By this time the titled refugees had brought the Prussian armies to the frontier; a majority of the clergy had identified themselves with the reaction, were breaking down the revolution among the people, and were producing a reversionary tendency to absolutism.  The king was vacillating and timid, but the queen had all the spirit and courage of her mother, Maria Theresa.  It is very evident from Madame Roland’s memoirs and letters, that these two women felt that they were in actual collision.  It is a strange contrast; the sceptered wife, looking from her high places with longing and regret over centuries of hereditary succession, divine right and unquestioned prerogative, calling on her house of Hapsburg for aid, appealing to the kings of the earth for assistance in moving back the irreversible march of destiny:—­from another palace the daughter of the people looking not back, but forward, speaking of kings and monarchies as gone, or soon to go, into tables of chronology, listening to what the ancient centuries speak from Grecian and Roman tombs, summoning old philosophies to attest the inalienable rights of man, looking beyond the mobs of kings and lords to the great nation-forming people, upon which these float and pass away like the shadows of purple Summer clouds; and stranger still, the ending of the contrast in the identification of these typical women in their death, both going to the same scaffold, discrowned of all their hopes.  Of all the lessons which life has taught to ambition, none are more touching than when it points to the figures of these women as they are hurried by the procession in which they moved to a common fate.

The ministry insisted that the king should proclaim war against those who were threatening invasion, and that he should proceed stringently against the unpatriotic clergy.  He refused to take either course against his ancient friends.  It was at this time that Madame Roland wrote to the king in advocacy of those measures that celebrated letter which her husband signed, and to which all of the ministers assented.  It is a most statesmanlike appeal for the nation.  It is predictive of all the woes which followed.  No Hebrew prophet ever spoke bolder to his king.  She writes:  “I know that the words of truth are seldom welcome at the foot of thrones; I know that it is the withholding truth from the councils of kings that renders revolution necessary.”

The king, instead of adopting the policy recommended, dismissed his ministers.  The letter was then made public through the newspapers.  Few state papers have ever produced such an effect.  It became a popular argument, and the people demanded the restoration of the ministry for the reasons which it contained, and for expressing which the ministry had been dismissed.

While the Girondists were supporting the ministry of their choice, they, with the king, were the object of furious attacks by the Jacobins.  When the ministry was dismissed the Gironde renewed its attacks upon the monarchy, emulated the Jacobins in the severity of its assaults, and began to conspire for a federative republic, similar to the United States, which to Madame Roland was the ideal of a free government.