One after another, Marie Antoinette lost her last chances of safety; blows as unforeseen as terrible beat down the combinations on which she had built her hopes. Within a fortnight she was to see the two sovereigns disappear from whom she had expected succor: her brother, the Emperor Leopold, and Gustavus III., the King of Sweden. Leopold had not been equal to all the illusions which his sister had cherished with regard to him, but, nevertheless, he showed great interest in French affairs, and a lively desire to be useful to Louis XVI. Pacific by disposition, he had temporized at first, and adopted a conciliatory policy. He desired a reconciliation with the new principles, and, moreover, he was not blind to the inexperience and levity of the _émigrés_. But the obligation, to which he was bound by treaties, to defend the rights of princes holding property in Alsace, his fear of the propaganda of sedition, the aggressive language of the National Assembly and the Parisian press, had ended by determining him to take a more resolute attitude, and it was at the moment when he was {24} seriously intending to come to his sister's aid that he was carried off by sudden death. Though she did not desire a war between Austria and France, the Queen had persisted in wishing for an armed congress, which would have been a compromise between peace and war, but which the National Assembly would have regarded as an intolerable humiliation. It must not be denied, the situation was a false one. Between the true sentiments of Louis XVI. and his new rôle as a constitutional sovereign, there was a real incompatibility. As to the Queen, she was on good terms neither with the _émigrés_ nor with the Assembly.