lts which he had heaped on both Louis and herself, and
on the Royalists as a body, he had given unmistakable proofs of his
personal animosity toward the king by his conduct on the 21st of June, and
by the indecent rigor with which he treated them both after their return
from Varennes. Even when he was loudest in the profession of his desire
and power to influence the Assembly in the king's favor, one of his own
friends had told him to his face that he was insincere,[6] and that Louis
could not and ought not to trust his promises; and every part of his
conduct toward the royal pair was stamped with duplicity as well as with
ill-will. It was not strange, therefore, indeed it was fully consistent
with the honest openness of Marie Antoinette's own character, that she
should prefer an open enemy to a pretended friend. She even believed what,
from the very commencement of the Revolution, many had suspected, that La
Fayette cherished views of personal ambition, and aimed at reviving the
old authority of a Maire du Palais over a Roi Faineant[7]. She therefore
directed her friends to throw their weight into the scale in favor of
Petion, who was accordingly elected by a great majority, while the
marquis, greatly chagrined, retired for a time to his estate in Auvergne.

The victory, however, was an unfortunate one for the court. It contributed
to increase the confidence of its enemies; and, as their instinct showed
them that it was from the resolution of the queen that they had the most
formidable opposition to dread, it was against her that, from their first
entrance into the Assembly, Vergniaud and his friends specially exerted
themselves; Vergniaud openly contending that the inviolability of the
sovereign, which was an article of the new Constitution, applied only to
the king himself, and in no degree to his consort; while in the Jacobin
and Cordelier Clubs the coarsest libels were poured forth against her with
unremitting perseverance to stimulate and justify the most obscene and
ferocious threats. The coarsest ruffians in a street quarrel never used
fouler language of one another than these men of education applied to the
pure-minded and magnanimous lady whose sole offense was that she was the
wife of their kind-hearted king.

And, in addition to this daily increase of their danger which such
denunciations could not fail to augment, the royal family were now
suffering inconveniences which even those whose measures had caused t