Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 7.djvu/191

 ST. JUST good cause by stepping aside from the path along which Barnave and Lameth, who abandoned the popular party, were moving.

Amid the first gleams of the Revolution you displayed a threatening attitude toward the court; you spoke against it with vehemence. Mirabeau, who meditated a change of dynasty, scented the price of your audacity and seized you. Thenceforward you strayed from rigid principles, and you were no longer spoken of until the massacre of the Champs de Mars. Then you supported, at the Jacobin Club, the motion of Laclos, which was a baleful pretext, paid for by the enemies of the people, for the unfurling of the red flag and an attempt at tyranny. The patriots who were not initiated in this conspiracy had ineffectually combated your sanguinary opinion. You were named with Brissot to draw up the petition of the Champs de Mars, and you both escaped the fury of Lafayette, who caused 2,000 patriots to be massacred. Brissot went about peaceably after that in Paris; and you, you passed away happy hours at Arcis-sur-Aube — if a person who conspired against his country could be happy. Is not the calm of your retreat at Arcis-sur-Aube comprehensible? You, one of the authors of the petition; while of those who had signed it some were loaded with chains, others were massacred; Brissot and you, were you