Two things command the attention when we study the France of 1791. France was monarchic and France was afraid. History knows what was to follow; the men of the time did not. There lay in their minds the centuries of history that had been; their future was to them out of conception, and as unreal as our future is to us. You may notice from the very first moment of the true Revolution a passion for the King. For most he is a father, but for all a necessary man. They took him back to Paris; they forced him to declarations of loyalty, and then, with the folly of desire, accepted as real an emotion which they had actually dictated. Such was the movement of the 4th of February 1790; such the sentiment of the Federation in July of that year. And the people understood his reluctance in taking communion from a nonjuring priest, however much the upper class might be astonished. What no one understood was that only Mirabeau stood between the Crown and its vilest temptations; only his balance of genius, his great and admirable fault of compromise, prevented Louis from yielding to his least kingly part, and while he lived the king of the French preferred the nation to his own person. But Mirabeau was dead. They did well to mourn him, those who had smelt out his treason and guessed the weakness of the artist in him; they did well to forgive him; his head misunderstood France, but his broad French shoulders had supported her. The 18th of April was a direct consequence of his death; the 21st of June was a fall through a broken bridge: Louis had yielded to himself. Well, France was also afraid. This democracy (as it had come to be), an experiment based upon a vision, knew how perilous was the path between the old and the new ideals. She feared the divine sunstroke that threatens the road to Damascus. In that passage, which was bounded on either side by an abyss, her feet went slowly, one before the other, and she looked backward continually. In the twisting tides at night her one anchor to the old time was the monarchy. Thus when Louis fled the feeling was of a prop broken. France only cried out for one thing—“Bring the King back.” Tie up the beam—a makeshift—anything rather than a new foundation. Here is the attitude of Danton in this crisis. France is not republican; his friends in Paris are. He inclines to France. It was Danton more than any other one man who finally prepared the Republic, yet the Republic was never with him an idea. The consequences of the Republic were his goal; as for the systems, systems were not part of his mind. At the close of this chapter we shall see him overthrowing the Crown; he did it because he thought it the one act that could save France; but the Crown as an idea he never hated: he lived in existing things.