rabeau was but the apostle--they
would fain have been the faction-leaders of the time. Jealous of his
influence, they would have crushed his talents beneath the superiority
of their popularity. Mediocrity thinks to equal genius by outraging
reason. A diminution of thirty or forty votes had taken place in the
left side. This was the work of Barnave and the Lameths. The club of the
friends of the constitution become the Jacobin Club, responded to them
from without. The popular agitation excited by them was restrained by
Mirabeau, who rallied against them the left, the centre, and the
intelligent members of the right side. They conspired, they caballed,
they fomented divisions in opinion all the more that they had not
control in the Assembly.

Mirabeau was dead, and now the field was open to them. The
Lameths--courtiers, educated by the kindness of the royal family,
overwhelmed by the favours and pensions of the king, had the conspicuous
defection of Mirabeau without having the excuse of his wrongs against
the monarchy: this defection was one of their titles to popular favour.
Clever men, they carried with them into the national cause the conduct
of Courts in which they had been brought up: still their love of the
Revolution was disinterested and sincere. Their eminent talents did not
equal their ambition. Crushed by Mirabeau, they stirred up against him
all those whom the shadow of that great man eclipsed in common with
themselves. They sought for a rival to oppose to him, and found only men
who envied him. Barnave presented himself, and they surrounded him,
applauded him, intoxicated him with his self-importance. They persuaded
him for a moment that phrases were politics, and that a rhetorician was
a statesman.

Mirabeau was great enough not to fear, and just enough not to despise
him. Barnave, a young barrister of Dauphine, had made his _debut_ with
much effect in the struggles between the parliament and the throne which
had agitated his province, and displayed on small theatres the eloquence
of men of the bar. Sent at thirty years of age to the States General,
with Mounier his patron and master, he had soon quitted Mounier and the
monarchical party, and made himself conspicuous amongst the democratic
division. A word of sinister import which escaped not from his heart,
but from his lips, weighed on his conscience with remorse. "Is then the
blood that flows so pure?" he exclaimed at the first murder of the
Revolution.