château of the Tuileries night and day had penetrated the very soul of
the king and queen.

The atrocious threats which assailed them whenever they showed
themselves at the windows of their residence, the insults of the press,
the vociferations of the Jacobins, the riots and murders which
multiplied in the capital and the provinces, the violent obstacles which
had been opposed to their departure from St. Cloud, and then the
recollections of the daggers which had even pierced the queen's bed on
the evening of the 5th to the 6th of October, made their life one
continued scene of alarms. They began to comprehend that the insatiate
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