How quickly the disenchantments come! Already Lafayette, the man of generous illusions, has had to imitate the conduct of those _émigrés_ on whom he has been so severe. He has fled to a foreign land, and found there not a refuge, but a prison. He will {390} remain more than five years in the gloomy fortress of Olmutz. The victor of Valmy, Dumouriez, will hardly be more fortunate. He will go over to the enemy, and live in exile on a pension from foreign powers. How close together deceptions and recantations come! Marat, who had already said to the inhabitants of the capital: "Eternal cockneys, with what epithets would I not assail you in the transports of my despair, if I knew any more humiliating than that of Parisians?"[1] Marat, who had said to all Frenchmen: "No, no; liberty is not made for an ignorant, light, and frivolous nation, for cits brought up in fear, dissimulation, knavery, and lying, nourished in cunning, intrigue, sycophancy, avarice, and swindling, subsisting only by theft and rapine, aspiring after nothing but pleasures, titles, and decorations, and always ready to sell themselves for gold!"[2] Marat will write, May 7th, 1793, that is to say, at the apogee of his favorite political system: "All measures taken up to the present day by the assemblies, constituent, legislative, and conventional, to establish and consolidate liberty, have been thoughtless, vain, and illusory, even supposing them to have been taken in good faith. The greater part seem to have had for their object to perpetuate oppression, bring on anarchy, death, poverty, and famine; to make the people weary of their independence, to make liberty a burden, to cause them to {391} detest the Revolution, through its excessive disorders, to exhaust them by watching, fatigue, want, and inanition, to reduce them to despair by hunger, and to bring them back to despotism by civil war."[3]