and began to wipe the dust from their soles. People cried
bravo, and he was carried in triumph.

Marie Antoinette could not become resigned to this hatred. Often she
frightened her women by wishing to go out of the palace and address the
people. "Yes," she would cry, her voice trembling, as she walked
quickly to and fro in her chamber, "yes, I will say to them: Frenchmen,
they have had the cruelty to persuade you that I do not love France, I,
the wife of its King and the mother of a Dauphin!" Then, this brief
moment of generous exaltation over, the illusion of being able to move
a nation of insulters quickly vanished. Her life was a daily, hourly
struggle. The wife, the mother, the queen, never ceased to contend
against destiny. She hardly slept or ate; but from the very excess of
danger she drew additional energy, and moral and material force. As
she awoke at daybreak, she required that the {263} shutters should not
be closed, so that her sleepless nights might be sooner consoled by the
light of morning. The most widely diverse sentiments occupied her
soul. A captive in her palace, she sometimes believed herself
irrevocably condemned by fate, and sometimes hoped for deliverance.

Toward the middle of one of the last nights preceding the 10th of
August, the moon shone into her bedchamber. "In a month," she said to
Madame Campan, "I shall not see that moon unless I am freed from my
chains." But she was not free from anxiety concerning all that might
happen before that. "The King is not a poltroon," she added; "he has
very great passive courage, but he is crushed by a false shame, a doubt
of himself, which arises from his education quite as much as from his
character. He is afraid of commanding; he dreads above everything to
speak to assemblages of men. He lived uneasily and like a child, under
the eyes of Louis XV. until he was twenty, and this constraint has had
an effect on his timidity. In our circumstances, a few clearly spoken
words addressed to the Parisians who are devoted to us would immensely
strengthen our party, but he will not say them." Then Marie Antoinette
explained why she did not put herself forward more: "For my part," said
she, "I could act, and mount a horse if need were; but, if I acted, it
would put weapons into the hands of King's enemies; a general outcry
would be raised in France against the Austrian woman, against female
domination; moreover, {264} I should reduce the King to n