A large contingent of the French nobility heartily desired the success of foreign armies. At Coblentz a gathering of twenty-two thousand gentlemen hastened to the side of the seven Bourbon princes: the Comte de Provence, the Comte d'Artois, the Duc de Berry, the Duc d'Angoulême, the Prince de Conde, the Duc de Bourbon, and the Duc d'Enghien. As M. de Lamartine has said: "Infidelity to the country called itself fidelity to the King. Desertion called itself honor. Fealty to the throne was the religion of the French nobility. To them the sovereignty of the people seemed an insolent dogma against which it was necessary to draw the sword under penalty of sharing the crime. There was real devotion in the act by which these men, young and {132} old, abandoned their rank in the army, and the ties of country and family, and rushed into a foreign land to defend the white flag as common soldiers.... Their country symbolized duty for the patriots; to the _émigrés_, duty meant the throne. One of these parties deceived itself concerning its duty, but both of them believed they were performing it." As to the unfortunate Louis XVI., he suffered cruelly. It was like death to him to declare war against his nephew, and at certain moments he felt that this Austrian army against which his troops contended might yet be his last resource. He could not even flatter himself that the sacrifice he had made of his sympathies and family feelings would be repaid by the love and confidence of his people. "We have no difficulty nowadays in comprehending," says M. Geffroy very justly, "what pure patriotism there was in that young army of 1792, which represented new France. But this army, formed in independence of the old regiments, was none the less, in the eyes of the Queen, a veritable army of sedition. She thought of it as composed of the victors of the Bastille, those whom Mirabeau styled the greatest scoundrels of Paris; the very rabble who came to Versailles on the 6th of October. She believed they could be crushed by the first attack at the frontier, and that France and Paris would be rid of them." The following reflection by M. Geffroy is very judicious: "Marie Antoinette committed a double error, but honest men who had not the same {133} overpowering motives as she, have committed it likewise. I do not allude merely to those Frenchmen who, after April 20, remained in the ranks of the Emigration, and who, apparently, did not suppose themselves to be betraying the true interests of their country. But look at M. de Bouillé. He even accepted a command in the foreign army under Gustavus III. And yet M. de Bouillé is an honest man who knows France and loves her ardently. Observe, in his Memoirs, his involuntary pride in our success, and how he shrugs his shoulders at the bluster of the Prussian officers."