in the most frequented places; that they should visit the hospitals, the artisans’ workshops, and make themselves friends by acts of charity and generosity, it is to her that he looks to carry out his suggestions, and to her affability and presence of mind that he trusts for the success which is to result from them;[9] and La Marck is equally convinced that “her ability and resolution are equal to the conduct of affairs of the first importance.”

Meantime her health continued good.  It showed her strength of mind that she never intermitted the recreations which contributed to her strength, about which she was especially anxious, that she might at all times be ready to act on any emergency; but rode with Elizabeth with great regularity in the Bois de Boulogne, even in the depth of the winter; and, while watching with her habitual vigilance of affection over the education of her children, she found a pleasant relaxation for herself in providing them with amusement also; often arranging parties, to which other children of the same age were invited, and finding amusement herself from watching their gambols in the long corridor of the Tuileries, their blindman’s-buff and hide-and-seek.[10]

The new year opened with grave plans for their extrication from their troubles—­plans requiring the utmost forethought, ingenuity, and secrecy to bring them to a successful issue; and also with fresh injuries and insults from the Assembly and the municipal authorities, which every week made the necessity of promptitude in carrying such plans out more manifest.  Mirabeau, as we have seen, had from the very first recommended that the king and his family should withdraw from Paris.  In his eyes such a step was the indispensable preliminary to all other measures; and some of the earliest of the queen’s letters in 1791 show that the resolution to leave the turbulent city had at last been taken.  But though what he recommended was to be done, it was not to be done as he recommended; yet there was a manliness about the course of action which he proposed which would of itself have won the queen’s preference, if she had not been forced to consider not what was best and fittest, but what it was most easy to induce him on whom the final choice must impend, the king, to adopt.  Mirabeau advised that the king should depart publicly, in open day, “like a king,” as he expressed himself,[11] and he affirmed his conviction that it would in all probability be quite unnecessary to remove farther than Compiegne; but that the moment that it should be known that the king was out of Paris, petitions demanding the re-establishment of order would flock in from every quarter of the kingdom, and public opinion, which was for the most part royalist, would compel the Assembly to modify the Constitution which it had framed, or, if it should prove refractory, would support the king in dissolving it and convoking another.