very favorable for such a
purpose, he resolved to pass a fortnight at St. Cloud. But when he was
preparing to set out, a furious mob seized the horses and unharnessed
them; the National Guards united with the rioters, refusing to obey La
Fayette's orders to clear the way for the royal carriage, and the king and
queen were compelled to dismount and to return to their apartments; while,
a day or two afterward, the Assembly came to a vote which seemed as if
designed for an express sanction of this outrage, and which ordained that
the king should not be permitted ever to move more than twenty leagues
from Paris.

Of all the decrees which it had yet enacted, this, in some sense, may be
regarded as the most monstrous. It was not only passing a penal sentence
on the royal family such as in no country or age any but convicted
criminals had even been subjected to, but it was an insult and an injury
to every part of the kingdom except the capital, which, by an intolerable
assumption, it treated as if it were the whole of France. Joseph, as has
been seen, had wisely pointed out to his brother-in-law that it was one,
and no unimportant part, of a sovereign's duty to visit the different
provinces and chief cities of his kingdom, and Louis had in one instance
acted on his advice. We have seen how gladly he was received by the
citizens of Cherbourg, and what advantages they promised themselves from
his having thus made himself personally acquainted with their situation
and wants and prospects; and we can not doubt that other towns and cities
shared this feeling, nor that it was well founded, and that the
acquisition by a king of a personal knowledge of the resources and
capabilities and interests of the great cities, of agriculture,
manufactures, and commerce, is a benefit to the whole community; but of
this every province and every city but Paris was now to be deprived. It
was to be an offense to visit Rouen, or Lyons, or Bordeaux; to examine
Riquet's canal or Vauban's fortifications. The king was the only person in
the kingdom to whom liberty of movement was to be denied; and the peasants
of every province, and the citizens of every other town, were to be
refused for a single day the presence of their sovereign, whom the
Parisians thus claimed a right to keep as a prisoner in their own
district.

It is hardly strange that such open attacks on their liberty made a deeper
impression on the queen, and even on the phlegmatic dispositio