executive authority for the benefit of the nation, while all the harsher duties, and all the censures they create, devolve on others.  It is, therefore, madame, through your means, and the well-known friendship you have ever evinced for the Royal Family, and the general welfare of the French nation, that I wish to obtain a private audience of Her Majesty, the Queen, in order to induce her to exert the never-failing ascendency she has ever possessed over the mind of our good King, in persuading him to the sacrifice of a small proportion of his power, for the sake of preserving the monarchy to his heirs; and posterity will record the virtues of a Prince who has been magnanimous enough, of his own free will, to resign the unlawful part of his prerogatives, usurped by his predecessors, for the blessing and pleasure of giving liberty to a beloved people, among whom both the King and Queen will find many Hampdens and Sidneys, but very few Cromwells.  Besides, madame, we must make a merit of necessity.  The times are pregnant with events, and it is more prudent to support the palladium of the ancient monarchy than risk its total overthrow; and fall it must, if the diseased excrescences, of which the people complain, and which threaten to carry death into the very heart of the tree, be not lopped away in time by the Sovereign himself.’

“I heard the deputy with the greatest attention.  I promised to fulfil his commission.  The better to execute my task, I retired the moment he left me, and wrote down all I could recollect of his discourse, that it might be thoroughly placed before the Queen the first opportunity.

“When I communicated the conversation to Her Majesty, she listened with the most gracious condescension, till I came to the part wherein Barnave so forcibly impressed the necessity of adopting a constitutional monarchy.  Here, as she had done once before, when I repeated some former observations of Barnave to her, Marie Antoinette somewhat lost her equanimity.  She rose from her seat, and exclaimed: 

“’What! is an absolute Prince, and the hereditary Sovereign of the ancient monarchy of France, to become the tool of a plebeian faction, who will, their point once gained, dethrone him for his imbecile complaisance?  Do they wish to imitate the English Revolution of 1648, and reproduce the sanguinary times of the unfortunate and weak Charles the First?  To make France a commonwealth!  Well! be it so!  But before I advise the King to such a step, or give my consent to it, they shall bury me under the ruins of the monarchy.’

“‘But what answer,’ said I, ’does Your Majesty wish me to return to the deputy’s request for a private audience?’