BOOK V.
I.
Whilst an instant's breathing time was permitted to France between two convulsive efforts, and the Revolution as yet knew not whether it should maintain the constitution it had gained, or employ it as a weapon to obtain a republic, Europe began to arouse itself; egotistical and improvident, she merely beheld in the first movement in France a comedy played at Paris on the stage of the States General and the constituent Assembly--between popular genius, represented by Mirabeau, and the vanquished genius of the aristocracy, personified in Louis XVI.

and the clergy.

This grand spectacle had been in the eyes of the sovereigns and their ministers merely the continuation of the struggle (in which they had taken so much interest, and showed so much secret favour) between Voltaire and Jean Jacques Rousseau on one side, and the old aristocratical and religious system on the other.

To them the Revolution was the philosophy of the eighteenth century, which had migrated from the _salons_ into the public streets, and from books to speeches.

This earthquake in the moral world, and these shocks at Paris, the presages of some unknown change in European destinies, attracted far more than they affrighted them.