and shop-keepers, had the power of deciding the contest in favor of the candidate for whom it should pronounce, Marie Antoinette declared for Petion.  She knew him to be a Jacobin,[5] but he was so devoid of any reputation for ability that she did not fear him.  Nor, except that he had behaved with boorish disrespect and ill-manners during their melancholy return from Varennes, had she any reason for suspecting him of any special enmity to the king.

But La Fayette, though always loud in his professions of loyalty, had never lost an opportunity of offering personal insults to both the king and herself.  It was to his shameful neglect (to put his conduct in the most favorable light) that she justly attributed the danger to which she had been exposed at Versailles, and the compulsion which had been put upon the king to take up his residence in Paris; and, not to mention a constant series of petty insults which he had heaped on both Louis and herself, and on the Royalists as a body, he had given unmistakable proofs of his personal animosity toward the king by his conduct on the 21st of June, and by the indecent rigor with which he treated them both after their return from Varennes.  Even when he was loudest in the profession of his desire and power to influence the Assembly in the king’s favor, one of his own friends had told him to his face that he was insincere,[6] and that Louis could not and ought not to trust his promises; and every part of his conduct toward the royal pair was stamped with duplicity as well as with ill-will.  It was not strange, therefore, indeed it was fully consistent with the honest openness of Marie Antoinette’s own character, that she should prefer an open enemy to a pretended friend.  She even believed what, from the very commencement of the Revolution, many had suspected, that La Fayette cherished views of personal ambition, and aimed at reviving the old authority of a Maire du Palais over a Roi Faineant[7].  She therefore directed her friends to throw their weight into the scale in favor of Petion, who was accordingly elected by a great majority, while the marquis, greatly chagrined, retired for a time to his estate in Auvergne.

The victory, however, was an unfortunate one for the court.  It contributed to increase the confidence of its enemies; and, as their instinct showed them that it was from the resolution of the queen that they had the most formidable opposition to dread, it was against her that, from their first entrance into the Assembly, Vergniaud and his friends specially exerted themselves; Vergniaud openly contending that the inviolability of the sovereign, which was an article of the new Constitution, applied only to the king himself, and in no degree to his consort; while in the Jacobin and Cordelier Clubs the coarsest libels were poured forth against her with unremitting perseverance to stimulate and justify the most obscene and ferocious threats.  The coarsest ruffians in a street quarrel never used fouler language of one another than these men of education applied to the pure-minded and magnanimous lady whose sole offense was that she was the wife of their kind-hearted king.