Louis XVI. had read much history, especially the history of England.  Like all unfortunate men, he sought, in the misfortunes of dethroned princes, analogies with his own unhappy position.  The portrait of Charles I., by Van Dyck, was constantly before his eyes in his closet in the Tuileries; his history continually open on his table.  He had been struck by two circumstances; that James II. had lost his throne because he had left his kingdom, and that Charles I. had been beheaded for having made war against his parliament and his people.  These reflections had inspired him with an instinctive repugnance against the idea of leaving France, or of casting himself into the arms of the army.  In order to compel his decision one way or the other in favour of one of these two extreme parties, his freedom of mind was completely oppressed by the imminence of his present perils, and the dread which beset the chateau of the Tuileries night and day had penetrated the very soul of the king and queen.

The atrocious threats which assailed them whenever they showed themselves at the windows of their residence, the insults of the press, the vociferations of the Jacobins, the riots and murders which multiplied in the capital and the provinces, the violent obstacles which had been opposed to their departure from St. Cloud, and then the recollections of the daggers which had even pierced the queen’s bed on the evening of the 5th to the 6th of October, made their life one continued scene of alarms.  They began to comprehend that the insatiate Revolution was irritated even by the concessions they had made; that the blind fury of factions which had not paused before royalty surrounded by its guards, would not hesitate before the illusory inviolability decreed by a constitution; and that their lives, those of their children, and those of the royal family which remained, had no longer any assurance of safety but in flight.

Flight was therefore resolved upon, and was frequently discussed before the time when the king decided upon it.  Mirabeau himself, bought by the court, had proposed it in his mysterious interviews with the queen.  One of his plans presented to the king was, to escape from Paris, take refuge in the midst of a camp, or in a frontier town, and there treat with the baffled Assembly.  Mirabeau remaining in Paris, and again possessing himself of the public mind, would lead matters, as he declared, to accommodation, and a voluntary restoration of the royal authority.  Mirabeau had carried these hopes away with him into the tomb.  The king himself, in his secret correspondence, testified his repugnance to intrusting his fate into the hands of the ringleader of the factions.  Another cause of uneasiness troubled the king’s mind, and gave the queen great anxiety; they were not ignorant that it was a question without, either at Coblentz or in the councils of Leopold and the King of Prussia, to declare the throne of France virtually vacant by default of the king’s liberty, and to nominate as regent one of the emigrant princes, in order that he might call around him with a show of legality all his loyal subjects, and give to foreign troops an incontestible right of intervention.  A throne even in fragments will not admit of participation.