This compassion led to a gentle approach. She tried to comfort George without letting him see that she needed the same consolation. This was done with that delicacy called womanly because the softer sex best practice it.
Marie Antoinette, trying to reign by dividing, saw she was on the wrong road, and was forcing together the souls which she wanted to keep aloof.
Hence, in the silence of night and the lonesomeness, she felt such wrestlings with Giant Despair as must give the spirit a high idea of its power since it can struggle with so vast a might.
She would have succumbed had it not been for the diversion of politics.
In her pride she ascribed her decay to the depreciation she had let herself as a woman suffer lately. In her active mind, to think was to act.
She set to work without losing a moment, but unfortunately the work was for her perdition.
Seeing that the Parisians had turned into soldiers and appeared to intend war, she resolved to show them what war really is.
For two months the King had been striving to retain some shred of royalty: with the peerage and Mirabeau, he had tried to neutralize the democratic spirit effacing it in France. In this strife the monarch had lost all his power and part of his popularity; the Queen had gained the nickname of "Lady Veto." She had been known as The Austrian, then as Lady Deficit, on account of the hole in the Treasury attributed to her generosity to her favorites; now, Lady Veto; she was to bear lastly the title of The Widow Capet.
After the conflict in which the Queen had endeavored to engage her friends by showing them that they were endangered with her, she remarked that only sixty thousand passports had been applied for by the higher classes, fleeing to foreign parts. This had struck the Queen.
She purposed her own escape, so as to leave the true royalists in France to wage a civil war. Her plan was not bad, and it must have succeeded had it not been for the evil genius who was plotting behind the Queen. Strange destiny! this woman who inspired great devotion, nowhere could attach discretion.