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Travels in France 



all hurried to the chateau. Vive le Rot might have been heard 

 at Marly: the king and queen appeared in the balcony, and 

 were received with the loudest shouts of applause ; the leaders, 

 who governed these motions, knew the value of the concession 

 much better than those who made it. I have to-day had con- 

 versation with many persons on this business; and, to my 

 amazement, there is an idea, and even among many of the 

 nobility, that this union of the orders is only for the verification 

 of their powers and for making the constitution, which is a new 

 term they have adopted; and which they use as if a constitution 

 was a pudding to be made by a receipt. In vain I have asked, 

 where is the power that can separate them hereafter, if the 

 commons insist on remaining together, which may be supposed, 

 as such an arrangement will leave all the power in their own 

 hands ? And in vain I appeal to the evidence of the pamphlets 

 written by the leaders of that assembly, in which they hold the 

 English constitution cheap, because the people have not power 

 enough, owing to that of the crown and the house of lords. The 

 event now appears so clear as not to be difficult to predict : all 

 real power will be henceforward in the commons ; having so much 

 inflamed the people in the exercise of it, they will find themselves 

 imable to use it temperately; the court cannot sit to have their 

 hands tied behind them; the clergy, nobility, parliaments, and 

 army will, when they find themselves all in danger of annihila- 

 tion, unite in their mutual defence; but as such a union will 

 demand time, they will find the people armed, and a bloody 

 civil war must be the result. I have more than once declared 

 this as my opinion, but do not find that others unite in it.^ At 

 all events, however, the tide now runs so strongly in favour of 

 the people, and the conduct of the court seems to be so weak, 

 divided, and blind, that little can happen that will not clearly 

 date from the present moment. Vigour and abilities would 

 have turned everything on the side of the court; for the great 

 mass of nobility in the kingdom, the higher clergy, the parlia- 

 ments, and the army were with the crown; but this desertion 

 of the conduct, that was necessary to secure its power, at a 

 moment so critical, must lead to all sorts of pretensions. At 



* I may remark at present, long after this was written, that, although I 

 was totally mistaken in my prediction, yet, on a revision, I think I was 

 right in it, and that the common course of events would have produced 

 such a civil war, to which everything tended, from the moment the 

 commons rejected the king's propositions of the seance royale, which I now 

 think, more than ever, that they ought, with qualifications, to have 

 accepted. The events that followed were as little to be thought of as of 

 myself being made king of France. — Author's note. 



