To those who do not love to contemplate the fall of human greatness,
I do not know a more mortifying spectacle, than to see the assembled
majesty of the crowned heads of Europe waiting as patient suitors in
the antechamber of regicide. They wait, it seems, until the sanguinary
tyrant Carnot shall have snorted away the fumes of the indigested blood
of his sovereign. Then, when, sunk on the down of usurped pomp, he shall
have sufficiently indulged his meditations with what monarch he shall
next glut his ravening maw, he may condescend to signify that it is his
pleasure to be awake; and that he is at leisure to receive the proposals
of his high and mighty clients for the terms on which he may respite
the execution of the sentence he has passed upon them. At the opening of
those doors, what a sight it must be to behold the plenipotentiaries of
royal impotence, in the precedency which they will intrigue to obtain,
and which will be granted to them according to the seniority of their
degradation, sneaking into the regicide presence, and with the relics
of the smile, which they had dressed up for the levee of their masters,
still flickering on their curled lips, presenting the faded remains of
their courtly graces, to meet the scornful, ferocious, sardonic grin of
a bloody ruffian, who, whilst he is receiving their homage, is
measuring them with his eye, and fitting to their size the slider of
his guillotine! These ambassadors may easily return as good courtiers as
they went; but can they ever return from that degrading residence, loyal
and faithful subjects; or with any true affection to their master, or
true attachment to the constitution, religion, or laws of their country?
There is great danger that they, who enter smiling into this Trophonian
cave, will come out of it sad and serious conspirators; and such will
continue as long as they live. They will become true conductors of
contagion to every country which has had the misfortune to send them
to the source of that electricity. At best they will become totally
indifferent to good and evil, to one institution or another. This
species of indifference is but too generally distinguishable in those
who have been much employed in foreign courts; but in the present case
the evil must be aggravated without measure; for they go from their
country, not with the pride of the old character, but in a state of the
lowest degradation, and what must happen in their place of residence
can have no effect in raising them to the level of true dignity, or of
chaste self-estimation, either as men, or as representatives of crowned
heads.