for us, and have placed him at table between the king and myself; but surrounded as I was by the very murderers who had caused his father’s death, I could not venture even to bestow a glance upon him.  Yet the Royalists will blame me for not having seemed to be interested in the poor child; while the Revolutionists will be furious, thinking that those who presented him to me knew that it would please me.”  And all that she could venture to do she did.  She knew that the marchioness was very poor, and she sent her by a trusty agent a few hundred louis, and with it a kind message, assuring the unhappy widow that she would always watch over her and her son’s interests.

CHAPTER XXVII.

The King accepts the Constitution so far as it has been settled.—­The Queen makes a Speech to the Deputies.—­She is well received at the Theatre.—­Negotiations with Mirabeau.—­The Queen’s Views of the Position of Affairs.—­The Jacobin Club denounces Mirabeau.—­Deputation of Anacharsis Clootz.—­Demolition of the Statue of Louis XIV.—­Abolition of Titles of Honor.—­The Queen admits Mirabeau to an Audience.—­His Admiration of her Courage and Talents.—­Anniversary of the Capture of the Bastile.—­Fete of the Champ de Mars.—­Presence of Mind of the Queen.

What was probably as painful to Marie Antoinette as these occurrences themselves was the apathy with which the king regarded them.  The English traveler to whose journal we have more than once referred, and who, in the first week of the year, saw the royal pair waiting in the gardens of the Tuileries, remarked that though the queen did not appear in good health, but showed melancholy and anxiety in her face, the king, on the other hand, “was as plump as ease could render him.[1]” And in the course of February, in spite of all her remonstrances, Necker succeeded in persuading him to go down to the Assembly, and to address the members in a long speech, in which, though some of his expressions were clearly intended as a reproof of the Assembly itself for the precipitation and violence of some of its measures, he nevertheless declared his cordial assent to the new Constitution, so far as they had yet settled it, and promised to co-operate in a spirit of affection and confidence in the labors which still remained to be achieved.

The greater part of the speech is believed to have been his own composition; and it is characteristic of the fidelity with which, on every occasion, Marie Antoinette adhered to her rule of strengthening her husband’s position by her own cordial and conspicuous support, that, strongly as she had objected to the step before it was taken, now that it was decided on, she professed a decided approval of it; and when a deputation of the Assembly, which had been appointed to escort the king with honor back to the palace, solicited an audience of herself to pay their respects, she assured the deputies that “she partook of