class, the philosophic education
of the eighteenth century had revived the old provincial spirit of
initiative, and the entire upper class had zealously and gratuitously
undertaken the public duties which it alone could perform well. District
presidents, mayors, and municipal officers, were all chosen from among
ecclesiastics and the nobles; the three principal officers of the
National Guard were chevaliers of St. Louis, while other grades were
filled by the leading people of the community. Thus had the free
elections placed authority in the hands of the socially superior, the
new order of things resting on the legitimate hierarchy of conditions,
educations, and capacities.--But for six months the club, formed out of
"a dozen hot-headed, turbulent fellows, under the presidency and in the
hands of a certain Rattier, formerly a cook," worked upon the population
and the rural districts. Immediately on the receipt of the news of
the King's flight, the Jacobins "give out that nobles and priests
had supplied him with money for his departure, to bring about a
counter-revolution." One family had given such an amount, and another
so much; there was no doubt about it; the precise figures are given, and
given for each family according to its known resources.--Forthwith, "the
principal clubbists, associated with the dubious part o