In her mention of the 14th of July as likely to bring fresh dangers, she is alluding to the announcement of an intention of the Jacobins to hold a fresh festival to commemorate the destruction of the Bastile on the anniversary of that exploit; a celebration which she had ample reason to expect would furnish occasion for some fresh tumult and outrage.  And we may remark that in one of these letters she rests her whole hope on foreign assistance; while in the other, she rejects foreign aid to escape from her almost hopeless position.  But the key to her feeling in both cases is one and the same.  Above all things she was a devoted, faithful wife and mother.  To herself and her own safety she never gave a thought.  Her first duty, she rightly judged, was to the king, and she looked to such a manifesto as she desired Austria and Prussia to issue, backed by the movements of a powerful army, as the measure which afforded the best prospect of saving her husband, who could hardly be trusted to save himself; while, for the very same reason, she refused to fly without him, even though flight might have saved her children, her son and heir, as well as herself, because it would have increased her husband’s danger.  In each case her decision was that of a brave and devoted wife, not perhaps in both instances judicious; for when Prussia did mingle in the contest, as it did in the first week in July, it evidently increased the perils of Louis, if indeed they were capable of aggravation, by giving the Jacobins a plea for raising the cry “that the country was in danger.”  But in the second case, in her refusal to flee, and to leave her husband by himself to confront the existing and impending dangers, she judged rightly and worthily of herself; and the only circumstance that has prevented her from receiving the credit due for her refusal to avail herself of Prince George’s offer is that throughout the whole period of the Revolution her acts of disinterestedness and heroism are so incessant that single deeds of the kind are lost in the contemplation of her entire career during this long period of trial.

It was the peculiar ill-fortune of Louis that more than once the very efforts made by people who desired to assist him increased his perils.  The events of the 20th of June had shocked and alarmed even La Fayette.  From the beginning of the Revolution he had vacillated between a desire for a republic and for a limited monarchy on something like the English pattern, without being able to decide which to prefer.  He had shown himself willing to court a base popularity with the mob by heaping uncalled-for insults on the king and queen.  But though he had coquetted with the ultra-revolutionists, and allowed them to make a tool of him, he had not nerve for the villainies which it was now clear that they meditated.  He had no taste for bloodshed; and, though gifted with but little acuteness, he saw that the success of the Jacobins and Girondins would lead neither to a republic