It was remarkable that La Marck himself, as has been already intimated, did not fully share the hopes which the king and queen founded on the adhesion of Mirabeau.  It was not only that on one point he had sounder views than Mirabeau himself—­doubting, as he did, whether the mischief which his vehement friend had formerly done could now be undone by the same person, merely because he had changed his mind—­but he also felt doubts of Mirabeau’s steadiness in his new path, and feared lest eagerness for popularity, or an innate levity of disposition, might still lead him astray.  As he described him in a letter to Mercy, “he was sometimes very great and sometimes very little; he could be very useful, and he could be very mischievous:  in a word, he was often above, and sometimes greatly below, any other man.”  At another time he speaks of him as “by turns imprudent through excess of confidence, and lukewarm from distrust;” and this estimate of the great demagogue, which was not very incorrect, shows, too, how high an opinion La Marck had formed of the queen’s ability and force of character, for he looks to her “to put a curb on his inconstancy,[2]” trusting for that result not so much to her power of fascination as to her clearness of view and resolution.

And she herself was never so misled by her high estimate of Mirabeau’s abilities and influence as to think his judgment unerring.  On the contrary, her comment to Mercy on one of the earliest letters which he addressed to the king was that it was “full of madness from one end to the other,” and she asked “how he, or any one else, could expect that at such a moment the king and she could be induced to provoke a civil war?” alluding, apparently, to his urgent advice that the royal family should leave Paris, a step of the necessity for which she was not yet convinced.  Her hope evidently was that he would bring forward some motions in the Assembly which might at least arrest the progress of mischief, and perhaps even pave the way for the repair of some of the evil already done.

On one point she partly agreed with him, but not wholly.  He insisted on the necessity of dismissing the ministers; but she, though thinking them, both as a body and individually, unequal to the crisis, saw great difficulty in replacing them, since the vote of the preceding winter forbade the king to select their successors from the members of the Assembly;[3] and she feared also lest, if he should dismiss them, the Assembly would carry out a plan which, as it seemed to her, it already showed great inclination to adopt, of managing every thing by means of committees, and preventing the appointment of any new administration.  Her view of the situation, and of the king’s and her position, varied from time to time, as indeed their circumstances and the views of the Assembly appeared to alter.  In August she is in great distress, caused by a decision of the emperor to remove Mercy to the Hague.  “I am,” she writes