Unhappily several motives combined to disincline her to it.  The insurrection which the Girondins[8] were preparing had originally been fixed for the 29th of July; but, a few days before, M. Bertrand learned that it had been postponed till the 10th of August.  This gave him time to mature his arrangements, all of which, as he reckoned, could be completed in time for the king to leave Paris on the evening of the 8th.  But before that day arrived news had reached the court that the Duke of Brunswick, the Prussian commander-in-chief, had put his army in motion, and that he was not likely to meet any obstacle sufficient to prevent him from marching at once on Paris; a measure which, to quote the language of M. Bertrand, “the queen was too anxious to see accomplished to hesitate at believing in its execution.[9]” And at the same time some of the Jacobin leaders—­Danton, Petion, and Santerre—­had opened communications with the Government, and had undertaken for a large bribe to prevent the threatened outbreak.  The money had been paid to them, and Marie Antoinette more than once boasted to her attendants that they were now safe, as having gained over Danton; placing the firmer reliance on this mode of extrication because it coincided with her belief that the mutual jealousy of the two parties would dispose one of them at least eventually to embrace the cause of the king, as their beat ally against the other.  The result seems to show that the Jacobins only took the bribe the more effectually to lull their destined victims into a false security.

A third consideration, and that apparently not the weakest, was Marie Antoinette’s rooted dislike of the Constitutionalist party.  In their rants the Duc de Liancourt had taken his seat in the first Assembly; though, as he assured M. Bertrand, the king himself was aware that his object in so doing had been to serve his majesty in the most effectual manner; and he was also the statesman whose advice had mainly contributed to induce the king to visit Paris after the destruction of the Bastile, a step which she had always regarded as the forerunner and cause of some of the most irremediable encroachments of the Revolutionists.  Even the duke’s present devotion to the king’s cause could not entirely efface from her mind the impression that he was not in his heart friendly to the royal authority.  She urged these arguments on the king.  The last probably weighed with him but little:  the two former he felt as strongly as the queen herself; and he delayed his decision, sending word to M. Bertrand that he had resolved to defer his departure “till the last extremity.[10]” His faithful servant was in amazement.  “When,” he exclaimed, “was the last extremity to be looked for, if it had not already come?” But his astonishment was turned to absolute despair when the next day M. Montmorin informed him that the project had been entirely given up, the queen herself remarking “that M. Bertrand overlooked the circumstance that he was throwing them altogether into the hands of the Constitutionalists.”