had been their crimes, were still the subjects of her husband, could, in her eyes, be becoming to her as queen; and when those who hoped to make a tool of her to crush their political rivals urged that no evidence would be accepted as equally conclusive with hers, since no one had seen so much of what had taken place, or had in so great a degree preserved that coolness which was indispensable to a clear account of it, and to the identification of the guilty, her reply was a dignified and magnanimous pardon of the outrages beneath which she had so nearly perished.  “I have seen every thing; I have known every thing; I have forgotten every thing;” and Mirabeau, not unthankful for the protection which her magnanimity thus throw around him, was eager to make atonement for his past insults and injuries.

And many of the recent events had convinced him that there was no time to lose.  The vote of November, debarring him, in common with all other members of the Assembly, from office, was a severe blow to the most important of his projects, so far as his own interests were concerned.  Within a month it had been followed by another, proposed by the Abbe Sieyes, a busy priest who boasted that he had made himself master of the whole science of politics, but who was in fact a mere slave of abstract theories, the safety or even the practicability of which he was utterly unable to estimate.  On his motion, the Assembly, in a single evening, abolished all the ancient territorial divisions of the kingdom, and the very names of the provinces; dividing the country anew into eighty-three departments, and coupling with this new arrangement a number of details which were evidently calculated to wrest the whole executive authority of the kingdom from the crown and to vest it in the populace.  At another sitting, the whole property of the Church was confiscated.  On another night, the Parliaments were abolished; and on a fourth, the party which had carried these measures made a still more direct and audacious attack on the royal prerogative, by passing a resolution which deprived the crown of all power of revising the sentences of the judicial tribunals, and of pardoning or mitigating the punishment of those who might have been condemned.  And, if to bring home to the tender-hearted monarch the full effect of this last inroad upon his legitimate power, they at the same time created a new crime to which they gave the name of treason against the nation,[12] without either defining it, or specifying the kind of evidence which should he required to prove it; and they proceeded at once to put it in force to procure the condemnation of a nobleman of decayed fortune, but of the highest character, the Marquis de Favras, in a manner which showed that their real object was to strike terror into the whole Royalist party.  The charges on which he was brought to trial were not merely unfounded, but ridiculous.  He was charged with designing to raise an army of thirty thousand men, with the