[History of the Girondists, Volume I by Alphonse de Lamartine]@TWC D-Link book
History of the Girondists, Volume I

BOOK VII
19/40

With any other person this royalty would have been a gift, for him alone it was an insult.

If Louis XVI.

had been capable of this abnegation of supreme power which makes disinterested heroes (and he was one), the deposed party, of which he was the natural head, was not like him; we may expect an act of sublime disinterestedness from a virtuous man, never from a party _en masse_.
Party is never magnanimous; they never abdicate, they are extirpated.
Heroic acts come from the heart, and party has no heart; they have only interests and ambition.

A body is a thing of unvarying selfishness.
Clergy, nobility, court, magistracy, all abuses, all falsehoods, all contumelies, every injustice of a monarchy, are personified, in spite of Louis XVI., in the king.

Degraded with him, they must desire to rise with him.


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