ion from state-burdens, had already found out its own
share in the peril of the experiment, and now sought, by a close
alliance with the _noblesse_, to avert the ruin that too evidently
menaced both. But the torrent had but accumulated at each irresistible
concession, and every day's work added to the democratic elements of a
constitution that had already made royalty a cipher, and annihilated,
as political institutions, the church and aristocracy.

Of course new schemes of regal antagonism again raised their heads, and
again a popular manifestation, bringing Paris into the very boudoir of
the queen, at Versailles, demonstrated the impuissance of all that took
the name of French royalism. The October insurrection was fomented by
Mirabeau and his Orleanist friends, for the same purpose as that of
July, to secure personal safety, and obtain a new scene of action, by
terrifying the court into exile, or the acceptance of Orleans'
protection. Had the duke been raised to the "lieutenant-generalship of
the kingdom," Mirabeau counted on a premiership, in which he purposed to
become the Chatham or Pitt of France. Had Louis the Sixteenth fled the
kingdom after the example of the Comte D'Artois, he purposed to proclaim
a republic, and become its "first consul;" and should the doom be that
France should be divided by civil war, and cut up into its old kingdoms,
he speculated on a sovereignty in his ancestral country, Provence, which
had already greeted him with so encouraging an enthusiasm.

Strangeness of event! While the monarchy, so short-lived, still survived
the insatiate Mirabeau, two of the extraordinary contingencies he
speculated on have already happened, to the profit of other actors, and
the existing republic, in its mutinous armies, intolerant factions, and
insane dynasties, offers no very improbable portent that, even after
half a century of a centralized and well-fixed nationality, the old
repartition of kingdoms may again present itself!

The great consummation of the confusion, however, failed for the
overmuch of means. "A bottle of brandy was given," said the orator,
"instead of a glass!" and the mob's capricious _impromptu_ of carrying
the king back with them to Paris, still more than the cowardice of the
Duke of Orleans, defeated this deep-laid Machiavelian combination.

Whatever the character, however, of the people's success, it could not
but be an additional success for their leader. The revolution, of which