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He had still the seals of France about him, and he brought me a statement of all that he had burnt. The portfolio contained twenty letters from Monsieur, eighteen or nineteen from the Comte d'Artois, seventeen from Madame Adelaide, eighteen from Madame Victoire, a great many letters from Comte Alexandre de Lameth, and many from M. de Malesherbes, with documents annexed to them.
The King seemed inclined to this advice; and this is one of the strongest proofs of his sincerity. Alexandre Lameth, Duport, and Barnave, still relying on the resources of their party, hoped to have credit for directing the King through the influence they believed they had acquired over the mind of the Queen.
The president of the day replied with an oration thanking M. Clootz for the honor done to France by such an embassy; and Alexander Lameth followed up the president's harangue by fresh praises of the deputation as holy pilgrims who had thrown off the shackles of superstition. Nor was he content with a barren panegyric.
He had still the seals of France about him, and he brought me a statement of all that he had burnt. The portfolio contained twenty letters from Monsieur, eighteen or nineteen from the Comte d'Artois, seventeen from Madame Adelaide, eighteen from Madame Victoire, a great many letters from Comte Alexandre de Lameth, and many from M. de Malesherbes, with documents annexed to them.
My principal occupation was to hear and take down the debates of the Assembly, and convey and receive letters from the Queen to the Princesse de Lamballe, to and from Barnave, Bertrand de Moleville, Alexandre de Lameth, Deport de Fertre, Duportail, Montmorin, Turbo, De Mandat, the Duc de Brissac, etc., with whom my illustrious patronesses kept up a continued correspondence, to which I believe all of them fell a sacrifice; for, owing to the imprudence of the King in not removing their communications when he removed the rest of his papers from the Tuileries, the exposure of their connections with the Court was necessarily consequent upon the plunder of the palace on the 10th of August, 1792.
The scheme of Duport, De Lameth, and Barnave was to thwart and weaken the Mirabeau and Orleans faction, by gradually persuading them, in consequence of the King's compliance with whatever the Assembly exacted, that they could do no better than to let him into a share of the executive power; for now nothing was left to His Majesty but responsibility, while the privileges of grace and justice had become merely nominal, with the one dangerous exception of the veto, to which he could never have recourse without imminent peril to his cause and to himself.
Following this decision, in May, 1794, the king of Prussia gave him into the keeping of the Emperor of Austria, and the dangerous prisoner, together with three of the officers who were with him when arrested, Latour-Maubourg, Bureaux-de-Pusy, and Lameth, were promptly carried to the strong fortress of Olmütz, high up in the gloomy Carpathian Mountains.
Surrounded by a brilliant staff of young officers of the party of La Fayette, Charles Lameth, du Jarri, Mathieu de Montmorency, he believed he had the opinions which they instilled into him. The king caressed, the Assembly flattered, the army respected, him.
Mirabeau himself, accused by Lameth on the subject of the law of emigration, came a few days before his death to listen face to face to the invectives of his denouncer, and had not disdained to justify himself. The clubs were the exterior strength, where the factious of the assembly gave the support of their names in order to intimidate the national representation.
Alexandre de Lameth was the only one of the three who survived the vengeance of the Jacobins. He remained in prison in that town fifteen months, and his friends began to hope that he would be forgotten, when an order arrived that he should be removed to Paris.
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