ideas he had heard overnight; but she excused it as arising from the conceit of youth, and occasionally teased him about it. Pétion and Robespierre, both members of the Constituante, had always belonged to the most advanced party in the Assembly, and on its dissolution they were triumphantly carried off on the shoulders of the people. Buzot, elected at Evreux, where he was born in 1760, also belonged to that small minority of the "thirty votes." Of all the men Madame Roland came in contact with, he was destined to exercise the greatest influence on her future life.
Mirabeau had passed away in April, and with him the massive pillar that had helped to prop the monarchy. Mirabeau's advice to the King had been to escape from Paris, advice followed by the Royal Family on the 20th of June, when they secretly escaped from the Tuileries, and directed their flight to the north-eastern frontier, where the Marquis de Bouillé, from his headquarters at Metz, was to have come to the rescue of the King. The world is familiar with the story of this thrilling flight; with the trivialities which, delaying it by an hour or so, rendered the well-concerted scheme abortive; with the recognition of Louis XVI.'s transparent disguise by Postmaster Drouet; with the latter's headlong nocturnal ride, and arrival at Varennes before the lumbering royal berline, which he successfully stopped under the gloomy gateway of that town; the seizure of the Royal party and their conveyance back to Paris by national guards, with the two deputies, Barnave and Pétion, sent to protect them from the fury of the mob. This anomalous procession moving along the sweltering highways, past the ever-renewing throngs of people with angry, menacing
