the main, was too fluctuating not to vary with events, but those events
had but one direction--the destruction of the monarchy.


II.

Nevertheless, in the midst of these vacillations of the royal will, it
is impossible for history to misunderstand that from the month of
November 1790 the king vaguely meditated a plan of escape from Paris in
collusion with the emperor. Louis XVI. had obtained from this prince the
promise of sending a body of troops on the French frontier at the moment
when he should desire it; but had the king the intention of quitting the
kingdom and returning at the head of a foreign force, or simply to
assemble round his person a portion of his own army in some point of the
frontier, and there to treat with the Assembly? This latter is the more
probable hypothesis.

Louis XVI. had read much history, especially the history of England.
Like all unfortunate men, he sought, in the misfortunes of dethroned
princes, analogies with his own unhappy position. The portrait of
Charles I., by Van Dyck, was constantly before his eyes in his closet in
the Tuileries; his history continually open on his table. He had been
struck by two circumstances; that James II. had lost his throne because
he had left his kingdom, and that Charles I. had been beheaded for
having made war against his parliament and his people. These reflections
had inspired him with an instinctive repugnance against the idea of
leaving France, or of casting himself into the arms of the army. In
order to compel his decision one way or the other in favour of one of
these two extreme parties, his freedom of mind was completely oppressed
by the imminence of his present perils, and the dread which beset the