tion. In that summer he was plotting to escape
to Metz and join the army which had been collected there under the
Marquis de Bouille, while Bouille himself, after the rising at Nancy,
was busy in improving discipline by breaking on the wheel a selection
of the soldiers of the Swiss regiment of Chateauvieux which had refused
to march against Paris on the 14th of July, 1789. In October, 1790,
Louis wrote to the King of Spain and other sovereigns to pay no heed to
his concessions for he only yielded to duress, and all this even as
Mirabeau made his supreme effort to save those who were fixed upon
destroying themselves. Mirabeau sought the King and offered his
services. The court sneered at him as a dupe. The Queen wrote, "We make
use of Mirabeau, but we do not take him seriously." When Mirabeau awoke
to his predicament, he broke out in mixed wrath and scorn: "Of what are
these people thinking? Do they not see the abyss yawning at their feet?
Both the King and Queen will perish, and you will live to see the rabble
spurn their corpses."

The King and Queen, the Nobility and Clergy, could not see the abyss
which Mirabeau saw, any more than the lawyers could see it, because of
the temper of their minds. In the eye of caste Europe was not primarily
divided into nations to whom allegiance was due, but into superimposed
orders. He who betrayed his order committed the unpardonable crime.
Death were better than that. But to the true aristocrat it was
inconceivable that serfs could ever vanquish nobles in battle. Battle
must be the final test, and the whole aristocracy of Europe was certain,
Frenchmen knew, to succor the French aristocracy in distress.

So in the winter of 1790 the French fugitives congregated at Coblentz on
the German frontier, persuaded that they were performing a patriotic
duty in organizing an invasion of their country even should their onset
be fatal to their relatives and to their King. And Louis doubted not
that he also did his duty as a trustee of a divine commission when he in
one month swore, before the Assembly, to maintain the constitution
tendered him, and in the next authorized his brother, the Comte
d'Artois, to make the best combination he could among his brother
sovereigns for the gathering of an army to assert his divine
prerogative. On June 21, 1791, Louis fled, with his whole family, to
join the army of Bouille, with intent to destroy the entire race of
traitors from Mirabeau and Lafayette down