y delays and
discouragement they wish to bring us to accept this shameful mediation,
ought the National Assembly to close its eyes to such a danger? Let us
all swear to die here rather than--" He was not allowed to finish.
The whole assembly rose to their feet, crying: "Yes, yes; we swear it!"
And in a burst of enthusiasm, every Frenchman who would take part in a
congress having for its object the modification of the Constitution,
was declared an infamous traitor. January 17, it was decreed that the
King should require the {27} Emperor Leopold to explain himself
definitely before March 1.

By a curious coincidence, this date of March 1 was precisely that on
which the Emperor Leopold was to die of a dreadful malady. He was in
perfect health on February 27, when he gave audience to the Turkish
envoy; he was in his agony, February 28, and on March 1, he died. His
usual physician asserted that he had been poisoned. The idea that a
crime had been committed spread among the people. Vague rumors got
about concerning a woman who had caused remark at the last masked ball
at court. This unknown person, under shelter of her disguise, might
have presented the sovereign with poisoned bonbons. The Jacobins, who
might have desired to get rid of the armed chief of the empire, and the
_emigres_, who might have reproached him as too luke-warm in his
opposition to the principles of the French Revolution, were alternately
suspected. The last hypothesis was hardly probable, nor does anything
prove that the Jacobins had any hand in the possibly natural death of
the Emperor Leopold. But minds were so overexcited at the time that
the parties mutually accused each other, on all occasions, of the most
execrable crimes. For that matter, there were Jacobins who, out of
mere bravado, would willingly have gloried in crimes of which they were
not guilty, provided that these crimes had been committed against kings.

What is certain is, that Marie Antoinette believed {28} in poison.
"The death of the Emperor Leopold," says Madame Campan, "occurred on
March 1, 1792. The Queen was out when the news arrived at the
Tuileries. On her return, I gave her the letter announcing it. She
cried out that the Emperor had been poisoned; that she had remarked and
preserved a gazette in which, in an article on the session of the
Jacobin Club at the time when Leopold had declared for the Coalition,
it was said, in speaking of him, that a bit of piecrust