A long continuance of sorrows and fears, such as had now for nearly three years pressed upon the writer of this letter, would so wear away and break down ordinary souls that, when a crisis came, they would be found wholly unequal to grapple with it; and we may therefore the better form some idea of the strength of mind and almost superhuman fortitude of this admirable queen, if, from time to time, we fix our attention on these not exaggerated complaints, for indeed the misfortunes that elicited them admit of no exaggeration; and then remember that, after so long a period of such uninterrupted suffering, her spirit was so far from being broken, that, as increasing dangers and horrors thickened around her, her courage seemed to increase also.  Her faithful attendant, Madame de Campan, has remarked that her troubles had not even affected her temper; that no one ever saw her out of humor.  In every respect, to the very last, she showed herself superior to the utmost malice of her enemies.

The news of the death of Leopold, whose son and successor, Francis, was but three-and-twenty years of age, gave fresh encouragement to his sister’s enemies.  The intelligence had hardly reached Paris when Vergniaud began to prepare the way for a fresh assault on the crown by a denunciation of the ministers, while the Jacobins and Cordeliers made an open attack upon another club which the Constitutionalists had lately formed under the name of Les Feuillants, holding its meetings in a convent of the Monks of St. Bernard,[2] and closed it by main force.  Though several soldiers, and La Fayette among them, were members of the Feuillants, they made no resistance; they only applied to Petion, as mayor of the city, for protection; and that worthy magistrate refused them aid, telling them that though the law forbade them to be attacked, the voice of the people was against them, and to that voice he was bound to listen.

The ministers fell before Vergniaud, and the unhappy king had no resource but to choose their successors from the party which had triumphed over them.  The absurd law by which the last Assembly had excluded its members from office was still in force, so that the orator himself and his colleagues could obtain no personal promotion; but they were able to nominate the new ministers, who, with but one exception, were all men equally devoid of ability and reputation, and therefore were the better fitted to be the tools of those to whom they owed their preferment.  The names of three were Lacoste, Degraves, and Duranton, of whom nothing beyond their names is known.  A fourth was Roland, who was indeed known, though not for any abilities of his own, but as the husband of the woman who, as has been already mentioned, was the first person in the whole nation to raise the cry for the murder of the king and queen, and whose fierce thirst for blood so predominated over every other feeling that a few weeks afterward she even began to urge the assassination of the only one among her husband’s colleagues who was possessed of the slightest ability because his views did not altogether coincide with her own.