This fiction, or this nullity cost the people 30,000,000 (of francs) a year in the civil list, a court, continual jealousies, and the interminable corruption practised by the court on the organs of the nation.

This was the real vice of the constitution of 1791: it was not consistent.
Royalty embarrassed the constitution; and all that embarrasses injures.
The motive of this inconsistency was less an error of its reason than a respectful piety for an ancient prejudice, and a generous tenderness towards a race which had long worn the crown.

If the race of the Bourbons had been extinct in the month of September 1791, certainly the Constituent Assembly would not have invented a king.
V.
However, the royalty of '91, very little different from the royalty of to-day, could work for a century, as well as a day.

The error of all historians is to attribute to the vices of the constitution the brief duration of the work of the Constituent Assembly.

In the first place, the work of the Constituent Assembly was not principally to perpetuate this wheelwork of useless royalty, placed out of complaisance to the people's eyes, in machinery which did not regulate it.