be better to be king of a single province than of a kingdom so abandoned and disordered as this.  I shall endeavor, if I can, to send the emperor information on all these matters.  But, in the mean time, do you tell him all that you consider necessary to prove to him that we have no longer any resource except in him, and that our happiness, our existence, and that of my child depend on him alone, and on his prudence and promptitude in action.[11]”

And, however she from time to time caught at momentary hopes arising from other sources, the only one on which she placed any permanent reliance were the affection and power of her brother; and that hope, in the course of the winter, was cut from under her by his death.[12] Yet so correct was her judgment and appreciation of sound political principles, or, perhaps we might say, so keen was her sense of what was due to the independence and dignity of France, in spite of its present disloyalty, that a report that the emperor and Prussia had, by implication, claimed a right to dictate to France in matters of her internal government drew from her a warm remonstrance.  As sovereign and brother she conceived that Leopold had a right to interfere to insure the safety of his own sister and of a brother sovereign; but she never desired him to interpose for any other object.  From her childhood, as we have seen more than once, she had learned to regard the Prussian character and Prussian designs with abhorrence.  And in a letter to Mercy of the 12th of September, after expressing an earnest hope that the emperor will not allow himself to be guided by “the cunning of Calonne, and the detestable policy of Prussia,” she adds, “It is said here that in the agreement signed at Pilnitz,[13] the two powers engage never to permit the new French Constitution to be established.  There certainly are things which foreign powers have a right to oppose, but, as to what concerns the internal laws of a country, every nation has a right to adopt those which suit it.  They would be wrong, therefore, to intervene in such a matter; and all the world would see in such an act a proof of the intrigues of the emigrants.[14]”

She proceeds to tell him that all is settled.  The king had adopted the line which she had marked out for him in her former letter.  The Constitution had been presented to him on the 3d of September.  He had taken a few days to consider it, not with the idea of proposing the slightest alteration, but in order to avoid the appearance of acting under compulsion; and, on the same day on which she wrote to Mercy, he was drawing up a letter to the Assembly, to announce his intention of visiting the Assembly to give it his royal assent in due form.  But, though she would not have had him act otherwise, she can not announce this apparent termination of the contest without some natural expressions of grief and indignation.