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Rh responsibilities which no man who does not feel himself incapable (and that was not Necker's case) is justified in declining. To throw back the love and influence offered him then for the last time by France; to sympathise with the popular cause and yet to abandon it; and to do all this out of obedience to the senseless caprice of a faction and the arbitrary command of a king, was to behave like a Court Chamberlain, but in no sense like a statesman.

The taking of the Bastille, and the King's declaration at the Hôtel de Ville, followed immediately on Necker's retirement. Madame de Staël records these events in a very few words, and shows herself, at the moment and henceforward through all the opening scenes of the Revolution, more alive to the humiliation and dismay of the Royal Family than to the apocalyptic grandeur of the catastrophe.

The acts committed, as one reads of them quietly now, are revolting in their mingled grotesqueness and terror. To those who witnessed them, they sickened where they did not deprave. The livid head of Foulon on the pike; the greasy, filthy, partly drunken populace, who rose as from the depths of the earth to invade the splendid privacy of royal Versailles; the degraded women dragged from shameful obscurity and paraded in the lurid glare of an indecent triumph; Madame de Lamballe's monstrous and dishonoured death; Marat's hellish accusations, and Robespierre's diseased suspicions, were things that must have destroyed in those who lived through them all capacity for admiration.

The fact that Madame de Staël did not lose heart