The new year opened with grave plans for their extrication from their troubles--plans requiring the utmost forethought, ingenuity, and secrecy to bring them to a successful issue; and also with fresh injuries and insults from the Assembly and the municipal authorities, which every week made the necessity of promptitude in carrying such plans out more manifest. Mirabeau, as we have seen, had from the very first recommended that the king and his family should withdraw from Paris. In his eyes such a step was the indispensable preliminary to all other measures; and some of the earliest of the queen's letters in 1791 show that the resolution to leave the turbulent city had at last been taken. But though what he recommended was to be done, it was not to be done as he recommended; yet there was a manliness about the course of action which he proposed which would of itself have won the queen's preference, if she had not been forced to consider not what was best and fittest, but what it was most easy to induce him on whom the final choice must impend, the king, to adopt. Mirabeau advised that the king should depart publicly, in open day, "like a king," as he expressed himself,[11] and he affirmed his conviction that it would in all probability be quite unnecessary to remove farther than Compiègne; but that the moment that it should be known that the king was out of Paris, petitions demanding the re-establishment of order would flock in from every quarter of the kingdom, and public opinion, which was for the most part royalist, would compel the Assembly to modify the Constitution which it had framed, or, if it should prove refractory, would support the king in dissolving it and convoking another.