speculation,"[23] and thinks he will hire and sublet houses at a
profit. On the 20th of June he witnesses, only as a matter of
curiosity, the invasion of the Tuileries, and, on seeing the king at a
window place the red cap on his head, exclaims, so as to be heard, "
Che Caglione!" Immediately after this: "How could they let that rabble
enter! Mow down four or five hundred of them with cannons and the rest
would run away." On August 10, when the tocsin sounds, he regards the
people and the king with equal contempt; he rushes to a friend's house
on the Carrousel and there, still as a looker-on, views at his ease
all the occurrences of the day.[24] Finally, the chateau is forced
and he strolls through the Tuileries, looks in at the neighboring
cafés, and that is all: he is not disposed to take sides, he has no
Jacobin or royalist inclination. His features, even, are so calm "as
to provoke many hostile and distrustful stares, as someone who is
unknown and suspicious." - Similarly, after the 31st of May and the
2nd of June, his "Souper de Beaucaire" shows that if he condemns the
departmental insurrection it is mainly because he deems it futile: on
the side of the insurgents, a defeated army, no position tenable, no
cavalry, raw artillerymen, Marseilles reduced to its own troops, full
of hostile sans-culottes and so besieged, taken and pillaged. Chances
are against it: "Let the impoverished regions, the inhabitants of
Vivaris, of the Cevennes, of Corsica, fight to the last extremity, but
if you lose a battle and the fruit of a thousand years of fatigue,
hardship, economy, and happiness become the soldier's prey."[25] Here
was something with which the Girondists could be converted! - None of
the political or social convictions which then exercised such control
over men's minds have any hold on him. Before the 9th of Thermidor he
seemed to be a "republican montagnard," and we follow him for months
in Provence. "the favorite and confidential adviser of young
Robespierre," "admirer" of the elder Robespierre,[26] intimate at Nice