By her king, who attempted to fly to Varennes to rejoin Bouillé at Montmédy; her nobility, who fought in the enemy's ranks and urged the Prussians on France; the priests, more terrible still, who spread abroad a spirit of civil war, not merely between citizens of the same country, province, or town, but between members of the same family, between husband and wife, between son and father, between brother and sister. At this period, when French Rome was struggling, we will not say against the world, but against Europe, there was scarcely a house which did not contain its Camille cursing her brother or weeping for her lover. Oh! it is at such moments as these that France is great, and it is evident she has a true mission from Providence, since she rose up, struggled and triumphed, when all other nations would have succumbed. All historians refer to Paris at this period as though it were Paris that did everything and sent the army of the Revolution to march to the frontiers. Of course Paris did much, Paris with its enlistment offices in every public square, Paris with its recruiting sergeants going from house to house, Paris with its roaring cannons, its beating drums, its clanging bells, Paris with its proclamations of the country's danger, Paris with the great folds of its flag of distress floating from the windows of the hôtel de Ville, Paris with the stentorian tones of Danton calling the people to arms; but the provinces did quite as much as Paris, and they had not passed through those terrible days of the 2nd and 3rd of September. Two departments alone, le Gard and le Haute-Saône, levied two armies among themselves. Two men unaided, each equipped and armed a squadron of cavalry. One village gave every single man it had, and offered besides a sum of three hundred thousand francs. The mothers did more than give themselves or their money, they gave their sons, a more terrible and heartrending travail than that of giving them birth. Eight hundred thousand men enlisted; France, which had been under great difficulty to raise an army to defend her Thermopylæ of the Argonne and to win the battle of Valmy, had a dozen armies at her command, and a year later began the march to conquer Europe. Frederic-William and Leopold made a grave error when they declared war against the Revolution; had they been satisfied with drawing a kind of protective cordon round France and with surrounding her with an armed girdle, France would in all probability have preyed upon herself. The volcano which threw up such fire and lava would have engulfed everything in the heart of that deep crater called Paris, wherein such days as the 5th and 6th October, as the 20th June, as the 10th August, as the 2nd and 3rd September, as the 21st January, had seethed and burst forth. But they broke open the mountain with two strokes of their swords, and laid bare a channel by which the Revolution flowed out over the whole world.