a conviction, that, with such an Assembly as would surely be returned, the Jacobin Club would practically exercise all the power of the State.  But the Constitutional party, who saw that it was aimed at them, opposed it with great vigor; and would probably have been able to defeat it if the Royalist members who still retained their seats would have consented to join them.  Unhappily the queen took the opposite view.  With far more acuteness, penetration, and fertility of imagination than are usually given to women, or to men either, she had still in some degree the defect common to her sex, of being prone to confine her views to one side of a question; and to overrule her reason by her feelings and prejudices.  Though she acknowledged the service which Barnave had rendered by defeating those who had wished to bring the king and herself to trial, she, nevertheless, still regarded the Constitutionalists in general with deep distrust as the party which desired to lower, and had lowered, the authority and dignity of the throne; and, viewing the whole Assembly with not unnatural antipathy, she fancied that one composed wholly of new members could not possibly be, more unfriendly to the king’s person and government, and might probably be far better disposed toward them.  She easily brought the king to adopt her views, and exerted the whole of her influence to secure the passing of the decree, sending agents to canvass those deputies who were opposed to it.  With the Royalist members, the Extreme Right, her voice was law, and, by the unnatural union of them and the Jacobins, the resolution was carried.

It is the more singular that she should have been willing thus, as it were, to proscribe the members of the present Assembly, because, in a very remarkable letter which she wrote to her brother the emperor at the end of July, she founds the hopes for the future, which she expresses with a degree of sanguineness which can hardly fail to be thought strange when the events of June are remembered, on the conduct of the Assembly itself.  The letter is too long to quote at full length, but a few extracts from it will help us in our task of forming a proper estimate of her character, from the unreserved exposition which it contains of her feelings, both past and present, with her views and hopes for the future, even while she keenly appreciates the difficulties of the king’s position; and from the unabated eagerness for the welfare of France which it displays in every reflection and suggestion.  That she still considers the imperial alliance of great importance to the welfare of both nations will surprise no one.  The suspension of the royal authority which the Assembly had decreed on the 26th of June had been removed on the decision that the king was not to be proceeded against.  Yet her first sentence shows that she was still subjected to cruel and lawless tyranny, which even hindered her correspondence with her own relations.  A queen might have expected to be able to write in security to another sovereign; a sister to a brother; but La Fayette and those in authority regarded the rights of neither royalty nor kindred.