Page:Dramatic Moments in American Diplomacy (1918).djvu/82

62 impossible task of coaching the hereditary despot to play the republican—the mind moulded in the form of arbitrary will to adopt the wiles of the politician and the forms of democratic cajolery and practice so familiar to the authors of the American Revolution. He sat up nights with the King's counsellors—de Montmorin, Bertrand de Moleville, de Monciel, and Brémond—framing speeches and measures with which to feed the Assembly and the Marseillais; letters to be written by the hidebound monarch to his captains and the Provinces—state documents which in other hands perhaps might have saved a kingdom.

It was of no avail. The expected explosion came on the 10th of August—and the constitutional and inevitable hesitation of the royal pigmy resulted in his deserting his own staunch defenders to be sacked with his castle, and himself to be seized and condemned to death.

This left Paris and France at the mercy of a mob-rule whose frightfulness has become a byword for all time. No man's life was worth