troubles, but those of their neighbors do not yet affect them; and the names of Liberty and Despotism are so deeply engraved in their heads, even though they do not clearly define them, that they are everlastingly passing from the love of the former to the dread of the latter;” and then she adds a sketch of her own ideas and expectations, and of the objects which she conceives it her duty to keep in view, in which it is affecting to see that her utter despair of any future happiness for the king and herself in no degree weakens her desire to promote the happiness of the very people who have caused her suffering.  “Our task is to watch skillfully for the moment when men’s heads have returned to proper ideas sufficiently to make them enjoy a reasonable and honest freedom, such as the king has himself always desired for the happiness of his people; but far from that license and anarchy which have precipitated the fairest of kingdoms into all possible miseries.  Our health continues good, but it would be better if we could only perceive the least gleam of happiness around us; as for ourselves, that is at an end forever, happen what will.  I know that it is the duty of a king to suffer for others; and it is one which we are discharging thoroughly.”

She had indeed at this time sufferings to which it is characteristic of her undaunted courage that she never makes the slightest allusion in her letters.  Of all the Jacobin party, one of the most blood-thirsty was a wretch named Marat.[7] At the very outset of the Revolution he had established a newspaper to which he gave the name of The People’s Friend, and the staple topic of which was the desirableness of bloodshed and massacre.  He had been exasperated at the receptions given to the royal family at the festival of July; and for some weeks afterward his efforts were directed to inflame the populace to a new riot, in which the king and queen should be dragged into Paris from St. Cloud, as in 1789 they had been dragged in from Versailles, and which should end in the murder of the queen, the ministers, and several hundreds of other innocent persons; and his denunciations very nearly bore a part of their intended fruit.  The royal family had hardly returned to St. Cloud, when a man named Rotondo was apprehended in the inner garden, who confessed that he had made his way into it with the express design of assassinating Marie Antoinette, a design which was only balked by the fortunate accident of a heavy shower which prevented her from leaving the house; and a week or two afterward a second plot was discovered, the contrivers of which designed to poison her.  Her attendants were greatly alarmed; and her physician furnished Madame Campan with an antidote for such poisons as seemed most likely to be employed.  But Marie Antoinette herself cared little for such precautions.  Assassination was not the end which she anticipated.  On one occasion, when she found Madame Campan changing some powdered