It was a significant hint, too, of the projects already formed by the worthless prince whose adherents these ruffians proclaimed themselves.  The Duc d’Orleans conceived himself to have lately received a fresh provocation, and an additional motive for revenge.  His eldest son, the Duc de Chartres,[4] was now a boy of sixteen, and he had proposed to the king to give him Madame Royale in marriage; an idea which the queen, who held his character in deserved abhorrence, had rejected with very decided marks of displeasure.  He was also stimulated by views of personal ambition.  The history of England had been recently studied by many persons in France besides the king and queen; and there were not wanting advisers to point out to the duke that the revolution which had taken place in England exactly a century before had owed its success to the dethronement of the reigning sovereign and the substitution of another member of the royal family in his place.  As William of Orange was, after the king’s own children, the next heir to James II., so was the Duc d’Orleans now the next heir, after the king’s children and brothers, to Louis XVI.; and for the next five months there can be no doubt that he and his partisans, who numbered in their body some of the most influential members of the States-general, kept constantly in view the hope of placing him on the throne from which they were to depose his cousin.

The next day the States were formally opened by Louis in person.  The place of meeting was a spacious hall which, two years before, had been used for the meeting of the Notables.  It had been the scene of many a splendid spectacle in times past, but had never before witnessed so imposing or momentous a ceremony.  The town itself had not risen into notice till the memory of the preceding States-general had almost passed away.  And now, after all the deputies had ranged themselves to receive their sovereign, the representatives of the clergy on the right of the throne, the Nobles on the left, the Commons in denser masses at the bottom of the hall;[5] as the king, accompanied by the queen, leading two of her children[6] by the hand, and attended by all the princes of the royal family and of the blood, by the dukes and peers of the kingdom, the ministers and great officers of state, entered and took his seat on the throne, the most unimpassioned spectator must have felt that he was beholding a scene at once magnificent and solemn; and one, from long desuetude, as novel as if it had been wholly unprecedented, such as might well inaugurate a new policy or a new constitution.