ppy results
during the last war. He knows that it is not only the King's policy but
his private inclination to be solicitous about his fleets, and that the
most active step he has taken during his whole reign was to visit the port
of Cherbourg. Pitt had served the cause of the French Revolution from the
first disturbances; he will perhaps serve it until its annihilation. I
will endeavour to learn to what point he intends to lead us, and I am
sending M.----- to London for that purpose. He has been intimately
connected with Pitt, and they have often had political conversations
respecting the French Government. I will get him to make him speak out,
at least so far as such a man can speak out." Some time afterwards the
Queen told me that her secret envoy was returned from London, and that all
he had been able to wring from Pitt, whom he found alarmingly reserved,
was that he would not suffer the French monarchy to perish; that to suffer
the revolutionary spirit to erect an organised republic in France would be
a great error, affecting the tranquillity of Europe. "Whenever," said
she, "Pitt expressed himself upon the necessity of supporting monarchy in
France, he maintained the most profound silence upon what concerns the
monarch. The result of these conversations is anything but encouraging;
but, even as to that monarchy which he wishes to save, will he have means
and strength to save it if he suffers us to fall?"

The death of the Emperor Leopold took place on the 1st of March, 1792.
When the news of this event reached the Tuileries, the Queen was gone out.
Upon her return I put the letter containing it into her hands. She
exclaimed that the Emperor had been poisoned; that she had remarked and
preserved a newspaper, in which, in an article upon the sitting of the
Jacobins, at the time when the Emperor Leopold declared for the coalition,
it was said, speaking of him, that a pie-crust would settle that matter.
At this period Barnave obtained the Queen's consent that he should read
all the letters she should write. He was fearful of private
correspondences that might hamper the plan marked out for her; he
mistrusted her Majesty's sincerity on this point; and the diversity of
counsels, and the necessity of yielding, on the one hand, to some of the
views of the constitutionalists, and on the other, to those of the French
Princes, and even of foreign Courts, were unfortunately the circumstances
which most rapidly impelled