[The following passage from from the author's The Life of Maximilien Robespierre (1849)in the Hathi Digital Library Trust web edition. — George P. Landow]

Decorative Initial Unhappily, kings cannot buy experience at any price. The terrible strokes of destiny fall upon them not as lessons, but as outrages. They never hear the truth, they cannot hear it. From childhood upwards, surrounded by flatterers (which means liars), they are to be pitied, deeply pitied, rather than blamed. They so seldom hear a true word spoken that they know not how to distinguish it from falsehood.* They are treated so like gods upon earth that we must not wonder if they believe in their own divinity. Experience teaches not kings; it only exasperates them! What king ever had so ample an experience as Louis Philippe? He lived through the first Revolution. He saw the Consulate and the Empire, the Hundred Days, the Restoration, and the Revolution of July, which placed him on the throne. He had known adversity, and struggled for his existence. He had lived in free states: in Geneva, in England, in America; yet he, too, when on the throne, went the old way, fell into the old foolish rut: bed, equivocated, and fell. [94]

Bibliography

Lewes, George Henry. The Life of Maximilien Robespierre; with extracts from his unpublished correspondence. London, Chapman and Hall, 1849. Hathi Digital Library Trust online version of a copy in the Harvard University Library. Web. 25 April 2017.


Last modified 28 April 2017