There are others besides myself who know that at this time one of the things about which the Queen most desired to be satisfied was the opinion of the famous Pitt.  She would sometimes say to me, “I never pronounce the name of Pitt without feeling a chill like that of death.” (I repeat here her very expressions.) “That man is the mortal enemy of France; and he takes a dreadful revenge for the impolitic support given by the Cabinet of Versailles to the American insurgents.  He wishes by our destruction to guarantee the maritime power of his country forever against the efforts made by the King to improve his marine power and their happy results during the last war.  He knows that it is not only the King’s policy but his private inclination to be solicitous about his fleets, and that the most active step he has taken during his whole reign was to visit the port of Cherbourg.  Pitt had served the cause of the French Revolution from the first disturbances; he will perhaps serve it until its annihilation.  I will endeavour to learn to what point he intends to lead us, and I am sending M.----- to London for that purpose.  He has been intimately connected with Pitt, and they have often had political conversations respecting the French Government.  I will get him to make him speak out, at least so far as such a man can speak out.”  Some time afterwards the Queen told me that her secret envoy was returned from London, and that all he had been able to wring from Pitt, whom he found alarmingly reserved, was that he would not suffer the French monarchy to perish; that to suffer the revolutionary spirit to erect an organised republic in France would be a great error, affecting the tranquillity of Europe.  “Whenever,” said she, “Pitt expressed himself upon the necessity of supporting monarchy in France, he maintained the most profound silence upon what concerns the monarch.  The result of these conversations is anything but encouraging; but, even as to that monarchy which he wishes to save, will he have means and strength to save it if he suffers us to fall?”

The death of the Emperor Leopold took place on the 1st of March, 1792.  When the news of this event reached the Tuileries, the Queen was gone out.  Upon her return I put the letter containing it into her hands.  She exclaimed that the Emperor had been poisoned; that she had remarked and preserved a newspaper, in which, in an article upon the sitting of the Jacobins, at the time when the Emperor Leopold declared for the coalition, it was said, speaking of him, that a pie-crust would settle that matter.  At this period Barnave obtained the Queen’s consent that he should read all the letters she should write.  He was fearful of private correspondences that might hamper the plan marked out for her; he mistrusted her Majesty’s sincerity on this point; and the diversity of counsels, and the necessity of yielding, on the one hand, to some of the views of the constitutionalists, and on the other, to those of the French Princes, and even of foreign Courts, were unfortunately the circumstances which most rapidly impelled the Court towards its ruin.