by a gesture, and whose fury he averted during the long journey between the throne and death.  The queen had placed her son, the young dauphin, between his knees.  Barnave’s fingers had played with the fair hair of the child.  The king, the queen, Madame Elizabeth, had distinguished, with tact, Barnave from the inflexible and brutal Petion.  They had conversed with him as to their situation:  they complained of having been deceived as to the nature of the public mind in France.  They unveiled their repentance and constitutional inclinations.  These conversations, marred in the carriage by the presence of the other commissioner and the eyes of the people, had been stealthily and more intimately renewed in the meetings which the royal family nightly held.  Mysterious political correspondences and secret interviews in the Tuileries were contrived.  Barnave, the inflexible partisan, reached Paris a devoted man.  The nocturnal conference of Mirabeau with the queen, in the park of Saint Cloud, was ambitioned by his rival; but Mirabeau sold, Barnave gave, himself.  Heaps of gold bought the man of genius; a glance seduced the man of sentiment.

IV.

Barnave had found Duport and the Lameths, his friends, in the most monarchical moods, but from other motives than his own.  This triumvirate was in terms of good understanding at the Tuileries.  Lameths and Duport saw the king.  Barnave, who at first dared not venture to visit the chateau, subsequently went there secretly.  The utmost precaution and concealment attended these interviews.  The king and queen sometimes awaited the youthful orator in a small apartment on the entre sol of the palace, with a key in their hand, so as to open the door the moment his footsteps were heard.  When these meetings were utterly impossible, Barnave wrote to the queen.  He reckoned greatly on the strength of his party in the Assembly, because he measured the power of their opinions by the talent with which they expressed them.  The queen did not feel a similar confidence.  “Take courage, madame,” wrote Barnave; “it is true our banner is torn, but the word Constitution is still legible thereon.  This word will recover all its pristine force and prestige, if the king will rally to it sincerely.  The friends of this constitution, retrieving past errors, may still raise and maintain it firmly.  The Jacobins alarm public reason; the emigrants threaten our nationality.  Do not fear the Jacobins—­put no trust in the emigrants.  Throw yourself into the national party which now exists.  Did not Henry IV. ascend the throne of a Catholic nation at the head of a Protestant party?”