“‘What answer?’ exclaimed the Queen.  No answer at all is the best answer to such a presumptuous proposition!  I tremble for the consequences of the impression their disloyal manoeuvres have made upon the minds of the people, and I have no faith whatever in their proffered services to the King.  However, on reflection, it may be expedient to temporise.  Continue to see him.  Learn, if possible, how far he may be trusted; but do not fix any time, as yet, for the desired audience.  I wish to apprise the King, first, of his interview with you, Princess.  This conversation does not agree with what he and Mirabeau proposed about the King’s recovering his prerogatives.  Are these the prerogatives with which he flattered the King?  Binding him hand and foot, and excluding him from every privilege, and then casting him a helpless dependant on the caprice of a volatile plebeian faction!  The French nation is very different from the English.  The first rules of the established ancient order of the government broken through, they will violate twenty others, and the King will be sacrificed, before this frivolous people again organise themselves with any sort of regular government.’

“Agreeably to Her Majesty’s commands, I continued to see Barnave.  I communicated with him by letter,’ at his private lodgings at Passy, and at Vitry; but it was long before the Queen could be brought to consent to the audience he solicited.

[Of these letters I was generally the bearer.  I recollect that day perfectly.  I was copying some letters for the Princesse de Lamballe, when the Prince de Conti came in.  The Prince lived not only to see, but to feel the errors of his system.  He attained a great age.  He outlived the glory of his country.  Like many others, the first gleam of political regeneration led him into a system, which drove him out of France, to implore the shelter of a foreign asylum, that he might not fall a victim to his own credulity.  I had an opportunity of witnessing in his latter days his sincere repentance; and to this it is fit that I should bear testimony.  There were no bounds to the execration with which he expressed himself towards the murderers of those victims, whose death he lamented with a bitterness in which some remorse was mingled, from the impression that his own early errors in favour of the Revolution had unintentionally accelerated their untimely end.  This was a source to him of deep and perpetual self-reproach.

There was an eccentricity in the appearance, dress, and manners of the Prince de Conti, which well deserves recording.

He wore to the very last—­and it was in Barcelona, so late as 1803, that I last had the honour of conversing with him—­a white rich stuff dress frock coat, of the cut and fashion of Louis XIV., which, being without any collar, had buttons and button-holes from the neck to the bottom of the skirt, and was padded and stiffened with buckram.  The cuffs were very large, of a different colour,