What is certain is, that Marie Antoinette believed { 28} in poison. "The death of the Emperor Leopold," says Madame Campan, "occurred on March 1, 1792. The Queen was out when the news arrived at the Tuileries. On her return, I gave her the letter announcing it. She cried out that the Emperor had been poisoned; that she had remarked and preserved a gazette in which, in an article on the session of the Jacobin Club at the time when Leopold had declared for the Coalition, it was said, in speaking of him, that a bit of piecrust could settle that affair. From that moment the Queen had regarded this phrase as an inadvertence of the propagandists."
On the very day when Marie Antoinette's brother died, Louis XVI.'s Minister of Foreign Affairs, De Lessart, had enraged the National Assembly by reading them extracts from his diplomatic correspondence, which they found not sufficiently firm. They were indignant at a despatch in which Prince de Kaunitz said: "The latest events give us hopes; it appears that the majority of the French nation, impressed with the evils they have prepared, are returning to more moderate principles, and incline to render to the throne the dignity and authority which are the essence of monarchical government." When De Lessart came down from the tribune, the whispering changed into cries of rage and threats against the minister and the court, which, it was said, was planning a counter-revolution at the Tuileries, and dictating to the cabinet of Vienna the language by which it hoped to intimidate France. { 29} At the evening session of the same day, Rouyer, a deputy, proposed to impeach the Minister of Foreign Affairs. "Is it possible," cried he, "that a perfidious minister should come here to make a parade of his work and lay the responsibility of it on a foreign power? Will the time never arrive when ministers shall cease to betray us? Were my head to be the price of the denunciation I am making, I would none the less go on with it." At the session of March 6, Guadet said: "It is time to know whether the ministers wish to make Louis XVI. King of the French, or the King of Coblentz."