Queen, the applicants were introduced, and, in my
presence, a paper was handed by them to Her Majesty. At the moment she
received it, I was obliged to leave her for the purpose of watching an
opportunity for their departure unobserved. These precautions were
necessary with regard to every person who came to us in the palace,
otherwise the jealousy of the Assembly and its emissaries and the
national guard of the interior might have been alarmed, and we should
have been placed under express and open surveillance. The confusion
created by the constant change of guard, however, stood us in good stead
in this emergency. Much passing and repassing took place unheeded in the
bustle.

"When the visitors had departed, and Her Majesty at one window of the
palace, and I at another, had seen them safe over the Pont Royal, I
returned to Her Majesty. She then graciously handed me the paper which
they had presented.

"It contained an earnest supplication, signed by many thousand good
citizens, that the King and Queen would sanction the plan of sending the
Dauphin to the army of La Fayette. They pledged themselves, with the
assistance of the royalists, to rescue the Royal Family. They, urged
that if once the King could be persuaded to show himself at the head of
his army, without taking any active part, but merely for his own safety
and that of his family, everything might be accomplished with the
greatest tranquillity.

"The Queen exclaimed, 'What! send my child! No! never while I breathe!

[Little did this unfortunate mother think that they, who thus pretended
to interest themselves for this beautiful, angelic Prince only a few
months before, would, when she was in her horrid prison after the
butchery of her husband, have required this only comfort to be violently
torn from her maternal arms!

Little, indeed, did she think, when her maternal devotedness thus
repelled the very thought of his being trusted to myriads of sworn
defenders, how soon he would be barbarously consigned by the infamous
Assembly as the foot-stool of the inhuman savage cobbler, Simon, to be
the night-boy of the excrements of the vilest of the works of human
nature!]

Yet were I an independent Queen, or the regent of a minority, I feel that
I should be inclined to accept the offer, to place myself at the head of
the army, as my immortal mother did, who, by that step, transmitted the
crown of our ancestors to its legitimate descendants. It is the monarchy