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Rh German potentates, and the emigrant princes, were concocting measures against the French people, who, since the King's unsuccessful flight, had kept him in semi-durance at the Tuileries. However, since the completion of the Constitution and its acceptance by Louis XVI., there was a fresh upflickering of royalty; but the conspiracies with the foreigner, the bribery, or attempted bribery, of public men, were never given up for long. "Louis XVI.," says Madame Roland, "was always vacillating between the fear of irritating his subjects, his wish to please them, and his incapacity of governing them always, on the one hand, proclaiming the maintenance of what he ordered to be sapped with the other, so that his oblique course and false conduct first excited mistrust and ended by rousing indignation."

The Legislative Assembly met on the 1st October 1791, while the country was distracted by apprehensions of invasion, and by doubt of its ability to meet it. In this crisis of her fate France, as if instinctively, had sent to represent her the men most apt to act with promptitude. In one night the aspect of the Chamber had entirely changed its character. The venerable Constitution-makers had vanished smoke-like into the past. In their stead had come slim figures, clustered locks, eyes flashing infinite hope. So youthful a Senate was never seen before.

Conspicuous among its members was a group of men, sent up from the ardent Gironde, destined to take the lead in the New Assembly. All of them men who had nourished their youth on the literature of Greece and Rome, they entered the arena with little or no practical experience, but with the Republic for watchword. They were the idealists of the Revolution.