"Do you believe that this prospect makes us recede?" queried the proud one, quickly rising. "I know the King is brave and the Queen heroic; so I never try to do anything with them but reason; unfortunately I can never pass my belief into their minds." "Why trouble about what you believe useless?" "Because it is my duty. It is sweet in such times to feel, though the result is unfruitful, that one has done his duty." She looked him in the face and asked: "Do you think it possible to save the King and the throne?" "I believe for him and hope for the other." "Then you are happier than I," she responded with a sad sigh: "I believe both are lost and I fight merely to salve my conscience." "Yes, I understand that you want a despotic monarchy and the King an absolute one: like the miser who will not cast away a portion of his gold in a shipwreck so that he may swim to shore with the rest, you will go down with all. No, cut loose of all burdens and swim towards the future." "To throw the past into a gulf is to break with all the crowned heads of Europe." "Yes, but it is to join hands with the French people." "Our enemies," returned Marie Antoinette. "Because you taught them to doubt you." "They cannot struggle against an European Coalition." "Suppose a Constitutional King at their head and they will make the conquest of Europe." "They would need a million of armed men for that." "Millions do not conquer Europe--an idea will. Europe will be conquered when over the Alps and across the Rhine advance the flags bearing the mottoes: 'Death to tyranny!' and 'Freedom to all!'" "Really, sir, there are times when I am inclined to think the wise are madmen." "Ah, you know not that France is the Madonna of Liberty, for whose coming the peoples await around her borders. She is not merely a nation, as she advances with her hands full of freedom--but immutable Justice and eternal Reason. But if you do not profit by all not yet committed to violence, if you dally too long, these hands will be turned to rend herself. "Besides, none of these kings whose help you seek is able to make war. Two empires, or rather an empress and a minister, deeply hate us but they are powerless! Catherine of Russia and William Pitt. Your envoy to Pitt, the Princess Lamballe, can get him to do much to prevent France becoming a republic, but he hates the monarch and will not promise to save him. Is not Louis the Constitutional King, the crowned philosopher, who disputed the East Indies with him and helped America to wrest herself from the Briton's grasp? He desires only that the French will have a pendant to his Charles the Beheaded." "Oh, who can reveal such things to you?" gasped the Queen. "The same who tell me what is in the letters you secretly write." "Have we not even a thought that is our own?"