“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?’

“‘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.