We have seen that this very fault was an excess of virtue. It receded before the deposing from the throne the family of its kings; it had the superstition of the past without having its faith, and desired to reconcile the republic and the monarchy. It was a virtue in its intentions; it was a mistake in its results; for it is an error in politics to attempt the impossible. Louis XVI. was the only man in the nation to whom the constituent royalty could not be confided, since it was he from whom the absolute monarchy had just been snatched: the constitution was a shared royalty, and but a few days previously, and he had possessed it entire. With any other person this royalty would have been a gift, for him alone it was an insult. If Louis XVI. had been capable of this abnegation of supreme power which makes disinterested heroes (and he was one), the deposed party, of which he was the natural head, was not like him; we may expect an act of sublime disinterestedness from a virtuous man, never from a party _en masse_. Party is never magnanimous; they never abdicate, they are extirpated. Heroic acts come from the heart, and party has no heart; they have only interests and ambition. A body is a thing of unvarying selfishness. Clergy, nobility, court, magistracy, all abuses, all falsehoods, all contumelies, every injustice of a monarchy, are personified, in spite of Louis XVI., in the king. Degraded with him, they must desire to rise with him. The nation, which well perceived this fatal connection between the king and the counter-revolution, could not confide in the king, however it might venerate the man; it saw, in him, of necessity, the accomplice of every conspiracy against itself. The _parvenus_ of liberty are as thinskinned as the _parvenus_ of fortune. Jealousies must arise, suspicions would produce insults, insults resentments, resentments factions, factions shocks and overthrows: the momentary enthusiasm of the people, the sincere concessions of the king, avert nothing. The situations were false on both sides. If there were in the Constituent Assembly more statesmen than philosophers, it must have perceived that an intermediate state was impossible, under the guardianship of a half-dethroned king. We do not confide to the vanquished the care and management of the conquests. To act as she acts, was to drive the king, without redemption, to treason or the scaffold. An absolute party is the only safe party in great crises. The tact consists in knowing when to have recourse to extreme measures at the critical minute. We say it unhesitatingly--history will hereafter say as we do. Then came a moment when the Constituent Assembly had the right to choose between the monarchy and the republic, and when she had to choose the republic. There was the safety of the Revolution and its legitimacy. In wanting resolution it failed in prudence. VIII.