[Footnote 276: Napoleon, at St. Helena, speaking in the light of subsequent events, said, "The National Assembly never committed so great an error as in bringing back the king from Varennes. A fugitive, and powerless, he was hastening to the frontier, and in a few hours would have been out of the French territory. What should they have done in these circumstances? Clearly have facilitated his escape, and declared the throne vacant by his desertion. They would thus have avoided the infamy of a regicide government, and attained their great object of republican institutions. Instead of which, by bringing him back, they encumbered themselves with a sovereign whom they had no just reason for destroying, and lost the inestimable advantage of getting quit of the royal family without an act of cruelty."] [Footnote 277: Our readers will not generally sympathize with Lamartine in the exclamation, "This was a dictatorship, and the most personal of all dictatorships, that a single man, taking the place of the Assembly and the whole nation, thus assumed. He, on his private authority and the right of his civic foresight, struck at the liberty and perhaps at the life of the lawful ruler of the nation. This order led Louis XVI. to the scaffold, for it restored to the people the victim who had just escaped their clutches."--_History of the Girondists, by Alphonse de Lamartine_, vol. i., p. 75.] [Footnote 278: Histoire de la Rev. Fr., par Villiaumé, p. 13.] CHAPTER XXII. RETURN OF THE ROYAL FAMILY FROM VARENNES. Proclamation of Marat.--Three Commissioners sent to meet the King.--Address to the Nation from the Assembly.--The slow and painful Return.--Conversation between Barnave and the Queen.--Brutality of Pétion.--Sufferings of the Royal Family.--Reception of the King in Paris.--Conduct of the Queen.--Noble Avowal of La Fayette.--Statement of the King.--Menace of Bouillé. Almost immediately after the flight of the king the club of the Jacobins became the most formidable power in France. It embraced all the desperate and the reckless advocates of reform. Marat, one of its most popular and energetic members, the morning after the flight of the king, issued the following proclamation to the populace of Paris:[279] "People! behold the loyalty, the honor, the religion of kings. Remember Henry III. and the Duke of Guise. At the same table with his enemy did Henry receive the sacrament, and swear on the same altar eternal friendship. Scarcely had he quit the table than he distributed poniards to his followers, summoned the duke to his cabinet, and there saw him fall, pierced with wounds. Trust then to the oaths of princes!