any avowed their satisfaction that
the king and queen were captured. For the plan concerted with Bouille
was to serve monarchy, not aristocracy. In her passionate resistance
to the party of d'Artois, Conde, and Calonne, the queen felt herself
the champion of popular royalism. In the language of the day, she was
for a counter-constitution, they for a counter-revolution. There was a
personal question also. The queen relied on Breteuil to save her from
Calonne, whom she suspected of having tampered with the king's
confessor to learn Court secrets. When she saw the answer from Mantua,
she at once knew his hand. If that was her brother's policy, it was
time to make a rush for freedom. The Jacobin yoke could be borne, not
the yoke of the _emigres_. Breteuil warned them to lose no time, if
they would escape from thraldom to their friends. When Marie
Antoinette resolved that flight with the risk of capture would be
better than rescue by such hands, she knew but half the truth. The
document brought back from Mantua by Durfort was a forgery. It
governed history for 100 years; and the genuine text was not published
until 1894. And we know now that Calonne, behind the back of the Count
d'Artois, fabricated the reply which lured the king and queen to their
fate. On June 9 Mercy wrote that they were deceived. In their terror
and uncertainty, they fled. The first motive of Lewis had been the
horror of injuring a religion which was his own. When he signed the
decree imposing the oath on the clergy, which began the persecution,
he said, "At least, it is not for long."

The elections to the next Assembly were appointed for July 5. If the
first Assembly was allowed to accomplish its work, all that had been
done to discredit one party and to conciliate another, all the fruit
of Mirabeau's expensive intrigues, would be lost. The final
determination that sent them along the road to Varennes was the
treason hatched at Mantua. They ran the gauntlet to the Argonne in the
cause of limited monarchy, to evade revolution and reaction. That was
the spirit in which Mirabeau urged departure, and in which Bouille
came to the rescue; and it is that which made the queen odious to the
expatriated nobles. But it was not the policy of Breteuil. He refused
to contemplate anything but the restoration of the unbroken crown. The
position was ambiguous. Contrary forces were acting for the moment in
combination. Between the reactionary statesman and the constitut