war increased the divisions of the Assembly, since the Jacobins were undisguisedly averse to it. Not one of their body bad any reputation for skill in arms, so that in the event of war it was evident that the chief commands, both in army and navy, must be conferred on persons unconnected with them; while the Girondins, though, as far as was yet known, equally destitute of members possessed of any military ability, looked on war as favorable to their designs, whatever might be the issue of a campaign. They were above all things eager for the destruction of the monarchy, and they reckoned that if the French army were victorious, its success would disable those who were most willing and might be most able to support the throne; while, if the enemy should prevail, it would be easy to represent their triumph as the fruit of the mismanagement, if not of the treachery, of the king's generals and ministers; and the opposition of these two parties was at this time so notorious that the queen thought it favorable to the king, since each would be eager to preserve him as a possible ally against its adversaries. It is for her husband's and her child's safety that she expresses anxiety, never for her own. With respect to herself her uniform language is that of fearlessness. She does not for a moment conceal from her correspondents her sense of the dangers which surround her. She has not only open hostility to fear, but treachery, which is far worse; and she declares that 'a perpetual imprisonment in a solitary tower on the sea-shore would he a less cruel fate than that which she daily endures from the wickedness of her enemies and the weakness of her friends. Every thing menaces an inevitable catastrophe; but she is prepared for every thing. She has learned from her mother not to fear death. That may as well come to-day as to-morrow. She only fears for her dear children, and for those she loves; and high among those whom she loves she places her sister-in-law Elizabeth, who is always an angel aiding her to support her sorrows, and who, with her poor, dear children, never quits her.[1]'
A long continuance of sorrows and fears, such as had now for nearly three years pressed upon the writer of this letter, would so wear away and break down ordinary souls that, when a crisis came, they would be found wholly unequal to grapple with it; and we may therefore the better form some idea of the strength of mind and almost superhuman fortitude of this admirable queen, if, from time to time, we fix our attention on these not exaggerated complaints, for indeed the misfortunes that elicited them admit of no exaggeration; and then remember that, after so long a period of such uninterrupted suffering, her spirit was so far from being broken, that, as increasing dangers and horrors thickened around her, her courage seemed to increase also. Her faithful attendant, Madame de Campan, has remarked that her troubles had not even affected her temper; that no one ever saw her out of humor. In every respect, to the very last, she showed herself superior to the utmost malice of her enemies.
The news of the death of Leopold, whose son and successor, Francis, was but three-and-twenty years of age, gave fresh encouragement to his sister's enemies. The intelligence had hardly reached Paris when Vergniaud began to prepare the way for a fresh assault on the crown by a denunciation of the ministers, while the Jacobins and Cordeliers made an open attack upon another club which the Constitutionalists had lately formed under the name of Les Feuillants, holding its meetings in a convent of the Monks of St. Bernard,[2] and closed it by main force. Though several soldiers, and La Fayette among them, were members of the Feuillants, they made no resistance; they only applied to Petion, as mayor of the city, for protection; and that worthy magistrate refused them aid, telling them that though the law forbade them to be attacked, the voice of the people was against them, and to that voice he was bound to listen.
The ministers fell before Vergniaud, and the unhappy king had no resource but to choose their successors from the party which had triumphed over them. The absurd law by which the last Assembly had excluded its members from office was still in force, so that the orator himself and his colleagues could obtain no personal promotion; but they were able to nominate the new ministers, who, with but one exception, were all men equally devoid of ability and reputation, and therefore were the better fitted to be the tools of those to whom they owed their preferment. The names of three were Lacoste, Degraves, and Duranton, of whom nothing beyond their names is known. A fourth was Roland, who was indeed known, though not for any abilities of his own, but as the husband of the woman who, as has been already mentioned, was the first person in the whole nation to raise the cry for the murder of the king and queen, and whose fierce thirst for blood so predominated over every other feeling that a few weeks afterward she even began to urge the assassination of the only one among her husband's colleagues who was possessed of the slightest ability because his views did not altogether coincide with her own.
General Dumouriez, whom she thus honored by singling him out for her especial hatred, was an exception to his colleagues in several points. He was a man of middle age, who enjoyed a good reputation, not only for military skill, but also for diplomatic sagacity and address, earned as far back as the latter years of the preceding reign; and he was so far from being originally imbued with revolutionary principles that, when, in the summer of 1789, a mutinous spirit first appeared among the troops in Paris, he volunteered to place his services at the king's disposal, recommending measures of vigor and resolution, which, if they had been adopted, might have quelled the spirit of rebellion, and have changed the whole subsequent history of the nation. But as Necker had rejected Mirabeau a few weeks before, so he also rejected Dumouriez; and discontent at the treatment which he received from the minister, and which seemed to prove that active employment, of which he was desirous, could only be obtained through some other influence, drove the general into the ranks of the Revolutionary party. He now accepted the post of foreign secretary in the new ministry; but the connection with the enemies of the monarchy was uncongenial to his taste; and, after a short time, the frequent intercourse with Louis, which was the necessary consequence of his appointment, and the conviction of the king's perfect honesty and patriotism which this intercourse forced upon him, revived his old feelings of loyalty, and, so long as he remained in office, he honestly endeavored to avert the evils which he foresaw, and to give the advice and to support the policy by which, in his honest belief, it was alone possible for Louis to preserve his authority.
Dumouriez was a gentleman in birth and manners; but his colleagues had so little of either the habits or appearance of decent society that the attendants on the royal family gave them the name of the Sans-culottes; and this name, meant originally to describe the absence of the ordinary court dress, without which no previous ministers had ever ventured to appear in the presence of royalty, was presently adopted as a distinctive title by the whole body of the extreme revolutionists, who knew the value of a name under which to bind their followers together.[3]
The attacks on the ministry were accompanied with more direct attacks on the king and queen themselves than had ever been ventured on in the former Assembly. By this time the system of espial and treachery by which they were surrounded had become so systematic that they could not even send a messenger to their nephew, the emperor, except under a feigned name;[4] and the Baron de Breteuil, who announced his mission to Francis, reported to him at the same time that the chiefs of the Assembly were proposing to pass votes suspending the 'king from his functions, and to separate the queen from him on the ground that an impeachment was to be presented against both, as having solicited the late emperor to form a confederacy among the great powers of Europe in favor of the royal prerogative.' The queen was, in fact, now, as always, more the object of their hatred than her husband, and toward the end of March a reconciliation of all her enemies took place, that the attack upon her might be combined with a strength that should insure its success. The Marquis de Condorcet, a man of some eminence in philosophy, as the word had been understood since the reign of the Encyclopedists, and closely connected with the Girondins, though not formally enrolled in their party, gave a supper, at which the Duc d'Orleans formally reconciled himself to La Fayette; and both, in company with Brissot and the Abbe Sieyes, who of late had scarcely been heard of, drew up an indictment against the queen.[5] Their malignity even went the length of resolving to separate the dauphin from his mother, on the plea of providing for his education; but the means which the Girondins took to secure their triumph for the moment defeated them. La Fayette did not keep the secret. One of his friends gave information to the king of the plot that was in contemplation, and the next day the Constitutionalists mustered in the Assembly in such strength that neither Girondins nor Jacobins dared bring forward the infamous proposal.
But Louis and Marie Antoinette reasonably regarded the attack on them as only postponed, not as defeated or abandoned. They began to prepare for the worst. They burned most of their papers, and removed into the custody of friends whom they could trust those which they regarded as too valuable to destroy; and at the same time they sent notice to their partisans to cease writing to them. They could neither venture to send nor to receive letters. They believed that at this time the plan of their enemies was to terrify them into repeating their attempt to escape; an attempt of which the espial and treachery with which they were surrounded would have insured the failure, but which would have given the Jacobins a pretext for their trial and condemnation. But this scheme they could themselves defeat by remaining at their posts. Patience and courage was their only possible defense, and with those qualities they were richly endowed.
A vital difference of principle distinguished the old from the new ministry: the former had wished to preserve,
