with such despotic vigilance? Would not confidence have created
confidence, and the breach have been less wide between the King and his
people?

"When the father and his family will now be thoroughly reconciled, Heaven
alone can tell!"




SECTION V.


"Barnave often lamented his having been betrayed, by a love of notoriety,
into many schemes, of which his impetuosity blinded him to the
consequences. With tears in his eyes, he implored me to impress the
Queen's mind with the sad truths he inculcated. He said his motives had
been uniformly the same, however he might have erred in carrying them
into action; but now he relied on my friendship for my royal mistress to
give efficacy to his earnest desire to atone for those faults, of which
he had become convinced by dear-bought experience. He gave me a list of
names for Her Majesty, in which were specified all the Jacobins who had
emissaries throughout France, for the purpose of creating on the same
day, and at the same hour, an alarm of something like the 'Vesparo
Siciliano' (a general insurrection to murder all the nobility and burn
their palaces, which, in fact, took place in many parts of France), the
object of which was to give the Assembly, by whom all the regular troops
were disbanded, a pretext for arming the people as a national guard, thus
creating a perpetual national faction.