h alone enable her to bear up against troubles such
as no one before has ever known."

But amidst all her grief she cherishes hope--hope that the people (the
"good people," as she invariably terms them) will return to their senses;
and her other habitual feeling of benevolence, though she can now only
exert it in forming projects for conferring further benefits on them when
tranquillity should be restored. The feeling shows itself even in letters
which have no reference to her own position. There had been discontent and
signs of insurrection in the Netherlands which Mercy's recent letters led
her to believe were passing away; and her congratulations to her brother
on this peaceful result dwell on the happiness "which it is to be able to
pardon one's subjects without shedding one drop of blood, of which
sovereigns are bound to be always careful.[5]"

Her brother, and many of her friends in France, were at this time pressing
her to quit the country, professing to believe that if her enemies knew
that she was out of their reach, they would be less vehement in their
hostility to the king; but she felt that such a course would be both
unworthy of her, as timid and selfish, and in every way injurious rather
than beneficial to her husband. It could not save his authority, which was
what the Jacobins made it their first object to destroy; and it would
deprive him of the support of her affection and advice, which he
constantly needed.

"Pardon me, I beg of you," she replied to Leopold, "if I continue to
reject your advice to leave Paris. Consider that I do not belong to
myself. My duty is to remain where Providence has placed me, and to oppose
my body, if the necessity should arise, to the knives of the assassins who
would fain reach the king. I should be unworthy of the name of our mother,
which is as dear to you as to me, if danger could make me desert the king
and my children.[6]"

We have seen that Marie Antoinette dreaded calumny more than the knife or
poison of the assassin; and there could hardly have been a greater proof
how well founded her apprehensions were, and how unscrupulous her enemies,
than is afforded by the fact that, in the latter part of this year, they
actually brought back Madame La Mothe to Paris with the purpose of making
a demand for a re-investigation of the whole story of the fraud on the
jeweler--a pretense for reviving the libelous stories to the disparagement
of the queen, the utter falsehood an