nd the
nation. The Girondists, at this time, wished to sustain the throne,
but they wished to limit its power and surround it by the institutions
of republican liberty. The king, animated by his far more
strong-minded, energetic, and ambitious queen, was slowly and
reluctantly surrendering point by point as the pressure of the
multitude compelled, while he was continually hoping that some change
in affairs would enable him to regain his lost power.

The position of the Girondists began to be more and more perilous. The
army of emigrant nobles at Coblentz, within the dominions of the King
of Prussia, was rapidly increasing in numbers. Frederic was
threatening, in alliance with all the most powerful crowns of Europe,
to march with a resistless army to Paris, reinstate the king in his
lost authority, and take signal vengeance upon the leaders of the
Revolution. There were hundreds of thousands in France, the most
illustrious in rank and opulence, who would join such an army. The
Roman Catholic priesthood, to a man, would lend to it the influence
of all its spiritual authority. Paris was every hour agitated by
rumors of the approach of the armies of invasion. The people all
believed that Louis wished to escape from Paris and head that army.
The king was spiritless, undecided, and ever vacillating in his plans.
Maria Antoinette would have gone through fire and blood to have
rallied those hosts around her banner. Such was the position of the
Girondists in reference to the Royalists. They were ready to adopt the
most energetic measures to repel the interference of this armed
confederacy.

On the other hand, they saw another party, noisy, turbulent,
sanguinary, rising beneath them, and threatening with destruction all
connected in any way with the execrated throne. This new party, now
emerging from the lowest strata of society, upheaving all its
superincumbent masses, consisted of the wan, the starving, the
haggard, the reckless. All of the abandoned and the dissolute rallied
beneath its banners. They called themselves the people. Amazonian
fish-women; overgrown boys, with the faces and the hearts of demons;
men and girls, who had no homes but the kennels of Paris, in countless
thousands swelled its demonstrations of power, whenever it pleased
its leaders to call them out. This was the Jacobin party.

The Girondists trembled before this mysterious apparition now looming
up before them, and clamoring for the overthrow of all