July 14 he did not hesitate to repair to the fete of the federation, there to renew publicly his constitutional oath.'

The royal family went in state for the last time. As Madame de Staël tells us:

The expression of the queen's face will never leave my memory. Her eyes were sunk and worn with weeping, and the splendour of her toilette and the dignity of her carriage contrasted strangely with those about her. . . . The king went on foot to the altar in the Champ de Mars. From that day the people never saw him till he mounted the scaffold.'

M. Sorel gives, we think, a very fair estimate of the character of the queen.

'Marie Antoinette was in no way a woman fitted for affairs of State. She was simply a woman. That was her charm and her misfortune. There was no trace in her of the genius of her mother, Maria Theresa. She was simply a young Viennese princess. Fond of pleasure, and sympathetic, she was too proud of her rank and birth and too disdainful of the opinions of the world to sacrifice to them even a trifling caprice. Frivolous, but little educated, and never reading, difficult to advise and impatient of schooling, which bored her, she judged of policies by persons, and of persons by the opinions of coteries. With little judgement she had plenty of courage, but her valour was apt to dissipate itself in anger or tears. Her heart, nevertheless, was noble, and honour was with her a passion. When the dignity of the crown seemed compromised or lowered-when it was outraged amidst provocation and insult, she hardened herself against attack, and one could then recognise in her the daughter of Maria Theresa.' (Vol. ii. p. 138.)

Though only frivolous, she was at first frivolous to excess, and allowed herself a freedom which the court never pardoned-neglect of etiquette. The follies of Trianon, which would have delighted the respectful goodnature of the Viennese, scandalised the Parisians, who were ready to pardon anything except the sin of not seeming to believe they meant what they said.

Painful to and fatal for her was the hostility, so early developed, of the king's brother, the Comte de Provence. This hostility outraged one of the strongest instincts of her nature when the count aspired to assume the title of regent amongst the émigrés. After the unhappy flight to Varennes,

'these pretensions of "monsieur" to the regency even aroused for a moment her husband from his torpor. He endured the Revolution as a sort of malady he could not understand. But in the intrigues of

Considérations sur la Révolution Française, vol. i. P. 381.

his brothers and their counsellors he detected both ambition and perfidy. . . . He formally disowned and protested against this regency,. and the queen eagerly supported him, for the Count de Provence's action troubled her in the only hope which animated her-namely, the happiness and future glory of her son. "If," said she, "the émigrés "should, against all expectation, succeed, we should fall into a new "slavery worse than the other. Nothing with them nor for them"the emperor must insist on this; it is the only way in which he can "do us-and especially me-a service. The cowards! after having "abandoned us, they desire that we alone should run risks to serve "their interests."

In spite of all her efforts the brothers would not yield, and the distress this caused at the Tuileries was all the greater because the insubordination of these princes caused the most distressing family dissensions. Madame Elisabeth had not, like the king and queen, been astonished and revolted by the conduct of her brothers. On the contrary, she thought them in the right, and surrounded herself with their emissaries. Our home is a perfect hell,' wrote Marie Antoinette; one cannot speak, and there is nothing but 'quarrelling all day long.' But the king did not sufficiently support his wife, and his invincible repugnance to any sustained thought was destined to paralyse him in the end. Her courage did not fail, and to relieve the pain caused her by the dissimulation she was forced to practise, she occasionally found satisfaction in giving free vent to her real sentiments. What a pleasure it will be,' she once exclaimed, if I can one day make evident to all these 'ruffians that I was never really their dupe!' She became plainly guilty of treason to the nation :

For a long time (in 1792) she had seen in the ministry-the assembly and the revolutionary part of the nation-nothing more than criminals, against whom all arms were legitimate. Maternal affection sustained her royal pride, and the feelings of her heart supported her policy. Thus she made no scruple of spying into the secrets of her adversaries and betraying their plans to the enemies of France. In her eyes the king was France, and her business was to save him and her children and restore his power. Louis had no secrets from her, and she had no secrets from her allies. Everything she could find out about the conduct of the war she communicated to Montmorin, Fersen, and Mercy.'

The royal intrigues only ended at last in a deplorable conflict of projects which destroyed each other. There was a too passionate queen, an apathetic king, at once the victim of the fears of his countrymen and the unscrupulous

Letter to Fersen of October 31, t. i. p. 207.

covetousness of foreign Powers. There were to be seen at the foreign courts, M. Sorel tells us, agents declaring on the part of the French ministry that the king desired their complete neutrality, while others, agents of the king himself, declared that no attention was to be paid to what the ministry said. There were also the emissaries of the emigrant princes, who protested that the king was not free, and that those who spoke in his name were not to be trusted in the least.

Such was the deplorable confusion, the sad tergiversation, and the helpless and hopeless abyss of fatal disaster into which circumstances had led an amiable and, on the whole, estimable woman and one of the best-intentioned of men. Of them M. Sorel says with truth that

'They were born to reign far from storms upon some modest throne of Germany or Italy, where they would have made their subjects happy and been happy themselves. In France-where, by a singular contrast, the people, insubordinate, turbulent, and apparently frivolous, never attach themselves to any but strong kings and austere queensthey had nothing but to die.' (Vol. ii. p. 134.)

Meantime, while the immense majority of the French nation, thoroughly impregnated with the revolutionary spirit, were rapidly developing towards what we know as modern France, a curious survival of old France continued to exist external to it. The emigration of 1790 was, in fact, as M. Sorel says, the ancien régime surviving its fall, and damning itself irretrievably. France, he tells us, had banished it, and it tried to reconstitute itself on the frontier, and then advance to the reconquest of France. Most of the émigrés had taken refuge at Coblentz, Mainz, or Worms. It had become the fashion to emigrate, and those who went were fully convinced that they would very soon return in triumph. The ecclesiastical princes of the Rhine, especially the Elector of Mainz, received them magnificently. According to the account of one of these émigrés, his court was brilliant, and I was constantly invited to dine and sup not only at ceremonious banquets, 'but also in the most private society of the elector, at the houses of Madame F. and Madame G., who were, as was whispered, his two ministers." Coblentz also, under the Elector of Trier, was a place of fashionable reunion. The émigrés had but one passionate desire-the counter-revo

The Baron d'Escars. See Geoffroy's 'Gustave III.,' vol. ii.

P. 152.

lution--and were as fanatical in their way as were the Jacobins themselves. At Coblentz, Monsieur' (the Count de Provence) had his maîtresse en titre, who was one of his wife's maids of honour. It was in her drawing-room that the count held his court, seated by the fireplace, indulging his taste for refined wit. The emigrant camp at Worms, though it exhibited all the defects of the old Freuch army, was greatly superior in tone to the court at Coblentz. Though plenty of folly was to be found there, it was at least a thoroughly sincere folly, where each man was prepared to shed his blood for the cause he had at heart. Everyone there also was devoted to their commander, Condé, who in the episcopal palace made a great parade of his mistress, Madame de Monaco. The émigrés showed but little respect for the king even before his arrest at Varennes. After that they showed him none. In their eyes the monarchy was of more account than the king, and the noblesse of more account than the monarchy. Under the title of Union des Provinces,' they formed a sort of league, which became disseminated all over France. If they had succeeded in re-establishing royalty, they would have liked to treat it as Guise treated the Valois. The king would have been head of the league only in order that he might obey it. They wished that he should reign indeed, but that the nobility should govern. While waiting thus to bring about the subjection of Louis XVI., they insulted him, calling him the poor man' or 'the imbecile.' It was the courtiers of 'monsieur' who brought the use of these expressions into fashion. The émigrés sought eagerly the support of Austria, though they had little love for and much dread of that Power. What they most feared and detested of all, however, was 'constitutional government.' The worst of all ' evils would be,' they said,* to receive a constitution at the 'hands of Austria. . . . It would be far better to lose a 'whole province than to have a constitution.' There was a remarkable resemblance, as M. Sorel points out, between the French émigrés and the Polish aristocrats. The former placed their privileges above the king's life, the latter made their privileges the most important of all State affairs. The French émigrés, taking refuge in the States of an hereditary enemy of their country, solicited and obtained help from that enemy to try and regain their privileges and

* Bombelles and Breteuil, May 8, 1792. See Fersen, vol. ii. p. 267.

the supremacy of their faction. The confederates of Targowitz similarly allied themselves with the Russians to destroy the Polish constitution of May 3. The émigrés desired the re-establishment of all their privileges, and to undo the whole beneficent work of the constituent assembly. They desired also to effect all this by the most unscrupulous violence, and by striking terror into the supporters of the French government. The impotence of the partisans of the ancien régime to understand or to lessen the evils of the Revolution left them no resource but to endeavour to crush it. No one repudiated the use of the most extreme violence and the sinister influence of fear. I hold it to be necessary to strike terror into the Parisians,' said Montmorin.* Fear will drive the assembly along the road it at present follows, till another fear propels it in the contrary direction. 'Depend upon it, those men are to be acted on by nothing but terror.' The royalist manifesto of July 25, 1792, declared that the allied Powers

<

'will treat as enemies and punish as rebels such national guards as may resist them, and will burn down and destroy the houses of, and treat with the utmost rigour, all those who dare to offer opposition. The inhabitants of Paris are summoned to submit to the king forthwith, and the members of the national assembly will have to answer with their heads for whatever may take place. The smallest outrage on the royal family is to be punished with exemplary vengeance and Paris delivered over to military execution and complete destruction.'

At Coblentz the émigrés declared that this manifesto should be executed to the letter, and talked of nothing but subjugation and extermination. A minister of Gustavus III. declared that it was absolutely necessary to annihilate that den of assassins, for as long as Paris exists there will never 'be kings.' Under these circumstances the French populace might well be alarmed. They held with much truth that the 'king was apathetic and dominated by others, the queen hostile, the nobility implacable, and that Austria was an enemy.' It was not very likely that the French people could be made to believe that 100,000 Germans would invade France, animated with no desire but that of establishing there a temperate monarchy and astonishing the world by their disinterestedness; that a king restored by foreigners to the plenitude of his power would only make use of it in order to effect constitutional reforms; that the queen would only employ Austrian troops to regain her legitimate influence; or that

* Letter to La Marck, July 13, 1792.