The royal plan had failed: let the King accept the new conditions and meet Paris half-way. Such were the decisions, and Louis wrote to Necker recalling him—the abortive Ministry of the Resistance was ended.

But that night, in the dead darkness, Artois fled from the coming terror; old Vermond also, the friend and tutor; Enghien, Condé, many another; and the Queen, with passionate love, compelled one who was now once more her friend to fly: the Madame de Polignac. She fled and was saved, bearing with her two ill-spelt, blotted lines in Marie Antoinette’s untrained and hurried hand: “Good-bye, dearest of my friends; it is a dreadful and a necessary word. Good-bye!”

In this way did the Assembly enter into its sovereignty, and in this way did Marie Antoinette first meet—though she never knew or grasped it—the temper of the French people, who, perhaps alone in Europe, can organise from below.

That creative summer of ’89, in which the Assembly now victorious began its giant business, was in the Queen’s eyes nothing but a respite for the Throne, or a halt in a retreat between one sharp action lost and the next to be ventured later, when new troops should be at hand and a new occasion serve. That these speech-makers hard by should declare a new creed of Rights, should—in words—abolish Feudal Dues, should debate the exact limits of the King’s power—all that was wind. Even the anarchy coincident with that vast transition, powerfully as it affected her spirit (and her letters show it) with horror, affected it still more with hatred and with a determination so to hold or tame this wild beast, her husband’s people, that her son should have his right at last, and that she herself might be free from a ceaseless humiliation.

They were killing men everywhere: they had killed the offensive and corrupt old Foulon in the streets of Paris—he and his powerful loathsome son-in-law, Berthier: square-jawed, an oppressor grievous to God, Berthier who, so lately, in those abortive three days of the Resistance, had sat at the King’s elbow promising that Paris should be held; Berthier had been clubbed to death and shot down as he swung a musket in defence of his big body. In the provinces everywhere the country houses burned.

The Queen waited. She wrote to her brother, to her dear friend Madame de Polignac; she chose (in the absence of that friend) a new governess for the Children of France, the worthy widow of Tourzel, a duchess for the occasion. She waited and did nothing. All September was a wrangling over the King’s Veto—his right to refuse a law: she may have known vaguely that to her the nickname of “Veto” was thereby attached: she did not heed it. In the last days of the month a vigorous attempt to persuade the King to fly was once more made and once more failed. By October new troops would have come—their numbers were to prove insufficient for attack but fatally sufficient for enthusiasm, and that enthusiasm of loyal courtiers (breaking out almost within earshot of a Paris fretting at every delay, hungry, mystified) provoked the next disaster.