The queen herself, although of a mind more powerful and absolute, was convinced by necessity, and joined the king in his intentions; but the king, who had not two wills, had nevertheless two administrations, and two policies, one in France with his constitutional ministers, and another without with his brothers, and his agents with other powers.  Baron de Breteuil, and M. de Calonne, rivals in intrigue, spake and diplomatised in his name.  The king disowned them, sometimes with, and sometimes without, sincerity, in his official letters to ambassadors.  This was not hypocrisy, it was weakness; a captive king, who speaks aloud to his jailers and in whispers to his friends, is excusable.  These two languages not always agreeing, gave to Louis XVI. the appearance of disloyalty and treason:  he did not betray, he hesitated.

His brothers, and especially the Comte d’Artois, did violence from without to his wishes, interpreting his silence according to their own desires.  This young prince went from court to court to solicit in his brother’s name the coalition of the monarchical powers against principles which already threatened every throne.  Received graciously at Florence by the Emperor of Austria, Leopold, the queen’s brother, he obtained a few days afterwards at Mantua the promise of a force of 35,000 men.  The King of Prussia, and Spain, the King of Sardinia, Naples, and Switzerland, guaranteed equal forces.  Louis XVI. sometimes entertained the hope of an European intervention as a means of intimidating the Assembly, and compelling it to a reconciliation with him; at other times he repulsed it as a crime.  The state of his mind in this respect depended on the state of the kingdom; his understanding followed the flux and reflux of interior events.  If a good decree, a cordial reconciliation with the Assembly, a return of popular applause came to console his sorrows, he resumed his hopes, and wrote to his agents to break up the hostile gatherings at Coblentz.  If a new emeute disturbed the palace—­if the Assembly degraded the royal power by some indignity or some outrage—­he again began to despair of the Constitution, and to fortify himself against it.  The incoherence of his thoughts was rather the fault of his situation than his own; but it compromised his cause equally within and without.  Every thought which is not at unity destroys itself.  The thought of the king, although right in the main, was too fluctuating not to vary with events, but those events had but one direction—­the destruction of the monarchy.

II.

Nevertheless, in the midst of these vacillations of the royal will, it is impossible for history to misunderstand that from the month of November 1790 the king vaguely meditated a plan of escape from Paris in collusion with the emperor.  Louis XVI. had obtained from this prince the promise of sending a body of troops on the French frontier at the moment when he should desire it; but had the king the intention of quitting the kingdom and returning at the head of a foreign force, or simply to assemble round his person a portion of his own army in some point of the frontier, and there to treat with the Assembly?  This latter is the more probable hypothesis.