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48 To defend his ungrateful sovereign was his religion, since, in spite of his talents, he did not reach the point of perceiving that there is a moment in the history of every nation when individuals must be sacrificed to principles. Perhaps this preoccupation of minds, naturally enlightened, with merely personal issues is the real key to all that was tragically mysterious in the Revolution. Madame de Staël herself deplored the fate of the King and Queen with precisely the same wealth of compassion that she would have expressed on the occasion of some catastrophe involving hundreds of obscure lives. It seemed as though only such sanguinary monomaniacs as Robespierre or St. Just, only such corrupt and colossal natures as Mirabeau or Danton, could look below the accidental circumstances of an event to its enduring elements. All that was morally and vitally, as distinguished from mentally and potentially, best in France threw itself into passionate defence of persons; while all that was strong, original, consistent, was drawn into the fatal policy of blood.

A few months after Narbonne's fall, Madame de Staël endeavoured to associate him in a plan which her pity had suggested to her for the escape of the Royal Family. She wished to buy a property that was for sale near Dieppe. Thus furnished with a pretext for visiting the coast, she proposed to make three journeys thither. On the first two occasions she was to be accompanied by her eldest son, who was the age of the Dauphin, by a man resembling the King in height and general appearance, and by two women sufficiently like the Queen and Madame Elisabeth. In her third journey she would have left the original party behind and taken with her the whole