“At last the die is cast.  All that we have now to do is to regulate the future progress and conduct of affairs as circumstances may permit.  I only wish that others would regulate their conduct by mine.  But even in our own inner circle we have great difficulties and great conflicts.  Pity me:  I assure you that it requires more courage to support the condition in which I am placed than to encounter a pitched battle.  And the more so that I do not deceive myself, and that I see nothing but misery in the want of energy shown by some, and the evil designs of others.  My God! is it possible that, endowed as I am with force of character, and feeling as I do so thoroughly the blood which runs in my veins, I should yet be destined to pass my days in such an age and with such men!  But, for all this, never believe that my courage is deserting me.  Not for my own sake, but for the sake of my child, I will support myself, and I will fulfill to the end my long and painful career, I can no longer see what I am writing.  Farewell.[15]”

Tears, we may suppose, were blinding her eyes, in spite of all her fortitude.  There was no exaggeration in her declaration to the Empress Catherine of Russia, with whom at this time she was in frequent communication, that the “distrust which was shown by all around them was a moral and continual death, a thousand times worse than that physical death which was a release from all miseries.[16]” And in the same letter she explains that to remove this distrust was one principal object which the king and she had in view in all their measures.  Yet, in spite of all his concessions, the week was not to pass without fresh insults being offered to the king, which shocked even his phlegmatic apathy.  The letter which he sent to the Assembly to announce his compliance with its wishes was indeed received with acclamations which, if not sincere, were at least loud, and apparently unanimous; and, as if in reply to it, La Fayette proposed and carried a motion that the Assembly should pass an act of amnesty for all political offenses; and a magnificent festival was appointed to be held in the Champ de Mars on the following Sunday, in celebration of the joyful event.  But, after the first brief excitement had passed away, the Jacobin faction recovered its ascendency, and contrived to make that very festival, which was designed to express the gratitude of the nation, an occasion of further humiliation to the unhappy Louis.  Every arrangement for the day was discussed in a spirit of the bitterest disloyalty.  When the question was raised, which in any other Assembly that ever met in the world would have been thought needless, what attitude the members were to preserve while the king was taking the prescribed oath to observe the Constitution, a hundred voices shouted out that they should all keep their seats, and that the king should swear, standing and bare-headed; and when one deputy of high reputation, M. Malouet, remonstrated against such a vote, arguing that so to treat the chief of the State would be a greater insult to the nation than even to himself, a deputy from Brittany cried out that M. Malouet and those who thought with him might receive Louis on their knees, if they liked, but that the rest of the Assembly should be seated.