itutional Guard might well discourage honest men who only sought
to devote themselves. How was it possible to remain faithful to a
chief who was false to himself, who was more like a victim than a king?
Finding themselves unsupported by the Tuileries, the royalists began to
look across the frontier, and many men who would have flocked around an
energetic monarch, fled from a feeble king and sorrowfully went to
swell the ranks of the emigration.

In spite of the advice of Dumouriez, Louis XVI. would not make use of
his right to form another guard. He preferred to put himself in the
hands of the National Guard, who were his jailors rather than his
servants. As to the Duke de Brissac, even the formality of an
interrogatory was dispensed with, and he was sent before the Superior
Court of Orleans. When he bade adieu to Louis XVI., the King said to
him: "You are going to prison; I should be much more afflicted if you
were not leaving me there myself." What was to be the fate of the
loyal and devoted servant, thus sacrificed to his master's inexcusable
weakness? He left the dungeons of Orleans only to be transferred to
Versailles by the Marseillais, and there, on September 9, 1792, was
assaulted by a {147} furious throng surrounding the carriages
containing the prisoners. The brave old man struggled long against the
assassins, but, after losing two fingers and receiving several other
wounds, he was killed by a sabre-thrust which broke his jaw, and his
head was set on one of the spikes of the palace gate.

[1] The magnificent mansion built for Madame du Barry by Louis XV., and
restored to her after her banishment to Meaux by Marie Antoinette.

{148}

XIV.

THE SUFFERINGS OF LOUIS XVI.

Dissatisfied with men and things, dissatisfied with others and himself,
the mind and heart of Louis XVI. were the prey of moral tortures which
left him no repose. He began to be ashamed of his concessions, and to
repent of having accepted pusillanimous advice. Why had he not
succeeded in being a king? Why had he garrisoned Paris insufficiently
ever since the outbreak of the Revolution? Why had he suffered the
Bastille to be taken, encouraged the emigration, and disbanded his
bodyguards? Why had he not opposed the first persecutions aimed at the
Church? Why had he pretended to approve acts and ideas which horrified
him? Why, by resorting to deplorable equivocations which cast a shadow
over his policy and his characte