The incidents of the four months' "secret" preparations to leave the Tuileries as described by Madame Campan read like scenes in a comic opera. The disguised purchases of elaborate wardrobes of underlinen and gowns; the making of a dressing-case of "enormous size, fitted with many and various articles from a warming-pan to a silver porringer"; the packing of the diamonds; the building of the new _berline_, that huge, lumbering Noah's ark which was to bear them swiftly away! The story of the pretended flight of the Russian baroness and her family; the start delayed by the queen turning into the Carrousel instead of into the Rue de l'Echelle, where the king and her children were awaiting her in the glass coach; the colossal folly of the whole business has been told by Carlyle in one of the most dramatic chapters in history. The Assembly declared on hearing of Louis' flight that the government of the country was unaffected and that the executive power remained in the hand of the ministers. After voting a levy of three hundred thousand National Guards to meet the threatened invasion, they passed calmly to the discussion of the new Penal Code. The king returned to Paris through an immense and silent multitude. "Whoever applauds the king," said placards in the street, "shall be thrashed; whoever insults him, hung." The idea of a republic as a practical issue of the situation was now for the first time put forward by the extremists, but met with little sympathy, and a Republican demonstration in the Champ de Mars was suppressed by the Assembly by martial law at the cost of many lives. Owing to the aversion felt by Marie Antoinette to Lafayette, who with affectionate loyalty more than once had risked his popularity and life to serve the crown, the court made the fatal mistake of opposing his election to the mayoralty of Paris and paved the way for the triumph of Petion and of the Dantonists. To the famous manifesto of Pilnitz by the Emperor of Austria and the King of Prussia in August 1791, calling on the sovereigns of Europe to support them in an armed intervention to restore the rights and prerogatives of the French king, the Assembly replied that, while they must regard as enemies those who tolerated hostile preparations against France, they offered good neighbourship, the amity of a free and puissant country to the nations of Europe. They desired no conquests and would respect the laws and constitutions of others if they evinced the same respect towards those of France: if the German princes favoured military preparations directed against the French, the French would carry among them, not fire and sword, but liberty. "_Let them ponder on the consequences of an awakening of the nations._"