“The churches employed for the paid worship of the state, cannot be devoted to any other service.  Citizens may hire other churches or chapels, and exercise their worship therein.  But this permission is forbidden to nonjuring priests suspected of revolt.”

XI.

This decree, which created more fanaticism than it repressed, and which accorded freedom of worship not as a right but as a favour, saddened the heart of the faithful; and the revolt in La Vendee, and persecution every where, followed.  Suspended as a fearful weapon over the conscience of the king, it was sent for his assent.

The Girondists were delighted at thus keeping the wretched monarch between their law and his own faith—­schismatic if he recognised the decree, and a traitor to the nation if he refused it.  Conquerors in this victory, they advanced towards another.

After having forced the king to strike at the religion of his conscience, they wished to force him to deal a blow at the nobility and his own brothers.  They renewed the question of the emigrants.  The king and his ministers had anticipated them.  Immediately after the acceptance of the constitution, Louis XVI. had formally renounced all conspiracy, interior or exterior, in order to recover his power.  The omnipotence of opinion had convinced him of the vanity of all the plans submitted to him for crushing it.  The momentary tranquillity of spirits after so many shocks, the reception he had met with in the Assembly, the Champ-de-Mars, in the theatre,—­the freedom and honours restored to him in his palace, had persuaded him that, if the constitution had some fanatics, royalty had no implacable enemies in his kingdom.  He believed the constitution easy of execution in many of its provisions, and impracticable in others.  The government which they imposed on him seemed to him as a philosophical experiment which they desired to make with their king.  He only forgot one thing, and that is, the experiments of a people are catastrophes.  A king who accepts the terms of a government which are impossible, accepts his own overthrow by anticipation.  A well-considered and voluntary abdication is more regal than that daily abdication which is undergone in the degradation of power.  A king saves, if not his life, at least his dignity.  It is more suitable to majesty royal to descend by its own will, than to be cast down headlong.  From the moment when the king is king no longer, the throne becomes the last place in the kingdom.

Be this as it may, the king frankly declared to his ministers his intention of legally executing the constitution, and of associating himself unreservedly and without guile to the will and destiny of the nation.  The queen, by one of those sudden and inexplicable changes in the heart of woman, threw herself, with the trust of despair, into the party of the constitution.  “Courage,” she said to M. Bertrand de Molleville, minister and confidant of the king:  “Courage!  I hope, with patience, firmness, and perseverance, that all is not lost.”