None but mediocrities remain under the shelter of old forms and institutions: There was a general mirage in the horizon of the future; and, whether the small saw therein their safety, or the great an abyss, all went headlong towards the novelty.
XII.
Such was the tendency of minds in Europe, when the princes, brothers of Louis XVI., and the emigrant gentlemen, spread themselves over Savoy, Switzerland, Italy, and Germany, to demand succour and vengeance from powers and principalities against the Revolution.

Never, from the first great emigrations of ancient people, fleeing from the Roman invasions, had been seen such a movement of terror and perturbation as this, which cast forth from the territory all the clergy and all the aristocracy of a nation.

An immense vacuum was created in France: first, in the steps of the throne itself; next, in the court, in chateaux, in ecclesiastical dignities; and finally in the ranks of the army.

Officers, all noble, emigrated in masses; the navy followed somewhat later, the example of the army, which also abandoned the flag.

It was not that the clergy, the nobility, the land and sea officers were more pressed upon by the stir of revolutionary ideas which had agitated the nation in 1789; on the contrary, the movement commenced by them.