These were the reasons that made him hesitate at this date. A man understanding Europe, he saw that the governments were not ready to move; a man understanding his own country, he saw that it would have the King in his place again; a man, on the other hand, who had met and appreciated the idealists, he saw that the Republic already existed in the mind; and a man who understood the character of his fellows better than did any contemporary, he saw that the men who were bound to lead were inclined to a declaration against the King. He suffered more than his action should have warranted, and he goes through a sharp few days of danger on account of association and of friends in spite of all his caution. When Louis was known to have fled, and when Paris, vigilant beyond the provinces, and deceived by the declaration of April, had undergone its first wave of passion, the word Republic began to be spoken out loud. The theorists found themselves for once in accordance with public humour; and against the keenness, if not the numbers, of those who petitioned for the deposition of the King on his return, there stood two barriers—the Assembly and the moderate fortunes of the capital. Danton lived with the former, thought with the latter, and was all but silent. The bust of Louis XIV. before the Hotel de Ville was broken; men climbed on ladders to chisel off the lilies from the palaces, and there soon appears a new portent: some one cries out, “Only a Republic can defend itself at the last.” To this somewhat confused cry for a Republic came the very sharp announcement from no less a person than Condorcet. Condorcet, the moderate and illumined, was also half a visionary, and there had always floated in his mind the system of contract by which England had excused the movement of 1688, but which France took seriously. England had for him the attraction which it had for all the professionals of that date—an attraction which lasted till the disasters of 1870, and which you may yet discover here and there among those who are the heirs of Lamartine. England had given them Locke, and Condorcet’s reasoning on the King’s flight[89] reads like a passage from the Bill of Rights. Yet he was a good and sincere man, and died through simplicity of heart. On the 4th of July, ten days or more after the King had been brought back to Paris,[90] it was Condorcet who made the demand for the Republic; in a speech at Fauchet’s club he asked for a National Convention to settle the whole matter. He wrote so in the papers[91] all through July, and even after the affair of the Champ de Mars he continued his agitation.