beggared aristocrats, male and female, would throw their money away by
day among the wondering natives, and gamble among themselves at night.
If they ever thought of the future it was only as the patricians in
Pompey's camp thought; who had no time to prepare for a campaign against
Caesar, because they were absorbed in distributing offices among
themselves, or in inventing torments to inflict on the rebels. Their
chief anxiety was lest the resistance should be too feeble to permit
them to glut themselves with blood. The creatures of caste, the
emigrants could not conceive of man as a variable animal, or of the
birth of a race of warriors under their eyes. To them human nature
remained constant. Such, they believed, was the immutable will of God.

So it came to pass that, as the Revolution took its shape, a vast
combination among the antique species came semi-automatically into
existence, pledged to envelop and strangle the rising type of man, a
combination, however, which only attained to maturity in 1793, after
the execution of the King. Leopold II, Emperor of Germany, had hitherto
been the chief restraining influence, both at Pilnitz and at Paris,
through his correspondence with his sister, Marie Antoinette; but
Leopold died on March 1, 1792, and was succeeded by Francis II, a fervid
reactionist and an obedient son of the Church. Then caste fused
throughout Germany, and Prussia and Austria prepared for war. Rouerie
had returned to Brittany and only awaited the first decisive foreign
success to stab the Revolution in the back. England also was ripening,
and the instinct of caste, incarnated in George III, found its
expression through Edmund Burke. In 1790 Burke published his
"Reflections," and on May 6, 1791, in a passionate outbreak in the House
of Commons, he renounced his friendship with Fox as a traitor to his
order and his God. Men of Burke's temperament appreciated intuitively
that there could be no peace between the rising civilization and the
old, one of the two must destroy the other, and very few of them
conceived it to be possible that the enfranchised French peasantry and
the small bourgeoisie could endure the shock of all that, in their
eyes, was intelligent, sacred, and martial in the world.

Indeed, aristocracy had, perhaps, some justification for arrogance,
since the revolt in France fell to its lowest depth of impotence between
the meeting at Pilnitz in August, 1791, and the reorganization of the
Co