The thought of the king, although right in the main, was too fluctuating not to vary with events, but those events had but one direction--the destruction of the monarchy.
II.
Nevertheless, in the midst of these vacillations of the royal will, it is impossible for history to misunderstand that from the month of November 1790 the king vaguely meditated a plan of escape from Paris in collusion with the emperor.

Louis XVI.

had obtained from this prince the promise of sending a body of troops on the French frontier at the moment when he should desire it; but had the king the intention of quitting the kingdom and returning at the head of a foreign force, or simply to assemble round his person a portion of his own army in some point of the frontier, and there to treat with the Assembly?
This latter is the more probable hypothesis.
Louis XVI.

had read much history, especially the history of England.
Like all unfortunate men, he sought, in the misfortunes of dethroned princes, analogies with his own unhappy position.

The portrait of Charles I., by Van Dyck, was constantly before his eyes in his closet in the Tuileries; his history continually open on his table.