257} squadrons would conduct them to the midst
of the French army, the asylum of devotion and honor. But Louis XVI.
refused. The last resources remaining to him were to evaporate between
his hands. He will profit neither by the sympathies of all European
courts, which ardently desire his safety; by his civil list, which
might be such an efficacious means of action; nor by the loyalty of his
brave soldiers, who are ready to shed their last drop of blood in his
defence. A large party in the Legislative Assembly would ask nothing
but a signal, providing it were seriously given, to rally with vigor to
the royal cause. He had intrepid champions there whom no menace could
affright, and who on every occasion, no matter how violent or
tumultuous the galleries might be, had braved the storm with heroic
constancy. Public opinion was changing for the better. The schemes
and language of the Jacobins exasperated the mass of honest people.
The provinces were sending addresses of fidelity to the King.

What was lacking to the monarch to enable him to combine so many
scattered elements into a solid group? A little will, a little of that
essential quality, audacity, which, according to Danton, is the last
word of politics. But Louis XVI. has a timorous soul. If he makes one
step forward, he is in haste to make another back. He is scrupulous,
hesitating; he has no confidence in himself or any one else. This
prince, so incontestably courageous, acts as if he were a coward. He
has made so many concessions already that {258} the idea of any manner
of resistance seems to him chimerical. Does the fate of Charles I.
make him dread the beginning of civil war as the supreme danger? Does
he fear to imperil the lives of his wife and children by an energetic
deed? Is he expecting foreign aid? Does he think to prove his wisdom
by his patience, and that success will crown delay? Is he so
benevolent, so gentle, that the least thought of repression is
repugnant to him? Does he wish to carry to extremes that pardon of
injuries which is recommended by the Gospel? What is plain is, that he
rejects every firm resolution.

Palliatives, expedients, half-measures, were what suited this honest
but feeble nature. Disturbed by contradictory councils, and no longer
knowing what to desire or what to hope, he looked on at his own
destruction like an unmoved spectator. He was no longer a sovereign
full of the sentiment of his power and his rig