r, had he reduced his most devoted
followers to doubt and despair? Such thoughts as these assailed him
like so many stings of conscience. The sentiments of monarchy and of
military honor awoke in him once more, and he sounded with bitterness
the whole depth of the abyss into which his irresolution had plunged
him. In seeing what he was, he recalled sorrowfully {149} what he had
been, and comprehended by cruel experience what feebleness could make
of a Most Christian King and eldest son of the Church, an heir of Louis
XIV. He thought of the many brave men, victims of his political
errors, who on his account had suffered exile and ruin; of the faithful
royalists menaced, because of him, with prison and death. He thought
of the incessantly repeated crimes, the massacres of the Glaciere, the
impunity of the brigands of "headsman" Jourdan, of Brissac's
incarceration. This is what it is, he said within himself, to have
suffered religion to be persecuted and to have believed that, were the
altar once overthrown, the throne might rest secure. He reproached
himself bitterly for having sanctioned the civil organization of the
clergy at the close of 1790, and thus drawn upon himself the censure of
the Sovereign Pontiff. He wanted to be done with concessions, but he
understood perfectly that it was too late now to resist, and that he
was irrevocably lost in consequence of events undesired and unforeseen.

What was to be done? How could he sail against the stream? Where find
a point of vantage? Ought he to take violent measures? If the unhappy
King had been alone, perhaps he might have tried to do so. But he
feared to endanger his wife and children by thus acting.

As if to push the wretched monarch to extremities, the National
Assembly passed two decrees which struck him to the heart. According
to the first of {150} these, voted May 19, any ecclesiastic having
refused the oath to the civil constitution of the clergy, could be
transported at the simple request of twenty citizens of the canton in
which he resided. According to the second, voted June 8, a camp of
twenty thousand federates, recruited from every canton of the realm,
were to be assembled before Paris, in order, as was said in one of the
preambles, "to take every hope from the enemies of the common weal who
are scheming in the interior."

They had counted too much on the King's patience. He could not resolve
to sanction the two decrees, and banish the ec