inspirations.  Counsels succeeded to counsels, and contradicted one another in the royal ear, as their results contradicted each other in their operations.  His enemies suggested concessions, promising him a popularity, which escaped their hands just as they were about to ensure it to him.  The court counselled the resistance which it had only in its dreams; the queen the courage she felt in her soul; intriguants, corruption, the timid, flight; and in turns, and almost at the same time, he tried all these expedients:  not one was efficacious; the time for useful resolutions had passed,—­the crisis was without remedy.  It was necessary to choose between life and the throne.  In endeavouring to preserve the two, it was written that he should lose both.

When we place ourselves in imagination in the position of Louis XVI., and ask what could have saved him? we reply disheartened—­nothing.  There are circumstances which enfold all a man’s movements in such a snare, that, whatever direction he may take, he falls into the fatality of his faults or his virtues.  This was the dilemma of Louis XVI.  All the unpopularity of royalty in France, all the faults of preceding administrations, all the vices of kings, all the shame of courts, all the griefs of the people, were as it were accumulated on his head, and marked his innocent brow for the expiation of many ages.  Epochs have their sacrifices as well as their religions.  When they desire to recast an institution which no longer suits them, they pile upon the individual who personifies this institution all the odium and all the condemnation of the institution itself,—­they make of this man a victim whom they sacrifice to the time.  Louis XVI. was this innocent sacrifice, overwhelmed with all the iniquities of thrones, and destined to be immolated as a chastisement for royalty.  Such was the king.

XII.

The queen seemed to be created by nature to contrast with the king, and to attract for ever the interest and pity of ages to one of those state dramas, which are incomplete unless the miseries and misfortunes of a woman mingle in them.  Daughter of Maria Theresa, she had commenced her life in the storms of the Austrian monarchy.  She was one of the children whom the Empress held by the hand when she presented herself as a supplicant before her faithful Hungarians, and the troops exclaimed, “We will die for our king, Maria Theresa.”  Her daughter, too, had the heart of a king.  On her arrival in France, her beauty had dazzled the whole kingdom,—­a beauty then in all its splendour.  The two children whom she had given to the throne, far from impairing her good looks, added to the attractions of her person that character of maternal majesty which so well becomes the mother of a nation.  The presentiment of her misfortunes, the recollection of the tragic scenes of Versailles, the uneasiness of each day somewhat diminished her youthful freshness.  She was tall,