royalty itself. Now that the monster can purvey for its own subsistence,
it will only carry the mark about it, as a token of its having torn the
womb it came from. Tyrants seldom want pretexts. Fraud is the ready
minister of injustice; and whilst the currency of false pretence and
sophistic reasoning was expedient to their designs, they were under no
necessity of drawing upon me to furnish them with that coin. But
pretexts and sophisms have had their day, and have done their work. The
usurpation no longer seeks plausibility: it trusts to power.

Nothing that I can say, or that you can say, will hasten them, by a
single hour, in the execution of a design which they have long since
entertained. In spite of their solemn declarations, their soothing
addresses, and the multiplied oaths which they have taken and forced
others to take, they will assassinate the king when his name will no
longer be necessary to their designs,--but not a moment sooner. They
will probably first assassinate the queen, whenever the renewed menace
of such an assassination loses its effect upon the anxious mind of an
affectionate husband. At present, the advantage which they derive from
the daily threats against her life is her only security for preserving
it. They keep their sovereign alive for the purpose of exhibiting him,
like some wild beast at a fair,--as if they had a Bajazet in a cage.
They choose to make monarchy contemptible by exposing it to derision in
the person of the most benevolent of their kings.

In my opinion their insolence appears more odious even than their
crimes. The horrors of the fifth and sixth of October were less
detestable than the festival of the fourteenth of July. There are
situations (God forbid I should think that of the 5th and 6th of October
one of them!) in which the best men may be confounded with the worst,
and in the darkness and confusion, in the press and medley of such