Page:Madame de Staël (1887 Bella Duffy).djvu/57

yet had adopted many of the new ideas. After having accomplished the difficult and perilous enterprise of escorting the King's aunts to Rome, and establishing them under the roof of the Cardinal de Bernis, he returned to Paris and ranged himself on the side of the Constitution. His soldier-soul (he was an extremely gallant officer) would not allow of his going any farther along the facile descent of change. The King's abortive attempt at escape and subsequent imprisonment in the Tuileries restored to Narbonne all the fervour which his allegiance as a courtier might originally have lacked. But he was a very intelligent man; so much so, that Napoleon himself years later rendered justice to his sagacity. He had serious tastes and a great love of knowledge, and was almost as witty as Talleyrand himself. He was made Minister of War in December 1791, and the general impression prevailed that Madame de Staël's influence had contributed to his appointment. He was young and full of hope, and proposed to himself the impossible task of encouraging the action of the Assembly at the same time as he sought to reconstruct the popularity of the King. He also exerted himself to prepare France for resistance to the armies of foreign invaders; visited the frontier; reported the state of things there to the Assembly; provisioned the forts; re-established garrisons, and organized three armies. But what he could not do was to inspire anybody with confidence in himself. "Too black for heaven, too white for hell," he could neither rise to the sublime ineptitude of deluded royalism nor sink to the brutal logic of facts. Curtly dismissed by the King, at the end of three months, on resigning the portfolio he resumed the sword.