had changed into horror and hatred the favourable feeling of the noblesse for the progress of opinion.  It saw that the first act of the people was to degrade superior authority.  The esprit de caste impelled the nobility to emigrate, the esprit de corps similarly influenced the officers, and the esprit de cour made it shameful to remain on a soil stained with so many outrages to royalty.  The women, who then formed public opinion in France, and whose tender and easily excited imagination is soon transferred to the side of their victims, all sided with the throne and the aristocracy.  They despised those who would not go and seek their avengers in foreign lands.  Young men departed at their desire; those who did not, dared not show themselves.  They sent them distaffs, as a token of their cowardice!

But it was not shame alone that led the officers and the nobles to join the ranks of the army, it was also the appearance of a duty; for the last virtue that was left to the French nobility was a religious fidelity to the throne:  their honour, their second and almost only religion, was to die for their king; and any design against the throne, in their belief, was a design against heaven.  Chivalry, that code of aristocratic feeling, had preserved and disseminated this noble prejudice throughout Europe; and, to the nobility, the king represented their country.  This feeling, eclipsed for a while by the debaucheries of the regency, the scandalous vices of Louis XV., and the bold maxims of Rousseau’s philosophy, was awakened in the heart of the gentlemen at the spectacle of the degradation and danger of the king and queen.  In their eyes, the Assembly was nothing but a band of revolutionary subjects, who detained their sovereign a prisoner.  The most voluntary acts of the king were suspected by them, and beneath his constitutional speeches, they imagined they discovered another and a contrary meaning; and the very ministers of Louis XVI. were believed to be nothing but his gaolers.  A secret understanding existed between these gentlemen and the king, and counsels were held in secluded apartments of the Tuileries, at which the king alternately encouraged and forbade his friends to emigrate.  And his orders, varied at each day and each fresh occurrence, were sometimes constitutional and patriotic when he hoped to re-establish and moderate the constitution at home; at other times, despairing and blameable when it seemed to him that the security of the queen and his children could only proceed from another country.  Whilst he addressed official letters through his minister for foreign affairs to his brothers, and the Prince de Conde, to recall them, and point out to them their duty as citizens, the Baron de Breteuil, his confidential agent to the Foreign Powers, transmitted to the king of Prussia letters that revealed the secret thoughts of the king.  The following letter to the king of Prussia, found in the archives of the chancellorship of Berlin, dated December 3rd, 1790, leaves no doubt of this double diplomacy of the unfortunate monarch.  Louis XVI. wrote:—­