iring the utmost forethought, ingenuity, and secrecy
to bring them to a successful issue; and also with fresh injuries and
insults from the Assembly and the municipal authorities, which every week
made the necessity of promptitude in carrying such plans out more
manifest. Mirabeau, as we have seen, had from the very first recommended
that the king and his family should withdraw from Paris. In his eyes such
a step was the indispensable preliminary to all other measures; and some
of the earliest of the queen's letters in 1791 show that the resolution to
leave the turbulent city had at last been taken. But though what he
recommended was to be done, it was not to be done as he recommended; yet
there was a manliness about the course of action which he proposed which
would of itself have won the queen's preference, if she had not been
forced to consider not what was best and fittest, but what it was most
easy to induce him on whom the final choice must impend, the king, to
adopt. Mirabeau advised that the king should depart publicly, in open day,
"like a king," as he expressed himself,[11] and he affirmed his conviction
that it would in all probability be quite unnecessary to remove farther
than Compiegne; but that the moment that it should be known that the king
was out of Paris, petitions demanding the re-establishment of order would
flock in from every quarter of the kingdom, and public opinion, which was
for the most part royalist, would compel the Assembly to modify the
Constitution which it had framed, or, if it should prove refractory, would
support the king in dissolving it and convoking another.

But this was too bold a step for Louis to decide on. He anticipated that
the Assembly or the mob might endeavor to prevent such a movement by
force, which could only be repelled by force; and force he was resolved
never to employ. The only alternative was to flee secretly; and in the
course of January, Mercy learns that that plan has been adopted, and that
Compiegne is not considered sufficiently distant from Paris, but that some
fortified place will be selected; Valenciennes being the most likely, as
he himself imagined, since, if farther flight should become necessary, it
would be easy from thence to cross the frontier into the Belgian dominions
of the queen's brother. But if Valenciennes had ever been thought of, it
was rejected on that very account; for Louis had learned from English
history that the withdrawal of James II