To preserve the _status quo_, and wait events, became now, for some weeks or months, as much his policy as his accessibility to passion and sudden influences would permit. He seemed to feel that he should give time to the molten lava of his volcanic greatness to settle, harden, and assume its individualism among things received. Holding aloof, therefore, from indentification with either party--leaning now on one side, now on the other; his speeches more with the movement, his policy more with the court; forcing both parties into explanations, while keeping himself, however, disengaged--he constituted himself their arbitrator and moderator, overawing both extremes; and while maintaining his pre-eminence of political influence, held himself ready to take advantage, at the least cost of consistency, of any fundamental change in the position of affairs. In the month of May or June, however, a private interview with the queen, in the Royal Garden of St. Cloud, followed by others, to the renewed scandal of her fame, laid the foundation of a new compact with the court, and a more decided policy. The chivalry of Mirabeau revived under the enthusiasm won by "Earth's loveliest vision"--a queen in distress and a suppliant--and he pledged himself, as the Hungarians to her royal mother, to die in the service of saving her throne. But the highest endeavors of Mirabeau have always at their base, like the monuments of his country, the filthy and the repulsive; and the chivalry of this new saviour of the monarchy received sustentation in a bribe--higgled for through months--of twenty thousand pounds, and a pension of more than that per annum. About the end of the year, three or four months before his death, he opened systematically his great campaign for what professedly was the restoration of regal authority. He was to out-Herod in patriotism the Herods of the Jacobin club: the court was to dare every thing short of civil war--perhaps even that; and the existing confusion, whatever it might be, was to be cured by another of greater extent, artificially induced by the charlatanism of art political. His scheme, in some points, it must be allowed, successfully imitated in our own days in Prussia, was: First--To reorganize the party of Order in the Assembly; and while, as far as possible, winning for it the sympathy of the country, to excite, by all available agencies, distrust and discontent with the opposing majority. Secondly--To inundate the provinces with publications against the Assembly; and by commissioners, sent nominally for other purposes, to obtain remonstrances from the departments against its further continuance.