tiate
Revolution was irritated even by the concessions they had made; that the
blind fury of factions which had not paused before royalty surrounded by
its guards, would not hesitate before the illusory inviolability decreed
by a constitution; and that their lives, those of their children, and
those of the royal family which remained, had no longer any assurance of
safety but in flight.

Flight was therefore resolved upon, and was frequently discussed before
the time when the king decided upon it. Mirabeau himself, bought by the
court, had proposed it in his mysterious interviews with the queen. One
of his plans presented to the king was, to escape from Paris, take
refuge in the midst of a camp, or in a frontier town, and there treat
with the baffled Assembly. Mirabeau remaining in Paris, and again
possessing himself of the public mind, would lead matters, as he
declared, to accommodation, and a voluntary restoration of the royal
authority. Mirabeau had carried these hopes away with him into the tomb.
The king himself, in his secret correspondence, testified his repugnance
to intrusting his fate into the hands of the ringleader of the factions.
Another cause of uneasiness troubled the king's mind, and gave the queen
great anxiety; they were not ignorant that it was a question without,
either at Coblentz or in the councils of Leopold and the King of
Prussia, to declare the throne of France virtually vacant by default of
the king's liberty, and to nominate as regent one of the emigrant
princes, in order that he might call around him with a show of legality
all his loyal subjects, and give to foreign troops an incontestible
right of intervention. A throne even in fragments will not admit of
participation.

An uneasy jealousy still prevailed in the midst of so many other alarms
even in this palace, where sedition had already effected so many
breaches. "M. le Comte d'Artois will then become a hero," said the queen
ironically, who at one time was excessively fond of this young prince,
but now hated him. The king, on his part, feared that moral forfeiture
with which he was menaced, under pretence of delivering the monarchy. He
knew not which to fear the most, his friends or his enemies. Flight
only, to the centre of a faithful army, could remove him from both these
perils; but flight was also a peril. If he succeeded, civil war might
spring up, and the king had a horror of blood spilled in his defence; if
it did not succeed,