A sort of Christian fanaticism had taken possession of the King's soul. Resigned to his fate, he ceased to struggle, and wrote to his confessor: "Come to see me to-day; I have done with men; I want nothing now but heaven."
[1] Listen, heaven, to the prayer That here I make: Preserve so good a father To his subjects.
One of the greatest griefs of a political career is disenchantment. To pass from devout optimism to profound discouragement; to have treated as alarmists or cowards whoever perceived the least cloud on the horizon, and then to see the most formidable tempests unchained; to be obliged to recognize at one's proper cost that one has carried illusion to the verge of simplicity and has judged neither men nor things aright; to have heard distressed passengers saying that a pilot without experience or prudence is responsible for the shipwreck; to have promised the age of gold and suddenly found one's self in the age of iron, is a veritable torture for the pride and the conscience of a statesman. And this torture is still more cruel when to disappointment is added the loss of a popularity laboriously acquired; when, having been accustomed to excite nothing but enthusiasm and applause, one is all at once greeted with criticism, howls, and curses, and when, having long strutted about triumphantly on the summits of the Capitol, one sees yawning before him the gulf at the foot of the Tarpeian rock.
Such was the fate of Lafayette. A few months had sufficed to throw down the popular idol from his pedestal, and the same persons who had once almost burned incense before him, now thought of nothing but flinging him into the gutter. Stunned by his fall, Lafayette could not believe it. To familiarize himself with the fickleness, the caprices, and the inconsequence of the multitude was impossible. For him the Constitution was the sacred ark, and he did not believe that the very men who had constructed this edifice at such a cost had now nothing so much at heart as to destroy it. He would not admit that the predictions of the royalists were about to be accomplished in every point, and still desired to hold aloof from the complicities into which revolutions drag the most upright minds and the most honest characters. He who, in July, 1789, had not been able to prevent the assassination of Foulon and Berthier; who, on October 5, had marched, despite himself, against Versailles; who, on April 18, 1791, had been unable to protect the departure of the royal family to Saint Cloud; who, on the following June 21, had thought himself obliged to say to the Jacobins in their club: "I have come to rejoin you, because I think the true patriots are here," nevertheless imagined that just a year later, all that was necessary to vanquish the same Jacobins was for him to show himself and say like Cæsar: "_Veni, vidi, vici_."