d hearing insult. Every noise in the city
made her apprehensive of an insurrection. Her days were melancholy, her
nights disturbed: she underwent hourly agony for two years, and that
anguish was magnified in her heart by her love for her two children, and
her disquietude for the king. Her court was forsaken; she saw none but
the shadows of authority; the ministers forced on her by M. de La
Fayette, before whom she was compelled to mask her countenance in
smiles. Her apartments were watched by spies in the guise of servants.
It was necessary to mislead them, in order to have interviews with the
few friends who remained to her. Private staircases, dark corridors,
were the means by which at night her secret counsellors obtained access
to her. These meetings resembled conspiracies; she left them every time
with a different train of ideas, which she communicated to the king,
whose behaviour thus acquired the incoherence of a woman persecuted and
distressed. Measures of resistance, bribing the Assembly, an entire
surrender of the constitution, attempts by force, an assumption of royal
dignity, repentance, weakness, terror, and flight,--all were discussed,
planned, decided on, prepared and abandoned, on the same day. Women, so
sublime in their devotion, are seldom capable of the continuous firmness
of mind--the imperturbability requisite for a political plan. Their
politics are in their heart, their passions trench so closely on their
reason. Of all the virtues which a throne requires they have but
courage; often heroes, they are never statesmen. The queen was another
example of this: she did the king incredible mischief. With a mind
infinitely superior, with more soul, more character than he, her
superiority only served to inspire him with mischievous counsels. She
was at once the charm of his misfortunes and the genius of his
destruction; she conducted him step by step to the scaffold, but she
ascended it with him.

XV.

The right side in the National Assembly consisted of men, the natural
opponents of the movement, the nobility and higher clergy. All, however,
were not of the same rank nor the same title. Seditions are found
amongst the lower rank, revolutions in the higher. Seditions are but the
angry workings of the people--revolutions are the ideas of the epoch.
Ideas begin in the head of the nation. The French Revolution was a
generous thought of the aristocracy. This thought fell into the hands of
the people, who f