"General Luckner and I," said he to the king, "will come to Paris to attend the celebration of the demolition of the Bastille on the 14th of July. In company with us, the next day, the king with his family shall visit Compiègne, fifty miles north of Paris. The people will have sufficient confidence in us to make no opposition. Should there be opposition we will have a sufficient force of dragoons at hand to strike by surprise and release you. Ten squadrons of horse-artillery shall there receive the monarch and conduct him to the army on the frontiers. The king shall then issue a decided proclamation forbidding his brothers and the emigrants to advance another step toward the invasion of France, declaring, in terms which can not be misinterpreted, his determination to maintain the Constitution, and announcing his readiness to place himself at the head of the army to repel the enemy. This decisive measure will satisfy France that the king is its friend not its foe. The allies can make no headway against France united under its monarch. The king can then return triumphant to Paris, amid the universal acclamations of the people, a constitutional monarch beloved and revered by his subjects."[340] This was the wisest course which, under the circumstances, could possibly have been pursued. It was constitutional. It would have been the salvation of the king and of France. Many of the king's personal friends entreated him, with tears, to repose confidence in La Fayette, and to comply with the counsels of the only man who could rescue him from destruction. But the fickle-minded king was now in the hands of the queen and the courtiers, and was guided at their pleasure. All their hopes were founded in the re-establishment of despotism by foreign invasion. The generous plan of La Fayette was rejected with a cold and almost insulting repulse. "The best advice," replied the king, "which can be given to La Fayette is to continue to serve as a bugbear to the factions by the able performance of his duty as a general." The queen was so confident that in a few weeks the allied armies would be in Paris, and that any acts of disrespect on the part of the people would only tend to hasten their march, that when Colombe, the aid-de-camp of La Fayette, remonstrated against the infatuation of so fatal a decision, she replied, "We are much obliged to your general for his offer, but the best thing which could happen to us would be to be confined for two months in a tower." When La Fayette was thus periling his life to save the royal family he knew that, by the queen's orders, pamphlets filled with calumny were composed against him, and were paid for out of the king's salary.[341]