cordance with the signs
which they themselves made from the body of the hall.[1] And if the
populace was thus the master of the Assembly while at Versailles, this was
far more the case after its removal to Paris, where the number of the idle
portion of the population furnished the Jacobins with far greater means of
intimidating their adversaries.

It was remarkable that La Marck himself, as has been already intimated,
did not fully share the hopes which the king and queen founded on the
adhesion of Mirabeau. It was not only that on one point he had sounder
views than Mirabeau himself--doubting, as he did, whether the mischief
which his vehement friend had formerly done could now be undone by the
same person, merely because he had changed his mind--but he also felt
doubts of Mirabeau's steadiness in his new path, and feared lest eagerness
for popularity, or an innate levity of disposition, might still lead him
astray. As he described him in a letter to Mercy, "he was sometimes very
great and sometimes very little; he could be very useful, and he could be
very mischievous: in a word, he was often above, and sometimes greatly
below, any other man." At another time he speaks of him as "by turns
imprudent through excess of confidence, and lukewarm from distrust;" and
this estimate of the great demagogue, which was not very incorrect, shows,
too, how high an opinion La Marck had formed of the queen's ability and
force of character, for he looks to her "to put a curb on his
inconstancy,[2]" trusting for that result not so much to her power of
fascination as to her clearness of view and resolution.

And she herself was never so misled by her high estimate of Mirabeau's
abilities and influence as to think his judgment unerring. On the
contrary, her comment to Mercy on one of the earliest letters which he
addressed to the king was that it was "full of madness from one end to the
other," and she asked "how he, or any one else, could expect that at such
a moment the king and she could be induced to provoke a civil war?"
alluding, apparently, to his urgent advice that the royal family should
leave Paris, a step of the necessity for which she was not yet convinced.
Her hope evidently was that he would bring forward some motions in the
Assembly which might at least arrest the progress of mischief, and perhaps
even pave the way for the repair of some of the evil already done.

On one point she partly agreed with him, but not wholly. H