They did not see that their pusillanimous flight must lead to a continuance of such atrocities, leaving, as it did, the undisputed sway in the Assembly to those very men who had been the authors of the outrages of which they complained.

They were, in fact, insuring the ruin of all that they most wished to preserve; for, in the progress of the debates in the Assembly during the winter, many questions of the most vital importance were decided by very small majorities, which their presence would have turned into minorities.

The greater the danger was, the more irresistible they ought to have felt the obligation to stand to the last by the cause of which they were the legitimate champions; and the final triumph of the Jacobin party owed hardly more to the energy of its leaders than to the cowardly and inglorious flight of the princes and nobles who left the field open without resistance to their wickedness and audacity.
It was a melancholy winter that the queen now passed.

So far as she was able, she diverted her mind from political anxieties by devoting much of her time to the education of her children.

A little plot of ground was railed off in the garden of the Tuileries for the dauphin's[6] amusement; and one of her favorite relaxations was to watch him working at the flower-beds himself with his little hoe and rake; though, as if to mark that they were in fact prisoners, both she and he were followed wherever they went by grenadiers of the city-guard, and were not allowed to dispense with their attendance for a single moment.