But amidst all her grief she cherishes hope—­hope that the people (the “good people,” as she invariably terms them) will return to their senses; and her other habitual feeling of benevolence, though she can now only exert it in forming projects for conferring further benefits on them when tranquillity should be restored.  The feeling shows itself even in letters which have no reference to her own position.  There had been discontent and signs of insurrection in the Netherlands which Mercy’s recent letters led her to believe were passing away; and her congratulations to her brother on this peaceful result dwell on the happiness “which it is to be able to pardon one’s subjects without shedding one drop of blood, of which sovereigns are bound to be always careful.[5]”

Her brother, and many of her friends in France, were at this time pressing her to quit the country, professing to believe that if her enemies knew that she was out of their reach, they would be less vehement in their hostility to the king; but she felt that such a course would be both unworthy of her, as timid and selfish, and in every way injurious rather than beneficial to her husband.  It could not save his authority, which was what the Jacobins made it their first object to destroy; and it would deprive him of the support of her affection and advice, which he constantly needed.

“Pardon me, I beg of you,” she replied to Leopold, “if I continue to reject your advice to leave Paris.  Consider that I do not belong to myself.  My duty is to remain where Providence has placed me, and to oppose my body, if the necessity should arise, to the knives of the assassins who would fain reach the king.  I should be unworthy of the name of our mother, which is as dear to you as to me, if danger could make me desert the king and my children.[6]”

We have seen that Marie Antoinette dreaded calumny more than the knife or poison of the assassin; and there could hardly have been a greater proof how well founded her apprehensions were, and how unscrupulous her enemies, than is afforded by the fact that, in the latter part of this year, they actually brought back Madame La Mothe to Paris with the purpose of making a demand for a re-investigation of the whole story of the fraud on the jeweler—­a pretense for reviving the libelous stories to the disparagement of the queen, the utter falsehood and absurdity of which had been demonstrated to the satisfaction of the whole world four years before.  Nor was it wholly a Jacobin plot.  La Fayette himself was, to a certain extent, an accomplice in it.  As commander of the National Guard of the city, it was his duty to apprehend one who was an escaped convict; but instead of doing so he preferred identifying himself with her, and on one occasion had what Mirabeau rightly called the inconceivable insolence to threaten the queen with a divorce on the ground of unfaithfulness to her husband.  She treated his insinuations with the dignity which became herself, and the scorn