disdained this war of words, caballed against ministers, and treated passing events with levity.  The queen, intoxicated with the adulation of those around her, urged the king to recall the next day what he had conceded on the previous evening.  Her hand was felt in all the transactions of the government:  her apartments were the focus of a perpetual conspiracy against the government; the nation detected it, and ultimately detested her.

Her name became for the people the phantom of all counter-revolution.  We are apt to calumniate what we fear.  She was depicted under the features of a Messalina.  The most infamous pamphlets were in circulation; the most scandalous anecdotes were credited.  She may be accused of tenderness, but never of depravity.  Lovely, young, and adored, if her heart did not remain insensible, her innermost feelings, innocent perhaps, never gave just ground for open scandal.  History has its modesty, and we will not violate it.

XIV.

On the days of the 5th and 6th of October the queen perceived (too late) the enmity of the people; her heart must have been full of vengeance.  Emigration commenced, and she viewed it favourably.  All her friends were at Coblentz; she was believed to be in close connection with them, and this belief was true.  Stories of an Austrian committee were busily spread amongst the people.  The queen was accused of conspiring for the destruction of the nation, who at every moment demanded her head.  A people in revolt must have some one to hate, and they handed over to her the queen.  Her name was the theme of their songs of rage.  One woman was the enemy of a whole nation, and her pride disdained to undeceive them.  She inclosed herself in her resentment and her terror.  Imprisoned in the palace of the Tuileries, she could not put her head out of window without provoking an outrage and hearing insult.  Every noise in the city made her apprehensive of an insurrection.  Her days were melancholy, her nights disturbed:  she underwent hourly agony for two years, and that anguish was magnified in her heart by her love for her two children, and her disquietude for the king.  Her court was forsaken; she saw none but the shadows of authority; the ministers forced on her by M. de La Fayette, before whom she was compelled to mask her countenance in smiles.  Her apartments were watched by spies in the guise of servants.  It was necessary to mislead them, in order to have interviews with the few friends who remained to her.  Private staircases, dark corridors, were the means by which at night her secret counsellors obtained access to her.  These meetings resembled conspiracies; she left them every time with a different train of ideas, which she communicated to the king, whose behaviour thus acquired the incoherence of a woman persecuted and distressed.  Measures of resistance, bribing the Assembly, an entire surrender of the constitution,