Louis’s life had been in danger, and that an assassin had been detected while endeavoring to make his way into the Tuileries; and the report had reached a number of nobles, among whom D’Espremesnil, once so vehement a leader of the Opposition in Parliament, was conspicuous, who at once hastened to the palace to defend their sovereign.  It was not strange that he and Marie Antoinette should receive them graciously; they had not of late been used to such warm-hearted and prompt displays of attachment.  But the National Guards who were on duty were jealous of the cordial and honorable reception which those Nobles met with; they declared that to them alone belonged the task of defending the king; though they took so little care to perform it that they had allowed a gang of drunken desperadoes to get possession of the outer court of the palace, where they were menacing all aristocrats with death.  Louis became alarmed for the safety of his friends, and begged them to lay aside their arms; and they had hardly done so when La Fayette arrived.  He knew that the mob was exasperated with him for his repression of their outrages in the morning, and that some of his soldiers had not been well pleased at being compelled to act against the rioters.  So now, to recover their good-will, he handed over the weapons of the Nobles, which were only pistols, rapiers, and daggers, to the National Guard; and after reproaching D’Espremesnil and his companions for interfering with the duties of his troops, he drove them down the stairs, unarmed and defenseless as they were, among the drunken and infuriated mob.  They were hooted and ill-treated; but not only did he make no attempt to protect them, but the next day he offered them a gratuitous insult by the publication of a general order, addressed to his own National Guard, in which he stigmatized their conduct as indecent, their professed zeal as suspicious, and enjoined all the officials of the palace to take care that such persons were not admitted in future.  “The king of the Constitution,” he said, “ought to be surrounded by no defenders but the soldiers of liberty.”

Marie Antoinette had good reason to speak as she did the next week to Mercy; though we can hardly fail to remark, as a singular proof of the strength of her political prejudices, and of the degree in which she allowed them to blind her to the objects and the worth of the few honest or able men whom the Assembly contained, that she still regards the Constitutionalists as only one degree less unfavorable to the king’s legitimate authority than the Jacobins.  And we shall hereafter see that to this mistaken estimate she adhered almost to the end.  “Mischief,” she says, “is making progress so rapid that there is reason to fear a speedy explosion, which can not fail to be dangerous to us, if we ourselves do not guide it There is no middle way; either we must remain under the sword of the factions, and consequently be reduced to nothing, if they get the upper hand,