a
Fayette desired to break off the intimacy between the Duc d'Orleans and
Mirabeau. He resolved at all risks to compel the prince to remove from
the scene, and by an exercise of moral restraint or the fear of a state
prosecution, to absent himself and go to London. He made the king and
queen enter into his plans, by alarming them as to the prince's
intrigues, and designating him as a competitor for the throne. La
Fayette said one day to the queen, that this prince was the only man
upon whom the suspicion of so lofty an ambition could fall. "Sir,"
replied the queen, with a look of incredulity, "is it necessary then to
be a prince in order to pretend to the throne?" "At least, madam,"
replied the general, "I only know the Duc d'Orleans who aspires to it."
La Fayette presumed too much on the prince's ambition.

VIII.

Mirabeau, discouraged at the hesitations and scruples of the Duc
d'Orleans, and finding him above or below crime, cast him off like a
despised accomplice of ambition, and tried to ally himself with La
Fayette, who, possessed of the armed force, and who saw in Mirabeau the
whole of the moral force, smiled at the idea of a duumvirate, which
could assume to themselves empire. There were secret interviews at Paris
and at Passy between these two rivals. La Fayette rejecting every idea
of an usurpation profitable to the prince, declared to Mirabeau that he
must renounce every conceived plot against the queen if he would come
to an understanding with him. "Well, general," replied Mirabeau, "since
you will have it so, let her live! A humbled queen may be fit for
something, but a queen with her throat cut is only good as the subject
of a bad tragedy!" This atrocious remark, which treated the bloodshed of
a woman as a jest, was subsequently known by the queen, who however
forgave Mirabeau, and did not allow it to interfere with her _liaisons_
with the great orator. But the cold-blooded infamy must have found its
way to her heart as an ominous warning of what she might fear hereafter.

La Fayette, sure of the consent of the king and queen, supported by the
feelings of the national guard, who were growing weary of factions and
the factious, ventured to assume quietly towards the prince the tone of
a dictator, and to pronounce against him an arbitrary exile under the
appearance of a mission freely accepted. He sent to request of the Duc
d'Orleans a meeting at the Marquise de Coigny's, a noble intelligent
lady attache