trand, "the queen was too anxious to see accomplished to hesitate at
believing in its execution.[9]" And at the same time some of the Jacobin
leaders--Danton, Petion, and Santerre--had opened communications with the
Government, and had undertaken for a large bribe to prevent the threatened
outbreak. The money had been paid to them, and Marie Antoinette more than
once boasted to her attendants that they were now safe, as having gained
over Danton; placing the firmer reliance on this mode of extrication
because it coincided with her belief that the mutual jealousy of the two
parties would dispose one of them at least eventually to embrace the cause
of the king, as their beat ally against the other. The result seems to
show that the Jacobins only took the bribe the more effectually to lull
their destined victims into a false security.

A third consideration, and that apparently not the weakest, was Marie
Antoinette's rooted dislike of the Constitutionalist party. In their rants
the Duc de Liancourt had taken his seat in the first Assembly; though, as
he assured M. Bertrand, the king himself was aware that his object in so
doing had been to serve his majesty in the most effectual manner; and he
was also the statesman whose advice had mainly contributed to induce the
king to visit Paris after the destruction of the Bastile, a step which she
had always regarded as the forerunner and cause of some of the most
irremediable encroachments of the Revolutionists. Even the duke's present
devotion to the king's cause could not entirely efface from her mind the
impression that he was not in his heart friendly to the royal authority.
She urged these arguments on the king. The last probably weighed with him
but little: the two former he felt as strongly as the queen herself; and
he delayed his decision, sending word to M. Bertrand that he had resolved
to defer his departure "till the last extremity.[10]" His faithful servant
was in amazement. "When," he exclaimed, "was the last extremity to be
looked for, if it had not already come?" But his astonishment was turned
to absolute despair when the next day M. Montmorin informed him that the
project had been entirely given up, the queen herself remarking "that M.
Bertrand overlooked the circumstance that he was throwing them altogether
into the hands of the Constitutionalists."

She has been commonly blamed for this decision, as that which was the
chief cause of all the subsequent calamities