demonstration began.  The bugles sounded a charge, the officers drew their swords, and the ladies of the court tore the tricolor from the soldiers’ coats and replaced it with the white cockade.  On October 5, a vast multitude poured out of Paris, and marched to Versailles.  The next day they broke into the palace, killed the guards, and carried the King and Queen captive to the Tuileries.  But Louis was so intellectually limited that he could not keep faith with those who wished him well.  On July 14, 1790, the King swore, before half a million spectators, to maintain the new constitution.  In that summer he was plotting to escape to Metz and join the army which had been collected there under the Marquis de Bouille, while Bouille himself, after the rising at Nancy, was busy in improving discipline by breaking on the wheel a selection of the soldiers of the Swiss regiment of Chateauvieux which had refused to march against Paris on the 14th of July, 1789.  In October, 1790, Louis wrote to the King of Spain and other sovereigns to pay no heed to his concessions for he only yielded to duress, and all this even as Mirabeau made his supreme effort to save those who were fixed upon destroying themselves.  Mirabeau sought the King and offered his services.  The court sneered at him as a dupe.  The Queen wrote, “We make use of Mirabeau, but we do not take him seriously.”  When Mirabeau awoke to his predicament, he broke out in mixed wrath and scorn:  “Of what are these people thinking?  Do they not see the abyss yawning at their feet?  Both the King and Queen will perish, and you will live to see the rabble spurn their corpses.”

The King and Queen, the Nobility and Clergy, could not see the abyss which Mirabeau saw, any more than the lawyers could see it, because of the temper of their minds.  In the eye of caste Europe was not primarily divided into nations to whom allegiance was due, but into superimposed orders.  He who betrayed his order committed the unpardonable crime.  Death were better than that.  But to the true aristocrat it was inconceivable that serfs could ever vanquish nobles in battle.  Battle must be the final test, and the whole aristocracy of Europe was certain, Frenchmen knew, to succor the French aristocracy in distress.

So in the winter of 1790 the French fugitives congregated at Coblentz on the German frontier, persuaded that they were performing a patriotic duty in organizing an invasion of their country even should their onset be fatal to their relatives and to their King.  And Louis doubted not that he also did his duty as a trustee of a divine commission when he in one month swore, before the Assembly, to maintain the constitution tendered him, and in the next authorized his brother, the Comte d’Artois, to make the best combination he could among his brother sovereigns for the gathering of an army to assert his divine prerogative.  On June 21, 1791, Louis fled, with his whole family, to join the army of Bouille, with intent to destroy the entire race of traitors from Mirabeau and Lafayette down to the peasants.  He managed so ill that he was arrested at Varennes, and brought back whence he came, but he lied and plotted still.