These metamorphoses would be hateful, if they did not in part belong to the flexibility of the French genius. The people of Athens governed itself; orators appealed to its passions in the public places; the sovereign crowd was composed of sculptors, painters, artizans, "who are wont to be spectators of speeches and hearers of deeds[204]," as Thucydides says. But when, good or bad, the decree had been delivered, who issued to execute it from amid that incoherent and inexpert mass? Socrates, Phocion, Pericles, Alcibiades. * Is it the Royalists who are "to blame for the Restoration," as is urged to-day? Not in the least: it was as though one should say that thirty millions of men had stood aghast, while a handful of Legitimists accomplished a detested restoration, against the wish of all, by waving a few handkerchiefs and putting a ribbon of their wives' in their hats! The vast majority of Frenchmen was, it is true, full of joy; but that majority was not a _Legitimist_ one in the limited sense of the word, applicable only to the rigid partisans of the old Monarchy. The majority was a mass composed of every shade of opinion, happy at being delivered, and violently incensed against the man whom it accused of all its misfortunes: hence the success of my pamphlet. How many avowed aristocrats were numbered among those who proclaimed the King's name? Messieurs Mathieu and Adrien de Montmorency; the Messieurs de Polignac, escaped from their jail; M. Alexis de Noailles; M. Sosthène de La Rochefoucauld. Did those seven or eight men, whom the people neither recognised nor followed, lay down the law to a whole nation? Madame de Montcalm had sent me a bag containing twelve hundred francs to distribute among the pure Legitimist race: I sent it back to her, not having succeeded in placing a crown-piece. An ignominious cord was fastened round the neck of the statue which surmounted the column in the Place Vendôme; there were so few Royalists to raise a hubbub around glory and to pull at the rope that the authorities themselves, Bonapartists all, had to lower their master's image with the aid of a scaffold; the colossus was forced to bow his head: he fell at the feet of the sovereigns of Europe, who had so often lain prostrate before him. It was the men of the Republic and of the Empire who enthusiastically greeted the Restoration. The conduct and ingratitude of the persons raised by the Revolution were abominable towards him whom they affect to-day to regret and admire. [Sidenote: Its supporters.]