club; he is not bewildered by democratic illusions, and entertains no
other feeling than disgust for the revolution and the sovereignty of
the populace.--At Paris, in April,1792, when the struggle between the
monarchists and the revolutionaries is at its height, he tries to find
"some successful speculation,"[1123] and thinks he will hire and sublet
houses at a profit. On the 20th of June he witnesses, only as a matter
of curiosity, the invasion of the Tuileries, and, on seeing the king at
a window place the red cap on his head, exclaims, so as to be heard,"
Che Caglione!" Immediately after this: "How could they let that rabble
enter! Mow down four or five hundred of them with cannons and the rest
would run away." On August 10, when the tocsin sounds, he regards the
people and the king with equal contempt; he rushes to a friend's house
on the Carrousel and there, still as a looker-on, views at his ease all
the occurrences of the day.[1124] Finally, the chateau is forced and he
strolls through the Tuileries, looks in at the neighboring cafes, and
that is all: he is not disposed to take sides, he has no Jacobin or
royalist inclination. His features, even, are so calm "as to provoke
many hostile and distrustful stares, as someone who is unknown and
suspicious."--Similarly, after the 31st of May and the 2nd of June,
his "Souper de Beaucaire" shows that if he condemns the departmental
insurrection it is mainly because he deems it futile: on the side of
the insurgents, a defeated army, no position tenable, no cavalry, raw
artillerymen, Marseilles reduced to its own troops, full of hostile
sans-culottes and so besieged, taken and pillaged. Chances are against
it: "Let the impoverished regions, the inhabitants of Vivaris, of the
Cevennes, of Corsica, fight to the last extremity, but if you lose a
battle and the fruit of a thousand years of fatigue, hardship, economy,
and happiness become the soldier's prey."[1125] Here was something
with which the Girondists could be converted!--None of the political or
social convictions which then exercised such control over men's minds
have any hold on him. Before the 9th of Thermidor he seemed to be a
"republican montagnard," and we follow him for months in Provence, "the
favorite and confidential adviser of young Robespierre," "admirer"
of the elder Robespierre,[1126] intimate at Nice with Charlotte
Robespierre. After the 9th of Thermidor has passed, he frees himself
with bombast from this