During the entire continuance of the Legislative Assembly, when Robespierre, having left the tribune, was pretending to educate the people by means of his journal, what he defended to the utmost was the royal Constitution. Madame Roland relates that after the flight to Varennes, when the prospect of a republic loomed up, possibly for the first time, at a secret meeting, Robespierre, grinning as usual, and biting his nails, asked ironically what a republic might be. In June, 1792, the entire Jacobin Club was royalist still. It proposed to drop Billaud-Varennes, because Billaud-Varennes had dared to put the monarchical principle in question. On the 7th of July following, two months and a half, that is, before the opening of the Convention, at the time of the famous Lamourette Kiss, all the members of the Assembly swore to execrate the Republic forever. Three weeks after September 2, Danton alleged the paucity and the weakness of the republicans, compared with the royalists, as {386} motives for the massacres. Pétion has said: "When the insurrection of August 10 was undertaken, there were but five men in France who desired a republic." Buzot, Madame Roland's idol, has written: "A wretched mob, unintelligent and unenlightened, vomited forth insults against royalty; the rest neither desired nor willed anything but the Constitution of 1791, and spoke of the republicans just as one speaks of extremely honest fools. This people is republican only through force of the guillotine." And yet, September 21, 1792, the Convention, holding its first sitting in the Hall of the Manège, began by proclaiming the Republic. Buzot, in his Memoirs, has thus described the deputations that were sent to the bar, and the public that occupied the galleries: "It seemed as if the outlet of every sewer in Paris and other great cities had been searched for whatever was most filthy, hideous, and infected. Villainously dirty faces, surmounted by shocks of greasy hair, and with eyes half sunk into their heads, they spat out, with their nauseating breath, the grossest insults mingled with the sharp snarls of carnivorous beasts. The galleries were worthy of such legislators: men whose frightful aspect betokened crime and poverty, and women whose shameless faces expressed the filthiest debauchery. When all these with hands and feet and voice made their horrible racket, one seemed to be in an assembly of devils."