XV.

The Comte d’Artois, his junior, spoiled by nature, by the court, and by the fair sex, had taken on himself the role of a hero.  He represented at Coblentz antique honour, chivalrous devotion, and the French character; he was adored by the court, whose grace, elegance, and pride were personified in him:  his heart was good, his mind apt, but not well informed, and of limited comprehension.  A philosopher, through indolence and carelessness before the Revolution, superstitious afterwards, through weakness and entrainment, he threatened the Revolution with his sword from a distance.  He appeared more fitted to irritate than to conquer, and at this early period he already manifested that unbridled rashness and that useless spirit of provocation which was one day to cost him a throne.  But his personal beauty, his grace, and his cordiality, covered all these defects, and he seemed destined never to die.  Old in years, he was fated to reign, and die, eternally young.  He was the prince of youth:  at another epoch he would have been Francis I., in his own he was Charles X.

The Prince de Conde was a soldier by birth, inclination, and profession.  He despised these two courts, transposed to the banks of the Rhine, for his court was his camp.  His son, the Duc de Bourbon, served his first campaign under his orders, and his grandson, the Duc d’Enghien, in his seventeenth year, acted as his aide-de-camp.  This young prince was the representative of manly grace in the camp of the emigres; his bravery, his enthusiasm, his generosity, all seemed to promise another hero to the heroic race of Conde.  He was worthy of conquering in a cause not doomed, of dying sword in hand on the battle field, and not to fall, some years later, in the fosse at Vincennes, by the “lantern dimly burning,” with no other friend than his dog, by the balls of a platoon of soldiers, ordered out at dead of night, as if for an assassination.

XVI.

Louis XVI. trembled in his palace at the shock of this war which he himself had proclaimed, and which loured on the frontiers.  He did not conceal from himself that he was less the chief than the hostage of France, and that his head and that of his children would be forfeited to the nation on the first reverse or peril.  Danger sees treason on every side, and the public journals and the clubs denounced more vehemently than ever the existence of the comite Autrichien, of which the queen was the centre.  This report was universally believed by the nation, and only cost the queen her popularity during the peace, but during the war it might cost her her life.  Thus, formerly accused of betraying the peace, this unfortunate family was now accused of betraying the war.  In false positions every thing is a danger; the king comprehended the extent of his perils, and hastened to avert the most impending.