Once there was a man in the world who was soured on discovering that his disposition was cowardly and vicious, and he visited his consequent disgust on society at large. He was an ill-starred lover of Nature, and Nature in her wrath armed him with eloquence as with a scourge. He dared to plead the cause of ignorance in the face of science, of savagery in the face of civilisation, of all low-life deeps in the face of all social heights. Instinctively the populace pelted this maniac, yet he was welcomed by the great and lionised by women. His success was so signal that, by revulsion, his hatred of humanity increased, and he ended in suicide as the final issue of his rage and disgust. After his death the world was shaken in its attempts to realise the dreams of Jean Jacques Rousseau, and that silent conspiracy which ever since the murder of Jacques de Molay had sworn destruction to the social edifice, inaugurated in Rue Platrière, and in the very house where Rousseau had once lived, a Masonic Lodge, with the fanatic of Geneva as its patron saint. This Lodge became the centre of the revolutionary propaganda, and thither came a prince of the blood royal, vowing destruction to the successors of Philip the Fair over the tomb of the Templar. It was the nobility of the eighteenth century which corrupted the people; the aristocracy of that period were seized with a mania for equality, which took its rise in the orgies of the Regency; low company was kept for the pleasure of it and the court obtained diversion in talking the language of the slums. The archives of the Order of the Temple[328] testify that the Regent was its Grand Master, that he had as his successors the Duc de Maine, the princes of Bourbon-Condé and Bourbon-Conti, and the Duc de Cossé-Brissac. Cagliostro drew auxiliaries from the middle class to swell the membership of his Egyptian Rite; everyone was eager to obey the secret and irresistible impulse which drove decadent civilisation to its destruction. Events did not tarry, but as if impelled by hands unseen, they were heaped one upon another, after the manner foreseen by Cazotte. The unfortunate Louis XVI was led by his worst enemies, who at once prearranged and stultified the paltry project of evasion which brought about the catastrophe of Varennes, just as they had done with the orgie at Versailles and the massacre of August 10. On every side they compromised the king; at every turn they saved him from the fury of the people, to foment that fury and ensure the dire event which had been in preparation for centuries. A scaffold was essential to complete the revenge of the Templars.