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It was the first act of hostility and defiance, and it showed that the king was parting with his Feuillant friends. But Delessart spoilt the effect by keeping back the note to the emperor for ten days, and communicating it then with precautions. Leopold II. was one of the shrewdest and most cautious of men. He knew how to wait, and how to give way.
Yet he was so helpless that he had to call the Feuillant nominee, Count Louis de Narbonne, his own natural cousin, to the ministry of war. The King was not alone in his opposition to the war, Robespierre and Marat, nearly in accord, both stood for peace.
The Girondins, in reply, impeached Delessart, who was sent to prison, March 10, and perished there in September. The Feuillant minister resigned. Robespierre, who divined the calculations of the Court, and feared that war might strengthen the arm that bore the banner, resisted the warlike temper, and carried the Jacobins with him.
The tactics of the Feuillant advisers brought a revival of popular feeling in favour of the Court, which seemed inconceivable at the epoch of the arrest. King and queen were applauded in the streets, and at the theatre the cry "Long live the king!" silenced the cry "Long live the nation!" This was in October 1791, before the Legislative Assembly had divided into parties, or found a policy.
After a lapse of almost eleven years, I again find this identical BEAUVILLIERS still in the full enjoyment of the greatest celebrity. ROBERT and NAUDET in the Palais du Tribunat, and VERY on the Terrace des Feuillant dispute with him the palm in the art of Apicius.
The Feuillant deputies went out with him to the Tuileries. The king announced to him his intention to give his sanction to the decree for the 20,000 men. As to the decree of the priests, he repeated to the ministers that he had resolved, and begged them to take to the president of the Assembly a letter in his own writing, which contained the motives for his veto.
The new minister, Narbonne, was accepted as a war minister, while his Feuillant colleague at the Foreign Office, Delessart, was obstinately pacific. On December 14 Lewis came down to the Legislature, and announced that he would insist that the émigrés should receive no encouragement beyond the frontier.
But the political tergiversations of Barrere, a man of noble birth, and who was a royalist Feuillant before the 10th of August, did not countenance his assuming this imperious and inflexible tone. "Who is this president of the Feuillants," said Merlin de Thionville, "who assumes to dictate to us the law?" The hall resounded with applause.
The Right, composed of firm and absolute constitutionalists, composed the Feuillant party. Its principal speakers were Dumas, Ramond, Vaublanc, Beugnot, etc.
The portfolio of the ministry of foreign affairs was confided to Chambonas; that of war to Lajard, a soldier of La Fayette's party; that of the interior to M. de Monciel, a constitutional Feuillant and friend of the king. This was on the 17th of June. The Jacobins, the people incited by the Girondists, were already disturbing the capital: all announced a coming insurrection.
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