duration to the society, which, sensible of its insignificance and impotence, soon afterwards dissolved itself. On the other hand, such was the eagerness to attend the Jacobin club, that it was found necessary to make new regulations to impede admittance, and that the galleries and even the places of the members were always crowded nearly to suffocation.

The king, whose dejection at the recent proceedings in Paris was increased by the tidings of the deaths of the emperor Leopold and Gustavus of Sweden which rapidly succeeded each other, was now aware that it was impossible to admit any other than men of the predominant party into his council; he therefore re-composed his ministry of more or less zealous Jacobins, appointing Duranthon to the department of justice, de Grave, afterwards superseded by Servan, for war, Roland for the interior, Clavière for the finances, and Dumouriez for foreign affairs. Dumouriez, who, in the time of Louis XV. had been employed as agent in Poland and Sweden, and had endeavoured to acquire importance, no matter how, ever since the commencement of the revolution, testified his gratitude to the Jacobins, not only by going to their club in a red cap, their distinctive decoration, borrowed from the galley-slaves at Toulon, and delivering suitable speeches, but by giving to the correspondence with the court of Vienna a blunt Jacobin tone, which strongly contrasted with diplomatic forms, and seemed to be adopted expressly for the purpose of frustrating all hope of compromise.

* Strictly speaking, from the soldiers of the Swiss regiment of Chateauvieux, who had been concerned in the sanguinary mutiny at Nancy, in 1790, who were therefore sentenced by the authorities of their native country to the galleys, and actually sent to them. At the beginning of 1792, these soldiers were brought back, at the instigation of the Jacobins, as martyrs of liberty, paraded through Paris in triumph, and even honoured with admission to the sittings of the National Assembly.

CHAPTER XIV.

DECLARATION OF WAR AGAINST AUSTRIA; INVASION OF THE TUILERIES BY THE POPULACE.

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In the month of March, 1792, death removed from the stage two of the most decided enemies of the new French constitution. The emperor Leopold expired unexpectedly on the 1st after a short illness, and Gustavus III. of Sweden perished by the hand of an assassin. Gustavus, as we have seen, had entered heartily into the alliance formed against France; and, in order to raise which he was to lead in person to co-operate army, with the emperor and the king of Prussia, he had been obliged to negociate large loans, and to impose heavy taxes on his subjects. The nobles, whom it had been his policy to humble, took advantage of these circumstances to prejudice the minds of the people against the sovereign. A conspiracy was formed for murdering him by several members of the aristocracy, in the hope of recovering for their order its former consequence. At the head of this scheme were counts Horn and Ribbing, the barons Bielke and Pechlin, and lieutenantcolonel Liljehorn. With these was associated Ankarstrom, who had been a page at the court of Sweden, and afterwards served in the army, from which he retired as captain. Of a violent temper and coarse manners, he had conceived a personal hatred against the king, on account of some severities which he had suffered, when his conduct was investigated in 1790 on a charge of high-treason.

The conspirators having in vain sought a favourable opportunity for executing their purpose during the diet held by the king at Gefle, in January, 1792, Ankarstrom, inflamed by revenge, offered himself as the instrument of

the murder; but Ribbing and Horn contested the infamous distinction. They agreed to cast lots, and the lot decided in favour of Ankarstrom. It was publicly known that the king purposed to attend a masquerade, which was to take place on the 15th of March, and the conspirators determined to avail themselves of this occasion to accomplish their design. That same evening, Gustavus received an anonymous note, warning him of his immediate danger from a plot that was laid to take his life, and beseeching him not to go to the masquerade, for which he was preparing, or he would be assassinated. The high-spirited monarch, nephew of Frederick the Great, despised the caution; entered the house about eleven o'clock, with count Essen, went into a box, and observed that his contempt for the note was fully justified, for, if there had been any design against his life, no time could have been more favourable than that moment. He then mingled without apprehension among the company, and was about to retire with the Prussian ambassador, when he was surrounded by several persons in masks. One of them, count Horn, tapped him on the shoulder, saying, "Good night, mask;" and at the same instant Ankarstrom fired a pistol at the king's back, and lodged the contents in his body. A scene of prodigious confusion ensued; amidst the general tumult and alarm, the conspirators had time to retire to other parts of the room, after the assassin had dropped his pistol and a dagger at the feet of the wounded king. The doors were immediately closed; all present were required to unmask, but no person betrayed any particular indications of guilt. No time was lost in conveying the king to his apartments; and the surgeon, after extracting a ball and some slugs, gave hopes of his recovery. These, however, soon proved to be fallacious. Having with perfect presence of mind arranged the most urgent affairs, ap

pointed his brother, the duke of Sudermania, sole regent, till his son, then a minor, should attain the age of eighteen years, and desired, in his dying moments, that all the conspirators, excepting the perpetrator of his murder, might be pardoned, Gustavus expired on the 29th of March. When his body was opened, a square piece of lead and two rusty nails were found lodged between the ribs.

The regent took the most active measures for the detection of the murderer and his accomplices. Ankarstrom was discovered and apprehended; he confessed his guilt, but refused to betray the other conspirators. On the 29th of April, he received sentence of death, was scourged on several different days with rods, and conveyed in a cart to the scaffold. Horn, Ribbing, and Liljehorn, were banished the country for ever.

Francis, eldest son of the emperor Leopold, and nephew of Marie Antoinette, on ascending the Austrian throne, gave notice to the French ambassador that he should persevere in the engagements contracted by his father with other powers, till France should reinstate the princes having possessions in Lorraine and Alsace in their rights, restore Avignon to the pope, and enable the government to curb those elements of the new constitution which gave alarm to other states. This was a welcome intimation to the French ministers, who were eager for war. After they had obliged the king to write, on the 13th of April, a letter to the new sovereign of Austria entirely in the spirit of the predominant party—it contained, for example, these expressions : "The French have sworn to live free or to die, and I have taken the same oath"-they persuaded him, before any answer could arrive, to go on the 20th to the Assembly; and, after reading the report drawn up by Dumouriez, to propose that war should be declared against Austria. Tears

[1792. trickled from the eyes of the unhappy prince, when, with tremulous voice, he uttered the important words. After a short discussion on this proposition in an evening sitting, it was approved by the Assembly, and thus commenced that conflict which was destined for twenty-three years to ravage almost every country in Europe, to consume countless victims, and to produce incalculable convulsions.

Agreeably to a plan framed by Dumouriez, the campaign was opened a few days after the declaration of war, by the entry of several French corps into the Netherlands; but that under Biron, which marched from Valenciennes upon Mons, as well as a second, destined to surprise Lille and Tournay, was put to flight with little effort by the Austrians. To cover their disgrace, the soldiers of this second corps raised the cry of treachery, aud murdered their commander and two of his aides-decamp at Lille in the most barbarous manner. The notions which the foreign courts had conceived of the inferiority of the French troops, and the hopes thence deduced of an easy triumph over them, seemed at the outset to be realized.

Immediately after the scandalous scenes at Lille, marshal Rochambeau, commander-in-chief of the army of the North, resigned; and whole regiments—for instance, the cavalry regiment Royal Allemand - went over to the emigrants. Great numbers of the officers of the native French regiments of the line did the same; for the whole existence of this class had revolved so exclusively around the idea of royalty and the honour flowing from that source, that they could not chime in with the new notions of citizenship and popular rule. The licentiousness and the audacious insubordination of the privates rendered the post of commander most irksome. The emigrants and the allies along with them imagined that, owing to these circumstances, it would be an easy matter for them to