I will not repeat that, bad son, bad husband, bad father, he could not
fail to be a bad friend, and that many of his confidants were the victims
of his perfidy or his rage.[21]
I will not repeat that his presumptuous rebellion, his implacable
hatred for the best of kings; the murderous outcries against him he so
shamelessly raised, and which, even in his own eyes, proved him the
most hateful of citizens, forced from him that admission, as true as
humiliating, “I would as soon be guillotined as banished, for where is
the country that would receive me?”
But no more—for I blush as I write these lines and my heart bleeds with
shame!
Besides, does it need more to represent the man we have just described as
quite capable of the crime we think we have the right to impute to him?
Still, we admit that the reality of a thing cannot be deduced from its
mere possibility, so we will enforce it by arguments of quite another
nature.