372 The King of the French, [Ocx. 



On his return, he found that his chance was at an end. The Jacobin?- 

 had made up their minds " There was to be no king in France." The 

 duke was expelled from Versailles ; and from that moment he threw off 

 the mask, if he had ever worn one. 



The infamous Oth of October, 1792, came, and the King, Queen, 

 and the royal children, were dragged to Paris by a mob, who paraded 

 the heads of the gardes du corps before the royal carriage, on pikes. 

 This was the day that stamped Lafayette for life. While he lives, it 

 will never be forgotten that " he sse-pt on the (5th of October." He was 

 commander of the National Guard, of forty thousand men. At the 

 head of this force, he ought to have stopped the mob of Paris from 

 going to Versailles to insult the Constitutional King. He did no such 

 thing. This band of blood, drunkenness, and robbery, got the start 

 of him by six hours. He then followed them, to rescue the King. 

 Lafayette arrived, and fortunately found that nothing had yet been 

 done. The National Guard were quartered round the palace. Lafayette 

 had an audience of the King, and solemnly assured him that he might 

 retire to rest with the utmost security ; he would answer for it, and would 

 guarantee the royal family against any attack by the mob. On this 

 assurance the King ordered the exterior posts of the palace to be given 

 up to the National Guard, and went to sleep. Lafayette went to sleep 

 too ! and slept so soundly, that he slept till the mob had burst their way 

 into the royal chambers, gutted the palace, stabbed the gardes-du-corps, 

 and taken the unfortunate monarch prisoner, to take him as a felon to 

 Paris. Then Lafayette put himself at the head of the National Guard 

 again, and again followed the mob. All this might have been mere neg- 

 ligence or folly, but it was singularly disastrous in the end. So much 

 for the Patriot who is now to watch over the pillow of Louis Philippe. 



Titles were next extinguished, and the proud name of Orleans was 

 sunk in the popular one of Egalitc. Citizen Equality was now a 

 plebeian like the rest, the fellow of the citizen tinker and the citizen 

 cobbler. His rabble compeers soon gave him a lesson in the rights 

 of man. His estates followed his titles. Some of his family fled, and 

 were glad to fly. His son entered the Revolutionary army. His own 

 life was in perpetual hazard. On the 21st of January, 1793, Louis 

 the Sixteenth was murdered on the scaffold. The Duke of Orleans had 

 voted for his death ; and even in that band of blood, the vote caused 

 an universal shudder. He was utterly undone from that hour. No 

 man's career ever gave a more striking example of the miseries of guilty 

 ambition. The Nobles hated him, as the betrayer of their order, the 

 Church as the patron of their confiscation, the King's friends as his 

 unnatural enemy, the People as a remnant of the aristocracy on which 

 they rejoiced to trample. To save himself in this general repulsion, he 

 had plunged into fatal intrigue with the Jacobins ; that troop of assassins 

 which seemed congregated for the scourge of France, and the abhor- 

 rence of human nature. They received him in triumph, kept him as a 

 tool, and then cast him off as a victim. Robespierre, who mastered all 

 his rivals by a supremacy in bloodshed, marked him for the scaffold. 



The malice of the master-fiend turned even his sacrifices and services 

 against this miserable man. " He has two sons in our army in Belgium ; 

 his influence is therefore dangerous. He has friends among our generals 

 he must be watched. He has called himself Egalite he cannot be 

 sincere, he must wish to be a duke again ; his hypocrisy must be 



