diplomatised in his name. The king disowned them, sometimes with, and
sometimes without, sincerity, in his official letters to ambassadors.
This was not hypocrisy, it was weakness; a captive king, who speaks
aloud to his jailers and in whispers to his friends, is excusable. These
two languages not always agreeing, gave to Louis XVI. the appearance of
disloyalty and treason: he did not betray, he hesitated.

His brothers, and especially the Comte d'Artois, did violence from
without to his wishes, interpreting his silence according to their own
desires. This young prince went from court to court to solicit in his
brother's name the coalition of the monarchical powers against
principles which already threatened every throne. Received graciously at
Florence by the Emperor of Austria, Leopold, the queen's brother, he
obtained a few days afterwards at Mantua the promise of a force of
35,000 men. The King of Prussia, and Spain, the King of Sardinia,
Naples, and Switzerland, guaranteed equal forces. Louis XVI. sometimes
entertained the hope of an European intervention as a means of
intimidating the Assembly, and compelling it to a reconciliation with
him; at other times he repulsed it as a crime. The state of his mind in
this respect depended on the state of the kingdom; his understanding
followed the flux and reflux of interior events. If a good decree, a
cordial reconciliation with the Assembly, a return of popular applause
came to console his sorrows, he resumed his hopes, and wrote to his
agents to break up the hostile gatherings at Coblentz. If a new _émeute_
disturbed the palace--if the Assembly degraded the royal power by some
indignity or some outrage--he again began to despair of the
Constitution, and to fortify himself against it. The incoherence of his
thoughts was rather the fault of his situation than his own; but it
compromised his cause equally within and without. Every thought which is
not at unity destroys itself. The thought of the king, although right in