umped, and was
necessarily suspicious.

By Mirabeau's advice, the Count of Provence at once made a public
declaration of sound revolutionary sentiments, and disavowed Favras.
His speech, delivered at the Hotel de Ville, was well received and he
rose in popular favour. Meantime, his unhappy confederate was tried
for treason against the nation, and found guilty. Favras asked
whether, on a full and explicit confession, his life would be spared.
He was told that nothing could save him. The judge exhorted him to die
in silence, like a brave man. The priest who assisted him afterwards
professed that he had saved the life of the Count of Provence. Favras
underwent his fate with fortitude, keeping his secret to the end. The
evidence which would have compromised the prince was taken away, and
no historian has seen it. The fatal documents were restored to him
when he became king by the daughter of the man who had concealed them.

For some weeks the Count of Provence was ambitious of power, and
allowed Mirabeau to put him forward as a kind of Prime Minister, or
for a position analogous to that of the Cardinal-nephew in
seventeenth-century Rome. He had ability, caution, and, for the
moment, popularity; but he was irresolute, indolent, and vain. If
anything could be made of him, it was clear that the active partner
would be Mirabeau. He was neither loved nor trusted by the king and
queen, and with such a confederate at his elbow he might become
formidable. Necker devised a plan by which his scheming was easily
frustrated. The king appeared before the Assembly, without
preliminaries, and delivered an unexpected statement of policy,
adopting the entire work of the Revolution, as far as it had gone, and
praising in particular the recent division of Provinces into
departments.

Every step, until that day, had been taken reluctantly, feebly, under
compulsion. Every concession had been a defeat and a surrender. On
February 4, under no immediate pressure, Lewis deliberately took the
lead of the movement. It was an act, not of weakness, but of policy,
not a wound received and acquiesced in, but a stroke delivered. The
Assembly responded by at once taking the civic oath to maintain the
Constitution. As that instrument did not yet exist, none could say
what the demonstration would involve. It was adopted for the sake of
committing the remnant of the privileged orders who yielded under
protest.

Mirabeau's aristocratic brother threw away