Page:Lectures on the French Revolution of John Acton.djvu/175

Rh the remnant of the National Assembly was to have been convoked, to place the daughter of Lewis on her father's throne.

At Novi, in the first action, Joubert fell, and Moreau commanded the retreat. Sieves now applied to him. Moreau was not yet the victor of Hohenlinden. His ascendancy was doubtful, and he hesitated. They were conferring together when news came that Bonaparte had escaped from Egypt, and would soon be at Paris. Sieyes exclaimed, rather impudently, "Then France is saved!" Moreau retorted, "I am not wanted. That is the man for you." At first Bonaparte was reserved, and took so much time to feel his way that Sieyes, who was the head of the government, called him an insolent fellow who deserved to be shot. Talleyrand brought them together, and they soon came to an understanding. The conspiracy of Brumaire would have failed at the deciding moment but for the Abbé. For Bonaparte, when threatened with outlawry, lost his head, and Sieyes quietly told him to drive out the hostile deputies. Thereupon the soldier, obeying the man of peace, drew his sword and expelled them.

Everybody now turned to the great legislator of 1789 for the Constitution of the hour. With incomparable opportunities for observation, he had maturely revolved schemes for the government of France on the lines of that which was rejected in 1795. He refused to write anything; but he consented to dictate, and his words were taken down by Boulay de la Meurthe, and were published long after, in a volume of which there is no copy at Paris or in London.

What I have just said will give you a more favourable view of Sieyes than you may find in books. The Abbé was not a high-minded man, and he has no friends in his own country. Some dislike him because he was a priest, some because he was an unfrocked priest. He is odious to royalists as a revolutionist, and to republicans as a renegade. I have spoken of him as a political thinker, not as a writer, an orator, or an administrator.