On the 23d of June, after the States had assumed their new form, and Louis at a royal sitting had announced the reforms he had resolved to grant, and which were so complete that the most extreme reformers admitted that they could have wished for nothing more, except that they should themselves have taken them, and that the king should not have given them, Mirabeau took the lead in throwing down a defiance to his sovereign; refusing to consent to the adjournment of the Assembly, as was natural on the withdrawal of the king, and declaring that they, the members of the Commons, would not quit the hall unless they were expelled by bayonets.
But, violently as Versailles and Paris were agitated throughout May and June, Marie Antoinette took no part in the discussion which these questions excited.

She had a still graver trouble at home.

Her eldest son, the dauphin, whose birth had been greeted so enthusiastically by all classes, had, as we have seen, long been sickly.

Since the beginning of the year his health had been growing worse, and on the 4th of June he died; and, though his bereaved mother bore up bravely under his loss, she felt it deeply, and for a time was almost incapacitated from turning her attention to any other subject..