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Title: Marie Antoinette
Author: Belloc, Hilaire
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Marie Antoinette" ***
MARIE ANTOINETTE
------------------------------------------------------------------------
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
THE PYRENEES
PARIS
HILLS AND THE SEA
ON NOTHING AND KINDRED SUBJECTS
ON EVERYTHING
EMMANUEL BURDEN, MERCHANT
THE CHANGE IN THE CABINET
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration:
THE LAST ACT OF THE FRENCH MONARCHY
ORDER GIVEN ON 10TH AUGUST, 1792, TO THE GUARD AT THE TUILERIES TO
CEASE FIRE AND RETURN TO BARRACKS
_On the authenticity of this document see Appendix C_
]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_MARIE
ANTOINETTE_
BY
H. BELLOC
πολυ κρεισσων ἡ αναγκη
WITH THIRTY-ONE ILLUSTRATIONS AND FIVE MAPS
THIRD EDITION
METHUEN & CO.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_First Published_ - _October 14th, 1909_
_Second Edition_ - _January 1910_
_Third Edition_ - _1910_
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TO
_GEORGE WYNDHAM_
------------------------------------------------------------------------
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
THE eighteenth century, which had lost the appetite for tragedy and
almost the comprehension of it, was granted, before it closed, the most
perfect subject of tragedy which history affords.
The Queen of France whose end is but an episode in the story of the
Revolution stands apart in this: that while all around her were achieved
the principal miracles of the human will, she alone suffered, by an
unique exception, a fixed destiny against which the will seemed
powerless. In person she was not considerable, in temperament not
exalted; but her fate was enormous.
It is profitable, therefore, to abandon for a moment the contemplation
of those great men who recreated in Europe the well-ordered State, and
to admire the exact convergence of such accidents as drew around Marie
Antoinette an increasing pressure of doom. These accidents united at
last: they drove her with a precision that was more than human, right to
her predestined end.
In all the extensive record of her actions there is nothing beyond the
ordinary kind. She was petulant or gay, impulsive or collected,
according to the mood of the moment: acting in everything as a woman of
her temper—red-headed, intelligent and arduous—will always do: she was
moved by changing circumstance to this or that as many million of her
sort had been moved before her. But her chance friendships failed not in
mere disappointments but in ruin; her lapses of judgment betrayed her
not to stumbling but to an abyss; her small, neglected actions matured
unseen and reappeared prodigious in the catastrophe of her life as
torturers to drag her to the scaffold. Behind such causes of misfortune
as can at least be traced in some appalling order there appear, as we
read her history, causes more dreadful because they are mysterious and
unreasoned: ill-omened dates, fortunes quite unaccountable, and
continually a dark coincidence, reawaken in us that native dread of
Destiny which the Faith, after centuries of power, has hardly exorcised.
The business, then, of this book is not to recount from yet another
aspect that decisive battle whereby political justice was recovered for
us all, nor to print once more in accurate sequence the life of a Queen
whose actions have been preserved in the minutest detail, but to show a
Lady whose hands—for all the freedom of their gesture—were moved by
influences other than her own, and whose feet, though their steps seemed
wayward and self-determined, were ordered for her in one path that led
inexorably to its certain goal.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. THE DIPLOMATIC REVOLUTION 1
II. BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD 17
III. THE ESPOUSALS 32
IV. THE DU BARRY 45
V. THE DAUPHINE 52
VI. THE THREE YEARS 73
VII. THE CHILDREN 116
VIII. FIGARO 130
IX. THE DIAMOND NECKLACE 154
X. THE NOTABLES 170
XI. THE BASTILLE 193
XII. OCTOBER 215
XIII. MIRABEAU 240
XIV. VARENNES 263
XV. THE WAR 292
XVI. THE FALL OF THE PALACE 307
XVII. THE TEMPLE 324
XVIII. THE HOSTAGE 348
XIX. THE HUNGER OF MAUBEUGE 365
XX. WATTIGNIES 377
APPENDICES 402
INDEX 419
------------------------------------------------------------------------
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
THE LAST ACT OF THE FRENCH MONARCHY. _Frontispiece_
ORDER GIVEN ON 10TH AUGUST, 1792, TO
THE GUARD AT THE TUILERIES TO CEASE
FIRE AND RETURN TO BARRACKS
MARIA THERESA - From the tapestry 13
portrait woven for Marie Antoinette
and recently restored to Versailles
MADAME DE POMPADOUR - From the Portrait 18
by Boucher in the National Gallery,
Edinburgh. From a photo by T. R. Annan
& Sons
THE FIRST DAUPHIN (THE FATHER OF LOUIS 26
XVI.)
LOUIS XVI. - From the principal bust at 70
Versailles
THE EMPEROR JOSEPH II. - From the 103
tapestry portrait woven for Marie
Antoinette and recently restored to
Versailles
MARIE ANTOINETTE - From the principal 117
bust at Versailles
THE COUNTESS OF PROVENCE - From the bust 129
at Versailles
MARIE ANTOINETTE - After the painting by 154
Madame Vigée Le Brun. From photo
kindly lent by Duveen Bros., Old Bond
Street
PORTRAIT BUST OF THE DUKE OF NORMANDY, 163
THE SECOND DAUPHIN, SOMETIMES CALLED
LOUIS XVII., WHO DIED IN THE TEMPLE
AUTOGRAPH NOTE OF LOUIS XVI. RECALLING 213
NECKER, ON THE 16TH OF JULY, AFTER THE
FALL OF THE BASTILLE
THE TUILERIES, FROM THE GARDEN OR WEST 231
SIDE, IN 1789
FACSIMILE OF THE FIRST PAGE OF THE 260
ADDRESS TO THE FRENCH PEOPLE WRITTEN
BY LOUIS XVI. BEFORE HIS FLIGHT
PÉTION 286
BARNAVE 289
FACSIMILE OF THE FIRST PAGE OF THE 297
LETTER WRITTEN ON THE 3RD SEPTEMBER,
1791, BY MARIE ANTOINETTE TO THE
EMPEROR, HER BROTHER, PROPOSING ARMED
INTERVENTION
EAST FRONT OF THE TUILERIES (THE SIDE 314
ATTACKED BY THE MOB) IN ITS LAST STATE
BEFORE THE COMMUNE OF 1871, AFTER THE
CLEARING AWAY OF THE STREETS AND
HOUSES IN FRONT OF IT
AN EARLY VIEW OF THE APPROACH TO THE 322
TUILERIES FROM THE CARROUSEL, SHOWING
THE THREE COURTYARDS
CONTEMPORARY PRINT OF THE FIGHTING IN 327
THE COURTYARD
INSCRIPTION ON THE BROKEN BUST OF THE 329
DAUPHIN. A RELIC OF THE SACK OF THE
PALACE
THE TOWER OF THE TEMPLE AT THE MOMENT OF 333
THE ROYAL FAMILY’S IMPRISONMENT
A ROUGH MINIATURE OF THE PRINCESSE DE 337
LAMBALLE Preserved at the Carnavalet
SANSON’S LETTER ASKING THE AUTHORITIES 343
WHAT STEPS HE IS TO TAKE FOR THE
EXECUTION OF THE KING
AUTOGRAPH DEMAND OF LOUIS XVI. FOR A 344
RESPITE OF THREE DAYS
REPORT OF THE COMMISSIONERS THAT ALL IS 346
DULY ARRANGED FOR THE BURIAL OF LOUIS
CAPET AFTER HIS EXECUTION
FIRST PAGE OF LOUIS XVI.’S WILL 348
ORDER OF THE COMMITTEE OF PUBLIC SAFETY 356
IN CAMBON’S HANDWRITING, DIRECTING THE
DAUPHIN TO BE SEPARATED FROM HIS
MOTHER
LAST PORTRAIT OF MARIE ANTOINETTE, BY 365
KOCHARSKI Presumably sketched in the
Temple, and now at Versailles
GATEWAY OF THE LAW COURTS THROUGH WHICH 380
THE QUEEN WENT TO HER DEATH
FIRST PAGE OF MARIE ANTOINETTE’S LAST 395
LETTER
FACSIMILE OF THE DEATH-WARRANT OF MARIE 398
ANTOINETTE
------------------------------------------------------------------------
LIST OF MAPS AND PLANS
MAP OF THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES AND THE 263
RETURN
SKETCH MAP OF THE ROAD FROM PARIS TO 267
VARENNES, JUNE 21, 1791
SKETCH MAP TO ILLUSTRATE DROUET’S RIDE 278
ELEMENTS OF THE STRATEGIC POSITION, 359
JULY-OCTOBER, 1793
BATTLE OF WATTIGNIES, OCT. 15 AND 16, 377
1793, AND THE RELIEF OF MAUBEUGE
------------------------------------------------------------------------
MARIE ANTOINETTE
CHAPTER I
_THE DIPLOMATIC REVOLUTION_
EUROPE, which carries the fate of the whole world, lives by a life which
is in contrast to that of every other region, because that life, though
intense, is inexhaustible. There is present, therefore, in her united
history a dual function of maintenance and of change such as can be
discovered neither in any one of her component parts nor in
civilisations exterior to her own. Europe alone of all human groups is
capable of transforming herself ceaselessly, not by the copying of
foreign models, but in some creative way from within. She alone has the
gift of moderating all this violent energy, of preserving her ancient
life, and by an instinct whose action is now abrupt, now imperceptibly
slow, of dissolving whatever products of her own energy may not be
normal to her being.
These dual forces are not equally conspicuous: the force that preserves
us is general, popular, slow, silent, and beneath us all; the force that
makes us diversified and full of life shines out in peaks of action.
The agents and the manifestations of the conserving force do not
commonly present themselves as the chief personalities and the most
remarkable events of our long record. The agents and the manifestations
of the force that perpetually transform us are arresting figures, and
catastrophic actions. Those who keep us what we are, for the most part
will never be known—they are millions. Those, on the other hand, who
have brought upon our race its great novelties of mood or of vesture,
the battles they have won, the philosophies they have framed and
imposed, the polities they have called into existence, they and their
works fill history. That power which has forbidden us to perish uses
servants often impersonal or obscure; it is mostly to be discovered at
work in the permanent traditions of the populace, and its effects are
but rarely visible until they appear solid and established by a process
which is rather that of growth than of construction. That power which
keeps the mass moving glitters upon the surface of it and is seen.
There are, nevertheless, in this perennial and hidden task of
maintaining Europe certain exceptional events of which the date is
clear, the result immediate, and the authors conspicuous. Of early
examples the victory of Constantine in the fourth century, the defeat of
Abdul Rhaman in the eighth, may be cited. Among the lesser ones of later
times is a decision which was taken in the middle of the eighteenth
century by the French and Austrian Governments, and to which historians
have given the name of the _Diplomatic Revolution_.
To comprehend or even to follow the career of Marie Antoinette it is
essential to seize the nature and the gravity of that rearrangement of
national forces, for it determined all her life. To the great alliance
between France and Austria by which such a rearrangement was effected
she owed every episode of her drama. Her marriage, her eminence, her
sufferings, and her death were each directly the consequence of that
compact: its conclusion coincided with her birth; from childhood she was
dedicated to it as a pledge, a bond, and, at last, a victim. Though,
therefore, that treaty can occupy but little place in pages which deal
with her vivid life—a life lived after the signing of the document and
after its most noisy consequences had disappeared—yet the instrument
must be grasped at the outset and must remain permanently in the mind of
all who would understand the Queen of France and her disaster; for it
was her mother who made the alliance; the statesman who presided over
all her fortunes planned and achieved it. It stands throughout her forty
years like a fixed horoscope drawn at birth, or a sentence pronounced
and sure to be fulfilled.
The Diplomatic Revolution of the eighteenth century sprang, like every
other major thing in modern history, from the religious schism of the
sixteenth.
If that vast disturbance of the Reformation which threatened so
grievously the culture of Europe, which maimed for ever the life of the
Renaissance, and which is only now beginning to subside, had broken the
national tradition of Gaul as it did that of Britain, it may confidently
be asserted that European civilisation would have perished. There was
not left on the shores of the Mediterranean a sufficient reserve of
energy to re-indoctrinate the West. A welter of small States hopelessly
separated by the violence and self-sufficience of the new philosophy
would each have gone down the roads an individual goes when he forgets
or learns to despise traditional rules of living and the corporate sense
of mankind. That interaction which is the life of Europe would have
disappeared. A short period of intense local activities would have been
followed by a general repose. The unity of the Western world would have
failed, and the spirit of Rome would have vanished as utterly from her
deserted provinces as has that of Assyria from hers.
If, on the other hand, the French had chosen the earliest moment of the
Reformation to lead the popular instinct of Europe against the Reformers
and to re-establish unity, if as early as the reign of Francis I. (who
saw the peril) they had imagined a species of crusade, why, then, the
schism would have been healed by the sword, the humanity of the
Renaissance would have become a permanent influence in our lives rather
than an heroic episode whose vigour we regret but cannot hope to
restore, and the discovery of antiquity, the thorough awakening of the
mind, would have impelled Europe towards new and glorious fortunes the
nature of which we cannot even conjecture, so differently did the course
of history turn. For it so happened that the French—whose temperament,
whose unbroken Roman legend, and whose geographical position made them
the decisive centre of the struggle—the French hesitated for two hundred
years.
Their religion indeed they preserved. The attempt to force upon the
French doctrines convenient, in France as in England, to the wealthy
merchants, the intellectuals and the squires, was met by popular
risings; those of the French, as they were the more sanguinary so were
also the more successful. The first massacre of St. Bartholomew, when
the Catholic leaders were killed in the south, was not forgotten by the
north; and after the second massacre of St. Bartholomew in Paris had
avenged it, the Reformation could never establish in France that
oligarchic polity which it ultimately imposed upon England and Holland.
In a word, the Catholic reaction in France was sufficiently violent to
recover the tradition of the State; but the full consequences of that
reaction did not follow, nor did France support the general Catholic
instinct of Europe outside the French boundaries, because, allied with
the Faith to which the nation was so profoundly attached and had barely
preserved, was the political power of the _Spanish-Austrian Empire_,
which the French nation and its leaders detested and feared.
It is difficult for us to-day to comprehend the might of Spain during
the century of the Reformation, and still more difficult to grasp that
external appearance of overwhelming strength which, as the years
proceeded, tended more and more to exceed her actual (and declining)
power.
The supremacy of Spain over Europe resided in a dynasty and not in a
national idea. It did not take the form of over-riding treaties or of
attempting the partition of weaker States, for it was profoundly
Christian, and it was military; in twenty ways the position of Spain
differed from the hegemony which some modern European State might
attempt to exercise over its fellows. But it is possible to arrive at
some conception of what that Empire was if we remember that it reposed
upon a vast colonial system which Spain alone seemed capable of
conducting with success, that it monopolised the production of gold, and
that it depended upon a command of the sea which was secured to it by an
invincible fleet. To such advantages there must further be added an
armed force not only by far the largest and best trained in Europe, but
mainly composed of the best fighters as well, and—a circumstance more
important than all the rest—an extent of dominion, due to the union of
the Austrian and Spanish houses, which gave to Charles V. and his
successors the whole background, as it were, upon which the map of
Europe was painted: in the sea of that Emperor’s continental
possessions, apart from a few insignificant principalities, France alone
survived—an intact island with ragged boundaries, menaced upon every
side. For the Emperor, then master of the Peninsula, of the Germanies,
and of the New World, was everywhere by sea and almost everywhere by
land a pressing foe.
However much this Spanish-Austrian power might stand (as it did stand)
for European traditions and for the Faith of civilisation which France
had elected to preserve, it was impossible for the French crown and
nation not to be opposed to its political power if that crown and that
nation were to survive. The smaller nations of the North—the English,
the Low Countries, &c.—were in less peril than the French; for these
were now the only considerable exception to, and were soon to be the
rivals of, the Spanish-Austrian State. Had the Armada found fair
weather, Philip might have been crowned at Westminster; but the
English—united, isolated, and already organised as a commercial
oligarchy—would have fought their way out from foreign domination as
thoroughly as did the Dutch. The duty of the French was other; their
independence was not threatened: it was rather their dignity and special
soul which were in peril and which had to be preserved from digestion
into this all-surrounding influence of Spain. To preserve her soul,
France gave—unconsciously, perhaps, as a people, but with acute
consciousness as a government—her whole energies during four
generations. The defence succeeded. Through a dozen such civil tumults
as are native to the French blood, and through a long eclipse of their
national power, they treasured and built up their reserves. After a
century of peril they emerged, under Louis XIV., not only the masters,
but for a moment the very tyrants of Europe.
The French did not achieve this object of theirs without a compromise
odious to their clear spirit. In their secular opposition to the
Spanish-Austrian power, it was the business of their diplomatists to
spare the little Protestant States and to use them as a pack for the
worrying of great Austria, whom they dreaded and would break down. The
constant policy of Henri IV., of Richelieu, of Mazarin, was to
strengthen the Protestant principalities of North Germany, to meet
half-way the rising Puritanism of England, and even at home to tolerate
an organised opulent and numerous body of Huguenots who formed a State
within the State. At a time when it was death to say Mass in England,
the wealthy Calvinist just beyond the Channel—at Dieppe, for
instance—was protected with all the force of the law from the fanaticism
or indignation of his fellow-citizens; he could convene his synods
openly, could hold office at law or in municipal affairs, and was even
granted a special form of representation and a place in the advisory
bodies of the State. All this was done, not to secure internal
order—which would perhaps have been better affirmed in France, as it was
in England, by the vigorous persecution of the minority—but to create a
Protestant make-weight to what appeared till nearly the close of the
seventeenth century the overwhelming menace of the Spanish and Austrian
Houses.
Such was the policy which the French Court wisely pursued during so long
a period that it finally acquired the force of a fixed tradition and
threatened to last on into an era of new conditions, when it would prove
useless or, later, harmful to the State. The general framework of that
Anti-Austrian diplomacy did indeed survive from the latter seventeenth
till the middle of the eighteenth century; but from the time when Louis
XIV. in 1661 began to rule alone, to that final rearrangement of
European forces in the Diplomatic Revolution, which it is my business to
describe, the Catholic powers tended more and more to be conscious of a
common fate and of a common duty. One after another the portions of the
old French diplomatic work fell to pieces as the strength of Spain
diminished and as the small Protestant States advanced in their cycle of
rapid commercial expansion, increasing population and military power;
until, a generation after Louis XIV.’s death, Protestant Europe as a
whole had formed in line against what was left of Rome.
It would not be germane to my subject were I to enter at any length into
the gradual transformation of Europe between 1668 and 1741. That first
date is that of the treaty which closed the last clear struggle between
France and Spain; the second date is that of the first great battle,
Mollwitz, in which Prussia under Frederick the Great appeared as a
triumphant and equal opponent against the Catholic forces of the Empire.
It is enough to say that during that period the results of the great
struggle were solidified. Europe was now hopelessly, and, as it seemed,
finally riven asunder; and those who proposed to continue, those who
proposed to disperse the stream of European tradition, gravitated into
two camps armed for a struggle which is not even yet decided.
The transition may be expressed as the long life of a man—nay, it may be
exactly expressed in the life of _one_ man, Fleury, for he stood on the
threshold of manhood at its commencement and in sight of death at its
close: what such a long life witnessed, between its eighteenth and its
ninetieth year, was—if the vast confusion of detail be eliminated and
the large result be grasped—the confirmation of the great schism and the
final decision of France to stand wholly against the North. There
appeared at last, fixed and consolidated, a Protestant and a Catholic
division in Europe whose opposing philosophies, seen or unseen, denied,
ridiculed or ignored, even by those most steeped in either atmosphere,
were henceforward to affect inwardly every detail of individual life as
outwardly they were to affect every great event in the history of our
race, and every general judgment which has been passed upon its actions.
The Spanish Power, based as it had been not on internal resources but on
a mere naval and colonial supremacy, could not but rapidly decline; it
had long been separated from the German Empire; it was destined to fall
into the orbit of France. On the other hand, the England of the early
eighteenth century was no longer a small community absorbed in
theological discussion; she had become a nation of the first rank, one
that was developing its industries, its wealth, and its armed strength.
She boasted in Marlborough the chief military genius of the age; she was
already the leader in physics; she was about to be the leader in
mechanical science (with all the riches such a leadership would bring),
and she was upon the eve of acquiring a new colonial empire.
In France the privileges of the Huguenots had been withdrawn as the
situation grew precise and clear, and the breach between them and the
nation was made final by their active and zealous treason in whatever
foreign fleets or armies were attempting the ruin of their country. In
England it had been made plain that the oligarchy, and the nation upon
which it reposed, would admit neither a strong central government nor
the presence of the Catholic Church near any seat of power: the Stuart
dynasty had been exiled; its first attempt at a restoration had been
crushed.
Meanwhile there was preparing a final argument which should compel men
to recognise the clean and fixed division of Europe: that argument was
the astonishing rise of Prussia, for with the appearance upon the field
of this new and strange force—an own child of the Reform—it was evident
that something had changed in the very morals of war.
When Austria was at her weakest, when the French Court, bewildered but
weakly constant to a now meaningless diplomatic habit, was watching the
apparent dissolution of the Empire and was ready to urge its armies
against Vienna, when England remained, and that only from opposition to
the Bourbons, the only support of the Hapsburgs, there was established
within five years the permanent strength of Frederick the Great and the
new factor of Prussian Power: a complete contempt for the old rules of
honour in negotiation and for the old rules of contract in dynastic
relations had been crowned by a complete success.
This advent, when every exception and cross-influence is forgotten, will
remain the chief moral and, therefore, the chief political fact of the
eighteenth century. By the end of the year 1745, Silesia was finally
abandoned by Austria; the Prussian soldier and his atheist theory had
compassed the first mere conquest of European territory which had been
achieved by any European Power since first Europe had been organised
into a family of Christian communities. It had been advanced for the
first time that Europe was not one, but that some unit of it might
overbear and rule another by arms alone; that there was no common
standard nor any unseen avenger upon appeal. That theory had appealed to
arms and had conquered.
Within three years the international turmoil, of which this catastrophe
was immeasurably the greatest result, was subjected to a sort of
settlement. One of those general committees of all Europe with which our
own time is so familiar was summoned to Aix-la-Chapelle; representatives
of the various Powers confirmed or modified the results of a group of
wars, and in the autumn of 1748 affixed their signatures to a complete
arrangement which was well known to be unstable, ephemeral, and
insincere, but which was yet of tremendous import, for it marked (though
in no dramatic manner) the end of an old world.
As the plenipotentiaries left their accomplished work and strolled out
of the room which had received them, they were still grouped together by
such weak and complex ties as the interests of individual governments
might decide. When they met again after the next brief cycle of war,
these men were arranged in a true order and sat opposing: for England,
Prussia, and experiment of schism on the one side; for the belt of
endurance on the other. Since that cleavage these two prime bodies,
disguised under a hundred forms and hidden and confused by a welter of
incidental and secondary forces, have remained opposing, attempting with
fluctuating success each to determine the general fortunes of the world.
They will so continue balanced and opposing until perhaps—by the action
of some power neither of war nor of diplomacy—unity may be
re-established and Europe again may live.
Of the men who so strolled out of the room at Aix one only, still young,
had grasped in silence the necessity of the great change; he saw that
Vienna and Paris must in the next struggle stand together and defend
together their common civilisation and their resisting Faith. He not
only perceived the advent of this great reversal in the traditions of
the chanceries; he designed to aid it himself, to mould it and to
determine its character. That he could then perceive of how large a
movement his action was to be a part no historian can pretend, for at
the time no one could grasp more than the momentary issue, and this
man’s very profession made it necessary for him, as for every other
diplomat, to see clearly immediate things and to abandon distant
speculation. But though his work was greater than himself and far
greater than his intention, yet he deserves a very particular attention;
for this young man of thirty-six was _Kaunitz_, and he, for a whole
generation, was Austria.
In so determining to effect an alliance between the Hapsburgs and their
secular enemy, Kaunitz equally determined, unknown to himself, the whole
fortunes of Marie Antoinette; she, years later, when she came to be born
to the Imperial house, was, even in childhood, the pledge he needed. It
is Kaunitz who stands forever behind the life of Marie Antoinette, like
a writer behind the creature in his book. It is he who designs her
marriage, who uses her without mercy for the purposes of his policy at
Versailles; he is the author of her magnificence and of her intrigue; he
is then also indirectly the author of her fall, which, in his obscure
and failing old age, he heard of far away, partially comprehended, and
just survived.
Kaunitz was the original of our modern diplomatists. In that epoch of
governing families not a few nobles were flattered to be called “the
Coachmen of Europe”: he alone merited the cant term. He served a
sovereign whose armies were constantly defeated; he was the adviser of a
mere crown—and that crown worn by a woman; in a time when the divergent
races of the Danube were first astir, he had at his command or for his
support neither a national tradition nor any strong instrument of war,
yet, by personal genius, by tenacity, and by a wide lucidity of vision,
he discovered and completed a method of “government through foreign
relations” which was almost independent of national feeling or of armed
strength.
An absence of natural violence, as of all common emotions, was
characteristic of Kaunitz. He disdained the vulgar pomp of silence; he
talked continually; he knew the strength and secrecy of men who can be
at once verbose and deliberate. Nor could his fluency have deceived any
careful observer into a suspicion of weakness, for his curved thin nose
and prominent peaked chin, his arched eyebrows, his Sclavonic type,
ready and courageous, his hard, pale eyes, showed nothing but purpose
and execution; and as his tall figure stalked round the billiard tables
at evening, his very recreation seemed instinct with plans.
The abounding energy which drove him to success revealed itself in a
thousand ways, and chiefly in this, that in the career of diplomacy,
where all individuality is regarded with dread, _he_ pushed his personal
tastes beyond the eccentric. Thus he had a mania against all
gesticulation, and he would present at every conference the singular
spectacle of a man chattering and disputing unceasingly and eagerly, yet
keeping his hands quite motionless all the while. Again, when he entered
the great houses of Europe and dined with men to influence whom was to
conduct the world, he did not hesitate to bring with him his own
dessert, which when he had eaten he would, to the great disgust of
embassies, elaborately wash his teeth at table. In the midst of the
hardest toil he was so foppish as to wear various wigs—now brown, now
white, now auburn. He was a constant traveller, familiar with every
capital in Western Europe, yet he so loathed fresh air that he would not
pass from his carriage to a palace door unless his mouth were covered.
He was a dandy who, in drawing-rooms loaded with scent and flowers,
loudly protested against all perfume; a gentleman who, when cards were
the only pastime of the rich, expressed a detestation of all hazard; a
courtier who, amidst all the extravagancies of etiquette of the
eighteenth century, barely bowed to the greatest sovereigns, and who, on
the stroke of eleven, would abruptly leave the Emperor without a word.
Such marks of an intense initiative, detachment, and pride were
tolerated in the earlier part of his life with amusement on account of
the affection he could inspire; later they were regarded with ill ease,
and at last with a sort of awe, when it was known that his intelligence
could entrap no matter what combination of antagonists. This
intelligence, and the single devotion by which such natures are
invariably compelled, were both laid at the feet of Maria Theresa.
He was older than his Empress by some seven years; there lay between
them just that space which makes for equality and comprehension between
a man and a woman. The year of her marriage had coincided with that of
his own; he had come at twenty-five to the court of this young sovereign
of eighteen. She had recognised—with a wisdom that never failed her long
and active life—how just and general was his view of Europe, and it was
from this moment that her interests and her career were entrusted to his
genius. He had already studied in three universities, had refused the
clerical profession to which his Canonry of Munster introduced him, and
had travelled in the Netherlands, in France, in England, and in Italy,
where he was made Aulic Councillor, and enfeoffed, as it were, to the
palace.
His abilities had not long to await their opportunity. It was but four
years after Maria Theresa’s marriage and his own that she succeeded to
the throne and possessions of the Hapsburgs: then it was the sudden
advent of Prussia, to which I have alluded, began the great change.
Maria Theresa’s succession was in doubt, not in point of right, but
because her sex and the condition in which her father had left his army
and his treasury gave an opportunity to the rivals of Austria, and
notably to France.
Europe was thus passing through one of those crises of instability
during which every chancery discounts and yet dreads a universal war,
when the magazine was fired by one who had nothing to lose but honour.
Frederick of Prussia was the warmest in acknowledging the title of Maria
Theresa; he accepted her claims, guaranteed the integrity of her
possessions, and suddenly invaded them.
From the ordering of that march of Frederick’s into Silesia—from the
close, that is, of the year 1740—Kaunitz, a man not yet in his thirtieth
year, was at work to repair the Empire and to restore the equilibrium of
Europe. Upon the whole he succeeded; for though the magnitude of the
Revolutionary Wars has dwarfed his period, and though the complete
modern transformation of society has made such causes seem remote, yet
(as it is the thesis of these pages to maintain) Kaunitz unconsciously
preserved the unity of Europe.
In the beginning of the struggle he had already saved the interests of
Maria Theresa in the petty Italian courts. At Florence, at Rome, at
Turin, at Brussels, his mastery continued to increase. In his
thirty-sixth year he was ambassador to London—he concluded, as we have
seen, the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle; by his fortieth he had been
appointed to Paris, and that action by which he will chiefly be
remembered had begun. He had seen, as I have said, the necessity for an
alliance between the two great Catholic Powers. Within the two years of
his residence in Paris he had successfully raised the principle of such
a revolution in policy and as successfully maintained its secrecy. A
task which would have seemed wholly vain had he communicated it to
others, one which would have seemed impossible even to those whom he
might have convinced, was achieved. To his lucid and tenacious intellect
the matter in hand was but the bringing forth of a tendency already in
existence; he saw the Austro-French alliance lying potentially in the
circumstances of his time; his business was but to define and realise
it.
In such a mood did he take up the Austrian Embassy in Paris. He was well
fitted for the work he had conceived. The magnificence which he
displayed in his palace in the French capital was calculated indeed to
impress rather than to attract the formal court of Versailles; that
magnificence was the product of his personal tastes rather than of his
power of intrigue, but the details of his over-ostentatious household
were well suited to those whom he had designed to capture. The French
language was his own; Italian, though he spoke it well, was foreign to
him; the German dialects he knew but ill and hardly used at all. His
habits were French, to the end of his long life French literature was
his only reading, and his clothes, to their least part, must come from
the hands of the French.
[Illustration:
MARIA THERESA
FROM THE TAPESTRY PORTRAIT WOVEN FOR MARIE ANTOINETTE AND RECENTLY
RESTORED
TO VERSAILLES
]
He moved, therefore, in that world of Paris and Versailles (as did,
later, his pupil, Mercy-d’Argenteau) rather as a native than a
foreigner. Even if the alliance had been as artificial as it was
natural, he would have carried his point. As it was, he left Paris in
1753 to assume the Prime Ministry at Vienna with the certitude that,
when next Frederick of Prussia had occasion to break his word, the
wealth and the arms of the Bourbons would be ranged upon the Austrian
side.
Upon that major pivot all the schemes of Vienna must turn at his
dictation. Every marriage must be contrived so as to fall in with the
projected alliance; every action must be subordinated to the arrangement
which would prove, as he trusted, the supreme hope of the dynasty. To
this one project he directed every power within him or beneath his hand,
and to this he was ready, when the time should come, to sacrifice the
fortunes of any member of the Royal House save its sovereign or its
heir. To this aspect of Europe, long before the termination of his
mission in Paris, he had not so much persuaded as formed the mind of
Maria Theresa.
The great and salutary soul of that woman explains in part what were to
be the fortunes of her youngest child. Not that Marie Antoinette
inherited either the opportunities or the full excellence of her mother,
but that there ran through the impatient energy and unfruitful
graciousness of the Queen of France a flavour of that which had lent a
disciplined power and a conscious dignity to the middle age of Maria
Theresa.
The body of the Empress was strong. Its strength enabled her to bear
without fatigue the ceaseless work of her office, and in the midst of
child-bearing to direct with exactitude the affairs of a troubled State.
That strength of hers was evident in her equal temper, her rapid
judgment, her fixed choice of men; it was evident also in her firm tread
and in her carriage, and even as she sat upon a chair at evening she
seemed to be governing from a throne.
A growing but uniform capacity informed her life. She had known the
value not only of industry but also of enthusiasm, and had saved her
throne in its greatest peril by her sudden and passionate appeal to the
Hungarians. It was this instinctive science of hers that had disarmed
Kaunitz. If he allowed her to suggest what he had already determined, if
he permitted her to be the first to write down the scheme of the
Diplomatic Revolution he had conceived, and to send it down to history
as her creation rather than his own, it was not the desire to flatter
her that moved him but a recognition of her due. She it was that sent
him to Paris and she that superintended the weaving of the loom he had
arranged.
Her dark and pleasing eyes, sparkling and strong, controlled him in so
far as he was controlled by any outer influence, for he recognised in
them the Cæsarian spirit.
Her largeness pleased him. When she played at cards, she played for
fortunes; when she rode, she rode with magnificence; when she sang, her
voice, though high, was loud, untrammelled, and full; when she drove
abroad, it was with splendour and at a noble turn of speed.
All this was greatly to the humour of Kaunitz, and he continued to serve
his Empress with a zeal he would never have given to a mere ambition. In
deference to her, all that he could control of his idiosyncrasies he
controlled. His great bull-dog, which followed him to every other door,
was kept from her palace. His abrupt speech, his failure to reply, his
sudden and brief commands—all his manner—were modified in consultation
with his Queen. She, on her part, knew what were the limits to which so
singular a nature could proceed in the matter of self-denial. She
respected half his follies, and her servants often saw her from the
courtyard shutting the windows, smiling, as he ran from his carriage,
his mouth covered to screen it from the outer air. Her common sense and
poise forgave in _him_ alone extravagances she had little inclination to
support in others. He respected in _her_ those depths of emotion, of
simplicity, and of faith which in others he would have regarded as
imbecilities ready for his high intelligence to use at will.
It was neither incomprehensible to him nor displeasing that her temper
should be warmer than his intelligence demanded. The increasing strength
of her religion, the personal affections and personal distastes which
she conceived, above all, the closeness of her devotion to her husband,
completed, in the eyes of Kaunitz, a character whose dominions and
dynasty he chose to serve and to confirm; for he perceived that what
others imagined to be impediments to her policy were but the reflection
of her sex and of her health therein.
Kaunitz saw in Frederick of Prussia a player of worthy skill. It was
upon the death of that soldier that he gave vent to the one emotional
display of his life; yet he permitted Maria Theresa to hate her rival
with a hatred which was not directed against his campaigning so much as
against the narrow intrigue and bitterness of his evil mind.
To Kaunitz, again, Catherine of Russia was nothing but a powerful rival
or ally; yet he approved that Maria Theresa should speak of her as one
speaks of the women of the streets, despising her not for her ambition
but for her licence.
To Kaunitz, Francis of Lorraine, the husband of the Empress, was a thing
without weight in the international game; yet he saw with a general
understanding, and was glad to see in detail, the security of the
imperial marriage.
The singular happiness of Maria Theresa’s wedded life was due to no
greatness in Francis of Lorraine, but to his vivacity and good breeding,
to his courtesy, to his refinement, and especially to his devotion. It
suited her that he should ride and shoot so well. She loved the
restrained intonation of his voice and the frankness of his face. She
easily forgave his numerous and passing infidelities. The simplicity of
his religion was her own, for her goodness was all German as his
sincerity was all Western and French; upon these two facets the opposing
races touch when the common faith introduces the one to the other. Their
household, therefore, was something familiar and domestic. Its language
was French, of a sort, because French was the language of Francis; but
while he brought the clarity of Lorraine under that good roof, which
covered what Goethe called “the chief bourgeois family of Germany,” he
brought to it none of the French hardness and precision, nor any of that
cold French parade which was later to exasperate his daughter when she
reigned at Versailles. He was a man who delighted in visits to his
country-side, and who would have his carriage in town wait its turn with
others at the opera doors.
Maria Theresa was so wedded, served by such a Minister, in possession of
and in authority over such a household during those seven years between
the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle and the French Alliance, between 1748 and
1755. These seven years were years of patience and of diplomacy, which
were used to retrieve the disasters of her first bewildered struggle
against Prussia and the new forces of Europe. They were the seven years
of profound, if precarious, international peace, when England was
preparing her maritime supremacy, Prussia her full military tradition,
the French monarchy, in the person of Louis XV., its rapid dissolution
through excess and through fatigue. They were the seven years which
seemed to the superficial but acute observation of Voltaire to be the
happiest of his age: a brief “Antonine” repose in which the arts
flourish and ideas might flower and even grow to seeding. They were the
seven years in which the voice of Rousseau began to be heard and in
which was written the _Essay upon Human Inequality_.
For the purposes of this story they were in particular the seven years
during which Kaunitz, now widowed, working first as ambassador in Paris,
then as Prime Minister by the side of Maria Theresa at Vienna, achieved
that compact with the Bourbons which was to restore the general
traditions of the Continent and the fortunes of the House of Hapsburg.
The period drew to a close: the plans for the alliance were laid, the
last discussions were about to be engaged, when it was known, in the
early summer of 1755, that the Empress was again with child.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER II
_BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD_
_2nd November 1755 to the Autumn of 1768_
ALL that summer of 1755 the intrigue—and its success—proceeded.
I have said that the design of Kaunitz was not so much to impose upon
his time a new plan as to further a climax to which that time was
tending. Accidents in Europe, in America, and upon the high seas
conspired to mature the alliance.
Fighting broke out between the French and English outposts in the
backwoods of the colonies. Two French ships had been engaged in a fog
off the banks and captured; later, a sharp panic had led the Cabinet in
London to order a general Act of Piracy throughout the Atlantic against
French commerce. It was a wild stroke, but it proved the first success
of what was to become the one fundamentally successful war in the annals
of Great Britain.
In Versailles an isolated and mournful man, fatigued and silent, who was
in the last resort the governing power of France, delayed and delayed
the inevitable struggle between his forces and the rising power of
England. Louis XV. looked upon the world with an eye too experienced and
too careless to consider honour. His clear and informed intelligence
would contemplate—though it could not remedy—the effects of his own
decline and of his failing will. He felt about him in the society he
ruled, and within himself also, something moribund. France at this
moment gave the impression of a great palace, old and in part ruined.
That impression of France had seized not only upon her own central
power, but upon foreign observers as well; the English squires had
received it, and the new Prussian soldiers. In Vienna it was proposed to
use the declining French monarchy as a great prop, and in using it to
strengthen and to revivify the Austrian Empire until the older order of
Europe should be restored. Louis XV., sitting apart and watching the
dissolution of the national vigour and of his own, put aside the
approach of arms with such a gesture as might use a man of breeding whom
in some illness violence had disturbed. Thus as late as August, when his
sailors had captured an English ship of the line, he ordered its
release. The war was well ablaze, and yet he would consent to no formal
declaration of it: Austria watched his necessities.
It was in September that Maria Theresa sent word to her ambassador in
Paris—the old and grumbling but pliant Stahremberg—that the match might
be set to the train: in a little house under the terrace at Bellevue, a
house from whose windows all Paris may be seen far away below, the
secret work went on.
It has been asserted that the Empress in her anxiety wrote to the
Pompadour and attempted, by descending to so direct a flattery of Louis
XV.’s mistress, to hasten that King’s adhesion to her design. The
accusation is false, and the document upon which it is based a forgery;
but the Austrian ambassador was Maria Theresa’s mouthpiece with that
kindly, quiet, and all-powerful woman. It was she who met him day after
day in the little house, and when she retired to give place to the
Cardinal de Bernis, that Minister found the alliance already fully
planned between Stahremberg and the Pompadour. Louis XV. alone was still
reluctant. Great change, great action of any sort was harsh to him. He
would not believe the growing rumour that Frederick of Prussia was about
to desert his alliance and to throw his forces on to the side of the
English Power. Louis XV. attempted, not without a sad and patient skill,
to obtain equilibrium rather than defence. He would consider an
arrangement with Vienna only if it might include a peaceful
understanding with Berlin.
[Illustration:
MADAME DE POMPADOUR
FROM THE PORTRAIT BY BOUCHER IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY AT EDINBURGH
]
As, during October, these negotiations matured so slowly in France, in
Vienna the Empress awaited through that month the birth of her child.
She jested upon it with a Catholic freedom, laid wagers upon its sex
(and later won them), discussed what sponsors should be bidden, and
decided at last upon the King and Queen of Portugal; to these, in the
last days of October, her messengers brought the request, and it was
gladly accepted in their capital of Lisbon. Under such influences was
the child to be born.
The town of Lisbon had risen, in the first colonial efforts of Portugal,
to a vast importance. True, the Portuguese did not, as others have done,
attach their whole policy to possessions over-sea, nor rely for
existence upon the supremacy of their fleet, but the evils necessarily
attendant upon a scattered commercial empire decayed their military
power, and therefore at last their commerce itself. The capital was no
longer, in the Arab phrase, “_the_ city of the Christians”; it was long
fallen from its place as the chief port of the Atlantic when, in these
last days of October 1755, the messengers of the Empress entered it and
were received; but it was still great, overlooking the superb anchorage
which brought it into being, and presenting to the traveller perhaps
half the population which it had boasted in the height of its
prosperity. It was a site famous for shocks of earthquake, which (by a
coincidence) had visited it since the decline of its ancient power; but
of these no more affair had been made than is common with natural
adventures. Its narrow streets and splendid, if not majestic, churches
still stood uninjured.
The valley upon which stood the commercial centre of Lisbon is formed of
loose clay; the citadel and the portion which to this day recalls the
older city, of limestone; and the line which limits the two systems is a
sharp one. But though the diversity of such a soil lent to these tremors
an added danger, they had passed without serious attention for three or
four generations; they had not affected the architecture of the city nor
marred its history. In this year, 1755, they had already been repeated,
but in so mild a fashion that no heed was taken of them.
By All-Hallow’een the heralds had accomplished their mission, the Court
had retired to the palace of Belem, which overlooks the harbour, and the
suburbs built high beyond that Roman bridge which has bequeathed to its
valley the Moorish name of Alcantara. The city, as the ambassadors of
Maria Theresa and the heralds of her daughter’s birth were leaving it,
was awaiting under the warm and easy sun of autumn the feast of the
morrow.
In the morning of that All Saints, a little after eight, the altars
stood prepared; the populace had thronged into the churches; the streets
also were already noisy with the opening of a holiday; the ships’ crews
were ashore; only the quays were deserted. Everywhere High Mass had
begun. But just at nine—at the hour when the pressure of the crowds,
both within the open doors of the churches and without them, was at its
fullest—the earth shook.... The awful business lasted perhaps ten
seconds. When its crash was over an immense multitude of the populace
and a third of the material city had perished.
The great mass of the survivors ran to the deserted quays, where an open
sky and broad spaces seemed to afford safety from the fall of walls.
They saw the sea withdrawn from the shore of the wide harbour; they saw
next a wave form and rise far out in the land-locked gulf, and
immediately it returned in an advancing heap of water straight and
high—as high and as straight as the houses of the sea front. It moved
with the pace of a gust or of a beam of light towards the shore. The
thousands crammed upon the quays had barely begun their confused rush
for the heights when this thing was upon them; it swirled into the
narrow streets, tearing down the shaken walls and utterly sweeping out
the maimed, the dying, and the dead whom the earthquake had left in the
city. Then, when it had surged up and broken against the higher land, it
dragged back again into the bay, carrying with it the wreck of the town
and leaving, strewn on the mud of its retirement, small marbles, carven
wood, stuffs, fuel, provisions, and everywhere the drowned corpses of
animals and of men. During these moments perhaps twenty, perhaps thirty
thousand were destroyed.
Two hours passed: they were occupied in part by pillage, in part by
stupefaction, to some extent by repression and organisation. But before
noon the accompaniment of such disasters appeared. Fire was discovered,
first in one quarter of the city, then in another, till the whole
threatened to be consumed. The disorder increased. Pombal, an atheist of
rapid and decided thought, dominated the chaos and controlled it. He
held the hesitating Court to the ruins of the city; he organised a
police; as the early evening fell over the rising conflagration he had
gibbets raised at one point after another, and hung upon them scores of
those who had begun to loot the ruins and the dead.
The night was filled with the light and the roar of the flames until, at
the approach of morning, when the fires had partly spent themselves and
the cracked and charred walls yet standing could be seen more clearly in
the dawn, some in that exhausted crowd remembered that it was the Day of
the Dead, and how throughout Catholic Europe the requiems would be
singing and the populace of all the cities but this would be crowding to
the graves of those whom they remembered.
That same day, which in Lisbon overlooked the clouds of smoke still
pouring from broken shells of houses, saw in Vienna, as the black
processions returned from their cemeteries, the birth of the child.
* * * * *
Maria Theresa, whose vigour had been constant through so many trials,
suffered grievously in this last child-bed of hers. She was in her
thirty-seventh year. The anxiety and the plotting of the past months,
the fear of an approaching conflict, had worn her. It was six weeks
before she could hear Mass in her chapel; and meanwhile, in spite of the
official, and especially the popular, rejoicing which followed the birth
of the princess, a sort of hesitation hung over the Court. Francis of
Lorraine was oppressed by premonitions. With that taint of superstition
which his Faith condemned, but which the rich can never wholly escape,
he caused the baby’s horoscope to be drawn. The customary banquet was
foregone. The dreadful news from Lisbon added to the gloom, and
something silent surrounded the palace as the days shortened into
winter.
With the New Year a more usual order was re-established. The life of the
Court had returned; the first fortnight of January passed in open
festivities, beneath the surface of which the steady diplomatic pressure
for the French alliance continued. It reached an unexpectedly rapid
conclusion. Upon the 16th of January the King of Prussia suddenly
admitted to the French ambassador at Berlin that he had broken faith
with Louis and that the Prussian Minister in London had signed a treaty
with England. For a month a desperate attempt continued to prevent the
enormous consequences which must follow the public knowledge of the
betrayal. The aversion of Louis to all new action, his mixture of apathy
and of judgment, led him, through his ambassador, to forget the insult
and to cling to the illusion of peace; but Frederick himself destroyed
that illusion. His calculation had been the calculation of a soldier in
whom the clear appreciation of a strategical moment, the resolution and
courage necessary to use it, and an impotence of the chivalric functions
combined to make such decisions absolute. It was the second
manifestation of that moral perversion which has lent for two hundred
years such nervous energy to Prussia, and of which the occupation of
Silesia was the first, Bismarck’s forgery at Ems the latest—and probably
the final—example: for Europe can always at last expel a poison.
Frederick, I say, was resolved upon war. He met every proposal for
reconciliation with German jests somewhat decadent and expressed in
imperfect French, which was his daily language. By the end of February
1756 the attempt to keep the peace of Europe had failed, and Louis XV.,
driven by circumstances and necessity, had at last accepted the design
of Maria Theresa and of Kaunitz. The treaty would have been signed in
March had not the illness of the French Minister, the Cardinal De
Bernis, intervened; as it was, the signatures were affixed to the
document on the 1st of May. By summer all Europe was in arms. The little
Archduchess, who was later to lay down her life in the chain of
consequence which proceeded from that signing, was six months old.
The first seven years of Marie Antoinette’s life were, therefore, those
of the Seven Years’ War.
As her mind emerged into consciousness, the rumours she heard around
her, magnified by the gossip of the servants to whom she was entrusted,
were rumours of sterile victories and of malignant defeats; in the
recital of either there mingled perpetually the name of the Empire and
the name of Bourbon which she was to bear. She could just walk when the
whole of Cumberland’s army broke down before the French advance and
accepted terms at Kloster-Seven. Her second birthday cake was hardly
eaten before Frederick had neutralised this capitulation by destroying
the French at Rosbach. The year which saw the fall of Quebec and the
French disasters in India was that with which her earliest memories were
associated. She could remember Kunersdorf, the rejoicings and the
confident belief that the Protestant aggression was repelled. Her fifth,
her sixth, her seventh years—the years, that is, during which the first
clear experience of life begins—proved the folly of that confidence; her
eighth was not far advanced when the whole of this noisy business was
concluded by the Peace of Paris and the Treaty of Herbertsburg.
The war appeared indecisive or a failure. The original theft of Silesia
was confirmed to Prussia, the conquest of the French colonies to
England. In their defensive against the menace to which all European
traditions were exposed, the Courts of Vienna and Versailles had
succeeded; in their aggressive, which had the object of destroying that
menace for ever, they had failed. In failing in their aggressive, as a
by-product of that failure, they had permitted the establishment of an
English colonial system which at the time seemed of no great moment, but
which was destined ultimately to estrange this country from the politics
of Europe and to submit it to fantastic changes; to make its population
urban and proletariat, to increase immensely the wealth of its
oligarchy, and gravely to obscure its military ideals. In the success of
their defensive, as by-products of that success, they had achieved two
things equally unexpected: they had preserved for ever the South-German
spirit, and had thus checked in a remote future the organisation of the
whole German race by Prussia and the triumph over it of Prussian
materialism; they had preserved to France an intensive domestic energy
which was shortly to transform the world.
The period of innocence then and of growth, which succeeds a child’s
first approach to the Sacraments, corresponded in the life of Marie
Antoinette with the peace that followed these victories and these
defeats. The space between her seventh and her fourteenth years might
have been filled, in the leisure of the Austrian Court, with every
advantage and every grace. By an accident, not unconnected with her
general fate, she was allowed to run wild.
That her early childhood should have been neglected is easier to
understand. The war occupied all her mother’s energies. She and her
elder sister Caroline were the babies whose elder brother Joseph was
already admitted to affairs of State. It was natural that no great
anxiety upon their education should have been felt in such times. The
child had been put out to nurse with the wife of a small lawyer of
sorts, one Weber, whose son—the foster-brother of the Queen—has left a
pious and inaccurate memorial of her to posterity. Here she first learnt
the German tongue, which was to be her only idiom during her childhood;
here also she first heard her name under the form of “Maria Antonietta,”
a form which was to be preserved until her marriage was planned.
Such neglect, or rather such domesticity, would have done her character
small hurt if it had ceased with her earliest years and with the
conclusion of the peace; it was no better and no worse than that which
the children of all the wealthy enjoy in the company of inferiors until
their education begins. But the little Archduchess, even when she had
reached the age when character forms, was still undisciplined and at
large. There was found for her and Caroline a worthy and easy-going
governess in the Countess of Brandweiss, an amiable and careless woman,
who perhaps could neither teach nor choose teachers and who certainly
did not do so.
All the warmer part of the year the children spent at Schoenbrünn; it
was only in the depth of winter that they visited the capital. But
whether at Court or in the country they were continually remote from the
presence and the strong guidance of Maria Theresa.
The Empress saw them formally once a week; a doctor daily reported upon
their health; for the rest all control was abandoned. The natural German
of Marie Antoinette’s babyhood continued (perhaps in the very accent of
her domestics) to be the medium of her speech in her teens, and—what was
of more importance for the future—not only of her speech but of her
thought also. In womanhood and after a long residence abroad the
mechanical part of this habit was forgotten; its spirit remained. What
she read—if she read anything—we cannot tell. Her music alone was
watched. Her deportment was naturally as graceful as her breeding was
good; but the seeds of no culture were sown in her, nor so much as the
elements of self-control. Her sprightliness was allowed an indulgence in
every whim, especially in a talent for mockery. She acquired, and she
desired to acquire, nothing. No healthy child is fitted by nature for
application and study; upon all such must continuous habits be
enforced—to her they were not so much as suggested. A perpetual
instability became part of her, and unhappily this permanent weakness
was so veiled by an inherited poise and by a happy heart that her
mother, in her rare observations, passed it by. Before Marie Antoinette
was grown a woman that inner instability had come to colour all her
mind; it remained in her till the eve of her disasters.
It is often discovered, when an eager childhood is left too much to its
own ruling, that the mind will, of its own energy, turn to the
cultivation of some one thing. Thus in Versailles the boyhood of the
lonely child, who was later to be her husband, had turned for an
interest to maps and had made them a passion. With her it was not so.
The whole of her active and over-nourished life lacked the ballast of so
much as a hobby. She was precisely of that kind to whom a wide, careful,
and a conventional training is most useful; precisely that training was
denied her.
The disasters and, what was worse, the unfruitfulness of the war had not
daunted Maria Theresa, but her plans were in disarray. The two years
that succeeded the peace produced no definite policy. No step was taken
to confirm the bond with France or to secure the future, when there fell
upon the Empress the blow of her husband’s death; he had fallen under a
sudden stroke at Innsbruck, during the wedding feast of his son, leaving
to her and to his children not only the memory of his peculiar charm,
but also a sort of testament or rule of life which remains a very noble
fragment of Christian piety.
Before he set out he remembered his youngest daughter; he asked
repeatedly for the child and she was brought to him. He embraced her
closely, with some presentiment of evil, and he touched her hair; then
as he rode away among his gentlemen he said, with that clear candour
which inhabits both the blood and the wine of Lorraine, “Gentlemen, God
knows how much I desired to kiss that child!” She had been his
favourite; there was a close affinity between them. She was left to her
mother, therefore, as a pledge and an inheritance, and Maria Theresa,
whose mourning became passionate and remained so, was ready to procure
for this daughter the chief advantages of the world.
The loss of her husband, while it filled her with an enduring sorrow,
also did something to rouse and to inspire the Empress with the force
that comes to such natures when they find themselves suddenly alone. The
little girl upon whom her ambitions were already fixed, the French
alliance which had been, as it were, the greatest part of herself, mixed
in her mind. Maria Theresa had long connected in some vague manner the
confirmation of the alliance with some Bourbon marriage—in what way
precisely or by what plan we cannot tell; her ambassador has credited
her with many plans. It is probable that none were developed when, a few
weeks after the Emperor’s death, there happened something to decide her.
The son of Louis XV., the Dauphin, was taken ill and died before the end
of the year 1765. He left heir to the first throne in Europe his son, a
lanky, silent, nervous lad of eleven, and that lad was heir to a man
nearer sixty than fifty, worn with pleasures of a fastidious kind, and
with the despair that accompanies the satisfaction of the flesh. A great
eagerness was apparent at Versailles to plan at once a future marriage
for this boy and to secure succession. Maria Theresa determined that
this succession should reside in children of her own blood.
Nationality was a conception somewhat foreign to her, and as yet of no
great strength in her mixed and varied dominions. How powerful it had
ever been in France, what a menace it provided for the future of the
French Monarchy, she could not perceive. Of the silent boy himself, the
new heir, she knew only what her ambassador told her, and she cared
little what he might be; but she saw clearly the Bourbons, a family as
the Hapsburgs were a family, a bond in Catholic Europe with this boy the
heir to their headship. She saw Versailles as the pinnacle still of
whatever was regal (and therefore serious) in Europe. She determined to
complete by a marriage the alliance already effected between that Court
and her own.
[Illustration:
THE FIRST DAUPHIN: (THE FATHER OF LOUIS XVI)
]
She knew the material with which she had to deal: Louis XV., clear
sighted, a great gentleman, sensual, almost lethargic, loyal. She had
understood the old nonentity of a Queen keeping her little place apart;
the King’s spinster-daughters struggling against the influence of
mistresses. She understood the power of the Prime Minister Choiseul,
with whose active policy the King had so long allowed his power to be
merged; she knew how and why he was Austrian in policy, and she forgave
him his attack upon the Church. Though Choiseul had not made the
alliance he so used it, and above all so maintained it after the
doubtful peace, that he almost seemed its author, as later he
seemed—though he took so little action—the author of her daughter’s
marriage. She did not grudge the French Minister such honours. She
weighed the historic grandeur of the royal house, and what she believed
to be its certain future. She sketched in her mind, with Kaunitz at her
side, the marriage of the two children as, years before, she had
sketched the alliance.
It was certain that Versailles would yield, because Versailles was a man
who, for all his lucidity and high training, never now stood long to one
effort of the will; but just because Louis XV. had grown into a nature
of that kind, it needed as active, as tenacious, and as subtle a mind as
Maria Theresa’s to bring him to write or to speak. Writing or speaking
in so grave a matter meant direct action and consequence; he feared such
responsibilities as others fear disaster.
It is in the spirit of comedy to see this dignified and ample
woman—perhaps the only worthy sovereign of her sex whom modern Europe
has known—piloting through so critical a pass the long-determined
fortunes of her daughter. There is the mother in all of it. That
daughter had imperilled her life. The child was the last of nine which
she had borne to a husband whose light infidelities she now the more
forgave, whose clear gentility had charmed her life, whose religion was
her own, and in respect to whose memory she was rapidly passing from a
devotion to an adoration. The day was not far distant when she would
brood in the vault beside his grave.
The old man Stahremberg was yielding his place (with some grumbling) to
Mercy. He was still the Austrian ambassador at Paris; but his term was
ending. Maria Theresa would perhaps in other times have spared his
pride, and would not have given him a task upon which he must labour but
which his successor would enjoy; but in the matter of her little
Archduchess she would spare no one. She had hinted her business to
Stahremberg before the Dauphin’s death; the spring had hardly broken
before she was pressing him to conclude it. Up to his very departure her
importunity pursued him. When Mercy was on the point of entering his
office (in the May of 1766), Stahremberg, in the last letter sent to the
Empress from Paris before his return, told her that her ship was
launched. “She might,” he wrote, “accept her project as assured, from
the tone in which the King had spoken of it.”
Maria Theresa had too firm and too smiling and too luminous an
acquaintance with the world to build upon such vague assurance. The
dignity of the French throne was too great a thing to be grasped at.
It must be achieved. When old Mme. Geoffrin passed through Vienna in
that year, Maria Antonietta was kept in the background off the
stage—but France was cultivated. The baby, who was Louis XV.’s
great-grand-daughter, Theresa, Leopold’s daughter, was presented to
that old and wonderful bourgeoise and made much of. They joked about
taking her to France; another baby, after all not much older, only
eight years older, was going to that place in her time.
And, meanwhile, the common arts by which women of birth perfect their
plans for their family were practised in the habitual round. The little
girl’s personality, all gilded and framed, was put in the window of the
Hapsburgs. She was wild perhaps, but so good-hearted! In the cold winter
you heard of (all winters are cold in Vienna) she came up in the
drawing-room, where the family sat together, and begged her mother to
accept of all her savings for the poor—fifty-five ducats.
Little Mozart had come in to play one night; he had slipped upon the
unaccustomed polish of the floor. The little Archduchess, when all
others smiled, had alone pitied and lifted him! Maria Theresa met the
French ambassador and told him in the most indifferent way how her
youngest, when she was asked whom (among so many nations) she would like
to rule, had said, “The French, for they had Henri IV. the Good and
Louis XIV. the Great.” Weary though he was of such conventionalities,
the ambassador was bound by the honour of his place to repeat them.
There still stood, however, in this summer of 1766, between the
Empress’s plan and its fruition a power as feminine, as perspicuous, and
as exact in calculation as her own. The widow of the Dauphin, the mother
of the new heir at Versailles, opposed the match.
She would not retire, as the Queen, her mother-in-law, had done, into
dignity and nothingness, nor would she admit—so tenacious of the past
are crowns—that the Bourbons and the Hapsburgs had all the negotiations
between them. She was of the Saxon House, and though it was but small—a
northern bastion, as it were, of the Catholic Houses—yet she had
inherited the tradition of monarchy, and she might, but for her
husband’s sudden death, have inherited Versailles itself. She was still
young, vigorous, and German. She had determined not only that her son,
the new heir, should marry into her house—should marry his own cousin,
her niece—but that he should marry as she his mother chose, and not as
the Hapsburgs chose. He was at that moment (in 1766) not quite twelve;
the bride whom she would disappoint not quite eleven years old! But her
plan was active and tenacious, her readiness alive, when in the
beginning of the following year, in March 1767, she in her turn died,
and with her death that obstacle to the fate of the little Archduchess
also failed.
With every date, as you mark each, it will be the more apparent that the
barriers which opposed Marie Antoinette’s approach to the French throne
failed each in turn at the climax of its resistance, and that her way to
such eminence and such an end was opened by a number of peculiar
chances, all adjutants of doom.
The House of Hapsburg was never a crowned nationality; it was and is a
crowned family and nothing more. Its states were and are attached to it
by no common bond. There is no such thing as Austria: the Hapsburgs are
the reality of that Empire. The French Bourbons were, upon the contrary,
the chiefs of a nation peculiarly conscious of its unity and jealous of
its past. Their greatness lay only in the greatness of the compact
quadrilateral they governed and of the finished language of their
subjects, and in the achievements of the national temper. Such
conditions favoured to the utmost the scheme of Maria Theresa, not only
in the detail of this marriage, but in all that successful management of
the French alliance which survived her own death and was the chief
business of her reign. _She_ could be direct in every plan, unhampered,
considering only the fortunes of her House; Louis XV. and his Ministers,
as later his grandson, were trammelled by the complexity of a national
life of which they were themselves a part.
Versailles had not declared itself: Vienna pressed. It was in March that
active opposition within the Court had died with the mother of the heir.
Within a month the French ambassador at Vienna wrote home that “the
marriage was in the air”: but the King had not spoken.
In that summer, as though sure of her final success, the Empress threw a
sort of prescience of France and of high fortunes over the nursery at
Schoenbrünn. The amiable Brandweiss disappeared; the severe and
unhealthy Lorchenfeld replaced her.
The French (and baptismal form) of the child’s name, “Antoinette,” was
ordered to be used: still Versailles remained dumb.
In the autumn the parallels of the siege were so far advanced that a
direct assault could be made on poor Dufort, the advanced work of the
Bourbons, their ambassador at Vienna.
Dufort had been told very strictly to keep silent. He suffered a
persecution. Thus he was standing one evening by the card-tables talking
to his Spanish colleague, when the Empress came up and said to this last
boldly: “You see my daughter, sir? I trust her marriage will go well; we
can talk of it the more freely that the French ambassador here does not
open his lips.”
The child’s new governess was next turned on to the embarrassed man to
pester him with the recital of her charge’s virtues. The approaching
marriage of her elder sister Caroline with the Bourbons of Naples was
dangled before Dufort.
The play continued for a year. Louis XV. bade his ambassador get the
girl’s portrait, but “not show himself too eager.” He is reprimanded
even for his courtesies, and all the while Dufort must stand the fire of
the Court of Vienna and its exaggerated deference to him and its
occasional reproaches! Choiseul was anxious to see the business ended.
Dufort was as ready (and as weary) as could have been the Empress
herself, but the slow balance of Louis XV. stood between them all and
their goal.
In the summer of the next year, 1768, the Empress’s eldest son, Joseph,
now associated with her upon the throne, determined to press home and
conclude. It was the first time that this man’s narrow energy pressed
the Bourbons to determine and to act; it was not to be the last. He was
destined so to initiate action in the future upon two critical occasions
and largely to determine the fortunes of his sister’s married life and
final tragedy.
He wrote to Louis XV. a rambling letter, chiefly upon the marriage
of yet another sister with the Duke of Parma. It wandered to the
Bourbon marriage of Caroline; he mentioned his own child, the
great-granddaughter of the King. It was a letter demanding and
attracting a familiar answer. It drew its quarry. Louis, answering
with his own hand and without emphasis, in a manner equally domestic
and familiar, threw in a chance phrase: “... These marriages, your
sister’s with the Infante, _that of the Dauphin_....” In these
casual four words a document had passed and the last obstacle was
removed.
The Empress turned from her major preoccupation to a minor one. This
child of hers was to rule in France; she was now assured of the throne;
she was near her thirteenth birthday—and she had been taught nothing.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER III
_THE ESPOUSALS_
THE fortnightly despatches from France customarily arrived at Vienna
together in one bag and in the charge of one courier. The Empress would
receive at once the letters of Mercy, the official correspondence,
perhaps the note of a friend, and the very rare communications of
royalty. In this same batch which brought that decisive letter of Louis
XV. to her son, on the same day, therefore, in which she was first
secure in her daughter’s future, there also arrived the usual secret
report from Mercy. This document contained a phrase too insignificant to
detain her attention; it mentioned the rumour of a new intrigue: the
King showed attachment to a woman of low origin about him; it was an
attachment that might be permanent. This news was immediately forgotten
by Maria Theresa; it was a detail that passed from her mind. She perhaps
remembered the name, which was “Du Barry.”
* * * * *
The Court of Vienna, permeated (as was then every wealthy society) with
French culture, was yet wholly German in character. The insufficiency
which had marked the training of the imperial children—especially of the
youngest—was easily accepted by those to whom a happy domestic spirit
made up for every other lack in the family. Of those who surrounded the
little Archduchess two alone, perhaps, understood the grave difference
of standard between such education as Maria Antonietta had as yet
received and the conversation of Versailles; but these two were Kaunitz
and Maria Theresa, and short as was the time before them, they did
determine to fit the child, in superficial things at least, for the
world she was to enter and in a few years to govern. They failed.
Mercy, the ambassador, was instructed to find in France a tutor who
should come to Vienna and could accomplish the task. He applied to
Choiseul. Choiseul in turn referred the matter to the best critic of
such things, an expert in the things of this world, the Archbishop of
Toulouse. That prelate, Loménie de Brienne, whose unscrupulous strength
had judged men rightly upon so many occasions and had exactly chosen
them for political tasks, had in this case no personal appetite to
gratify and was free to choose. A post was offered. His first thought
was to obtain it for one who was bound to him, a protégé and a
dependant. He at once recommended a priest for whom he had already
procured the Librarianship of the Mazarin Collection, one Vermond. The
choice was not questioned, and Vermond left to assume functions which he
could hardly fulfil.
There was needed here a man who should have been appalled by the
ignorance he might discover in his charge, who should be little affected
by grandeur, who should be self-willed, assertive, and rapid in method;
one whom the Empress might have ridiculed or even disliked, but whom she
would soon have discovered to be indispensable to her plan. Such a man
would have tackled his business with an appreciation of its magnitude,
would have insisted upon a full control, would have communicated by his
vigour the atmosphere of French thought, careless of the German
shrinking from the rigidity of the French mind. He would have worked
long hours with little Marie Antoinette, he would have filled the days
with his one object, he would have shocked and offended all, his pupil
especially, and in a year he would have left her with a good grounding
in the literature of his country, with an elementary but a clear scheme
of the history and the political forces which she was later to learn in
full, with an enlarged vocabulary, a good accent, and at least the
ability to write clearly and to work a simple sum. His pupil would have
been compelled to application; her impulse would have been permanently
harnessed; she would have learnt for life the value of a plan. Such a
tutor would hardly have desired and would certainly not have acquired a
lasting influence later on at Versailles. His work would have been done
in those critical years of childhood, once and for all. He would
probably have fallen into poverty. In later years he might have appeared
among the revolutionaries, but he would have found, face to face with
the Revolution, a trained Queen who, thanks to him, could have dealt
with circumstance.
In the place of such a man, Vermond arrived.
He was a sober, tall, industrious priest of low birth; his father had
let blood and perhaps pulled teeth for the needy. His reserve and quiet
manners reposed upon a spirit that was incapable of ambition, but
careful to secure ample means and to establish his family and himself in
the secure favour of his employers. He was of middle age, a state into
which he had entered early and in which he was likely long to remain.
His mind within was active and disciplined; its exterior effect was
small. He thought to accomplish his mission if he was but regular in his
reports, laborious in his own study, and, above all, tactful and subtle
in handling the problem before him.
To such a character was presented an exuberant child, growing rapidly,
vivacious, somewhat proud, and hitherto unaccustomed to effort of any
kind, a monkey for mimicry, clever at picking up a tune upon the keys, a
tomboy shouting her German phrases down the corridors of Schoenbrünn, a
fine little lady at Vienna—acting either part well. The light russet of
her hair and her thick eyebrows gave promise of her future energy; she
had already acquired the tricks of rank, the carriage of the head and
the ready mechanical interest in inferiors—for the rest she was empty.
In this critical fourteenth year of hers, during which it was proposed
to fashion out of such happy German childhood a strict and delicate
French princess, she did not read and she could barely write. The big
round letters, as she painfully fashioned them in her occasional
lessons, were those of a baby. Her drawing was infantile; and while she
rapidly learnt a phrase in a foreign language by ear, a complete
revolution in her education would have been needed to make her accurate
in the use of words or to make her understand a Latin sentence or parse
a French one.
To cultivate such a soil, exactly one hour a day was spared when the
Court was at Vienna—somewhat more when it was in the country—and these
few minutes were consumed in nothing more methodical than a dialogue,
little talks in which Vermond was fatally anxious to bring before his
pupil (with her head full of those new French head-dresses of hers, the
prospect of Versailles, and every other distraction of mind) only such
subjects as might amuse her inattention.
The early months of 1769 were full of this inanity, Vermond regularly
reporting progress to the Austrian Embassy in France, regularly
complaining of the difficulty of his task, regularly insisting upon his
rules and as regularly failing in his object. In the autumn the Empress
was at the pains of asking her daughter a few questions, notably upon
history. The result did not dissatisfy her, but meanwhile Maria
Antonietta could hardly write her name.
Side by side with this continued negligence in set training, and in the
discipline that accompanies it, went a very rapid development in manner.
The child was admitted to the Court; she was even permitted the
experiment of presiding at small gatherings of her own. The experiment
succeeded. She acquired with an amazing rapidity what little remained to
be learnt of the externals of rank. The alternate phrases addressed to
one’s neighbours round a table, the affectation of satiety and of
repose, the gait in which the feet are hardly lifted; the few steps
forward to meet a magnate, the fewer to greet a lesser man, and that
smiling immobility before men of the ordinary sort which is still a
living tradition in great drawing-rooms; the power of putting on an air
in the very moment between privacy and a public appearance—all these
came to her so naturally and by so strongly inherited an instinct, that
she not only charmed the genial elders of the Austrian capital but
satisfied experienced courtiers, even those visitors from France, who
examined it all with the eyes of connoisseurs and watched her deportment
as a work of art, whose slight errors in technique they could at once
discover but whose general excellence they were able to appreciate and
willing to proclaim.
She did indeed preserve beneath that conventional surface a fire of
vigorous life that was apparent in every hour. Once in the foreign
atmosphere of France and subject to exasperation and contrast that heat
would burst forth. She became, as her future showed, capable of violent
scenes in public and of the natural gestures of anger—it is to her
honour that she was on the whole so often herself. Here at Vienna in
this last year her young energy did no more than lend spirit and grace
to the conventions she so quickly acquired.
The opening of the year 1770 found her thus, her German half forgotten,
her French (though imperfect) habitual, her acquaintance with the air of
a Court considerable. Though she was still growing rapidly she was now
dressed as a woman and taught to walk on her high heels as did the
ladies her seniors. Her hair was brushed off her high forehead in the
French manner, the stuff of her frocks and the cut of them were French,
her name was now permanently Frenchified for her, and she heard herself
called everywhere “Marie Antoinette”; none but old servants were left to
give her the names she had first known.
March passed and the moment of her departure approached. The child had
never travelled. To her vivacious and eager temper the prospect of so
great a journey with so splendid an ending was an absorbing pleasure. It
filled her mind even during the retreat which, under Vermond’s guidance,
she entered during Holy Week, and every sign of her approaching progress
excited in her a vivid curiosity and expectation, as it did in her
mother a mixture of foreboding and of pride.
The official comedy which the Court played during April heightened the
charm: the heralds, the receptions, that quaint but gorgeous ceremony of
renunciation, the mock marriage, the white silver braid and the white
satin of her wedding-clothes, the salvoes of artillery and the feasts
were all a fine great play for her, with but one interlude of boredom,
when her mother dictated, and she wrote (heaven knows with what a
careful guidance of the pen) a letter which she was to deliver to the
King of France. With that letter Maria Theresa enclosed a note of her
own, familiar, almost domestic, imploring Louis XV., her contemporary,
to see to the child as “one that had a good heart,” ... but was ardent
and a trifle wild.
These words were written upon the 20th of the month; on the morning of
the 21st of April 1770 the line of coaches left the palace, and the
Archduchess took the western road.
There was no sudden severance. Her eldest brother, Joseph, he who was
associated with her mother in the Empire, accompanied her during the
whole of the first day. Of an active, narrow, and formal intelligence,
grossly self-sufficient, arithmetical in temper, and with a sort of
native atheism in him such as stagnates in minds whose development is
early arrested, a philosopher therefore and a prig, earnest, lean, and
an early riser, he was of all companions the one who could most easily
help Marie Antoinette to forget Vienna and to desire Versailles. The
long hours of the drive were filled with platitudes and admonitions that
must easily have extinguished all her regrets for his Court and have
bred in her a natural impatience for the new horizons that were before
her. He left her at Melk. She continued her way with her household,
hearing for the last time upon every side the German tongue, not knowing
that she heard also, for the last time, the accents of sincere affection
and sincere servility: the French temper with its concealed edges of
sharpness was to find her soon enough.
Her journey was not slow for the times. She took but little more than a
week to reach the Rhine from Augsburg—a French army on the march has
done no better. It was on the evening of the 6th of May that she could
see, far off against the sunset, the astonishing spire of Strasburg and
was prepared to enter France; only the Rhine was now between her and her
new life.
She bore upon her person during this last night on German soil a last
letter of her mother’s which had reached her but the day before
yesterday. It was the most intimate and the most searching she was to
receive in all the long correspondence which was to pass between them
for ten years, and it contained a phrase which the child could hardly
understand, but which, if texts and single phrases were of the least
advantage to conduct, might have deflected her history and that of
Europe. “_The one felicity of this world is a happy marriage: I can say
so with knowledge; and the whole hangs upon the woman, that she should
be willing, gentle, and able to amuse._”
Next day at noon she crossed in great pomp to an island in mid-river,
where a temporary building of wood had been raised upon the exact
frontier for the ceremony of her livery.
It is possible that the long ritual of her position—she was to endure it
for twenty years—was already a burden upon her versatility, even after
these short weeks. Here, on this island, the true extent of the French
parade first met her. It was sufficient to teach her what etiquette was
to mean. The poor child had to take off every stitch of her clothes and
to dress, to a ribbon or a hair-pin, with an order strictly ordained and
in things all brought from Versailles for the occasion. Once so dressed
she was conducted to a central room where her German household gave her
to her French one, at the head of which the kindly and sometimes foolish
Countess de Noailles performed the accustomed rites, and the Archduchess
entered for ever the million formalities of her new world. They had not
yet fatigued her. She was taken to Mass at the Cathedral; she received
the courtesy of the old bishop, a Rohan, in whose great family Strasburg
was almost an appanage.
There was a figure standing by the Bishop’s side. She saw, clothed in
that mature majesty which a man of thirty may have for a child of
fifteen, the bishop’s coadjutor, a nephew and a Rohan too. She noted his
pomposity and perhaps his good looks, but he meant nothing to her; he
was but one of the Rohans to be remembered. He noted her well.
Next day and for six more her journey proceeded amid perpetual
deputations, Latin, flowers, bad verses, stage peasantry, fireworks,
feasts and addresses, until, a week after she had crossed the Rhine, she
slept at Soissons and knew that on the morrow she would see the King.
The pavement of the long road out from Soissons, the great royal road,
had sounded under the wheels of her carriage for now the best part of
the day. She had already found Choiseul awaiting her in state, and had
exchanged with this old friend of her mother’s those ceremonial
compliments of which the child was now well weary, when, through the
left-hand window of her coach, which was open to the warm spring day,
she saw before her a thing of greater interest—the league-long line of
trees that ends abruptly against the bare plain and marks the forest of
Compiègne.
Into this wood the road plunged, straight and grand, until after a
declivity, where a little stream is crossed (near the place where the
railway lines join to-day), there appeared awaiting her, as Choiseul had
awaited her some miles before, a great and orderly group of people, of
carriages, and horses; but this company was far larger and was ranked
with more solemnity than others that had met her upon her progress. She
knew that it was the King.
The splendour which a history full of trumpets had lent to the French
name, the lineage of the Kings, the imagined glories of Versailles—all
these had penetrated the nursery and the schoolroom of the Princess. As
she came down from her carriage, with either hand reposing in the hands
of her escort, an awe of the Capetian monarchy came upon her, and she
knelt upon the roadway in the midst of the Court, of the Princesses who
now first saw the little heiress of their lives, of the gilded carriages
and the men-at-arms.
The King raised her up and kissed her forehead; he motioned forward a
heavy, shambling, frowning boy, his grandson, for whom all this pomp
existed. The lad shuffled forward, bent a little perhaps, and kissed her
in his turn with due ceremony—for he was to be her husband. When this
little ritual and its sharp emotions were over she had a moment, before
her introductions to the Blood, to the King’s mature daughters, to the
Orleans and the rest, in which to seize with that bright glance, which
was always so ready for exterior things, the manner of the King.
Louis XV. was at that moment a man just past his sixtieth year. Long
habit had given him, as it gives to all but the greatest of those
educated to power, an attitude constrained though erect. His age had
told on him, he had grown somewhat fat, he moved without alertness and—a
weakness which had appeared but lately—his rare and uncompleted gestures
expressed the weight of his body; but his muscles were firm, his command
of them perfect, and he still had, especially in repose, so far as age
can have it, grace.
The united pallor of his complexion, which had been remarkable in youth,
seemed now more consonant to his years. The steady indifference to which
he had reduced his features was now more dignified than when its
rigidity had seemed unnatural and new. His expression had even acquired
a certain strength from the immobility and firmness of his mouth, whose
lines displayed a talent for exact language and a capacity for continued
dignity; but his eyes betrayed him.
They were warm in spite of a habit of command, but the sadness in them
(which was profound and permanent) was of a sort which sprang from
physical appetites always excessive and now surviving abnormally beyond
their time. There was also in those eyes the memory of considerable but
uprooted affections, and, deeper, of a fixed despair, and deeper far—a
veil as it were behind their brightness—the mortal tedium, to escape
from which this human soul had sacrificed the national traditions and
the ancient honour of the crown.
This great Monarch, whom no one since his boyhood had approached without
a certain fear, received his grandson’s betrothed with an air almost
paternal. It was a relaxation upon his part to which he owed, during the
remainder of his life, the strongly affectionate respect which Marie
Antoinette, vivacious and ungoverned, paid to him alone in the palace.
He presented the rest in turn. She heard names which were to mix so
intimately with her own destiny, and when they set out again upon the
road she could discreetly watch during the long ten miles to Compiègne,
Chartres who would soon be Orleans, the faded faces of the King’s
spinster-daughters, the old Duke of Ponthièvre; and she watched with a
greater care that daughter of his whose foolish, dainty, and sentimental
face, insecure upon its long thin neck, was that of a young, unhappy
widow: the Princesse de Lamballe.
When they had slept at Compiègne in state, the whole pageant moved on
next morning down the Paris road upon the last day’s march of that
journey, and the child thought that she was now upon the threshold of
nothing but an easy glory. She was nearing—amid great mobs and a whole
populace come out to greet her, not only Paris and Versailles, but much
more—she was nearing that woman whose name her mother had heard and half
forgotten, whose name she herself had never heard. It was a name whose
influence was to deflect the first current of her life: the name of Du
Barry.
* * * * *
There is but one instrument efficacious to the government of men, which
is Persuasion, and Persuasion sickens when its agent fails in dignity.
Dignity is the exterior one of the many qualities necessary to
commandment; these in some cases touch closely upon virtue, so that, in
some situations of authority, a dignified man is presumably a good one.
But in the particular case of national government it is not so. The
audience is so vast, the actor so distant and removed, that in this
matter dignity resides mainly in the observance of whatever ritual the
national temper and the national form of the executive demand. Such
functions of ritual endanger rather than strengthen the soul of him who
is called upon to assume them. To his intimates they appear as
mummeries. It is often a sign of personal excellence in a ruler when he
is himself disgusted with them and even casts them aside; but they are
necessary to the State. For if such ritual is ill-observed, dignity
fails; in its failure persuasion, I say, sickens, and when persuasion
sickens, government, upon which depends the cohesion of a nation and the
co-ordination of its faculties, breaks down.
The method of government in France at this time was a true personal
monarchy.
The institution had increased in consciousness and in executive power
down the long avenue of fourteen hundred years. Its roots were in Rome.
It stood up in the seventh century as a memory of the Roman Peace, in
the eighth as a promise to restore the Roman order. From the ninth
onwards it was vested in a Gaulish family and already had begun to
express the Gaulish unities; by the thirteenth its mission was ardent
and victorious. When the religious wars of the sixteenth century were
resolved in a national settlement and the Bourbon branch was finally
acknowledged, the crown was supreme and the whole people held to and
were summed up in the Monarchy. It had made a yeoman of the serf, it had
welded the nation together, it had established the frontiers, it had
repressed the treason of the wealthy Huguenots: it was France.
The person of the Monarch was public and publicly worshipped. His spoken
words were actually law: he could impose a peace; his private decision
could suspend a debt, imprison a transgressor, ruin or create an
industry. Into such a mould had the French energy forced the executive
when the genius of Richelieu and the cunning of Mazarin confirmed the
powers of the throne, and left them in legacy to the virile sense of
Louis XIV.
This King was very great and cast accurately also to the part he should
fill. The conventions and the trappings of the part delighted him; he
played it royally, and when he died, though he left the crown to an
infant great-grandson, yet its security seemed as permanent as does
to-day the security in similar powers of our English rich. But that
great-grandson, at first gradually and at last rapidly, undermined the
stable seat he had inherited. Louis XV., by his good qualities as well
as by his evil, tended more and more to reject the ritual necessary to
his kingship. His good breeding and his active physical appetites, his
idleness and his sincerity, all combined to weary him of the game, so
that at the end of his long reign he had almost ceased in the eyes of
the populace to be a King at all.
The Monarchy therefore perished, and mainly through Louis XV.’s
incapacity to maintain its essential livery. Its collapse, its
replacement (with consequences enormous to the whole of Europe) by that
other French formula which we call “The Revolution” or “The Republic,”
was so exactly contemporaneous with Marie Antoinette’s marriage and with
her presence at Versailles, that far too great a part in the catastrophe
is assigned to her own misjudgments and misfortunes. No error or
disaster of hers gave the death shock to the institution with which her
life was mingled; that stroke had been delivered before the child
crossed the Rhine, and the moment when the blow was struck was that in
which Mercy had penned the name “Du Barry,” which Maria Theresa had read
so carelessly in Vienna on the same day that brought the letter sealing
her daughter’s marriage.
The public appearance of Madame Du Barry was the turning-point in the
history of Versailles, and the little Archduchess, when she came upon
French earth, did not bring a curse to her new country, for the destiny
of that country was already determined; rather this France which she had
entered had prepared a tragedy for her and a fate expected by her own
unhappy stars.
Those who have watched the destruction of an old and strong wall will
remember that it seemed at first to resist with ease every battery of
the assault. At last there came one effort, more violent than the rest,
which broke long, zig-zag lines throughout the fabric. The work was
done. A few succeeding impacts visibly disintegrated the now loosened
stones until the whole fell rapidly into ruin. So it was with the French
Monarchy. The Regency, the floating theories of public criticism, the
indeterminate foreign policy, the military reverses of the Seven Years’
War, the careless lethargy of Louis XV. in State affairs, had impaired
the fabric of tradition, but that fabric still stood. It might yet have
been restored and made whole had not the King in his last years chosen
the particular mistress and presented her in a particular manner, which
threw chaos into the scheme that every Frenchman took for granted when
he considered his sovereign. This last thud, coming after so many
accumulated tremors, loosened all the wall. The trials and distractions
of the next reign did but pull apart, and that easily, the loosened
stones. The imposing posture which the French demand of their symbols
had been dropped by the old King; the new one could not restore it.
Choose at random any man or woman of your acquaintance in history, put
them upon the throne after the death of Louis XV., and though the
succeeding quarter of a century would have varied somewhat with various
individualities in power, the doom of the Monarchy would by none have
been averted.
Let us see what happened when that fatal news of Madame Du Barry’s
advent spread through the Court and the capital of France and reached,
like the ripple of a wave, the shores of Vienna.
The King (as has almost every other King in history) had indulged his
body; he had also indulged his desire for intimate companionship, his
man’s whim for an expression, a tone of voice, or a gesture. This
licence, which to their bane is granted to privileged and symbolic men,
had led him into every distraction. His amours were many, but middle age
had fixed his routine, if not his constancy, upon one woman of
remarkable character.
Madame de Pompadour, as she came later to be called, was not of the
nobility. To have taken a mistress publicly from the rank of business
people was a serious reproach to the King; but though the mass condemned
such an alliance, and though the wealthy, both of the middle class and
of the courtiers, found an added blame in the financial reputation of
her father and the notorious lightness of her mother, yet there was
about this young, vigorous, and commanding hostess something that could
prevent too violent a reaction of opinion.
She was extremely rich; her drawing-room had held all the famous men of
her day; her education was wide and liberal, her judgment excellent. She
played and sang with exceptional charm. She had good manners; she rode,
spoke, read, and entertained as might the principal of her
contemporaries.
The acknowledged position of such a woman at Court, though a new
degradation, was a tolerable one. It was easy for the most reserved to
understand how, in those years between thirty and forty when the
strongest affections take root, the King had found in her company a sort
of home. Her character was, moreover, comprehensible and secretly
sympathetic to that vast proprietary body, the Bourgeoisie, which then
were and are now the stuff of the nation.
She was prudent, she could choose a friend or a servant; her vivacity
did not lack restraint. She was decent, fond of quiet silk, of good
taste in decoration and of management. Her position at Versailles was a
sort of conquest effected by the middle classes over the Court. Such a
mistress, ruling for many years, the nation received at last with far
more calm than could the buzzing nobles of the palace. As she (and the
King) grew older, as her power became absolute and his individual
presence grew remote, the situation was acceptable to Paris even more
than to those who immediately surrounded the throne.
She died. There was an interval of puzzled silence about the person of
the King. No one dreamt of a new power at Court. A nullity of action in
the King himself, a few more stories, obscure and scandalous, the end of
the reign and the accession of the heir who should bring with him such
reforms as all the intellect of the country demanded: these were the
expectations which followed her death, and especially were they the hope
or the certitude of that group of men, mostly not noble, who had long
managed both law and finance.
This prospect had, however, omitted one capital factor in the
calculation. Louis XV., during these long years of regular habit, had
grown old, and age in such a character, thus isolated, thus re-entrant,
and yet hungry for whatever might tempt the senses, could only lead to
some appalling error. In years he was, when Madame de Pompadour died,
but little past fifty, but that blindness to exterior opinion and that
carelessness for the future which properly belong to an age much more
advanced, had already spread like a mist over his mind. After an
interval of less than four years from the Pompadour’s death, the nation
and the capital and those leaders of opinion who awaited a mere negative
decline full of petty rumours but controlled as to great affairs by that
Choiseul whom the Pompadour herself had chosen for Minister, were
presented with the Du Barry: the scandal and its effect were
overwhelming.
This woman was a prostitute.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER IV
_THE DU BARRY_
THE presence of the Du Barry at the Court of Versailles, the fact that
this presence preceded the Austrian child’s arrival, that it was first
publicly admitted at the first public appearance of the Dauphiness, and
that the four years of her tutelage were overshadowed by the new Royal
Mistress was the initial and irretrievable disaster of Marie
Antoinette’s life. It moulded her view of the nation and of the family
with whom she had now to mingle; it deeply affected the populace she was
to attempt to rule; it cloistered, warped and distracted her vision of
France at a moment in adolescence when vision is most acute and the
judgment formed upon it most permanent. All the Queen’s tragedy is
furnished by the early spell of this insignificant and licentious woman.
With her advent was introduced for the first time into the Court that
insolent and calculated disregard for rule in gesture and vocabulary
wherein which the rich will often secretly relax their ordered lives,
but which, when it appears publicly amidst their daily furniture, is as
shocking as nakedness or as blood.
Judged in the pure light of human morals the position of the Du Barry
was surely less offensive to God than that of any mistress any King has
ever chosen. Louis wronged no one by this whim. He wrecked no remains of
chastity—the woman had never known the meaning of the word. He wronged
no subject (as has and does almost every royal lover in every amour)—her
marriage had been but a hurried form run through to satisfy etiquette,
“that she might be presented at Court.” He provided himself with a
companion too inferior to make political intrigue her main ambition, and
with one that could and did surround him with an abject but constant,
familiar, and comfortable affection. It was such a vagary of old age as
those in which have terminated countless lives, when old gentlemen of
breeding but of enfeebled will surround their last years with youth and
with the vigour, tainted vigour, that is inseparable from vulgarity.
There is not one of us but has come upon a dozen such unions: they are
often confirmed by a tardy marriage.
But in the case of Louis and this scandal of his a necessary element to
such disgrace, the element of retirement, was lacking. Those symbols
which, if they are insisted upon, are mere hypocrisies, but which, taken
normally, are the guardians of a tolerable life, were outraged. The eyes
of the noble-women at Versailles were full, some of a real or affected
timidity, others of a real or affected dignity. Such ladies as chose to
be sprightly or even to advertise their loose habit with over-brilliant
and vivacious looks, retained, considered, and could always assume
refinement; but the beautiful eyes of the Du Barry were brazen. The
_mignardises_, which are always ill-suited to a woman, might be
deliberately affected by the less subtle of the more elderly beauties:
with the Du Barry, despite her evident youth, they had already become
native and ineradicable. She lisped alarmingly; she lolled, or, when it
was necessary for her to sit erect, was awkward. Her entry into a room
was conscious; her assertions loud, her amiability oiled, her
animosities superficially violent. It is upon solemn occasions that such
deficiencies are most glaring, and solemn occasions were of continual
recurrence at Versailles. In a word, she was most desperately out of
place, and therefore produced an effect as of dirt, jarring against
whatever was palatine and splendid in the evil of the Court by her
parade of the loose good-nature and the looser spites of the Parisian
brothels.
Yet it is not difficult to see what had brought the King into so fixed a
relation with her. Whoever will compare any of the portraits of her by
Drouais with any by Boucher of the Pompadour will see, not the same
character indeed, but the same brows and forehead.
Louis could not continue in those early and familiar relations with her
which had become a necessity to him, unless in some way her place were
publicly acknowledged; but to force such a personality upon the Court,
to give it precedence and to see that its position should be permanent,
was an effort he had avoided for months. A scene was intolerable to him.
He suffered from the most common defect attaching to men of lineage and
wealth in that he feared, or rather could not endure, the prospect of
violence. Orders even and debate, if they were of a personal and verbal
kind, he shrank from as do some men from loud noises. The more important
and decisive of his actions were effected in short notes, every line of
which, as we read them to-day, manifest his urgent need of isolation: of
getting the business done without the friction of another presence, and
once done, put aside for ever.
For the public presentation of the Du Barry the marriage of his
grandson, and especially the presence of the little Archduchess, offered
a fatal opportunity. It would be impossible for the malicious to allude
to the office of the Mistress in the presence of the child; the occasion
would compel the princes and princesses of the blood to attend, and
would equally forbid any general revolt. He determined to give the
Archduchess a formal banquet on the journey before the Court and its
company had reached Versailles, to summon to it the chief members of the
Court, and to let them find at table, without warning, the woman whose
existence had hitherto not been spoken of in his presence.
The official limit of Paris upon the west—in those days—a line drawn far
beyond the houses and enclosing many fields, gardens, and suburbs, ran
from what is now the Trocadero to what is now the Arc de Triomphe.
Outside the gate or barrier was an empty space of land but partially
cultivated and with no more than a scattered house or two upon it, save
where, along the waterside and on the hill above it, clustered the
village of Passy. This empty space merged gradually into what were then
the wild and unfrequented Boulogne woods. Just on the edge of these, in
a situation which was close to the town and yet upon one side accessible
to the forest, stood a royal hunting-box called “La Muette,” which had
gradually developed into a little palace. Here, on the evening of the
day after Compiègne, the long and splendid train of the Court arrived,
bearing in the chief coach the King, the Dauphin, and this new Austrian
girl for whom Louis had already shown so much respect and tenderness,
and whose entry into her rank he was yet to distort.
The day had been long for the child, but her curiosity and the vitality
of her years had forbidden her to feel fatigue.
Dense mobs of people, cheering and running by the side of the carriages,
had indeed been familiar to her since her babyhood, but the vivacity and
the shrillness and the surprising contrasts of this active
civilisation—its solemn roads, its simple architecture, broken by an
occasional and unexpected magnificence, the long lines of ordered trees
which here seemed as native as in her own country they had seemed
artificial and foreign; the half-hour’s glimpse of an austere French
convent which she had had when she visited at St. Denis (in passing);
the King’s daughter, veiled among the Carmelites; the outskirts of a
gigantic city such as she had never known—all these sufficed to distract
her until the fall of the cold spring evening, when the line of
carriages clattered into the paved courtyard of La Muette.
As though such experiences were not sufficient to bewilder her with the
new world, the girl found when she came to her room, attended by Madame
de Noailles and the ladies of her suite, such a parade of diamonds upon
her table as to-day one will see only in the vulgar surroundings of a
public show.
The instinct for gems which was latent in her, but which the extreme
simplicity of the Austrian Court had not permitted to arise, awoke at
once. They were the diamonds of the woman who would have been her
mother-in-law had she lived, or rather who, had she lived, would never
have permitted this marriage. They had reverted to the Crown upon her
death, and Louis XV. had had them placed there upon Marie Antoinette’s
table in readiness for her appearance; he had so sent them partly from a
sort of paternal kindness, partly from a desire typical in him to exceed
even in giving pleasure; but also, perhaps, partly to atone for the harm
he was about to do her. For when the child came down, some two hours
later, and was led in the strict etiquette of the Court procession into
the dining-hall of the little palace, she could not but notice
throughout the meal that followed a constraint less natural than that
regular constraint of the French Court life which, in twenty-four hours
of experience, had already struck her quick apprehension. It was not
that men and women waited for the King to speak, but that their answers
were given without vivacity, and with that curious mixture of restraint
and purpose which she had already perhaps noticed, in her brief
acquaintance with the French, to be the mark of their conversation in
anger. She saw also that the old King looked straight before him with
something of sullenness in his dignity, and she saw sitting next to him
a woman whose presence there must have perpetually intrigued her
imagination. That woman was the Du Barry.
To whatever adventures and novelties the children of gentle-folk are
exposed, there is always one note of vulgarity which they can make
nothing of and which, while it offends them, disturbs and astonishes
them much more than it offends. In the midst of that curiously silent,
erect, and very splendid table, where forty of her sex and of her rank
were present, the presence of this one woman was in its nervous effect
like the intolerable reiteration of a mechanical sound interrupting a
tragic strain of music. The Du Barry had not the art, so common to the
poorest members of the nobility or of the middle class, when they would
slip in among the wealthy, of remaining silent and of affecting a
reverence for her new surroundings. She held herself with a loose ease
before them all, was perhaps the only one to laugh, and permitted
herself an authority that was the more effective because it hardly
concealed her very great hesitation in this first public recognition of
her place.
What the child Marie Antoinette made of such an apparition will never be
known. Her first letters to her mother upon the matter come later, when
she had fully understood the insult or at least the indignity which had
been done her. The only record we possess of her emotion is this: that
when just after supper some courtier was at the pains to ask her, with
infinite respect and a peculiar irony, what she had thought of Madame Du
Barry, she said, “Charming,” and nothing more.
Next day in the early morning the coaches took on again the last steps
of the journey to Versailles. Twelve miles which were a repetition of
those scenes, those crowds, and those cheers of which the little
Archduchess was now sufficiently weary, but which were leading up to
that event toward which her childhood had been directed, and which could
not but drive out of her mind the doubts of the evening before.
By ten o’clock the procession had passed the great gates of Versailles;
three hours were spent in the long, distressing, and rigid ceremonies of
the Court in whose centre she was now placed and whose magnificence now
first enveloped her. It was one before the procession formed for the
marriage ceremony, and had placed at the head of it the girl, and the
boy whom, in this long trial of two days, she had but little regarded.
She came under the high vault of the new, gilded chapel as full of life
as the music that greeted her entry. On her left the boy, to whom so
much publicity was a torture, went awkwardly and with the nervous
sadness of his eyes intensified; his gold braid and his diamonds
heightened his ill-ease. He managed to give her the ring and the coins
proper to the ceremony, to kneel and stand when he was told; but _she_
went royally, playing, as girl children so easily play, at womanhood,
and smiling upon all around.
The contrast was gravely apparent when they passed together down the
aisle with the Quête, and when they sat—he effaced, she
triumphant—during the little sermon which the Grand Almoner was bound to
deliver. The heir was not relieved till the Mass was over and the book
was brought wherein the signature of the witnesses and principals to a
marriage are inscribed.
It is natural to the extreme of privilege that it should affect
occasional and absurd simplicities. The last generation of Versailles
was eager for such things, and it had become the custom that a royal
marriage should be registered not in any grand and parchment manner but
in the common book of a parish church, the church to whose parish the
palace was nominally attached. Father Allart, the rector of this, in
whose hard and unimportant life such days were set, came in to give the
book. The Grand Almoner set it before them and they signed—the King
first, with his large and practised name; the Dauphin next in a writing
that was thin, accurate, and null. He passed the pen to this little new
wife of his, who was to sign third. At so practical a test her womanhood
dropped off her, her exceedingly ignorant childhood returned. She got
through the “Marie” with no mistake of spelling, but the letters were a
trifle uncertain and the word askew. Why had not some one ruled a line
as lines are ruled in copy-books? “Antoinette,” the second word, was
larger and gave more trouble; the last letters fell away deplorably. And
when it came to the third name, “Josepha,” it was too much for her
altogether. She did her best with the “J”—it ended in a huge blot, and
she became so flurried that she spelt her last name anyhow, without the
“e,” and let it go to pieces. She was relieved to give the pen to
Provence, who, though he was yet so young, wrote his name strongly like
a man. Artois, Mesdames, the Orleans followed. Each as they signed could
see at the head of the page that deplorable and dirty scrawl which the
child, whose advent each of them feared, had left as a record of her
fifteenth year.
The Court left the chapel. As they passed into the outer galleries of
the palace before the enormous and increasing crowd which thronged the
stairways and the landing-floors, the air seemed much darker than when
they had passed in an hour before. Through the great windows the sky
could be seen lowering for a storm. As she entered the private
apartments to receive homage the darkness increased; the ceremony was
not over before a first loud clap of thunder startled them; the rain
fell with violence upon the populace that had crowded the gardens, the
fireworks set out for that evening were drenched, the fine dresses of
the Paris shop-women were spoiled: all the grandeur in front of the
palace was lost in umbrellas. It cleared, and they crushed in, with
their muddy boots well scraped, to file in thousands, a long procession
urged on by the Guards and passing, behind a barrier, down the immense
hall, where the tables were set for cards. The King and his Court played
solemnly like actors who must pretend to see no audience, sitting thus
as a public symbol of the nation.
The crowd passed thus, company after company, staring at Monarchy and at
the dresses and the gems till the West grew dark, and the myriads of
candles, reflected on a wall that was all mirrors, lent that evening its
true colours. When the last reluctant sightseer had looked his last over
his shoulder and had felt the tapestry drop behind him, the ceremony
ceased, the tables were cleared, the King rose and conducted the bride
to her room. A full ceremonial of etiquette was wearily and thoroughly
performed, the Grand Almoner (once again) blessed the children’s bed,
and that was the end of the marriage.
Outside, the crowd went back through the May night to their lodgings or
to Paris, full of feasting, damp, surrounded by the fresh air that
follows rain. They carried with them a confused memory of a great
outing—music, grandeur, diamonds, innumerable lights, no fireworks, and
a storm.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER V
_THE DAUPHINE_
_Wednesday, 16th of May 1770 to Tuesday, 10th of May 1774_
WHEN the mock-marriage was over and the night passed, and when, with the
Thursday morning, the long routine that was to be her life opened upon
her, the child could watch with less excitement and with less illusion
the nature of that new world. Her vivacity was not diminished, but her
spirit immediately adopted a permanent attitude of astonished
observation towards emotions and conventions whose general scheme she
could not grasp at all. Daily the incidents which passed before her
while they violently moved also repelled her senses; she was reconciled
to them only by their repetition.
Versailles was the more bewildering to her because, in all its
externals, it was the world she had known from her birth. The French
cooking, architecture, dress, and social manner had for a century
imposed themselves upon the palaces of Europe; but the French mind, now
first in contact with her own, remained to her a marvellous and
unpleasing revelation, which, even after years of regarding its energy,
still shocked her.
There was a ball that night. She danced with her bright-eyed and tall
young brother-in-law. At what he was sneering she could not understand,
nor even if the boy’s expression was a sneer: she knew that it was
strange. She did not notice the absence of half the Court; she did not
know that her mother’s request for Precedence to be given to the
Princesses of Lorraine had raised this silent French storm; had she been
told she would not have comprehended. The extreme and individual French
jealousies, the furious discussions that underlie the united formality
of French etiquette, were alien and inhuman to her German breeding; for
active and living, almost Southern, as was this Viennese girl, she
enjoyed to the end the good simplicity of her mother’s race. She danced
with young Chartres. If something in him chilled her, she could not
divine what it was in that character which even then seemed closed, and
which later was to make him vote her husband’s death, and sit at wine in
his palace while she sat a prisoner and widowed in her prison at hand.
For days the feasts continued and for days her unexpected experiences of
persons and of a strange nationality were relieved by pageants and
popular clamours which, at her age, could distract her from weary
questions. It was at one of these that there sounded once more that note
of disaster which came at rhythmic intervals across her life and
continued to come until a climax closed it. She had leave to go with her
aunts, the King’s daughters, by night with a small escort to see the
public holiday in Paris which celebrated her marriage. She was to go
without ceremony, not to be recognised, merely to satisfy a child’s
curiosity for a spectacle in her own honour. As the coach came up the
river road towards what is now the Trocadero hill she could already see
far off the flash of the rockets, and she heard with increasing pleasure
the roar of a great crowd met to do her honour. As she neared the great
square which is called to-day the Place de la Concorde she was
disappointed, as children are, to see that the coach was late; the great
scaffolding and final set-piece in which her initials were interlaced
with those of the Dauphin was sputtering out in the inglorious end of
fireworks—but something more intimate to her (had she known herself) and
worse than her childish disappointment had marked the moment of her
arrival. The coach was stopped abruptly, the guards closed round it, and
it was turned back at once towards Versailles. As it rumbled through the
darkness more quickly than it had come, she seemed to hear in the
distant clamour both fierceness and terror. It was a sound of panic. She
heard the news whispered respectfully and fearfully to her aunts during
a halt upon the way. Perhaps they thought her too young to be told. She
complained as she went that the truth was concealed from her, and when
they reached the palace late that night she was crying. Next day the
news was public, and she learned that after this first rejoicing, in
what was to be her capital city, there had been crushed and maimed and
killed many hundreds of her people; it proved one of those misfortunes
which, as much from their circumstance as from their magnitude, remain
fixed for years in the memory of a nation, and the day on which she
learned it was the last of the month of her wedding.
During the summer that followed this presage she learnt the whole lesson
of Versailles. She was still a child. Mercy still wrote of her to her
mother in a tone which, for all its conventional respect, was a tone now
of irritation against, now of amused admiration for, a child. She had
her daily childish lessons with the Abbé Vermond and daily exasperated
him by her distractions. She still wrote painfully her childish letters
to Maria Theresa, took her little childish donkey-rides, and was
strongly impressed, as a child would be, by those of her elders who
alone could show some authority over her—Mesdames, her husband’s aunts.
She was growing fast; and there is nothing more touching in the minute
record of her life than the notes of her increasing stature during this
year, so oddly does the nursery detail contrast with the splendour of
her place in Europe and the titles of her rôle.
She was still a child; but as her fifteenth birthday approached and was
passed she had learnt (while it wearied her) the full etiquette of her
part, and she had begun, though imperfectly, to recognise what were the
politics of a Court and in what manner intrigue would approach her: how
to avoid or master it she discovered neither then nor at any later time
throughout her adolescence and maturity.
With the advent of winter and its long and brilliant festivals, another
thing which she had begun to comprehend in the palace became for her a
fixed object of hatred: the position and influence of the Du Barry.
She knew now what this official place was which the Favourite held. Her
disgust for so much regulation and pomp in such an office would in any
case have been strong, for Marie Antoinette came from a Court where the
sovereign was herself a woman and where all this side of men’s lives was
left to the suburbs: that disgust would in any case have been sharp, for
she was too young and too utterly inexperienced to be indulgent; it
would in any case have been increased by a sense of isolation, for all
around this German child were the French gentry taking for granted that
everything touching a King of France, from his vices to his foibles,
must be dressed up in a national and symbolic magnificence. Her disgust
would, I say, in any case have risen against so much complexity allied
to so much strength, but that disgust turned into an active and violent
repulsion when she saw the Du Barry not only, as it were, official but
also exercising power. This to her very young and passionate instincts,
whether of sex, of rank, or of policy, was intolerable; it was the more
intolerable in that the Du Barry’s first exercise of power happened to
go counter to interests which the Dauphine regarded rather too
emphatically as those of Austria and of her family.
The chief Minister of the Crown, the Duc de Choiseul, kindly, sceptical,
well-bred and rather hollow, had been, if not the mere creation or
discovery, at any rate the ally of Madame de Pompadour. Madame de
Pompadour had been a statesman herself: Choiseul had perpetually
supported her and she him, more especially when he ran in the rut of the
time, showed himself conventionally anti-Christian, and (having been
educated by the Jesuits) was drawn into the intrigue by which that order
was suppressed. He had been ambassador at Vienna, though that in a year
when Marie Antoinette was a baby, so that she had no early memories of
his snub-nose and happy, round face; but she had known his name all her
life from the talk of the palace in Vienna, and she had known it under
the title which he had assumed just after her birth. The Duc de Choiseul
was for her, as for every foreigner, a name now permanently associated
with French policy and a Minister who was identical with Versailles.
Maria Theresa was grateful to him for having permitted the marriage of
her daughter: that daughter after some months of the French Court very
probably imagined that he had not only permitted but helped to design
the alliance. It was against this man that the Du Barry stumbled.
It would not be just to accuse the young woman Du Barry of design. The
State was a very vague thing to her. She held good fellowship with many,
owed her advancement to Choiseul’s enemies, and was, in general, the
creature of the clique opposed to him, while for D’Aiguillon, who
already posed as the rival of the elder man, she felt perhaps a personal
affection. She was very vain and full of that domestic ambition which
comes in floods upon women of her sort when they attain a position of
some regularity. She loved to feel herself possessed of what she had
learned in the old days to call (in the jargon of her lovers) “office,”
“power”; to feel that she could “make” people. As for the pleasure of an
applauded judgment, or the satisfaction of that appetite for choice
which inspires women of Madame de Pompadour’s sort in history, the Du
Barry would not have understood the existence of such an emotion. The
most inept and the most base received the advantage of her patronage,
not because she believed them capable of administration, but simply
because they had shown least scruple in receiving her, or later, amid
the general coldness of the Court, had been the first to pay her an
exaggerated respect. As for those with whom she could recall
familiarities in the past, she was willing to make the fortunes of them
all.
Though such an attitude could easily have been played upon by the
courtiers of her set, it could never have supplied a motive force for
her demands nor have nourished the tenacity with which she pressed them;
that force and that tenacity were supplied to her by her own acute
sensitiveness upon her new position. The angry pique to which all her
kind can be moved in the day of their highly imperfect success was
aflame at every incident which recalled to her the truth of her origin
and the incongruity of her situation: in her convulsive desire to
revenge against every slight, real or imagined, she found an ally in the
old King, her lover. He also knew that he was in a posture of
humiliation, and under his calm and tired bearing he suffered a
continual irritation from that knowledge. As he pottered about his
frying-pans, cooking some late dish to his liking, or went alone and
almost furtively down the hidden stair between her little, low,
luxurious rooms and his own rooms of state, his silent mind was even
less at ease than in the days, now so long past, when an utter weariness
with the things of the flesh and a despair of discovering other emotions
had first put into his eyes the tragedy that still shines from them upon
the walls of Versailles.
All, therefore, that the Du Barry did through Louis XV. as her power
increased was not for this or that person whom she feared or loved; it
was rather against this or that person whose presence she found
intolerable. All that she suggested, so far as persons were concerned,
the King was ready to achieve.
Had some married woman of force and subtlety formed the centre of
opposition to the Favourite, the reign would have ended easily. Mary of
Saxony, the Dauphin’s mother, had been such a woman, and would, had she
lived, have conducted affairs to a decent close. Fate put in the place
of such a woman first three old maids—the King’s daughters—and next this
little girl, the Dauphine.
The origins were slight, but in its course the quarrel gathered impetus.
At first came that silent great supper-party at La Muette and the
instinctive repulsion which the child felt and which this woman from the
streets as instinctively resented. Next, in the summer, one of the
Dauphine’s women had a sharp quarrel with the Favourite in the stalls of
the Court theatre. The Favourite had her exiled from Court, and the
Dauphine, crying secretly with anger in her rooms, could obtain no
redress. During the summer absences of the Court in the country palaces
a perpetual travel and larger room to move prevented an open battle; in
the following winter that very grave event, the exile of Choiseul,
sealed the difference.
It was the error of Choiseul not that he had opposed the Favourite’s
entry—on the contrary, he had thought it a useful whim that would amuse
and occupy his sovereign—but that he could not take her seriously. His
“world,” his relatives, his intimates, those whom he had placed and
salaried during twelve years of power, were outspoken in their contempt
for the Du Barry. Her own simple spite lumped all together and made the
Minister the cause of her difficulties and their victim. For months she
had half amused, half frightened Louis by an increasing insolence to De
Choiseul at cards and at table. He had met this insolence at first with
the ironic courtesy that he must have shown during his life to a hundred
such women; later, by a careful and veiled defence; last of all by a
resigned and somewhat dignified expectation of what he saw would be the
end.
When a society approaches some convulsion the pace of change increases
enormously with every step towards the catastrophe. “_This_ at least no
one dreams of. _That_ at least cannot happen!” But this and that do
happen, and at last all feel themselves to be impotent spectators of a
process so forcible and swift that no wisdom can arrest it. Political
literature in such moments turns to mere criticism and speculation; it
no longer pleads, still less directs. So it is to-day with more than one
society of Western Europe; so it was with the close of Louis XV.’s
reign.
In May 1770, when the Austrian alliance was consummated by the arrival
of Marie Antoinette and by the wedding at Versailles, the revocation of
the one conspicuous statesman in France would have seemed impossible. He
had no more capacity than have the most of politicians, but he did at
least read the rough standard demanded in that trade, and his name was
rooted in the mind of his own public and of Europe. If the dismissal of
Choiseul had been proposed in the summer, there still remained enough
active force opposed to this new Du Barry woman to have prevented the
folly; but at the rate things were going every month weakened that
force; by the end of the year it was too late to act in his defence.
On Christmas Eve fat Hilliers came lurching out of the Favourite’s room
and brought Choiseul a note in Louis’ hand. It was a short note exiling
him to his place at Chanteloup and relieving him of office.
There was no one to replace the Minister: the action was that of a
common woman who exercised a private vengeance and could conceive no
reasons of State. Yet no one was astonished—save perhaps the child to
whom so vast a change was the climax of all that had bewildered her
since she had first spoken to the French Court.
Maria Theresa and Mercy, her ambassador to Versailles, had that
knowledge of the world which permitted each to find footing, even in
such a welter. Each from a long experience knew well that the depth of
political life moves slowly for all the violent changes of machinery or
of names. Each felt the alliance—the object of all their solicitude—to
be still standing, in spite of Choiseul’s fall; and each divined that
their little Princess, who was the pledge of that alliance at the French
Court, and whom they destined, when she was Queen, to be its
perpetuator, might at this moment weaken and ruin it: her probable
indiscretion and her simplicity were the points of danger. Her
plain-spoken anger might ruin their plans for a recovery of Austrian
influence. Each therefore concentrated upon a special effort—Mercy by
repeated visits from the Austrian Embassy in Paris to the Court at
Versailles and by repeated admonitions; Maria Theresa (in whom the fear
for her daughter’s future and position was even greater than her
solicitude for the Austrian policy) by repeated letters, too insistent
perhaps and too personal wholly to effect their object.
Marie Antoinette was persuaded to a certain restraint, but she was
neither convinced nor instructed. She saw the whole situation as a girl
would see it, in black and white: Madame du Barry was of the gutter, and
had yet been able to destroy a name she had always heard associated with
the fortunes of her own family and the dignity of the French Crown. The
complexity of the situation, the short years it was likely to last, the
necessity during those years of weighing the intricate and changing
attachments of the great families in their interlacing groups—all this
escaped her.
So little did she see the intricate pattern of politics that, when Louis
XV., less than two months later, exiled the higher courts of law and all
but roused a rebellion, she did not connect with the reign of her enemy
this act of violence which isolated and imperilled the Crown; she
thought it royal, immediate, and just, still seeing mere kingship, as
children see it in a fairy tale, beneficent and paternal.
The six months of administrative anarchy that followed meant nothing to
her. When in July, D’Aiguillon—inept, a mere servitor of the
Favourite’s—was at last appointed to the vacant post of Prime Minister,
this act—in its way more astounding than the dismissal of Choiseul—was
only remarkable to her because it was the Du Barry’s doing. And during
the whole of her sixteenth year she represented at Court a fixed
indignation which, in her alone, steadily increased as the powers of the
Favourite became absolute; for as Marie Antoinette approached womanhood
she developed a quality of resistance which was the one element of
strength of her early character, but from which was fatally absent any
power to design. That obstinate power of resistance was to raise around
her multiplying and enduring enmities; it was to mature her in her first
severe trials, but was also to bring her to the tragedy which has lent
her name enduring and exaggerated nobility.
This opposition which the Dauphine offered to Madame du Barry, an
opposition which did but rise as that woman (during 1771) opened, one
after the other, all the avenues of power to her lowest or least capable
courtiers, took on no form of violence.
Marie Antoinette, as the pale auburn of her hair and her thick eyebrows
darkened, as her frame strengthened and her voice took on a fuller tone,
added to the vivacity of her childhood a new note of passionate emphasis
which was ill-suited to her part, and which in any circumstances but
those of luxury would have approached vulgarity. In many minor matters
she forbore to put the least restraint upon a momentary annoyance; she
would have some design she disapproved destroyed; a bookcase, though it
was Gabriel’s, she had broken before her eyes to appease her discontent.
But in the major matter of this quarrel she put on a sort of solemnity,
and her resistance took the simple but unconquerable form of silence.
She would not recognise the Favourite, though she were to meet her five
times a day, and she would not address one word to her.
That silence, which kept open at Court a sharp wound and which stood a
permanent and a most powerful menace to all that had power at
Versailles, became for Mesdames the King’s daughters (who had first
given this example) and for all the defeated parties a welcome
symbol—though for the Princess herself it was a most perilous one. To
break that silence was the effort of every converging force about her.
Her mother in repeated warnings; Mercy, the King, and most of all the
Favourite herself, came to think it a first point of policy that what
might have been pardoned in the child should not remain a cause of acute
offence in the woman. She was now nearly eighteen months at Versailles;
she had entered her seventeenth year. But whenever the Du Barry crossed
her in the receptions or met her eyes at table, whatever beginnings of a
salute may have escaped the loose manner of the Favourite, she suffered
the mortification of a complete refusal. The feminine comedy was
admirably played, and for the Dauphine the King’s mistress remained a
picture or an empty chair—sometimes to be blankly gazed at; never to be
recognised or addressed.
There was indeed a moment in August when the Dauphine’s resolution
wavered. Mercy had visited the Du Barry; he had spoken to her intimately
and with gallantry. He had probably promised her the graces of the
Dauphine; he returned to Marie Antoinette to press his advice. So
pressed she promised her mother’s ambassador that she would speak, but
when the moment came and the meeting had been carefully arranged, after
cards at evening, she remembered too much: she remembered perhaps most
keenly a recent thing, the choice of one of this woman’s friends, in
spite of her protests, for one of her ladies-in-waiting. She strolled to
the table where Mercy and the Favourite were talking together. As she
came up Madame du Barry put on an air of expectation which invited her
approach. The girl hesitated and turned back. A scene not consonant to
that society was avoided only by Madame Adelaide, who had the presence
of mind to summon her niece at the critical moment of the insult; but
the fiasco led to further and more peremptory orders from her mother, to
a long and troubled interview between Mercy and the King, and at last to
the conclusion which they all desired. The Dauphine recognised the Du
Barry; but the recognition came in a manner so characteristic of Marie
Antoinette that it would have been better for her and for them if they
had not won their battle.
Upon the New Year’s Day of 1772 at Versailles, on which day it was
agreed (and this time most solemnly vowed) that a greeting should be
given, and during the formal reception held at Court that day, there
came a moment when, in an uneasy silence, the moving crowd of the Court
saw the Dauphine approach the Favourite, pass before her, and say as she
passed—not so directly nor so loudly as might be wished, but still so
that the Du Barry might have taken the words as addressed to herself:
“_There are very many people at Versailles to-day_.” Before a reply
could be given her she had passed on. Next day she said to Mercy: “I
shall not let that woman hear the sound of my voice again.”
The moment of time during which this quarrel reached its height was one
of extreme anxiety to Maria Theresa, and indeed to all. It was that
during which the first public renunciation of the international morality
which had hitherto ruled in Christendom was in negotiation at the
instance of Prussia. It was secretly proposed that an European
government should be disregarded without treaty and subjected to mere
force without the sanction of our general civilisation. Frederick had
suggested to Russia long before with deference, recently to Catholic
Austria with a sneer, the partition of Poland.
It is characteristic of the more deplorable forms of insurgence against
civilised morals that they originate either in a race permanently alien
to (though present in) the unity of the Roman Empire, or in those
barbaric provinces which were admitted to the European scheme after the
fall of Rome, and which for the most part enjoyed but a brief and
precarious vision of the Faith between their tardy conversion and the
schism of the sixteenth century. Prussia was of this latter kind, and
with Prussia Frederick. To-day his successors and their advisers, when
they attempt to justify the man, are compelled still to ignore the
European tradition of honour. But this crime of his, the partition of
Poland, the germ of all that international distrust which has ended in
the intolerable armed strain of our time, has another character attached
to it: a character which attaches invariably to ill-doing when that
ill-doing is also uncivilised. It was a folly. The same folly attached
to it as has attached to every revolt against the historic conscience of
Europe: such blindnesses can only destroy; they possess no permanent
creative spirit, and the partition of Poland has remained a peculiar and
increasing curse to its promoters in Prussia; to their mere accomplices
in St. Petersburg it has caused and is causing less weakness and peril;
while it has left but a slight inheritance of suffering to the
Hapsburgs, whose chief was at the moment of the crime but a most
reluctant party to it.
There is not in Christian history, though it abounds in coincidence or
design, a more striking example of sin suitably rewarded than the menace
which is presented to the Hohenzollerns to-day by the Polish race. Not
even their hereditary disease, which has reached its climax in the
present generation, has proved so sure a chastisement to the lineage of
Frederick as have proved the descendants of those whose country he
destroyed. An economic accident has scattered them throughout the
dominions of the Prussian dynasty; they are a source everywhere of
increasing danger and ill-will. They grow largely in representative
power. They compel the government to abominable barbarities which are
already arousing the mind of Europe. They will in the near future prove
the ruin of that family to which was originally due the partition of
Poland.
Enormous as was the event, however, both in its quality of evil and in
its consequences to mankind, it must not detain the reader of these
pages. Its interest here lies only in the first and principal example
which it affords of Marie Antoinette’s direct and therefore unpolitical
temper. She was indeed only upon the verge of womanhood—she had but
completed her sixteenth year—but her failure to understand the critical,
and, above all, the complex necessities of the Hapsburgs at that moment
was characteristic of all the further miscalculations that were to mark
her continual interference with diplomacy for twenty years. It was
imperative that Austria should find support in the grave issue to which
Maria Theresa had been compelled against her conscience and her reason.
Berlin and St. Petersburg suddenly having agreed to a mutual
aggrandisement, help was imperative, and help could only come from her
ally at Versailles. Upon this one occasion, if upon no other, the young
daughter of the Empress was justified in working for her family, and
that could only be done through the woman whose influence was now the
one avenue of approach to Louis XV. A recognition of the Du Barry was
essential to Vienna in that new year of 1772. The Dauphine made it, but
she made it in such a way that it was a worse insult even than had been
her former silence. Had war broken out that spring, at the melting of
the snow, it is possible or probable that Versailles would not have
supported Vienna against Prussia and Russia in arms.
There was almost a quarrel between the growing girl and the Empress her
mother. To that mother she still remained the child who had left Vienna
two years before; but then, in Versailles and to those who saw her, this
year made her a woman.
That she had passed the boundary of adolescence was apparent in many
ways. She was more and more enfranchised from the influence of elder
women—notably of her husband’s aunts, her intimacy with whom faded
throughout 1772 and disappeared in 1773. Her step had acquired that firm
and rather conscious poise which was to distinguish her throughout her
life. The growth of her stature was now accomplished, and she was tall,
and though her shoulders had not the grace and amplitude which they
later assumed, her figure had, in general, achieved maturity. Her hair,
now a trifle darker and browner in its red, her eyebrows, always
pronounced but now thicker and more prominent, announced the same
change. Her motives also, though insufficient in judgment, were deeper
in origin. Her resistance to her mother’s and to Mercy’s most pressing
insistence in the matter of the Favourite was a resistance no longer
even partially suggested to her by others; it was due now to a full
comprehension of the old King’s degradation, and to a formed abhorrence
of the Du Barry. Moreover, when she yielded for a moment—as she did
perhaps three times in the course of two years—it was with some measure
of thought: she consented to approach the King’s mistress at moments
when the ambassador or her mother had convinced her by speech or letter
of an acute necessity; but already, in her excuses when she refused, she
began to use the argument of a woman, not of a child—she pleaded the
“authority of her husband”: it was a phrase in which she, least of all,
put faith!
With this advent of womanhood there came, of necessity to a character so
ardent, fixed enmities. She was no longer despised as a child; she was
hated as an adult. Mesdames the King’s daughters, whose influence over
her had disappeared, joined, in their disappointment, the over-large
group of her detractors. The fatal name of “Autrichienne,” the foreign
label that clung to her at the scaffold, originated in the drawing-rooms
of the three old maids, and all around her, as her power to order or to
fascinate increased, there increased also new hatreds which attained to
permanence, because her German memories, her eager action, her crude and
single aspect of the multitudinous and subtle French character, her
rapid turning from this pleasure to that, her ignorance of books and of
things, lent her no power to wear these courtiers down or to play a
skilful game against them.
Forgetfulness was easy to her. To help her to forget she had the
intoxication of that moment which comes once in life and is the powerful
blossoming of our humanity. Her eighteenth year, the last year before
she ascended the throne, was the great moment of her youth.
She had not been beautiful as a child, she was not destined to real
beauty in her womanhood; but at this moment, with the spring of 1773 and
on to that of 1774, there radiated from her the irresistible appeal of
youth.
Paris, which had learnt to despise and half to hate the Crown, which had
felt itself widowed and abandoned by the emigration of the Bourbons to
Versailles, caught her charm for a day. When she made with the Dauphin
her first official entry into the city, great crowds acclaimed her
perpetually; she had that emotion, so dear to women that it will drive
them on to the stage itself, of a public applause directed towards their
persons: the general applause of Paris was almost an applause of lovers.
For just these passing hours on a sweet day in early June she saw and
loved the city wherein her doom was written upon every stone, and for
these hours the Tuileries which she inhabited were faëry and so full of
delight that she could not tell whether the air was magical or owed its
fragrance only to the early flowers.
In such a mood, daily drinking in happiness and a certain sense of
power, admired almost openly by distant men and—very likely—by Artois,
her young brother-in-law, who had known her all these years, she passed
the high tide of the summer and autumn, and found in the ensuing winter
for the first time that lively and absorbing interest in social pleasure
which very largely determined her life.
Of the balls in which she danced, of the masked balls that were her
special delight, one stands out in history—and stood out in her own
memories, even to her last hour, a night unlike all others.
* * * * *
The reader has divined that the marriage of May 1770 had been no
marriage. It was contracted between children; and years must pass—years
which were those of the school-room for both of them—before Maria
Theresa could expect an heir with Hapsburg blood for the French throne.
But those years passed; the child was now a woman, and still the
marriage remained a form.
From an accident to which I will return in its proper place, the Dauphin
and herself were not wife and husband; and to this grave historical fact
must largely be attributed the disasters that were to follow. For the
moment, however, this misfortune did little but accentuate her isolation
and perhaps her pride. In her childish advent to the Court it could mean
nothing to her. Lately she had understood a little more clearly; but she
was pure; her training was in admirable conformity to her faith; she was
not yet troubled—until the opening of that last year ’74, with its
gaiety and pride. This season of vigour, radiance and youth lacked the
emotion which has been so wisely and so justly fitted by God to that one
moment through which we make our entry into a full life. She was married
to the heir of France: her virtue and her pride forbade her to be loved.
Yet was she also not married to that heir, and her life now lacked, and
continued to lack, not only love, but the ardent regard that was her
due.
No Frenchman could have turned her gaze. Between her temperament and
that of her husband’s nation the gulf was far too deep. But one night,
late, as she moved, masked in her domino, through the crowd of a Paris
ball-room, she saw, among so many faces whose surface only was revealed
to her, another face of another kind—a boy’s. It arrested her. The
simple and sincere expression which Versailles had never shown her, the
quiet manliness which, in Northerners, is so often allied to courage and
which stands in such contrast to the active virility of Gaul—all that
which, in the secret places of her German heart, unknown to herself, she
thought proper to a man, all that whose lack (though she could not
analyse it) had disturbed and wounded her in the French palace, was
apparent in the face before her. She asked his name, and heard that it
was Fersen. He was a Swede, the son of a considerable political noble,
sent here on his travels with a tutor. She went up and spoke to him.
She could look into his eyes and see their chivalry. His low, handsome
forehead, his dark brows, his refined, firm lips, his large and gentle
eyes completed in detail the profound impression with which that first
glance had struck her. Once she had begun to speak to him, so masked,
she continued to speak continually. A boy of eighteen is far younger
than a girl of his age—they were born within six weeks of each other,
and he was a child compared with her; he desired her, she consenting,
and he became hers in that moment. When they had separated and he
reached his rooms at morning there was ready in his heart what later he
wrote down, that the Dauphine was delightful, and that she was the most
charming Princess he ever had known. She upon her side had followed him
with her eyes to the door of the great assembly. She was not to see him
again for four years, but during all those years she remembered him.
* * * * *
This was the way in which Marie Antoinette entered life, and almost
simultaneously with that entry came her ascent of the throne: the old
King was changing.
He suffered: his digestion failed; from time to time he would abandon
his hunting. It was in the January of 1774 that the Dauphine had met
Axel de Fersen. Before the spring of that year Louis XV.’s increasing
infirmities were to reach their end.
Gusts of strong faith swept over him in these failing years, as strong
winds, filled with a memory of autumn, will sweep the dead reeds of
December. His fear of death, and that hunger for the Sacraments which
accompanies the fear, came to him in dreadful moments. For thirty-eight
years he had neither communicated nor confessed. All his life he had
avoided the terrace of St. Germain’s, because a little lump far off
against the Eastern sky was St. Denis, the mausoleum of the Kings, and
he had not dared to look on it. But, with no such memorial before him,
Death now appeared and reappeared.
Once in his little private room—it was late at night and November—he
played at cards with the Du Barry. They were alone, save for an old
crony of his pleasures, Chauvelin, which well-bred and aged fellow stood
behind the woman’s chair, leaning upon it and watching the woman’s cards
in silence, his rapacious features strongly marked in the mellow light
of the candles. Something impelled the woman to glance up at him over
her shoulder. “Oh, Lord! M. de Chauvelin, what a face!” It was the face
of a dead man. She leapt and started from it, and the body fell to the
floor.
The King, his age and apathy all shaken from him, shouted down the empty
corridors: “A priest! a priest!” They came, and in the presence of the
King absolved what lay immovable upon the shining floor, in a hope or
wish that some life lingered there. But Chauvelin was quite dead.
Now, in his last Easter, the dread came back for ever and inhabited the
King. Upon the Maundy Thursday of ’74 (it was the last day of March) the
Court were all at Mass, and the sermon was ending. The priest, strong in
that tradition of Bossuet which had not perished, turned to the royal
chair and related for his peroration the legend of an ancient curse:
“Forty days, and Nineveh shall be no more.” All the Court heard it and
forgot it before the chanting of the creed was done—but the King was
troubled. He reckoned in his mind; he counted dates and was troubled.
The liturgical times went by; he abandoned his mistress; he lived apart
and gloomy: but his Easter duties were not accomplished, nor did he
communicate or confess, nor was he absolved. Then the cloud lifted and
he began to forget, and the tie which held him to the Du Barry, and
which had in it now something of maturity and routine, was very strong
upon him. He yielded and returned to her where she waited for him down
the park at the little Trianon. His domesticity returned—but not for
long.
It was upon Tuesday the 26th of April that he came in from hunting
changed. He would not eat. He wandered a little and was cherished by his
companion, but his fever grew. Next day he woke to suffering. He
attempted to hunt, but his knees were weakened and he could not ride his
horse; and coming back to Trianon, he groaned with his head in torment.
His dread increased; but his doctors, who had been long familiar with
his moody interludes, thought little of the thing. They carried him back
through the trees to the palace, to his own room in the northern wing,
and that day and the next, as the fever grew, rumours went louder and
louder in the palace. On the Friday, at eventide, as a candle chanced
near the face of the sick man, the doctor looked closer; and in the next
hour, before midnight, the Princess Clothilde, talking in Madame de
Marin’s room in whispers to the Duke of Crois, opened a note from the
Dauphine. She cried aloud: “They say it is the small-pox!”
They dared not tell him. He had the assurance to demand the truth, and
when he heard it he said, “At my age a man does not recover.” He
maintained from that moment, through the increasing torment and
disfigurement of his disease, a complete mastery over himself and even
to some extent the powder of ordering the Court. He saw to it that his
grandson the Dauphin should not come near his room, for of all the royal
families in Europe the French Bourbons alone had not been vaccinated. He
accepted the services of his daughters.
One thing alone he hesitated on, and that was to relinquish the society
of his Favourite.
He was too proud and too silent a man for his contemporaries or for
ourselves to know the full cause of his hesitation. Passion at that
moment it could not have been. The possibility of his recovery he had
himself denied, and his every phrase and act showed how clearly he felt
the approach of death. He himself had drawn the secret of his malady
from the reluctant Cardinal whose duty it was, as Grand Almoner, first
to inform him of his danger, but whose worldly fear of consequence had
kept him from speaking—though he was urged to his duty by every other
prelate at Court. The King was in no doubt as to the nature of the soul,
nor as to the scandal which, under the special conditions of his throne,
his one great frailty had given. He knew the Church; he could not, as
might a philosopher, take refuge in the memory of good deeds to outweigh
the evil, or (as might a monarch of a different civilisation) in the
deep hypocrisies which there shield birth and wealth from
self-knowledge. His Christian faith was strong and clean. Yet he
hesitated. If he still clung to the Du Barry, it was perhaps because
nothing was left him in the visible world but the gaiety and the
assiduous care which had endeared this woman to him.
She kept near him throughout the first hours of his malady, and every
evening, when the Princesses had left their father’s room, she would
come in by a private further door and sit beside the little camp-bed on
which he lay. She overcame all repugnance; she soothed his pustuled
forehead with her hand. He felt, perhaps, as though to abandon her was a
first breaking with life.
The aged Archbishop of Paris, himself suffering grievously from the
stone, bore, not without groaning, the jolting journey to Versailles; he
came to undertake himself what the Grand Almoner dared not do—to demand
the dismissal of the Favourite. He was not allowed into the King’s room.
The group of courtiers continually present in the outer chamber, the Œil
de Bœuf, could watch with much amusement the gestures of command and of
refusal that passed between the Archbishop and the Duke of Richelieu in
the antechamber beyond. At last he was admitted, but it was arranged
that others should be present, and nothing passed between him and the
King save a word of condolence from each for the other’s suffering.
It was by no stimulation from without but by his own act that the King
took the last step in his penance. Upon Tuesday the 3rd of May, towards
midnight, Madame du Barry being with him, as was her custom, to tend him
through the night, he said to her, in those brief sentences of his which
had for years forbidden discussion or reply, that he must prepare for
his end and that she must leave him; he told her that a refuge was
prepared, and that she should want for nothing. She stumbled half
fainting from the room to the Minister whose career she had made, the
Duke of Aiguillon, believing with justice that he was not ungrateful,
and in his rooms she cried and lamented through what remained of
darkness.
With the morning the King gave D’Aiguillon his orders, and that
afternoon the Duke, worthily loyal although his career was ended, sent
his own wife to take her in a hired carriage, without circumstance and
therefore without disgrace, to their country house some miles away. It
was the thirty-fourth of the forty days.
That evening the King asked Laborde, his valet, for Madame du Barry. The
servant answered that she was gone. “Already?” he sighed, and her name
was not heard again.
Thursday and Friday passed: the first with a rally which the more
foolish hoped would save the life of the King; the second with the
disappointment of all that corrupt and intriguing clique which depended
upon his recovery.
Meanwhile the Dauphine kept her rooms. She knew what desperate court
would be pressed upon her husband and herself were the doors to be
opened; nor did the Dauphin give a single order of the hundred that were
already solicited of him, save that all should be ready for the whole
Court to leave for Choisy. Early upon the morning of Saturday this
seclusion was broken: long before the common hour of the palace, at
half-past five, a roll of drums awakened its people, and the Princess
came down with all her ladies to see the Sacrament carried through
Versailles.
[Illustration:
LOUIS XVI
FROM THE PRINCIPAL BUST AT VERSAILLES
]
Between a double row of the Guard, under the great canopy that was
reserved for such solemnities, the priests carried the Viaticum, and
about It in a long procession as It passed were the torches and the
candles. She stood with her sister-in-law at the head of the crowd in
the great hall outside the bedroom door; she endured the stench of
corruption that filled the air, though every window was open to the
morning; she caught, by her tall stature and straight carriage, the
scene that was acting within.
Between the purple robes and the surplices, in the ring of waxen lights,
she saw the old man whom alone she had respected and indeed loved in her
new home attempt to raise himself, calling: “_My great God has come to
me.... My great God!_” She saw him with what strength he had plucking
the cotton cap from his head and failing in his effort to kneel. His
face was no longer the face she had known, but crusted dark and hideous,
swollen, horrible. She heard the Grand Almoner repeat the King’s strong
phrase of repentance, passionately solemn, and she knew the voice so
well that perhaps she also heard the mumble in which he urged its
repetition. Then the doors closed; the Court dispersed. She regained her
apartments, and the isolation and the strain returned. They told her of
his increasing delirium, of the crowds that came from Paris daily, of
the certain approach of death. So Sunday and Monday went by—the
thirty-eighth, the thirty-ninth day.
The dawn of Tuesday broke upon a clear sky. It was the fortieth day.
The spring on that fine morning turned to summer, and before noon the
Park was full of a crowd which moved as though on holiday. The Parisians
had come increasingly since Sunday into Versailles. The inns were full,
and at all the tables outside the eating-houses of the town the people
eat their mid-day meal with merriment in the open air. Between the Park
and the town, huge and isolated, already old, the palace alone was
silent. There, each group shut close in its own rooms, awaited—the one
dismissal, another the fruit of long intrigue, another, in a mixture of
eagerness and dread, the new weight of royalty. It was the 10th of May,
and still the agony endured. A candle burnt in a window above the
courtyard. Passing groups looked up at it furtively; grooms, with
bridles ready in their hands, glanced at it from beneath the distant
doors of the guard-room, and saw it twice renewed, as one o’clock and
two struck through the afternoon from the chimes of St. Louis. Three
struck. They looked again and it was still shining.
Within, his head supported by Laborde the valet, his mind still clear,
the old King still attempted with his distorted lips the answers to the
prayers for the dying. He heard them faintly and more faintly in that
increasing darkness which each of us must face. When the priest at last
came to those loud words, “Go forth, thou Christian soul,” his murmuring
ceased. The candle at the window was extinguished. The clatter of
horse-hoofs rose from the marble court and the jangling of stirrups
against mounting spurs. The Duke of Bouillon came to the door of the
room, stood before the silent crowd in the Œil de Bœuf, and said with
ritual solemnity: “_Gentlemen, the King is dead!_”
At that same hour on that same day a British man-of-war sailed into
Boston harbour: she bore orders to impose the tax on tea which
ultimately raised America.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER VI
_THE THREE YEARS_
_Tuesday, the 10th of May 1774 to Easter Sunday, April 19, 1778_
FROM the death of Louis XV. to the close of the summer of 1777 is a
period of somewhat over three years. In those three years the fates of
the French monarchy and of the Queen were decided. For though no great
catastrophe marked them nor even any considerable fruit of policy, and
though an onlooker would have said no more than that something a little
disappointing had, in the process of these years, chilled the first
enthusiasm for the new reign, yet we can to-day discover within their
limits most of those origins from which the ruin of the future was to
come.
For the Queen especially, whom hitherto her minority, her seclusion and
the deliberate silence of her childhood had guarded, the opportunities
for action which her husband’s accession suddenly offered were
opportunities of fate, and the three years with which this chapter has
to deal were for her young and exalted innocence of eighteen like that
short week of spring when seeds are sown in a garden: they were a brief
season of warmth, of vigour, and of clarity during which circumstance
sowed for her in every variety the seeds of misfortune and of death. All
is there: the advent of an uneasy gaiety; the solace of gems, of cards,
of excessive friendships; the vivid but wholly personal, erratic and
capricious intervention in matters of State; the simple confidence in
the policy of her mother’s Austrian government and the continual support
of it; the enmities which all active natures provoke, but which hers had
a talent for confirming; the friction of such an activity against the
hard and, to her, the alien qualities of the French mind—all these,
which the Princess could try to ignore when her husband was but heir and
she in her retirement, appear with the first months of her liberty as
Queen, strike root, and are seen above ground before she has completed
her twenty-second year. And with these positive irritants their negative
reactions also come: the Court assumes its divisions; the stories and
the songs and the nicknames begin against her; the popular legend
concerning her is conceived; the trend of the Orleans faction in
antagonism to her is established, and a new generation contemporary
with, or but slightly senior to, her own has become fixed within the
same three years in a direction which—though none then saw it—could not
but destroy her in the progress of years.
To understand in what way the common accidents of that brief three
years’ term moved to their great effects it is necessary to know two
things: first, the physical infirmity under which Louis XVI. suffered,
and, secondly, the nature of the Bourbon Crown he wore; for it is the
conjunction of such an infirmity with such an office that lends to the
first years of his reign and to the first errors of his wife their
capital importance in the history of that one woman and of the world.
* * * * *
Louis, it had first been whispered, and was now upon his accession
commonly asserted, could have no heir.
When first the mere form of marriage between him in his boyhood and
Marie Antoinette (a child) had been solemnised, no public and no
familiar regard was paid to the relations between them. The great
ceremony was necessarily esteemed a solemn and irrevocable betrothal
rather than a wedlock, and (as I have already said) it was taken for
granted that in some two or three years the process of nature would
continue the royal line.
But as the Princess advanced to her sixteenth, to her seventeenth year;
as her upstanding and vigorous youth achieved first a full growth, then
ripeness, then maturity, and yet provoked no issue, the common
explanation of such an accident could not but be generally given, and
the impotence of the Dauphin was universally accepted. At eighteen, in
the last autumn of the old King’s reign, the young wife had stood
apparent and triumphant, clothed with a charm which, if it was not that
of beauty, was certainly that of exuberant life; a whole ball-room had
been arrested at her entrance; the crowds of Paris had quickened at her
approach; the lively look, the deep brows, and the full hair tender and
vaguely red, which Fersen had seen suddenly revealed, were those of a
woman informed with an accumulated and expectant vitality. It was not in
her that the defect could lie. Louis, so it plainly seemed, was
deficient and was in title only her husband.
A conjunction of this kind is not uncommon even in an active, healthy,
and laborious lineage of the middle rank; among the wealthy it is
frequent; in the genealogy of families which carry a public function,
such as those of monarchs or of an oligarchy, for all the careful choice
which their marriages involve, it is often present. Such accidents are
provided for. In many cases probably, in some certainly, a
supposititious child is introduced. When that course is difficult or
repugnant the situation is acknowledged; the consort chooses between her
devotions and a lover; all the planning and all the necessary
preparation which attach to the succession regard the brother or cousin,
who is henceforward accepted as the heir, and _his_ position is the more
highly established from the contrast his vigour may afford to the defect
in the reigning incumbent.
I say such a conjunction is of a known type in history; there were
precedents for action and a certain course to be pursued. Monsieur, the
King’s brother, would have attracted the service and respect to which
his then vigorous intellect was fitted. The Queen’s vagaries would have
been contemptuously excused, for she would have stood apart from the
line of succession, and her character would have been indifferent to her
husband’s subjects. The Crown as an institution would have suffered
little, though its immediate holder would have lost personal prestige,
had the conjecture of Louis’ impotence, which was, upon the King’s
accession, common to the Court and the populace, been confirmed.
Now that conjecture was, as the future showed, erroneous. A very
careful, sceptical, and universal observer might have discovered, even
as early as this year of Louis’ accession, that it was erroneous.
In the first place the gestures, habits, and character of the King were
not such as should be associated with this kind of imbecility. His body
was indeed unhealthy and diseased; it was the body of a nervous,
overgrown, loose-limbed child, inherited from a nervous father and from
an exhausted race; a body which nature would have removed as it removed
his son’s, had not the doctors built up upon its doomed frame an
artificial bulk of flesh. I say he was diseased, but not in the manner
then believed. The febrile attachment to violence, the lack of humour,
the weary eye, which betray an insufficiency of sex and which we so
frequently suffer in political life and at the university, were quite
absent in Louis. Contrariwise he was good-humoured and kindly (saving to
cats), very fond of hard riding and capable in that exercise; he was
further of an even though astonishingly slow judgment, and possessed
that desire to _make_ (to file, saw, fit, design, ply a trade of hand
and eye) which is an invariable accompaniment of virility. He loved and
practised mechanical arts, such as the locksmith’s or the watch-maker’s.
There was nothing in him of what is nowadays called (by a French
euphemism) “The Intellectual.”
Were positive evidence lacking such general contrasts between what he
was supposed to be and what he was would still have great weight; but
evidence more exact can be discovered. The letters written by Marie
Antoinette to her mother afford it.
Maria Theresa was in an increasing torment, as each passing month
excited her bewilderment, lest her daughter should furnish no heir to
the French throne and the object at once of her strong motherly
affection and of her political scheme should fail. Her questions were
frequent, urgent and clear: her daughter replied to them in terms which
a very little reading will suffice to illumine. Marie Antoinette was
young and, as I have said, essentially pure; she did not fully
comprehend the nature of a situation which was undermining her serenity
and gravely marring her entry into life, but she was able both to
express her dissatisfaction and yet to assure the Empress upon more than
one occasion that she had at last a reasonable hope of maternity. These
hopes were in each case disappointed. That such hopes, on the one hand,
certainly existed, and that the whole atmosphere of her married life
was, upon the other, false and almost intolerable, depended upon the
fact that Louis suffered from a partial—and only a partial—mechanical
impediment. This impediment a painful operation would suffice to remove;
but the knowledge that it was but partial, the divergent advice of
doctors and the lethargy which invariably deferred his decisions, all
impelled the young man towards procrastination, with the result that in
a few months—the brief period immediately and before his accession—his
wife had learnt that fever of the mind which accompanies alternations of
nervous incertitude; she had weighing upon her a perpetual and acute
anxiety which was the more corroding in that it contained so
considerable an element of physical ill-ease.
The detail is highly intimate and would merit no place in any biography
but this. It must be fixed, and has been fixed here, first because to
neglect it is to ignore the misfortune from which (if from one origin)
flowed the destruction certainly of the Queen, and very probably of the
French monarchy itself—a matter of moment to every European; secondly,
because history has never yet given it its true place nor fully set
forth its nature and importance.
In such a situation Marie Antoinette’s quick nature took refuge in every
stimulant; wine she disliked—it was among her few but marked
eccentricities that throughout her life she would taste nothing but
water—but gaming, jewels, doubtful books, many and new voices about her,
violent contrasts, caprice upon caprice, unexpected visits, sudden
passions for this or that new friend, excessive laughter (and excessive
pique), emotions seized wherever they could be found—watching in merry
vigils for summer dawns, masked balls that took up all the winter
nights, escapades: in a word, a swirl of the fantastic and the new
became for her a necessity that—had it taken some one form—would have
been called a vice. Her dissipation was driven, as vice is driven, with
a spur; it was compatible, as vice is compatible, with her original
virtues; it produced, as vice produces, a progressive interior ill-ease.
She was a tortured woman in those years.
Children became a craving to her.
One day as she went with the lady who was supposed to control the
etiquette of her life, as she went sadly in her coach along the western
road, she turned off it along a by-lane for her pleasure, and reached
that village of St. Michel which lies upon the slope of the hill above
Bougival. As she passed through the village in her grandeur and took the
Louveciennes road, she saw a peasant child and, by a sudden but most
intense and profound impulse, caught it up and said she would make it
hers. It was a little tiny boy, still a baby, toddling upon the road; it
had been christened James; the name of its parents was Amand. The freak
was good news for them; they blessed her, and she went away. And the
child was to be adopted and brought up at her expense, and she was to
watch it in Versailles.
Very many years later his name came up again, obscure, but fixed, in the
roll-call of a battle, and we shall read it once more, stamped across
the strange sequence of her life.
* * * * *
If any one desires to see, in a very modern and tawdry mirror, what evil
had possessed the mind of this well-born lady, let him watch (from some
distance) a certain financial world in London and that cosmopolitan gang
in Paris to which that world is allied by blood and in whose
support—whenever it is endangered—they are to be found, for in Paris and
London they are one. With far more refinement and with infinitely
greater variety, she (like those modern money-dealers) sought in a rush
of fantastic and novel experience to assuage a thirst. _They_ have no
plea save the coarseness of their lineage. _She_ had for excuse the
gnawing of a position which none about her comprehended, and which she
herself, though her body resented it, saw but dimly with her young mind,
and which disturbed her as a confused, intolerable thing.
From within, therefore, she is amply to be excused; but consider the
effect of her fever upon those who saw her. Consider the effect of this
new manner of hers upon the public function of the French monarchy.
The French have, with their own hands, destroyed the conception of “a
king”: in Europe to-day we look around and find nothing of monarchy
remaining. A few impoverished symbols, a few indebted, a few
insufficiently salaried men, of whose true character the public knows
nothing, afford or do not afford unifying titles for a bureaucracy
there, an oligarchy here: in Italy a national name, in Spain a moribund
tradition. But that monarchy which the Gaulish energy had drawn out of
the stuff of old Rome was another matter; it was a sacramental alliance
between an _idea_ and a _thing_.
The _Idea_ was that of the Gallic formula “without Authority there is no
life”—for Authority is Authorship: this Gallic formula also sustains the
Faith.
The _Thing_ was one lineage of actual and living men: devoted, from
father to son—sacrificed almost as in a public sacrifice—condemned to
the perpetual burden of being mixed into this _Idea_ and of supporting
the burden of its intensity and power.
There had descended from the Merovingian and the Carolingian families to
the Capetian, bearing a power that increased with every century, the
conception of a creative executive made flesh; an executive that should
reside in the living matter of a family of men who should be seen,
known, touched, loved, or hated; who should rapidly pronounce new and
necessary laws, actively preserve the yet more necessary body of ancient
and fundamental custom, observe in public the religion of the community,
and, above all, lead in battle. That was the rôle; that was the mould.
The bond of heredity forced many an incongruity into that mould (a child
sometimes and sometimes a madman), yet—so short is one human life in the
general story of a nation—the gap thus formed was rapidly filled by a
successor, and the permanent impression remained of a soldier
incarnating a community of soldiers.
This institution had now endured for much more than a thousand years.
This Gallic institution had impressed itself (here, as in Germany, by
imitation; there, as in Britain, by direct importation) upon all the
civilisation of the West. It had grown old, as must all human
institutions that have no direct sustenance from forces outside time;
but even so it maintained a mysterious vitality. Its kings were
anointed. It held a sort of compact with the Divine, and in this its old
age was still alive with a salutary if a grotesque publicity.
The King and Queen of France were the least protected of any in the
realm from insult, satire, and gibe; even where their own law protected
them, a general conspiracy, as it were, the instinct of all society,
defended the pamphleteer.
The King and Queen were publicly owned: all they had was public money;
all they did they did before a crowd. Every week they dined at a table
in a vast hall. Their nobles stood by but did not eat—before them a
thousand or (according to the weather) ten thousand of the populace
defiled curiously and unceasingly. They prayed in public. They were
expected to receive in public the applause or the condemnation of all.
They were public for the destruction of secret things, conspiracies,
masonries, Templars, trusts, rings. They were publicly approached by any
at random and publicly claimed as the public redressers of wrong—always
in theory and often in actual fact. Nay, their physical acts were
public. They dressed and undressed before an audience—or rather _were_
dressed and undressed by these. The birth of every royal child was
witnessed by a mob crowding the Queen’s chamber.
The vast inconvenience of such a part was but one aspect of its
sanctity, and the Crown united, as in the heart of a mystery, the
functions of Victim and of Lord.
Amid the great new wealth of the eighteenth century, and in the glare of
its brilliant new intelligence, it may be imagined with what a fence of
tradition and precedent public opinion and its own nature insisted on
defending this national centre. Anecdotes of that rigid, minute, and
often inhuman etiquette are too well known to need repetition here. Two
instances may suffice.
The Queen could drink nothing by night or by day but from the hand of
the highest in rank of the women present, nor could this last accept the
glass and the water save from the hand of a page. The King must not eat
at all until he had performed an ablution like a priest: the vessels of
this and the napkin were sacred; rather than put them to a profane use,
when they had once done their service they were destroyed by fire.
Such extravagances in the old age of an institution lend themselves to
ridicule, as do (for instance) the fantastic ceremonies of the House of
Commons or the comic-opera costumes of court officials and of peers. But
though, isolated, they present this weakness, collectively, and seen in
relation to the function they serve, such survivals have a meaning, and
a consideration of such ceremonial helps men to a comprehension of the
institution it surrounds.
Conceive, then—for it is the note of all this chapter—the impact of such
a mood as that of the distracted Queen upon such a Court, stiff with
such traditions and living under such a bright beam of publicity, the
mark of a million eyes all keen to discern whatever trifle was done
between mid-day and dawn. Marie Antoinette chafed impatiently against
this central national institution. The fever now upon her caused her
always to despise and sometimes to neglect the rules that were of the
essence of her position. The moral and internal constraint which
tortured her inflamed her to “live her life”; but for those of great
wealth and opportunity such a mood is and must be dissipation;
dissipation in its fullest sense: the dispersion not only of character
and of self-discipline, but of responsibility, of externals even, and at
last of power. It meant, and necessarily meant, the patronage of those
far below her and their consequent estrangement; the contempt of those
immediately beneath her and their consequent enmity.
Just after the old King’s death the Court was at La Muette. She must
needs, to prove her liberty, go up and talk familiarly to an old
gardener like any Lady Bountiful. The old gardener’s annoyance is not
recorded; that of her ladies is. They complained to the King, who was
troubled, but who, knowing the truth, answered, “Let her be.”
That same day, when a deputation of the Burgesses’ wives paid her their
court, coming from the city at her gate and full of ceremony, she could
do nothing more dignified than giggle at their awkwardness and at their
dress. In the intervals of, according to each, a pompous greeting, she
must whisper to one or other of her ladies most unpompously; the very
servants were rendered uneasy by her manner.
In how many ways and how rapidly this mood (this physical, fatal,
necessary mood) was to wear down her position immediately after her
accession to the throne many examples will show. The best and the most
general aspect from which one may first regard it is her attempted
immixture in public affairs, for that also was a fretful and personal
thing, part of her mood.
* * * * *
The first six or seven months of the new reign cover the period which
was officially that of mourning for Louis XV. and are for the general
historian of this importance: that in them was fixed the new ministerial
tradition which culminated in the summoning of the States-General.
This new tradition owed nothing to the Queen. She was hardly aware of
its presence. For her the choice of new Ministers was a personal and
almost a domestic business in which she somehow had a right (and could
find it entertaining) to play a part—she knew not what nor how. That
part of hers turned out, as a fact, a small part and indecisive, utterly
without plan; but such as it was it marks her necessity for action and
change, and exhibits her place beside the King. In the intervals of
choosing a new hairdresser and a new dressmaker, she paused now
half-an-hour, now an hour, in the cabinet, hearing names which she
hardly knew, and giving random advice which must have strained her
audience to the very limits of toleration.
It was not mere Austrian action. Her brother the Emperor would often beg
her not to meddle; the Austrian ambassador Mercy deplored her innocence
of affairs and her inability to follow any one interest for one hour.
Her mother wrote affectionately and worriedly, giving her the stale old
advice of supporting Vienna—but fearing her capacity to do so. Meanwhile
the Queen herself acted from the simple motive of being seen about, and
added to this the equally simple motives of private tastes. Thus she
would have restored Choiseul to some office. He came up a month after
the accession, and she greeted him very kindly. He had helped to make
her Queen, he was the traditional ally of Vienna, and though Vienna
certainly did not want him now, Marie Antoinette went by the name and
its associations alone: she judged as a child would judge. The King, who
had no intention of accepting Choiseul, made a little awkward
conversation with him, the opening of which turned pleasantly upon the
old man’s baldness, and next day Choiseul went back home, “to see to the
tedding of his hay.”
Again, the choice of Maurepas for chief Minister, four weeks before, was
not—as has been represented—hers. The King chose his father’s old friend
rather for permanent adviser and companion than as a first
Minister—which title indeed he never received, and that Maurepas entered
at all was the work not even of the King himself but of his aunt, Madame
Adelaide. In the confusion of the first two days, when Sartines,
Choiseul, Machault were all possible as Prime Ministers and all
discussed, Madame Adelaide repeatedly suggested Maurepas’ name. To her
and her sisters he was a tradition, part of a time which these old maids
looked back to with regret as the last time of dignity, before
mistresses had destroyed their father’s Court and half exiled them to
their apartments.
Maurepas was seventy-three; he had left office between forty and fifty,
and had done so from a quarrel with the Pompadour. This alone
recommended him to Louis XV.’s daughter; that he should have been
untouched by the vile interregnum of the Du Barry recommended him still
more. Madame Adelaide had known him in power when, as a girl of
seventeen, the eldest of the sisters, she was certain of life, in tune
with her great position, and pleased with all she saw. Now after
twenty-five years, which had been increasingly marred by a distant and
bitter isolation from the Court, his name recurred to her as that of a
fellow-sufferer and a memory of her youth. Madame Adelaide’s devoted
service in her father’s last illness (she had caught the small-pox
herself in attending him) gravely increased the weight of her advice. It
was through her that Louis XVI. received the old man, and, once
received, he remained. True, Marie Antoinette had carried the message to
the King from his aunt, but she had done no more than this.
If it is asked why, with so little influence, the Queen’s perpetual
interference was none the less permitted, and why this girl of eighteen,
vivacious as she was ignorant, might ceaselessly bustle in and out of
the council chamber, the answer is not that she was Queen—for no Queen
had yet acted thus at Versailles, nor would any woman conscious of power
have done so—but first that her whole self was now restless beyond
bearing, and next that the King was ashamed to withstand her whom,
afflicted as he was, he could hardly propose to command or regulate.
With every fresh opening of the council door she made an enemy, with
none a friend; but Louis all the while could only answer “Let her be.”
In one thing only during these months had she a clear object—and that
was not a policy: she was determined to be rid of the Du Barry’s name.
That woman was far away, exiled to Burgundy from the moment of the
accession, to return afterwards to Louveciennes, but some of her clique
remained, hated by all the populace and half the Court as much as by the
Queen. With so much support Marie Antoinette succeeded. Three weeks
after the death of Louis XV., D’Aiguillon was relieved of the department
of Foreign Affairs: the grant of public money which he received on his
resignation—it was but £20,000—would seem to us in modern England
pitifully small, for we take it for granted that public officials should
have a share in the public funds. But it is significant of the time and
of the French temper that the grant was vigorously opposed and was
obtained only on the personal demand of old Maurepas, who (by one of
those coincidences so frequent in aristocracies) happened to be the
uncle of this his chief political opponent.
Here was Marie Antoinette’s one success. The Austrian Court and Embassy
had desired to keep D’Aiguillon—he could be played upon. Marie
Antoinette had rejected their advice; she had gone, day after day, to
the King, until he had consented to deprive D’Aiguillon of his post—and
immediately her deficiency was apparent. To deprive D’Aiguillon was, in
politics, not necessary, and, if accomplished, not final. To find some
one for the Foreign Office who should at once be able and yet work
contentedly under old Maurepas was of both immediate and of weighty
importance. She refused to interest herself in the matter!
Luckily for France, Vergennes, then the representative of Louis at the
Court of Stockholm, was chosen by the good judgment of the King, in
spite of an impossible oriental wife.
Vergennes, approaching his sixtieth year, tenacious, silent,
industrious, highly experienced, and microscopic, as it were, in the
detail of diplomacy, was just such an one as the French needed to
conserve the forces of their nation, to balance the smaller States
against the rivals of Versailles, and to choose the very moment for the
attack on England which, later, was to establish the United States. It
is probable that, but for him, in the embarrassment of French finance
and the consequent weakness of French arms, the nation would have fallen
into some German conflict or have been abused before some German
contention. As it was, the French owe in great part to Vergennes that
peaceful accumulation of energy which permitted the Revolution to
triumph.
In the nomination of this considerable diplomatic force the Queen had no
part at all.
She had no part in the nomination of Turgot.
It is difficult to write the name of “Turgot” without admitting a
digression, though such a digression adapts itself but ill to any
account of the Queen.
Turgot is the name that dominates the first two years of the reign for
every historian. The time has hardly come to criticise him. Criticism of
his faults is easy; a full appreciation is difficult, so near are we
still to his time, and so exactly did he represent the spirit which was
at that moment germinating in every intellect, so active was he in its
expression. The over-simple economies, the plain egalitarian political
theory, the positive scepticism (the Faith was then at its lowest
throughout the world), the glorious self-possession, the rectitude, yes,
and the interior glow of the “Philosophers,” all the Genius of the
Republic was incarnate in this man. When upon that singular date (it was
the 14th of July) he entered the Ministry, there entered with him the
figure, winged for victory yet austere, whose mission it was to create
the great and perilous Europe we now know. I mean the Republic. Already
Napoleon was born.
Marie Antoinette had no knowledge of this spirit. It had not approached
her. She knew vaguely that it was indifferent to her religion (to which
the very young woman was already sensibly though slightly attached). She
knew much more clearly from current talk that it (and Turgot) stood at
that moment especially for _Retrenchment_; and that word _Retrenchment_
she approved, for she had no conception of the sensations that might
ensue upon it to her own life if from a word it should become a policy.
And Turgot himself had spared her sensibilities by doubling her
pin-money.
I say she had no part in the nominating of Turgot—in his fall she was to
have too great a part.
By the end of August the new Ministry and its policy were complete. All
the Du Barry gang and all the memories of Louis XV.’s end were
gone—burnt and hanged in effigy by the populace as well. In their place
sat a Council whose actual head and principal figure was the young King,
slow, large, assiduous, freckled, pale, in a perpetual obese anxiety,
ardently seeking an issue to the entanglement of his realm; whose senior
was the chiselled old Maurepas, intensely national, witty, experienced
in men, but neither instructed nor of a recent practice in affairs;
whose foreign affairs were dealt with by the methodical gravity of
Vergennes; whose navy was in the honest hands of Sartines, and whose
finance—the pivot of every policy, but in France of ’74 life and
death—lay under the complete control of Turgot.
I have said that finance had become for the French in 1774 a matter of
life and death; and the point is of such capital importance to the
Queen’s story that I must beg the reader to consider it here, at the
outset of her reign.
What was the economic entanglement of the French Crown at this moment?
The reply to that question is not part of Marie Antoinette’s character
and conduct, but it so persistently and gravely affected her life and it
is so dominating a feature of revolutionary history that a clear
conception of it must be entertained before any general understanding of
the period can be achieved. Not that the financial difficulty was the
main cause of the Revolution—to assert as much would be to fall into the
puerile inversion which makes of history an economic phenomenon—but that
the financial difficulty was a limiting condition which perpetually
checked and warped the political thought of the time whenever that
thought attempted to express itself in action.
The clearest background against which to appreciate the finance of old
monarchical France is that of the England which was its triumphant
rival.
The United Kingdom had at that time less than half the population of
France. The territory of England was in much the same proportion—at
least, her arable and industrial territory. Her white colonial
population was larger then, in proportion to her home population, than
it is now, but she had not then the full wealth of India to tax nor the
vast revenues now drawn, both in usury and in true profit,[1] from
Australasia, Southern America, and Africa. In other words, the
prosperity of England at that time was domestic and real; it contained
no parasitic or perilous element which a war could interrupt and a
defeat destroy. This England bore with ease a national debt of over 130
million pounds. She was about to engage in a struggle which would nearly
double that debt, and yet to feel no weakness. She raised a revenue of
ten to eleven millions, which in a few years rose without effort to
fifteen—then at the end of it all she was free to triple her debt during
the great European war against Napoleon, and yet triumphantly to
increase, and, when the war was over, to survive, the only nation with a
credit, and at once the bank and the workshop of Europe.
Footnote 1:
I mean by usury interest levied upon unproductive loans; I mean by
true profit the share of produce legitimately claimed by the lender of
funds which have been put to productive use.
France, so much larger in area and population and inheriting so superior
a tradition of magnitude, had all but failed. With citizens double the
English in number, and with an arable soil in proportion, the French
Crown could only with the utmost difficulty attract to the exchequer a
sum of barely twelve—at the most, and counting every expedient,
thirteen—million pounds from the national income. Briefly, England could
support with ease a larger debt than could this neighbouring nation
twice her size; England could spend with prodigality as much as that
nation was compelled to spend with parsimony; and England could raise
without effort a revenue already equal, soon to be superior, to that
which the rival government could but barely extract from its subjects.
Nor does this comparison exhaust the contrast between financial health
and disease upon either side of the Channel. England thus prosperous was
increasingly at ease. France thus exhausted was increasingly
embarrassed. Deficit followed deficit; that expenditure should exceed
revenue had become a normal annual incident publicly discounted, nay, a
sort of fixed ratio appeared between what _should_ be and what _was_ the
income of the government, and the expenditure exceeded revenue with a
solemn regularity much in the proportion of forty-four to thirty-seven.
In the American War, which either nation was approaching, England,
defeated, was to incur 170 million of debt and yet to emerge, a few
years after the defeat, financially stronger than ever in the Wars of
the Revolution. France, victorious, was to incur but a third of that
liability, and yet in the Revolution France was compelled to declare
herself insolvent.
Why did so startling a contrast appear? To us to-day it is almost
inconceivable. The French are now somewhat less in population than the
English, they pretend to no serious empire beyond the Mediterranean, yet
they raise for national purposes a larger revenue, and they raise it
with far greater facility; they support a debt double our own, without
troubling the least gullible and most thrifty investing public in
Europe. Considerable additions to their total liability hardly affect
their credit, when ours falls by a fifth of its index upon the issue of
150 millions. The value of their agricultural land rises rapidly as does
that of their urban; they find public money for enterprises which we
starve or neglect. Their universities, though dependent on public funds,
abound; their national church, deprived of official assistance,
flourishes on but a fraction of their surplus wealth; their historical
buildings are kept up in magnificence upon public funds. It is
difficult, I say, for an Englishman to try to appreciate the
overwhelming economic advantage which, under George III., England
enjoyed over the Bourbons, who were her rivals; because in the course of
a century, and especially of the present generation, the tables have
been turned. It is England now that is in doubt as to her financial
position and her fiscal methods. It is in England that money is lacking
for necessary social reforms. It is English credit which fluctuates with
violence, and English direct taxation which is strained to
breaking-point.
In the time of which I write all these perils and disadvantages attached
to France and to France alone. The France which England faced in the
great struggle was a France labouring in anxiety for money, and the
cause of that increasing pressure is apparent to History: the _method_
of public economics had failed in France then as perhaps it is now
failing here in England.
Men inherit, and of necessity every generation is shut in with custom.
Who would in England to-day dream of taxing the mass of Englishmen—or
rather, of taxing them directly and to their own knowledge? The very
idea is laughable! There may be coming into a coal-miner’s cottage in
Durham twice the income of a clerk, but who would dare send in an
assessment or talk of a shilling in the pound? The clerk must pay; the
miner go free—for such is the tradition of the Fisc. Who would rate the
houses of the wealthiest class as the houses of the middle class are
rated? It would seem madness. So, but in a more acute fashion, did the
financial system of France suffer at the end of the eighteenth century.
Its data, its conventions were those of an older state of society long
departed. It presupposed the manor, and the manor was dead; it
presupposed the self-contained country-side at a moment when the various
provinces of the whole State had long been intimately bound together by
commerce and when strong international links of exchange had already
begun to arise. The evil was a fiscal system out of touch with the
realities of the time. The remedy was a violent and rapid remodelling of
that system. All could perceive the evil, many the remedy; but custom
and the collective force of private avarice in the individual minds
checked, and checked sharply, with the blind control of a natural force,
all reform that attempted to act and to do. The attempt at reform was
baulked, as a natural force baulks human purpose, by a million atomic
actions. The million separate interests refused it.
For such an attempt, for such audacity, Turgot with his austere,
convinced, and isolated mind was better suited than any other man; yet
even he in a very few months had refused to level the hard-grained
social knots which blunted every tool of the reformer who would level
the inequalities of the State. Within two years his attempt had failed
and he had resigned—but while the resistance of the tax-payer counted
for much in his resignation, the increasing ill-balance of his young
Queen counted for more.
During the first part of his administration of finance Marie
Antoinette’s ill-balance was not so marked as to give promise of what
was to come. No folly, no conspicuous extravagance marred the first
weeks of her reign—her inchoate and girlish irruptions into the Council
were alone of ill-omen; but as the new Court settled down into its
stride, accumulated its first traditions and began to take on a
character of its own, her aspect in the public eye was daily fixed with
greater clearness, and the impression so conveyed to a nation already in
rapid transition was a further element of irritation and confusion.
For the permanently present threat of poverty and embarrassment, which
with every year corroded more and more deeply the public service and
rendered less and less stable the general equilibrium of the State, lent
to the habits the Queen was about to form, and still more to the public
exaggeration of those habits, a gravity they could never otherwise have
assumed. It was part of her lot that she could not, from the very nature
of her position, understand the relationship between her petty
extravagances and the popular ill-ease.
She was right. Her extravagance, such as it was, came slowly—nay, though
that extravagance was a proof of excess in her character, it was never
really excessive in amount; the sums we mention when we speak of it are
trifling when we compare them with the financial debauchery of our own
age. Why, that whole annual increase in her allowance which Turgot has
been blamed for making would not have paid for one night’s riot in the
house of some one of our London Jews. Even when her expenses did exceed
the limit she should have set upon them; even when, as month followed
month, the love of jewellery and the distraction of cards involved her
in private debt, the sums so wasted in a whole year were not what some
of our moderns have scattered in a few days. Her total debts after two
years were less than £20,000! Moreover, careless and wasteful as the
girl was for those well-ordered times, her excesses never bore an
appreciable proportion to the scale of the public embarrassment. Her
difficulties were never so great but that the sale of a farm or two
could meet them. Had the Bourbon Crown enjoyed private as well as a
public revenue, her lack of economy and of order would perhaps never
have been heard of.
But it is the characteristic of any morbid condition that the slightest
irritant produces an effect vastly beyond its due consequence. The
financial embarrassment from which the Kingdom suffered may or may not
have been relievable by the plain and harsh methods of Turgot—it is a
question to which I will return—but even if they were so relievable,
their immediate application could not but be an aggravation of popular
suffering; and just in the years when increasing economic difficulty and
sharp economic remedies for it were catching the public between two
millstones of poverty below and retrenchment above, the populace had
presented to them, upon a pinnacle whence she could be observed on every
side, a young woman who in some sense summed up the State, and yet who,
in mere externals at least, showed a growing disregard for method and a
pursuit of every emotion that might distract her from what the French
thought the duty, but what she knew to be the tragedy, of her marriage.
The mourning of the Court forbade display until the autumn of 1774, and
though with the autumn and the winter there was some relaxation of
ancient rules and some revolt already observable upon Marie Antoinette’s
part against the fixed and inherited rules of her station, yet there was
nothing which had yet seized the popular imagination nor even gravely
affected her position within the narrow circle of her equals. It was not
until the next year, 1775, that the error and the misfortune began.
It had long been intended that her brother, the Emperor Joseph, should
visit France, and by his more active character persuade Louis XVI. to an
operation which he perpetually postponed. The repeated adjournment of
this visit (which was to resolve so many doubts) was among the fatal
elements of the Queen’s early life. In the place of that sovereign, the
youngest child of the Hapsburgs, Maximilian, little more than a boy,
fat, and what would have been called in a lower rank of society
deficient, waddled into the astonished Court at La Muette in the opening
of February.
The accident of his arrival did neither the Queen nor the Court any
great hurt among the crowds of the capital. His startling ignorance and
heavy lack of breeding amused the crowd; they were glad to repeat the
amusing anecdotes of his awkwardness as later in their Republican armies
they were glad to caricature his obesity when he had achieved the
ecclesiastical dignity of a princely archbishopric. But among her
intimate equals the visit was disastrous. The Princes of the Blood
insisted upon receiving his call before they paid their court to him,
since he was travelling incognito. It was a point (to them) of grave
moment. The Queen rubbed it in with spirit. She would not let him pay
such a call. She told them that her brother “had other sights to see in
Paris and could put off seeing the Princes of the Blood.” The King stood
by during the quarrel, irresolute, upon the whole supporting his wife.
The King’s brothers for the moment supported her also; but the kernel of
the affair lay in her disregard of inherited tradition, in her contempt
for those fine shades of mutual influence and deference which to the
French are all important indications of authority, but which to her were
meaningless extravaganzas of parade. Chartres, during the progress of
what he thought an insult, she a piece of common sense, deliberately
left the Court, publicly showed himself in Paris, and was applauded for
his spirit.
This wilfulness, this picked quarrel, sprang from the same root as, and
was similar to, whatever other fevers disturbed her entry into her
twentieth year.
The Queen had conceived a violent affection for the Princesse de
Lamballe, a young woman of the Blood, but Piedmontese, the widow of a
debauchee—a simpering, faithful, stupid, sentimental and most
unfortunate young woman, often gushing in her joy, next, in grief,
wringing her enormous hands. It was an attachment almost hysterical and
subject to extreme fluctuations. The Queen had conceived a second
attachment, with the opening of this year 1775, for another woman, as
good-natured indeed, but more solid and more capable of intrigue than
Madame de Lamballe, the Comtesse de Polignac. In the empty society of
the one, in the full and babbling coterie of the other, Marie Antoinette
expended the greater part of her energy. Finding to hand, as it were,
the Guémenées (and Madame de Guémenée constitutionally fixed as
“Governess to the children of France”—children that did not exist), she
plunged also into the Guémenée set, and there she discovered, for the
first time in her young life, a powerful drug for the stimulation of
whatever in adventurous youth has been wounded by disappointment and
youth’s hot despair—gambling. The gambling took root quickly in this
girl who hated wine and had desired so much of life. It was large in
’75; in ’76 it was to be ruinous to her watched and doled allowance.
Meanwhile the tailors and the milliners and all the ruck of parasites
were taking advantage of the new reign to play extravagant experiments
in fashion, to build fantastic head-dresses and to load humanity with
comic feathers. She did not create such novelties, but she was willing
to follow them.
The young bloods, in one of those recurrent fits of Anglomania to which
the wealthy among the French are subject, must introduce horse-racing.
She passionately approved. It gave her gambling the familiarity or lack
of restraint which she was determined to breathe for the solution of her
ills; it gave her the feeling of crowds about her, of pulse and of the
flesh.
Young Artois, the youngest of the King’s brothers, because he was the
most vivacious of those nearest her, must be her constant companion.
Mercy noted his “shocking familiarity”; he feared that scandals would
arise.... They did.
Again, as the new reign advanced, her unpolitical and most unwise
concern for personalities showed more vividly than ever. Because the
ambassador in London was in her set she must take up his cause with a
sort of fury, when he was accused of abusing his position for the
purposes of commerce. He was acquitted, but, much more than the trial or
any of its incidents, the open and passionate attitude of the Queen
struck the society of the time. So in the very moment of the coronation
she again openly received Choiseul, though she knew that he could never
return to Court, that her mother and all Austria disapproved.
Much worse than all of these, the constant jar upon her nerves broke
down a certain decent reticence, the barrier of silence, which should,
always in a woman of her age, and doubly in a woman of her position, be
absolutely immovable. She publicly ridiculed the painful infirmity of
the King. Her sneers at his incapacity were repeated; they crept into
malicious, unprinted songs; she permitted herself similar confidences,
or rather publicities, in her correspondence; she wrote them with her
own hand, and there is little doubt that others besides those to whom
they were addressed saw that writing. He, poor man, went on painfully
with his duty, hour by hour in his councils, considering the realm,
distantly fond of her, but necessarily feeling in her presence that
mixture of timidity, generosity and shame, the secret of which was no
longer private to his wife and him, but, through her lack of elementary
discipline, spreading grotesquely abroad in an exaggerated and false
rumour to the world.
So much had been accomplished by her own character and destiny when a
full year had passed after the old King’s death. She had made the Crown
a subject of jest, her character suspect, her husband, that is, the
foundation of her own title, ridiculous, when the date had arrived in
the summer of ’75 for the solemn coronation of Louis at Rheims.
Mercy, with an inspiration sharper than that which diplomats commonly
enjoy, had suggested her coronation side by side with that of the King.
Such a ceremony might have retrieved much. Precedent was against it, but
after so very long an interval precedent was weak; at best it could but
have afforded a spiteful and small handle for the enmities which Marie
Antoinette had already aroused. She had but to insist, or rather only to
understand, and her fate would have halted. She was indifferent. The
miraculous moment when high ceremonial and the subtle effect of historic
time combined to impress and to transform the French nation, the moment
of the unction of the King, found her nothing more than the chief
spectator in the gallery of the Cathedral transept looking down upon all
that crowd of peers and officers whose position in the ceremony was
exactly fixed.
She had come in to Rheims the night before under a brilliant moon,
driving in her carriage as might any private lady. The “chic” of such an
entry pleased her. She had allowed the King to precede her by some days,
and whatever magic attached to the ritual descended upon him alone, and
left her unsupported for the future. Her letter to her mother, written
upon the morrow of the occasion, shows how little she knew what she had
missed. The Court returned to Versailles, the careless vigour of her
life was renewed, the thread of her exaggerated friendships and her
exaggerated repulsions was caught up again.
When her young sister-in-law was married a few weeks later to the heir
of Piedmont and Savoy, she did not conceal her relief at the departure
from her Court of this child, with whom, for some reason or another, she
could not hit it off. When Madame de Dillon, with her Irish beauty,
passed through the Court, that lady moved Marie Antoinette to yet
another violent friendship—luckily of short duration. As for the
Princesse de Lamballe, she had already revived for her the post of
Superintendente of the Queen’s Household (a post that had not existed
for thirty years), and later she insisted upon there being attached to
it the salary (which France imagined enormous) of £6000 a year.
It is of great interest to note that public dissipation or abandon of
this kind, glowing familiarities, long-lit and brilliant nights, an
ardent pursuit of what had become to her a very necessity of change—all,
in a word, that was beginning to fix her subjects’ eyes upon her
doubtfully, and not a little to offend the mass of the nobility around
her, all that was found in her insufficient to the niceties and balance
of the French temper, was easily excused by foreign opinion. Just that
something which separates the French from their neighbours was lacking
to the foreign observance of this foreign woman. Her carriage, which to
the French was a trifle theatrical, seemed to foreigners queenly; her
lively temper, which the French had begun to find forward, was for the
foreigner an added charm.
There is no need to recall the rhetoric of Burke, for Burke was not by
birth or training competent to judge; but Horace Walpole, who was
present that very summer at the Court of Versailles, and saw the Queen
in all her young active presence at her sister-in-law’s wedding-feast,
writes with something of sincerity, and, what is more, with something
for once of heart in his words. He thinks there never was so gracious or
so lovely a being.
One judgment I, at least, would rather have recovered than any of
theirs. It has not been communicated. I mean that of Doctor Johnson. For
Doctor Johnson some months later stood by the side of his young girl
friend, behind the balustrade at Fontainebleau, watching curiously with
his aged and imperfect eyes this young Queen at the public ceremony of
the Sunday Feast. The old, fat, wheezy man, who now seems to us England
incarnate, stood there in the midst of the public crowd behind the
railing, blocking its shuffling way as it defiled before royalty dining,
and took in all the scene. The impression upon a man of such philosophy
must have been very deep. I believe we have no record of that impression
remaining.[2]
Footnote 2:
The life of Doctor Johnson has become an object of such wide national
study that more than one reader may be acquainted with his judgment of
the scene. If it exists, it should be published to the advantage of
history.
Though Marie Antoinette’s carriage and her manner had founded of her so
beneficent a legend abroad and had begun in her new home so much of her
future disaster, with those who knew her most intimately and who were of
her own blood, with the Hapsburgs of Vienna, her conduct, certainly not
queenly, seemed not even tragic. They scolded sharply, and the Emperor,
her brother, crowned a series of violent notes by one so violent that
Maria Theresa kept it back. To her childlessness (which was for them a
fault in her), to her conduct (which her own family who had known her as
a child exaggerated at such a distance) was added the exasperation of
remembering that with some elementary caution she might have acted as
the agent of the allied Austrian Court whose daughter she was; they were
angered in Vienna to see that, instead of so acting, she wasted her
position in private spites and private choices.
In fine, when the Day of the Dead came round and the leaves of ’75 were
falling, she could look back from her twentieth birthday to her
accession, and the view was one of eighteen months of mental chaos
wherein one emotion rapidly succeeded another, each sought for the
purposes of distraction and oblivion, and of feeding in some sort of
firework way that appetite for life which Louis could not nourish with a
steady flame. With the next year further elements were to be added to
those existing elements of dissipation. The foundations of the future
which she had already levelled out were to be strengthened. The public
judgment of her was to become more apparent, and the legend which at
last destroyed her was to take a firmer root.
The year 1776, for ever famous in the general history of the world, was
the climax and the turning-point of this early exuberance and excess. In
its first days, during the hard winter which marked the turn of the
year, she had begun amusements which for the first time permitted her to
cross the barrier which divides the reproach of one’s intimates from
public scandal. Her play had grown from mere extravagant gambling to
dangerous indebtedness, and she had been bitten by the love of jewels,
especially of diamonds. In this year, too, the simple and somewhat empty
friendship which she still slightly bore to Madame de Lamballe was
finally replaced by more violent caprices; she began to associate with
the powerful Guémenées, with the gentle but subtle and intriguing
Countess of Polignac.
Her indiscretion rose continually. In February she was seen with the
Princesse de Lamballe whirling over the snow into Paris, without an
escort, as a private woman might, to the disgust and the hatred of the
crowd.
The exhilaration of the cold—for her who was from Vienna—the
exhilaration of her twentieth year, her love of merry domination over
the timid little tall companion, whom she was so soon to abandon, drove
her from audacity to audacity. Her sledges, which had been but a
domestic scandal at Versailles, dared to reach Sèvres, St. Cloud; they
crossed the river, because the hunting wood of Boulogne invited them.
Upon one fatal morning she traversed that last screen and shot through
Paris on her shining toy.
The sledge was daringly, impudently alone. There was no guard, no decent
covering for royalty, no dignity of pace or even of ornament; its pace
was a flash, and its high gilding a theatrical _décor_; mixing with that
flash and that gilding was the jangling of a hundred little bells.
The streets were all aghast at such a sight. Sèvres and the villages
round Versailles had stared, bewildered, to see a Queen go by in such a
fashion; but Paris was too great to be merely bewildered, and Paris grew
angry, as might an individual at a personal insult offered.
The next month saw her first reckless purchase of gems; she pledged her
name for £16,000, and acquired in exchange of that debt diamonds not
only expensive beyond the means of her purse, but unworthy of her rank
and of the traditions of her office.
To such follies she added her personal interference in the matter of
Turgot. That bright-eyed, narrow, intelligent, and most un-Christian man
had missed the problem ready to his hands. In time of war, with a good
army and a soldier behind him, he might have solved it; in a time of
luxury, misery, and peace he could not. In the very days when he was
propounding his theories of unfettered exchange and of direct taxation
for the salvation of the Monarchy, the harvest of ’75 had failed. In the
one exceptional moment of famine when interference with trade was
certainly necessary to French markets, his free trade doctrine was
imposed. A popular hatred rose against him, and he was hated not only by
the populace, who felt the practical effects of his economic idealism,
but by the rich handful who were still devout and who could not tolerate
his contempt for the Faith, by the corrupt who could not tolerate his
economy, and by the vivacious who could not tolerate his sobriety. His
rapid and fundamental reforms, moreover, were opposed by the Parlement
of Paris[3] as by a wall. They refused to register the edicts. He had
still great influence with the King, though hardly with any other
effective power in the State, and in the month of March the King in a
Bed of Justice compelled the Parlement to register Turgot’s decrees and
give them the force of law. It registered them; but none the less Turgot
was doomed.
Footnote 3:
It should be made clear, though it is elementary, that the Parlement
of Paris, by nature a supreme court of law, exercised also the
anomalous but traditional function of registrar of royal decrees. Nor
was a law a law until this body had consented to enroll it or had been
overcome by a grave, rare and solemn public ritual of the King’s
called “a Bed of Justice.”
Mercy, who saw very clearly that the man must go, but who also saw
clearly the extreme danger that the Queen ran in taking upon herself any
part in his going, did all that his influence could command to prevent
her interference. He spent his energy and his considerable persuasion in
vain. The one motive force and the only one that could persuade her to
public action had already stirred the Queen; she believed herself to
have received a personal affront; the Cabinet had recalled a favourite
in her set from the Embassy of St. James’s. The girl was determined upon
revenge, and because Turgot as Comptroller-General showed most
prominently in the Cabinet, it was upon Turgot that her wrath fell, or
rather it was Turgot falling from power whom she precipitated by her
final influence. Upon the 10th of May, Guines, whom the Cabinet had
recalled from London, was raised to a Duchy in a public note; by the
12th, Maurepas had told the Comptroller-General that his office was
vacant, and Marie Antoinette talked wildly of sending him to the
Bastille.
There was at this time in Paris a man called Necker, with whom history
would have little concern had not the accident of the Revolution later
thrown his undetermined features into the limelight. He was a product of
Geneva, a money-dealer therefore, and a Calvinist by birth and trade—in
no way by individual conviction, for his energies had long been directed
to the accumulation into his own hands of the wealth of others. His
reputation as a solid business man was therefore high, and he was very
rich; of moral reputation, as the Catholic French understand the term,
he had none.[4] His dealings with the treasury had brought his name
forward, and in a few months, under a different title, he replaced
Turgot at the head of the embarrassed finances of the country!...
Societies in dissolution do such things.
Footnote 4:
His vivacious and ugly daughter was to be a catch famous throughout
Europe. Years later Fersen—of all men!—was suggested to her. Pitt in
’85 had a bite at her ill-gotten dowry. Luckily for the girl, she
escaped him, but she married De Staël, became famous, wrote her lively
and didactic comments on the Revolution, grew uglier still, showed a
small black moustache, at last wore a turban and drove Napoleon to
despair.
His conception of reform was what one might expect from such a lineage.
He cooked the public accounts, flattered all to remain in power, was
hopelessly void of any plan, and, to meet the crisis, just borrowed: the
first of modern stock-jobbers to conduct a State, and the model to all
others. He was destined to become a sort of symbol of liberty ... and
therein he is an example to democracy as well as to money-changers.
To the signal folly of precipitating Turgot’s fall the Queen was content
to add further marks of excess. As though her purchases earlier in the
year had not been sufficient, she must buy bracelets now worth three
years of her income—bracelets, the news of which reached Vienna—and she
must give rein to every conceivable indulgence in the passion of
gambling. All the world talked of it, and all that summer, as the
influence of her new friends rose and as her careless excitement reached
its limit, the fever grew.
At Marly, during the summer visit of the Court, later in the year at
Fontainebleau, she carried on the scandal. One autumn night and day in
this last place bankers from Paris kept the faro tables open for
thirty-six hours; they were the hours before her birthday, and the Mass
of All Saints was sung to a Court pale and crumpled with the lack of
sleep. The morrow, her twenty-first birthday, was sour with the memory
of the reproach against that debauch. The Court returned for the winter
to Versailles, and Maria Theresa determined that it was time for the
Queen’s brother, the Emperor Joseph, to make the journey he had long
promised, and to stem these rapids which threatened to become a cataract
in which everything might be swept away. Her scolding letters to her
daughter were accompanied by active plans for the journey of her son.
She expected, and not without reason, that that son’s advent would
change all, for she knew that he would have the direct mission to
persuade Louis to an operation, to relieve the imperfect marriage of the
burden that pressed upon it, and to remove from the life of that young
wife the intolerable nervous oppression whence all this increasing
violence proceeded.
It is to the Emperor’s journey, therefore, that all one’s attention
should be directed as one reads her life from the closing days of 1776
to his appearance in Paris, after repeated delays, in the spring of the
following year.
Meanwhile that other spirit whose action was to come in upon her life,
America, was born. The week that had seen Turgot’s dismissal had seen
passed in Philadelphia the Pennsylvania Resolution of Separation from
the English Crown, and in the keener intellectual life of Virginia it
had seen produced upon the same day the first statement of those general
principles which the Colonies had drawn from Rousseau and upon which
were to be based, for whatever good or evil fortunes still attended it,
the democracy of our time. The revolt grew from those skirmishes of ’75
that had begun a Civil War to the Separatist decisions of ’76; the
strain upon England’s tenure of her empire increased, and Vergennes all
the while watched closely, hoping from that embarrassment to find at one
moment or another the opportunity for relieving his country from the
permanent threat of an English war.
It was a difficult and a perilous game. A British success might be, or
rather would be, followed by swift vengeance against the embarrassed and
fettered Crown of France. The Cabinet of Versailles would need allies
against what was believed to be an all-powerful navy, and for eighteen
months Vergennes was working to obtain these allies, in spite of the
terror which the British fleet inspired. This policy, whose ultimate
results were to be so considerable and so unexpected, took a new shape
upon a certain day which should perhaps be more memorable in the history
of the United States than any other. I mean the 28th of November of this
year 1776.
Early that morning, the weather being clear and the wind southerly, a
pilot from the rocks of Belle Isle had made out three ships in the
offing, but they were hull-down; later, he saw one bearing a strange,
quite unknown flag. He sailed towards it. The colours were those of the
new Republic, and the stars and stripes flew above a sloop of war that
carried Franklin; she had with her two English prizes for companions.
Franklin landed. Within three weeks he was in Paris, and by the first
week of the New Year he was at Passy in the suburbs, the guest of
Chaumont, from whose great house and wide park proceeded the careful
intrigue by which the Thirteen States were finally established in their
Independence.
All who can pretend to history have respect for Vergennes, but that
respect is far heightened by the close reading of what followed.
Alone of the European States Great Britain could not be balanced but
could balance. Great Britain was secure among them and their insecurity.
Great Britain alone in her growing monopoly of industry and in her
impregnable self-sufficiency, economic and military, could not be pinned
down into a diplomatic system; she alone could afford to scorn alliance
and could in a moment change from friend to foe and strike at any
exposed and vulnerable part of the European group—especially at a
maritime neighbour. The British army maintained a proved excellence of a
hundred years; it was particularly famous for its endurance; its records
of capitulation were rarer than those of any other; it could afford to
be small; its infantry stood fire brutally and could charge after losses
that would have been fatal to its rivals; it had for framework the
squires and the yeomen of solid country-sides, for material the still
manly remains of a peasantry in the English shires, the Highlands, whose
native language, diet, and race were at that time corrupted by nothing
more alien than a little garrison. Finally, there was then available to
the full for purposes of war the vigour of an as yet unruined and not
yet wholly alienated Ireland.
A navy, adequate in numbers, but no drain upon the productive power of
the nation, gave mobility to this force, the soil of these Islands fed
the people upon it, and meanwhile an industry, textile and metallic,
such as no other country dreamed of, supplied an increasing and
overflowing resource for war. It is but a hundred and thirty years since
things were thus. A vast change has passed, and it is difficult for the
modern student, perplexed and anxious for the future of his country, to
enter into the international policy of his fathers; yet must he grasp it
if he is to understand what a revolution was effected by the issue of
the American War; for it is probable that when the first complete survey
of modern Europe is taken, the separation of the American colonies will
establish a fixed date which marks not only the division between the
monarchical and the bureaucratic, the old and the new Europe, but also,
in our province, the division between what had been England and what
later came to be called “the Empire”—with the destinies befitting such a
title and the colonies to which it is attached.
Vergennes saw that this England, free upon the flank of his embarrassed
country, was now suddenly engaged in the most entangling of nets, an
unpopular and distant civil war. He knew that with a Protestant
population of her own blood (at that time the States were in philosophy
wholly Protestant, in tradition entirely English) would only be attacked
by the governing families with the utmost reluctance. There was no fear
of extreme rigours, or of sharp, cruel, and decisive depression; there
was sympathy and relationship on both sides. Therefore the war would
drag.
Vergennes had seen, two years before, the little English garrison
permitting the inhabitants to arm and drill without interference; he
knew that opinion in England was divided upon the rebellion. His whole
attention was concentrated upon the prolongation of that struggle and
upon postponing to the last the intervention of France. His attention,
so given, was successful, and he secured his object.
At first and for as long as might be he would support, unseen, the
weaker of the combatants. He received Franklin, though privately; he
refused ships or a declaration of war. Arms and ammunition he liberally
supplied—but he did so through a private and civilian person, whom he
vigorously denounced in public, who had to go through the form of
payment from the United States, as might any other dealer, and who was
very nearly compelled to go through the form of receiving heavy
punishment as well. The private firm so chosen was “_Roderigo Hortalez
et Cie_”; the modern cheat of anonymity in commerce had begun, and
_Roderigo Hortalez_ was, in reality, that same shifty, witty,
courageous, and unsatisfied man who had already played upon Versailles
and Vienna and whose pen was later to deliver so deep a thrust at the
Monarchy. Caron, or, to call him by the title of nobility he had
purchased, “De Beaumarchais.”
* * * * *
While Vergennes was acting thus, every effort was being made at Vienna
to advance the journey of the Emperor: postponed from January to
February, from February to March, that journey was at last undertaken,
and with the first days of April 1777 Joseph was present upon French
soil, and driving down the Brussels road towards Paris.
[Illustration:
THE EMPEROR JOSEPH II
FROM THE TAPESTRY PORTRAIT WOVEN FOR MARIE ANTOINETTE
AND RECENTLY RESTORED TO VERSAILLES
]
But all that while, in spite of his advent, the rush of the Court had
increased, and to the twenty other fashions and excitements of the
moment one more had been added—enlistment for America. The youngster,
who was typical of all that wealthy youth, not yet sobered or falsified
by fame, La Fayette, was determined to go; and almost as a pastime,
though it was a generous and an enthusiastic one, the American
Revolution was the theme of the Court in general. It became the theme of
the Polignac clique in particular, a theme sometimes rivalling the high
interest of the cards, or lending an added splendour to fantastic
head-dress and to incongruous jewels.
And the Queen meanwhile, quite lost, pushed the pace of all the throng
about her, despairing of any remedy to that evil which her brother was
posting to reform.
If Fersen had been there!
* * * * *
Upon Friday evening, the 18th of April, the Emperor Joseph drove past
the barrier of St. Denis and entered Paris. It was already dark, but the
stoic was in time for dinner. He was in strict incognito, that he might
be the more admired, and had given out the arrival of “Count
Falkenstein” to all the world. He slept in the humblest way at his
Embassy; he had hired two plain rooms in Versailles by letter—at a hotel
called “the Hotel of the Just,” presumably Huguenot; next day he paraded
as The Early Riser and was off to Versailles before the gentry were out
of bed: the whole thing was as theatrical as could be. He wished to meet
his sister alone—but he let everybody know it. He came up to her room by
a private stair—and spoke of it as an act of simplicity and virtue. The
man was of the kind to whom—most unhappily for them and their
founder—Marcus Aurelius provides a model. His certitudes were in words
or negations; his pride in things facile and dry; his judgments, vapid,
determined, superficial, and false—in a manner Prussian without the
Prussian minuteness; in a manner French, but with none of the French
clear depth and breadth. Of hearty Germany he had nothing; and among all
the instruments of action designed in Gaul he could choose out only one,
the trick of sharp command, which the accident of despotic power
permitted him to use over a hotch-potch of cities and tongues.
The task before him, which was the re-establishment at Versailles of the
interests of Austria, comprised two parts: first, he must counsel or
compel the Queen—who stood for Austria at Versailles—to such conduct and
dignity as would permit her to exercise permanent political power;
secondly, and much more important, he must force the King to that
operation from which he so shrank and yet by which alone the succession
of the Crown through Marie Antoinette could be assured.
For the first of these tasks, the reform of his sister’s conduct,
Joseph’s empty character, without humour and without religion, was
wholly insufficient—nay, it provoked the opposite of its intention. The
obvious truth of his harsh criticism moved the Queen, but his bad
manners, his public rebuke, offended her more. His precise (and
written!) instructions forced upon her one irksome and priggish month of
affected rigidity; she did but react with the more violence from the
absurd restraint.
With the second and more positive task he was more fortunate. His brutal
questions, his direct affirmation and counsel, his precise instructions,
all conveyed in the sergeant-major manner which is of such effect upon
the doubtful or the lethargic, accomplished their end. Louis inclined to
the advice which had for now three years urged medical interference; he
submitted to an operation, and the principal question at issue for two
great States was in this secret manner accomplished: it was the one
success, the only one, of Joseph’s tactless and unwise career. It was of
the highest consequence to him and his house and all Europe; for, his
counsels once obeyed, the maternity of Marie Antoinette was ultimately
sure. When the Queen should have borne a child there could but follow
the rage of disappointed successors, a secure and increasing influence
upon her part over her husband, through this the antagonism of the
Monarchy to the nation, and at last the Revolution and all its wars.
The reader may inquire the precise date of so momentous a detail. It is
impossible to fix it until (if it still exist) the document once in the
hands of Lassone be published; but we can fix limits within which the
operation must have taken place. It must have been within that summer of
1777 in one of three months, June, July, or August; probably in late
August or the very beginning of September. It was certainly later than
the 14th of May, when, according to Mercy, the private interviews upon
the matter between Joseph and Louis were still unfinished. Marie
Antoinette’s letter of June 16th makes it probably later than that date.
A phrase of Maria Theresa’s on the 31st of July, referring to news of
the 15th (the last news from Mercy), makes it possible that she thought
all accomplished by 15th of July. A phrase of Mercy’s on the 15th of
August makes it more probable still. By the 10th of September a phrase
used by Marie Antoinette in her correspondence with Maria Theresa makes
it certain.[5]
Footnote 5:
See Appendix A.
Compared with this capital consequence of his journey the rest of
Joseph’s actions, opinions, and posings in France are indeed of slight
importance. His affectation of retirement and simplicity, his common
cabs, his perpetual appearance in public and as perpetual pretence of
complaint at his popularity are the tedious trappings of such men. In
some things he was real enough; in his acute annoyance with the Queen’s
set, for instance—especially with Madame de Guémenée, and her late
hours, high play and familiar, disrespectful tones. He was sincere, too,
in his astounding superficiality of judgment; he was keen on science,
eager for the Academies, and in that scientific world of Paris which
boasted Lavoisier and the immortal Lamarck discovered that “when one
looks close, nothing profound or useful is being done.”
At the end of May he left for a tour in the French provinces. His
ineptitudes continue. He has left notes of his opinions for us to enjoy.
He judges the army, and condemns it—all except the pipe-clay and white
facings of the Artois Regiment. That pleased him. He saw nothing of the
cannon which were to break Austria and capture a woman of his house for
Napoleon. He judges the navy after a minute attention, and finds it—on
the eve of the American War!—thoroughly bad. One thing he does note
clearly, that Provence, the King’s brother, has been seen going through
France in state, as though sure of the succession. After what had passed
at Versailles, such expectations on the part of Louis XVI.’s brother
must have bred in Joseph a mixture of anxiety and amusement.
He returned to Vienna, and began to address himself to his next failure
in policy and judgment—he coveted Bavaria. The death of the Elector of
Bavaria would raise the issue of his succession. That death was
approaching, and Joseph began to intrigue through Mercy, through his
mother, and as best he could through his sister, for the succession to
the Duchy and for the support of France against Prussia in his outworn,
out-dated ambition. While he still played with such toys, much larger
forces were ready to enter the scene, and changes that would make the
little balances of German States forgotten; for as that summer of 1777
heightened, dry, intensely hot, and as all the air of the life around
Versailles was cleared by the new intimate relations of the Queen and
her husband; as the chief domestic problem of the reign was resolved, as
it became increasingly certain that the royal marriage would soon be a
true marriage and the way to the succession secure, there had come also
the certitude of war with England in the matter of the American
colonies.
It is upon this latter certitude that attention must now be fixed,
before one can turn to the tardy accomplishment of the Queen’s hopes for
an heir. The foreign policy of that moment is essential to a
comprehension of her fate, for upon the unexpected turn of that
unexpected conflict with Great Britain was to depend the fatal respite
which destiny granted to the French Monarchy: a respite of years, during
whose short progress the financial tangle became hopeless, the Queen’s
ill-repute fixed, and the Crown’s last cover of ceremony destroyed.
I say there had come a certitude of war with England.
Of three things one: either England would reduce the rebels; or, having
failed so to reduce them, she would compromise with them for the
maintenance of at least a nominal sovereignty; or, she would wholly fail
and would be compelled wholly to retire. In the first case it must be
her immediate business to attack the French Government whose secret aid
had alone made the prolongation of rebellion possible; in the second
case, with still more security and a still more confident power, she
could attack an enemy which, because it had not dared openly to help her
foes, had earned their contempt and lost its own self-confidence. In the
third case she would find herself free from all embarrassment and at
liberty to destroy a rival marine, whose inferiority was incontestable
but whose presence had been sufficient to embarrass her complete control
of the North Atlantic and to sustain—however disingenuously—her
rebellious subjects.
In any one of these three issues a war with England must come. But these
three issues had not an equal chance of achievement. A complete victory
of the British troops, probable as it was, could hardly result in a
permanent military occupation of a vast district, English in blood and
speaking the English tongue. A complete defeat of British regulars at
the hands of the varied and uncertain minority of colonists, and the
acknowledgment of American independence by a Britain unembarrassed in
Europe, was an absurdity conceivable only to such enthusiastic boys as
was then the young La Fayette, to such wholly unpractical minds as that
of Turgot, or to popular journalists of the type which then, as to-day,
are uninstructed whether in historical or in military affairs.
The middle issue was so much the more probable as to appear a calculable
thing: the troops of George III. would determine the campaign, but the
settlement following the expensive success of the British army would be
a compromise whereby the colonies should be free to administer their own
affairs, should be bound in some loose way to Great Britain, and should
stand benevolently neutral towards, if not in part supporters of, her
position in Europe.
The formula which guides a commercial State such as Britain in its
colonial wars has long been familiar to its rivals; it is as simple as
it is wise. Though we give it the epithet of “generous” and speak of the
“granting of self-government,” while enemies will call it, with equal
inaccuracy, “a capitulation” followed by “an alliance,” the nature and
purpose of such compromises are those of a fixed policy and one upon
whose unalterable data the British Empire has been built up.
It was in the nature of things that the British Government in this
summer of ’77 should first seek to master the Americans in the field,
next compromise with the defeated colonials, set them up as a nation
nominally dependent, really allied, and so find itself free in Europe
for the great duel with France. At Versailles Vergennes prepared not
attack but resistance, and pulled with an accurate proportion of effort
all the strings that should delay Great Britain, on the one hand, and,
on the other, unite into one body of resistance against her the Atlantic
seaboard of Europe and the principal navies of the Continent—that is,
the Powers of France and the Peninsula; the admiralties of Versailles,
Lisbon and Madrid.
As the Emperor Joseph’s carriage rolled westward along the main road of
Brittany, approaching the gates of Brest, Vergennes was signing for
despatch to the Spanish Court that note of his which inaugurated the
active part of his plan of defence against England. Precisely a week
later, Burgoyne and his forces started southward from Canada upon what
should have been the decisive march of the British campaign in America.
A consideration of the map will at once convince the reader, first, that
Great Britain was in a position suitable to immediate victory, and
secondly, that the military advisers of her Government had formed the
best possible plan for its rapid accomplishment.
What was the military object of the war? The control of a seaboard: a
seaboard stretching indeed through fifteen degrees of latitude and
extending in its contour over far more than fifteen hundred miles, but a
seaboard only. Behind it lay districts which for military purposes did
not exist—untouched, trackless, resourceless. The life of the colonies,
especially their life during the strain of a war, flowed through the
ports.
Again, this band of territory ran from a long southern extremity, whose
climate was unsuited to active work by Europeans, through a middle
temperate interval to another extremity of winter fogs and rigorous
winter cold. A continental climate rendered the contrast of North and
South less noticeable, for the warm continental summer embraced it all,
and the cold continental winter penetrated far south; but that contrast
between the two halves of that seaboard was sufficient to afford a line
of social and political cleavage already apparent in the eighteenth
century and destined in the nineteenth to occasion a great domestic war.
Again, there lay behind this seaboard, at a distance nowhere greater
than three hundred miles nor anywhere much less than two, that valley of
the St. Lawrence which Great Britain firmly held; her tenure was secure
in the diversity of its race, religion and language from those of the
rebels and in the unity which the admirable communications of its great
waterway confirmed.
Here then was a line already wholly held, the St. Lawrence, and parallel
to it a line already partially held, and always at the mercy of the
British fleet—the ports of the sea-coast. Up and down the belt of land
between those parallel lines went the scattered bands of the rebels.
Even their organised armies were loosely co-ordinated in action and
expanded or diminished with the season.
The obvious strategy for the British was to cut that intervening belt in
a permanent fashion by establishing a line from the St. Lawrence to the
sea, so to separate for good the forces of their opponents and then to
deal with them in detail and at leisure.
An accident of topography afforded to this simple problem an obvious
key: just down that dividing-line, which separates the northern climate
and the Puritan type of colony from the rest, a sheaf of natural ways
leads from the coast to the valley of the St. Lawrence, and of these the
plainest and by far the best is the continuous and direct depression
which is afforded by the long, straight valley of the Hudson and
continued in one easy line along the depression marked by Lakes George
and Champlain. There is not upon all that march one transverse crest of
land to be defended nor one position capable of natural defence, and in
its whole extent water-carriage is available to an army save upon the
very narrow water-shed where (according to the amount and weight of
supplies) two—or at most three—days must be devoted to a land portage.
But even here, between the foot of Lake George and the Upper Hudson,
existed then what is rare even to-day in the New World, a road passable
to guns.
Under such conditions, even had the rebellion been universal and
homogeneous, the strategy imposed was evident. The sea was England’s;
the English forces had but to land in force, to occupy one or more of
the ports at the outlet of these ways leading to the valley of the St.
Lawrence, and simultaneously to march down from that valley to the sea.
They would thus cut the rebellion in half; the cut so made could easily
be permanently held, and the English henceforth could operate at their
choice and in increasing numbers from any point of the coast against
either section of a divided enemy.
I say this was the obvious plan even had the rebellion been homogeneous
or universal; but it was neither—and nowhere was it weaker or more
divided against itself than on this very line of cleavage. It was
precisely in the valley of the Hudson and at its mouth that the British
could count upon the greatest hesitation on the part of their opponents
and upon most support, sometimes ardent support, on the part of their
friends. New York was thoroughly in the Royal power, and the plan of
marching from the St. Lawrence down to that harbour seemed certain to
conclude the campaign. Leaving such garrison as New York required, Howe
sailed with 20,000 men in this opening of the summer of 1777 to attack
some one of the harbours; after a cruise of some hesitation he sailed up
the Delaware and landed to march on the rebel source of supply,
Philadelphia. At the same moment Burgoyne set out upon his march from
the St. Lawrence valley to the sea.
Each was easily successful. Washington, covering Philadelphia from a
position along the Brandywine, was completely defeated. Philadelphia was
in British hands before the close of September; an attempt at relief was
crushed in the suburbs within a week. As for Burgoyne, his force, though
it amounted to less than a division, was equally at ease. He swept
easily down Lake Champlain: the American irregulars abandoned the
isthmus and their positions near Ticonderoga, which were militarily
identical with that pass. He pursued the enemy to the extremity of the
water, and on southward up the valley, towards the water-shed, defeating
every rally and confident of immediate success.
It was but early in July, and he had already accomplished half his
route, and could boast the capture of over a hundred cannon—mainly of
French casting.
All had gone well. The news reaching London, reached Paris and Madrid by
the mouths of English Ministers and Envoys, whose tone was now of an
increasing firmness, and who, in the immediate prospect of success,
began to ask in plain terms how matters stood between France and Spain,
and whether these two Bourbon Crowns were prepared for open war.
Vergennes was in an agony of writing, of secrecy and of defence, urging
Spain to draw secretly close to France that both might stand ready for
the inevitable blow which England would deliver when the colonies were
once subdued.
What followed was Burgoyne’s woodland march of a few miles across the
portage from the lakes to the Hudson.
The cause of that march’s amazing delay, and of the disaster consequent
upon such delay, will never be fully explained; because, although not a
few acquainted with European roads and European discipline and arms are
also acquainted (as is the present writer) with the un-made country
traversed by that force, yet there was no contemporary who, by a full
double experience of American and European conditions, could present in
his account the American advantage in such a country at that time and
the corresponding difficulties of European troops. From Fort Anne, where
the last American force had been scattered, to Fort Edward, where the
Hudson is reached, is one day’s easy walking. It took Burgoyne’s army
twenty-one. I have neither space nor knowledge to say why: German
slowness (half the army was German), the painful construction of
causeways, officers (one may suppose) drinking in their tents, a vast
train, an excess of guns, a fancied leisure—all combined to protract the
delay. The month of July was at an end when the British reached the
river, and, having reached it, the men were on fatigue duty day after
day bringing in the guns and supplies that had come by water to the
extremity of Lake George.
In this way August was wasted, and an attempt to raid draught cattle a
few miles to the south-east at Bennington in Vermont was, in spite of
the active loyalty or treason of many colonists, defeated and
destroyed—a disaster due to the foreign character, the small number
employed, and the dilatory marching of the troops so detached. It was
mid-September before the army crossed the Hudson to its western bank,
where a small auxiliary force approaching from the Mohawk valley was to
have joined it. That force failed to effect a junction. All were
bewildered, and now a heavy rain began to soften the green ways and to
swallow the wheels of the guns. Burgoyne reached no further south than
to the site of a drawn struggle before the mouth of the Mohawk. And
already the American irregulars, on hearing of the British difficulties,
had gathered and grown in number; they were at last near double the
invading force, and September was ending. The woods were full of colour
as Burgoyne’s little army fell back—but a few miles, yet back; an
irresolution was upon it, because advance was no longer possible, and
yet a full retreat would mean the failure of all the large plan of
England. There was a rally, a success, a failure, and the loss of guns.
With October they were beneath the heights of Saratoga. Certain supplies
attempted to reach them by crossing the river; the far bank was found to
be held by the increasing forces of the rebellion.
It was determined to abandon the effort and to retire—at last, but too
late. The road to the lakes was blocked; more guns were lost; the enemy
were gathering and still gathering, a random farmer militia whom such an
entanglement tempted: they were soon four to one. An attempt at relief
by the force down river from New York had failed. On the 12th of
October, a Sabbath, the harassed army reposed. On the 13th, a Monday,
Burgoyne ordered an exact return of forces, forage, and supply; some
five thousand were to be found, but not four thousand men could stand to
roll-call armed; not two thousand of these were British; perhaps a
week’s supply remained; of all his park, thirty-five pieces alone were
left to him. He called a council, to which every officer above the rank
of lieutenant was summoned, and that afternoon the proposals to treat
were drawn up and despatched; by ten, Gates, in command of the American
force, had sent in his reply. Tuesday and Wednesday were taken up in the
terms of an honourable surrender—not exactly observed. On Thursday the
16th these terms were signed, and on that day, that repeated day the
16th of October, the keystone of the British plan in North America had
crumbled, and the strong arch of a wise strategy was ruined.
It was but a small force that surrendered in those lonely hills to a
herd of irregulars. The causes of the failure were many, tedious,
gradual, and therefore obscure; but the effect was solemn and of
swelling volume. It roused the colonies; it slowly echoed across the
Atlantic; it changed the face of Europe.
The French Court, at the moment of that surrender in the woods three
thousand miles away, sat at Fontainebleau decided upon pleasure.
Goltz, watching all things there for the King of Prussia his master,
wrote (on that very day, the 16th of October!) that the French had let
their moment slip: England was now secure, he thought—for one of the
great weaknesses of Prussia is that, like self-made men, she has no
instinct for fate.
Florida Blanca (upon the very day that Burgoyne’s troops piled arms) was
writing from Madrid to Vergennes that “the two Courts” (of France and
Spain) “should do all to avoid cause of complaint on the part of Great
Britain at such a time.”
Vergennes himself, gloomily alone amid the foolish noise of
Fontainebleau, in the sweat of late hours and gaming, thus abandoned by
Spain and seeing his hopes of a Spanish alliance going down, wrote (on
that same 16th of October, the day that Burgoyne’s troops piled arms!):
“The Ministers of England think her the mistress of the world.... My
patience has been hard tried ... true, the two (Bourbon) Crowns must go
warily.... I hope the constraint may end, but I have no wish for war....
I only ask that England shall not compel us to do what she dares not do
herself, that is, to treat these Americans as pirates and outlaws.”
In such a mood of despondence and of anxiety the French Foreign Office
awaited the first blow England might choose to deliver; in such a mood
of reluctance and fear Spain refused to declare herself on the side of
the French should England choose to strike; and in such a tension
Western Europe stood for one week, another, and a third, when, early in
November, came the first rumours of the truth. How they came it is
impossible to determine. They came before known or common methods could
have brought them; they came before true news, like a shadow or a
presage. On the 7th of November Vergennes had written to Noailles of a
hint of some English defeat, “not too much to be trusted.” On the 15th
he was wondering at the insistence of the English Ministers upon their
Pennsylvanian successes, at the English silence upon the Hudson march.
As the month wore on, as the English insistence grew gentler, the
English silence more profound, Vergennes determined his final policy;
but even as he was drawing up his memorandum in favour of recognition to
be granted to, and of alliance to be concluded with, the United States,
on the 4th of December, and before this document was signed, full news
came and all was known.[6] The 4th of December is a day propitious for
arms; it is the gunners’ festival.
Footnote 6:
It is important to remember that Vergennes’ report in favour of
recognising the United States was drawn up _before_, signed _after_,
the news of Saratoga had reached Versailles.
The issue was not long in doubt. Upon the 5th the story and consequence
of Saratoga were drawn up and despatched on every side. Upon the 6th the
fateful document calling the American delegates to an audience with
Louis was submitted to that King, and he wrote in his little sloping
hand at the foot of it that word “_approuvé_,” which you may still read.
Upon the 8th, Franklin at Passy drafted, Deane, Lee, and he also
_signed_, their memorable acceptance. The days that followed, to the end
of ’77 and beyond it, were occupied in nothing more than the
confirmation of this revolution in policy, and it was certain that by
the New Year the French Crown would support the Rebellion in arms.
* * * * *
Such were the three years in which the seeds of the Queen’s tragedy were
sown: they were sown deep. The stock of her disaster was established in
a vigorous soil; but during the silent period of its growth, before the
plant had come to its evil maturity, a few deceitful years were still to
hide from her the sequence of her fate. For the two glories of life were
upon her—victory and the birth of children.
In common with all her Court the Queen could now, in the hale winter of
’77-’78, imagine herself upon the threshold of a new and fruitful life.
Her chief anxiety was now dispelled, for she might await securely the
advent of an heir. Her vivacity and her distractions seemed now as
harmless as her habit of changing pleasures was now fixed; her casual
but active excursions into public affairs had now in her husband’s eyes
an excuse or motive they formerly had lacked, and her political
interference, though utterly without plan, was even destined to achieve
for a moment a peculiar, if deceptive, success.
This period of her life ends with a scene which the reader may well
retain, for it sums up the change; a scene which forms the happy
conclusion of so much unrest and the introduction to a brief, a most
uncertain, but—while it lasted—an enlarged and a conquering time.
The new year had come. The winter festivities of early ’78 were at their
height awaiting their end at the approaching carnival. It was the 21st
of January—a date thrice of great moment to the French people—and the
Queen was holding a ball (characteristically hers) in the palace. There
was a fuller life that evening, in the glare of a thousand candles, than
had yet been known, a more continuous and a more vivacious noise of
laughter and of music. Paris had come more largely than usual; there
were many strangers, and the air seemed full of an exultant
conciliation. Upon this joy and movement there fell a sudden silence; it
was a silence the Queen well comprehended and had expected too, for
Provence, coming straight from the Council, had entered the room and had
given her the message she awaited. The message was repeated, whispers
first, then louder and more eager questions and replies were everywhere
heard; voices rose louder: young Artois openly cheered.
The English ambassador had turned at the unusual scene and knew its
meaning; he despatched to his Government that night the news that the
Independence of the United States had been recognised and orders to the
French navy signed.
* * * * *
What followed may be briefly told. In somewhat over a fortnight the
treaty of recognition and of alliance with the new Republic was
concluded. The approaching affair with England began to equal, very soon
it wholly surpassed, in interest and peril the petty Bavarian quarrel,
and though war was not formally declared, French ships were in February
already attacked by English. In mid-March the treaty was notified by the
French ambassador in London to the Prime Minister of England;
forty-eight hours later Lord Stormont at Versailles had demanded and
received his papers. A month of preparation passed.
At last, upon Easter Sunday (the 19th of April in that year) two
couriers riding crossed each other at the royal gate of Versailles—the
one reaching, the other leaving, the palace. He that drew rein and was
ending his journey bore great news: D’Estaing had sailed from Toulon
with twenty ships of the fine, and the campaign was opened. He that set
spurs and was but just beginning his post bore great news also, for he
had upon him that letter (it is still preserved) in which Marie
Antoinette told her mother that now she was certainly with child.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER VII
_THE CHILDREN_
_Easter Sunday, April 19, 1778, to Monday, October 22, 1781_
THE expectation of an heir, the Queen’s ascendency over her husband, the
promise of adventurous war, proceeded with the year. Meanwhile the
little business of Bavaria somewhat marred the hopes of the now renewed
and invigorated Monarchy. It is a business history should make little
of; hardly a combat—rather a diplomatic rupture soon arranged. It
covered the year exactly—it was settled with the close of it; but it had
its significance in the Queen’s life, _for her political action in it
confirmed and extended the popular idea that Marie Antoinette was
treasonable to French interests in the department of foreign affairs_.
The most apparent thing of that moment was the new certitude and
strength of the Queen now that she was to be a mother. Her love of
change became less frivolous, more mixed with character; her old
passionate friendships, her appetite for colour of every kind—in jewels,
in fantasies, in voices—took on some depth and permanence. Even her
interference with public affairs was no longer the mere whim that had
been the bane of Turgot: it had objects; those objects were pursued,
though they were personal and unwise. Unfortunately her mother and Mercy
persuaded her, just as her strength appeared, not to the aggrandisement
of her husband’s throne, but to the mere fending off of Prussia from
Maria Theresa’s land in the Bavarian quarrel. There arose concerning her
action a swarm of whispers, voices not yet of moment, though numerous in
the taverns and clear at Court.
[Illustration:
MARIE ANTOINETTE
FROM THE PRINCIPAL BUST AT VERSAILLES
]
The Elector of Bavaria had died while Versailles and all the Court were
in the height of their absorption in the American Rebellion; just in
that last December which had been full of the first active approach of
Vergennes towards the American envoys. The passing of the Electorate to
another branch of the family, and that branch childless, or rather
lacking direct legitimate issue, threw the musty anarchy of German
archives open to the lawyers; they were rummaged, and a dust arose. The
various fragments out of which the old Duchy and the newer Electorate
were pieced together found claimants everywhere, and the two heads of
antagonism were necessarily Vienna and Berlin: Berlin, which would
support the heir to the old Duchy—at a price; Vienna, which would
protect the reigning Elector for the reversion—on doubtful pleas of
inheritance—to some half of the mosaic over which he ruled.
There was here no plain conscience of civilised right against a northern
and blundering atheism such as had earlier supported the defence of
Maria Theresa against the too successful cynicism of Frederick the
Great. The ambitions of Joseph were the ambitions of a philosopher; they
were at least as empty and by no means as thorough as the soldierly
ambitions of his opponent the King of Prussia: the injury was mutual,
the contempt of justice equal, for Joseph was a pupil of Frederick’s in
wrong-doing. To each, however, the complex little territorial quarrel
seemed of secular magnitude. Maria Theresa was maddened with anxiety,
and wrote, so maddened, despairing appeals to her daughter at
Versailles. Mercy moved all his persuasion to persuade the intervention
of France. Vergennes as resolutely refused to be involved. England was
approaching Austria, to the detriment, it was hoped, of the Bourbons,
the whole weight of diplomatic thought was at work, and Europe was
warned and threatened with incredible futures as one or the other of the
two enemies armed for the acquisition of a titular sovereignty over the
tortuous and overlapping boundaries of a feudal ruin. Such were the
petty concerns of statesmen and even of demagogues in a year when the
young men who were to fight at Valmy were already boys. The politicians
wrangled over the Bavarian succession as we to-day wrangle over colonial
things, imagining them to contain the future fate of Europe.
The Queen at first did little. Mercy complained of her detachment. She
was occupied in the greater matter of her maternity, passing all the
time of the first leaves and the early summer rains in quietude at
Marly; she would have no Court about her, and when she wrote to Maria
Theresa it was perpetually of the child. That seclusion and that hope so
much attached to her the new affections and the new pride of Louis that
when at last she spoke to him, and spoke with increasing violence, for
her family and for Vienna, she largely accomplished her aim. She did not
intend to involve the Foreign Office—Vergennes was apparently
immovable—but so great was now her influence with Louis that by autumn
she did obtain a tardy intervention, and until she obtained it she
showed in every way her determination to be heard. The first acts of war
in July moved her to countermand a feast at Trianon; during August she
frequently disturbed the Council by her presence. In September she put
forward an uncertain proposal for mediation. It was refused, and her
anger added to the difficulties of the French Crown. But she did
obtain—the forgotten act was to re-arise, enormous, at her scaffold—she
did obtain a subsidy. Treaty demanded it: it had been refused: the whole
duty of the Bourbon Crown was to watch finance—yet fifteen million went
to Austria. The taverns made it a whole convoy of gold; there were songs
against the Queen, accusing her of “paying out French gold.” Older and
worse stories about her were revived. The printed obscenities from
London and Amsterdam began to flow. The set at Court which had called
her openly “the Austrian” before her accession, and since her accession
had in secret still so called her, passed on the term to the street, and
the nickname was common in Paris before the end of the year.
All these things she had forgotten before the winter closed upon her and
her hour approached. They were indeed little things, seedlings. Much
greater was the coming of an heir—and Fersen’s return.
* * * * *
He had come back late in August. The moment she had seen him, with his
tall, upstanding gait and serious eyes, she came forward and reminded
him (and those about her) of his old acquaintance—he was a friend. The
lad was still quite young; here was she now a woman, and the effect of
four years, changing her so greatly in body had less changed him in
body; it had less changed her in heart. For as the days fell shorter and
autumn lapsed into winter, his rare and brief notes betray the growing
charm of the woman who perpetually remembered him. All through the
months of the cold, through the time of her approaching childbirth, and
through the gaieties of the new year that succeeded, he remained. Many
noted her visage and her tone, once especially when she sang and looked
at him during her singing. At last he also—when in April he left the
Court, bitten with the gallant adventure of America, like so many of his
rank—he also had understood. She followed him perpetually with her eyes;
she followed him as he left her rooms again for the last time, and it
was noted that there were tears in her eyes.... A wealthy woman rallied
Fersen, as he left, upon his conquest; he was now old enough to deny
gravely that any woman of that Court had deigned to consider him: having
so denied it, he was gone.
As for the Queen, she wrote or spoke of him in public as a young
nobleman only, now known and worthy of advancement, and since she kept
the rest strictly in her heart no emphasis here of that which lay at the
root of her life would give it dignity or value in these pages. Yet
throughout these pages the name of Fersen should be the chief name.
He was gone for five more years after so brief a sight of new things.
* * * * *
Meanwhile the Court awaited the birth of an heir.
There was a murmur all around. Monsieur had written frankly enough to
the King of Sweden that his hope of the succession was gone. The Court
was transformed, and Marie Antoinette especially was a new power: the
light calumnies were grown heavy now; the revenge for personal touches
was becoming a State affair; a weight of office was upon her, for she
was now to be half the Crown and the true wife of a King who governed,
and the mother of a King after him.
It was on the 19th of December, in the very early hours long before
dawn, that her husband was warned: in the forenoon her travail began.
I have said that the French Monarchy was a sacramental and therefore a
public thing. The last act of its public ritual was about to be
accomplished; for the last time it rose to the mystical duties of its
office and dared to mix with the nation, not as a person, but as an
Institution for whom, being immortal, peril was nothing, and, being
impersonal, decency and comfort nothing. Could it have so dared again it
would have been saved, but it did not dare.
The populace demanded admittance to the birth, and were admitted in the
ancient way. The square room in which the Queen lay, upon a low little
camp-bed before the fire, was crowded in a moment; upon the carved
marble of the chimney-piece two street arabs were seen climbing. The
market-women were there, mixed with the ladies of the Court, and a great
press of the poor from the streets had found an entry and were packed
also upon the great stairs outside. Everything was a-buzz and a-tiptoe,
questioning, craning for the news; the market-women commiserated and
complained; the ladies-in-waiting stood silent, each estimating the
event—the change there would be at Court, the strong place the King
would now hold, and, above all, the new power of the mother—the little
heir, the boy who should dispossess Monsieur, exile Artois perhaps, and
recapture the heart of the crowds to the Bourbon name.
For some critical moments there was a silence.
Vermond (the tutor’s brother), who was her doctor, or her midwife, had
ordered every crevice to be closed. Even the chinks of the window had
paper gummed to them. In such an air and under such an ordeal the Queen
fainted. Louis in a passion of sense thrust his arm through a pane of
glass and let in the winter cold; Vermond lanced a vein, and with the
bleeding and the fresh draught of air the Queen returned to life. They
told her that the child was a girl.
* * * * *
There were great crowds at her churching and some eagerness. The Latin
Quarter was impassable with folk as her coach crawled up the hill
towards the shrine of Ste. Genevieve. The square in front of the
Cathedral was very full—but they lacked a Dauphin. The King was glad
enough. When, upon Christmas Eve, the child had grasped his finger, he
had told his pleasure to all. Her name and godparents, her household and
her future were discussed as solemn things. But in Versailles the air
was dull with anti-climax; they had depended upon, or braced themselves
for, or begun their intrigue against, a son of France—and none was
there.
The little girl who thus was born alone survived. Her brothers
perished—the heir in prison; her father and her mother both were
publicly destroyed. She lived. The country house of her old age I well
remember, a solemn and lonely place, small and grey and deep in the
woods—long empty. It fell into ruins, was sold for stone, and a road
driven over it; but after nightfall horses refused to pass the place,
and legends of darkness clung to the last blood of the Bourbons.
It was but the close of January when the Queen returned from La Muette
and her churching to Versailles and the disappointment of Versailles. It
was just a year from the ball-room scene that had meant war with the
English. That year had done nothing but maintain the struggle, to the
surprise and encouragement of the French Ministry; it had done no more,
but even that was much. The naval actions had been at the worst
indecisive, the English communications along the rebel coast were now in
perpetual jeopardy, and would so remain until a French fleet was
destroyed: none was destroyed. Even an attempt to blockade the French in
Boston harbour had failed, and in November D’Estaing had slipped away
from Byron under the advantage of a storm. Of all the operations of that
year perhaps the most momentous to history was the chance and
inconclusive fight of July in the Atlantic, for it gave the Queen
occasion to doubt the courage of Chartres and to ridicule it: and
Chartres, soon to be Orleans, found his growing hatred of her fixed for
ever.
As for her, she kept her carnival, the carnival of 1779. Her less light
purpose now earned her reproaches far more deep than those which had
pursued her first childless years; but in her new hopes she could forget
them, and her much rarer omissions did not remain in her mind. She did
not see how solidly the foundations of her fate were being laid in the
dark, and how every trivial folly was her foe; no act of hers proved
great enough to destroy the last effect of these trivial follies.
She went to the Opera-ball on Shrove Tuesday with the King—it was a
folly (they said) to leave Versailles so soon. She went without him a
week later—it was a folly to go alone. That night, her coach breaking
down, she must take a public fly—a piece of common sense. She spoke of
the adventure, and it pleased her hugely, but the populace twisted it
into I know not what adventures, repeated and enlarged in a thousand
ways.
When in April the measles incommoded her, she must retire to Trianon for
a month—it was common sense; but it was “breaking roof” with the King,
and therefore a lesion in the constant etiquette of the Crown. She took
with her her young sister-in-law, Madame Elizabeth, whom she had once
petulantly avoided, and now, saner, loved; and Madame de Lamballe was
there too. It was common sense; but her absence from the Court was
hateful, was an insult to the courtiers, and the presence at Trianon
during the day of four gentlemen, her friends, was more hateful still.
The lies poured out in a printed stream from London; and the Paris
coffee-shops, and the drawing-rooms too, had now woven round her an
enduring legend of debauchery more real than things witnessed or heard.
The calumny was fixed.
If a moment must be chosen of which one can say that it was the decisive
moment in her public ill-repute, the moment before which that repute was
yet fluid, the moment after which it was set, then that moment must be
found in this summer of her twenty-fourth year, 1779. It was an effect
coming well after its cause: the high tide of a wave that the first
reckless three years had raised.
It may be asked whether, had some shock or some necessity wholly changed
her, had she given up every lightness as she had already given up most
excesses, she might not yet have warded off the approaches of a distant
judgment. No, she could not. The character of the attack upon her she
could have modified; but she could only have diminished its volume by
increasing its intensity, or its rapidity by extending its already
almost universal vogue: she could not have escaped it. The most sober
actions of that enthusiastic nature would now for ever be criticised.
Had no money gone on slight pleasures, the money spent in every error of
foreign policy would have been put down to her; every unpopular
dismissal she was to be guilty of, innocent or no, and her name was to
be, in every story of intrigue, however incredible, pre-judged. She was
destined henceforward to be forgotten in victory and remembered in
defeat, nor could anything have saved her save a sudden comprehension of
France. No God revealed it to her, and to the general protest that was
rising beneath her came accident after accident, some hardly of her
doing, some not at all, but every one pointing towards the single issue
of her fate, not one in aid of her.
The nights of August were hot and the early autumn also. The customary
tours of the Court had been countermanded to save money. The princesses
walked at evening and mingled with the crowd on the terrace of the
palace, where was the band. It gave scandal. It gave scandal that the
Queen should walk later with Artois. It gave most scandal that Madame de
Polignac, with her refined and silent face, her gentle deep-blue eyes
under that dark hair—a type not national—should so entirely possess the
Queen.
The Polignac clique demanded and obtained on every side. It was a double
evil: a proof to the Court that the aristocracy as a whole were excluded
from favour and that a faction ruled; a proof to the nation that, at a
time when finance was the known burden, and when, in the midst of
prosperity, a permanent crisis weighed on the impatient poor and the
public forces alike, the executive, the King, could blindly spend money
and endow every Polignac claim. The sums involved in this patronage of
the Polignacs, as in every other public extravagance of the French, were
small. The debts of a Pitt or a Fox were far larger, the luxuries of our
modern money-dealers are mountainous compared to them; but they fell on
a nation wholly egalitarian, unused to and intolerant of government by
the wealthy, and a nation which regarded (and regards) its government as
the principal engine to use _against_ the rich, not in their aid.
Trianon, not enormous in its cost, grew to be yet another legend, and
that legend was not diminished when, in the summer of 1780, a little
theatre was opened there, a little stage for the Queen.
All the world did such things! None could blame her—yet all did. After
all, one great house after another had put up its show—most of them more
costly than hers: but there was in her gradual extension of the
amusement something that aggrandised it and made it a public talk; her
invitation to the great Paris companies of actors, her very seclusion at
first, with its opportunity for rumour, later her open doors, swelled
the comment and the offence of Paris. Paris detested this private
theatre from the first. There was in it a mixture of carelessness for
the State and of personal abasement which Paris could not tolerate in a
French Queen; yet how simple was the distraction to her, and how could
the subtleties of these Paris critics, themselves the best actors in the
world, deriding acting and despising it, be comprehensible to her? She
played on.
The King came often. He applauded. She permitted—in this year 1780 at
least—no one but the royal family to witness her from the audience ...
but the parts were many and needed many players. She made dull Campan,
her librarian, manage for her; she gave no place in the distraction to
those who thought their presence about her to be a most solemn right and
duty. In the autumn to the acting she must add singing, though her voice
was not always in tune and was often displeasing in its lack of volume.
Stage parts demanded stage lovers, and, learning this, Mercy in his turn
opposed. He came at her invitation (but he insisted on being hidden
behind the lattice of a box), he applauded her acting somewhat, was
courtier-like to her singing—but he disapproved.
Silent, a little bent, low-voiced, a man of but fifty-three—though
seeming older—Mercy was now at the height of that long career during
which for twenty-two years he was Austria itself permanently present
before Marie Antoinette, a spy over her for her mother’s sake and for
her own, a devoted servant of the Hapsburgs and Lorraine.
His nobility was of the Empire: a Belgian from Liège, a man without
nationality, and with no comprehension of the rising religion of
patriotism, he had from his childhood formed part of that cosmopolitan
soldiery which was the shield of Maria Theresa; he lived for that Great
Lady who maintained him in his embassy, and in his manner and tradition
he maintained the character it had had under his master, Kaunitz.
He had passed all his early manhood in that splendid river-side house in
Paris which the dandyism of the great diplomatist his teacher had
demanded. His youth—reserved, awkward and probably laborious—had left
him very observant. He had adopted for life all the externals of the
Parisians, but—with the narrowness of his profession—he had failed to
see that inmost part of them which was so soon to launch a tempest of
wars against all that bunch of private interests on which he depended,
and to destroy it. The French Crown was nothing to him, and whether in
Paris, at Versailles, or down river in his great country house at
Conflans, the French nation left him careless. He was lord of a French
manor in Lorraine, of another near his _château_ on the river. His wines
were French, and marvellous, and cellared in 15,000 bottles, which the
peasants of the Oise drank for him joyfully in ’92—nothing more saddened
the old man in his exile when the Revolution was on.
His horses were superb. Even of coachmen he boasted two—each beautiful
and large; each equal in domestic rank.
Unmarried, he maintained with dignity an opera-singer of some fame and
of the refinement customary in that trade; at the close of his life he
left upon record their “close and rooted friendship.”
Such was the man who for nine years had watched his Princess as she grew
to womanhood and at last to motherhood at the French Court, and for nine
years had sent those long, regular, and careful letters to Maria Theresa
which are now our source for quite half the history of the place and
time. His life also was at a crisis and a change in this year of 1780,
for in the autumn of it his great sovereign died.
Maria Theresa was sixty-three. She was still vigorous in body, powerful
in voice, alert in brain, but for many years a great melancholy had not
abandoned her. She had continually contemplated her husband’s tomb; her
letters to her children, and especially to the Queen of France, were
full at the last of an approaching silence. The Bavarian trouble had
broken her; in the long expectation of a grandson to the French throne
she had been disappointed; the future of her daughter had terrified
her—for she saw the gulf. It was upon the 24th of November that she felt
her fatal illness; until the 29th she wrote and dictated her affairs of
State, and on that very date wrote at length to the Queen. Then she saw
Death coming visibly; she staggered into a chair, and with words of
rational charity upon her lips she died.
It was a week—Wednesday, the 6th of December—before the news could reach
Versailles. It came at evening. Marie Antoinette saw suddenly receding,
as the sea had receded from Lisbon at her birth, the principal aspect of
her life. The memory of her mother, and the constant letters—scolding,
anxious, loving, or imperious—had been her only homely things where
everything around her had been alien and increasingly alien. Her mother
for nine years, her mother and Mercy’s voice, had been tangible: all the
rest was strange. That deep and inner part which she did not or could
not show, which she herself perhaps did not know, and which appeared but
three times upon the surface of her life, rose through its eager and not
profound levels of sense. Her whole frame was broken; she spat blood.
She put herself that hour in black of every kind disordered, and she met
the coming year charged with a sorrow that could now never wholly leave
her. But that year was to give her the two chief things of that phase in
her life—the news of a successful battle, and the birth of a son; and a
third—the woman _La Motte_, through whom the chief of her evils were to
come upon her.
Far off in Virginia, La Fayette lay at Richmond with a handful of men.
Cornwallis made a dash for him and failed, marched back, burning and
plundering, to the coast, received a confused tangle of orders, entered
Yorktown and awaited the English fleet. Washington had heard how Grasse
in the West Indies would sail with the French fleet; he marched
southward to join the French commanders. With him was young Fersen, who
for so long had not seen France and who was there volunteered for
America; with him also was Rochambeau and all his men, and they hurried
to victory together through the wet, heavy summer of 1781 along the
Atlantic plain.
Meanwhile in Versailles nothing was toward. The Court had lost its old
gaiety in the stress of the war and of the “economies.” The Queen
awaited and implored a son. The Emperor, coming in July 1781 for the
second time to a country he despised, “found much improvement,” was
entertained at Trianon, and went away. It was August, hot, drowsy, and
silent; it was September, and an intense anxiety for the birth—now at
last, if it might be—of an heir.
And as that September passed, two things came into this strange life
upon which so many varied things arose and joined darkly in their dates;
each accident was quite unknown to the Queen.
The first was this, that the British fleet coming up to save Cornwallis
found Grasse already within the bay, was beaten off, and with it the
chance of succour; so that La Fayette and Washington meeting could and
did, just as the month ended, lay siege.
The second was this: that up in the mountains of Alsace a lady, a
friend, introduced a younger lady and a poor one to the notice of the
Bishop of Strasburg. He was that coadjutor to the see, now succeeded to
it, whom Marie Antoinette had seen as a child—the first to meet her in
France after her crossing of the Rhine. He was now the Grand Almoner,
and was spending the end of the hot season in his palace of Saverne. It
was thus that the woman _La Motte_ first touched her victim, the
Cardinal de Rohan. And it so happened that the Cardinal de Rohan, who
had been the first to greet the Queen on her passage of the Rhine as a
child, now aspired to be her lover, or—as his fatuous misconception of
her would have put it—“one of her lovers.” She for her part had
resolutely avoided him. He was odious to her. Upon his ambition and
credulity this woman La Motte was to play.
* * * * *
It had been upon April 25 that Cornwallis in the Carolinas had broken
camp and started northward, to conquer and to hold the central seaports
of the rebels as he had conquered and held Charlestown. On the 20th of
May his two hundred miles were marched, and he had joined the troops in
Virginia.
That march was not followed in Versailles—and even had it been followed,
nothing would have been thought of its progress. The war had lingered so
long, the issue had so dragged, that no chance could be foreseen, and
the tangle of those wildernesses without roads, hardly with towns, was
beyond European imagining. They knew that young La Fayette was still
desolate somewhere there—they knew no more. Fersen—if more than his
bright image came to her, if rumours of his letters home could come to
her—must have given the woman who remembered him something of his own
lassitude: cooped up as was that Swede in New England, without supplies,
without money, cursing the Americans, telling the French Cabinet they
were masters of folly, saying the Southern States were conquered by the
British, and complaining with a Northern complaint of the indiscipline
of the French. But there was greater business to engage attention at
Versailles: the Queen was again with child; and Necker, failing at the
vast financial tangle, had fallen.
Just as Cornwallis and the army in Virginia met to complete the war,
Necker had been sent back from his command of the exchequer to those
private and less reputable dealings with which the Puritan was more
familiar and at which he was more successful than in the financing of a
military nation. The Queen, who had not driven him forth at all, who
would have had him remain, was blamed because she did not save him. The
rising democratic opinion of Paris had already vaguely begun to favour
Necker’s ineptitude: he was a foreigner; he had no faith (save the
Genevese mask); but he was novel, he was a change—he was therefore
demanded, and his dishonesty was not comprehended; yet that dishonesty
was even then about to cost some price to the French State, for by his
counsel and after his dismissal appeared that first sham Exchequer
Statement to deceive the nation, to cajole it into a loan, to embitter
it for the future; and the blame of the trick was to fall on the Crown
and not on him, its author.
* * * * *
It was October 1781: Cornwallis was surrounded in Yorktown: the British
fleet had failed to relieve him and the siege advanced; the parallels
were opened; they were firing at six hundred yards, and Cornwallis still
held on. The third week, and they were firing at three hundred: two
redoubts still forbade a nearer approach. On the 14th the two redoubts
were carried by the French, and next day came the storming.
The river lay near a mile broad behind Yorktown: Cornwallis might yet
cross to Gloucester; his guns were dismantled and his force shattered,
more by sickness than by fire, but he made the attempt, and the wind
defeated him. Upon that ominous Friday, the 19th, he laid down his arms,
and England had lost the war. By an accident native to lingering
campaigns a series of chances and one coincidence at the end—the entry
of the French fleet—had suddenly determined the issue: the young Boys of
the French Court, heretofore grumbling and themselves disliked, were
suddenly become heroes; the colonists, “half savages,” “mostly traitors
to the English,” were suddenly become “the athletes of Liberty”; many in
England and all the Rivals of England made up their minds that the
business of England in the history of the world was at an end.
* * * * *
It was Fersen, with his command of French and English, who had
negotiated that surrender. Soon he would return.
* * * * *
[Illustration:
THE COUNTESS OF PROVENCE
FROM THE BUST AT VERSAILLES
]
At Versailles that October Friday and the week-end following it were
still. For the few days the Court was silent. The issue of the expected
childbirth had been debated or feared; it was now not mentioned in an
intensity of expectation. The morning of the Monday that silence
continued. The King had ordered his hunt; four of the carriages had
already started, when he bethought him before he left to see the Queen
again. He thought her to be in pain, and though she denied the pain, he
ordered the Hunt to return, and an unusual rumour and press at once
filled the great galleries. It was a little after eleven o’clock when
the passages and halls were full of a gathering crowd, and the cold and
splendid staircase which made the royal life at Versailles a public
thing, a thing of the open air, were already crammed before noon by a
mob of the populace; but this time custom was disdained and the doors
were shut fast. Within, the Queen lay groaning on her pallet-bed before
the fireplace, but there was air around her: no such press as had all
but killed her three years before. Yet that exclusion of the populace
helped to kill the Monarchy.
At one o’clock a Swedish noble, chancing to be at the Queen’s door, was
told the news. He was caught and electrified by it as though he had been
of the French blood. He turned to the first woman he met and said: “We
have an heir!” Now that woman happened to be Provence’s wife, and the
scene—her red anger and her disdain, his bewilderment—were taken up at
once into the laughter of the moment. All the world laughed or cried: it
was like the excitement of a great victory turning the tide of a
disastrous war.
The Queen, when she could speak, noting the silence round her pallet and
hearing the noise without, said faintly and smiling: “I have been a good
patient.... Tell me the truth.” They were still silent, and she was sure
that another daughter had been born, till the King came in and said to
her:—
“The Dauphin begs leave to come in.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER VIII
_FIGARO_
_Monday, October 22, 1781, to April 27, 1784_
THE birth of an heir struck, as it seemed, an epoch in the evident
transformation of the Monarchy and in the increasing position which
Marie Antoinette occupied upon that scene; not that such a birth was
either unexpected or unlikely. The Court and the nation had known for
now three years that the royal family was established; it was certain
that children would now support and surround the throne, and even in the
preceding year nothing but a natural accident had postponed the hope of
a prince. But the living presence of the child, the founding of a secure
succession within so short a period from the earlier disappointment,
had, as have all symbols, an effect greater than that which calculable
chances could expect.
A wide popular enthusiasm, though later it was extinguished, did for the
moment rise spontaneously to the encouragement of Government, and that
initiative which the French had for centuries demanded and still
demanded from the custodians of their State was, as it were, thrust into
the hand of Louis.
Of all qualities in ruling that which this people will least forgive is
ease: in their delight at the news of a Dauphin, France, and
particularly Paris, implicitly urged to energy if not the good-humoured
and slow-thoughted man who was in theory the whole executive, at least
the machinery of which he was the centre. A new phase of one sort or
another had certainly begun.
Sudden causes of change are never unaccompanied by coincidence; allied
forces invariably converge upon the main cause of change and unite for a
common effort. Three such advancing supports synchronised in these last
months of 1781—the new aspect of the Austrian Alliance, the success in
America, and the death of old Maurepas, who since the accession of Louis
XVI. had presided at the Council. Each of these accidents was singly
powerful; in their combination they were irresistible; and a moment of
opportunity, to which a man of rapid decision might have given great
effect, was apparent even to Louis in the close of that year.
The result of Maria Theresa’s death and of Joseph II.’s uncontrolled
power in Austria had now matured. The naïf but persistent enmity of the
Emperor towards the Faith—whose doctrines were in his little vision as
barbaric as the Gothic architecture, and whose rapid elimination from
European culture he took for granted—was, if not the mainspring, at
least the chief expression of that general action whereby he imperilled
his house and profoundly modified the situation of Austria. His
preparation to rob and destroy the religious orders, his unconcealed
contempt for the ideal they represented, his similar pretension that
patriotism was a superstition, his petty but sincere conviction that
none save material benefits guided by moral abstractions were of use to
mankind—in a word, his despotic atheism—culminated in an “Edict of
Toleration,” which, when allowance is made for a century’s development,
may be compared for its affront against the customs of his subjects to
that which had cost James II. of England his throne. In itself it had no
bearing upon France and was hardly heard of in that country, but it was
a recantation of all that Maria Theresa had stood for; it meant an open
admiration for Frederick of Prussia, his method and his principle; it
argued a philosophy which would, not reluctantly and of necessity, but
eagerly and of set purpose, overset old traditions and sacred landmarks,
that had attempted the suppression of a national language in Hungary,
and was to suggest time and again, as a simple solution of political
problems, the denial of all that for which men have always been prepared
to die.
This act, the precursor and the type of so many others of his, was
signed in Vienna during that same month of October 1781 which saw the
happy delivery of his sister at Versailles and the culmination of the
American War upon the Chesapeake. Nay, these capital events fell within
one week. It was upon a Monday that the Edict was promulgated, upon the
following Monday that the Dauphin was born, upon the Friday between that
the English and German garrison in Yorktown laid down its arms.
The success of the war in America, especially the dramatic finale of
Cornwallis’ surrender, had an effect upon opinion in Paris which, though
it was sudden and short, was yet very powerful. The French, having of
all nations by far the most general experience of war, are slow to
adventures of such a kind as had been their intervention in America: the
Court had been especially slow; the King perhaps the most reluctant of
all—in the last peril of death he exclaimed against the memory of that
campaign. Once engaged, therefore, if matters had gone ill (as the
French troops in America most characteristically swore they would go
ill!), or even if a long and indefinite campaign had dragged on through
succeeding years so that the full financial effect of the struggle could
have been felt before its close, then the whole weight of blame would
have fallen upon Versailles. At it was, Yorktown came like the thrust of
a spur, and the Monarchy, doubtful as was its course, leapt forward.
The death of Maurepas was the last coincidence of these three; it was as
exactly synchronous and as full of effect as either of its fellow
accidents. The capitulation of Lord Cornwallis was known in Paris
precisely thirty-one days after it had taken place. It was upon the 19th
of November, a Monday, that Louis had the news. The Queen had not yet
risen from child-bed, Louis was sitting with her in her room, when the
Duc de Lauzun was announced, and gave the message that Yorktown had
surrendered. Upon the Wednesday following, De Maurepas was dead. The
importance of that passing lay in this, that Louis, at such a juncture,
now first attempted to be free.
All men are chafed, and that perpetually, by what they know of their own
defects, and Louis could not forget, from his accession onwards, that it
was always in him to yield to a quicker brain. He thought it shameful in
a King. He never yielded from weakness, but often from bewilderment. His
own decision would come to him after he had acted on the decision of
another. He understood, he desired to act, later than did his advisers:
often so late that, by the time his will was formed, occasion had
passed. If, when his slow judgment had matured, he found it different
from that upon which immediate action had been taken, he was angered. If
that immediate action had proved disastrous, he was secretly indignant
that his slower wit had not prevailed. But, stronger than all these
reasons, the mere instinct of the imperfect warned him to a distaste of
guidance.
He had, however, come to the throne a boy; in years but twenty, in
experience (save in the excellent art of horsemanship) null. He had
found ready to hand this old Minister, Maurepas, courteous, active, with
a good though a too facile judgment; a patriot whose career had been
ruined by the mistress of Louis XV. (in itself this was a recommendation
to the young King), and a courtier whom his father, the Dauphin, had,
upon his deathbed, pointed out to be the true counterweight to the
irreligion of Choiseul: Louis XVI. had accepted such a guide and had
upon the whole not repented of his choice. For seven years the young
King had received the counsel of this old man; a habit had been formed,
and a strong affection with it. But as Maurepas approached his end, as
the gout forbade him his former clearness of thought, and a continual
confinement interfered with his attendance at the Council, the maturer
judgment of Louis began, though secretly, to assert itself. He showed
for the depositary of so lengthy a Court tradition a filial devotion; he
would come in person, and familiarly, to bring news to the old man’s
room—notably the news of the Dauphin’s birth was so given, domestically
and alone. There subsisted between them one of those intimate relations
which so often arise between the permanent official upon the one side
and the responsible authority upon the other: it became a personal tie,
and when, Maurepas died Louis would renew it with no one. After some
hesitation the King lit for a first Minister upon Vergennes, but he
would not give to this new officer the official title of Premier; he was
jealous of a fuller power which he now proposed to exercise continuously
and with a more direct affirmation than in the past. Louis was incapable
of the task he so attempted, but if ever there was a time in the reign
when such a task could be attempted, this autumn and winter of 1781 was
that time.
Here then was the field: a treasury embarrassed, but relieved, in
appearance at least, by a frank audit—for the “cooked” accounts Necker
had prepared before his dismissal bore the aspect and title of a public
audit; great and unexpected success in a doubtful foreign war; a monarch
possessed of a power approaching that of a modern Cabinet, and now ready
to experiment with that power; abroad, Joseph II., who was the chief
element of international politics and the national ally of France, had
entered upon a new direction of the Austrian House. Upon such a field
was to work the increasing influence of the Queen.
It is true that a certain part of her repute was now fixed in public
opinion: that she was extravagant, that she was bound to favourites,
that she was foreign. The legend had arisen in Paris, and no detail of
her action, no appreciation of complexity could easily alter the simple
conclusions of the Parisian populace. But, on the other hand, she was
the mother of the heir, her position was stable while the opinion of the
capital was not so, and it did not seem impossible that in the long
course of years the great and dumb national mass should be indoctrinated
in her favour, as the growth of her children, an older judgment in her,
and perhaps a continued peace and a return to prosperity, should restore
the tradition of the Monarchy, or rather confirm it in its new
characters.
If the King was now ready to act and to reform the State, Marie
Antoinette was of far more influence with him than ever she had been
before. It was hers, if she chose, to regulate the new phase of
Government. She did in part so choose, and she might have succeeded. Her
habits would, indeed, have continued—her cards, her theatre, her gems,
her familiarity—but all, as it were, tinctured, accepted, taken with the
life of the Court and little affecting a new-found order. Had the
problems presented to her been of those that fitted her intuition or
experience, she might even then have lifted her fate. For a year and for
more than a year—all 1782 and on into 1783, the solidity of her position
was assured; the future was apparently prepared. A group of trifling
incidents passed her quite, or almost, unperceived in the midst of an
established leadership in Europe, of royal visits that cemented a
general alliance, and of accomplished hopes; another year passed, she
was presented—her influence being then at its height—with the affair of
the Scheldt, a problem in which the interests of her Austrian House
clashed with that new patriotism which, least of all things French,
could she understand. She blundered, she necessarily blundered; but as
she looked around to see what forces were left her, she found not only
the results of that blunder confronting her, but an appalling menace
proceeding from a direction wholly unconnected with her life—from the
business of the diamond necklace—and beside it, grown suddenly quite
loud like an offensive chorus of disdain, the voice of a writer whom she
had half patronised and wholly despised, the neglected voice of
Caron—Beaumarchais: by the beginning of ’84, one of those accidents—the
pen of Beaumarchais—had shaken her influence and that of all the
Monarchy; by the end of ’85 the other—the affair of the necklace—had
destroyed it.
* * * * *
The year 1782 opened upon the new gladness of the Queen; her churching
at Notre Dame (now customary) was marked, if not by a vivid popular
greeting, yet by no coldness. At the Hôtel de Ville in the evening she
met an official and commercial world that was warmly hers; she shared as
warmly in the glories of the American news; she would have driven home
in her own carriage the wife of La Fayette to show her enthusiasm for
his triumph and his return. Her ampler manner, her more contained and
settled bearing was consonant with the position she had gained; it
promised her, in those who saw and approved it among the magistracy of
the city, a continuance and an increase of influence. Back at Versailles
she continued without scandal, and yet at a fast-rising expenditure, the
habits which had now become permanently hers: new fashions in dress
perpetually changing and in head-dress, cards into the small hours, and
her private theatre at Trianon still receiving her upon its stage to the
applause now, not of a half-dozen or so of the royal family, but of a
full audience; many courtiers, many friends of friends, and even the
officers of the Guard were permitted to see her painted behind the
foot-lights, to note her true rendering of vivacious parts, and to
accept when she sang her imperfectly-trained, insufficient, and somewhat
violent voice. Of these regular dissipations the last was the most
criticised, though even that seemed by this time so normal that of
itself it did not lessen her growing power; but in distant connection
with her taste for such things there arose, and precisely at this
critical moment, a discussion which was largely to affect her life: it
was the discussion upon the “Mariage de Figaro.”
The “Mariage de Figaro” was no great thing; it was a well-written play
from the pen of a man, now advanced in middle age, whose diction and
care for letters were typical of his own time, but whose vices were
entirely modern. Born in a low position, his darting mind had carried
him to a sort of fluctuating eminence, especially in wit. He had taught
music to princesses, married an infatuated widow, adopted her name of
Beaumarchais, purchased some insignificant post and with it a nominal
right to the “de” of nobility, preserved his health, speculated,
probably robbed, certainly made and lost considerable sums, traversed
and thoroughly understood English society, repaid its hospitality by
advancing the American cause in France, speculated upon the commissariat
of that campaign, rendered jealous years ago the equally cynical
Voltaire, and now at fifty was getting talked of again in the matter of
his new play.
He and it were little things to Marie Antoinette, but the rumour of them
was considerable, for, a few months before, at the end of the past year,
the King had heard that this “Mariage de Figaro” was not tolerable: it
was a satire upon all established things. The play was already ordered
for the Théâtre Français. Louis had it read to him privately, and for
once made a rapid decision. As literature he could not judge its
considerable merits; as politics he put his foot down: such laughter at
such an expense to government and all tradition was not to be borne—and
the licence was withdrawn. The public rumour rose and grew.
Every witty lady about the Court and in the capital, many more who
desired a reputation for wit, insisted upon reading the play; upon
hearing it read aloud; upon having Beaumarchais come and read it aloud.
All the Polignac world was mad on it. Loménie de Brienne boasted that he
had heard it oftenest. The Princess de Lamballe moved heaven and earth
to have it read by the author in her very rooms.
The “Mariage de Figaro” was, therefore, to the Queen a perpetual phrase
on the lips of the smart, literary and unliterary: it is doubtful if she
read a line of it, but she heard of it and heard of it again. She forgot
it for the moment; later she remembered it again—not to her good.
Meanwhile a much larger matter vexed her. In the midst of her active and
interested life, of promotions, personal successes and habitual
pleasures, the insistence of her brother Joseph continually pursued her,
and a mixed anxiety, an anxiety to be political, an anxiety to escape
responsibility, came to her almost daily—from Mercy immediately,
ultimately from Vienna: she felt upon her the uneasy burden of the
Hapsburgs.
While her mother still lived there had at least been between her and
Marie Antoinette an unbroken habit of command upon the one side,
obedience and protest upon the other. The pressure of Vienna had been a
natural one then. Maria Theresa possessed, moreover, the tact not only
of a woman, and of a religious woman, but the large vision of a careful
and perilous diplomacy brought to success. Joseph lacked all these:
religion, honour, tact, acquaintance, experience. His commands to Mercy
were as crude as any of his judgments upon the world: “Had Mercy seen
the Queen?” “Was she doing her duty by the House of Austria?” “Would
Mercy suggest this, that?” “Since the Queen was so powerful with the
King, why had this, that detail of French policy not _exactly_ suited
the demands of the Empire?” Broken by the buffer of Mercy’s long
experience these arid and unfruitful hastes came less brutally to the
ears of Marie Antoinette. She never felt herself the servant of her
family, nor in direct antagonism to the Crown of her husband; she felt
only that she was perpetually required to be doing—she hardly knew
what—much as in her mother’s time, but without the aid of her mother’s
handwriting and remembered voice—certainly without her mother’s wisdom
to control.
The pressure from Joseph II. continued; it was to be two years before it
took effect in a great matter, but when that matter arose the Queen’s
plain service to Vienna—something far in excess of what she had done in
the Bavarian affair—showed how much that irksome and long pressure had
effected. She came to act as an Austrian army would have acted, and
quite understanding all she did, she came very near to betraying her
allegiance to the French throne.
For the rest these early months of ’82 were filled, among her pleasures
and her rising power, with other annoyances; notably that from time to
time her friends in that excessive society of hers spoke to her of their
debts, and she knew well that in the matter of money grants at that
moment of increasing embarrassment in public finance the King himself
was slow to listen to her.
There were many such friends. The greatest and the nearest perhaps of
those whom Marie Antoinette knew to be embarrassed were the Guémenées,
and the Duchesse de Guémenée, the titular governess of the Dauphin, a
woman whom she met most constantly and cherished, closely concerned her.
She further suffered the ceaseless and recurrent advances of the
Cardinal de Rohan.
It had become enough for her to see his handwriting upon a note to make
her burn the thing unread. Her dislikes were now often reasoned, always
steady: it was enough that she had to meet the Grand Almoner upon State
occasions of religion or ceremonial; her society she forbade him. Had
the Cardinal wanted proof of that stupidity which he was later to plead
in Court as the excuse of his follies, he could have given none better,
nor any of more weight with posterity, than his complete ignorance of
such a woman as was this daughter of Maria Theresa, and his absurd
pretensions to gain her intimacy, her support, and possibly her heart.
Had he known women even vaguely, by types, this florid and handsome man
would have abandoned at fifty the attempt to interest a vital, impetuous
woman of twenty-seven, loving swift pleasure, but superior to him in
rank, chaste, a mother, and carrying against him in particular a
traditional grudge for the loose jests which, during a brief embassy at
Vienna, he was wont to pass at the expense of her own people. But the
Cardinal de Rohan did not know women even in the mass, and it was
necessary, as he thought, that he should play cards with her and be from
time to time one of the fifty or so who eat supper with her at Trianon.
He had the weakness of stupid men when they are well born and have
attained office—I mean the ambition for political titles.
A thousand lesser incidents of this time she could not herself, had you
asked her daily, have recorded. One among such petty details it is worth
the reader’s while to recall, though it had made upon her even less
impression than the babble about Beaumarchais’ play; though it passed
completely from her memory. It was the presence now and then upon the
stairways of Versailles, and for moments only, of a short woman, very
fair, with a small, well-arched foot, and delicate hands, quick and even
furtive of glance, not beautiful but attractive and provoking in face,
dressed in a manner that combined excess with the evidences of poverty,
but in her gestures of a passable breeding. This figure was often seen;
now leaving the room of some lady of the Court, now crossing the
courtyard on foot towards the town.
The Queen may or may not have heard that this woman, though an
adventuress, was (from over the left) a Valois; of some birth,
therefore, but very poor, and given to borrowing small sums: Marie
Antoinette’s sister-in-law of Provence, Madame, may or may not have told
the Queen that she had got this woman a tiny advance of thirty pounds
upon her tiny pension of twenty-four. Whether her name of “De la Motte,”
or so much as the presence of this chance passer, was noted by Marie
Antoinette is not known, but certainly if either were, it took no more
place in her mind than any other of the hundred insignificant names she
heard and forgot every day. Moreover, after the early spring of 1782,
this woman was no longer seen at Versailles; she had borrowed a few
pounds, and was gone.
With May the true life of the Court and the active interests of the
Queen awoke to receive the first of those great political visits which
form the historical pageant of Versailles: the heir of Catherine of
Russia came with his wife, and the whole year might almost have been
named from so conspicuous an event.
The inordinate pomp of royalty in its old age had led to a fashion of
incognito which did not have, and was not intended to have, its
occasional modern effect of privacy, but which, by cutting short
interminable and necessary ritual, left crowned travellers the freer for
luxury and dissipation. It saved them the judges, the orators, the
Governors, the Universities—in general the middle classes, and left them
free for actors, wine, and their own company, and the frenzied plaudits
of the innumerable poor. The Emperor of Austria had set the fashion five
years before; it was followed now by the Russian Court, and Catherine’s
son chose to present himself in France under the somewhat theatrical
alias of the “Comte du Nord.”
The Grand-Duke Paul had the face of a Tartar, and—what was piquant—the
manners, and, above all, the ready epigrams of a Parisian. His wife was
a huge German woman, rather absolute and—what was curious—learned. For
exactly a month they dominated the Court of France; from the end of May
to the end of June they filled it with their presence, and not a little
of the hankering after French things and French alliances, which, much
later, distinguished Paul III. during the revolutionary wars, may have
sprung from this short and vivid episode of his twenty-eighth year.
It is characteristic of Marie Antoinette that the prospect of a great
encounter and of the society of equals confused her; it is equally
characteristic of her that once she had got over that nervousness she
drew the young man and his wife at once into that rather isolated and
over-familiar circle of intimates with which Mercy, her brother, and the
French reproached her, but without which, as it seemed, she could not
live. Behind the solemn and rare functions, the regal hospitality of the
Condés at Chantilly and the Court ball at Versailles, was a whole
atmosphere of gambling and private theatricals; of plays at Trianon,
intimate suppers, costly presents given at a moment’s thought, and, very
late at night, in the rooms of Madame de Polignac or in the Queen’s,
when the King had left them, a complete ease full of little improvised
dances and familiar jests. In such an atmosphere the German
Grand-Duchess maintained, perhaps a little stiffly, her formal
compliments, but the Russian Grand-Duke went headlong; he suffered the
spell; there was even a moment when he confided to the Queen his
humiliation at home and the tyranny of his mother Catherine.
Upon one matter the husband and the wife most certainly agreed, for to
the second it was belles-lettres, to the first Parisiana: they must have
things read to them “by the authors.” All the little tricks with which
the wealthy and leisured enveigle the masters of the pen to visit their
palaces, to amuse them for an hour, were set at work.
Of the many so caught one was especially demanded, and the Queen heard
again, not without boredom, the perpetual name of Beaumarchais. “Oh yes,
you must hear Beaumarchais!” Madame de Lamballe had got him to her
rooms. It was difficult, but she had got him. The Archbishop of Toulouse
knew him well. He was splendid. “You must hear him read this play of
his; it has been forbidden, you know. It is seditious. It is so witty,
and he does read it so well!” The Comte du Nord and his wife asked no
better than to be in the swim. Beaumarchais was willing enough; he came
and read to them, and they heard from his thin ironic lips, saw
illustrated by his exact gesture and brilliant, ambitious little eyes,
the edge and sharpness of a drama that worked—once it was public—like an
acid, to the destruction of all their world. How they applauded!
That warm month of long evenings that fade into early dawns shining with
lamps in the park, with candles and mirrors in the vast length of the
palace, was approaching its end, when, for the last time, Marie
Antoinette devised her last considerable fête—once more at Trianon.
It was to be a garden fête at night: by this time certainly wearisome to
the Grand-Duchess, but to the Grand-Duke attractive—with this one flaw,
that on the morrow he would be gone. The fête was held; it was brilliant
and full. At its close when, as custom demanded, the royal party passed
out, down a lane of guests on either side, the Queen saw—for a moment—a
pair of red stockings; the legs were neither meagre nor young. All the
rest of the figure was a large dark cloak, but she caught beneath the
hat of it the somewhat flushed and large face of the Grand Almoner.
This little incident disturbed her. Here was a private gala of her own,
given only to those of her private circle privately invited by her, and
this odious man must creep in. Next day when her guests were gone she
spent some portion of her considerable energy in ferreting out the
culprit. The incident was traced to the lodge-keeper of Trianon, who had
taken a bribe from the Cardinal under a promise that if he were let in
he would keep a strict disguise and would not penetrate into the
gardens. The lodge-keeper was sent his way to starve, and later—since he
really did begin to starve—was given back his place by this impulsive
woman.
It was a very little though a very exasperating incident that a great
officer of the Crown, whom etiquette compelled her to meet in chapel,
but whom she had carefully excluded from her intimacy and her
privileges, should have appeared by a trick at a party so especially her
own. Perhaps she remembered it as one remembers for a long while petty
accidents that have sharply moved us for an hour. He certainly
remembered it, for he had been found out in no very dignified manœuvre.
He was certainly sore; but in men of his stupidity, of his privileges,
and of his habits of luxury, hatred is no enduring passion. His
ambition, however, such as it was, remained; he was the more determined
to succeed in that high object of recognition and of friendship with the
Queen, from the results of this disastrous attempt and from the failure
of his appearance on that June night at Trianon.... It was but a week
later that Madame de la Motte came in to Paris, called at his palace in
the Marais, and reminded him of his earlier charities.
The uneventful summer came and passed, full of the customary glories and
the customary distractions. No date marked evil or good. The American
War, though it languished, was now decided, and England had given up the
struggle. The reform of the French finances, though ceaselessly a topic
of council, was as ceaselessly neglected. The Emperor continues to
badger Mercy, and Mercy to badger the Queen upon matters of no
importance save to Joseph II.’s ill-considered plans of aggrandisement.
* * * * *
Fersen, pottering between Philadelphia and Baltimore, wrote
home—wearily—but not to her.
* * * * *
It was a long summer of nothingness during which Marie Antoinette’s
position was confirmed, her public view a trifle, if but a trifle,
enlarged. With her habits permitted, her popularity sufficient, her
influence established, she had a foretaste of that security such as
should accompany middle life, and such as is native to women for whom
such satisfaction is allied with maternity; she turned for an added
interest to her children.
The little Princess Royal could talk and run; the baby Dauphin knew his
sister already and moved his arms at her approach. The two children
between them filled daily a larger and more natural place in the Queen’s
thoughts. They could not indeed weaken the habits which those first
feverish three years had rooted and the next had done nothing to
destroy, but their innocence and the nameless bond of the flesh enlarged
her; their growth, their surprising discovery of new days. It was not
wholly without reason that the King their father grew at this moment to
listen in smaller things to her advice beyond that of others.
Ceremonial, or rather lucrative, as were the functions of the Princesse
de Guémenée, she was yet constantly in attendance upon the children, of
which she was titular governess, and the Queen was constantly in her
society. The charge was a great one; if it had first been granted as a
favour to one of the set of favourites, it had now ripened into
something more, for the common interest in such a couple as Madame
Royale and the heir gave rise, in this middle of ’82, to an occasional
communion between the Queen and the gouvernante which neither found in
the general and much more continual amusement of their set. Their
intimacy was the greater that the children had been sent through the
park to Trianon during the hot weather, that the Princesse de Guémenée
was with them secluded there, and that there she and the Queen were
necessarily often alone together. In her favourite retreat and under her
domestic trees, the approaching vaccination of the little girl—a matter
of moment at that time—and a dozen details of the sort concerned them.
By a petty accident of a sort common to aristocracies the Cardinal de
Rohan, the Queen’s aversion, happened to be own brother to Madame de
Guémenée, the Queen’s chief friend. Not a word was said in favour of
that brother, for these were matters upon which even the Queen’s
favourites were compelled to keep silence; but the populace, who do not
understand such complexities, remembered the relationship.
The complaints of the lesser woman upon the debts of herself and her
husband—though such complaints are wearying to the closest
friendships—did no more than slightly weary the Queen. They were soon
forgotten, for Marie Antoinette held in a profound manner that faith in
chance good fortunes and in ultimate relief from embarrassment without
which those who never labour could not live; and when the complaints
were done with, she turned to speak of the children.
So August went by and most of September, when, one morning at the close
of that month, Monsieur de Guémenée very suddenly declared that he could
not so much as attempt to pay his debts, and threw himself upon his
creditors.
It was a shock. I have repeatedly insisted in this book upon the
insignificance of French extravagance in the close of the eighteenth
century, in comparison with the modern figures of our Plutocracy, and on
the modesty of the sums the historian has to deal with—£5000 a year was
a princely fortune; the Cardinal de Rohan’s £30,000 a year seemed almost
the revenue of a State, an income beyond computation. Well, in such a
world, accustomed to such a scale of wealth, the Guémenées went bankrupt
for a solid million of our English pounds. It opened a whirlpool in the
finances of the time, and the creditors, to make matters worse, were of
every rank and spread throughout the kingdom; there were peasants among
them, prelates, farmers-general, and—most clamorous of all—a few large
and many small shopkeepers of Paris. To these last—especially to the
smaller ones—delay would be fatal. Delay was precisely the expedient
chosen.
There exists a little, ill-written scrawl addressed to the Princess; it
is ill-spelt, with words omitted in its haste. It runs: “You have heard
that my daughter’s vaccination has gone off well—I breathe again!... The
King will see you get those letters all right.” That scrawl was written
by Marie Antoinette, and the “letters” mentioned were the _Moratorium_
which a French King could of his own free will impose as might the
caprice of a judge upon the process of law. It was a royal decree
forbidding during the King’s pleasure the recovery of a debt. The
creditors must wait till it was lifted.
That little scrap of paper was not known to the populace—it was not
discovered till a few years ago—but the populace, with an instinct that
rarely failed them during the pre-revolutionary and revolutionary time,
guessed by what influence had been granted this privilege of delay, with
all its fatal consequences to the smaller folk, who spread their anger
until Paris was humming with it; and even the remoter provinces (notably
Brittany), wherever there was a wretched unpaid creditor to be found,
whispered the name of the Queen.
She, upon her part, felt she had done next to nothing—an obvious and
small act of courtesy for a dear friend. She had chosen that very moment
to be at La Muette with the Court—not at Versailles, to which such
things were native, but right at the gates of Paris, and there thought
fit to do something more for her friend than the trifle already
effected. She went to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Fleury—at a time
when the Treasury in its deep embarrassment was expecting the
counter-shock of the American War, at a time when the last additional
taxes could hardly be paid—to ask him if (irony of ignorance!)
“something could not be done” for the Guémenées. Fleury could do
nothing, and it was as well.
All this while and all that summer and autumn the little active, furtive
woman, De La Motte, the Valois with the well-arched foot and the shifty
but provocative eye, was pecking at De Rohan: now knocking discreetly at
his palace doors in Paris, now travelling, as cheaply as could be, to
his great château in the Vosges—borrowing a few pounds, and again a few
pounds. It was a very little thing, like a drifting rag in a great
city—but a rag infected with the plague.
* * * * *
In such a commotion as the crash of the Guémenées made, no one noticed
that the Queen procured for her chief friend, for one who hardly desired
it and who was ill fitted for it, for Madame de Polignac, the high post
which Madame de Guémenée had been compelled to resign. The new charges
such an appointment involved were forgotten in the torrent of feeling
that followed the great bankruptcy. It came just as the excitement upon
America had thoroughly died down, just as the bills for that war had to
be met, and just as winter was upon the populace. The new taxes were
collecting, the whole financial system was at a breaking-point, when,
early in ’83, Fleury resigned the finances. His fall was furthered by
the Queen, who remembered his refusal.
If, a year before, the satire of Beaumarchais had been wisely suppressed
by the King, and if, nine months before, even the reading by heirs
apparent of so fierce a piece of wit was thought hazardous, now it was
plainly a peril. To extend the fame of that solvent of society, even by
discreet recitations within the palace, was unwise; to act it, to add to
its native force of aggression gesture, life, and publicity of the
stage, would be a piece of madness. Most ardently was that amusing piece
of madness desired by the lassitude of the Court and by those amateurs
in changing pastime who surrounded the Queen. It is said that she
pleaded again for her friends, and begged, as she had before, for the
piece to be licensed. If she did so, she failed; for leave to act the
“Mariage de Figaro,” even upon the private stage of a courtier, was
again refused.
Side by side with such details went the growth of yet another great
European conflict, and with it once again the pressure of Austria upon
Marie Antoinette.
For over a century the Scheldt had been closed to commerce by
international treaty, and the trade that should naturally flow along
that magnificent estuary of which Antwerp is the port had been
artificially deflected to Holland. The Austrian Netherlands were
therefore mechanically starved of a trade that had once been pre-eminent
in Europe. It was as though Lancashire should be forbidden by a
parchment to use Liverpool to-day, and should be dependent upon Preston
or—as would more probably follow—upon Bristol and Glasgow. That part of
the Low Countries which is, roughly speaking, the Catholic part and most
of which is now included in Belgium formed, by an accident of history,
an isolated fragment of the Hapsburg domain, and the closing of the
Scheldt acutely affected a monarch whose mind, being narrow, was
especially alive to anomalies that interfered with the rotundity of his
rights. There was to Joseph II. something monstrous in the decay of
Antwerp and the silence of that vast waterway—something out of nature,
like the diversity of tongues, within his empire; it was a sentiment he
felt less keenly in matters less disadvantageous to himself.
The chief beneficiary by this quaint artifice was, of course, Holland,
but, among the greater Powers, England. If any one would know why, he
has but to travel to-day from the Pool of London to Antwerp, and wonder
next morning at the orderly and teeming crescent of the quays. Antwerp
is London’s chief and most dangerous rival.
It was, therefore, during the failure of England in America that Joseph
proposed the destruction of so ancient an instrument as the Peace of
Westphalia and determined upon the opening of the river. To such a
project the assent of France was essential, but the Cabinet of
Versailles, in one of those acts of wisdom which were not unknown to the
decaying Monarchy, postponed the discussion till the close of the war.
The war had been over since the autumn of ’82; the peace had been signed
at Paris in the new year. It was in 1783, therefore, that there began
the growing pressure of Joseph II. upon Mercy, of Mercy upon Marie
Antoinette, to see that the interests of Austria in this matter, as in
others of the past, should predominate at Versailles. This purely
Austrian move, though it took months to mature, was the political motive
of the whole year, and side by side with it, like a tiny instrument
accompanying a loud orchestra, went the rising popular demand for
Beaumarchais’ play: also, just once or twice and for a moment only, one
can hear in the background the occasional note of Madame de La Motte.
Thus on Candlemas Day (a feast of the 2nd of February) she was seen at
Versailles. It was a brief episode; she stood patiently in the rank of
petitioners waiting for the Queen to pass upon her way to High Mass, and
presented some modest demand—directly or indirectly—for money. It was
refused, with a crowd of others, by the secretaries appointed to examine
such things; and, if the Queen’s eyes had rested upon her face at all,
no sort of impression of her remained. The Queen entered the chapel, and
the Cardinal de Rohan pontificated there.
“Figaro” was more amusing and deserves a greater mention. All the jokes
of the spring and all the society question was of “Figaro.” By June,
somehow or other, by some intrigue, very possibly by a word from the
Queen, the scandalous, the delightfully tickling attack upon all their
privileges, their scandals—their very life; the comedy that half of them
already knew by heart, and from which the younger could recite whole
passages in Beaumarchais’ very manner, was to be acted at last—but only
for the Court. Of course, such a scandal could not be allowed in Paris,
or in the town. The Hall of the Menus Plaisirs was got ready, the parts
were learnt, the actors of the Comédie Française were come, the
courtiers and their wives had their tickets in hand, the carriages were
at the door, the theatre half full, when a messenger came from the King
bearing a _lettre de cachet_, a peremptory, secret and immediate order:
the “Mariage de Figaro” was not to be played.
All who have seen a jostle of the wealthy suddenly deprived of some
pleasure—especially of a satire upon themselves—may imagine the anger
that arose. Meanwhile the King, who had bethought him so late of this
vigorous act, murmured thoughtfully in his room that probably in the
long run Beaumarchais would have the best of it.
He had. By September M. de Vandreuil had the play ready for “the ladies”
and young Artois—he had put up a private stage. The smart and the
literary were assured there would be no disappointment—nor was there.
Beaumarchais had been recalled by a special secret messenger from
England, whither he had retired in a pretended pique; secret permission
was given, the “Mariage” was secretly played (before two hundred
people), and the thing was done. Play-acting and a sort of passionate
frivolity had conquered the State. I must ask pardon for wasting so many
lines upon so light a matter.
Two greater things were at hand: Calonne was about to be put at the head
of the finances; Joseph II. was beginning to be decisive about the
Scheldt.
The business of the Scheldt had dragged all through 1783. The active
hostility of France and England had ceased a year before—to the grave
disadvantage of England. Peace had been actually signed for nine months,
yet nothing had been done, and the Cabinet of Versailles still
temporised. To Joseph this recalcitrance upon the part of his ally was
not only irritating, as had been years ago the French hesitation to
support him in the Bavarian chance of war, it was incomprehensible; he
could lay it to nothing but folly. To what depths of folly Versailles
might descend he would admit even his clear brain incapable of judging.
The French lay, as he conceived, open to every attack; theirs was a
power visibly in decay which had made indeed a chance lucky move beyond
the Atlantic, but which could not long continue great. It was surely
their duty, as it was obviously their policy, to be guided by Vienna. It
was not till now—after so many years!—that he had come across the sharp
French “jib” which has since his time disconcerted so many diplomatists.
For the statesmen of that people, under every régime—at least, every
modern régime (wherein I count the later Ministers of Louis XV. and the
anti-clericals of the present Republic)—have much in them, whatever
their rank, of their own peasantry. It is as though the Frenchman, when
he acts as a Minister for the collectivity of France, was collectively
inspired and thought like the mass of ploughmen that build up his
nation. As the peasants perpetually bewail the weather, so he the times.
As the peasants curse authority (which they are so zealous to maintain
as a guarantee of property), so the Statesman the régime of his epoch.
As they will speculate rashly once in a generation, so he in the Seven
Years’ War or in 1870. As they for years after such an error build up a
fortune in the stodgiest securities, so he will build up alliances and
an army in the long periods of national repose. As they with
protestations of ruin and yet with courtesy will relinquish as
make-weight to a bargain some article wholly worthless to them, so he
will reluctantly throw into the diplomatic scale some barren or
untenable possession overseas. As they in a bargain ask with the most
natural air a most fantastic price, so he in a diplomatic proposition.
But, above all, as the French Peasantry, when their apparent stupidity
tempts the city man to ask for something that really concerns them,
become first dumb, then nasty, so the French Statesman, quite
unexpectedly and in one day, clouds over and reveals an astonishing
obstinacy to yield any point of material value to his nation.
The opening of the Scheldt was of no advantage to France. The existence
of a strong Austrian State to the north of her was a thing to avoid; the
diplomatic tradition of a hundred years was in support of Holland, and,
though the Austrian Alliance had changed much, it had been made to
exercise pressure towards the Elbe, not towards the North Sea. Hence for
all the courtesy, the postponements, the protestations of a continued
warmth in the Alliance and the rest of it, France steadily refused to
move. The Emperor Joseph did something he had been slow to do of recent
years: he wrote directly to his sister.
* * * * *
Far off in the Vosges Madame La Motte, the little, proud, active woman
with the furtive eyes, was closeted with the Cardinal de Rohan in his
château of Saverne. She had, she told him, _all but_ recovered her true
place as a Valois; she needed aid for a _very_ little time longer. Here
was a bill upon a Jew, down on the plain in Nancy; quite a small
bill—not a hundred and fifty pounds. The Cardinal backed her bill.
* * * * *
Marie Antoinette could not for the life of her have shown you the
Scheldt on the map; she knew her own incompetence, the advice she
proffered was null or uncertain, and, in any case, whatever slight
suggestion she may have made was quite passed by in the counsels of her
husband. From that moment Joseph was turned, if somewhat slowly, towards
action. He would clear the Scheldt by force, and compel the Cabinet of
Versailles to follow; he took his time and made his plan—but he did not
succeed.
The advent of Calonne was not the least of the accidents that impeded
him, and Calonne’s appointment with its large consequences was partly—as
were now so many things—the work of the Queen. A man of fifty,
provincial, a gentleman, a good lawyer, Calonne was also a friend of the
Polignacs; and Marie Antoinette, on that account alone, supported his
candidature to the Direction of Finance: when she knew him she grew to
dislike him. He was intensely national, vigorous, gay, a trifle too
rapid in thought, ambitious, virile with a Latin virility; he was of a
type she could never affect, and it is certain that he despised her
intellect and resented her interference with affairs—he probably showed
it.
But once he was appointed to the Treasury, her distaste came too late.
That department, as the entanglement of the public fortune increased in
complexity, grew to absorb in importance every other. The complete
autonomy of each Minister within his department (which was a necessary
consequence of Autocracy and the mark of government at Versailles) left
him independent of his colleagues. The vast consequence of any Exchequer
Act at that moment and thenceforward made the Exchequer supreme over
War, over Home, and even over Foreign affairs.
It is difficult to describe the man: his acts must describe him. It is
enough to say that he was not corrupt, that he carried through his
attempt with courage, that he spent the public money largely and gaily
in order to forward his plan of procuring a large increase of revenue
rather than a large reduction of expenditure; that he was saddled with
the remains of the American War debt; was heir in office to the
dishonest and incompetent Necker, and that, so far as mere
administration could, it was he in particular who later opened the
Revolution by one act of courage, and not without deliberation, when he
clearly saw that an active nation needed action to live: for it was he
who summoned the Notables and so convened the first of the Assemblies.
* * * * *
The winter of ’83-’84 was very hard. The new taxes—imposed in the
desperate attempt to fill the Treasury during the preceding year, before
Calonne came, were just beginning to tell. The new loans—which were
Calonne’s own—hung over the prosperity of the State.... The Queen was at
ease; the letters of Rohan no longer came for her to burn; he no longer
crept by tricks into her presence.... Then there was “Figaro.” “Figaro”
was being talked of more than ever.... The King must give his consent
... he had given it to a private stage.... Come, would he not give it
for the public? The play lay there, in the minds of the leisured and the
wealthy; it was potentially a destroyer of the State on which they
battened; but boredom is stronger than appetite with the smart, and the
smart urged “Figaro” on towards its full and final publicity.
The winter drew on towards spring. It still froze hard. Calonne
continued loans and largesse. “To be free of a tangle, you must borrow;
to borrow, you must be at ease; to be at ease, you must spend.” He spent
largely upon the poor of Paris; he consented to fêtes; he took the thing
at a charge. As a nation in the grasp of a dreadful foe might win
through by loan upon loan and pouring out fresh millions, bribing
colonial soldiers recklessly—five, six, seven, ten shillings a day, and
to hell with the commissariat—so he in the grasp of an embarrassed
fiscal system that was dying in an agony and that nothing could recover.
Such procedure invited force of itself; it paved the way for a vast
physical, armed change to effect renewal. With the old régime no man
could have done anything, not the gayest or the most daring; and what
régime has ever changed itself? Calonne was killing the old régime.
He even attempted to feed the people of Paris by free gifts. But still
the people of Paris were not contented, and above them, in the ranks
that make “Opinion,” there was an increasing demand, an insistence for
the “Mariage de Figaro.” It was already March, and the play was still
disallowed.
* * * * *
In his bishop’s palace that March, the woman La Motte was telling the
Cardinal de Rohan one of those truly considerable lies upon which
history turns; a lie comparable to the lie of Bismarck at Ems—or to any
other that any of my readers may cherish. The Cardinal sat listening,
his florid, proud, prominent, unintelligent face all ears. “_She had
reached the result of so much patient waiting. Her dignity of Valois_
(and she was a Valois) _was to be recognised; her lands_ (she had no
lands) _were_ _to be restored to her. It was the_ QUEEN _whom she had
conquered: the_ QUEEN _was now her friend, her intimate friend. The_
QUEEN _would do anything in the world for her. Through her was Rohan’s
avenue to the_ QUEEN. _Her poverty was at an end. She could soon repay
so many years of his kindness._”
* * * * *
Marie Antoinette was concerned with little in those weeks; it is just
possible she again spoke a word for that eternal “Figaro.” If she did
she was but one of a hundred—and the King gave way. The censorship
should be removed, but on condition that certain passages most offensive
to the established order of the State should be deleted. On that point
Louis would not budge ... it made all the difference. They were deleted,
and the King—misjudging now—said (not without foreboding): “I hope it
will be a frost.” On the first night the Public answered him.
A vast crowd broke for hours against the railings of the Comédie
Française, a crowd in which every kind of man was crushed against every
kind. The doors opened to a mob that stormed the theatre like a citadel,
and that, when it entered, could see, in reserved places and entered
earlier than the public, every head in Paris that counted. Even
Monsieur, deep in his private box, was there, and there behind their
bars were the Parliament, the Ministry—even, discreetly, the Church.
The play began.... To-day, in a society which it has helped to create,
its jests seem obvious, its epigrams platitudes. To that eager people,
starved of reform in the midst of a huge transformation of society, they
were brilliant exactitudes of wit, struck off like bright
coins—precisely the thing desired. This man found satisfied as the play
proceeded his revenge against bought law, that man his brooding against
an old insult of privilege, that other his disgust at an apparent
national decline, yet another his mere hunger: and all these Frenchmen
found in the play an echo of their national contempt for a government
that cannot excuse itself, even by logic; all found and each found his
necessity for passion against existing things assuaged by the sparkle
and the venom of the play. They roared at it with delight as men do at
the close of successful assault. They laughed as do men satisfied to
repletion. They felt a common enemy gone under. There was not one so
privileged but had heartily supped of ridicule against some aspect of
the society he had learnt to despise.
The curtain fell to a storm of triumphant noise. The Parisians went out
into the darkness full and fed with the idea of change, and a great
crack had opened in the walls of the palace. It was the 27th of April
1784.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER IX
_THE DIAMOND NECKLACE_
_From April 27, 1784, to August 15, 1785_
AS the summer of 1784 broadened through May and June it led on the Queen
to every grace of life, and at last, as it might have been imagined, to
security. The season itself was fruitful and serene: the establishment
of prestige abroad—so often a forerunner of evil to European nations—was
now triumphantly achieved. There was now about the Court an air of
solidity and permanence which the visit of foreign princes continued to
confirm, and this air (thanks to Calonne’s largesse) seemed less
poisoned by that financial ill-ease which had turned even the last
victories of the American War into doubtful and anxious things.
Marie Antoinette had entered into that content and calm which often
introduces middle age after a youth tormented by an inward insecurity.
Her inheritance was sure. Her children had not yet betrayed the doom of
their blood. The legend of her follies meant daily a little less,
because daily it became more and more of a legend worn by time,
dangerous only if its set formula should be filled with life and reality
by some new scandal. The violence of her youth now seemed exorcised; her
fulness of feature, which had shocked the taste of Louis XV.’s Court,
accorded with these her later functions of authority. She was indeed in
that full flower of womanhood which later so perturbed the memories of
Burke and lent one famous passage of sincerity to his false political
rhetoric.
As Marie Antoinette so entered at last into maturity, and, it would
seem, into peace, the comedy which was to bring upon her every
humiliation entered upon the Stage of this World. In the waters below
her, Jeanne de La Motte de Valois, fishing for goldfish, struck and
landed her Cardinal.
[Illustration:
MARIE ANTOINETTE
AFTER THE PAINTING BY MADAME VIGEE LE BRUN
]
Gustavus of Sweden, Northerner and Flibbertigibert, the same that had
slung diamond necklaces round the Du Barry’s little dog and the same
that had despised the Dauphine, was at Court in the early days of that
June, and saw the Queen now a woman; his affections were immediately
moved. There was a touch of flirtation between them; on her side also a
real friendship which for years continued in correspondence—for the
softness of the North never failed to soothe and to relieve this
Austrian woman caught in the hardness of French rules and the pressure
of French vitality. He had come as the “Comte de Haga,” and she feasted
him well. That new toy, a balloon, was sent up to amuse him—she had it
called by her name—and he was shown all that Trianon could show by day
or by night. She was the more gracious from the awkwardness of Louis,
who came ill-dressed to meet Gustavus and who was slow with him. She
gave him deference. She consented, at one great supper of hers, to stand
with her women and supervise all, while he was seated. Only she would
not dance with him; she said she danced no more....
Meanwhile accompanying the King of Sweden and ever at his side, Fersen
was come again to Versailles.
Fersen was now a man. War had made him. Marie Antoinette could silently
watch in him a very different carriage and a new alertness of the
visage, but his eyes still bore the tender respect that she had known
and remembered.
He was now for some years to come and go between Versailles and the
world. He was a colonel of French Horse, and his place was made....
The King of Sweden went down well; the Court was full of him. The Queen
surpassed herself in well-receiving him.
The month of June was filled with this sincere and pleasing gaiety; but
all that June, far off, the La Motte was going and coming in her secret
ways, talking to the Cardinal of letters to her “from the Queen,”
assuring him that these letters gave proof of his growing favour. She
did more and boldly; she affected to _show_ him those royal letters!
There was a soldier of sorts, cynical, ramshackle, hard up, like all her
gang, Rétaux de Villette by name; he it was who wrote these letters
whenever the La Motte might ask him—so much a time. They must have
amused him as he wrote them! He was at no pains to disguise his hand; he
wrote straight out to his “dear heart,” the Countess de La Motte Valois,
anything she asked him to write—especially praise of Rohan—and when he
had written it (at so much a time) he would boldly sign “Marie
Antoinette” with a flourish; and the La Motte would show the letter to
Rohan, and Rohan (that is the amazing and simple truth) would believe
them to be the Queen’s!
If the Cardinal had any doubts at all they were easily dispersed.
Cagliostro, who enjoyed the Illumination of the Seventh House and had
powers from the other world, most strongly reassured him—for a fee; the
seen and unseen powers all combined to reassure the fatuous Rohan, and
he was ready, as June ended, to believe not only that he was in favour
with the Queen but in very peculiar favour indeed, and that all this
show of avoidance and silence upon her part was a mask necessary to
conceal a deeply-rooted tenderness. She might turn her head away when
the Grand Almoner passed on his rare and pompous occasions of
ecclesiastical office in the galleries of Versailles. She might refuse
to speak to him a single word. She might, whenever she deigned to speak
of him to others, speak with complete contempt and disgust. She might
(as she had and did) successfully prevent the smallest honour or moneys
coming to him. But, oh! he saw it all! It was but a mask to hide her
great love—and, sooner or later, he would have his reward for such long
and patient waiting!
He in his turn wrote—constantly. To the letters the La Motte showed
him—dainty scented notes on little dainty sheets of gilded blue (but
written, alas! by such rough hands)—he would answer, with imploring,
respectful, adoring lines, handed to the La Motte, that she might give
them to her great and high friend. Now he could understand why
Cagliostro had promised him in oracular enigmas that “glory would come
to him from a correspondence,” and that “full power with the Government”
was immediately awaiting him. He was ready to assume it.
July was empty enough for the Queen. Her guest was gone; there was
little doing at Versailles. Her amusements, especially her theatre, she
had deliberately given up, determined to let the legend against her die.
She waited through the dull month a little worried. Her brother the
Emperor was still fussing about his diplomatic quarrel, the opening of
the Scheldt, and the rest of it; she was anxious for him and for peace.
Henry of Prussia would soon be visiting Versailles, there intriguing (as
she dreaded) against her Austrian House. But, on the whole, the month of
July 1784 was a dull month for her. It was not dull for the La Mottes.
The male La Motte in early July sauntered, on those fine sunny days, in
the Palais Royal. He was looking for something; he was looking for a
face and a figure not too unlike those of the Queen of France. It was
not a difficult thing to find; the type was common enough, and in the
first days of his search he found it. The woman was a woman of the town,
young, with a swelled heart, as it were, and no brains; she was timid,
she was ready to swallow anything offered her. He followed her with
gallantry, and found that her professional name was d’Oliva; her true
name the more humble one of Le Quay. For a week or so this new lover of
hers went on like any other, he appeared and reappeared most naturally;
but when the week was over and he had grown most familiar to her—and
perhaps with his birth and high accent most revered—La Motte confided to
her great and flattering news. _There was a great Lady at Court who
sought her aid in a matter of vast importance_, and that great Lady
spoke perhaps for a Lady greater still. The grandeur of the position was
left to brew, and on the 22nd of July, when it was already dusk, the
great Lady (who was the female La Motte) swept into the poor girl’s
humble lodgings—a vision of the Court and the high world; she told the
wide-eyed hussy things that seemed too lofty for human ears. _The Queen
had need of her._
For herself, said the La Motte, she was the Queen’s one great, near
friend (she showed a letter—one of the famous letters), and if the
d’Oliva would do as she was begged to do, the gratitude of the Queen
would far excel in effect the paltry 400 _pounds_ that _she_, La Motte,
would give. Come, would she help the Queen?
Oh yes! the d’Oliva would help the Queen! She would come next day to
Versailles!
Why, then, all was well.... And that very night, posthaste, the
interview over, Madame de La Motte galloped off to Versailles to take a
room with her maid.
For the Queen the dreary month was ending—there was no trouble upon her
horizon. She had written again to Sweden; she asked for, and obtained,
the reversion of the See of Albi for a friend of the King of Sweden’s.
There was no other news.
History does not show perhaps one situation more wonderfully unlike the
common half-happenings, complexities and reactions of real life, nor one
more wonderfully fulfilling the violent and exact, simple, and
pre-arranged ironies of drama, than the contrast of that night: the
Queen in the palace, ignorant of any ill save the old and dwindling
tales against her, listless after a summer month of idleness and of
restraint—and coming right up at her, down the Paris road, the woman who
was to destroy her altogether.
The La Motte and her maid got in to Versailles very late. They took
rooms at the Belle Image. Next day La Motte and Rétaux, the soldier,
came, bringing the poor girl d’Oliva with them; and after a short walk
in the town, during which she was left in the hotel with that “great
Lady,” before whom she trembled, they told the d’Oliva that they had
seen the Queen and that all was well. They waited till the morrow. On
the evening of that morrow, the 24th of July, Madame de La Motte warned
the d’Oliva that the time was come. She dressed her all in white,
magnificently; she gave her a letter and a rose, and said: “To-night we
go into the Park together, and there you will see for a moment a great
Lord. Give him this letter and that rose, and say these words: ‘You know
my meaning!’ You will have no more to do.” It was about eleven, a dark
night and no moon, when the two women went together into the vast
gardens of the palace.
As you stand in the centre of the great façade of Versailles and look
westward down a mile of formal lawn and water, there lie to your left in
the palace what were the Queen’s rooms, and to your left in the gardens
a large grove called “the Queen’s Grove,” in which are the trees that
can be seen nearest to her windows or to be reached most quickly from
what were her private doors.
Near and within this grove, by an appointment which the La Motte had
sworn him to observe, paced and repaced the Cardinal. The La Motte had
told him he would see the Queen.
In an enormous cloak of dark mysterious blue that covered his purple to
the heels, in a broad soft hat that flapped down and hid his face, this
fool of magnitude paced the gardens of Versailles and waited for the
delicious hour. Behind him as he paced followed respectfully a man of
his—one Planta, a sort of insignificant noble. The hour came. The_La
Motte found the Cardinal. She led him along a path among the high
trees—and there for a moment, near a hornbeam hedge that grew there, he
saw dimly a woman in white, showing tall and vague in the darkness. This
figure held forward to him in some confusion a rose, and said very low,
“You know my meaning!” Rohan seized the hem of the white dress and
kissed it passionately, but before another word could pass a man came
forward at speed and whispered as in an agony: “Madame! D’Artois is
near—Madame!” The La Motte said “Quick!...” The thing in white slipped
back into the shadow of a bush, the Cardinal was hurried away—but his
life had reached its summit! He had heard dear words from the lips of
the Queen!...
Marie Antoinette was asleep perhaps, or perhaps chatting, muffled, with
Polignac’s wife, or perhaps, more likely, by her children’s nursery
beds, watching their repose and questioning their nurse in the wing of
the great palace hard by. A hundred yards away, in the darkness of the
grove outside, that scene had passed which set the train of her destiny
alight; and the explosion caused by it ruined all that creviced society
of Versailles and cast it down, casting down with it the Queen.
There existed at that time necklace. Fantastic stories have been told of
its value; of those sovereigns to whom it was offered, and who, with a
sigh, had been compelled to refuse it. It may very likely have been
offered to Marie Antoinette (with her old passion for jewels) some years
before, in ’79, after the birth of her first child. It may be that the
King would have given her the expensive thing—£64,000 was the price of
it—it may be he had never seen it. At any rate, all the world knew that
the unrivalled necklace existed, and had for some years existed as the
property of two Court jewellers who worked in partnership, Boehmer and
Bassange, and that they could not find a purchaser. The reader should
remember this necklace, for though it will not be before him till six
months after this July of ’84, yet, but for the scene in the “Queen’s
Grove,” Rohan would never have handled it, and had Rohan never handled
it, there would not have arisen that enormous scandal that came so
opportune to new rumours and new angers, and in the end dragged down the
Queen.
* * * * *
With August came Prince Henry of Prussia and all the bother of him. The
Emperor was pressing the Dutch more and more. France was half inclined
to prevent that pressure, in spite of the Austrian Alliance. France was
determined, at any rate, to prevent Austria, allied or not, from
strengthening herself upon the North and East. England, to keep the
Scheldt shut, was more than half inclined to prevent that pressure, in
spite of Holland’s attitude during the American War. Prussia stood by to
gain—and part of Prussia’s chance was the opportunity of feeling and
influencing Louis XVI.’s Cabinet.
Prince Henry came, as Frederick’s brother, to feel and to influence; to
see how much could be done by way of separating Vienna from Versailles.
It was a strain on the Queen. What could she know of these intrigues and
counter-intrigues? She saw things, now as ever, few and plain; she saw a
Prussian attempt to separate her House and the House into which she had
married. Therefore Prince Henry’s visit was a difficulty to her. She
solved it as one might expect of her character, by avoiding him. She
wrote to the King of Sweden a little too familiarly, and assured him
that she had hardly seen the visitor: she “was at Trianon continually,
with intimates only.” Paris thought much of him (for Prussia was then,
as now, efficient); she was very properly fatigued, but, improperly, she
did not conquer her fatigue. During all his stay he saw her perhaps not
half-a-dozen times, though he (as might be expected of his character or
of any of his descendants, ancestors, or collaterals) stayed on and on
and on.... He stayed steadily on in France till November!—and before
November enough had happened!
The little Dauphin was really ill. His mother was anxious. St. Cloud was
bought for him, in some vague hope that the “air” was better there—as
though the “air” of one suburb more than another could cure the rickets
of the Bourbons.
Next, it was known that the Queen was again with child. She wrote of it
(familiarly enough) to the King of Sweden.
More than this, war was apparent. The Emperor’s smouldering quarrel with
the Dutch had broken into flame; upon the 4th of October 1784 an
Imperial ship had sailed up the Scheldt to see if the Dutch would oppose
an entry. The Dutch did oppose it; they shot at the Imperial ship and
took it, and every ruler in Europe put his hand to the hilt of his
sword.
So far Marie Antoinette had done little at Versailles but be worried by
all this complex quarrel; a fortnight before the incident she had told
her brother that “really she was not so important at Versailles”; she
hoped it was a thing to shirk. Now that the guns had begun, she was in a
panic and made a call upon her old and natural violence. She effected
little: Vergennes and the tradition of French diplomacy were too much
for such tantrums, but the superficial aspect of her action was
striking. It was known that she continually saw the King, that she made
scenes, that she stormed. It was known that she was “Austrian” in all
this—if it was not understood by the people that she had failed. On the
contrary, when in the upshot a compromise was arranged, she appeared
once more in that most odious light—a woman sending French tribute to
Vienna.
For when the Emperor consented to the closing of the Scheldt (it was not
till February of the next year that he gave way), the French Cabinet,
which had firmly supported Holland, was gradually influenced to
guarantee the indemnity which the dignity of the Imperial Crown
demanded: it was close on ten million florins.[7] The Dutch refused so
large a sum. The Queen wrote, cajoled, insisted in favour of her
brother, her House and Austria. The French Foreign Office, true to its
tradition of taking material interests seriously, stood firm and backed
Holland steadily. At last the French agreed to take over and to pay as
sponsors for Holland one-half the sum demanded of the Dutch Government,
if thereby they might avoid war in Europe.
Footnote 7:
The fiction of the indemnity is entertaining. The Dutch were to
“yield” Maestricht as the equivalent to the Emperor’s granting the
closing of the Scheldt. The indemnity was to “redeem” Maestricht.
The payment was due to the Queen’s vigour or interference, and meanwhile
there had arisen one of those large and sudden affairs which give
everything around them a new meaning, which emphasise every coincident
evil, and draw together into their atmosphere every ill-will and every
calumny. Just before Marie Antoinette appeared before the populace as
one who was sending millions of French treasure to her foreign brother
came the explosion—in the interval of all this diplomacy and
negotiation—of what is called in history “The Affair of the Diamond
Necklace.” The truth with regard to that famous business is as follows:—
When the Cardinal de Rohan left the Park that midnight of July after the
rapture of a word from the ridiculous d’Oliva, he was fallen wholly in
the hands of the La Motte. _She_ it was, as he thought, who had done
this great thing for him. _She_ had given him the Queen; and he was now
entirely sure of his right to act for Marie Antoinette and to serve her.
The La Motte began by begging money of him for the Queen’s pet
charities. She obtained it: first, two or three thousand pounds at the
end of August. Rétaux wrote the letter: “It was for people whom she
wanted to help.” Rétaux signed it with his “Marie Antoinette”: and Rohan
paid. A few pounds of it went to the unhappy woman whom La Motte had
used, the rest to creditors or show. Much at the time when the Scheldt
business was at its height, just as Prince Henry was leaving and all
were talking of the Queen, in the autumn of 1784 a new letter came
(again from Rétaux’ hand) asking for _four thousand_. There was the
signature “Marie Antoinette,” there the beloved terms, and Rohan blindly
paid: his man took the money to the La Motte, “to give the Queen.” The
Cardinal was sure of his way now; he was a master; the Queen was under
obligations to him. The money was spent in a very lavish display by the
male and the female La Motte. They travelled with grandeur; they visited
in a patronising manner the earlier home of their poverty; they lived
high. With the end of the year 1784 more money was needed—and here
enters into history that diamond necklace which had so long been waiting
its cue to come upon the stage.
[Illustration:
PORTRAIT BUST OF THE DUKE OF NORMANDY, THE SECOND DAUPHIN,
SOMETIMES CALLED LOUIS XVII, WHO DIED IN THE TEMPLE
THIS BUST WAS BROKEN IN THE FALL OF THE PALACE,
AND HAS RECENTLY BEEN RECOVERED AND RESTORED TO VERSAILLES
]
The name of La Motte was now current—in the mouth alone and among the
populace, not at Court—for one who could do much. Bassange heard, from a
friend, of the La Mottes: of Madame de La Motte. He sent the friend to
see whether his white elephant of a necklace could be moved towards that
quarter. Madame de La Motte said wisely that she must see the jewels, a
day or two after Christmas. She saw them; for three weeks they were kept
on the hook. Upon the 21st of January 1785, a date that has appeared
before and will appear again in this history, she sent and told them
that the Queen would buy, but (in her usual manner) a “great lord” would
be the intermediary; and on the 24th, by the time it was full daylight,
the great lord came in the winter morning to do that little thing which
led to so much at last. It was the Cardinal de Rohan who came, handled
the jewels, bargained, promised four payments (at six-monthly intervals)
of £16,000 each, the first for the 1st of _August_ (the date should be
noted), and demanded delivery on the 1st of February. The jewellers
brought the gems on that day to his great palace in the Marais, and he
then told them frankly that the buyer behind him was the Queen.
They saw a signature, “Marie Antoinette de France”; they saw a part at
least of a letter, to the effect that she the Queen was not accustomed
to accommodation and therefore begged him to negotiate. They were
satisfied, left the necklace, and were gone. That night the Cardinal
gave it to Madame de La Motte at Versailles, or rather, hiding himself
in an alcove, saw it given to a man who acted the part of the Queen’s
messenger and who was, of course, Rétaux.
All this, I say, passed on the 1st of February 1785.
Next day, Candlemas—just two years after Madame de La Motte had made her
desperate effort to approach the Queen with a petition—Rohan and the
jeweller, one as Grand Almoner in the high religious function of the
day, the other as a man in the crowd, each watched the royal party go by
and noted the Queen; each missed the jewel that surely she should be
wearing on the morrow of its purchase, and each saw that it was not yet
worn. Each for different reasons wondered, but each for different
reasons was silent, and each determined, for different reasons, to wait.
Meanwhile the necklace was in the custody of the male La Motte ready for
its journey to London, the refuge of the oppressed.
Lent passed. On Easter Sunday the Queen’s third child—he who became the
Dauphin of the Imprisonment—was born. If, thought Rohan, the Queen had
purposely waited before putting on the necklace, in order to avoid a
coincidence of date between _his_ visit to the jewellers and _her_ first
wearing of the gem, surely a long enough space would have passed by the
time of the Relevailles, the ceremonial churching in Notre Dame which
followed the birth of every member of the Blood Royal. The Relevailles
approached. It was more than eight months since the Cardinal had been
given that rose at midnight, and he began to grow anxious. The necklace
haunted him.... Far off in London the male La Motte was selling, stone
by stone, the better part of it; the rest Rétaux was carefully disposing
of in Paris itself.
It was on May 24 that the Queen proceeded to Paris for the ceremony of
the Relevailles. All the antique grandeur was there and the crowds, but
over all of it and over the crowds a new and dreadful element of popular
silence. The guns saluted her through a silent air. In the streets of
the University the very wheels of her carriage could be heard, so hushed
was the crowd. The rich in the opera that evening cheered her, but going
in and coming out through popular thousands she heard no cheers. She
supped in the Temple with Artois, whose appanage the liberties of the
Temple were, and she could see through the night in his garden, as she
had seen so often before in his feasts and his receptions, the dimmer
and more huge from the blaze of light near by, that ominous great Tower
which, it is said, she had always dreaded and dreaded more acutely now
with an access of superstitious fear. “Oh! Artois, pull it down!”
The Grand Almoner was present at this high function; he watched her and
marvelled that the necklace should still be hidden away.
The next morning she could be certain how Paris had changed. There was
throughout its air a mixture of indifference and of dislike that
poisoned her society with it. Paris now thought of her fixedly as the
living extravagance of the Court. St. Cloud was at their gates to
reproach her, with its title of the “Queen’s Palace,” its printed
“Queen’s” orders on the gate. The Deficit was there to reproach her. Her
very economies, the lessened festivities, the abandoned journeys of the
Court, her rarer and more rare appearances in the capital, the lack of
noise in Trianon, were, in the public mouth, a consequence of past
excesses. The judgment was false, but it stood firm.
Her undue influence over the King and the councils of the King was
another legend, less false than that of gross extravagance. There was no
proof, but a crowd has more judgment than an isolated man, and the crowd
divined what we now know. They had divined it in this critical year
which saw France balancing on the verge of war with Austria, and which,
before its close, saw the payment of the Dutch indemnity by the French
to the Queen’s brother at Vienna. All her action for twelve months was
wholly Austrian in their eyes, and they were wholly right. It was in
such a popular atmosphere, so sullen and so prepared, full for a year
past of “Figaro’s” ironic laughter against a régime already hurrying to
its end, that the explosion of that summer was to come; for the 1st of
August was near, and with it the time for the first instalment upon the
necklace.
In June the Count de La Motte was back from London paying part of the
money he had received for the diamonds to a Paris banker—one Perregaux.
In July—on the mid-Tuesday of the month—Boehmer in his capacity of Court
Jeweller brought to Versailles certain jewels. He brought with him also
a letter which he gave to the Queen at mid-day as she came out of Mass;
he gave her the letter with mystery and with profound respect, and was
gone. The Queen read that note; it was incomprehensible to her. It
assured her of her jewellers’ unalterable devotion; it begged her to
believe that Boehmer and Bassange were willing to accept her “latest
proposals,” and it ended with their satisfaction that “_the finest set
of diamonds in the world should adorn the greatest and the best of its
Queens_.” Whether Marie Antoinette had even heard of the necklace in the
past we cannot tell, though probably, like all the rest of the world,
she had. Whether she had or not, the note was equally mysterious to her.
The Comptroller of the Household, the Baron de Breteuil, was told of the
little bother; he sent for Boehmer, asked him what on earth the note
meant, but he only received mysterious replies leading nowhere.
If it be asked by the reader why, seeing a complication of some sort
before her, Marie Antoinette did not at once order an investigation to
be pursued by the police, the answer is simple enough to any one
acquainted with her character: the annoyance bored her. Her instinct was
simply to avoid it. She may (some say so) have spared herself trouble
upon some theory that the jeweller was mad: anyhow, she spared herself
trouble.
If it be asked how the complication ever arose, why that enigmatical
letter was written, and why, once written and delivered, Boehmer should
have hesitated and equivocated meaninglessly in his answers to Breteuil,
the answer is simple when one hears what had just passed in that lower
world of duped Cardinal and intriguing, most impudent of adventurers,
rapscallions and spiritualists.
Madame de La Motte had been driving Rétaux of late to write more
frequently than ever his “Marie Antoinette” letters to the Cardinal. The
poor soldier was not a woman, he was not even a writer of fiction, and
he had been kept hard at it to force the note of love so often and in
such various ways; until at last, one letter had been ordered of him
saying, as the date of the first instalment approached, that “really the
price was too high.” Couldn’t the Cardinal, for her sake, get some £8000
off the price? If he could, the Queen would pay on the 1st of August,
not the £16,000 then due, but a full £28,000. The Cardinal read and
obeyed. The jewellers were agreeable. Hence Boehmer’s note of July 12th,
and hence (since he was convinced that the Queen, by the very method of
her purchase, desired secrecy above all things) his evasive replies to
De Breteuil.
Thus, in that world beneath of which she knew nothing, things were
coming to an issue against Marie Antoinette: one last event did all.
Upon the Saturday before the payment was due, the Cardinal (acting upon
a further letter) gave Boehmer something over £1000 and said to him that
it was free money—over and above the fixed price—to console him for the
unwelcome news that the first instalment could not be met quite
punctually. Come, the Queen would certainly pay on the 1st of October;
it was but two months to wait. He had seen it in a note of the Queen’s
which the Countess de La Motte had just shown him.
It is probable that even the Cardinal had become suspicious now—he says
as much himself—but his pride and his fear of exposure held him. As for
the jeweller, the interview of that Saturday broke his back; he was
distracted. On the Tuesday (or the Wednesday) the climax of the comedy
was reached. The Countess de La Motte met the two partners Boehmer and
Bassange together, and told them boldly that the signature “Marie
Antoinette de France” was a forgery—so there! In the stupefaction that
followed she added the quiet advice that for their money they must bleed
the Cardinal—“He had plenty”—and so left them.
Then followed that general scurry which is the note of embroglios as
they flare up towards their end. Bassange runs here, Boehmer runs there;
the one to Rohan in his Episcopal Palace, the other to those who can
help him with the Queen—notably to Madame Campan, who has left an
exaggerated and distorted account of the interview. To Bassange the
Cardinal (anything to gain time in the hurly-burly) swears the signature
is true; to Boehmer Madame Campan, with her solid, upper-servant face,
announces the redundant truth that he seems to have been let in. As for
the La Motte, she flies to Rohan, and he (anything to keep things dark
and to protect a witness to his incalculable stupidity of a coxcomb)
consents to hide her; he gives her asylum in his great house.
Next Boehmer goes to Versailles—at once—and implores the Queen to see
him. The Queen has really had her fill of this kind of thing; she
refuses. But next week she consents, and the revelations begin.
It was at such a moment, with such storms about her, in the full and
growing unpopularity of her Austrian influence in the affair of the
Dutch indemnity, in the full and growing renascence of the legend of her
extravagance, that Marie Antoinette had determined not only to play once
more in her theatre at Trianon—the chief reproach of the past, a legend
with the populace for unqueenly exposure, for lack of dignity, for
expense—not only to break her wise resolve, which had been kept for more
than a year, that her plays should cease, but actually to play another
piece by that same Beaumarchais whose wit was the spear-head of the
attack upon the old régime. The decision came neither of cynicism nor of
folly upon her part; it came of tragic ignorance.
It was while she was rehearsing her part of “Rosine” that she was
persuaded—probably by Madame Campan herself—to send for Boehmer and to
hear his tale. He came upon the 9th of August, Tuesday, by the Queen’s
command, to Trianon. At first he simply asked for the money he believed
his due. When he saw that Marie Antoinette neither understood why it
should be paid, nor for what, nor by whom, he told the whole story as he
had heard it. He was sent off to write down coherently and at length in
a clear memorandum the details of this amazing thing, and when he had
gone the Queen raved.
Each consequence and aspect of the abomination, as each successively
appeared to her, struck her with separate and aggravated blows. Her name
linked with a libertine whom, of all libertines, she most loathed—a man
who was the object of her dead mother’s especial contempt! The
half-truths that would come in; her love of jewellery—now long
conquered, but now widely remembered! Her secret debts—now long paid,
but already a fixed idea in the public mind! At the best that such a man
had thought it conceivable that she should be such a woman; at the worst
that the world might believe it!
Upon Friday the report of Boehmer came in. She mastered it that day and
the next, and on Sunday the 14th, the eve of the Assumption, she begged
her husband to spend all the day with her at Trianon. He willingly came.
They together—but surely at her initiative—determined on a public trial.
Mercy would have done what we do now in England when there is danger of
public scandal and the weakening of government; he would have paid the
La Motte woman something to be off. Vergennes was strongly in favour of
silence—as strongly as Downing Street would be to-day—for he was of the
trained diplomatic kind. The King’s honour, the Queen’s intense and
burning indignation against calumny persuaded them to risk publicity.
The course taken was, I repeat, not a course easy for my modern readers
to understand; we take it for granted in the modern world, and
especially in England, that a matter of this sort, involving, as it
were, all the social fabric, is best snuffed out. Thus the French
Foreign Office were willing to destroy the Pannizardi telegram, and
rather give a traitor the advantage of concealing damning evidence
against himself than to risk a rupture with Italy. Thus the English Home
Office allows criminals of a certain standing to go free rather than
endanger social influences whose secrecy is thought necessary to the
State; nor do we allow any to know what sums or how large are paid for
public honours, nor always to what objects secret subscriptions of
questionable origin—in Egypt, for instance—are devoted. Louis XVI. and
his wife at this critical moment decided otherwise and upon another
theory of morals. They decided to clear by public trial the honour of
the Crown. That decision, more than any other act, cost them their
thrones. It has preserved the truth for history.
* * * * *
The Feast of the Assumption has for centuries attracted the French by
its peculiar sanctity. Even during that phase of infidelity, which,
before the Revolution, covered all their intellect and still clings to
the bulk of their lower middle classes, the French maintained it. Even
to-day, when a fierce anti-Christian masonry has moulded groups of
artisans and intellectuals into ardent champions against the Faith, the
Assumption is universally observed. In the Court of Versailles, though
now but a ceremony, it was the noblest ceremony of the year.
It was warm noon upon that 15th of August. The Court in all its colours
stood ranked outside the Chapel Royal. The Grand Almoner, the Cardinal
de Rohan, taller than the prelates and the priests around him, stood
ready in procession to enter and to celebrate the Pontifical High Mass
as soon as the King and Queen might appear; but the King and Queen and a
Minister or two in attendance were waiting behind closed doors in Louis’
private room. The procession still halted: the Court was already
impatient: the doors still stood closed. They opened; a servant came out
and told the Cardinal that the King wished to see him a moment. The
servant and he went in together, and the doors shut behind the purple of
Rohan’s robes and the lace upon his wrists and shoulders.
The Court outside grew weary of waiting. A quarter of an hour, twenty
minutes passed; it was near the half-hour when those doors opened again
and the Head of the King’s Household, the Baron de Breteuil, appeared
with the Cardinal at his side. A lieutenant of the Guard happened to be
by. Breteuil summoned him and said aloud: “The King orders you not to
leave the Cardinal as you take him to his palace: you are answerable for
his person.”
So Rohan was arrested, and there is no record who sang Mass that day.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER X
_THE NOTABLES_
_August 15, 1785, to August 8, 1788_
FOR the Queen the decision to send the Cardinal to trial was a final
action. The thing was done—and, for that matter, nearly done with.
When she could find time in an interval of her occupations to write to
her brother Joseph—it was not till a fortnight later—the whole letter,
though it dealt in detail with the affair as one deserving a full
explanation, was written upon a tone of relief. It was tuned all of it
to one key-phrase: “I am delighted to think that we shall never hear of
this filthy business again.”
Hardly was that decisive act accomplished than there suddenly appeared
upon twenty points of the horizon, not only in frontal advance but upon
either flank and in either rear of the perilous position she occupied,
as many separate forces unconnected or but vaguely in touch with one
another; some directly antagonistic to others, but all having it in
common that the Queen was their objective, and that the trial of the
Cardinal had been their signal for mobilisation and the march.
It is in the character of unwisdom to analyse and to proceed upon the
results of analysis: in the character of wisdom to integrate the whole.
The analysis of the situation just before the Cardinal’s arrest showed
clearly one great factor of opposition—the Rohan clan. They were
everywhere in France contemporary and in France historical; they filled
Marie Antoinette’s generation and a hundred years. The sisters, cousins,
brothers-in-law were ubiquitous. Paris was conspicuous with their
palaces, the Court with their functions, the provinces with their loyal
dependants or necessary adherents. They were the nucleus of the
strongest group that remained to the wealthy nobility. The Guémenées,
the Soubises, even the Condés, were one with all the Rohans. A Rohan put
to open trial would have in that day the effect which a chief of our
modern financial gang put to open trial might have to-day. Imagine one
of our judges forced to try a Rothschild!
The Queen saw clearly—it is always easy to see one simple thing
clearly—that one Rohan force opposed to her; she determined to brave it;
but latent, unconscious of themselves until her own action called them
into being, how many other forces were there not!
There was no member of the higher nobility but to a greater or less
degree felt vaguely a right to immunity from such publicity—and this man
was of the highest of the nobility, a type. There was no member of the
clergy but could formulate a clear historical and legal right to the
exemption of a cleric from the judgment of a lay tribunal—and this man
was of the highest of the clergy.
Had he been Archbishop of Toulouse or Sens, or any wholly Gallic see
even, his case would have been simpler; he was Bishop of Strasburg and
his metropolitan was of Mainz: the Archbishop of Mainz was a conceivable
opponent.
He was a prince of the Church: Rome had a right to speak—and almost did.
He was a prince of the Empire: Vienna had a right to speak—and almost
did.
Austria and France had for now two years been at a strain: it was just
two years since Joseph had written his first serious letter upon the
Scheldt to his sister: the government of Austria was embittered, and had
for sovereign a man who would not refuse to trade upon the embarrassment
of Versailles. The last negotiations for indemnity against the opening
of the Scheldt were still pending. The moment was opportune.
The Cardinal could be judged by but one tribunal of the King’s, and that
a quasi-governmental body which had for a generation stood in increasing
opposition to the Crown—the Parlement. For them also the moment was
opportune.
He could be tried in but one town, and that town the capital, which had
now taken up such a definite position of hatred against the Queen; in
but one part of that town, in the Palais, right in the heart of Paris
upon which all the crowds of that unity so easily converge, and whose
towers were a perpetual symbol of the Monarchy which had deserted its
ancient seat for the isolated splendour of Versailles.
But of much more weight than even these considerable and separate bases
of resistance was that indefinitely large body of smaller and more
fluctuating dangers whose integration the Queen should have seized if
she was to save herself from destruction.
There are in politics, as in physics, conditions of unstable equilibrium
in which a mass of fragments, seemingly in repose, may at a shock be
exploded. Their energy lies ready to be released by the least
disturbance. It is the business of statesmanship to remove or to
dissolve such as these before large things are undertaken, lest a
violent motion explode them. A thousand such lay about the palace of
Versailles, threatening the Queen. Whatever particular grudges (even in
friends) had had time to grow, the memories of hatred in enemies, the
last of the Du Barry’s faction, the last of D’Aiguillon’s. The
suspicions of the devout against her frivolity, the contempt of the
philosophical for her religion, the irritation of the politician against
her presence at the Council, the necessary enmity of Calonne—all the
imperfect and capricious pleasures she had failed to pursue, all the
losses, dismissals, and humiliations rightly or wrongly laid to her
charge, were there, not consciously prepared, but fatally bound to
spring to life if once a body of action against her took visible form.
That form the trial of the Cardinal was to present. When such a body of
opposition was in motion all would attach themselves to it, each from an
aspect of its own. All the old dangers, as each appeared, made alliance
with the new and immediate perils.
Madame de La Motte was arrested three days after the Cardinal, in the
early hours of the 18th of August, just back at dawn in pomp from a
great provincial party in Champagne. Her husband fled to London, there
to meet a sympathy readily extended to such exiles, and to keep in touch
with those centres of enmity against the French Crown and religion with
which he was familiar. It was on the very day when Paris was in the
first busy rumour upon the whole matter—when it was learnt that the
Cardinal had been allowed to burn half his papers, that La Motte had got
away, that suspicion was permitted to attach to the Queen—it was upon
such a day, the 19th of August—that the Queen chose to re-open the
theatre at Trianon and to re-open it with a play of Beaumarchais’.
Many tragedies in history contain some such coincidences, but none so
many or so exact as those which accompany and determine the tragedy of
Marie Antoinette.
Consider the position: the legend of her extravagance has
re-arisen—unjustly. Trianon is—unjustly—the chief popular symbol of that
extravagance. The theatre of Trianon, the most in view, the most obvious
of its expenses, she had wisely suppressed during many months. The park
at St. Cloud, at the gates of Paris, is a further count in the
indictment against her. Her visit to Paris for her churching in May has
proved her grievously unpopular: the hated financial agreement with
Austria in regard to the Scheldt is developing, as it is believed (and
rightly believed), under her guidance. Upon all this comes the
thunder-clap of Rohan’s arrest—and just as men are beginning to
comprehend and to explain it, just as the public and foreign enmity
necessarily suggest her complicity, say that “there is more than meets
the eye,” that “you will see, the Queen will make victims of them all;
but she _is_ responsible for the purchase of the gems!” just as the
obvious lies were establishing themselves through the embryonic press of
those days and the café gossip—in that very Assumption week she chooses
to appear upon her stage at Trianon, dressed and painted for a part
written by whom? By the man Caron—Beaumarchais by purchase—whom all the
vulgar now associated with the most successful attack upon the existing
régime, whom the older and the higher world remembered as the associate
and perhaps the partner of the Jewish clique in London that had
published the first dirty lie against Marie Antoinette’s chastity when
she was as yet but a child of eighteen.
Why was such a folly committed? The answer to that question is all
around the reader to-day. That society did not know its doom. It was
“chic,” it was “the thing” for the ruling powers to read and to see
acted criticism upon themselves. The little spice of danger—they could
think it no more—was a piquant addition to jaded and well-known
pastimes. But the Queen! How terribly more great and more real the
living consequences were to be to _her_ than to any such abstraction as
“a régime”: _she_ was to see and to feel continued physical violence, to
be menaced with muskets, to be forced from her husband before his death,
to have her child dragged from her; she was to be wholly abandoned,
tortured silently by a subterranean silence, and at last publicly
killed.
To the coincidence of that piece of folly another was soon added. All
the succeeding month was full of the last negotiations with Austria: on
the 19th of September public discussion of the necklace had gone far
enough to move her to a long letter; she wrote and explained
disdainfully to her brother—on the 20th was definitely signed the
obligation on the part of France for half the Dutch indemnity. Austria
received—for no reason save the Queen’s pressure and an imaginary relief
from war—about a million pounds. With the public debt already a matter
for debate and about to become the critical matter for action, it was a
monstrous thing.
Budget for budget—stating the proportions in terms of modern revenue—it
corresponded to what a payment of between ten millions or twelve would
be to-day. Stated in terms of ease of payment, of ability to pay, it
represented far more than such a sum would represent in a modern
budget—and not a penny of that humiliating obligation need have been
incurred but for the Queen.
Those historians who regard as beneath discussion the great popular cry
of the Revolution that Marie Antoinette “sent money to Austria” are too
ready to neglect whatever is rhetorical. Tumbrils of gold did not
pass—as the populace believed—but this enormous obligation was incurred,
and incurred through her and in favour of her brother.
That autumn, winter, and spring the necklace was the theme. The confused
currents of opinion had this in common that all accused the Queen, just
as, in the great modern parallel of the Dreyfus case, the confused
currents of opinion, differing widely and sometimes in direct opposition
on vital points, had it all in common that Catholic society was the real
defendant throughout and the real villain of the piece. According to
some Rohan was the Queen’s lover, afraid to accuse her or perhaps too
fond—but at any rate he had purchased the necklace by her orders.
According to others the La Motte had been the Queen’s cat’s-paw in
tricking Rohan. According to others again, more extreme, the Queen had
been herself the actual agent throughout, and would now, by an official
pressure, procure a verdict against her lover and her friend in order to
whitewash her own character. In general the absurdity which took most
hold was nearer to the latter theory than to any other: it became a test
point simply whether Rohan would be acquitted or condemned. Rohan
acquitted, the Queen (by some wildly illogical process of general
opinion!) was supposed to be proved guilty of authorship in the whole
affair. Rohan condemned, she was equally guilty of authorship—only, in
that case the mob and the foreigner would say that wicked judges had
proved pliant to Court influence.
As in the modern trial which I have already quoted as the great historic
parallel to the trial of Rohan, no evidence could affect the minds of
those who had already concluded: to make their fixed conclusion fit in
with the facts any contradiction of human psychology and human
probabilities was admitted. Did some pornographer attack the Queen and
defend Rohan? Straightway he was a hero! Had there been a Pantheon he
would have had his burial there. Did some anonymous pamphleteer assert
his conviction of the Queen’s guilt? Straightway he was an authority.
Did some obscure and needy man take money to support the immense power
and fortunes of the Rohans against the impoverished crown? Straightway
(like those who supported Jewish finance in the modern parallel I have
quoted) he became a being full of self-sacrifice defending the weak and
the oppressed against haughty power. The document whereby the necklace
was ordered was signed “Marie Antoinette _de France_,” a signature quite
impossible in form and not even remotely resembling in handwriting that
of the Queen. No matter. It must be supposed, “for this occasion only,”
that she wrote thus—once at least. Or, if that lie was too hard to
swallow, then she had made Rohan sign thus, or get it signed thus,
precisely in order to cover her tracks by an improbable signature.
Anything at all was said and believed—especially in foreign
countries—provided it implicated the Queen.
The preliminary stages of the trial were long. Oliva was not arrested
till late in the winter, at Brussels, fluttering and confused; Rétaux
not till the spring, at Geneva.
The Queen endured those months of increasing public insult and
increasing doubt. She was in her fourth pregnancy, and, what was more,
her character, to some extent her body, had aged somewhat. She had
passed that thirtieth year which her mother had foreseen to be critical
for her; she had come to what a superstition or a coincidence made her
regard as the beginning of bitter years.
Meanwhile in his room at the Bastille, where he was confined, the
Cardinal held his court, enjoyed his receptions, and continued to
impress the Parisians with all the pomp of his rank. It was not till the
end of May that he was taken to the Conciergerie—the last step before
the public trial; he went by night upon the 29th of the month. On the
next day, the 30th of May 1786, in the morning, the Parlement met in the
Grand Salle, the indictments were read, and the pleadings opened.
That trial has been described a thousand times. The Rohans of every
degree were packed at the doors of the court. The deference they met
with, the immense crowds which, during those long two days, awaited the
verdict, the anxiety at Versailles—all these are the theme of every book
that has dealt with this best known of historic trials: they need not be
repeated here. At the close of the proceedings came the significant
thing: the public prosecutor demanded no more than that the Cardinal
should apologise for having thought the Queen capable of such things,
and should resign the Grand Almonry—on that small point, the forty-nine
judges deliberated a whole day long.
It was dark, it was nine o’clock on the 31st of May when their
conclusion was announced: some would have condemned him to the mere
apology and resignation thus demanded, a few to apology but not to
resignation, the majority were simply for acquittal, and at last, by
_twenty-six_ votes to _twenty-three_, Rohan left the court completely
absolved. For the rest the La Motte was ordered to be flogged, branded,
and imprisoned at Salpetière. Her husband—in contumacy—to the galleys.
Rétaux to be transported. As for the Oliva, they declared her not to
fall under the matter they had to try—she was free.
In Paris the acquittal of the Cardinal (which meant to the mob simply
the condemnation of the Queen) caused an immediate popular outburst of
cheering and congratulation. They surrounded his palace. They demanded
and obtained its illumination. He was compelled to show himself and to
be acclaimed. Then, as must ever be the case with such false heroes, he
was completely dropped. Those who had done most to secure the verdict
were most in a position to know the perils of further ovation. When the
King had stripped him of every possible function and emolument and had
exiled him to the Velay, the Rohans themselves were the most assiduous
to impose silence upon him and to force him back into obscurity. He
lived, unnoticed and unremembered, remote in Strasburg; was advised, on
election to the States-General two years later, not to sit; sat, refused
the civil oath, emigrated, survived the Queen by some ten years, and
died, doing after that no more evil.
No public insult could more deeply have wounded the Queen than this
verdict and that demonstration. Her health was touched, but much more
her very self was overshadowed as she feared—and she was right—for ever.
She had not even, as have we, the resource of history. She did not know
how thoroughly history can deal with these Popish plots and Royal
Necklaces and Dreyfus Innocencies and the rest, nor how contemptuously
time and learning together expose at last every evil intrigue. She only
knew—and she was right—that in her time the calumny would never be set
right. And indeed this one of the great historical enthusiasms for
falsehood was not set right till our own time. Napoleon, musing years
after upon the verdict, called it, with his broad judgment and his
opportunities for comparison and knowledge, the beginning of the
Revolution, the gate of her tomb. Marie Antoinette was of no great
judgment—she was contemporary to it all; no experience or research, but
only instinct, could guide her—but some such dreadful presentiment of
the capital importance of the affair stood fast in her mind: in part it
greatly ripened her view of this bad world; much more it oppressed or
broke the springs of her spirit; and while there is henceforward in all
she did new tenacity and much calculation of effort, there is, much
more, an inner certitude of doom.
The King went off to Cherbourg, where Calonne, still seeking to
re-establish the finances by an extended public employment of labour and
by display, had achieved the first stage of that magnificent artificial
harbour, the model of all of its kind that were to follow in Europe and
on the Mediterranean. Everywhere Louis met with easy but fervid
acclamation. He had never seen the provinces before. He came back
radiant. The new warmth and zeal, which, under another aspect and
reacting against other stimuli, were so soon to produce the great
change, had already touched the people, and he had bathed, as it were,
in a public energy which, till then, cabined in Versailles or wearied by
the cliques of Paris, he had never known. All that enthusiasm, his and
his people’s, he communicated in many letters to the Queen; but she had
suffered her blow, and nothing now could undeceive her but that fate was
coming. Her relation the Archduke, the last of so many royal visitors at
Versailles, had gone. In July her fourth child was born—a girl; and that
same summer every stranger that passed through Paris noted the
beginnings of the storm. The pamphlets were awake; the press had risen
to a continuous pressure of suggestion, anecdote, and attack, and the
necessity for facing and solving the insistent fiscal problem was no
longer a theory to be discussed politically but a thing to be done.
The Court was brilliant in a last leaping flame. Fontainebleau that
autumn was glorious with colours and men; the balls at Versailles that
winter of ’86 shone with a peculiar and a memorable splendour—but it was
the end. There were to be no more glories: the last ball had been given,
the last progress made.
Calonne, whose French audacity might a little earlier have saved the
State, dared an experiment which failed—but which, from its nature and
the things it could but breed, led on to the Revolution. He determined
(and he persuaded the King) to summon, for consultation upon the
finances and the betterment of the realm, a council of all those who led
in the nobility, the Church, the Parlements, the Services, the great
municipalities. This convention was to be named, upon the parallel of
the last similar summons—now some two centuries old—an assembly of “the
Notables.” The Ministry were given the King’s decision suddenly, upon
the 29th of December. The Notables were to meet upon that day month.
More than one critic—especially among the aged—foresaw, the dyke once
opened, what a flood would follow; all, wise or unwise, felt that the
meeting would be the end of most that they had known and the beginning
of quite new perils and perhaps new energies or a new world.
Whether or no the Queen was hurt at a sudden determination in which she
had taken no part nor even had a voice, she very rapidly in the next six
months rose to hold the Government in her hands: thenceforward to the
meeting of the States-General and the opening of the Revolution, her
decision and her vigour take part in all those acts—a dozen at the
most—which proved ultimately the authors of her destruction.
The Notables met—or rather did not meet—upon the day named, the 29th of
January ’87. They came to Paris on the appointed day, they met in the
streets of Paris, in drawing-rooms and elsewhere; but those provincial
mayors, great judges, and members of the high nobility had to wait and
chafe for many days before they were legally convened. Criticism and
violence of tongue had time to grow; there was a sense of weakness, of
anarchy even, in the petty details of governmental action following on
such delay. When they did meet, before their debates had time to
develop, one event after another was transforming everything around the
Queen.
The Polignacs had quarrelled with her; Madame de Polignac, her life-long
friend, had threatened to retire from her post with the Children of
France. Many—most—had followed them; all whom the Polignacs had
benefited, through the Queen, for so many years. A last and new faction,
more intimate, more wounding, more in possession of her secrets, and
more dangerous than any other was thus formed.
Vergennes was just dead; the King, should Calonne fail in the great
business of Reform which the Assembly of Notables had opened, would be
left without a Chief Minister, and the Queen’s place was plainly ready
for her in his council-room.
More than these, the La Motte had escaped from prison, and had fled (of
course) to London.
There was not then, as there is to-day, in London a vast and organised
journalistic system by which news is afforded, withheld, or falsified at
will. Nay, even had there been such a monopoly, journals had not
one-hundredth of the power they have to-day. Again, those who governed
England then were usually well travelled and were acquainted with the
French tongue. Again, there existed, what has since failed us, strong
independent opinion and a cultivated middle class. The female La Motte
was, therefore, not welcomed in London with those transports of
affection or homage which she would receive to-day; but there was
already sufficient horror at continental procedure and sufficient
certitude in the baseness of all administration of justice abroad to
stand her in very good stead. The nourishment of the public conscience
upon the sins of foreigners had already begun. La Motte was something of
a martyr, and, as she seemed poor, could make some livelihood out of the
public folly. She began that series of pretended “Revelations” which
were in some few months to be among the principal torments of the Queen.
Whether (like Esterhazy by our Press in the parallel I have already
drawn) she was bribed to say such things, we have no record. At any rate
her publications paid her—for a time.
It has been said that Marie Antoinette helped the La Motte to fly from
prison. It may be so. When in a great public quarrel the innocent side
is blundering and unwise, its acts of unwisdom are incalculable. Marie
Antoinette had certainly sent to have the woman visited in prison. It is
possible that, as she had hoped a public trial could help her, so she
hoped now the La Motte loose would do less harm than the La Motte
imprisoned and gagged, with every rumour free to circulate. Perhaps she
was wholly ignorant of the whole matter. Anyhow the La Motte was
loose—and the flood of calumny springing from London flowed against the
Queen and did its work. She, at Versailles, grew every day to be more
and more absorbed in the crisis which was developing with such
rapidity—for it was already apparent as March proceeded that the
experiment of the Notables had failed. Calonne had still his native
courage and his peculiar rapidity of manœuvre; he fought his hand
hard—but the opposition was too plain, too large, and too strong for
him. His plan had been just—he had conceived the reformation of
lightening the worst taxes and of arranging a more equal redistribution
of the burdens upon land—a new redistribution in which no privilege
should exist of rank or custom—and, more daring, but still, in the
tradition of Turgot, he had planned an adumbration of the Revolution by
proposing provincial, local, and parochial assemblies.
Two currents of hostility met him: one that the Notables in the main
stood personally for privilege; the other that every one in France
desired more change, and, above all, more “democratisation” of the
centre of the national machinery.
There was an appetite for debate, for “facts”; a demand for exact
accounts and public audit and public consent to taxes.
These two currents gained their intensity, however, from the legend
which had gathered round Calonne, as the Financier of the Deficit and
the Adviser of the Throne. A symbolic character, which was never his but
which has endured almost to our own time, was popularly superimposed
upon him, a character of mere frivolity, of mere extravagance in time of
security, especially of subservience to fancied expensive whims of the
Queen.
She, alas! thought to do a public service and a strong one by persuading
Louis to the dismissal of his Minister when his failure with the
Notables was proved. She won. On the 8th April 1787 Calonne fell, to be
exiled, to fly (of course) to London, and thence, only too probably, to
help swell that river of evil speaking and writing which, since her
thirtieth year, had flowed so regularly against the character of Marie
Antoinette; but which now broke all bounds and filled half the
pamphlets.
If in this she acted publicly, decidedly, and to her hurt, in her next
equally decisive step the Queen acted even more publicly, more
decisively, and more both to her own hurt and that of the alien populace
whom she already detested but desired, in such a crisis, to rule. After
some mention of Necker, she forced Loménie upon the King.
* * * * *
The writing of history, more than any other liberal occupation, suffers
from routine. I will not detain the reader of this chronicle with any
long digression upon the effect of the French Revolution, upon the
nature, the prodigious force and the universality of what may be called,
according to the taste of the scholar, the Catholic reaction or the
Catholic renaissance of our day. Still less would I disturb the progress
of my story with a divagation upon the ease with which our academies
here fall into every trap set them by the enemies of the Faith
abroad—whether those enemies be random politicians, high stoics,
sceptics of a noble temper, common usurers, or men fanatical against all
restriction of the senses. But I will so far delay the reader at this
moment as to state plainly a succession of undoubted historical and
contemporary truths in no particular order, and to beg him to reach a
conclusion by a comparison of them all.
It is in the routine of our universities to say that Catholicism was
struck to death by two great upheavals: the Reformation opened it to
attack; the Revolution dealt the mortal blow: it is now said to be
dying, and especially in France. This is the first truth: that our
universities say these things; some regret, some are pleased: but it is
believed and said in either camp. Next, it is true that Louis XVI.
practised his religion and believed in it. Next, it is true that his
Queen, never wholly abandoning the rule of religion—far from it—was now,
in 1787, particularly devoted and increasingly exact in her observance;
daily, as she daily suffered, more penetrated inwardly by the spirit of
the Church. A fourth truth is that no single man pretending to high
intelligence in that generation of Frenchmen believed in more than a
God: the only quarrel was between those who believed in such a Being and
those who denied this last of dogmas. The fifth truth is, that but
yesterday all the French hierarchy and all the 80,000 priests of the
Church—save, perhaps, three—suffered the loss of all corporate property
and all established income rather than vary in one detail from the
discipline of Rome. The sixth truth is that the prominent and
outstanding names of the French hierarchy or of the Church’s defenders
before and during this revolutionary crisis were: Rohan, an evil liver,
a cheat, a fool, and a blackguard; Talleyrand, something even lower in
morals than he was higher in wit; the Archbishop of Narbonne—living six
hundred miles from his See with his own niece for mistress; Grégoire, a
full schismatic and in his way an honest man; Maury, a vulgar
politician, like one of our own vulgar politicians to-day, a priest out
for a fortune, a sort of “Member of Parliament,” a petty persecutor of
the Pope in person and of the Papacy, in time a _Cardinal_—and this man
Loménie. The seventh truth is that Marie Antoinette (who practised her
religion) ardently supported Loménie and befriended him, and that,
therefore, Louis (who was devout) accepted him for Chief Minister.
Read these undoubted truths together and decide whether the Faith has
advanced or receded in a hundred years.
* * * * *
Who was Loménie de Brienne? He had had, these twenty years, a reputation
for what is vaguely called in aristocracies “ability.” He had presented
the address of the Clergy in the Coronation year. He was Archbishop of
Toulouse. He suited La Fayette’s idea of honesty. He had inordinate
passions. He was yet further and later Archbishop of Sens—for the sake
of the pickings. He had led with no scruple of honour the opposition to
Calonne in the Notables. Mercy favoured him. Vermond, the Queen’s old
tutor, who owed all to him, supported his claim, and Marie Antoinette
imposed him. But who was he?
He was an active, careful, and laborious atheist to whom the King, by a
scruple, refused the See of Paris, holding that the See of Paris was
peculiar and had always better be held by a man who believed in God. He
was a wit, he loved wealth inordinately—and that was all. He had his
reputation with the wealthy, but no action of his remains. Such was the
hierarchy that moment, and to a circle of such men was power restricted.
And Loménie de Brienne was made and put into his seat by the advice of
Vermond, Marie Antoinette’s old tutor, by the advice of Joseph II., a
protector of religious doubt; he repaid her by a constant devotion.
It was on May Day 1787 that this personage was put, with an inferior
title, at the head of the finances, a position which—now more than
ever—was necessarily the chief post in the French State. On the 25th the
Notables, from whom he came and whom he had led, were dissolved....
Fersen, eager to spend one last day in Versailles, had come for a few
flying hours. He watched their dissolution as a show ... he did not
return till the eve of the Revolution, and, once returned, he remained a
pledged sacrifice, a servant, to the end....
The Notables had done nothing, and Loménie himself proceeded to do much
the same; or rather to bring forward for the _third_ time as an active
proposition—for the millionth as a theory propounded—the scheme of
financial reform which every predecessor had, in one shape or another,
presented. The destruction of the fossil compartments—walls which
separated various antique forms of taxation, a larger total tax, a more
equitable distribution; the abolition of imposts uselessly vexatory;
_loans_ to oil the wheels of change.
The Notables had gone: but to register such decrees a power parallel to
that of the Throne must—as we saw in the case of Turgot—concur. The
permanent body of legal advisers to the Prince—a conception as old as
Rome and morally in continuity with the Empire—the body which had tried
Rohan—the Parlement—pleading the absence of a regular budget and of
public discussion, refused to register, and within three months of
Loménie de Brienne’s appointment, the Parlement in session had proceeded
from Sabattier’s famous pun[8] to affirm that _no permanent impost could
be levied upon the nation without the summons and consent of the
States-General_.
Footnote 8:
“Vous demandez l’état des recettes—ces sont les états generaux qu’il
nous faut.”
The reader should pause upon that phrase.
The conception that All should rule is coeval with society. But the
words so used by Sabattier were not a mere opinion nor a mere
reiteration of justice. They were spoken in that assembly of lawyers
which formed the chief body of the State, and once spoken in such an air
they were creative.
This memorable declaration of July 1787 launched the Revolution.
* * * * *
Nothing can reinvigorate itself or snatch itself from decay save by a
return upon itself and a recapture of its own past. To revive the
States-General was to bring back to life the vigour of the Middle Ages,
and to renew—at the close of this last long and glorious but exhausted
phase in the national life—the permanent energy of Gaul.
When in the eleventh century the great transition from the Dark Ages to
mediæval civilisation was accomplished, there came, along with the new
Gothic architecture and the new national tongues, as the last fruit of
that florescence, an institution known in each province of Christendom
by some local name (for the creation was local and spontaneous) but
everywhere bearing the same characters, in formation, object, and inner
nature. This Institution had for its purpose the affirmation of a
doctrine fundamental in the Faith, that sovereignty lies and can only
lie with the community. This Institution had for instrument wherewith to
enforce that right a conception at once as mystical and as plain as any
that the Faith has admitted or revealed in her strict dogmas, the
conception of _representation_: two men should speak for thousands; the
spirit of a community should enter and be seen through individuals who
should speak with the voice of districts; these representatives should
_be_ the very numbers for whom they stood: an institution as tangible,
as real, as visible as the Sacrament; as mysterious as the Presence of
the Lord. It was a miracle of faith, but it conquered; and even to-day,
woefully corrupt, there resides in Representation something of majesty
and a power in moments of great dangers or of great national desire to
gleam for a moment through the dead body of an Institution whose whole
principle of popular sanctity has been forgotten.
The theory of Representation sprang, I say, naturally from that young
and happy time when Europe arose from sleep: the century of the
Christian reaction against Asia.
The valleys of the Pyrenees, a scene of continual armed endeavours,
spurred on by the constant pressure of Islam, first organised the idea.
The cool and cleanly little town of Jaca—an outpost on the Roman road
into Spain that led down to the frontiers of the Moors—the little
frontier town of Jaca saw the first strict gathering of the kind in the
very first of the Crusades: but Jaca was not alone; it was throughout
Christendom a natural, a simultaneous growth. The southern cities of
Gaul, the great provinces, Languedoc, Bearn, distant and isolated
Brittany, the compact England of the thirteenth century, followed;
lastly, and not till the opening of the fourteenth century, a united and
majestic gathering of Representatives, designed to bring before the
Crown at Paris the voice, complaint, or will of all its subjects,
emerged.
These assemblies, a _Cortes_ in Spain, a _Parliament_ in England, were
in France called _Estates_—and that rare one which stood, not for one
province of Gaul, but for all combined, was known as the
_States-General_. Like every other institution of its kind it was alive
with the mediæval passion for Reality. Not abstract statistics nor some
crude numerical theory, but the facts of society were recognised in, or
rather everywhere translated into, these representative bodies. There
were corps of nobles—since the Middle Ages, descending from the Roman
centuries and their rich landed class, had nobles for a reality. The
priests were separate; the commoners. In some cases (notably in towns)
special corporations had special delegates; in all—especially in the
States-General of France—the various aspects of the State were present
in the shape of innumerable statements and mandates enforced upon the
Representatives (and therefore the servants) of clerical and commercial
corporations, of territorial units, of municipal authorities.
So long as the high attempt of the Middle Ages was maintained so long
these councils flourished. That attempt bent down and failed in the
sixteenth century—and with it declined, corrupted, or disappeared the
corporate assemblies which were to the political sincerity of the Middle
Ages what the universities were to its intellectual eagerness, the
Gothic to its majestic insistence upon eternal expression.
In certain places the advent of the Renaissance in the sixteenth century
closed the story of Representation; in others, under the influence of
the Reformation, it became a form. In the two chief centres of the West
two varied fortunes attached to the two failing branches of that great
mediæval scheme. In Protestant England the form of Representation
survived; in Catholic France the memory. By one of those ironies in
which History or Providence delights, the English oligarchy, which, in
the phrase of a principal English writer, “had risen upon the ruins of
Religion,” the Howards, the “Cromwells,” the Cecils, and the rest,
maintained the form of The House of “Commons.” The squires used that
organ in the seventeenth century to destroy the power of a Crown whose
own folly had, through the plunder of the Monasteries, led to its own
complete impoverishment and to the enrichment of the gentry. The squires
maintained that Crown but kept it as their salaried servant, and thus
throughout the eighteenth century the fossil of a representative system
was in England not only cherished but actively cherished to serve us as
the armour of privilege. Parliament remained intensely national, full of
sacred ceremonies and forms, and still using conveniently to the rich
some shadow of that theory of national sovereignty which, in breaking
with the Faith, the nation had broken with perhaps for ever: whether for
ever or not our own immediate future will show.
For Europe the strange accident by which dry-bones Representation thus
survived in England was of vast consequence. This fossil bridged the
gulf between the living Parliaments of the Middle Ages and the advent of
modern democracy—and by a curious inquiry into the archæology and the
extinct functions of English public life, Catholic Europe has begun to
reconstruct its own past. For England the consequences of the survival
are known to all who have watched the complexion of the Commons and type
of membership that House to-day enjoys—and the strange mode of
recruitment of the Lords!
In France the fortunes of Representation, that mediæval thing, became,
from the moment when the Middle Ages failed, very different. The Gallic
States-General had stood by the side of, and nominally informing, a
Roman and centralised sovereignty: they were not, like the English
Parliament, an institution immixed in and at last identical with a
wealthy oligarchy; they were an institution that stood by the side of
and was at last suppressed by a national despotism. They ceased abruptly
(in 1614), but they never lost their soul. Should they hear the call to
resurrection they could rise whole and quick, a complete voice of the
nation to counsel or to command. In July 1787, with the protestation of
the _Parlement of Paris_ and its appeal to the past, that call had come,
and from that moment onward it was plain that all France would now soon
be found in action. Within two years the thing was decided.
* * * * *
What was the Queen’s position during those two years? She was in the
saddle. Her fulness of life, her firmness of purpose, had come upon her
quickly. She was already divorced from joy; she was already, and for the
first time, mixed constantly with public affairs. It is sometimes
written that Loménie de Brienne “gave her a place in the Council.” That
is nonsense. She chose to enter publicly what, in private, had been hers
since the March of 1787 at the latest: what had been partly hers long
before. Her strength of utterance, her now formative disillusions (for
disillusionment is formative in women), her apparent peril (for peril is
formative in those who desire to govern), her recent grievous
humiliation and suffering (for these are formative in all), formed her
and gave her fixed and constructive power. Her power was most
imperfectly, at moments disastrously, used; but if the reader would
understand the violent five years which follow this moment and culminate
in the crash of the throne, he must first seize the fact that, though
vast impersonal forces at issue were melting and recasting France, and
therefore Europe, the personality nearest the French Executive
throughout was that of Marie Antoinette.
In _her_ room at Versailles met the coming intriguers during the
struggle with the Parlement under Brienne. _She_ it was against whom the
dishonoured Orleans, with the instinct of a demagogue, intrigued and
whispered. She it was who spoke of “a necessary rigour” when the
fighting begun; she—we may presume or be certain—who forbade the King to
fly in the days of October; she certainly upon whom the great effort of
Mirabeau turned; she who planned or rather guided the escape to
Varennes; she who principally suffered from the recapture; she who
constantly and actively advised Vienna, Mercy, Fersen, Mallet, in the
perilous months that followed that failure; she who sustained the Court
after the 20th of June; she against whom Paris charged on the 10th of
August: hers was that power the memory of which exasperated the
Revolution and drove even its military advisers to useless reprisals,
and to her death at last.
I do not say that the powers of that awful time were personal or of this
world—far from it. Nor do I say that you will not find crowded into that
little æon of years a greater host of high and individual wills than a
century may count in meaner times—there were a regiment of active,
organising, and creative minds astir within a mile of Notre Dame. Still
less do I pretend that the Queen’s judgment, her rapidity, her energy,
and her certitude were comparable to any of a hundred or more in that
arena. She was nothing compared with their greatest, little compared
with their least. But I say that close to the _executive_—to that which,
until August ’92, could command soldiers, sign edicts, and, above all,
correspond with foreign Powers—its adviser, its constant moderator, at
times its very self, was the Queen.
Her last child, the baby of eleven months, was now in the July of 1787
dead. It was the second death of a thing loved that she had known—her
mother’s the first; it was the first death she had _seen_ of a thing
loved. In the desertion of her friends, the great part she had to play,
the open wound of the necklace verdict, she took that death as but one
more poignant sorrow. The little girl had been ailing for but four days:
Marie Antoinette shut herself up with her husband and his sister for one
day in Trianon to recover that shock. She returned to act.
She applauded and sustained her husband—or rather Brienne—during the
struggle with the Parlement all July. She heard (and despised) the call
for the States-General. When the _Lit de_ _Justice_, the solemn ceremony
by which the King could enforce the registration of his edicts in spite
of the Parlement’s refusal, was held on the 6th of August, it was held
at Versailles, as it were under the Queen’s eye: the Parlement replied
by refusing to admit the registration so made.
The Parisian crowd surrounded the Parlement in Paris and applauded: not
for this or that, nor for the nature of the taxes protested, nor for
anything but for that prime principle—that the _States-General_ should
be summoned. The Queen ordered economies: they came into force at once,
that very week. Those who lost their posts became new enemies of hers:
the economies were nothing to the crowd: she gained nothing with the
public: she lost more with Versailles. It was dangerous for her to
approach the capital.
If she had hoped, by an economy that seemed to her so important, to
affect the Parlement, Marie Antoinette was in grievous error: in error
from that lack of perspective and of grip which her position, and above
all her character, had left in her. Within a week of it all the
Parlement had replied by a renewed refusal to register, a renewed demand
for the States-General, and was away at Troyes, exiled but sitting in
full power, deliberating and enthusiastically supported by Paris old and
new. At Versailles, Loménie de Brienne, the Queen’s man, demanded the
title, beyond the practical power, of Chief Minister: such a demand led
to the resignation of what little brains were left in the Council. In
September he compromised with the Parlement, and let it return.
Loménie next formulated decrees which proposed indeed to rely on
ordinary taxation—but to an extraordinary extent and on a novel
scheme—and to call the States-General _within five years_: he intended
(as did the Queen) to adjourn and surely to drop the meeting of the
States-General altogether. In November, when a majority in the Parlement
was secured by the absence of some, perhaps the purchase of others, he
caused the King to meet that body—and then raised its anger again by
registering without counting votes and, as it were, by the autocratic
power of the King. If, as is possible, the Queen did not advise or
countenance this last act, at any rate the whole tone of her
correspondence applauds the decision.
The consequences following on this error were immediate. Orleans, now
the Queen’s chief enemy, made himself a spokesman of discontent and was
exiled to the provinces; he attributed his disgrace to the Queen.
Sabattier and Tieteau de St. Just were arrested on the bench itself. The
States-General, precisely because it had been proposed to consider them
“in five years,” and because the Parlement had insisted on an earlier
date, were more in the public mouth than ever; and as the year closed,
Brienne, and all Brienne stood for, bethought them of some wide action
that should remove all this friction and leave government secure.
That action had the Queen for its authoress. It was an attempt at
despotic reform without representation, an Austrian model, and it was
named “The New Order.”
No year in Marie Antoinette’s life had more affected her experience, her
character, and her position in the State than this of 1787, her
thirty-second year, which now drew to an end. She had made a Ministry;
she had influenced, supported, in part created a policy; she had reaped
the full harvest of pain in the first death of a child, in the growing
illness of her eldest son, in the flood of calumny which had succeeded
the La Motte’s escape from prison. She had come rapidly to actual power,
she was exercising it with facility—and every act of hers led more
nearly and more directly to the cataclysm before her.
The public hatred of her had immensely grown—in intensity, in volume,
but especially in quality, since she had manifestly become the chief
adviser of her husband and the creator of a scheme of government. The
Polignacs, as I have said, had joined the enemy. Orleans was now
definitely the head of her bitter opponents. The drawing-rooms of Paris
had joined the populace against her. It had been actually proposed to
mock her effigy during the rejoicing at the return of the Parlement from
exile. The wits had renewed their nicknames: she was “Madame Deficit” as
well as “the Austrian” she had always been—and by the winter all the
quarrel in which the Parlement, the crowd, and nearly every permanent
force was now ranged against the Crown, saw in her the core of the
resistance and the personal object of attack.
The year 1788 at its very opening showed clearly how far the development
had gone. That system of “a new order”—a powerful, uncriticised Crown,
thorough reform, the negation of ideals—saw, risen up against such
feminine and practical conceptions, those much stronger things—dogmas.
The civic religion of the French and the creed of the era they were
framing emerged. Before Easter the Parlement had denied the right of the
executive to imprison at will, as also the right of the Prince to
assimilate his edict to a public law, and had demanded the complete
freedom of the three lawyers who had been arrested. But—an ominous
thing—the Parlement claimed no privileges. It demanded the release of
its members as _citizens_—and _of human right_ against the arbitrary
power of the Crown.
Against such a force as this—a creed—the only weapon that “The New
Order” and the Queen could imagine was a reform of machinery. In this,
as in so much else during the furious struggle of those eighteen months,
“The New Order” fore-planned much that the Revolution itself was to
achieve: it was modern, it was suited to circumstance, but lacking first
principles it was apparent and direct, but lacking nationality and being
opposed to the summoning of the States-General it was doomed. The scheme
of “The New Order” included a replacing of all this antique, corporate,
and privileged power of the Parlement by a High Court more fully
reflecting the governing classes of the nation. It was not unwise, and
Marie Antoinette—to judge again from her correspondence and from the
universal opinion of contemporaries—was largely its originator and
wholly its ally. It miserably failed.
The secret plan of it—surrounded with fantastic precautions—was
divulged. The threatened Parlement (and it had the whole nation behind
it) met at once, and D’Epresmenil explained the peril, and declared once
more, but far more directly than before, for the principles upon which
the Revolution was to turn, and especially the right of the
States-General alone—regularly and periodically summoned—to grant
supply. The arrests that followed—arrests which the Queen called with
quite singular blindness “acts of rigour”—perilous as she saw, but
necessary as she imagined—were the signal for an approach to civil war.
“The New Order” was resisted forcibly in the provinces by the
privileged, by custom, by the populace (who feared new taxes), by local
patriotism which feared the loss of local character and (what indeed so
soon did come) the merging of all in one homogeneous State. All the
troops were out; revolt had begun.
In June 1788 the Clergy—summoned to meet and grant an aid, as a last
desperate resource for means—replied by an assertion in turn of _their_
immutable custom and peculiar right. In July “The New Order” broke down.
The demand for the States-General was acceded to by the Crown and by the
Queen. On the 8th of August 1788 they were definitely summoned for the
May Day of the following year.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XI
_THE BASTILLE_
_August 8, 1788, to September 30, 1789_
THE decision was taken. France was alive with the advent of the
States-General. The autumn of 1788 had come. Fersen was with the Queen.
It was more than fourteen years since, a boy of eighteen, Northern,
dignified, and grave, his large and steady brown eyes had met hers from
far off among the hundreds in the Masked Ball at the Opera. He was then
a child. She also was a child, pure, exiled, of an active timidity, and
not yet even Queen. I have written what happened then: the rare
occasions on which he had come and gone. Now he was here with her at
Versailles.
The something permanent which every human life has known had entered in
that moment of her girlhood and settled finally within her heart. The
accidents of living did little to disturb so silent and so secure a
thing. He had been but a chance visitor to Paris—a Swedish lad on his
Grand Tour—when they had thus met for ever; during the critical first
three years of her reign he had been away in his own country. He had
returned, as I have said, in the summer of 1778. The worst of her
torments was settled then: she was to be a mother; she might expect an
heir to the throne; the adventure, the successful adventure, of America
had begun. A position of womanhood and of rule, such dignities and such
repose, might have paled or rendered ridiculous the chance passion of
extreme youth: they did neither. Whether he came or went, his quiet
image—the one fixed thing she had known in a world she could not
know—remained. He had been received at once right into the tiny inner
circle of the Polignacs before he left for the American War. He had been
with the Queen continually, reserved and of that breeding which she
longed for, the unpassionate poise of the North. Her child, her
husband’s child, was born; ’79 and its war news came, and Fersen had
resolved at last to go. He also by that time, as has been read, knew
what had entered his life.
The Queen, as he inhabited the halls of Versailles during his farewells,
had followed him with her eyes, and very often they had filled with
tears. All the world saw the thing. He had gone off at last to America,
to wonder at the swamps and the bare landscape, the odd shuffling
fighting and the drag of an informal war. His English gave him work
enough interpreting between his own French Generals and Washington; he
wrote home from time to time to his father, he busied himself in
learning his military trade—but of Versailles or to Versailles there was
not a word. During all the three years, ’80-’83, that he suffered the
new countries, the Queen and he heard nothing the one of the other.
He had returned to Europe; but it was only the journey of his sovereign
Gustavus that kept him some months in France, though a colonelcy, more
or less honorary, and a pension of some hundreds had been given the
young man there. A wealthy marriage, long arranged in England for him,
he let slip without concern. The proposal (a year before the affair of
the necklace) that he should marry Necker’s ugly daughter he resigned at
once in favour of his friend, young Staël, his sovereign’s ambassador.
With a commission in Sweden as well as in France, it was his own country
he preferred. His moments at Versailles were rare, his visits very
brief—such as that in which he saw the Notables dissolved (of which
scene he records his judgment); in none did he more than appear, silent,
for a very few hours or days at Versailles. The girl who had met him, a
boy, in ’74, was now a woman of thirty and more; chance glimpses alone
had lit up the very long space of those years: she had suffered all the
business of the necklace, all the rising hatred of Paris, without any
too close a word from him; she was entering the Revolution and the way
to death when he reappeared: henceforward he did not leave her.
That bond, which time had neither increased nor diminished and which
permanent absence and silence had left unfalsified, now became a living
communion between them. He was never what is called her “lover”; the
whole sequence is that of a devotion as in a tale or a song, and yet
burning in living beings: a thing to the French incomprehensible, to men
of other countries, to Englishmen, for instance, comprehensible
enough—but, whether comprehensible or not, as rare as epic genius.
* * * * *
Brienne had fallen: the Queen, and the Queen alone, had put back Necker
in his place. Why had she done this? From a desire to rule, and an
opportunity for it.
There are those who discover in themselves the capacity to govern, that
is to organise the wills of men. Often great soldiers find this in
themselves, and are led to govern a whole State at last: such was
Napoleon.
There are others to whom cheating, intrigue and cunning are native: such
are, at bottom, however high their station, the slaves, not the
dictators or the helpers, of their fellow-beings; they have a keen nose
for the herd; they will always follow it, and it is their ambition to
fill posts where they can give favours and draw large salaries. Of this
sort are parliamentary politicians to-day: from such we draw our
Ministers. They have of poor human nature an expert knowledge such as
usurers have and panders; they are, therefore, not unsuited to choose
permanent officials or to recommend to others places of trust and power.
There is a third kind, and to this third kind Marie Antoinette
belonged—as many another woman and feminine man has belonged. It neither
organises nor intrigues; it desires to do neither, and is incapable of
both. All it desires is to be able to say “I govern.” The accident of
the last two years had permitted her to say this—but, having said it,
she could say nothing more. She knew the outcry against Calonne: she
undid him. She knew the reputation of Brienne: she made him. She saw
Brienne most evidently out of favour with opinion: she un-made him. She
heard shouts for Necker—and Necker was summoned to her little room, was
regally examined, graciously received and installed.
Those who can govern through a period of peril (that is, those who can
organise the wills of men during the short and indeterminate time before
any resultant of clashing social forces has yet appeared) note, decide,
order, speak, and do—and when it is too late to act, their genius tells
them that it is too late. In the early winter of 1788 it was not yet too
late. What would one possessed of the power of government have done? In
the first place, such an one would have stated the evil publicly in
detail and with authority; in the next, chosen not one but a body of men
to deal with particular difficulties (as, for instance, a particular
_légiste_ for the troubles of that absurdity, the Common Law; a
particular soldier to suggest a reform of the army, &c.); in the third,
used as allies all the positive forces available, all the enthusiasms,
all the tide—to this force (by persuasion) how much may not be
harnessed? So Mirabeau would have done; so Napoleon did; so some ready
eye in 1788 might have planned. The States-General is the fever? You
shall have it: in Paris, with splendour. The Commons are the cry? They
shall be in full double number and with special new powers—a new dress,
perhaps, as well. The nation is crying out for Government? Give them the
Crown: the King on horseback day after day.
Had some such judgment controlled that moment, France would have
preserved the Monarchy, old institutions clothed in their old names
would have been squeezed and fitted into new moulds; France so changing,
there would have been some change in Europe—an episode well worthy of
memory and noted by special historians. The Bishops of the Church in
France would—to-day—have been what Rohan and Narbonne were then; the
Faith, already derelict, would by this time very probably have descended
to be a ritual for wealthy women or an opinion for a few valueless, weak
men: that self-praise and that divorce from reality which is the mark of
our backwaters in Europe and of the new countries everywhere would
(perhaps) have settled in the succeeding century upon all Europe, and,
for the first time in its long history, our civilisation would have
missed one of its due resurrections. As it was, God intended the
Revolution. Therefore, every error and insufficiency in those directing
its inception was permitted, and therefore, on account of such
insufficiency, the full force of a military people ran freely, as run
natural things, and achieved what we know.
The Queen had nominated Necker from a mere desire to rule, and had
therefore simply chosen the man most loudly called for. Necker, on his
side, was well worthy of so facile a judgment; he was all that is meant
by Geneva.
By his own standards, which were those of a company promoter, he was
just barely honest—by those of chivalric honour he was deplorably
tainted. Full of avarice, order and caution, a very Huguenot, he sought
everywhere an economic solution for political problems; unsoldierly, of
course, and in the presence of danger worthless, he was none the less
patient in detail and of a persevering kind; very vacillating in the
presence of fierce and conflicting desires around him, he was yet
tenacious of a general plan. To all these characters he added that kind
of ambition which is avid of popularity on condition that it shall face
no bodily risk and that it shall labour in words or on paper only. He
had his reward: his insignificant figure was for a year the symbol of
all the great ferment; his presence with, or absence from, the Council
was the test of advance or of retreat in the revolutionary movement. So
for one year—then for a few months he is forgotten; then he hears a mob
in the streets, and flies.
With such a man as figurehead it is not difficult to judge the obvious
development of the autumn and winter which produced the first great
Parliament of the Revolution. Opinion was invited: the pamphlets poured
in. On matters already fixed in public opinion Necker could be decisive,
as, for instance, that the Commons in the approaching Assembly should be
as numerous as the clergy and the nobles combined—for this was the
universal rule in provincial parliaments; but when (two days after
Christmas) this point (which had afforded food for violent writing but
was in reality certain to be conceded)—when, I say, this point was fixed
by King and Queen and Council, Necker so drafted the decision as to make
it appear all his own to the populace: while at Court the angry higher
nobility said it was all the Queen’s. A far more decisive matter—and one
that escaped the partisans—was whether the Nobles, Clergy, and Commons
should sit and vote together, as the necessity for a Popular Will—for
one voice—demanded, or should play the antique fool and, in a crisis so
actual and vivid, solemnly vote separately, checking each other’s
decisions, nullifying the public mandate—all for the sake of custom.
Here Necker _could_ have decided and changed history: but there was not
an opinion sufficiently unanimous to guide him in his nullity. He left
that essential piece of procedure to be settled by the Estates
themselves when they should have met; he thus (as will be seen) made of
the first and most necessary act of the States-General, the insistence
of the Commons that all should vote together, an illegal thing—and so
coloured all their succeeding action with the colour of rebellion. One
thing Necker had done of his own judgment, and it was idiotic. He had
summoned the Notables again for a month in the autumn—he was soon glad
to be rid of that folly: the decree I have mentioned followed, and in
February 1789—legally before the end of January—the elections to the
States-General began.
No such complete representation of a great nation has been attempted
since that day; no such experiment could be attempted save with
political energy at white heat and under the urgent necessity of a
secular charge. The confused noise which filled the rising spring of ’89
was, for once, the voice of all: thousands upon thousands of little
primary assemblies, of advisory letters, of plaints, of legal
suggestions, of strict orders and mandates to the elected (without which
no political freedom can exist), of corporate actions by guilds, by
townships, by chapters, by every form of political personality, filled
and augmented the life of France. So vast was the thing that to this
day, amid the libraries of monographs that seem to exhaust the
Revolution, all have shrunk from the delineation of this rising ocean of
men. There is no final work upon the elections of ’89. No one has dared.
April passed. The deputies began to stream into Paris. Paris, in the
last days of that month and the first of the next, began to overflow
into the royal town at its gates. Sunday, the 3rd of May, saw one long
procession of every kind and fortune pouring, in spite of the drenching
weather, from the capital up into the hills of Versailles. Upon the
morrow the opening religious ceremony of the Session was to be held.
* * * * *
At about six o’clock of the morning of Monday, the 4th of May, it was
still raining—not violently, but still raining; the dawn struggled in
wet clouds over the woods and the plain of Paris beyond, and the
pavements of Versailles were shining flat under the new day, with large
puddles in their worn places. As the light broadened the rain ceased.
The uniform and dull low sky began to break and gather: the innumerable
crowd moved. Some thousands were sodden after a night spent out of
doors; many thousands more, moving from their packed rooms, where a bed
was a guinea and the mere shelter of a roof a well-let thing, began to
crowd the pavements, the roofs, the cornices; as for the windows, every
window had its bouquet of heads at high price, well-dressed heads and
eager. The morning rose and grew warm.
The palace of Versailles looks east and north down towards the woods
that hide Paris; it looks down three broad, divergent avenues, spreading
like the fingers of a hand, and starting (as from the palm of such a
hand) from a wide space called the “Place d’Armes,” which forms a huger
outer court, as it were, to the huge Court of the Kings. To the right
and to the left of this main square and its avenues, as you look from
the palace, lie the two halves of the town: the northern, to the left,
has for its principal church Notre Dame; the southern, to the right, has
for its principal church St. Louis, which is now the Cathedral; each
building is by situation and plan the centre of its quarter. The way
from Notre Dame to St. Louis is up the Rue Dauphine, across the great
Place d’Armes, and then down the Rue Saborg—all in a straight line not
half a mile long, with the great Place taking up more than the middle
third. From the one church to the other was the processional way of
Versailles; it was chosen for that day. From seven onwards the
Parliament had been gathering in Notre Dame; not till ten did the royal
carriages arrive, all plumed and gilded, swung low and ridiculous: the
King and his household, the Queen and hers; the Princes of the Blood—but
as for Orleans he was already with the lords in the church, disdaining
his rank and making a show of humility. They all set out in procession
for St. Louis, the clergy of Versailles in a small surpliced body
leading, the dark Commons next, the embroidered and feathered Nobility,
the Priests, the Household, the music, the Bishop; then the Blessed
Sacrament in the Archbishop of Paris’ hands, with Monsieur and his
brother and two more of the Blood at the corners of the canopy; last of
all the Queen and her ladies—all in the order I have named; two thousand
and more four-front, the length of a brigade—and every one of them (save
the Archbishop who held the Monstrance) with a blessed candle in his or
her hand. By the time the head of the line was at St. Louis, the tail
had hardly left Notre Dame[9] and as each detachment took the line,
young Dreux Brézé, Master of Ceremonies, on foot since seven, ordered
them.
Footnote 9:
Carlyle, of course, puts one church for the other and makes the
procession walk wrong way about. The Cambridge history, however, is
accurate in this detail.
The myriads of people saw them go by. The sun was shining at last: all
could be seen, yet the cheers were pointed and full of meaning; the
silence also was full of meaning. They cheered the Commons as those six
hundred went by, in black without swords—all in black save for a Breton
amongst them. Some curiously picked out Mirabeau; they were silent at
the lords’ blaze of colour, half cheering only Orleans, his face such a
picture! the sacred candle flickering in his hands; they did not (as
would a modern crowd) all uncover to the Blessed Sacrament; they cheered
the King. Then, as the Queen passed, there passed with her a belt of
silence. As she went slowly with her ladies along that way silence went
with her; cheering went before and after. At one place only was that
silence broken, where a group of rough women suddenly shouted out as she
passed insulting _vivats_ for Orleans: it may be that she stumbled when
she heard them.
From the advanced colonnade of the great stables (where the sappers are
lodged to-day) upon the roof of the colonnade, there was a truckle-bed
and many cushions laid, and on it was lying the broken body of her son,
the Dauphin, who would not inherit all these things: he was very visibly
dying. His miserable little frame, all bent and careless, lay there at
its poor ease. His listless and veiled eyes watched the procession go
by. It is said that his mother, in that half-mile of ordeal, glanced up
to where he lay, and smiled.
The sun still shone upon the double row of soldiers—the blue of the
Gardes Françaises upon this side, the red of the Swiss upon that; the
crowd was in gaiety—the wet were now dry; the last of the line were now
gone and the doors of St. Louis had closed on them. It had been a great
show, and all the place and its pleasures were open to the people. Next
day the Session was opened in that same hall which had been raised two
years before for the Notables.
A member of the Commons, sitting in the back row of his order, would
have seen before him, rank upon rank, the dense mass of black uniform
menace which his six hundred presented, half-filling the floor of the
great oblong hall; to left of him, against a row of columns, the clergy
of every rank; to the right, against the opposite row of columns, the
blaze of the Nobles—among them Orleans, his face insolently set towards
the Throne. Far above and beyond them all, at the end of the hall, like
an altar raised upon its steps, was the last splendour of the Throne.
The golden threads of the lilies shone upon the vast canopy of purple
velvet that overshadowed it. Seated upon it, alone above his kingdom,
the last of the kings possessed a great majesty, in which the known
hesitation of his gait, the known lethargic character of his person,
were swallowed up in awe: an enormous diamond gleamed in the feather of
his hat. Below and around him were grouped the Princes of the Blood and
the great officers of State, and in front of the group in a long line
sat the Ministry. Necker among these—the only one dressed as the Commons
were dressed—appealed to the Commons; while at the foot of the throne,
in purple and silver white, a little diamond circlet and a heron’s
feather in her hair, stood the Queen.
This the Commons could see, under the light that fell from high windows
near the roof; it fell over two thousand of the public—guests chosen
rather than a true public; they filled the galleries above, they swarmed
in the dark aisles beneath, undivided from the three orders—a
familiarity shocking to our historians who, craning their necks, have
watched as a privilege and with respect the fag-end of the House of
Commons or the County Council from a pen.
To the command of Dreux Brézé all that great hall rose: the King rose
also, read his short speech in a firm voice, and put on his hat to sit
down. The Nobles covered themselves at the King’s gesture: among the
Commons there was confusion—they did not know the etiquette, or rather
some did, some did not. The incident was insignificant and comic: a
graver thing followed it. Barentin rose, the Keeper of the Seals; he
spoke for an hour. Had he spoken for three minutes and spoken but one
sentence it would have been all he had to do, for he was there to tell
them that _it was left to the Three Orders to sit separately or together
as they might choose_. All the Revolution was latent in that command.
The Nobles would vote to sit separate; possibly the clergy: the
“National Assembly”—as all thought of it, as all called it—would be
turned into a “Lords and Commons”—an absurd, complicated and do-nothing
machine with privileges and customs, quaintnesses and long
accommodations between this house and that; it would lose touch with the
general; the sap of national life would be cut off from it; it would not
be able to create; it would be the jest of that which really governed.
As in England to-day our various elected bodies are the jests of the
plutocracy, so in 1789 the “National Assembly,” tripartite, played upon
by vanity and ignorance, would have become the jest of the Crown. But in
France an institution, once unreal, disappears, and before July the
Assembly was, according to this plan, to disappear. It was deliberately
conceived as a means of nullifying and destroying the Parliament.
Necker spoke next. He spoke for three hours, and was listened to
throughout, for he dealt with finance. His speech was full of lies—but
his name had not yet lost the titular place of idolatry. When he had
ended his Genevese falsehoods, the ceremony was over and all were free
to dine. But with Barentin’s words the Revolution had begun.
All May Gaul worked and seethed. The instinct of numbers aimed straight
for the objective upon which all turned, and the Commons demanded the
accession to one corporate Assembly of the Nobles and Clergy. They
negotiated with the privileged houses; they affirmed the principle of
combined voting: Necker sent for soldiers. By the end of the month the
last attempt at some voluntary arrangement had failed. Meanwhile the
King, by some lethargy or through the intrigue of some cabal, had not
yet formally received a deputation of the Commons.
What did the Queen make of that May? The days seemed to her first an
ugly rumour throughout Versailles, buzzing round the palace—soon an
uproar. She stood with the few that actively maintained privilege
against the Commons; but, a trifle wiser than they, she conveyed their
counsels in a moderated form to the King. It was not enough: the troops
still came into Paris—Gaul still rose higher and higher; and through the
tumult something much more to her, more intimate, infinitely more acute
and true, ran and held her as a physical pain will pin the mind and hold
it during the playing of some loud and meaningless music: it was the
dying of her little son—he lay at Meudon dying.
The end of the French Monarchy was mirrored in the fate of the last
bodily forms that were to contain its Idea. The Bourbon heirs, one after
another, died before succession. Louis XV., a great-grandson, himself
delicate from birth, was succeeded by a grandson again, a boy painfully
saved by the doctors—a man throughout life partially infirm. The line
had come at last to this child, the Dauphin, whose advent had been the
opportunity for such strong joy throughout the country and in whom the
New Age was to find its first King. All the phases of doom had shown
themselves: first, the high promise, then the vague doubts, the
mysteries of a general disease; lastly, the despairs. For a month, ever
since the opening of the States-General, which he had languidly
witnessed, it had been but a question of the day on which the boy would
die. That day had come.
It was the 3rd of June at Meudon. The King and the Queen had come in
answer to sudden and graver news of their child; they reached the place
in the early afternoon—and they were implored to return. The boy was
within, at his agony. The King sank into a chair and cried that his son
was dead, and the poor lad’s mother, suddenly broken in the midst of so
many and such great public alarms, of her government, her resistance and
her perils, suddenly knelt down and cried wildly, rocking her head in
her hands, burying her face on Louis’ knees: she called out to God. They
were left thus together, and at one the next morning the Dauphin was
dead.
It was as though two majesties or angels challenged each other in those
days: the majesty which reigns inwardly and which everywhere makes of a
son’s death the supreme agony of the world, though sons die hourly; the
majesty which reigns outwardly and which commands, once in a thousand
years, the passing of societies and kingdoms. For while this death was
doing at Meudon, in the Commonwealth the last decisions also were at
hand. Two days after the sad procession of ranks and delegates had done
honour to the dead child, the Commons summoned for the last time the
Clergy and the Lords to join them and form one body to mirror the
nation. It was but three days after the little body had been taken to
lie at St. Denis among the kings that the next step was taken. The
Revolution broke with law—it now first began to be the Revolution and to
do. The Commons declared themselves to be no longer the “Commons,”
but—with all of the privileged orders who would join them—they declared
themselves to be the “National Assembly”: those who would not join them
were no part of the body which was to remake the world: their legality
was not to avail them: the Commons had “made act of sovereignty,” and
the strain between two centres of authority, the Crown and the
Representatives, had begun.
It was this that the Queen must watch and parry and try to understand,
now, when the first part of her flesh had gone down into the grave, and
her brain, shaken with despairs, must attempt to control and to
comprehend the wave; and her eyes, weary of weeping, to read orders, to
note faces, and her voice, with which she could no longer call her son,
to command. She was in the centre of the resistance for a month, and it
failed.
For a few days, in spite of the call for troops which had been heard—and
the troops were coming—for a few days more, speech was still formidable,
and every phase of the debate ringing through the great shed of the
Menus was a further affirmation of the new and violent sovereignty of
those usurpers, the Assembly. In twenty-four hours a decision was taken
by the Crown.
To the assumption of sovereignty by the Commons the Court replied. There
was to be a Royal Session on the Monday following, the King present, and
all the division between the orders settled by his final voice—as to the
Commons declaration it was ignored.
And meanwhile Speech was silenced. Barentin, Keeper of the Seals, had
seen to that. He wrote to the King that it was _imperative_ the Commons
should be silenced until the Royal Session was held. He wrote: “Coupez
Court.” Have done with the business! A simple way to silence the Commons
was found.
It was upon Friday the 19th of June that Barentin had written his letter
to the King. Upon the Saturday morning, the 20th, the weather having
turned to rain and the streets being deserted, the first stray members
of the Commons came up to the door of the Menus to resume their debates.
No notice had reached them, nor even their elected Speaker, Bailly, the
worthy astronomer. They came with umbrellas dripping above them, the mud
splashing their black stockings and black knee-breeches, the rain
driving in upon their black Court coats. They tried the door; it was
locked, and a sentry came forward. They saw, streaked under the rain, a
little scrap of writing nailed to the door. The Hall was “closed by
royal order,” and, within, the sound of hammering marked the carpenters
at work preparing for Monday’s ceremonial. They wondered: others came;
the group grew until at last many hundreds of the Commons stood there
without, upon the pavement of the wide-planted avenue. Mirabeau was
there and Robespierre was there, Sieyès, Bailly—all the Commons. Up at
the end of the way the King’s great palace lay silent and, as it were,
empty under the rain. No one crossed its vast open courtyard; its shut
streaming windows stared dully at the town. The Commons moved away in a
herd, leaving the sentry and his comrade to pace and be drenched, and
the little scrap of writing to be washed and blurred on the locked door.
As they moved off the noise of hammering within grew fainter till they
heard it no more.
That very middle-class sight, a great mob of umbrellas wandering in the
streets, was full of will: wandering from one place to another they
landed at last in a tennis court which was free, just where a narrow
side-street of the southern town makes an elbow. Into that shelter they
poured: and over against them, watching all they did from above, from
his home just across the lane, was Barentin, Keeper of the Seals. He saw
the umbrellas folded at the door, the hundreds pressing in, damply; he
saw through the lights of the Court their damp foot-prints on the
concrete of the hall—a table brought: Bailly, the president, standing
upon it above the throng and reading out the oath that they “_would not
disperse till they had given the nation a constitution_”—then he saw the
press of men signing that declaration one by one.
He heard the mob gathering outside and filling the street. Among them at
least one witness has left a record of what could be heard through the
open doors—how Mirabeau reluctantly signed, pleading popular pressure;
how one man only refused to sign, thinking it, what it was, rebellion.
He was Martin, of Auch.
It was the summer solstice, a date unlucky to the Bourbons.
The King heard all these things—but there was nothing to be done. Sunday
passed, and Monday—the Royal Session was postponed. It was not till
Tuesday morning, the 23rd, at ten that the procession formed and that
Louis prepared to attend it. It was still raining.
All the pomp that could be gathered had been gathered for that occasion,
though the very skies were against it. Four thousand men stood to arms
lining that less than half a mile from the palace to the Menus. Hidden
in the woods beyond, camped up on Satory and dispersed in the suburbs
around, six regiments more were ready. A vast crowd, wholly silent,
watched the Court go by. The Queen unbroken (but carrying such recent
agony!), Artois vivacious and trim, the Ministers hurried, Louis
somewhat bent, fat, suffering.
A man who saw that sight has written that he thought to see some great
funeral go by: he was right. Of the two million dead which the
Revolution demanded from Moscow to the Tagus, the first was passing in
the splendid coach of the kings—I mean, Unquestioned Security. That
fixity of political creed and that certitude in social structure, which
hitherto no wars had shaken in Europe for century upon century of
Christian order, had perished. Men cannot live or breathe without
political security, yet for now more than a hundred years Europe has in
vain awaited its return.
The King had reached his throne in the great shed of the Menus; the
Queen was beside him; the Orders, the Nobles and the Clergy stood ranked
on either side; then after some delay the Commons were permitted to
enter by a mean side-door and to fill the dark end of the place with
their dark numbers.... Where was Necker? The Symbol of the New Age was
not there; the fatuous Genevese had stayed at home. He had presided at
the Council which had drawn up the declaration the King was about to
read. He _may_ have suggested certain softenings of phrase in it; they
_may_ have been rejected by the Queen or another—but it was a document
the responsibility of which he, in duty, bore; it was for him to resign
or to be present: he hedged by his absence and let it be thought that he
protested.
With a rumble and a shuffling the twelve hundred of them sat down. When
they were all well sat down, Barentin in a loud voice proclaimed:
“Gentlemen, the King gives you leave to be seated!” The King turned to
the Queen upon his left and bade her also take her throne. She
courtesied with an exaggerated grandeur and chose to stand while the
whole long speech was delivered—a royal witness to the Crown of which
she was now much more the strength and principle than any other there.
The speech was decisive. It willed this and that in strong
imperatives—even the voice of the King, into whose mouth these words
were put, was firm: he willed very liberal and modern things—but no
divided authority—above all, no divided authority! The new and rival
sovereign, the Usurper, must resign. The Commons were but the Commons.
Of their recent claim no word, but, upon the contrary, an assertion that
the States-General might not, even were they to vote in common,
determine their own procedure.
As he read, here and there a man would applaud—even from among the
Commons.
“Remember, gentlemen, that none of your plans, none of your schemes can
become Law without _my_ express approval. It is _I_ that have, till now,
given my subjects all their happiness....” And the speech closed with:
“I command you, therefore, gentlemen, to _disperse at once_. _To-morrow_
you shall come each into the Hall _assigned_ to his order.”
When he had read these words the King sat down: the speech was ended.
There was but a moment between his ending and his rising again to go.
The Queen, very dignified, rose with him. Together, and followed by
their train, they left the hall. It was just noon.
The Nobles rose in their turn and left the building: the Bishops
preceded them, but of the lower clergy many—half perhaps—lingered. The
body of the Commons refused to move.
They sat massed, in silence, at the far end of the great gaudy shed.
Over against them, at the further end, the workmen had begun to take
down the scenery of that royal play; the curtains were being lowered,
the carpets rolled up, and there was hammering again. Across the empty
benches of the Nobles and the Hierarchy, in the empty middle of the
hall, every exclamation, however subdued, of the bewildered but
determined Commons echoed: but the background of that interval was
astonishment and silence.
This curious and dire silence, a silence of revolt, lasted perhaps
half-an-hour, when there entered into it the Master of the Ceremonies,
young Dreux Brézé.
He was little more than a boy, just married, of a refined and rather
whitened sort, tall, covered with cloth of gold. He was not ashamed to
stud his hands with diamonds, like an Oriental or a woman; he shone with
light against the dark mass of the Commons, and he alone wore a sword.
He bore no signed or sacred letter, and his mere office was not
awful.[10] He advanced, and in that slightly irritable but well-bred
drawl of his he muttered something as though ashamed. They cried, “Speak
up!” He spoke louder. “They had heard the King’s orders....” He repeated
the phrase. Various cries and exclamations arose. Then Mirabeau,
standing forward, said—What did he say? It is uncertain, and will always
be debated, but it was something like this: “We are here by the will of
the people, and only death can dismiss us.” Dreux Brézé walked out with
due ceremony, backwards.
Footnote 10:
It had originally been created to provide a salary for one, Pot, who
was further dignified with the title of Rhodes—names curiously
English.
* * * * *
Well, then, why was Death not brought in to sweep the Commons? Here were
soldiers all around—foreigners, Germans, and Swiss—in number a full
division: why was no shot fired? Because, although apparently no force
lay opposed to them save the mere will of less than a thousand unarmed
debaters, there did in fact lie opposed to them the potential force of
Paris. Close on a million souls, say two hundred thousand men, capable
of bearing arms, almost homogeneous in opinion, lay twelve miles down
the valley, as full of rumour as a hive—at the sound of a musket they
might rise and swarm. It was not a calculable thing; Paris _might_ after
half-an-hour of scuffle turn into a mere scattered crowd; there _might_
be a fierce resistance, prolonged, bleeding authority to death unless a
sufficient force contained Paris also, as the debaters at Versailles
were already contained. That force was summoned.
Thirty regiments moved. All the last days of June the great roads
sounded with their marching from every neighbouring garrison. The rattle
of new guns one morning woke from sleep the unknown Robespierre, who
watched them from his window passing interminably under the July dawn;
they baited their horses in the stables of the Queen. Of nearly all the
troops so gathering one little portion, the half-irregular militia body
(militia, but permanently armed) called “the French Guards,” was other
than foreign. The “French Guards” might not indeed be reliable; but, as
it was thought, they hardly counted. The rest were for the most part
German-speaking mercenaries, the solid weapon of the Crown: and still
they gathered.
Neck to neck with the advance of that mobilisation the Assembly raced
for power; for every brigade appearing you may count a new claim. In the
first hours of their revolt, when Dreux Brézé had but just retired, they
proclaimed themselves “Inviolable”—that is, in their new sovereignty,
they declared an armed offence to that sovereignty to be treason.
The sight of Paris, heaving as for movement on the 24th of June,
Wednesday, when the news of the royal session and its sequel came,
determined the Duke of Orleans to take a line. He desired to profit by
the dissensions. He continually bribed and flattered and supported, by
his wealth and through his parasites, the vast and spontaneous surge of
opinion, adding perhaps a fraction to its power. He was among the
stupidest of the Bourbons, for he thought in his heart he might be King.
This null and dissipated fellow led a minority of the Nobles to the
Commons and declared their adhesion to the Assembly: that was the
Thursday, the 25th—the next day the Court itself, the King, deliberately
advised the union of all the orders!
The Court had yielded—for the moment. The Court thought it was better
so: the troops were gathering, soon a blow was to be struck, and the
less friction the better while it was preparing....
So, as the first week of July went by, everything was preparing: the
Electoral College of Paris had met and continued in session, forming
spontaneously a local executive for the capital; certain of the French
Guard in Paris had sworn to obey the Assembly only, had been imprisoned
... and released by popular force ... and pardoned. The last troops had
come in; the Assembly was finally formed. On the day when it named its
first Committee to discuss the new Constitution, the Queen and those
about the Queen had completed their plan, and the Crown was ready to
re-arise and to scatter its enemies.
There was in this crisis a military simplicity as behoved it, for it was
a military thing. No intriguing. Necker, the symbol of the new claims,
was to go—booted out at a moment’s notice, and over the frontier as
well. A man of the Queen’s, a man who had been ambassador at Vienna, a
very trusted servant of over fifty years continually with the Monarchy,
a man of energy, strong stepping, loud, Breteuil was in one sharp moment
to take his place. Old Broglie, brave and renowned, was to grasp the
army—and the thing was done: the Assembly gone to smoke: the debating
over: silence and ancient right restored. And as for the dependence on
opinion and on a parliamentary majority for money!... why, a bold
bankruptcy and begin again.
So the Queen saw the sharp issue, now that all the regiments were
assembled. A corps of German mercenaries were in the Park, encamped;
their officers were cherished in the rooms of the Polignacs: they were a
symbol of what was toward. Paris might or might not rise. If it rose,
there would be action; if not, none. In either case victory and a prize
worth all the miserable cajoling and submission to which the Court had
been compelled while the soldiers were still unready. They were ready
now. So the Queen.
On Saturday the 11th of July, at three in the afternoon, Necker was
sitting down with his wife and a certain friend to dinner: the excellent
dinner of a man worth four millions of money—doubtfully acquired. Ten
thousand men lay at arms within an hour of Versailles; at all the issues
of Paris were troops amounting to at least two divisions more—mainly
German cavalry: one regiment at Charente, Samade; one regiment at Ivry;
one, of German hussars, at the Champ de Mars; one, of Swiss infantry,
with a battery, at the Étoile (where is now the Arc de Triomphe). Two
more, German, south of the river; a whole camp at the northern gate—and
many others. No food could enter the city save by leave of that circle
of arms.... To Necker, so sitting there at table, was brought a note
from the King; he opened it: it told him he was ordered out of office
and ordered out of the kingdom too. He finished his dinner, and then
took horse and coach and drove away along the Brussels road.
There followed three days which very much resembled, to the Queen and
the General Staff of the Resistance, those days during which a general
action is proceeding at the front and a stream of accounts, true and
false, exaggerated, distorted, coming pell-mell and in the wrong order,
confuse rather than inform the anxious ears at headquarters far in the
rear. Men tore galloping to and fro continually up and down the twelve
miles of road between the palace and the gates of Paris. “Paris had
risen.” “No, only an unarmed mob parading the streets.” “Yes, there had
been a collision with Lambesc’s cavalry.”... On Sunday, late, a cloud of
dust was Lambesc’s orderly coming to Versailles with news: there had
been no bloodshed. Monday more rumours: “They are forging weapons.”...
“They cannot move: ... they lack ammunition.”... “They have formed
patrols: ... the streets are patrolled.” Then, at night, fires were
reflected on the cloudy sky down the valley—the populace were burning
the Octroi Barriers.
It was determined by the chiefs of the army to force the northern gate
of Paris and so to subdue the tumult—but there was neither fear nor
haste: the tumult was a mere civilian tumult: the thousands roaring in
Paris had no arms—and then what about organisation? How can a mob
organise? Tuesday came, the 14th of July, a memorable day, and in the
forenoon news or rumours reached Versailles that a stock of arms had
been sacked. It was the arsenal—no, this time came details; it was the
Invalides that had been sacked—twenty thousand muskets. More news:
powder had been found and seized by the mob; in the great square before
the Town Hall a jolly priest, sitting astride of a barrel, was seeing to
the serving out of powder and of ball—one almost heard the firing. “The
Bastille has most of the ammunition in Paris. No mob can take _that!_
the pieces have been trained on the street a whole fortnight since.”
“The Bastille has checked the mob.” “No, they have sacked that also,
with all its ammunition.” “They have captured artillery.” “Nonsense! a
mob cannot capture guns!” Then again, more definite and certain, longer
accounts, eye-witnesses, as the afternoon drew on to evening. One: “It
has fallen.” Another: “I saw the governor killed ... a thousand men in
the crowd were hit, but the crowd kept on.... How many dead? A hundred,
at least a hundred.” “They have cannon on Montmartre—the northern gate
cannot be forced.” Berthier wrote to the King alone: “To-night the
troops will master the streets.” And meanwhile, like a chorus of human
voices to all this roar of powder, the Assembly was pouring out
decisions and acting the moral sovereign manfully in the face of
material arms—sitting “permanently.” Even at midnight, when nearly all
was known and the popular victory assured, Bailly the Speaker was still
sitting there presiding after a sitting of seventy-two hours over the
drowsy Commons. And they had voted! They had voted regrets for Necker;
they had voted the responsibility of _all_ advisers of the King for
these calamities: they had voted bankruptcy “infamous.” So many moral
broadsides fired at the Queen.
The morning of the 15th dawned; the firing had ceased, the smoke had
rolled away, and with the new day the issue of the action lay plain.
Paris had conquered.
The King alone with his brother, unarmed, unguarded, walked to the
Parliament House and announced the withdrawal of the mercenaries; the
Queen—bitterness of irony!—had to stand smiling, with her children, at
the central balcony of the palace above the courtyard and to receive the
ardent homage of the people for the failure of her great design—in a few
months, in October, she was to stand on that balcony again.
All that day and the next the King sat anxiously with his Council
debating only one thing—Marie Antoinette’s purpose that he should fly.
She urged it with vehemence: her jewels were packed and ready—they would
fly to Metz and conquer in a civil war. But the majority outweighed her,
notably old Broglie, who feared the issue of German mercenaries against
French troops—and the King remained. She with angry tears gave way: it
was decided that the King should, upon the contrary, seek Paris on the
morrow, accept and legalise the acts of the city, its new popular armed
force, its new elected Mayoralty—La Fayette the chosen head of the one,
Bailly occupying the other.
[Illustration:
AUTOGRAPH NOTE OF LOUIS XVI, RECALLING NECKER,
ON THE 16TH OF JULY, AFTER THE FALL OF THE BASTILLE
]
The royal plan had failed: let the King accept the new conditions and
meet Paris half-way. Such were the decisions, and Louis wrote to Necker
recalling him—the abortive Ministry of the Resistance was ended.
But that night, in the dead darkness, Artois fled from the coming
terror; old Vermond also, the friend and tutor; Enghien, Condé, many
another; and the Queen, with passionate love, compelled one who was now
once more her friend to fly: the Madame de Polignac. She fled and was
saved, bearing with her two ill-spelt, blotted lines in Marie
Antoinette’s untrained and hurried hand: “Good-bye, dearest of my
friends; it is a dreadful and a necessary word. Good-bye!”
In this way did the Assembly enter into its sovereignty, and in this way
did Marie Antoinette first meet—though she never knew or grasped it—the
temper of the French people, who, perhaps alone in Europe, can organise
from below.
* * * * *
That creative summer of ’89, in which the Assembly now victorious began
its giant business, was in the Queen’s eyes nothing but a respite for
the Throne, or a halt in a retreat between one sharp action lost and the
next to be ventured later, when new troops should be at hand and a new
occasion serve. That these speech-makers hard by should declare a new
creed of Rights, should—in words—abolish Feudal Dues, should debate the
exact limits of the King’s power—all that was wind. Even the anarchy
coincident with that vast transition, powerfully as it affected her
spirit (and her letters show it) with horror, affected it still more
with hatred and with a determination so to hold or tame this wild beast,
her husband’s people, that her son should have his right at last, and
that she herself might be free from a ceaseless humiliation.
They were killing men everywhere: they had killed the offensive and
corrupt old Foulon in the streets of Paris—he and his powerful loathsome
son-in-law, Berthier: square-jawed, an oppressor grievous to God,
Berthier who, so lately, in those abortive three days of the Resistance,
had sat at the King’s elbow promising that Paris should be held;
Berthier had been clubbed to death and shot down as he swung a musket in
defence of his big body. In the provinces everywhere the country houses
burned.
The Queen waited. She wrote to her brother, to her dear friend Madame de
Polignac; she chose (in the absence of that friend) a new governess for
the Children of France, the worthy widow of Tourzel, a duchess for the
occasion. She waited and did nothing. All September was a wrangling over
the King’s Veto—his right to refuse a law: she may have known vaguely
that to her the nickname of “Veto” was thereby attached: she did not
heed it. In the last days of the month a vigorous attempt to persuade
the King to fly was once more made and once more failed. By October new
troops would have come—their numbers were to prove insufficient for
attack but fatally sufficient for enthusiasm, and that enthusiasm of
loyal courtiers (breaking out almost within earshot of a Paris fretting
at every delay, hungry, mystified) provoked the next disaster.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XII
_OCTOBER_
_September 23, 1789, to Maundy Thursday, April 1, 1790_
ON the 23rd of September the Regiment of Flanders marched into
Versailles.
To seize all that follows two things must be clearly fixed: first, that
the Queen was now separate from all the life around her; secondly, that
the accidents of the next fortnight determined all that remained of her
life.
The Revolution, now organised, possessed of regular authorities and of a
clear theory, was in action, moving with the rapidity of some French
campaign towards clean victory, or, upon an error or a check, defeat—a
defeat absolute, as are ever the failures of high adventure.
The Queen has been called the chief opponent of that Revolutionary idea
and of those new Revolutionary authorities: it is an error so to regard
her; she did not meet their advance in so comprehensive a fashion. She
saw nothing but a meaningless storm whirling about her; she cared for
nothing in the great issue but the preservation during the tempest, and
the full restoration at the end of it, of all that was to have been her
little son’s; she feared as her only enemy a violent and beastly thing,
the mob, in whose activity she recognised all that had so long
bewildered her in the French people; but while she feared it she also
despised it as a thing less than human, incapable of plan, able to hurt
but certain at last to be tamed. The march of Paris upon Versailles
which was now at hand, with its flaming brutality, its anarchy of
thousands and of blood, confirmed in her for ever her wholly
insufficient judgment. From those days until she died her only appeal
was to the foreigner, her only strategy the choice of manner and of time
for using an actual or a potential invasion.
It may next be asked why the Regiment of Flanders marching in led to
such abrupt and to such enormous consequences? It was accompanied by a
section of guns only, and though its ready ammunition was high for a
mere change of garrison in those days,[11] it was but one unit more
where, three months before, division after division had been massed
round Paris and throughout Versailles.
Footnote 11:
They were eleven hundred strong, with about half-a-dozen reserve
cartridges a man and the pouches full; also one waggon of grape for
the guns attached to the regiment.
The answer to the question is to be found in the temper of those who
watched that entry. It took place in the afternoon with imposing parade;
the grenadiers of Flanders filed up the Paris road between the ranks of
the Body-Guard—a new regiment of the Guard which was still stranger and
somewhat hostile to the temper of the crowd. Again, Flanders was a
quasi-foreign regiment, comparable to those which the Crown had drafted
in before the rising of Paris destroyed the plan of a civil war and had
since, on a deliberate pledge, withdrawn. Again the reinforcement
coincided with that long verbal struggle upon the acceptation by Louis
of the Decrees (of the Rights of Man and the abolition of Feudal Dues)—a
verbal struggle apparently futile, but in essence symbolic of the Veto
of the Crown. To this it must be added that Paris, in which, in spite of
harvest, a partial famine reigned, was again roused for adventure; that
now for weeks the opposition of the King to the Decrees of the Assembly
had exasperated the leaders of opinion—those innumerable writers and
those orators who could now voice, inflame, and even guide an
insurrection; finally, it must be remembered that there remained but one
solid and highly disciplined body intact throughout the insurrections of
that summer, the desertions and the siding of the troops with the
populace—this was the Army of the East that lay along the frontier under
the command of Bouillé. It was of no great size—some 25,000 men—but it
was largely foreign (Swiss and German) in composition, was excellently
led, well drilled, already _political_ in the united spirit of its
command. Thither it was feared and hoped the King would fly: a regiment
or two to flank his evasion and to escort it would be sufficient: this
was the meaning of the Regiment of Flanders.
All this, however, would not alone have provoked an uprising: the
departure of the King actually attempted might have done so, but we now
know, and most then believed, that though the Queen urged flight, Louis
would not consider it. The true cause of the catastrophe; the
disturbance, which ruined the unstable equilibrium of political forces
that October, was a manifest exaltation or crisis of emotion observable
in the officers of the newly arrived regiment, still stronger in the
Guards, pervading the whole Court, and nowhere centred more fiercely
than in the heart of the Queen. It was as though the tramp of that one
column of relief, added to so much restrained and impatient emotion,
coming after the silent angers of that long summer, coinciding with a
critical intensity of indignation and of loyalty within the palace, was
just the final sound that broke down prudence. All the commissioned,
many of the rank, betrayed the new glow of loyalty in chance phrases and
in jests; chance swords were drawn and shown, chance menaces or chance
snatches of loyal songs in taverns led on to the act which clothed all
this rising spirit with form, and stood out as a definite challenge to
Paris and to the Assembly.
It was customary (and still is) for the officers resident in a French
garrison to entertain the officers of a newly-come regiment. The Guards
had never done so yet. They were all of the gentry, the general custom
of the army affected them little, for in all ranks, the gentlemen of the
Guard were in theory, to some extent in reality, equal in blood.
Nevertheless their officers chose, for the purposes of a political
demonstration, the pretext of a custom hitherto thought unworthy of
their corps. The Guard had fixed upon Thursday, the 1st of October, to
show this civility to Flanders. In the atmosphere of these days the
occasion could not but become a very different matter from such a dinner
as the mess of even the premier corps—so acting for the first time—could
offer to a provincial body of the line.
In the expenses determined,[12] and the place chosen, it was evident
that all the Court was moving: the great theatre of the palace, unused
for so long and reserved for the greatest and most official ceremonies,
was made ready, lavishly; the tables were set upon its stages, the
lights, the decorations were the King’s; and when the officers of
Flanders, all, perhaps (save their Colonel), unready for so much
splendour, found themselves in the Salle d’Hercule—the guests of the
palace rather than of the Guards—it was apparent that some large affair
was before them: they were led to the theatre and the banquet began.
Footnote 12:
The dinner alone, apart from wine, ices, lights, &c., was, even in the
prices of that day, over £1 a head—say nowadays £2. Yet the individual
hosts were asked for but five shillings each: the difference must have
been paid! And the wine!
It was just three o’clock: down in the town the Assembly was voting the
last clauses of the Constitution. In the courtyards of the palace the
private soldiers of Flanders had gathered, buzzing at the gates—later,
and for a purpose, some few were admitted, but that was not until some
hours had passed: they pressed curiously, now and then making way for
some belated member of the band, which, with that of the Guards, was to
play at the banquet.
The tables were set in a horse-shoe, and two hundred and ten places were
laid: more than the two messes were concerned! Eighty seats were for the
Guards—for all that could be found connected with the Guards—and the
Guards were there in full; double their usual number were in Versailles:
there were others, strange guests and chosen volunteers. There were
others, men whose presence proved a certain plan, officers of the local
national militia, the new armed force of the Revolution, but officers
picked carefully for their weakness or their secret disapproval of the
national movement. So they sat down and began to eat and drink; there
were provided two bottles a man.[13]
Footnote 13:
210 men, 400 bottles.
Outside the great empty theatre the autumn evening closed; within, by
the thousand lights of it, the ladies of the Court, coming, as the
banquet rose higher, into the boxes to applaud, saw one by one the
_white cockades_ of the Guards transferred to their guests. The national
colours were regulation for Flanders; they were the essential mark of
the new national Militia—yet, first one guest then another, eagerly or
reluctantly, weakly or defiantly, took on the white cockade of the old
Monarchy which the Guards still legally wore. The women folded paper
cockades and threw them down ... at last all seated there were under the
emblem; some say that black cockades for the Queen were also shown. They
drank to the King, the Queen, the Heir; the noise of laughter and of
enthusiasm grew, the toasts and the cheers were exchanged from the boxes
to the stage; the floor of the theatre filled with new-comers—speech and
the exhilaration of companionship gained on them and rose. Some there in
wine felt now again, like a memory in the blood, the old and passionate
French love of the kings. Some, who had come to Versailles secretly
determined for the Crown, now at last gave full rein and let the soul
gallop to its end. All were on fire with that Gallic ardour for
adventure against great odds, and in all that Gallic passion for
comradeship was aflame. Some few of the rank and file were admitted ...
the heavy men of Flanders ... they also drank. The Queen (the meat being
now gone, the fruits served) was seen, whether come by reluctance or
willing, in her box.... They cried her name and swords were drawn. They
clamoured for her to come down from where she sat there radiant, hearing
at last the voices and the mood upon which (so little did she understand
of war) she imagined and had imagined her victory to depend.
She came down and passed slowly before them and their delirium, smiling
highly, holding in her arms her little son; and the King, less certain
of the issue, heavy, splashed with the mud of his hunting, went with her
as she proceeded. They passed. The height of their fever was upon these
soldiers; one leant over to the band and suggested, “_Pleasant it is to
be...._” The band consulted; they were not sure of the tune. “Well,
then, play ‘_O Richard! O my King!_’” That everybody knew, any one could
sing it; it was a tune of the day—and with the music madness took them.
They poured out into the cold night air of the marble court, singing,
cheering, all armed—defiant of the new world. The whole life of the
palace and its thousands, invigorated, mixed with music and
re-heightened the strain. Sundry bugles were blown as though for a
charge. The noise of that clamour rang through the town, the populace
without the gate was gathering, the Militia armed; and the crowd thus
alarmed in the far night could see, beyond the palace railings under the
brilliant windows of the front, a herd of men still cheering madly, the
gleam of swords raised, and one dark figure climbing to the King’s
window to seize and kiss his hand; and against the lights within, the
shadows of the family approving.
The colonel of the Versailles Militia went to the palace and returned:
the crowd dispersed, the cheering of the revellers died away. Next day
was sober; yet even all next day the exaltation, though now sober, grew.
The national uniform of the Militia was insulted and challenged in
Versailles, turned out of the palace. The Queen, ineffably ignorant,
gave colours to a deputation of that Militia, and begged them, with a
smile, to believe that _yesterday had pleased her greatly_—she had seen
certain of their officers at the feast—and so little was enough to
deceive her! There was another milder meeting (for the men), a mere
exchange of glasses, and all Saturday, the 3rd of October, the armament
of the Crown, such as it was—some thousands—stood ready and did not
forget the valour and the ardent loyalty which their chiefs had lit with
such memorable cheers and songs.
But another noise and another life began beyond that fringe of woods
which eastward veiled Paris. The million of that place were in a hum:
messages came from them and to them. Marat had explored the new force in
Versailles, the Presses in Paris were raining pamphlets—something
confused and enormous, a vision of their national King abandoning them,
a nightmare of treason; all this mixed with hunger oppressed the mind of
the million. I say “mixed with hunger,” for though there was by this
time plenty of grain there was little flour, and in the lack of bread
violent angers had risen: some thought the Assembly (their talisman),
the very nation itself, to be again in peril from the soldiers. So all
Sunday, October 4, the hive of Paris droned in its narrow streets and
gathered; upon Monday, for the second time that year, it swarmed.
* * * * *
To the west and to the south of Paris there runs a ring of clean high
land against the sky, and it is clothed with forest; one part of it,
still charming and in places abandoned, is called the Forest of Meudon,
and many who read this have walked through it and have seen at the end
of some one of its long rides the great city below.
In the morning of Monday, the 5th of October 1789, the far corner of
these woods near Chatillon rang with shots, and down one alley or
another would come from time to time the soft and heavy beat of horses
at a canter, as grooms and servants moved with the guns. The King was
shooting. A south-west wind blew through the trees with no great
violence; some rain had fallen and more threatened from the shredded,
low, grey clouds above. Of all the company in those alleys and between
those high trees, on which the leaves, though withering, still hung, the
King alone was undisturbed. His pleasure in horsemanship and his seven
miles’ ride from the palace, his delight in the morning air, and his
keen attention to the sole occupation that called out his lethargic
energy, forbade him to consider other things; but all his suite were
wondering, each in his degree, what might be happening in the plain
below them, or in Paris, or in the town of Versailles which they had
left—for it was known that Paris was moving.
All morning long they shot in those woods until, when it was already
perhaps past noon and rain had again begun to fall, a sound of different
riding came furiously up the main alley which follows the ridge and
springs from the high road. It was the riding of a man who rides on a
fresh horse and changes post, and is a courier. His name was Cubieres,
and he was a gentleman of the Court flying with news, straight in the
long French stirrup, with a set face, and his mount belly to ground. He
took one turning, then another, came thundering up to the King and drew
rein.
The King, as this messenger reached him, was noting his bag in a little
book. The message of Cubieres was that Paris had marched upon
Versailles, that the great avenue road was black with tattered women and
with men, seething and turning, and demanding food and blood. He brought
no rumours, and he could tell the King nothing of the Queen. The King
mounted. All mounted and rode at speed. They turned their mounts
westerly again, and rode at speed toward Versailles. And as they rode
two feelings dully contended in the mind of Louis: the first was anxiety
for his wife; the second annoyance at the sudden interruption of his
business; and later, as the bulk of the palace appeared far off through
the trees, he was filled with that irritant wonder as to what he should
do, what his action should be: the trouble of decision which cursed him
whenever he and action came face to face. The wind had fallen, and now
the rain poured steadily and drenched them all.
* * * * *
Consider that grey morning in the town also—I mean in the town of
Versailles—and how under that same covered sky and those same low shreds
of flying cloud the empty streets of Versailles were arming.
Upon the broad deserted avenue before the gates of the National Assembly
there were no passers-by; the drip from the brown leaves of the trees,
the patter from the eaves of the stately houses, and the gurgling of
water in the gutters enforced the silence. Now and then an official or a
member in black knee-breeches and thin buckled shoes, delicately
stepping from stone to stone, would hurriedly cross over the paving,
cloaked and covered by an ample umbrella, as was the habit of those
heroes when it rained; but for the rest the streets were empty, the
setts shining with wet under the imperfect autumn light. Far off, beside
the railing and before the wrought-iron gates of the palace, the troops
were beginning to form, for it was already known that the bridge of
Sèvres had been left unguarded and that the mob was pouring up the Paris
road. The troops came marching from one barrack and another in the
various quarters of the town, converging upon this central place, and
some, the Swiss, were issuing from the outlets of the palace itself, and
some, the Mounted Guard, were filing out of the half-moon of the royal
stables, where now the Sappers and the 22nd of Artillery may be found.
They formed and formed under the weather. The Body-Guard upon their
great horses, deeply mantled and groomed as for parade, lined all the
front; behind them the Swiss on foot filled the square of the courtyard;
Ragged Flanders, the Ragged Regiment of Flanders, famous in song for its
rags as for its amours and its drums,[14] stood by companies before them
all in the wide public place, where all the roads of Versailles converge
and make an approach to the Court and form an open centre for the royal
city.
Footnote 14:
“Y’avait un grenadier,” &c.
The formation was accomplished, food was served, arms piled. They stood
there in rank alone, with no civilians to watch or mock them under the
rain, and behind them the great house they were guarding stood empty of
Monarchy. And before them the wide avenue from Paris, the Avenue which
was the artery of opinion, of energy, and all the national being at that
moment, stood empty also, and it rained and rained. The great body of
troops, red, yellow and blue in bands, were the only tenants of the
scene.
* * * * *
Within the Assembly a debate not over-full of purpose had alternately
dragged and raged: it had been known almost from the opening of the
sitting that Paris would move. Those premonitions which have led the
less scholarly or the more fanatical of historians to see in the
Revolution a perpetual pre-arrangement and cabal, those warning things
in the air which you find at every stage of the great turmoil (rumours
flew before the King all the way to Varennes, and the victory upon the
right wing at Wattignies was known in Paris an hour before the final
charge), those inexplicable things had come, and immediately upon their
heels had come direct news from one messenger after another: how the
wine merchants’ shops had been sacked, how the bridge of Sèvres was
passed, how the rabble were now but five miles off and breasting the
hill. That futility, which the Revolutionary Assemblies suffered less
perhaps than other Parliaments, but which is inherent in all discussion,
condemned this engine of the new Democracy to discuss on such a day
nothing of greater moment than the order of that day, and the order of
that day was the King’s letter: for the King had written that he would
“accede” to the Decrees (of Rights of Man and to the extinction of the
Feudal Dues) but that he would not “sanction” them. And on the verbal
discussion between the word “accede” and the word “sanction” legal
tomfoolery was fated to batten, while up in the woods of Meudon the King
who had written that letter was still shooting peacefully and innocent
of guile, and while so many thousands, desperately hungry, were marching
up the road, having black Maillard—as who should say murder—for their
Captain, and dragging behind them a section of their guns.
From such futility and from such tomfoolery the debate was just saved by
the strength of personality alone. Mounier, in the Speaker’s chair, lent
energy to them all, though of a despairing kind; and when some one had
said to him, “All Paris is marching upon us,” and had foreseen the
invasion of the palace and perhaps the ruin of the Crown, he had
answered, according to one version, “The better for the Republic,”
according to another version, “The sooner shall we have the Republic
here.”
At the back of the great oblong colonnaded hall, trim Robespierre, fresh
from “The Sign of the Fox” and from his farmer companions, was, in that
vibrating and carrying little voice of his, laying down decisions. There
should be no compromise; if they compromised now, the Revolution was
lost. But he was careful to be strictly in order—he was always careful
of that—and the thing on which he advised “no compromise” was not the
mob, but the letter of the King.
A larger man touched nearer to the life, though it was but an
interjection; for Mirabeau, ever vividly grasping facts and things, had
hinted at the Queen: that mob was marching on the Queen. He had said
that he would sign if, in whatever might follow, “The King _alone_
should be held inviolate.” And there is one witness who affirms that he
added in a whisper, which those on the benches about him clearly heard,
that he meant specifically to exclude from amnesty and from protection
the woman against whom so many and such varied hatreds had now
converged, and who stood to a million men for innumerable varied reasons
a legendary enemy, but one in her flesh and blood to be hated—the
negation of all the hope of the moment and of French honour and of the
national will.
* * * * *
This woman, upon whom already lay the weight of so much discontent and
terror, sat that morning for the last time in Trianon, where the rain
was beating against Gabriel’s graceful, tall windows and streaming down
the panes. Some ill-ease compelled her, though the place was protected,
remote and silent, and though the weather was so drear, to wander in her
gardens and to cross the paths between the showers. In the early
afternoon she was in the Grotto, and it was there that the news came to
her, for a messenger found her also as that other one had found her
husband. He bade her come at once to the palace, and told her that the
mob had filled the town.
She came; it was still the middle afternoon, and such light as the day
afforded was still full, when she saw from the windows of the
ante-chamber, looking over the full length of the courtyard, beyond the
line of soldiers, that eddying volume of the populace and heard the
noise of their mingled cries. It was the first time in her life that she
had seen the people menacing. She listened to the distant roaring for a
long time in silence, with her women about her, until the noise of
horse-hoofs clattered upon the flags below, and she knew that Louis had
returned. He came, booted and splashed, up the great stairs; there
members of his Ministry and his advisers were ready. Marie Antoinette
entered with them into the Council Room, and as the door was shut behind
her there was shut out, though barely for an hour, the instant noise of
that peril.
This is the way in which Paris came to Versailles and began its
usurpation of the Crown.
* * * * *
There is a tall window in Versailles in the corner of the Council Room
whence one can see the Courts opening outwards before the palace and so
beyond to the wide Place d’Armes. Through that window, streaming with
rain under the declining light of the pouring October day, could be seen
the tumult.
All the wide enclosure before the palace was guarded and bare. Over its
wet stones came and went only hurried messengers—orderlies from the
armed forces or servants from the Court. Holding the long 300 yards of
gilded railing was the double rank of the Guards, mounted, swords drawn;
next, the Dragoons, a clear and detached line of cavalry; in front of
these, in triple rank, the Regiment of Flanders.
Three armed bodies thus guarded the sweep of the railings and the
approach to the palace in parallel order, and beyond them, right into
the depths of the landscape, stretched a vast and confused mob filling
up the three great avenues and crowding half the Place d’Armes; in that
mob many of the armed Militia of Versailles, met at first in formation
but now mingled with the populace, could be distinguished. At such a
distance no distinct voices could be heard, but a roaring sound or
murmur like the noise of a beach rose from the multitude and outweighed
the furious patter of the rain on the glass: at rare intervals a shot
was fired, wantonly, but no news of bloodshed came. From time to time a
patrol of the Guard could be seen, towering on chargers high above the
populace, forcing its way through; swords also sometimes striking could
be distinguished. This uncertain and menacing sight, blurred in the
rain, was all that the Queen could distinguish.
Within the King’s room was a deputation of women, and Mounier, the
President of the Assembly, had been received; council upon council was
held, that the Queen at least should retire to some neighbouring town,
that the King should fly—but nothing was determined, and to that
reiterated policy of flight so often suggested since July, now so
pressing, the King murmured as he paced back and forth, “A King in
flight!...” It is said that the horses were ordered; but with every
moment the plan became more difficult. Darkness fell upon a sky still
stormy; the troops still held their lines, but the noises seemed nearer
and more menacing. It was imagined better to withdraw the Guard at
least, as the pressure upon them increased.
That order may be criticised, but it may also be defended. La Fayette
was marching on Versailles from Paris with a considerable force of
partly trained Militia. The Guards, round whom the legend of the supper
had grown, and whose white cockades were an insult to the national
colours, exasperated the populace beyond bearing, and were, it was
thought, the main cause of the pressure to which the troops were
subjected. Wisely or foolishly, the Guard was withdrawn; the line
regiments alone were left to contain the mob.
It was eight o’clock, and for two hours further a futile deliberation
proceeded in the royal rooms. In those hours first one messenger then
another convinced the King of a thing inconceivable in those
days—personal danger to himself and especially to the Queen. At ten
o’clock he signed the Decrees, the refusal of which were thought to be
the political cause of the tumult. At midnight could be heard at last
the regular marching of drilled men: La Fayette had arrived with 20,000
from Paris—not soldiers, if you will, men of but three months’ training,
but in uniform, capable of formation and well armed—the Militia of
Paris.
So profound was the mental distance between the surroundings of the King
and the leaders of the reform that not a few at Court feared this
relieving force, thinking that such a man as La Fayette might be tempted
to capture the Monarchy with it and to betray it to the mob! They
understood him little. He showed that night some statesmanship, great
activity, and an admirable devotion to duty: it was his judgment that
failed. He judged falsely of what the crowd were capable; he
underestimated his countrymen, and he judged falsely of what his Militia
could do; he over-estimated uniform and an imperfect drill. He urged
that the regular troops, the pressure upon whom after all these hours
was now almost intolerable, should be withdrawn; he further urged that
he should be permitted with his Militia and with some few of the Guard
to police the open spaces and to protect the palace.
His advice—the advice of the only man with a large armed force behind
him—was accepted. By two o’clock there was silence and, as it was
thought, security. Men slept as they could in such shelter as they might
find or in the open. Far off there was the glare of a fire, where, in
the midst of the crowd, a wounded horse had been killed and was roasting
for food. The hubbub within the palace had died down; nothing was heard
but the rhythmic clank of a sentry, or, as the hours passed, the
challenge of a relief. The Queen also slept.
What followed has been told a thousand times. Her great bedroom looked
east and south; it was the chief room in her wing, which, just beyond
the central Court, corresponded to the King’s upon the northern side.
From that room to the Council Chamber and to the King’s private
apartments there were three ways: the way by the main gallery of mirrors
which her household took upon Sunday mornings and on all sorts of grand
occasions to join the King for High Mass; a second shorter way through
little rooms at the back, which were her own private cabinets; and,
thirdly, a secret passage worked now in the thickness of a wall, now in
the space between two floors, and leading directly from the King’s room
to her own.
All that afternoon and evening the new strength of her character had
conspicuously appeared. Her friends, her enemies remarked it equally.
There was something almost serene in her during these first experiences
of peril; but they were to grow far more severe. Her children she had
sent into the King’s wing. She was assured of peace at least until
morning, and she slept.[15]
Footnote 15:
Fersen was in the palace that night. It has been affirmed that he was
with her. The story is certainly false.
Further along than the tall chapel whose roof so dominates Versailles,
towards what is now the limit of the Hotel of the Reservoirs, in the
Court which is called that of the Opera House, one of the great iron
gates which gave entry into the palace grounds stood open on that gusty
night of rain. A single sentinel, chosen from the Militia, stood before
it. By this gate not a few of the crowd found their way into the palace
gardens, and, coming to the southern wing, vaguely knew, though the
interior of the place was doubtful to them, that they stood beneath the
windows of the Queen.
Marie Antoinette had slept perhaps three hours when she awoke to hear
cries and curses against her name, and staring in the bewildered moment
which succeeds the oblivion of sleep she saw that it was dawn. Then next
she heard somewhere, confused, far off, in the centre of the building, a
noise of thousands and their cries. Her maid threw a petticoat upon her
and a mantle, and delayed her a perilous moment that she might have
stockings on as she fled. She made for the private rooms that would take
her to the King’s wing, when, as the noise of the invading mob grew
louder and their leaders (missing her door) poured on clamouring to find
and to kill her, one of her Guards half-opened the door of her room and
cried, “Save the Queen!” The butt of a musket felled him: the Queen was
already saved.
The violence of those who thus poured past her door found no victim. She
had run through her little library and boudoir, knocked at the door of
the Œil de Bœuf and had it hurriedly opened to her; she had knocked and
knocked and some one had opened the door fearfully and shut it again
when she had passed through. She saw the Œil de Bœuf barricaded. A
handful of the Guard went desperately piling up chairs, sofas and
foot-stools against the outer doors, while she slipped through to the
King’s room. He meanwhile, as the assault on the palace had awakened him
also, had run along the secret passage to her room, and, seeing it
empty, had come back to find her in his own.
The eruption of the mob had been as rapid as the bursting of a storm.
The immediate forming of the La Fayette’s Militia Guard and its victory
proved almost as rapid. The first shot had been fired at six, probably
by one of the Guards at the central door: within an hour the Militia had
cleared the rabble out, even the tenacious pillagers were dislodged, and
the populace stood, thrust outside the doors and massed in the narrow
marble Court beneath the King’s windows, in part discomfited but much
more angry, and with a policy gradually shaping in the common mouth: a
policy expressed in cries that “they would see the King,” that “the King
was their King,” that “they must bring back the King to Paris.”
The morning had broken clear and fine and quite calm after the rain of
yesterday and the wind of the night; its light increased with the
advancing hours: the energy of the mob remained—and in the midst of it a
long-bearded man, half mad, an artist’s model, was hacking off the heads
of the two Guards who had been killed when the palace was rushed.
The Queen looked down upon the flood of the people from the windows of
her husband’s room. Her sister-in-law was at her shoulder, her little
daughter close to her left side, and in front of her, standing upon a
chair, the Dauphin was playing with his sister’s hair and complaining
that he was hungry: and all the while the mob shouted for the King.
The King showed himself. They would see the Queen too: and La Fayette,
still their adviser and still trusted in a bewildered way as a sort of
saviour, told her it was imperative that she should come. She went,
therefore, to the great central room of all that house, the room which
had been the state bedroom of Louis XIV., and stepped out upon the
balcony of its central window, holding her children by the hand. The mob
roared that they would have no children there. She waved them back into
the room, and stood for some moments surveying the anger of the unhappy
thousands packed beneath, with the new and serene day rising in the
eastern heaven behind them. Her hands were on the rail of the balcony.
She hardly moved. There were weapons raised in the tumbling crowd: one
man aimed at her and then lowered his musket. La Fayette came forward,
took her right hand, knelt and kissed it, and the little scene was over.
How could she have known until that moment that there were such things?
It was certain more and more as the day grew to noon that the Court must
obey and that the populace had morally conquered. In a little inner room
the King and Queen sat together, and together they decided (or, the King
deciding, she could not but decide in the same necessity) that they
would return to Paris. She turned to her husband and said: “Promise me
at least this: that when next such an occasion shall come, you will fly
while yet there is time.” Louis, to whom the idea of flight was hateful,
let his eyes fill with tears, but did not answer.
* * * * *
Louis’ decision to return was a wise decision. The popular demand was
not to constrain but to possess their King. It was not until later that
the changing mood of Paris and its success seemed to make of that moment
of October the beginning of the King’s captivity; with some little
difference in persons and in wills, this yielding to what all the
national sentiment demanded might even yet have made of the Crown once
more an active national emblem and of the person of the King a leader.
It was half-past one when the carriages with difficulty came to the
palace. It was two before the march to Paris began.
The road from Versailles to Paris falls and falls down a long easy
valley which the woods still clothe on either side of the very broad and
royal highway: the woods rose in that autumn afternoon dense and
unbroken for many miles. Two things contrasted powerfully one against
the other: the howling turbulence of the crowd, the stillness of nature
all around. It was as though some sort of astonishment had struck the
trees and the pure sky, or as though these were spectators standing
apart and watching what tempests can arise in the mind of man.
The season was late; the foliage was but just turning; the gorgeous
leaves hung tremulous in that still air: none fell. The masses of colour
in the thickets of Viroflay were tapestried and immovable; and all this
silence of the world was soft as well. The air had about it that tender,
half-ironical caress which it possesses on perfect autumn days in the
Parisis, and the sky was of that misty but contented blue which they
know very well who have wandered in that valley upon such days. Cleaving
through such beatitude, a long line of shrieking and of clamouring, of
laughter and of curses, of the shrill complaints of women, of the moans
of pain and of fatigue, mixed with the sudden wanton discharge of
muskets, went, for mile after mile; the populace were drawing back their
King to Paris.
[Illustration:
THE TUILERIES FROM THE GARDEN OR WEST SIDE, IN 1789
]
It is not seven miles from the palace to the river—not another four to
what were then the barriers of the city. They took for these eleven
miles all but seven hours. The coaches crawled and pushed through the
swarm of the angry poor. The Queen, her husband and her children,
Monsieur, Madame Elizabeth, the governess of the royal children—all sat
together in one great coach rumbling along in the midst of insult and of
intolerable noise. From where she sat, facing the horses near the
window, the Queen could see far off at the head of that interminable
column two pikes slanting in the air. The heads of the Guards who had
saved her were upon them.[16] She could see here and there, close under
those trophies, glints of yellow, where certain of the Foot Guards were
marched like prisoners along, with the blue of the national Militia
flanking and escorting them on either side; and, mixed in the crowd, the
Mounted Guardsmen were there, prisoners also, with the Mounted Militia
holding them. Of all that followed after she could see nothing; but she
could hear. There was the rumbling of the wheels of the two cannon, the
great sixty waggons loaded with flour, and she could hear the cries that
cursed her own name. The afternoon wore on. The sun lay low over the
palace they had left. It was dusk by the time they reached the river; it
was dark before they came to the barriers of the town.
Footnote 16:
Or else they were not: there are two versions.
There, by the same gate of entry which the first of the Bourbons had
traversed two hundred years before, the Monarchy re-entered that capital
which, for precisely a century, it had, with a fatal lack of national
instinct, abandoned. Bailly, the Mayor, met them under torches in the
darkness and presented the keys of the city. The Royal Family must needs
go on, late as it was and they lacking food, to the Hotel de Ville, that
the crowds of the city might see them. It was not until ten o’clock that
the unhappy household, the little children broken by such hours and so
much fasting, found themselves at last under the roof of the Tuileries.
The Tuileries were a barracks.
The huge empty line of buildings, which, had they been thus abandoned
to-day, would have been made a Sunday show, had in that age been put to
no use; they had become in the absence of the Court but a warren of
large deserted rooms. Furniture was wanting; there was dust and
negligence everywhere; the discomfort, the indignity, the friction were
but increased by the hasty swarms of workmen who had been turned on in a
few hours to fit the place for human living. No more exact emblem of the
divorce between the Crown and Paris could be found than the inner ruin
of that royal town-house, nor could any deeper lesson have been
conveyed—had the last of the Bourbons but heeded it—than the reproach of
those rooms.
As for Paris—Paris believed it had recovered the King. The month and
more that followed was filled with a series of receptions and of
plaudits. The Bar, the University, the Treasury, last of all the
Academy—all the great bodies of the State were received in audience and
joined in a general welcome. Parliament was at work again before the end
of the month, first in the Archbishop’s palace upon the Island, later in
the great oval _manège_ or riding-school which lay along the north of
the palace gardens. It was there that all the drama of the Revolution
was to be played.[17]
Footnote 17:
Those curious to retrace the very sites of history may care to know
exactly where the _manège_ stood, since in the _manège_, as a great
phrase goes, “La France fit l’eternel.” The major axis of its ellipse
corresponded to the pavement to the north of the Rue de Rivoli under
the Arcades, and the centre of this axis was where the Rue Castiglione
now falls into the Rue de Rivoli. Its southern wall slightly
overlapped the line of the present railing of the Tuileries Gardens;
its northern was about in a line with the northern limit of the
property now occupied by the Continental Hotel.
That drama began to work, as the winter of 1789 advanced, with a new, a
more organised, and, as it were, a more fatal rapidity; and as the
volume of the reform grew and its momentum also rose, the Queen sank
back further and further into the recesses of her religion.
Her energy was not diminished. Those few months of silence did but
restore her power to act with speed and even with violence in the
succeeding year, but for the moment, like a sort of foil to the speed of
the current around her, she steadfastly regarded the only things that
remain to the doomed or the destitute.
The communion of her daughter chiefly concerned her then. To this it was
that she looked forward in the coming spring, and this (insignificant as
the matter may seem to those who know little of such minds) was the
fixed interest of that winter for the Queen.
Her letters during those months betray that momentary isolation. She
inclined once more, after the tumults and defeats, to a not very worthy
contempt for the slow, insufficient, and absolutely just mind of her
husband. There are phrases of violence like the sudden small flames of
banked fires in those letters of hers in that season; but her reserve
remains absolute. She boasts that she “had seen death from near by.” But
“she will keep to her plan and not meddle.” “My business is to see the
King at ease.” Then again, later, in Lent she sneers: “One at my side is
prepared to take things in a modest way.” She follows with a phrase that
is reminiscent of the audacity she so recently showed and was again so
soon to show: “_I_ shall not let the power of the Throne go at so cheap
a rate.” This letter, which, read to-day after so many years, breathes
the too jagged vigour of the woman, has about it an awful character; for
she wrote it to a man who, even as she wrote it, was lying dead—her
brother and her mainstay, the Emperor. The desire to return to the arena
is still in her: she writes once, wistfully, “I must get hold of the
leaders.” There are other letters, passionate, womanish letters to her
woman friends. To Madame de Polignac, out in exile at Parma, letter
after letter. In these, as in all the rest, you read her interval of
seclusion from the fight. That interval was one of five months.
She in those five months, from the Day of the Dead in November 1789 to
the very early Easter of 1790, was like an athlete who, in the midst of
some furious game, stands apart for a moment recovering his breath and
relaxing his muscles while the struggle grows more active, separate from
him, but acted before his eyes. Soon he will re-enter the press with a
renewed vigour. And so did she when after that sad winter she combined
with Mirabeau, and the driving force in those two minds tried to work in
a yoke together. But for the rest, I say, religion chiefly held her. Her
isolation was not so much a plan (as she pretended) as a physical and
necessary thing. She was exhausted. She had done with the body for a
moment; she was concerned with the soul.
If one could portray graphically the accidents of that tragic life, if a
mould could be taken of her great hopes and her great sufferings, if a
cast in relief could be made of her passion, you would find, I think, in
such a map of her existence two high peaks of exalted suffering and
vision: the death of her son—so small in history, so great to her—would
be the first; and the second would be those hours in October when she,
to whom all such things had been mere words, was for the first time in
her wealthy life threatened with cold air against her body, the vulgar
in her bedroom, and death; when she first saw a weapon levelled at her
and first came in physical contact with _violence_, a thing that all
save the wealthy and their parasites daily know. These were the two
strong, new, and terrible days which had bitten into her experience.
These were and remained her isolated memories. The rest, her future
evils, came by a more gradual slope: her very death was to her less
enormous. Her dumbness during these winter months of ’89 and the working
inwards of her life was a reaction of repose after the shock of October.
By the vast mass of the Louvre there is a church dedicated to that Saint
Germanus who preached against Pelagius in Britain, and who, as an old
man, had laid his hand upon the head of the young Saint Geneviève, the
goose-girl, near Mount Valerian and had foreseen her glory. This church
has much history. From its tower rang the call to arms which roused the
populace of Paris against the wealthy oppressors of the Huguenot faction
and maddened the poor to take their revenge in the Massacre of St.
Bartholomew. It was and is the parish church of the palace. Here, before
Lent was over (upon Wednesday in Holy Week), the little girl, her
daughter, knelt at her first Communion. The Queen stood in the darkness
of the nave, dressed without ornament, her fine head serious, her
commanding eyes at once tender and secure.
* * * * *
I cannot write of her or hear of her without remembering her thus; and
that last power of hers, a power made of abrupt vivacity tamed at last
by misfortune into dignity and strength, here, I think, begins. Such a
power was not henceforward the permanent quality of her soul—far from
it, but it appeared and reappeared. It was strong more than once for a
moment in the last hours before she died; and how well one sees why such
as had perceived in her the seeds of this force of the spirit, even when
she was distraught and played the fool in youth, now, when it had
blossomed, worshipped her! Upon this last mood her legend is built and
survives. She had a regal head.
* * * * *
She stood in the nave unnoticed in her black dress without ornament, and
saw the little girl go up in white and veiled to the altar-rails. There
was no one there. Never since Constantine had the Faith been lower in
France; but the Faith is a thing for the individual mind and not for
majorities.
They went back homewards. They gave alms.
* * * * *
Meanwhile, though this was her true life for those months, one must
speak of what went on without: the rising of the Revolutionary song and
the noises at her feet. For out of this swelling energy and increasing
peril was to grow her experiment of an alliance with the virile brain of
Mirabeau.
There stands, side by side with the activity of mortal life, a silent
thing commonly unseen and, even if seen, despised. It has no name,
unless its name be religion: its form is the ritual of the altar; its
philosophy is despised under the title of Theology. This thing and its
influence should least of all appear in the controversies of a high
civilisation. With an irony that every historian of whatever period must
have noted a hundred times, this thing and its influence perpetually
intervene, when most society is rational and when most it is bent upon
positive things; and now at the moment when the transformation of
society towards such better things seemed so easy and the way so plain,
now in late ’89, before any threat had come from the King or any danger
of dissolution from within, this thing, this influence, entered
unnoticed by a side-door; it was weak and almost dumb. It and it alone
halted and still halts all the Revolutionary work, for it should have
been recognised and it was not. It demanded its place and no place was
given it. There is a divine pride about it and, as it were, a divine
necessity of vengeance. Religion, if it be slighted, if it be
misunderstood, will implacably destroy.
It was the Queen’s Birthday, the Day of the Dead, November 2, 1789, one
of those fatal and recurrent dates to which her history is pinned, which
saw the sowing of that seed and the little entry of what was to become
the major and perhaps the unending feud of our modern democracies.
The clergy of the French Church were then national to a degree hitherto
unknown in the history of the Church in any of her provinces. The
national movement swept them all. The Episcopacy represented, in some
few of the greatest sees, the Revolutionary enthusiasms, in the mass of
bishops the resistance to the Revolution which was exactly parallel to
the attitude of the lay nobility. The parish clergy reflected with exact
fidelity the homogeneous will of the nation. It was a priest who
furnished the notes of the Revolutionary movement in the capital of
Normandy. Later it was a priest who wrote the last (and the only
literary) stanza of the Marseillaise. Even the religious, or what was
left of them (for monastic life had never fallen to a lower state or one
more dead since first St. Martin had brought it into Gaul), met the
movement in a precisely similar fashion, suspected it in proportion to
their privilege or their wealth, welcomed it in proportion to their
knowledge of the people and their mixing with them. It was the poor
remnant of the Dominicans of Paris that received and housed and gave its
name to the headquarters of pure democracy, the Jacobins.
The clergy, then, were but the nation. The long campaign against the
Faith, which had so long been the business of the Huguenot, the Deist,
the Atheist, and the Jew, had indeed brought the Faith very near to
death, and, as has so often been insisted in the course of these pages,
it is difficult for a modern man to conceive how tiny was the little
flickering flame of Catholicism in the generation before the Revolution,
for he is used to it to-day as a great combative advancing thing against
which every effort of its enemies’ energies must be actively and
constantly used. The clergy as a body of men were national and willing
to aid the nation; the Faith, which should have been their peculiar
business, had almost gone—therefore it was that to put to national uses
what seemed the grossly exaggerated endowments of religion seemed a
national policy in that embarrassed time. Therefore it was that the
endowments so attacked could ill defend themselves, for the philosophy
of their defence, which lay in their religion, was forgotten. Obviously
necessary and patriotic as the policy seemed, it awoke that influence of
which I speak, which does not reside in men and which is greater than
men, which only acts through men, but is not of them; and
Religion—seemingly all but dead—rose at once when it felt upon it the
gesture of the civil power.
It was, I have said, the 2nd of November, the Queen’s Birthday, the Day
of the Dead, that the vote was taken upon the confiscation of religious
endowments. The light was failing as that vote began. The candelabra of
the great riding-school were lit, and it was full darkness before the
vote was ended, for five-sixths of all possible votes were cast and
nearly one thousand men voted each to the call of his name upon a roll.
When the figures were read, a majority of 222 had decided the thing,
and, in deciding it, had determined the dual fortunes of Europe
thenceforward to our own time. The Revolution, a thing inconceivable
apart from the French inheritance of Catholic Dogma, had raised an issue
against the Catholic Church. For three weeks had the matter been
debated; the days of October had launched it, and while yet the
Parliament was in Versailles a bishop—one later to be famous under his
own name of Talleyrand—had moved in favour of that Act.
It was a simple plan, and to see how immediate and necessary it seemed
we have but to read the figures of the clerical funds and of their
iniquitous distribution; yet it failed altogether and had for its effect
only one effect much larger than any one dreamt—the creation of enmity
in the only Thing that could endure, indefinitely opposed to the
Revolution, mobile, vigorous, and with a life as long or longer than its
own.
The figures were these: In a nation of 25 millions now raising, by a
grinding and most unpopular taxation, less than 18,000,000 in the year,
and of that paying quite one-half as interest upon a hopeless and
increasing debt, was present a body of men, 40,000 in number, whose
revenues had always been considered as the retribution of a particular
function now universally disregarded; and _these revenues would almost
suffice to pay the amount which would save the nation from bankruptcy_.
The property from which these revenues were derived was sufficient to
cancel the debt and to set the nation free upon a new course of
readjusted taxation, an increased and unencumbered activity and, as it
seemed to all at that moment, to save the State. Talleyrand himself in
his clear and chiselled speech put the matter with the precision of a
soldier. The reform would wipe out all encumbrances, permit the
destruction of the old and hateful taxes, notably the salt tax, suppress
the purchase of public offices, and meanwhile permit the nation in its
new course to pay without grievous burden regular salaries to the clergy
as civil servants according to their rank, which salaries would abolish
the gross inequalities which had arisen in the economic development of
fifteen centuries. No ordained priest would have less than what was in
those days regarded as a sufficient maintenance. The monstrous revenues
of certain sees, which were of no service to Religion or to the State,
would disappear.
The plan was simple, it seemed most rational, and, as I have said, it
was voted—from it was to proceed directly within two months the creation
of those Government notes upon the security of Church lands, whose very
name is for us to-day a summary of the disaster—the Assignats: the
Assignats, which have become a cant term for worthless paper. Before
Christmas that ominous word was to appear. Before spring the false step
of dissolving the moribund religious orders was to be taken. Before
summer the plan to establish a national Church controlled by the State
was to be formulated; within a year that simple plan of disendowment had
bred schism and the fixed resistance of the King, later it engendered
Vendée, Normandy, all the Civil Wars, and—with a rending that has all
but destroyed Europe—a separation between the two chief appetites native
to mankind, the hunger for justice in the State, and that other hunger
for God, who is the end of the soul. The wound is not yet healed.
Such was the principal act passing during those months of the winter and
spring under the eyes of the Queen in her retirement and silence;
accompanying that act was much more. The first of the plots had broken
out, the first of those recurrent and similar plots for saving the
person of the King; the first of the victims, Favras, had been hanged;
the first hint, therefore, of a distinction between the King as head of
the nation and the King as a person to be preserved had appeared. It was
to grow until it threw into the whirlpool of the Revolution the flight
to Varennes.
Just before the end of February, the force upon which Marie Antoinette
now most relied—her brother Joseph—died. Leopold, a character of no such
readiness or maturity, succeeded him, and the Queen, reading his letter
upon the 27th, knew that she had come to that turn of human life after
which, even for the most blest, everything is loss without replacement,
until we stand alone at the tomb. Even for the most blest: for her the
turn had come just as she and all of hers must sail into the darkness of
a great storm.
I have said that it was on the last day of March, Spy Wednesday, that
she had stood obscure in her plain black, blotted against the darkness
of the nave and watching the Communion of her child. Upon the next day,
Holy Thursday of 1790, was published, by order of the Revolutionary
Parliament, that official paper called “The Red Book,” which suddenly
heralded to all the public all that her Court had been, which gave body
and form to all those hitherto vague rumours and legends of extravagance
and folly which had been the chief weapons of her enemies. It was as
though a malarial, impalpable influence weakening her had suddenly
distilled into a palpable and definite material poison. It was as though
some weapon of mist, which though formidable was undecided, had become
suddenly a weapon of steel. The publication of that list of pensions, of
doles, of bribes effected in her fortunes a change like the change in
the life of some man whose reputation has hitherto suffered from hints
and innuendoes, and who suddenly finds himself with the whole thing
published in the papers upon the witness and record of a Court of Law.
Let a modern reader imagine what that publication was by so stretching
his fancy as to conceive the delivery to general knowledge in this
country of what is done in payment and receipt by our big
money-changers, our newspapers, our politicians, and let him imagine (by
another stretch of fancy) a public opinion in this country already alive
to the existence of that corruption and already angry against it: then
he will see what a date in the chances of the Queen’s life was this Holy
Thursday!
The business now before herself and such as were statesmen around her
was no longer to make triumphant, but rather to save the Monarchy.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XIII
_MIRABEAU_
_From April 1, 1790, to midnight of the 20th June 1791_
THERE existed in France at that moment one force which, in alliance with
the Government, could have preserved the continuity of institutions,
among other institutions of the Throne. That force resided in the
personality of Mirabeau.
Had he survived and so succeeded—for his failure was only possible with
death—the French nation might indeed have preserved all its forms and
would then have lost its principle and power. It might have been
transformed into something of lower vigour than itself, it might have
grown to forget action, and the nineteenth century, which was to see our
civilisation ploughed by the armies and sowed by the ideas of
Napoleon—so that it became a century enormous with French energy and has
left us to-day under a necessity still to persevere—might have been a
time of easy reaction: an Europe without Germany, without Italy: an
Europe having in its midst the vast lethargic body of the French
Monarchy and dominated wholly by the mercantile activity of England.
This, I say, might, or rather would, have been the fate of the
Revolution, and therefore of the world, with what further consequences
we cannot tell, had Mirabeau, once in alliance with the Court, survived;
for wherever in history the continuity of form has been preferred to a
spirit of renascence, such lethargy and such decline have succeeded. But
though an effect of this kind would have resulted for Christendom in
general, for the Queen and for her family the success of Mirabeau would
have been salvation. The air and the tradition of the palace would have
survived; she would have grown old beside her husband in a State
lessened but preserving many of the externals of power; her later years
wise, resigned, and probably magnificent. As it was, the alliance
between Mirabeau and the Court was made—but before the first year of its
effect had run, Mirabeau was dead: he dead, the slope of change led
Marie Antoinette, with rapid and direct insistence, to flight, to
imprisonment, and to the scaffold.
It is but very rarely that so much can be laid to the action of one
brain in history. What were the characters in Mirabeau’s position that
made it true of him in this spring of 1790? They were these: that he had
through certain qualities in him become accepted as the organ of a
popular movement; that, by other qualities more profoundly rooted in
him, he was determined upon order; and, finally, that an early maturity
of judgment—already hardened before his fortieth year—strong passions
often satisfied and their resulting fruit of deadness, much bitter
humiliation, the dreadful annealing of poverty working upon known and
vast capacity, had rendered him quite careless of those imaginary future
things the vision of which alone can support men in the work of
creation. He was now a man walking backwards, observing things known,
judging men, testing their actions and motives as one would test natural
and invariable forces, using the whole either to achieve some end which
had already been achieved elsewhere—which was in existence somewhere and
had reality—or to preserve things still standing around him, things
whose nature he knew. He would have preserved all and he would have
degraded his land. This most national of Frenchmen would have closed to
France her avenue of growth. He was “practical”: and the chief quality
of his people, which is the power most suddenly to evoke a corporate
will, he did not comprehend. It was a mystery, and therefore he ignored
it. Of things hidden he could divine nothing at all. The Faith, for
example, being then driven underground, he utterly despised.
His command of spoken speech, sonorous, incisive, revealing, dominating
by turns; his rapid concentration of phrase, his arrangement and
possession (through others) of innumerable details, were points that
made him the chief of a Parliament: his courage and advancing
presence—for he was a sort of lion—peculiarly suited him to the Gauls,
and his love of men, which was enormous, forbade the growth of those
feminine enmities which are the only perils of our vulgar politicians
to-day, and which sprouted from debate even in the high temper of the
Revolution, as they must sprout wherever talking and not fighting is the
game.
His travel, his wide reading, his communication throughout Europe and in
the greatest houses with numerous close, varied and admiring friends,
gave him that poise and that contempt for vision which made his
leadership, when once he led, secure.
With all this went the passion to administrate, to do, which months of
speeches and of opposition to the executive had but swollen. In April
his opportunity came.
It was the Queen who made this capital move.
For many months indeed he would have come in secret to the aid of the
Court. From the very meeting of the States-General the year before,
Mirabeau had known that his place was with Government rather than in the
tribune. His past of passion forbade him executive power. Necker, with
quite another past—a nasty financial past—had dared to insult him in the
early days of the Parliament. All the summer he had begged La Marck, his
friend, to speak for him to the Queen, to the Throne. La Marck, who was
very close to the Queen and was a companion since Trianon, had spoken,
but Mirabeau was still a voice only, and, to women, an unpleasant one.
In October he had directly attacked the Queen—she held him responsible
for the two dreadful days and the insults of the drag back to Paris. The
decrees in November which preserved the Assembly from decay by
forbidding its members to accept office had closed the Ministry to him:
in December he had tried to work a secret executive power through
Monsieur, and Marie Antoinette’s distrust of Monsieur had again foiled
him. La Marck had given up hope of helping his friend, the decrees and
the debates of the Assembly shook the Throne with increasing violence,
the King was counselless, when, after some long debate within herself,
of which, in the nature of the thing, we can have no hint or record, the
Queen, in the days when the preparation for her child’s sacrament was
her chief affair, and a fortnight or so before that communion,
determined to unite the brain of Mirabeau to the Crown.
She easily persuaded Louis. Before or after that persuasion she spoke to
Mercy, and Mercy wrote to that ancestral Belgic land whither La Marck,
certain that nothing could be done in Paris, and desiring to check the
effects of the revolt in the Austrian Netherlands upon his estates, had
betaken him three months before. La Marck at once returned; he crossed
the frontier, and in his private house, up along the Faubourg St.
Honoré, Mirabeau and Mercy met upon an April evening. All was most
secretly done, so that none, not the populace, nor the Parliament, nor
the courtiers—nor even Necker—should know. These two very separate
abilities, Mercy and Mirabeau, recognised each other: for some days yet
the latter, and the greater, the storm-tossed one, doubted; he still
spoke of “an embassy” for his reward—he stooped to beg favour again of
La Fayette. At last he was convinced of the Court’s sincerity, and on
the 10th of May he wrote for the King—that is, for the Government (there
was no other)—that first admirable Letter of Advice, which remains the
chief monument of his genius. In one year he had proceeded from being an
Evil Reputation to be a Speechifier, from a Speechifier to a something
inspiring dread: now he was secretly in power; in half power; his was
one of the hands on the tiller. To himself that year had been but a year
of debt and makeshift; his principal relief at this vast change was a
relief of the purse.
Mirabeau wanted money. He was a gentleman and his honour wanted it. In
his appetite for it he did all a gentleman would do, sacrificing that
self-respect which men not gentlemen would not part with to save their
lives. He approached enemies and friends indifferently. La Fayette,
whose militia power offended him and whose nullity drove him wild, La
Fayette whom he had attacked and publicly jeered at, he quietly tapped
for £2000 and railed when that cautious Saviour of Two Worlds sent less
than half the sum. He had the gentleman’s morbid shame of old debts and
the gentleman’s carelessness in contracting new. He was of the sort that
kill themselves rather than finally default, and yet who take the road
that makes defaulting sure. To such a man, now rising on the
Revolutionary wave, entertaining, ordering secretarial work on every
side, playing the part of a public god, the offer of the Court was new
life. Yet here again some apology must be offered to the modern reader
for the pettiness of the sum which sufficed in those days to purchase so
much power upon such an occasion. For the salvation of the Monarchy
Mirabeau was to receive, upon the payment of his debts, not half the
income we give to a politician who has climbed on to the Front Bench:
when he had accomplished his task he was to receive, upon retirement, a
sum that would just purchase such a pension as we accord for life to a
nephew or a son-in-law fatigued by two years of the Board of Trade. He
accepted the terms: but for him and for those like him a wage, however
shameful or secret, is but an opportunity for intense and individual
action. He was the more himself and the less a servant when he had wages
to spend. He designed his campaign at once: to see the Queen upon whose
energy alone he relied and in whom—though he had never kissed her hand
or spoken to her face to face—he divined a corresponding courage; and
next, through her, while maintaining his demagogic power, to crush the
growth of anarchy by the welding of an army; and at last to restore the
Monarchy by a civil war. For order was, he imagined, the chief affair,
and anarchy was all that great brain could discover in the early ferment
of the time.
He was a man very capable of being a lover: he was an artist who
ardently desired an instrument: he trusted his capacity with women, and
he far over-priced the power in action though not the vigour of the
Queen. She upon her side dreaded the meeting and delayed it, though
Mercy himself and the new Archbishop of Toulouse, now her confessor,
urged it.
Upon the 4th of June the Court had left Paris for St. Cloud to spend,
within an hour of the capital and within sight of it, the months of
summer. That memorable anniversary of her son’s death isolated and
saddened the woman upon whom was thus thrown a responsibility too great
for her judgment. All the month she hesitated, while the notes from
Mirabeau in his new capacity as Counsellor of the Court, coming in
continually more insistent, more authoritative, and more wide, made the
meeting a necessity. At last, upon the 29th, she decided. A room was
chosen, “such that none could know;” he was to come upon Friday, July 3,
to the little back-door of the garden towards the park: there was a
further delay—he was put off to the morrow. He slept at his sister’s
house at Auteuil, and early on the Saturday morning, taking his sister’s
son with him for sole companion, disguised, he drove to the little
garden-door. Everything was silent about him in the summer morning as he
drove from Auteuil to St. Cloud, that nephew of his riding as his
postillion, and no one by. A certain suspicion weighed upon him. He
remembered the delays, the secrecy; he remembered that no friend loved
him as much as each loved or hated the Crown. Before he put his hand to
the latch he gave the boy a note and said: “If I am not returned within
three-quarters of an hour, give this to the Captain of the Militia,”
and, having said this, he went alone into the garden.
In France and throughout his world the event of those days was the
Federation. In ten days all the delegates would meet upon the Champ de
Mars for the anniversary of the Bastille: the change in men was to be
confirmed in a vast meeting of friendship: the King was to swear and a
world quite renewed was to arise. Even in London the blaze of the
triumph had struck the street, and the common shows were preparing
pictures and models of the feast. Upon this all Europe was turned as the
delegates came swarming daily into the simmering July of Paris and as
the altar rose upon the great open field by the river. For him, and now
for history also, a greater, what might, had Mirabeau lived, have been a
more enduring scene, was the secret morning meeting so prepared.
The Queen awaited him in a room apart, the King at her side. She awaited
with some hesitation the fierce step and the bold eye, the strong pitted
face of “the Monster,” but her rank and a long apprenticeship to
reception had taught her to receive. He came in and saw this woman whom
he had so much desired to see, he spoke with her for half-an-hour, and
as he left her he kissed her hand. Two things remained with him: the
moderation, the over-moderation of the King, but in her a sort of regal
determination which was half an illusion of his own, but which most
powerfully filled his spirit and which left him enfeoffed to the cause
he had so long chosen to serve. He came out to his nephew, where the
carriage waited, radiant, all his energy renewed. He had perhaps a clear
conception of the Queen in action supporting him, determining the King,
eagerly accepting his wisdom and his plans. In that he gave her far too
great a place; but great men impute greatness, and Mirabeau was too
great for women.
The show of the Federation passed, gloriously; the life of the nation
rose to passion and broke bounds. In the matter of the army, by which
alone Authority could live, Mirabeau saw its strength dissolved. The
melting of society had destroyed that discipline, the hardest, the most
necessary and the least explicable bond among men: the frontier mutinied
for arrears of pay, and with the first days of August it was evident
that neither for defence nor for the re-establishment of law would the
army be available. The army, that one solid weapon of the Monarchy, was
now cracked all down the blade. The Army of the East, long, as I have
said, the chief resource of the executive, was affected like the rest of
the service. There Bouillé, a trained and careful man, wealthy, noble,
of course, Whiggish in politics, and of middle age, held the command and
saw from one day to another in all the garrisons of his command the
method of soldiers failing. One mutiny followed another; regimental
chests were seized for arrears of pay; the non-commissioned officers
were no longer with the _cadre_ in spirit; officers of the lower grades
had been insulted, of the higher reluctantly and more reluctantly
obeyed.
It was at this moment that Mirabeau saw fit to give that grave advice
for which posterity has judged him so hardly and which yet betrays the
decision of his soul. He determined upon civil war.
Many things might have saved him and the nation from such a policy:
notably La Fayette, a plaster head of the Militia might have been made a
reserve force behind the failing regulars; and it has been pretended
that La Fayette and Mirabeau were now quite separate, and the wealthy
young fellow useless to his elder the Statesman, because La Fayette, in
opposing Mirabeau’s presidency of the Assembly for the Federation, had
offended the vanity from which great orators suffer. The cause is
insufficient. Mirabeau had lost all hope that La Fayette could act. He
passed him by. What as a fact did prevent the immediate prosecution of
Mirabeau’s policy was the insufficiency of the Queen, and this it was
that saved the country and the memory of her adviser from a course that
would certainly have preserved the Throne.
Contrasted against the surroundings of her family and her Court, even of
her immediate enemies, her decision had shone: contrasted against
Mirabeau’s will it was pale. She preferred, she even attempted to foist
upon him, that project of foreign intervention which, three years later,
killed her; and his famous words in his Advice of August 13 seemed to
her rhetoric or worse. Its style was “extraordinary”: he was “mad.”
“Four enemies are at the charge,” he had written, “the taxes,
repudiation, the army, and winter”—she could not bear the style: but he
was right. The harvest was in—it was not sufficient; a new and vast
increase of assignats was voted—Mirabeau himself most urgently advising
it—and on all this, at the end of August, came Nancy.
The chief and the last foundation of force for the King were the Swiss
regiments. Those of the Guard in the last supreme moment of the Monarchy
all but saved it. At Nancy in that August of 1790 three regiments were
quartered, two French, one Swiss, that called “Château Vieux.” They
mutinied, mainly for pay; after scenes which do not concern this book,
they were broken—upon the last day of the month, with a loss to the
still disciplined troops opposing them of forty officers and ten times
that number of men. The gravity of that day was of a kind we also know,
when, in some crisis (with us such crisis has been for generations
foreign, not domestic) a much graver thing, a much louder noise, brings
to a pitch emotion ready for violence and suddenly presents as a reality
what all had desired or feared. Of such are the first shots of a war,
the first news of a fatal illness. The French mutineers were disbanded.
The opinion of the moment would have tolerated no course more severe:
but—and this was the wedge that struck into the heart of the time and
clove men asunder—the Swiss were made such an example of old things as
the whole Revolution had come to sweep away. True, their own rich
officers were the judges of the Swiss; what was done did not then lie
and does not lie to-day on the conscience of the French people; but when
of these foreign peasants, driven by poverty to a foreign service and
maddened to mutiny by the fraudulent retaining of their pay, _one-half_
were made the subjects of a public horror, the country gasped. The town
of Nancy, a town of great beauty, the flower of Lorraine, had fought
with and had supported the mutineers. It suffered the sight of _half_ of
the whole Swiss regiment marched out for punishment, half sent to
barracks and then reserved for some obscurer fate. Of those so publicly
destroyed, two-thirds were for the galleys, near a third were hanged on
high gallows before all, to turn the stomachs of the new Citizens for a
free state; one was broken on a wheel with clubs, his bones crushed to
satisfy the privileged in a social order already infamous, his blood
spattered on the pavement of a town which had befriended him. It was an
anomaly of hell fallen in the midst of the new hopes and within six
weeks of that clamour of goodwill upon the Champ de Mars when all such
nightmares were to have been buried for ever.
The Assembly voted its thanks for the restoration of order: the vote was
moved by Mirabeau. Bouillé commanded an army now silent, and the thing
was done. But the minority of wealthy men that had thus dared applaud
the executions at Nancy was now cut off from fellowship with the nation,
and the civil war which Mirabeau desired was come in spirit—for the
Government, the only possible executive, the Crown, was with that
minority.
Necker, lost in public opinion, defeated in finance, thoroughly
terrified at the sound of arms, was off across the frontier for ever to
Geneva, his Bible and his money-bags. For a few months Mirabeau’s
strength was to remain increasing, the one central thing—but secretly
his power of action was marred, for, while the Court listened and heard
him, it did not move. He would have seen the Queen—she would not see
him. Already his complicity was guessed by a few—it had been denounced
frenziedly amid parliamentary jeers and laughter by one young man, since
dead: but the rumour had terrified the palace. Mirabeau, still taking
the palace’s pay, still pouring in upon it Advices which he desired to
be commands—(and yet still refused so much as a Royal audience)—grew
continually upon the Parliament.
As his power over the Assembly increased, his fret against the
hesitation of the Court increased with it; it increased to desperation,
and that desperation was the more exasperated because a man of his
temper could not grasp—in the absence of personal interviews—what it was
that held back the Crown. Yet to a man of another temper the explanation
would have been easy. There was a conflict, not only of mediocrity with
genius, not only of two wills—the one accustomed to an inert command,
the other avid to exercise a vigorous one—but a conflict also of ends to
be attained; for that which Mirabeau desired—and which he thought the
King and Queen to desire—was a national thing, whereas what the King and
Queen now desired was a personal thing. He all the while was considering
the Monarchy, an institution necessary to his country: they thought more
and more daily of their individual selves: their habits, their wounded
right, their children—their religion.
In nothing did the friction of that new machine, the alliance between
Mirabeau and the Court, show more than in this matter of religion. To
Mirabeau, as to every vigorous spirit of that generation, the Faith was
inconceivable. How far, by an effort of fancy, he could picture minds
that held it one cannot tell, but one may be certain that he could not
but associate such minds with ineptitude. Now the business of 1790,
unknown to the men who most mixed in that business, was Religion. France
had of herself transformed herself in eighteen months. The Roman
conceptions had returned, the municipalities governed, the whole people
were moving in a stream together, equality had re-arisen to the surface
of things; war, if war came, would be a national thing—the life in each
had determined to be based upon a general will. At this overwhelming
change the Parliament had assisted; it was their function to express its
main features in new laws, and, as to details, to thresh them out in
debate and make them fit the new scheme: among these details was the
definition of the Clergy’s status. The Catholic Church was present—for
the peasants at least—and it must thus still be recognised, its powers
must be defined, the terms of its recognition must be formulated. These
cultivated men of the Parliament—and I include the bishops—had no
conception of Resurrection. The Church was an old thing, passive, woven
into the lower stuff of the State; it would not again be what a dim
tradition affirmed it once to have been. Let it die down quietly in its
villages and go. As for the _Institution_ of it, the higher-salaried
places—its use in Government—why, that was to be Gallican.
Just before the Federation in July the CIVIL CONSTITUTION OF THE CLERGY
had passed the House. Just before Nancy the King had assented, and it
was law.
To the men who spoke and legislated, it was a just and straightforward
law; to us who know a future they could not know, it is a monstrous
absurdity. Priests and bishops “elected”—not by enthusiasm or by clamour
or by a populace ardent, but by paper votes—as we elect our dunderheads
to Westminster! Unity, the prime test of life, secured by no more than a
letter to Rome announcing election and courteously admitting communion!
Every diocese and parish a new creation, created without any
consultation of Peter and his Authority! Yet such was the sleep of the
Faith a century ago that this incredible instrument provoked discussion
only; and such protests as came were not protests of laughter or even of
anger, but protests of argument—with after-thoughts of money. But the
King and the Queen believed.
Had she not suffered, this void of the century in matters of the soul
might have left Marie Antoinette indifferent. She had been indifferent
to that prig-brother of hers when he played the philosopher at Vienna
and the fool in the Netherlands. The populace, who guard the seeds of
religion, were unknown to her as to the King and to the Parliament. But
she had so suffered that she had concentrated upon the Creed: her
husband had always held it simply—he was a simple man. Now, when he
signed the Civil Constitution, and she knew of that act, it was proof
that they had done with the national ferment, that their concern was to
get away, to return, and to reconquer; that henceforward no public act
of theirs, no acceptation of any Reform, had in it or was meant to have
the least validity in conscience. She especially was quite cut off
henceforward from the crown she had worn—it was no longer a symbol of
her State for her; and if she had continued to wear it, as Mirabeau
desired, after a reconquest achieved through civil war, she would have
worn it contentedly over defeated subjects rather than over a nation.
All this Mirabeau saw as little as he saw the passion of the village
priests, the anger of the women in the country-sides. The resistance
(which immediately began) he thought purely political. Priests that
would not take the oath were Partisans of the old tyranny and breakdown;
the Pope, who was preparing his definite refusal, was a subtle Italian
whom he, Mirabeau, must meet by a Gallic brutality. To the King Mirabeau
secretly represented the Civil Constitution and the gathering revolt
against it as an excellent lever for recruiting the provinces and
raising that civil war of the Government against anarchy which was his
whole policy; but to the Assembly (and here it was most of himself that
appeared) he spoke against the Church’s refusal to accept with a
violence that astounded, and at times provoked to rebuke, his most
extreme admirers. All his spirit during that autumn and early winter of
1790-91 is one of diatribe and fury against the intangible foe he
himself had raised.
On the 26th of November he forced the Assembly to vote the prosecution
of priests who refused the oath; on the 4th of January he accused the
hierarchy of their old game—“too well known in our history”—of playing
for an “ultramontane” authority; ten days later, on the 14th, he broke
all bounds: swore that the priests cared little if religion died (and
much he cared for it!) so that their _power_ was saved. The priests
present left the hall. He continued with greater violence, and all the
Assembly protested. On the proposition of Camus (himself next-door to a
Huguenot) it was moved and carried that Mirabeau be no longer heard.
When, a bare week after all this, a Letter of Advice reached the King
from Mirabeau headed, “_On the Way to make use of the Civil
Constitution_,” how should the King not be bewildered?
The King read it; he found a stupefying series of counsels. How could so
simple a man as he understand the contradiction between Mirabeau’s
public speeches and secret executive advice? “No time” (he read in
Mirabeau’s private communication to the Crown)—“No time could be more
favourable for uniting all the malcontents, the most dangerous ones, and
raising his royal popularity to the detriment of the Assembly;” he was
to provoke resistance secretly, to refuse executive aid: to throw the
odium of the Civil Constitution _and_ of the priests’ resistance to it
on the Assembly. What could a man of Louis’ kind make of all this? Had
Marie Antoinette been a she-Mirabeau, as Mirabeau half-believed her to
be, _she_ might have followed the plan. Contrariwise, she was a
Christian mother, much too untaught and too devout by now to use
religion for political intrigue. To emphasise their bewilderment, this
Husband and Wife find that their late Confessor—whom they had
indignantly rejected for his schism—had taken the oath at the pressing
of Mirabeau himself.... It is not to be wondered at that Mirabeau’s
advice hung fire.
There were other glaring contrasts between his public and his private
view: there was Mirabeau’s high playing of the demagogue rôle. He must
roar with the Jacobins: that organisation, the “radical thousand” of
Paris, and a hundred and fifty societies at its back throughout France,
already directed the storm from the October of ’90. He mixed with it,
flattered it, became its powerful spokesman in the Assembly, was its
President by the end of November; and while he so marked and emphasised
with his voice and will almost every one of the succeeding steps that
led towards a pure democracy, he marvelled that the Court would not
accept his secret counsel and believe his support of the Crown to be his
true motive of action all the while. It was indeed his main motive; but
men of his stature also require applause, and the double part he filled
was acted too brilliantly upon its public side for his private
statesmanship—to which all his intellect and much of his heart was
really devoted—to obtain full weight at the palace. He was permanently
mistrusted, and he met that mistrust by chance phrases of contempt or
insult which he may or may not have intended to be repeated to the woman
and the office which he desired both to guide and to save.
In one thing, however, his influence still weighed: in that one thing it
would have sufficed, had he lived, to save the Queen. I mean in the
plan, still debated and still postponed, for the abandonment of Paris by
the Crown.
I have said that the main misunderstanding between the Queen and
Mirabeau lay in this, that for him a national, for her a domestic, end
was now in view. For months he had urged a public withdrawal from the
capital, a public appeal to the armed forces, a withdrawal to some near
and loyal town, a town with a palace and tradesmen dependent on it—to
Compiègne, for instance, a long day’s ride[18] away; thereafter an
appeal to the provinces and, if the extremists and Paris would fight,
then a civil war and a reconquest of power. He had talked of the Queen
on horseback with her son; he resurrected Maria Theresa and imagined
bold things. The Queen desired for her husband, herself, and her
children merely safety: but she would not leave the King.
Footnote 18:
To be accurate, a little less than fifty miles.
Once that summer the Queen and her children had driven out from St.
Cloud towards the western woods that overhang the Seine; the King and
his gentlemen had ridden westward also in the wooded plain below. Many
in either retinue had thought the moment come, but each party returned
at evening.
Returned to Paris in the autumn, the rising flood of public feeling made
a public appeal and a public withdrawal more difficult with every
succeeding month, and month after month it was postponed.
The foreigner, of whom the French had hardly thought during the first
months of their enthusiasm, now re-arose before them; many were already
anxious for the frontier, and already the irritant of German menace,
which was to lead at last from Valmy to Wattignies and from Wattignies
to Jena, had begun to chafe the military appetites of Paris. Were war to
break out with the spring of the next year—nay, were it only in the
air—the escape of the King from Paris would be more difficult than ever.
It was at the close of October,[19] before the Court had left St. Cloud
for Paris, that the plan for leaving Paris first took definite shape and
that Louis sent Parniers with a message to Bouillé at Metz.
Footnote 19:
Oct. 20, not the 23rd, a date accepted since the publication of
Bouillé’s Memoirs in 1833, but corrected by collation with the
original two years ago.
Mirabeau had pointed to Bouillé as the only general to defend that
march; not because Bouillé was on the frontier, but because Bouillé had
got his army in hand again, was very capable, did not intrigue. But
Bouillé, in Mirabeau’s design, was to come westward and to receive the
King at Compiègne. The General himself accepted such a plan and urged
it. The King still preferred a flight to the very frontier, Besançon for
choice, and it is impossible—when his reluctance to leave at all is
considered, his whole character, his wife’s counsel, and her previous
attitude in the letters and appeals of that summer—to doubt that the
Queen had moulded that decision. It was not a firm choice. Bouillé’s
son, coming at Christmas to Paris to sound people and things, found La
Fayette of very dubious loyalty, and he doubted the aid of the Militia.
He saw Fersen (the young fellow took for granted that Fersen was the
Queen’s lover); he saw him in Fersen’s own house in the Faubourg St.
Honoré. They discussed the rottenness of the army, the unlikeliness of
immediate foreign aid. It was decided to postpone the thing for three
months.
And meanwhile the Queen heard debated before her the alternatives of a
flight to the frontier and of a domestic rising nearer Paris in defence
of the Crown. She was by all her bent—and was increasingly to be—in
favour of foreign support; but Mirabeau’s counsel was something to her.
At the end of February it prevailed, and La Marck came to Bouillé at
Metz with the news that Mirabeau’s plan should be considered. Bouillé
agreed. There was to be no suggestion of flight: the Court’s choice of
the frontier was to be abandoned. Compiègne should be the goal of a
short and determined march. The soldier rejoiced, as did Mirabeau, that
a final decision had been made, that no near presence of foreign aid was
expected, and that the idea of a flight to the frontier was given up.
March, perhaps the close of it, was to see the thing done, and so with
the spring was to be issued the challenge to civil war: then and then
only, if necessary, might there follow a retirement upon a fortress.
The thing was dangerous and more dangerous. Mesdames, the King’s aunts,
had left their country house at great pains for Italy: the populace had
all but detained them. La Fayette, a month later, had disarmed certain
gentlemen of the palace and had insisted that his Militia alone mount
guard. It was certain, as March crept on, that the decision must soon be
taken, and that the double power of Mirabeau over Court and Parliament
could alone force the exit from Paris to a well-chosen town, and so
decide the issue of a Restoration of the Monarchy now so grievously
imperilled. Mirabeau still grew in power, still spoke in his loudest
tones, still watched, and drove all his team of political dupes and
Royal clients, still remained strongly double. Swearing to one that he
had all ready for the end of Monarchy if the King should fly; writing
continually (and more sincerely) to another his plans in aid of such a
flight; asking for yet more money (on the 2nd of March); urging a
further double-dealing with the Assembly in a secret and verbal message
to the King (on the 13th); betraying the Jacobins, his Jacobins, in a
private letter (on the 21st). Doing all this with his intrigue fully
formed, and the royal family already sheltered under the wing of that
intrigue, Fate entered.
It was on the 24th of March that Mirabeau wrote his last letter to La
Marck. His friend had mining rights in the kingdom: the new mining laws
were down for debate that week. He promised to speak, and on the morning
of the 27th he called on La Marck upon his way to the _manège_; he was
faint and compelled to rest awhile upon a couch there, but he rallied
and went on to the Parliament. It was Sunday. The streets were full of
people: he was recognised, followed, and cheered.
Upon that 27th of March he spoke more than once: his ill-ease was not
apparent. On the 28th he was struck. But even so lying in his bed, for
the next three days, in spite of an increasing agony, he made of his
moments of respite occasions for set words, usually well chosen, pagan,
proud, memorable, and a trifle affected. A crowd in the street without
kept guard and silence. A crowd was about his bed continually.
Talleyrand, reconciled, came; La Marck, who loved him, came
repeatedly—and a hundred others. He spoke, and they spoke, of Death, as
a matter for converse, often for jest. La Marck quizzed him: “Oh, you
connoisseur of great death-beds!” Talleyrand told him that he came,
“like the populace, to hear.” A man who loved him said well, “that he
acted death as a great actor upon a national stage.” Astounding courage,
and more astounding silence upon the thing he had never cared for or
believed: all the greatness and all the void of the eighteenth century
was here. He admitted God, however, and rallied his good doctor, a
materialist—as then were all, and still are most, experts in viscera:
the days were sun-lit, and the sun reminded him of God. So for four
days; upon the fifth day, the 2nd of April, at half-past eight in the
morning, those watching his last and silent agony saw that he was dead.
* * * * *
Many modern historians have said that the death of Mirabeau affected but
little the plans that had been made for flight.
It is an error. The death of Mirabeau changed all, and it was one more
of those hammer-blows of Fate exactly coincident with the sequence of
the Queen’s weird.
It is true that the flight was already long arranged. It is true that
its very details were planned for the most part long before Mirabeau
died. Nevertheless had Mirabeau lived the whole thing would have had a
different issue; and for this reason, that Mirabeau dominated all that
world—not only the world of the Court but also the world of Parliament,
and, in some indirect way, the world of Opinion as well—by Will. Any
action that the Court had taken with Mirabeau alive and active would
have been bent to Mirabeau’s plan, and even if the flight had been, not
(as he counselled) to Compiègne, but to Montmédy and the frontier,
Mirabeau would have forced at once its success and a consequent civil
war. He would have permitted no departure without being privy to it; he
would have sworn, shouted, cajoled and persuaded doubly upon either
side—for Mirabeau was a soldierly man; he had a plan and could use men
by ordering. He could use them for the achievement of a fixed end, which
was now the salvation of the Monarchy; for he believed the Monarchy to
be the skeleton and framework of France—this creative light of the
Revolution around him seemed to him a mere mist and dazzle. Great as he
was, I repeat it, the Revolution seemed to him to be drifting towards an
Anarchy. He was like a landsman who may be brave and domineering but who
shudders when he first comes across the temper of the sea.
But what might have happened is but hypothesis. For Mirabeau died; and
Mirabeau once dead it was necessarily certain that the Court, left to
itself, should attempt to preserve not Monarchy but merely the Court.
Mirabeau living, that determination of theirs to save their bodies would
have done no harm, and the eagerness of the Queen to get away to the
neighbourhood of friends would have been used as human intelligence uses
the instinct of animals. Mirabeau dead, that force ran ever along its
own blind line, attempting merely to save the persons of the King and
Queen and their children. Attempting so small a thing it happened to
fail: but on the failure or success of that attempt the largest things
depended.
It was, as we have seen, upon Saturday the 2nd of April that Mirabeau
died, and had said in dying that there went with him the last shreds of
the Monarchy.
The Sunday following his death was that upon which the Schismatic
Priests said their first Masses in every parish of the city.
* * * * *
I have not space to reiterate in this volume the vast issue involved. I
have sufficiently emphasised and shall further emphasise the profound
truth that every Civil Revolution is theological at bottom, because, at
bottom, it must be based upon a divergence of philosophy: a divergence
between the philosophies of the old order and the new. A chance test of
philosophy thrown at random into the Revolutionary movement had
separated men suddenly and was rifting the State asunder; for a
fortnight Paris raged upon the Nationalisation of the Church.
I will not detain the reader. There was here one of those double duties
where the wisest get most bewildered and the most sincere go the
furthest astray. Let the reader remember (difficult as it is to do so in
the religious atmosphere of our time) that with the educated of that day
Religion was dead—with the populace of Paris even more dead. The thing
was a mere emblem. Its last little flickering light (which we have since
seen to grow to so great a flame) was not comprehended, save as a
political institution, by the great bulk of the Parliament, by the
professions, by the workers; the very beggars in the street despised the
Faith, and the shrines were empty. You were a priest or one of the very
few Mass-goers? Then you were suspected of supporting the old forms of
civil polity! After the Civil Constitution of the Clergy you
deliberately refused to take a reasonable oath to the Constitution and
the new-born Liberty of Men? Then you were a traitor, and a silly
traitor at that. Let it be remembered that at this moment Religion had
no warriors. All the vast rally of the nineteenth century was undreamt
of. The bishops were place-hunters full of evil living;[20] the Creed an
empty historic formula: a convention like the conventions of “party” in
England to-day. The reader _must_ see this, in spite of all the
nineteenth century may have taught him to the contrary, or he will never
see the Revolution.
Footnote 20:
We have seen Mgr. of Narbonne. His mistress was his own niece.
In such a crisis two factors, quite uncomprehended, stood like
rocks—they were but small minorities: so are rocks small accidents in
the general sea. The one was that little group of people who still
practised the united Catholic Faith—and it just so happened that of
these the King was one, his sister another, and—from the beginning in
her light, easy way, latterly with increasing depth—his wife a third;
the other factor was the mass of the humbler Clergy. They felt as by an
instinct the note of unity; they refused to subscribe: to all, or nearly
all, the bishops it was—for the most part—a matter of rank and policy to
resist the _Bill_; to the two-thirds of the country Clergy to resist the
_Law_ was loyalty to our Lord.
What the King felt in that quarrel we all know. Marie Antoinette, in
spite of her devotion, was never able to neglect the human, the purely
temporal, the vulgarly political aspect of the quarrel. Her husband,
sincerely sympathetic though he was with the French temper, thought
mainly of the Divine interests in the matter; though he thought slowly
and badly, that was his thought. The populace, the politicians—all the
world—saw nothing whatsoever in the Catholic resistance but a dodge
devised by privilege to put a spoke in the wheel of the Revolution. And
Paris especially, having for so long abandoned religion, raged round the
refusal of the priests.
It is pitiful to read how small a rally the Faith could make! _One_
chapel in all Paris was hired for the true Mass to be said therein, and
handfuls here and there put forward a timid claim to approach the only
altar which Rome acknowledged. I say it for the third or for the fourth
time, to-day we cannot understand these things, for the Resurrection of
the Catholic Church stands between us and them; but to this Paris on
that Lenten Sunday, the 3rd of April 1791, the presence of the
Schismatic Clergy, each in his parish, was a plain challenge launched
against the Crown, and it was nothing more: the attachment of the Court
to the Roman Unity seemed to Paris a mere political intrigue, odious and
unnational and stinking of treason. For a fortnight the Parisian anger
raged, and the 17th of April was Palm Sunday.
It has become a rule for those who are in communion with the Catholic
Church that they should receive the Sacraments at least once a year, and
that at Easter or thereabouts; a rule defined, if I am not mistaken,
during the struggle with the Lutheran—that latest of the great heresies.
This rule the King had satisfied, and on that Palm Sunday had taken
Communion in his Chapel from a priest who had not sworn the Civic Oath.
All the customary talk of some religious necessity by which he was in
conscience compelled to leave Paris is balderdash. The attempt he made
the next day, the Monday, to leave the city in order to spend the Easter
days in the suburban palace of St. Cloud was purely political. Religion
had no part therein. It cannot be determined to-day—unless indeed
further evidence should come before us—how much the mere desire to prove
a liberty of action on the part of the Court, how much a sort of
challenge sure to be defeated, how much a hope that escape would be
easier from a suburban point, entered into this plan; but it is quite
certain that the Body of the Lord and His Resurrection had nothing
whatsoever to do with it. And when upon Monday of Holy Week, the 18th of
April, a little before noon, the royal family got into their carriage to
drive, as was their constitutional right, to the neighbouring palace
those few miles away where the populace could not surround them, a
crowd, organised as were these crowds of the Revolution, held them all
around. The scene has been repeated too often to be repeated here; one
character marks it—it is one of profound importance—for the first time
armed and disciplined force was wholly upon the side of the Revolution.
The Militia which La Fayette had formed were with the people, and the
common will of that great mob was present also in the men who bore arms.
It had not been so in any of the movements antecedent to this, unless we
admit the sharp national anger of the loose and almost civilian “French
Guards” against the hired German Cavalry in July 1789. Hitherto there
had been a distinction between the people at large and that portion of
the people which was armed and disciplined, a distinction which now
broke down because to the French temper on this Monday of Holy Week 1791
the issue was too grave for such distinctions. The national King must be
kept in Paris; the people would not let him leave, much as a man will
not let his money go out of his sight or out of his control.
Let it be noted that here, as is invariably the case throughout the
history of the French people, the general mass had easily learned a
secret thing: All the bamboozlement had failed—as it is failing to-day
in spite of the financial press of Paris, the Secret Societies, and
every other instrument of fraud. The vast crowd which hustled round the
King’s carriage knew and freely repeated his project of invasion which
had now been so carefully and, as it was thought, so secretly plotted
for six months.
The French people are accustomed to, and have, as it were, an appetite
for, duels in the dark where one of the two combatants must die. There
was determination upon the one side—without proof—that the King desired
to fly and must be restrained. There was determination upon the
other—accompanied by frequent denial—that the King should escape to the
French frontier and should be free.
Not the next day, but the day after, Wednesday in Holy Week, the Queen,
the Queen herself pulled the trigger. All that blind force of desire for
the mere personal safety of her family, which Mirabeau would have
controlled, but which in her unguided hands was an unreasoning torrent,
impelled her action. She wrote to Mercy that her very life was in danger
and that the business must be done with next month at the latest. She
mentioned the place of flight, Montmédy.
Eight weeks followed, during which every effort of the royal family was
directed to the achievement of a mere flight.
The limits of these pages do not permit me the many details which could
make of that early summer a long book of intrigue. When the thing had
failed each had his excuses, and Bouillé would have it that with a
docile obedience on the part of the Court he could have saved the Court.
It may be argued that if the King had gone by way of Rheims he would
have escaped. It may be argued that the delay of twenty-four hours
(which certainly did take place) made such and such a difference. All
these arguments fall to the ground when it is considered that the King
did escape from Paris, escaped easily along the road to the frontier,
was safe and trebly safe until, as will be seen, two accidents, wholly
incalculable and each a clear part of Fate, broke that immemorial Crown
of the French Monarchy. The first (as will be seen) was the error—if it
was an error—made by young Choiseul on the Chalons road—a mere
mechanical one; the second—much more miraculous—was the ride of Drouet,
galloping in a dark night under a covered moon wildly through the very
difficult ridgeway of Argonne, and even that miracle only just came off
by fifteen minutes. It was not delay, whether of twenty-four hours or of
a fortnight, which brought them back to Paris. It was that other force
for which we have no name, but which one may call if one likes Necessity
or Something Written.
* * * * *
[Illustration:
FACSIMILE OF THE FIRST PAGE OF THE ADDRESS TO THE FRENCH PEOPLE,
WRITTEN BY LOUIS XVI BEFORE HIS FLIGHT
]
Fersen, who loved the Queen and whom the Queen loved, had stood in the
centre of the plot, had seen all the conspirators, and brought to its
climax everything. He was now to risk his life. The great
travelling-carriage, called a berline (which easily held three people
upon either side), was waiting in its shed in the stables of the house
he had hired, as the summer solstice-a date fatal to the
Bourbons—approached. Fersen himself in disguise was to drive them,
disguised also, from their palace by night in a cab to where that
travelling-coach awaited them. Their passports were ready; the
children’s governess, the Duchess of Tourzel, was to play the part of
the chief personage and to be called the Baroness of Korff. The Queen
was to be the governess of her children, the King her valet, his sister
a maid; the children were to be Madame de Korff’s children, and the
Dauphin was dressed as a girl and called by a girl’s name.
* * * * *
There are a few square yards in Paris which should be famous in history.
Here Joan of Arc fell in her failure to force the western gate of the
city. Here to-day is the hotel called the Hôtel de Normandie, frequented
by foreigners, and opposite is a money-changer’s booth. Here the Rue St.
Honoré crosses the Rue de l’Echelle. There[21] at midnight of the 20th
of June, Fersen, dressed as a coachman, was waiting with his cab to
drive them to the travelling-coach which awaited them at the eastern
boundary of the city. He had already visited the palace to make all
sure. His disguise was good, his acting excellent. His love compelled
him. He took snuff with the other cabbies. He waited resignedly. The
lights went out, midnight approached, and first one, then another of
certain beings approached him down the dark alley that led from the
courtyards of the palace. The King came, and the royal children, their
governess, and the King’s sister. Last of all, and after some delay, the
Queen. All of them had escaped safely from what was the chief barrier
around them all—the Militia Guard. When they were well in their cab,
Fersen, that devoted man, drove them in a leisurely manner to the gates
of the city, found the berline drawn up on the high road, and with it
two Gentlemen of the Guard who had come, disguised in old yellow
liveries, to act as postillions, while a third had ridden on to the
post-house. Fersen had the berline driven by his servants, himself upon
the box, and so reached, in that earliest of all dawns of the year, the
first post and relay, the suburban post-house of Bondy.
Footnote 21:
To be accurate, the exact spot was a few steps to the south of the
present crossing or much about the middle of the modern Rue de
l’Echelle, and opposite No. 3 of that street.
There was light in the North. He saw before him at that hour the free
road to the frontier; the country and the simple minds of subjects; the
happy past returning; the end at last of all that Parisian fever, and
the chastisement perhaps of all that Parisian violence—at any rate, the
solution of the whole affair. His friend was free.
* * * * *
The King had but to reach the garrisons of the east and Austria would
move, the last of the regular French armies would advance: now that the
royal person was no more in danger from such a march, the march on Paris
would begin.
But it was the summer solstice, a moment ill-omened to the Bourbons.
[Illustration:
Map of the FLIGHT to VARENNES and the RETURN
]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XIV
_VARENNES_
_From midnight of Monday, June 20, 1791, to just after seven in the
evening of Saturday, June 25, 1791_
IT was no longer night; it was near day, the brightening air smelt of
morning. The links of the harness-chains clattered a little as the relay
horses were hacked against the pole of the big carriage. Fersen
sauntered to the carriage window of that side upon which the Queen sat.
He called out loudly her supposed mistress’s assumed name, “Madame
Korff,” saluted her and turned to go on his lonely cross-country ride to
Bourget and the Brussels road, by which he also purposed to fly. But,
even as he turned, they say that she held his hand a moment and slipped
upon his finger a ring. It was a ring of yellowish gold, broad and
heavy, and having set in it an unknown stone. It is still preserved.
Here is the story of the ring:—
* * * * *
It was again the 20th of June—the summer solstice that strikes, and
strikes again and again, at the Bourbons and at the soldiers of the
Bourbons. Nineteen years had passed since the dawn when Fersen had left
the Queen at Bondy, seventeen since he had broken his heart at her death
and had become silent. His campaigns had forbidden him to show
prematurely the effect of advancing age; indeed, as men now count age,
he had not reached the limits of decline—his fifty-fifth year was not
accomplished.... But emotions so inhuman and so deep had so torn him in
his vigour that there had followed a complete and an austere silence of
the soul: he had long seemed apart from living men. His face preserved a
settled severity, his eyes a contempt for the final moment of danger:
that moment had come.
He was Marshal of the Forces; the populace of Stockholm was in rumour,
for the North still had vigour in it, impregnated from France. He had
been torn from his carriage, chased from the refuge of a room, and now
stood bleeding on the steps of the Riddenholm alone (the Squires were
within the church, barricaded: they had left him outside to die). The
populace, hating him, hated even more a ring which they saw large and
dull upon his finger, for they said among themselves that the ring was
Faëry and that death issued from its gem whenever it was held forward;
Death flashed from it and struck whomsoever it was turned upon. Charles
Augustus himself had seen it upon parade; it had lowered upon him and he
had fallen dead from his horse.... Fersen, so standing, wounded and
alone, with the mob roaring round the steps, held his sword drawn in his
right hand—but the ring upon his left was a better weapon, and no one
dared come forward.
At last a traitor (since there is a traitor in every tragedy), a servant
of his who had turned fisherman, drew other fishermen round him and
whispered to them to gather stones: thus, from a distance, standing upon
the steps above them, Fersen was stoned and died.
When he was quite dead the populace drew round his body, but they would
not go too near, and even as they approached they shielded their eyes
from the ring. But this traitor, Zaffel, bolder than the rest, went
forward also with an axe, and, shielding his eyes also, he hacked the
finger off. The people cheered as they would cheer a man that had
plucked a fuse from a shell. He ran, with his head still turned, to the
river-side, and he threw the finger with the Queen’s ring upon it far
out into the stream.
Next day Stockholm was as calm as though there had been no evening
tumult. Zaffel at early morning took his boat out upon the cold lake
water by a pleasant breeze, and pointed up river: he had a plan to fish.
When he had left the many islands of the town behind him and had passed
into a lonely reach of pine-trees, he felt a gentle shock upon the keel,
and the boat stood still.... He went forward to the bows and looked
over; he could see nothing but very deep green water bubbling below. As
he came back aft the masthead caught his eye, and there, clasping it,
was a severed hand; the blood which was apparent at the wrist was not
running. The hand grasped the trunk of the mast with rigour, and Zaffel,
as he saw it, shuddered, for one finger of that hand was gone.
The boat went forward in spite of the tide and aslant the wind, with the
sheet loose and the sail at random, and he in the boat could feel for
hours that the impulsion of its course was from the masthead to which he
no longer dared a look upwards. The boat cut steadily across the eddies
of the Moelar. At times he tried the tiller, but he found the fixed
movement unresponsive to his helm.
There is no darkness in the North at this season, but a twilight which,
if there are clouds, fades from the grey of evening to the grey of dawn;
he had sat, cold, crouching in the stern of his boat, throughout all the
hours of the day, and now this grey twilight was upon him. In the midst
of it he saw far up-stream a white rock from which, as it seemed to him,
some phosphorescence glowed unnaturally, and in the midst of that light,
upon a ledge of the stone, was the ring. He took it, as at a command;
then at last he dared look up at the masthead. He saw the hand, now
whole, relax and change and disappear, and he felt the boat go free,
turn and drift down-stream.
When he was back upon the quays of Stockholm, all his body trembling
with a fast of twenty-four hours and with the cold of the morning, his
neighbours as they caught the mooring-rope asked questions of him. He
answered them with meaningless songs, and then, as the vision returned,
with pointings and terror. He was mad.
They took him off to the Bethel beyond the stream. On the Knights’
Island, within the church of Riddenholm, the Squires who had deserted
Fersen upon the day before were at that moment gathered round the coffin
to do honour to his burial; and upon the pall they noticed (some
curious, some indifferent) the broad band of yellowish gold and the
unknown stone.
When it came to the burial, the grave-diggers dared not put it into
earth as they should have done; they gave it to his family. With them it
still remains, to do evil and disturb his sleep.
* * * * *
From Bondy the great carriage went forward under the growing light of
the day. At Claye a cabriolet with the Queen’s waiting-women joined and
followed the berline. That increasing light forbade the family to sleep;
they settled in comfort upon the broad and padded seats of white velvet,
leaning back into them, and every word they said revealed the enlarging
confidence of their souls. The King felt himself already upon horseback;
the Queen and the Duchess repeated the rôles they were to play on
whatever little public occasions the rapid journey might involve them
in. The Duchess as Madame Korff, in whose name the transport had been
made out; the Queen as her governess—and so forth. They went rapidly in
that mixed landscape of wood and market-garden and half-continuous
village which still marks the confines of Paris and of the influence of
Paris. Now they were in the open country, with Paris quite forgotten,
now in a district with a dialect of its own—sure test of honesty and of
freedom. The country-sides were awake, the mowers were in the field; the
road was down among the narrow pastures of the Marne, and at last in
Meaux, where for the first time they halted for a relay.
So near to Paris, the wealthy equipage and its suite attracted no
curiosity, while prudence still restrained the travellers from showing
themselves in the market square, fatigued as they may already have been
by a continuous travelling of now over five hours—for it was past six
and the town was astir by the time the berline and the cabriolet had
rumbled in. To this concurrence of good accidents the neighbourhood of
the capital added another element, for the posting station of Meaux was
so used to the continual passage of considerable travellers (how many of
the emigrants had it not re-harnessed!) that not only was the whole
place incurious, but also the relay was rapidly effected. It was not a
quarter of an hour before they were off again upon the Chalons road.
[Illustration:
Sketch Map of the Road from
=PARIS= TO =VARENNES=
June 21st. 1791
]
By the route they had chosen, which had the advantage that it was
somewhat shorter and, what was of even more importance, less frequented
than the main way through Chateau Thierry and Epernay, the distance
before them to Chalons, the next large town, was somewhat over seventy
miles. It would fill the whole morning and more. They fell to talking to
one another with some little anxiety as to what might happen when
Chalons, with its considerable population, its newspaper and its
activity, was reached. But their immunity at Meaux, the advent of a
pleasing, shaded and tolerable day, the remote country-sides through
which they passed after branching off the main road at La Ferté, dulled
their fears, or rather exorcised them. They fell to eating—a sort of
picnic without plates, cutting their meat upon their bread, and drinking
their wine from a cup passed round. No sunlight fell upon the green
blind of the off-side window to fatigue their eyes; no reflections of
excessive heat as the morning rose shone from the road upon the white
velvet of the cushions: they were in comfort and at ease.
By eight they were upon the side-road they had chosen; by ten, at the
hour when the peasants were reposing under the high quadruple rank of
roadside trees, with their scythes at rest beside them, they came to the
post of Viels-Maisons. They were behind their hour—a trifle—but they
were by this time quite secure in mind. The governess had given the
children air, and had walked with them up the long hill by which the
road leaves the Marne valley. The pace had been hardly business-like,
perhaps to save fatigue. The King had sauntered from the carriage more
than once to stretch his legs at the post-houses; there were even
occasions upon which he had spoken to the little groups of peasants that
surrounded the carriage as the new horses were put in. For a moment
indeed some anxiety—very probably baseless—had arisen amongst them at
the sight of a horseman who seemed to be following the carriages; the
children and their governess, who were on the back-seat, had noticed a
rider far down the road behind them, but he turned off and was seen no
more.
In the stables of Viels-Maisons was a postillion of the name of Picard;
his action is worthy of note to any one who would comprehend the nature
of this journey, the emotions which it aroused in those who witnessed
it, and the tangle of authority amid which the flight was driven. His
action is worthy of note especially to those who would see, as it is
necessary to see, the Champenois peasantry who form the background of
all the picture. He first, at this long distance from Paris, fifty miles
and more, recognised the King.
He might have sold the knowledge; he might have gambled on the royal
family’s success, have whispered his recognition, and have waited for
his reward; he might have presupposed the final success of the National
Government, and have taken immediate steps to earn its gratitude by
denouncing the King. This peasant did none of these three things; he
held his tongue.
The carriages rolled onward. At mid-day when, at one of the posting
stations in that great bare dusty plain, an isolated place, the King had
strolled out again, in the interval of the harnessing, to joke with a
knot of poor yokels and to give charity to them, Moustier, one of the
Guards who were acting as drivers, ventured a timid remonstrance, and
Louis said what should never be said within the hearing of the gods—that
he was now safe from all accidents. When he had said this he continued
to talk to the poor about him; he talked of their crops and of the hay
that he saw tedding.
It is possible that some one of these wondered a little overmuch at the
grand people; it is possible there had been rumours: but if any beggar
or mower among them guessed, he also held his tongue—and the carriages
rolled onward.
* * * * *
The day, still veiled and moderate, was at its height; it was two
o’clock, or a little later, when the road, which had hitherto borne
every mark of age, took on the appearance of new work, the line of trees
was interrupted, and the stones of the kerb were clean and freshly sawn.
A green valley, then but imperfectly drained though but slightly below
the general level of the Champagne, lay across its course.... An older
track had skirted this marshy land, but for now six years the road had
cut straight across the doubtful soil upon a great embankment, which was
one of those new engineering works of which the reign, for all its
financial embarrassment, had been full. Upon this embankment stood (and
stands) the posting-house, and upon such a site little else could stand.
There were at that time but two other roofs: a blacksmith’s forge and a
tavern. The post was called “The Petit Chaintry”; it is Chaintrix
to-day, and a hamlet still. Here lived an elderly man, Lagny, a widower,
with his daughters and one son-in-law, by name Vallet, a dangerous lad,
for he had travelled, and had been himself brought up in the noise and
curiosity of an inn; nay, he had seen Paris, and had marched with the
Federals upon the Champs de Mars the year before. Only rarely did Vallet
visit his wife’s home—but there is a fate and a God. In this lonely
plain of Champagne where no one travels, where few then knew Paris,
even, let alone the Court, this man happened on that one day to be at
the stables of his father-in-law’s posting-house; he happened also to be
by nature—the nature of a townsman—garrulous and touched with melodrama.
He recognised and worshipped the King. From that moment the secret was
dissolved: and in loyalty perhaps half-an-hour was consumed.
No record remains of the spreading of the news, but proof remains of the
result. Vallet insisted on riding himself upon the leaders; he rode
hard, and twice he let his horses down, breaking harness; so that an
hour perhaps was lost by his hard riding. Before even the berline and
its attendant cabriolet left Chaintry, Lagny and his daughters had been
told. The royal family had not denied the recognition; they had even, in
reward for the loyalty displayed, bestowed gifts upon the inn-keeper. It
is certain that the news must have spread through the country-side.
In such an atmosphere of recognition, nay, of open dependence upon the
loyalty of those who knew them, they traversed the remaining twelve
miles of road and entered Chalons, where alone they feared arrest and in
whose crowds only detailed forethought and plan could have preserved
them unknown. That plan and that forethought had been wholly absent; a
vague instinct of its necessity had in the morning haunted the fears of
the travellers, but now, after the safety and isolation of the many long
hours from Meaux, it was forgotten.
They entered the big town at four o’clock; the two carriages drove
clattering through its streets; they pulled up at the posting-house in
the Rue St. Jacques. Viet, the post-master, came out to see to the
horses. A crowd gathered, and to every one in that crowd and to Viet,
and to any one of the town who cared to ask, the presence of the King
was perfectly well known. It was discussed with approval or disapproval;
indeed, the journey would have ended here, but that Viet himself, true
to the character of the peasant (for he was peasant-born), refused all
risk. Officially he knew nothing; he would neither detain nor speed the
King; he was obstinately silent. Whether Louis won, or his enemies, he,
Viet, at least would be safe.
As he was buckling the last of the fresh horses, a man dressed with care
and with some appearance of wealth approached him, and insisted upon
what was, by the Constitution, his duty; but Viet gave him no change and
was still silent. The man, dressed with care and with some appearance of
wealth failing to move this very minor functionary, went off to the
Mayor, Chorez by name; there was no time to lose; horses are unharnessed
and others harnessed in but a little delay. The Mayor was as silent as
Viet; he took refuge in that common excuse of temporisers and cowards—he
demanded “proof.” It is probable that the well-dressed man with some
appearance of wealth went off upon the frontier road. We do not know,
for we do not even know his name; but when a little before five o’clock
the berline had halted a moment at the foot of a rise, surely it was the
same man who passed it rapidly and muttered to the royal family as he
passed: “You have planned ill!”
The town of Chalons lies upon the border of an extensive plain peculiar
in French history. Here, as tradition will have it, Attila’s army was
destroyed by the Romans and the Barbarians whom the Romans had trained.
It is a wide and desolate space, which the prosperity succeeding the
Revolution has transformed, but which, as we watch it to-day from a
distant height, still bears something of its ancient poverty—to the eye
at least—so level is it and so treeless. Far off to the eastward runs
the wooded wall of Argonne, very faint and small; at the base of this
the town of Ste. Menehould.
From Chalons to Ste. Menehould by the straight road bridging the plain
is a long day’s march, twenty-five miles or more: and there is very
little between. The passage of this bare, direct and dusty stretch was,
the fugitives might imagine, the very last and the least of the risks
they were to run. Chalons, which alone they feared, had not detained
them, the emptiness of the country-side renewed or rather rendered
absolute their confidence. Within an hour they would be at the culvert
of Somme-Vesle, an utterly deserted spot with nothing but the stables of
the post to mark it.
* * * * *
At this point of their successful journey let the reader note in what
order the guarding of the flight had been conceived by Bouillé.
The first stages of it—till beyond Chalons—were to be quite bare of
soldiery, lest suspicion should arise and Paris receive the alarm; but
once well past Chalons, the hundred miles and more accomplished, small
posts of cavalry, mostly German mercenaries, were to be placed, upon one
pretext and another, at intervals along the way, until at _Varennes_
Bouillé’s own son should meet the fugitives with his troop, and eastward
from Varennes the remaining miles to Montmédy, which was their goal,
they would need no special guard; they would be in the thick of
Bouillé’s army.
The first of these small posts was one of German mercenary _Hussars_
under the Duc de Choiseul, a nephew of the old statesman of Louis XV. It
was to expect the King at Somme-Vesle at _one_—giving as an excuse for
its presence escort for a convoy of bullion—but an exact keeping of the
time-table was urgently necessary, for it would be perilous for the
foreign troops to hang about indefinitely in these eastern villages.
It was at the lonely post-house Somme-Vesle, then, that the first
soldiers were to be looked for by the King; there, as it had been
arranged, the first Hussars would be seen, posted upon the lonely road;
these would close up immediately behind the carriage for a body-guard.
With each succeeding stage of the shortening trial troop after troop
would fall in and join that barrier and increase it, Dragoons at Ste.
Menehould, more at Clermont, till, before the evening gathered, the
Royal Family would have between them and the National Government of
Paris or the young patriots of the villages of the Marne, a guard of
their own soldiers, an escort warding them into the heart of the
frontier army that was to be their salvation.
The hour passed quickly—it was not yet six—when the King, who had
watched with his old interest in maps every detail of the road, and had
followed it with a guide-book upon his knee, heard the brake upon the
wheels; a slight descent ended, and the carriage drew up. A long
farmhouse, with stable-door and garden-gate shut tight and with no head
at a window, stood, French fashion, all along the kerb. They looked from
the window, noted the desertion of the fields, the silence of the house,
and the broad paved way, and asked with a growing anxiety, what they
feared to know, the name of the place.
The third Gentleman of the Guard, Valory, who had at each stage gone
before them to have the horses ready, came to the door and told them it
was the posting-house of Somme-Vesle: of soldiers not a sign; a few
peasants, slouching off to the fields.
* * * * *
Long before the King, with his delays of loyalty and his breakdowns, had
reached Chalons, just upon three, under that veiled sky and upon a dip
of that monotonous, dead straight, white road, close to the bridge and
posting-house of Somme-Vesle, half a troop of Hussars were up and
mounted. They were Germans, but their foreign gutturals were not heard
by the sleepy ostlers of the place, for, in some disorder, the little
knot of mounted men were at attention. At their head, upon his finer
horse, sat Choiseul, and with him Aubriot, a lieutenant of Dragoons, and
old Goguelat, used to commissariat, to organisation, and to plans. They
pointed westward up the Chalons road, looking along its right line
between the parallel perspective of its trees. Choiseul especially
strained his eyes to see whether no rising dust or no two distant specks
of a large vehicle and a cabriolet following it might announce the
advent of the King, but there was no sign upon the road.
He had so sat his horse for hours.
It was eleven when his light travelling-carriage had trotted up to the
stables,[22] his German soldiery had joined him before noon, and by one,
as the time-table of the plan had been given him, the berline should
have been there.
Footnote 22:
He had come from Paris, where he had made the last arrangements, and
with him and in his carriage he had brought Leonard, the Queen’s
hair-dresser. This garrulous fellow he had sent forward down the road
to Montmédy, and his mysterious hints at important secrets did much to
spread the news. See also Appendix G.
An anxious hour of waiting brought no news. Two o’clock passed. Yet
another hour of growing anxiety upon the soldiers’ part, of growing
suspicion in the inn. And now it was three o’clock; but there was no
sign upon the road.
Already the hoofs of these fifty mercenaries had been clattering and
pawning for three hours and more round and about the long white wall of
the posting-house. The ostlers, the few and sleepy ostlers, were not
fond of such visitors, nor were the peasants in the fields.
Choiseul had much to think about beside the punctuality of the fugitives
as he sat his horse there straining his eyes along the road. The people
of the place had asked him familiarly, in the new revolutionary manner,
what this body of horse was for; they might have added, “Why was it
foreign, mercenary horse?” Such a question was certainly implied.... Why
had an army of the frontiers thrown out a point of its cavalry-screen
towards its base against all the known rules of war, instead of towards
the frontier which it was to line and defend?... If it was for orders or
for manœuvring, why did they stick close to this one posting-house?...
Troops, even unsuspected troops, had been known to commandeer
food-stuffs without payment: and the peasantry were sullen.
All these things were passing in the minds of the French peasants there,
and Choiseul, who was also French, knew what was passing in their minds.
There was something more: the country-side was armed. The Revolution had
made of every village a tiny, ill-trained but furnished military post;
of every market-town a section, with two guns and a team of gunners; of
every city a rough volunteer garrison, with ammunition and with arms,
without discipline for a campaign, but in a momentary scuffle possessed
of the power to wound.
Had even this been all, what Choiseul did might not have been done; but
it was not all. There had always been present in the minds of these
officers upon the frontier the permanent indecision and fears of the
King. The date of the flight had been postponed and postponed. Choiseul
himself, who had been in Paris with the King twenty-four hours before,
was aware of that indecision and those fears.
It was three, and half-past three, and later; it was four—and still
nothing appeared. The road still lay empty and silent; the posting-house
became, if possible, a trifle more curious; the group of peasantry
increased: the men were hustled. Why did not these foreign soldiers
unsaddle? What was the urgency? Choiseul had his reply ready, his casual
piece of news: “They were expecting treasure, and he was ordered to
furnish an escort.” Why, then, let them trot up the road to meet it!...
With every quarter of an hour the strain grew greater.
Four o’clock passed, and half-past four. It was for Choiseul to judge
exactly (as it has been for how many another soldier commanding
thousands where he commanded fifty) beyond what point resistance would
mean disaster. From time to time a peasant crossed a distant field
bearing perhaps a message to his armed peers; from time to time an
ostler would ask a question of one of the Hussars and disappear, bearing
perhaps a message of his own, and Choiseul thought, “If the country is
raised behind me in Argonne, the King is cut off and lost!”
Among so many Germans a French soldier was easier of approach. The
post-master of the place, lounging by, made up to speak to Aubriot. What
he said was this: “So the King is expected to pass?... At least, the
people are saying so....” He sauntered away.
It was near five. By Choiseul’s watch it was a trifle later still. The
situation could no longer be borne, and the moment for retreat had come.
Ten to one the King had not started after all....
As Choiseul left he saw that fresh horses were put into his
travelling-carriage; he ordered into it his valet and the Queen’s
hair-dresser, Leonard, whom he had brought from Paris; he gave them a
note which said that it had been necessary for him to abandon
Somme-Vesle, and that, moreover, he doubted if the Treasure would come
that day. He himself was going to rejoin the General, and new orders
must be issued on the morrow. This note was to be _shown_ to the officer
in command at Ste. Menehould, and _given_ to the officer in command at
Clermont. Thence they were to post for Montmédy. This note written and
handed, open, to his valet and Leonard, Choiseul saw the carriage go;
and when he had seen it well away, he turned rein, ordered his weary
Germans, and bent reluctantly eastward along the road which his command
had traversed that morning.
So they rode back till, at Orbeval, Choiseul took a guide, crossed
Neuville Bridge and plunged into Argonne, lest by following the high
road right into Ste. Menehould they might raise that alarm which at
every cost it was his duty to allay.... In vain. The country was already
awake: that rumour, that something in the air which no historian has
ever traced, had preceded him, and a woman in Ste. Menehould had said to
a soldier in a tavern that “the King would pass that way.”
In this way was the post of Somme-Vesle abandoned. It was in the
neighbourhood of half-past five when the cavalry filed out and up the
slight eastern slope of the road. Just hidden by the brow of hill behind
them as they left the spot where they had waited it for so long, the
King’s berline had begun the last climb before the descent to the
post-house. Fifteen minutes economised on the Royal Family’s delays
would have saved them.
* * * * *
The berline waited, as it had waited so often that day; the horses were
changed in as humdrum a fashion. Within the carriage a doubt had fallen
on the fugitives.... It was a lonely house in a lonely dip of the plain
with a vast, straight, empty road rising upon either slope before it and
beyond. They drove on to Orbeval, but in a mood now changed; they passed
Orbeval and approached the long hill-forest of Argonne.
It was already full evening; the clouds upon the western horizon had
lifted; the reddening and descending sun shone for the first time that
day against the rise of the Argonne woodland ridge and upon the bare
rolling folds of corn-land and of mown pasture at its base.
Under the level shafts of that sunset the belated berline approached
Ste. Menehould. They passed the lonely tavern upon the height called “At
the Sign of the Moon”; they saw for a moment upon their left a mill not
yet grown famous—the mill of Valmy. The shadows lengthened, and just as
the sun disappeared they rattled full speed into the main square of the
town.
The green blinds were up to admit the cool of the evening. The Queen
looked from her window, without concealment, and saw the gossiping and
curious crowd which a French town collects upon its public place at the
end of day. She saw the soldiers—some of them, she thought, saluted; she
saw their officer. He came up and addressed her respectfully in his
garlic-accent of Bearn. He certainly saluted fully, and she bowed her
acknowledgment of the salute. She saw and heard no more, unless perhaps
she saw, on the King’s side and through the open window of it, a young
man still heavy with the swagger of the dragoons (for he had served) and
still insolent with the brave insolence of soldiers; clear in eye,
hooked in nose, bronzed, short, alert and, as it were, itching for
adventure. If she did see this figure, she saw it for but a moment: the
horses were in, the whips were cracking, the carriage was on the move:
he had thus for a moment passed her window, coming in from the fields,
where he had been mowing; he had passed for a moment, and was gone. It
was Drouet, the acting post-master of the place, and the son of the old
post-master. He had noted that the yellow coach was huge and heavy; he
had carelessly said to his postillions, “Don’t kill the cattle”; then he
had gone off: it was but a moment of time.
They were off, a top-heavy haystack of a thing, rolling full speed up
the hill beyond the river, and right into the advancing darkness. As
they went, rising high with the road, through the orchards and into the
forest and the hills, they heard, far behind them, one pistol-shot and
then another, the distant noise of a crowd, high voices, and the
shuffling of horse-hoofs. But the cries grew fainter, and they had soon
left all far behind. They gained the complete silence of the high wood,
under the stars. They began the ascent of Argonne.
But already in Ste. Menehould all was known. The girl who had said “It
was the King” was now but one of many. The popular Council had met, and
hardly had it met, and hardly had the crowd outside in the square
appreciated the rumour, when those came in from Neuville village who had
an hour or two before watched the movement of Choiseul and his Hussars,
and the retirement of the cavalry over the bridge of Neuville into the
forest seeking Varennes. Their report added certitude to the general
clamour: “Choiseul and his Hussars had hung about the posting-house of
Somme-Vesle for hours!” “They had taken a guide and were in the woods
behind Ste. Menehould at that moment.” The troops in Ste. Menehould
itself must have the same purpose. There was no doubt at all it was the
King. And to this news there was added news, that Choiseul and his
Hussars were keeping in touch with the main road, scouting back from
time to time, ready and watching.
The handful of cavalry at Ste. Menehould were French, not German. When
Leonard had passed through, half-an-hour before, and had shown
Choiseul’s note to the officer in command, that Captain had bid his men
unsaddle and take their ease. They were now filled with the evening’s
fraternity and wine. There was an attempt to gather them against the
towns-people. It failed. And as the twilight lessened one resolution
after another was taken in the Town Hall with the rapidity that marked
the action of the Revolution everywhere, from Paris to the smallest
village. The municipal drum beating and the tocsin noisy against the
hills, vote after vote proceeded. The Captain of the troop was arrested;
the troop itself disarmed. The despatch of a courier to pursue and
intercept the King was decided, and that courier chosen and named.
It was upon young Drouet, for his horsemanship and his courage, that the
choice fell. He took with him a companion, Guillaume, an inn-keeper,
such as he himself was; once a dragoon, as he himself had been. They
saddled the last two horses left in the stable and thundered off up the
long hill that rises from the town into Argonne, down the sharp ravine
of the Islettes, and onwards along the great eastern road—the road to
Metz—whither all thought the King was bound. An hour ahead of them on
that same road rattled the cabriolet and rolled the huge berline.
There was a moon, but the clouds covered her. The darkness of this, the
shortest night of the year, deepened for its brief hours, but there was
still a glow in the north as they neared, towards ten o’clock, the post
of Clermont. Drouet heard voices in the darkness before him; it was his
own postillions on their way back from the end of the stage, and Drouet
hailing them, heard that the travellers, when the relay horses were
harnessed, had given the order to leave the main Metz road and to turn
up northward to Varennes.
The military temper of this people! The halt had not lasted a moment,
but in the moment Drouet had formed his plan.
He had not, it seemed, a stern chase before him, a mere gallop up the
Metz road. The quarry had doubled, and along its track were Guards.
There were troops at Clermont as there had been at Ste. Menehould; there
would now be troops every few miles until the headquarters of the
treason should be reached; it was his business to warn the citizens
against Bouillé, to avoid the outposts of that commander, to cut by a
corner way across the elbow ahead of the royal carriages, to intercept
them and to thwart all. He took at once, therefore, to the wood upon his
left; he took it where now the railway most nearly approaches the road,
about half a mile beyond the level crossing, and plunged with his
companion into its long deep rides. He galloped up the steep to a farm
he knew upon the summit, risking holes and fallen trunks of trees. Once
there he followed, along the crest of the ridge, a green lane of
immemorial age that runs along the summit. It was well past ten. Up on
the ridge of the forest these two men galloped steadily and hard through
the night, with high trees like a wall on either side. Three hundred
feet below, upon the open plain that skirts the wood, the berline swayed
at speed along the paved high road. So the race ran. The fugitives slept
unwarned and deeply as they drew on to Varennes through the silent
darkness. On the hills above, with every beat of the hoof upon the turf,
the two riders neared and they neared. Upon who should win that race
depended the issue of Civil War.
On the issue of that race all the future depended: all France and all
Europe. The riders had eleven miles of rough woodland in the dark to
cover, an hour at most for their ride. Below them on the high road, with
a start of two miles and more, their quarry was hurrying, rolling to
Varennes. If the wheels and the smooth road beat them, it was Austria
over the frontier, France without government, defeat, and the end of
their new world; but if they in the woodlands beat the wheels on the
smooth road, then the Revolution was saved.
Through a clearing in the midst of the tangled undergrowth the two
riders saw before them, as they still rode furiously, the glimmer of a
known white stone, a landmark; they sheered down a ride to the right:
the wood ended abruptly, and they saw below them the lights of
Varennes—one or two at that late hour, and the twinkle of the town lamps
in the square of the town. The grasses of the forest were dull no longer
under the anger of their ride: they clattered on a high road for a
moment, next in the narrow street of Blainville Hill. They came down
upon the bridge head and saw the dark line of the river; they halted the
sweating beasts and strained to listen. They heard no sound, except the
panting of their mounts; there was no rumbling of wheels, no distant
approach of riders, no noise of cavalry. They had been beaten, and the
berline had already passed the town and its one bridge—or the wheels had
not yet rumbled in, and they had won. It struck eleven as they waited
so.
[Illustration:
Sketch Map
TO ILLUSTRATE DROUET’S RIDE
]
Guillaume crossed the bridge to the main square to see what he could
find, whether indeed they had come too late, and whether between them
and the fugitives was now cast abroad that compact screen of cavalry
which had failed at Somme-Vesle and at Ste. Menehould. Drouet stayed on
the hither side of the bridge, inquiring among the taverns of the upper
town if any had seen a large travelling-coach go by. It seems that no
one had noticed such a thing.... Yet the berline was there.
He saw it suddenly, up the steep hill; he saw the two great lights of
it, and he heard the postillions protesting that the stage was finished,
that they were not bound to go down the hill, that their mistress at
Clermont needed the horses early next morning for the carrying of her
hay. But even in the midst of the discussion, though he could not see
the horses in the darkness under the houses, he could hear the skid upon
the wheels, and he knew that the heavy vehicle had begun to move. He ran
down at once to a little inn called “The Golden Arm,” burst in upon a
group of rustic politicians, and warned them in one word that a large
carriage would next moment go braked and sliding past: that carriage
would hold, he said, the King, their public King—in flight for the
frontier.
* * * * *
The military temper of this people! Here were a handful of men in the
black darkness of a now moonless night, with not five minutes in which
to make the decision that should transform the whole polity in which
they lived. Yet they saw in a flash—and Drouet saw clearest of them
all—first that the high town was not occupied with troops, and that
therefore the commanding officers and those awaiting the King must be in
the low town beyond the river; secondly, that but one communication
connected the King and his rescuers, and that that communication was the
narrow bridge across the Aire, the river of Varennes; thirdly, that they
could gather in those few minutes no forces, even of the smallest,
wherewith to hold the bridge, and that the least noise, until the bridge
was held, would give the alarm.
There stood at the bridge head a great van for the removal of furniture,
packed, with its pole upon the ground, waiting for the dawn, when it
should be harnessed and start upon its road. In a moment they had drawn
it across their end of the narrow bridge and blocked the approach. In
the same moment certain of their companions had warned the officials of
the town, and these, especially Sauce, the Procurator, saw to the
rousing of every house upon the hither side of the river.
All this was done with such rapidity that the officials were astir, the
bridge barricaded, and two men already armed, before the royal carriage
had skidded half-way down the hundred yards of hill. At that point an
archway running under an old church blocked the road; at that archway
the two armed men posted themselves, and just as the outrider of the
fugitives had come into the narrow pass, the challenge was given which
ended the hopes of the Monarchy. For the two sentries thus improvised
challenged, the outrider dismounted voluble, the horses of the cabriolet
were thrown back upon their haunches, the huge coach and six behind it
slithered somehow to a stop upon the steep road, and the Queen suddenly
realised that the crash and the disaster had come. She heard the threat
to fire. She looked from her window, as the Duchess fumbled for the
passports, and uttered one of those phrases memorable in history for
their anti-climax: she begged the gentlemen who had stopped them to go
through the formalities quickly, _as she was desirous of reaching the
end of her journey as quickly as might be_.
The two armed men had increased now to eight; to this little group was
added a German soldier or two wandering aimlessly upon leave,
uncommanded and perfectly drunk. The ladies in the cabriolet had got out
and had been thrust into the inn; but even when matters had gone so far,
that incertitude and fear of responsibility, which had saved the family
thrice already in their flight, all but saved them again. The passports
seemed regular, and had it not been for the wild energy of Drouet, his
threats and his violence, the journey would have proceeded, the van
would have been rolled back from the bridge, the relay of horses in the
square of the lower town would have been harnessed, Bouillé’s own son,
who had been waiting in a hotel beyond the river all day and was waiting
there now in the dark expectant, would have accompanied them out of the
borough.... With the dawn, which was now not two hours off, the vanguard
of Bouillé’s cavalry would have ensured their safety for ever. But
Drouet stormed, shouted perpetually the words “High treason!” and gained
all that he desired, which was delay. “If there were any doubt,” said
Sauce, “to wait for morning would do no harm. The horses needed rest;
the night was dark.” He lifted the lantern in his hand and put it
closely and curiously into the face of the Queen: “You must get down,
Madame; you must get down.” He would not endorse the passport until the
morning.
Even during the few words of this conversation, the crowd had continued
to increase, and with the crowd the armed men. It occurred to the King
to command; he did it paternally, with a “Now then,” and a “Come, come,”
bidding the postillions go forward. Nothing happened. He looked out of
the window and saw that the postillions had dismounted, and there came
again, now from a great number of levelled muskets, the threat to fire.
There was but one faint and last chance against discovery: to pretend no
more than an inconvenience, and to do as they were bid.
The family got down wearily (for twenty-four mortal hours they had been
cramped upon that journey), entered the house of Sauce the Procurator
just opposite, and waited for the morning. Meanwhile in the street
outside the clamour of Ste. Menehould was repeated, the tocsin sounded
and the drum, the men of the town armed by tens and by hundreds, and at
last all the population, children and old men and women, were crowding
the street and filling it with perpetual noise.
It was not yet light when the Hussars, Choiseul and his Hussars, came
blundering out of the wood. Mercenary troops have great advantages. If
the troops are foreign the advantages are greater still; but a
disadvantage attaches to such troops, which is the need of interpreters.
They could understand nothing of what was going on around them; they
could not understand the speech that was made urging them to save
“their” King.
They were ordered to charge, and did so, clearing the street, and they
formed after the short charge in front of the mean house which held the
royal family. There could be no further doubt in the townsmen’s minds;
it was indeed the King.
The Hussars and the King and the Queen, their gaolers, the Municipality,
all were in a general agreement that with the dawn the Royal Family
should continue its journey. But meanwhile that incalculable element,
the populace, swelled out of all knowledge. When the first light showed
in the streets far more than the population of Varennes was there. They
poured in from the country-sides; the men going to the fields to catch
the grass with their scythes before the dew was off it heard the news
and came; those coming in for market to the lower town heard the news
and came; the Men of the Forest came. And the rumour that Bouillé was on
the march with his army, at the head of the hired German cavalry, did
but increase the crowd.
It was full day. For a second time under the increasing menace the
Hussars were ordered to charge. They hesitated; and against them, now in
rank, were the armed men of the local National Guard. The sun had risen.
Goguelat tried to force his way forward, trusting that if he did so his
Hussars would follow. But these looked on in a kindly German way,
bewildered, and the officer of the National Guard shot Goguelat, who
fell from his horse. The crowd, already morally impassable for its
determination and its arms, was now physically so. All down the street
to the bridge and all round, up the courts and alleys, one could see
nothing but the crowd; and the proportion of Militia uniforms among
them, the number of bayonets that showed above their shoulders,
increased as the hours passed, as four o’clock struck, and five, and
six. The King’s green coat had been seen a moment at the window; the
cheers that met it (for they were cheers, not groans) were now swelled
by the voices of some ten thousand armed men, and already the cry was
raised “for Paris.” ... Already had the scouts of Bouillé’s Uhlans
appeared far off upon the sky-line of the eastern hills.
He could never have passed the bridge in time. Nothing but artillery
could have cleared the town. The general and popular decision was made
and grew; no discipline, no individual command could meet it. The cry of
“Paris” filled the air, now with a meaningless noise, now with a comic
rhythm, such as impatient audiences make in theatres or soldiers on the
march. There were negotiations, but with every mention of “Montmédy” the
shout of “Paris” grew louder.
The couple of guns, which the National Guards of the town were allowed
by law, had at their head, as was only right, a gunner. It was this
gunner who brought the good news out at last and said that the King had
consented to return.
By seven the whole swarm of thousands, with the berline wedged in the
midst, were off back westward again upon the Paris road, a vast dust
about them, songs, and—what is more curious—speed, but a speed which was
soon crushed under the pressure of such a multitude. As they lost the
horizons of Varennes, the last sight they saw behind them was the main
body of Bouillé’s German cavalry as it came over and formed upon the
hill beyond the river, baffled. By ten, in a violent heat of the sun,
the throng had crawled to Clermont; the first, the only doubtful and the
fatal stage of the capture and the return was accomplished.
* * * * *
What had happened that the King’s mind should change? For all those
hours in Varennes every official had desired the continuation of the
journey; all the “responsibles” had withstood the growing anger of the
populace, when suddenly Radet, the gunner, had announced a capitulation,
and, almost as suddenly, within the half-hour before seven, after all
those dark and morning hours of delay, the King had consented to return.
What had happened was this: Two men had come with authority from the
Council of Paris and from the Parliament—Bayon and Romeuf were their
names; they had reached Varennes in the morning, the first exultant, the
second reluctant; each came burdened with that Authority by which the
French live, and both had entered the house of Sauce. The Queen had
stormed, and had dashed their written message of Authority to the
ground, but even the reluctant Romeuf had picked it up and laid it again
reverently before her. Authority by which the French five lay now in the
National Parliament. It was this which compelled the King. To this he
had yielded.
* * * * *
The military temper of this people!
The Parliament learnt the flight of the King at about eight or nine
o’clock in the morning following that midnight adventure. Bayon was
commissioned to “pursue, capture, and report” in the forenoon of that
day, the 21st of June. He started eleven hours behind the King. The
King, driven by Fersen, had passed the barriers of Paris, as we have
seen, just after midnight of the 20th.
It was close on noon when Bayon had shot like an arrow through the Porte
St. Martin, galloping hell and leather along the great frontier road.
Louis was at Chaintry then, _fifty miles_ ahead. An hour after Bayon,
Romeuf, who had been sent also, followed upon another trail: he was
royalist and hated the job, but he obeyed orders; at last he caught the
right scent from witnesses and rumour, and was thundering off with a
heavy heart, but a soldier, down the same way.
Bayon rode and he rode, a ride to test his breeches. Seventy miles,
eighty miles is a ride for any man. Bayon, relaying at every post and
covering, in between, his fifteen miles an hour or more, galloped into
Chaintry just before six in the evening, and there at Chaintry—where at
mid-day Louis and Marie Antoinette had graciously revealed themselves to
old Lagny—Bayon found a suspicious man, one De Briges, very evidently
employed to follow and to aid the fugitives. Bayon dismounted, held that
man prisoner, and dined, but not before he had sent on, by his written
Authority, Lagny’s boy helter-skelter up the road to rouse Chalons
beyond.
Romeuf was less speedy, but a fine rider for all that. He started, as I
have said, an hour behind Bayon; he reached Chaintry (on account of
missing the scent at starting) two hours behind him, when Bayon, having
dined and sent forward that messenger, was already off in a carriage to
Chalons following the trail. They met at Chalons—a town all informed and
astir—thenceforward the two together—Bayon eager, Romeuf in despair for
his friends (but discipline constrained him), drove, not rode, past the
bonfire glare and howling of Ste. Menehould, all night through Argonne,
till by morning they came—with their Authority—to Varennes.
But in this day and night of hard-riding Frenchmen, a third must be
mentioned: Mangin, druggist and lawyer of Varennes, had galloped from
Varennes at dawn, had left his horse collapsed at Clermont, had relayed
and relayed, still riding, urging back to Paris to give news to the
Parliament.
He passed in a flash the carriage of Bayon, careless of it; long before
six he was at Ste. Menehould, changed horse, was off to Orbeval, changed
horse, was off to Somme-Vesle, changed horse, was off to Chalons, riding
and riding hard, nearly fifty miles and not yet eight o’clock. He eat
and drank and mounted, re-horsed, and on: what skin! All the long road
all day, gallop and change and gallop under the sun: twelve hours in the
saddle when he came to the deep Marne, sixteen when he dashed into
Bondy.... A companion who had met him rode on to share his triumph....
Mangin shook him off.... The suburbs of Paris ... the barrier—eighteen
hours of it before he dismounted and staggered into the Assembly! Lord!
what a ride!
It was ten at night; the hundreds of candles guttered and glimmered over
a handful of exhausted men upon the benches of the Parliament; Mangin
handed his message to the Chair, and his ride was done. Good Lord! what
a ride!
* * * * *
Beauharnais was in the Chair: remarkable for this, that his widow
married Napoleon.
Beauharnais read the message: “The King is taken!”
As Parliaments go that Parliament was drastic and immediate; it came to
its conclusion in two hours—a space of time that meant thirty miles to a
courier. It nominated, somewhat after midnight, three commissioners:
Barnave, Pétion, Maubourg—of the centre, of the left, and of the
right—and with them Damas for military orders. Each young, each growing
in fame—Barnave and Pétion already famous—they left together with the
morning.
It was Thursday, Corpus Christi. Every village of the Marne valley was
garlanded and upon holiday, the church doors stood open to the humming
air of midsummer, the peasants, most of them at games, some few in
procession or coming out from Mass upon that great Feast, made every
stage of the road alive; as the sun rose to noon, the population of the
villages on either slope of the river valley poured in like rivulets
down the chalky lanes, swelling the mob upon the great highway. By the
afternoon the throng had so largely increased that the carriage of the
Parliamentary Commissioners could no longer go at the trot; it was
walked, as was walked, surrounded by a larger, dustier, much fiercer
crowd, that other carriage, the berline, which was crawling to meet them
across the flat miles of Champagne.
The hills grew higher, the dale narrower, as their slow progress brought
them past Dormans, and gradually, with the multitude about them, to
Mareuil. The setting sun was on the famous vineyards and on the fringe
of forest far above: they were anxious perhaps whether they would meet
the returning fugitives while yet it was light, and so be spared the
risk of confusion and perhaps disaster in the darkness.
But that meeting could not now be far off. Rumours first, then couriers,
going before the gradual advance of the King’s captors, announced his
advent, and the three Commissioners wondered what they would see.
Reports had already moved them, true details in the midst of much fable,
of invasion and of fancied massacres and fires ... the mob at Chalons,
the sleepless night of consultation, the irruption of a violent militia
from Rheims, the terrible slow march on the Epernay road with its jeers
and anger and threats of death; the violent jostle at Epernay itself—the
fear that the prisoners might never reach the capital. They had heard
composedly of these things, with clearer and clearer detail as the later
passages of the long agony were given: they were now very near the
meeting.
The hot day had fallen to its end, and evening was come quite pure over
the high plateaus that bound the valley; it was darker upon the
water-meadows of the valley floor when they saw before them, a long way
off, the dust, and heard the noise, when they came near and smelt the
incalculable crowd that roared round the carriages of the King.
The advent of the Commissioners of Parliament threw an abrupt silence
over the French, ever avid for worship: these three dissimilar men, one
of whom alone approached greatness, were taken as transubstantiate with
the National power. In such an attitude, near the doors of the berline,
in the centre of the compact thousands that were massed, hats off and
reverent in gaze, between the hillside and the river, Pétion read the
Decree of the Assembly.
With excuses upon their part and voluble instance from the King, Pétion
and Barnave managed to get themselves into the carriage, for the Queen
took the Dauphin on her knee, the Princess stood before her aunt, and
Pétion, decorously straightened between the Duchesse de Tourzel and
Madame Elizabeth, faced Barnave, who sat, more generously large, between
the King and Queen.
[Illustration:
PÉTION
]
At last the Commissioners could watch that driven group. Three nights
without sleep, two of agony; three days, one of flight, two of
intolerable heat, insult, violence, and a snail’s-pace progress, had
left them feverish, and yet—as sufferers are when all is quite
abnormal—interested in tiny things, and careless. Their linen was dirty
in the extreme—the Queen’s grey dress stained, torn, and roughly mended;
the King’s brown coat a very dusty brown; but their faces were
clean—they had washed at Epernay—and they were not unlively.
It got darker and darker. The noise of the crowd outside calmed a
little, though from time to time a great rustic head would lumber in at
the window to stare at royalty. The Queen, who had talked rapidly from
the moment she had seen her deliverers, Madame Elizabeth, who had caught
and pressed Pétion’s arm and clung in a foolish ecstasy of terror, kept
up a ceaseless chatter—and the King, against his wont, joined in. They
had not meant to leave the country—far from it. “No” (from the King); “I
said so positively. Did I not?” (appealing to his wife). “We are really
anxious about the three Guardsmen. We went to Mass at Chalons this
morning—but it was constitutional, I assure you.” Only once did the
reserve of an earlier (and a later) time appear upon the Queen: it was
when Barnave hinted that one of the men on the box was Swedish, when
Pétion added that the man who had driven the coach from the Tuileries
was a Swede—called?... he pretended to hesitate about the name: the
Queen had said, “I am not in the habit of learning hackney coachmen’s
names,” and, after saying it, was, for perhaps the first time in two
hours, silent. Then she forgave them—forgave Barnave at least—and talked
on in lower tones. She was getting to like Barnave. The little boy,
playing with the buttons on Barnave’s coat, made out the letters on
them: “It says ‘We will live free or die.’” He was proud to read such
small letters so well. He repeated the phrase, but no one of his elders
answered him.
Pétion, upon the back-seat, felt an arm upon his in the darkness. He
remembered the same arm as it held him close when he had met the berline
two hours before. He saw under the moonlight the white and small hand of
Madame Elizabeth lying near his, and it occurred to him[23] that this
very pious, very narrow, very distant girl either suddenly loved him or
feigned love in order to corrupt his republican ardour—for he was
already a republican.
Footnote 23:
He has recorded the sensation at length, in print.
It is objected with indignation that women of birth do not so demean
themselves with country lawyers. The indignation is fatuous, but the
objection is well found. Women of birth have indeed so profound a
repugnance for his class that even the bait of a great fortune, though
it often compels them to a marriage, will hardly overcome the loathing,
and if they must yield to passion it is more commonly to favour a groom
than a solicitor. But this woman had no such frailties. She was saintly,
foolish, well bred and bewildered. She may have made herself as pleasant
a companion as it was in her power to be, for by such easy arts the
rich, when they fall, will always try to appease their conquerors. More
than that she certainly did not do. The Queen knew better in what way to
command her captors; she fixed upon Barnave, and within the first day of
their companionship she had drawn him from that other camp into hers.
They slept at Dormans—so much as they could sleep with the mob howling
all night in the square outside. Next day, Friday, the third of that
return, the fourth of their martyrdom, they continued the Paris road.
The day was yet hotter than the yesterday had been, and the violent and
the out-o’-works from Paris began to join the crowd. At evening the
tower of Meaux stood up before them against the red sky.
There, at Meaux, Marie Antoinette took a turn with Barnave; long, quiet
looks, a familiar and continued conversation, a stroll in the garden
alone and decent confidences during the night, finally captured Barnave.
He was, from the moment of their return to Paris, the Queen’s.
He suffered no conversion in opinion, he did not forget his early
political principle, he simply became indifferent to it and a servant of
something that lived and suffered and exercised also upon some few—and
he was one—a charm, perhaps of voice, perhaps of carriage, but, at any
rate, of sex.
He worked henceforward absolutely for Marie Antoinette. He achieved so
little that his name will hardly appear again in this record of her
fall, but his name should be retained as a proof of what she still was
to men.
He has long been accused of treason. He would have told you that he
betrayed a formula, a phrase, to be the more loyal to a soul and body
which he had come, as by a revelation, to understand. But Barnave was
wrong: not to bodies or things, but to ideas, are men rightly subject:
religion resides in dogma: loyalty must express itself in a creed, and
the Word is God. These reasonings against reason, these preferences of
the thing to the idea, are dangerous to honour.
[Illustration:
BARNAVE
]
Henceforward Barnave was near her always: advised her secretly, wrote to
dictation from her lips, ran risk and peril, and at last died by the
same hands which had killed her also upon the scaffold.
This bishop’s palace at Meaux, the hall that Bossuet had known, was
their last resting-place. The sun was well up, it was already warm when
they left the town for the slow stretch of thirteen hours to Paris.
The weather would not change. The same intense and blinding heat pursued
and tortured them; but it was now less tolerable than ever, both from
the length to which the strain had been spun out, and from the
increasing crowds which lined the old paved road in a wider and wider
margin as they neared the capital. The flat hedgeless fields seemed
covered with men—as the prisoners saw it through their low windows—to
the horizon. The murmur beyond had swelled into a sort of permanent
roar, which mixed with the songs and cries of the few hundred that still
kept pace with the carriages, and, now that they had left the valley of
the Marne and entered the dry plain that bounds Paris to the north, the
drought and the dust were past bearing. The approach of evening afforded
them no relief. At the gate of the city, where at least they might
expect the contrast of the familiar streets and the approach to repose,
they were disappointed. The driver had orders to skirt the barrier round
to the western side. So for some two hours more this calvary dragged on:
the ragged marchers themselves were exhausted, many clung to the sides
of the coach. Some few had climbed upon its roof and jeered and
threatened those three Guards, who sat silent in their yellow liveries
not replying, awaiting their chance of escape at the end of this endless
journey.
When the last slope into the town was climbed, the travellers, as they
crossed the flat summit where is now the Triumphal Arch of Napoleon,
could see at last before them, beyond lines of trees and about the
innumerable heads, the windows of their palace sending back the evening
light in a blaze, and to the left that huge oblong roof of the
riding-school where sat the Parliament.
Meanwhile, as the berline passed the barrier, the bellowing and the
songs, the tramping and the press of moving poverty, white with dust and
parched to drunkenness, ceased suddenly. It was like a stream of anarchy
breaking against that curious homogeneity of attitude and clear purpose
which marked the capital upon every principal day of the Revolution and
cut it off sharply from the provinces and even the suburbs around.
This new and purely Parisian crowd which they now entered, silent,
dark-coated and with covered heads—largely of the middle class—thronged
all the length of the Champs Élysées and packed the Place de la
Concorde. The myriad fixed eyes of it saw the convoy show black against
the western fight upon the summit of the hill; they watched it creeping
down the avenue between the double fine of soldiery, each section of
which, as the King passed, reversed arms as at a funeral soldiers
reverse arms.
There was no sound. The spontaneous discipline which makes Paris a sort
of single thing, living and full of will, so controlled this vast
assemblage that neither a cry was raised nor a hat lifted. The note of
the whole was silence.
During the full half-hour of that long approach down the hill this
silence endured; the carriage was at the gates of the Tuileries Gardens,
had entered them. Within the riding-school, the _manège_ where sat the
Parliament, to benches that rapidly emptied as the curiosity of the
Deputies drew them away, Fursy was droning out a report upon fortified
places of the first, the second, and the third class. Outside, the crowd
still denser but silent as ever, the berline passed, and the sections
saluted—a reversed salute, on either side; it was within a furlong of
its goal when, from a platform outside the Parliament building, a young
member of the Royalist right, drawing himself well up that he might be
observed, lifted his hat and very gravely and pronouncedly made
obeisance to the Crown.
The spell was broken. There was a scuffle, a hubbub, a general war; the
slowly-moving crowd crested into weapons as a deep swell at sea will
crest into foam. The postillions of the berline urged their horses; a
hundred yards to go, and the hedge of soldiery was forced and the mob
was upon the carriage. The three Guardsmen sat still untouched, with
death upon them; but the horses floundered through the deafening cries
and strugglers, trampling and rearing; the great vehicle was hauled and
piloted in; the wrought-iron gates clanged behind it. It was past seven,
and the journey was ended.
A week had gone. On Monday night they had watched with Fersen; all
Tuesday fled; on Wednesday night and morning suffered at Varennes, and
in the slow drag-back to Chalons; on Thursday at Epernay met the
Commissioners; all Friday suffered their captivity till Meaux was
reached—and now, as the light of Saturday began to fall, the hunting was
over.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XV
_THE WAR_
_From Saturday, June 25, 1791, to half-past eight on the evening
of June 20, 1792_
A MAN, callous or wearied by study, might still discover in the pursuit
of History one last delight: the presence in all its record of a
superhuman irony.
In Padua, where the Polignacs had taken refuge with their loot, the
Emperor Leopold, returning from Tuscany, was at that moment their host
and guest. With them and their circle he discussed the enormities of the
French and the approaching escape of his sister and the King; for he was
cognisant of their plan: he knew that since the death of Mirabeau the
idea of relying upon French arms against the Parliament had been
abandoned, and that an invasion by foreign allies was the scheme of the
Court.
Leopold certainly designed, when the first part of that scheme was
accomplished and the King was in safety on the frontier, to strengthen
the royal armies with his own and to advance upon the Revolution.
Varennes, I repeat, was everything. The King once free of Paris, and the
armies would have been over the frontier. The King a captive in Paris,
and compelled to pose as the acting and national Executive, war was
another matter. The French nation could act as one force.
So insecure and dilatory were the communications of the time that for a
whole fortnight nothing but guesses reached Padua. Upon the 2nd of July
these guesses urged Leopold to write; but at last upon the 5th, a
fortnight after the flight, came definite and official news. The King
had succeeded. He was safe in Metz with the army of Bouillé. The Queen
was safe beyond the frontier in Luxemburg.
Leopold sat down and wrote at once a sort of pæan, a cry of triumph and
of immediate action, and offered his treasury, his army, his everything
to his sister for the immediate march against the French people.
She, in Paris, watched and guarded every way, had found it possible to
write to Fersen two notes which, when he destroyed these many monuments
of her love for him, he copied with his own hand. Her main preoccupation
is that he should not return by stealth. She tells him he is discovered,
and that his part in the flight is known; she begs him to keep safe. But
it is probable or certain from one phrase in these notes that in the
bitter anger of the moment she desired to be rescued by a chivalry under
arms, and would appeal to war.
That determination in turn she abandoned, and from the month of August
onwards, until nine months later the armed struggle began, one plan,
lucid, and especially lucid when one considers that it proceeded from so
imperfect a judgment as hers, possessed her and was continually
expressed: she demanded an International Congress backed by arms, the
immediate threat of a vast but silent force, and no word of hostilities.
Nevertheless and largely, as we shall see, through her war came. It came
with the spring, and these few months after Varennes are but the lull
before the noise of the first guns.
I would here admit into the text of this book one of those discussions
which, in History of a living sort, should but rarely be admitted, and
belong rather to an appendix. I admit it because a conclusion upon it is
vital to any comprehension of the Queen and of the European position
which ended in the struggle between France and Europe.
No historical quarrel has been more warmly debated than this. Did the
old society, notably the Germanies, and at last all the privileged of
Europe, down to the very merchants of the city of London, attack the
Revolution to destroy it? Or did the Revolution break out in a flame
against them, and compel them to the action they took and to the
generation of war which ended in Waterloo?
In the current negation of morals the question has been thought by many
to lack reality. Yet such is the nature of man that if he cannot give a
human answer upon the matter of right and wrong, and a decision upon
_motive_, all his action turns to dust, and he can neither approve nor
disapprove any human act. Now when man can neither approve nor
disapprove, things cease to be, so far as his intelligence is concerned;
and without morals even his senses are dead. Therefore is it, and has it
always been, of supreme importance to every great conflict of History
that the one side or other should justify itself in motive. And
therefore has this discussion raged around the origins of the Great War.
There is one sense in which the debate can never be resolved. It can be
argued for ever as a metaphysical proposition, just as a man may argue
whether a spherical surface is concave or convex, and fall at last into
mere legomachy, so it may be eternally debated as to which of the two
combatants was legitimately defending his existence. It is evident that
both were in this position.
Again, there is a fruitless and eternal debate opened if we are to
consider separately every chief personality concerned. Did Brissot
really want war? Did Danton want it? Did the Emperor want it? Did Berlin
want it? Did Spain? Did the King, Louis? Did Dumouriez? The varying
ignorance of each character named, the varying intensity of the emotions
and necessities of each, the divergence of particular objects in each
individual case make such a synthesis impossible. But if one looks at
the field in general and considers the common action of men between the
return from Varennes and that April day when Louis was compelled to read
out the Declaration of War before the French Parliament, a true picture,
I think, arises in the mind, which—when, if ever, the Revolution ceases
to incline the judgment—will be the final judgment of History. It is as
follows:—
All desired war: all feared it. All attempted to postpone it. But, as
all energy of its nature polarises, these energetic hatreds and fears
gathered round two centres. The one in France had for its heart the
young men from the south and all their group, soon to be called the
“Girondins,” who, when the new Parliament gathered at the close of the
summer of Varennes, rapidly came to lead it. These men, Gallic in
temper, more and more desired to bring to the issue of arms sooner
rather than later what they thought must end—could not but end—in war.
Round this clear opinion, by the time winter had come, what was living
and active in France increasingly gathered. It is a phenomenon repeated
a hundred times in the history of the French people. We shall certainly
see an example of it in our own generation. The hand once upon the hilt
of the sword draws it.
Over against this current of opinion the Emperor (Marie Antoinette’s
brother), the King of Prussia, the English oligarchy, the Spanish
Bourbons also tended to war; their decision was not due to an increase
of determination—they were determined on the main question all along—but
to the gradual settlement of details long in negotiation between them.
These details settled, and the mutual suspicions and jealousies of the
Allies sufficiently though partially appeased, the privileged bodies of
Europe certainly marched against France, and to the Girondin crusade was
opposed something which was intended not to be resistance but rather a
rapid and successful act of police. The thing had got to end, and,
though the Powers only crossed the frontier in the succeeding summer,
all the Courts of Europe and all the privileged bodies of the old
Society were contented and glad that the fight was on. Nor were any more
contented than the governing class in England, who had helped to
engineer the campaign and who could not but reap the fruit of it, though
it was profoundly to their interest not to bring into the field the
insufficient armed forces at their command.
In the appreciation of this situation an element must be remembered
without which the modern student goes all astray. The Allies seemed
bound to win. We to-day, looking back upon those amazing twenty years,
forget that truth. Valmy, though still almost inexplicable, has
happened, and we take it for granted. The long straggling regiments of
Napoleon, the butchers’ boys turned generals, the vulgarian dukes and
marshals, the volunteer gunners and the rest of it, won; and their
victory is now part of the European mind. In that winter before the war
broke out, as ’91 turned into ’92, it was not so.
The elements obvious to every thinking man, especially to the cold and
therefore profoundly insufficient judgment of alien observers in Paris
itself (of such coxcombs as Gouverneur Morris, for instance), were
elements which made the final and rapid defeat of the Revolution
certain, and gave that approaching defeat all the qualities of what I
have called it, an act of police. The Allies might be jealous and
suspicious one of the other, but there can be no doubt once an accord
was come to—and it was reached in the early months of ’92—that against
the anarchy into which the French people had fallen, and the hopeless
indiscipline of their swollen armies, the operations of the invaders
would soon become but a series of executions and a summary and severe
suppression of armed mobs. The enthusiasm of the Girondins, and soon of
all France, was the enthusiasm of rhetoricians and that self-doubting
expectation of the impossible which is proper to inebriate moods. Nor
was there one commander of experience west of the Rhine who anticipated
victory for the French, nor one commander east of the Rhine who dreaded
the failure of the kings. It was mere sound—as poetry and music are mere
sound—that urged the French to war. And those who in theory combated the
policy of war, of whom Robespierre was the most remarkable, those who,
from their concrete experience, desired to fend it off (with the army in
such a state! with the military temper of the people so hopelessly
wild!)—that is, you may say, every general officer—foresaw at the best
some sort of compromise whereby the Revolution would end, after some few
battles lost, in some sort of Limited Monarchy. It was the appetite for
a Limited Monarchy which made so many acquiesce in such a campaign in
spite of the certainty of defeat. It was the fear that the great ideal
of the Revolution might tail off into a Limited Monarchy that made the
most ardent democrats oppose the policy of what could not but be a
disastrous war.
[Illustration:
FACSIMILE OF THE FIRST PAGE OF THE LETTER WRITTEN ON THE 3RD
SEPTEMBER, 1791, BY MARIE ANTOINETTE TO THE EMPEROR,
HER BROTHER, PROPOSING ARMED INTERVENTION
]
Meanwhile, during the earlier months of this development, the French
nobles who had crossed the frontier (the Émigrés), and notably the
brothers of the King, were an element of peril to either side, lest, a
small and irresponsible body, they should provoke hostilities before
either side demanded them. The Émigrés were active because they had
nothing to lose, and careless of the moment because for them negotiation
was unnecessary. To restrain this activity was the chief anxiety of the
great interests which were slowly coalescing into that invincible
instrument of war whose mission it was to restore order under the King
of Prussia and the Duke of Brunswick. As the months proceed, as the
coalition forms, this disturbing element is of less and less importance.
In the early summer of ’92, when war is once declared, the Émigrés fall
into line with the rest of the Allies; and when the invading army
crosses the frontier, the Émigrés cross with it in the natural course of
things and merge in the advancing flood.
* * * * *
Such was the general development of the European situation between the
month of July 1791 and the month of April 1792.
What, during that period, was the particular disposition of the Queen?
She was very active. She had determined upon a lucid plan, and of all
the brains that were thinking out how and when, if ever, the struggle
should come, hers was perhaps the most tenacious of its purpose.
We have a dozen letters of hers between the return from Varennes and the
end of the year. One of great length, written to her brother in
September, is accompanied by a memorandum and exactly details her plan.
With the exception of two which were written, as a blind, for
publication, and which in a private note she ridicules and disowns,
every word she writes is consistent with her thesis. She proposes again
that the International Congress should be called. In her later letters
she begs that it may be called near the frontier, as, for instance, at
Cologne. Before it is summoned, and during its session, there must be
gathered an overwhelming military force ready to invade at once. But not
a syllable must be breathed that could be taken as menace. In this plan
Marie Antoinette was considering the personal safety of her husband and
her child; and the whole theory of the action she advised pivoted upon a
certain conception of the French people which was now so fixed in her
mind that nothing could dissolve it; her theory was the French were not
a military people; that they spent energy in words, and that before a
plain evidence of force they would always give way; she carried that
theory of hers, little as it later accorded with the brute facts of
actual war, unmodified to the scaffold.
I have repeatedly insisted in this book upon the inability of Marie
Antoinette to perceive the French mind. As a young woman her
misconception of her husband’s people dealt with no more than
personalities, ladies’ maids, duchesses, and the rest. When Gaul moved,
and when she began her attempt at power in 1787, along through the
communal millioned action of the Revolution, this misconception became a
strong creed, a vision, as it were. She saw the French people intensely
active, cruel, cowardly, and unstable: much in them of the cat and the
fox, nothing of the eagle. She perceived their great mobs and their
sudden united actions—but these phenomena were to her sporadic; she saw
them—she did not reason upon them nor argue from them some peculiar
regimental talent in the populace; and if you had told her that these
appearances of marching thousands were due to a power of organisation
from below—a national aptitude for the machinery necessary to arms and
to diplomacy—the words would have seemed to her simply meaningless. She
could not so much as conceive humanity to be capable of organisation
save by the direct action of a few placed above it.
Of military qualities she understood nothing. She confused order,
silence, and similarity of buttons with discipline. She had no
conception of ferocity as the raw material of valour. Safe out of Paris
she would without a moment’s hesitation have ordered the invasion, and
she would have expected its successful issue in less than six weeks.
Even in Paris she would have bargained to conquer with a “whiff of
grape-shot” or some such rubbish; but in Paris, without one regiment to
hand _and without regular artillery_, she felt that the very bodies of
her family were in peril from “monsters and from tigers”—the words are
her own: hence only did she hesitate and demand an armed congress rather
than an invasion. To that armed congress and its menace she had no doubt
at all that the French would yield.
A metaphor will explain the situation clearly. A human being, caught by
some fierce animal but not yet mauled, appeals in a whisper to a comrade
near by to load, and, if possible, by some demonstration of human force
and of intelligent will to make the wild beast loose its hold; he begs
that comrade to do nothing merely provocative lest the animal should
rend him upon whom it has pounced: but, of course, that comrade is to
fire at the first active gesture of attack the brute may deliver. Of the
ultimate victory of his armed comrade the man in peril feels there can
be no doubt at all; he only advises a particular caution on account of
his own situation and impotence.
Moreover, she was convinced, and says it in so many words, that the
French would give way at once before the presence of a great and silent
but determined force upon their frontier.
So clear is the plan in her mind that she is bitterly impatient of the
necessary caution and delay of diplomacy, and of the long process of
negotiation whereby Berlin is brought into the agreement, the
tergiversations of Madrid are discounted and the exact balance between
desire for war and power to wage it are sounded. Here and there the
peevishness of her early womanhood appears in the complaints she makes,
almost as though she had been abandoned by her brother and his armies.
At last, in February 1792, this long correspondence is ended. The French
nation has, upon the whole, accepted, its young rhetoricians have
enthusiastically acclaimed, the approach of war. She, true to her plan,
proposes that her brother shall meet this growing enthusiasm by positive
demands, definitely formulated, dealing with the internal affairs of the
French people, proceeding from Vienna and demanding instant reply. We
now know that she herself drafted these demands, and on the 16th of
February Mercy writes to tell her that the Emperor will order the French
Parliament to maintain the French Monarchy in its full rights and
liberty, to withdraw the French armies from the frontier, to respect the
imperial rights of the Alsatian feudatories; and that he will at once
back up this ultimatum with an additional force, beyond that already
gathering, of 40,000 men. She acknowledges the plan and confirms it. A
fortnight later, upon the 1st of March, Mercy can give her the last
great news: Prussia has formally consented to move, though demanding, of
course, from the French Monarchy after its victory compensation for the
cost of the campaign—which will surely be willingly accorded.
It was on the 1st of March, I say, that this final news was written,
when, as so continually chances throughout Marie Antoinette’s life, a
special fate appears and intervenes.
On the 1st of March the King of Prussia has agreed to march with
Leopold, and all is ready for that armed demonstration which would, as
she was convinced, calm this great storm about her. On that same day,
the 1st of March, Leopold lay dead. Doctors assure us that he was not
poisoned.
Two things followed upon that death: first, the heir, her nephew, a
sickly boy of twenty-four, now held in Vienna all the power that in
those days accompanied a Crown, and he in his weakness was now the
master of the armies his father had summoned.
Secondly, there must be a long delay for the business and the trapping
of his election and his crowning.
Her plan meanwhile had failed. It was to be not a silent threat of arms,
but war. The French temper had taken Leopold’s command as a challenge.
The ultimatum she had suggested or drafted was met by a total change in
the Executive of France. Dumouriez was made the chief man in the new
Ministry and was put personally in charge of Foreign Affairs. The guns
were certainly ready. For ten days after Dumouriez’ nomination the Queen
drew from him his designs; and on the tenth day wrote secretly to Mercy
in cipher betraying the French plan of campaign upon the Meuse. Three
days later the last of her friends who could command an army, the King
of Sweden, stabbed a fortnight earlier, died; and on the 20th of April
her husband, as “the Head of the French Executive,” read out in a firm
voice a declaration of war against her nephew “the King of Hungary”—for
he was not yet crowned Emperor. Having so read it in a firm voice he
went back home, and Marie Antoinette and he must now bethink themselves
how the madness of the Parisians, when the invasion should begin, might
be fended off—at least from their own persons and from their heir, until
their saviours should show the white Austrian uniforms in Paris and
march the grotesque Prussian march within sight and hearing of the
Tuileries. On the 30th of the month she advised Mercy that the first
proclamation of the invaders had best be mild.
* * * * *
Such had been the plan of the Queen, and such its fortune; and by such a
fate had she been shadowed. For the sake of clarity I have omitted
during this recital all save her negotiation. I will briefly return to
the drift of the Revolutionary progress around her, and show how this
also led up to that fatal conclusion, from the failure of the flight to
Varennes at the end of June 1791 to the declaration of war in the
following April.
* * * * *
When spirits are at high tension and in full vision, as it were, often a
shock brings back the old, sober, and incomplete experience of living.
Such a shock the flight to Varennes had afforded. While the royal family
were yet absent there had been talk against the very institution of the
Crown; some rich men had spoken of the Republic; the Revolutionary
exultation ran very high. The flight was arrested: the royal family were
brought back, and in a sort of mechanical, unconscious way reaction
gathered force; after all (the politicians thought) the nation must not
lose, could not afford to lose, might lose its very soul in losing, the
web of inheritance which had come to it from so many centuries.
This force of reaction exploded when, during the Feasts of the
Federation, three weeks after the return of the royal family, a popular
outbreak upon the Champ de Mars was repressed by the declaration of
martial law, the use of the Militia under La Fayette, and the authority
of the Mayor of Paris.
The Revolution, going the way we know it did, the hatreds, the threats
of vengeance covertly growing from that day (which the poor and their
champions had already christened among themselves the “Massacre of the
Champ de Mars”), take on a great importance; but to the people of the
time the tumult and its armed repression did not seem of any great
consequence save as the beginning of quieter things. The end of the
summer was principally occupied in some speculation as to what the new
Parliament would do when it should be convened in the autumn. That
Parliament was restricted in power: the National Assembly which had made
the Revolution was to be dissolved. This second body was to do no more
than elaborate the details of laws; it was called, and remains to
history, “The Legislative.”
By an ironical accident, this very Parliament of one year, from which
the great and by this time well-known leaders of the early Revolutionary
movement were specifically excluded (for no man might sit in it who had
sat in the National Assembly), had thrust upon it the duty or the burden
of the Great War. Such was the Revolutionary time and air, that from
anywhere genius sprang; and through these men of the Legislative—so many
of them young, nearly all of them unknown, chosen only to sit in an
ephemeral assembly for a year—there blew such inspiration as Plato
thought to blow through poets, but which, in times of social creation,
blows through rhetoricians too, Chief among these was the group of men
from the South who were later called the Gironde. It was their business
to demand and to withstand the first assault of Europe, and indeed
before the Parliament met at all, it was certain that the assault would
come, for in the August of 1791, in the midst of the reaction which
overshadowed Paris, and while the principal leaders of the Revolution
were exiled or in hiding, there was drawn up that compact between the
German monarchs which is called the Declaration of Pillnitz.
This document has too often been put forward as an example of the
hesitation and moderation of the Kings. Such a view of it is an academic
reaction from the old, popular, and vague but in the main just
conception that privilege made deliberate war upon the Revolution: a
conception which often took Pillnitz for the inception of that
counter-crusade.
The matter can be presented quite simply to the reader. The Emperor,
Marie Antoinette’s brother, whom we have seen so eager, had the flight
to Varennes succeeded, to move his armies at once, combined at Pillnitz
with the King of Prussia in an appeal to all monarchical governments
that they should use such strength as might give back to the King of
France his old arbitrary power, and re-establish him therein. The two
allies swear publicly that they will use all necessary force, when such
an appeal bears fruit, to support this universal assault upon the French
people, and meanwhile they will direct their troops to the best striking
points from which the military action of that people may be paralysed.
There is the Declaration of Pillnitz in a few words; and while one
partisan may insist upon its caution or nullity, another upon its
insolence and provocation, all must agree who read history quietly and
without a brief, that it was a violent and public declaration of hostile
intention as it was also the first definite public act from which
hostilities sprang.
The Parliament met in September. Its proposed secondary value soon
proved to be primary; the splendid definition, rapidity and precision of
the National Assembly was well reflected among these younger and less
tried men: but much more powerful than Parliament was the growing
exaltation of the populace.
_That_ had many roots: the oblivion of the French (after forty years) of
what war might mean, the impatient passion for _any_ solution which all
feel during a moment of strain, most of all the moral certitude (and how
well founded!) that if the enemy delayed they delayed only for their own
purpose, and that war must certainly come—all these pressed to the final
issue: the noise of the cataract could already be heard.
As to the acceptation of the Constitution by the royal family, their
reluctance, the Queen’s anger, it but little concerns the story of her
fate. At bottom she and Louis also were willing enough by this time to
sign anything and to swear anything. The war must come, and the war
would solve all. The Queen herself, who was now, as I have shown, in the
thick of the intrigue, put it simply enough to the man she most loved,
to Fersen, in a note that has been preserved and which she wrote before
the end of September. “It would have been more noble to refuse (the
Constitution) ... it is essential to accept (it), in order to destroy
any suspicion that we are not acting in good faith.”
So far as concerns that unhappy and devoted life, one incident deserves
a very special mention. Twice in the autumn there had been talk of yet
another flight: the plan was not impossible, but it had been dropped,
partly because the King might have had to fly alone, partly because the
Queen was confident that a show of strength and a vigorous menace upon
the frontier would be enough to change all. In the new year the proposal
for their escape took on a more serious form, and Fersen reappeared for
the last time, and for the last time saw the Queen.
It was upon Saturday morning, the 11th of February 1792, that he started
upon that perilous journey, and it was his business to discuss in detail
and by word of mouth whether escape were still possible. Upon Monday,
the 13th, at evening, he passed the barrier of Paris. He saw the Queen
before he slept, and next day at midnight spoke secretly to her and to
her husband together. He carefully noted before them the routes that
might be followed: the method of escape: perhaps (as had appeared in
several plans) the string of forests that runs up from Paris
north-eastward toward the marches of Flanders.
The King and the Queen wasted no little time in that midnight hurried
parley in reproaches against the ingratitude of all and in bewailing
their isolation. The next day Fersen left with nothing done. He returned
indeed to Paris four days later, but he dared not enter the palace. The
whole thing was futile and every plan had broken down.
He never saw her again.
A fortnight later he wrote his King in Sweden, detailing all that they
had told him.
Before he could reply or act, the King of Sweden had been shot in a
masked ball at Stockholm, and some days later, as the reader knows, he
had died.
* * * * *
The Declaration of War had not only broken the original plan of the
Queen; it had changed from a general and partly passive to a particular
and active terror the life of Paris around her. Nothing had yet appeared
to show as a reality what all knew in theory, the extreme peril of the
nation, the military certitude inspiring the Allies, the despair
increasing among what was left of the French Regulars. There had indeed
been desertions immediately following the declaration of war, especially
desertions of the German mercenaries, in bulk. A skirmish, or rather a
panic upon the frontier, had also given evidence of the rot in the
jumble of armed men whom the Revolution could summon. The first tiny
action—it was hardly an action at all—had seen mutinies and the massacre
of officers. Paris once more rose and fermented, and there was a surging
around the walls of the palace. The enemy had not yet crossed the
frontier; but in the short breathing space before he should appear, and
while the royal family were holding a fortress, as it were, for their
own security until that enemy should arrive, Parliament put as a sort of
ultimatum to the King a demand for the execution of two decrees: one
against the Clergy who would not subscribe to the Civic Oath; a second
in favour of the formation of a camp of 20,000 volunteers under the
walls of Paris.
The error of uniting in one requisition two such diverse pleas only
posterity can recognise. For the men of the time there was a plain link
between either demand, for the recalcitrant Clergy seemed to them
nothing more than anti-nationalists, and it seemed to them that nothing
but an anti-national desire for the occupation of Paris by the foreigner
could make the King hesitate to permit the formation of the camp of
volunteers.
It was upon the 19th of June that the King published his veto against
both these bills or projects of the Parliament, behind which lay the
violent opinion of active Paris.[24]
Footnote 24:
And what was more significative, the whole of the little wealthy
reactionary minority was opposed to the projects, and signed a
petition in proof of its opposition.
What follows is well known. Paris rose, and rising poured into the
palace. It was the 20th of June: the anniversary of the flight: the
summer solstice fatal to the Bourbons.
It has been said that the rising was artificial and arranged. The same
nonsense is talked of the St. Bartholomew. No one who has seen such
things can believe them artificial. They are corporate things. There was
little violence, though there were many arms among those thousands upon
thousands; and as they poured through the rooms, which opened one into
the other like a gallery, they were not much more (save for their rough
clothes and their arms) than the same populace which had demanded for
generation after generation, and had obtained, the right to see, to
visit, to touch their public King.
The Court had forgotten the popular conception of the Monarchy; but the
populace necessarily preserves a longer memory than the rich. The thing
was a menace, upon the whole not ill-humoured: a violent recollection
that the King was the servant of the common weal, and its symbol,
something to be handled, met, and perhaps ordered. The mob, in whom
atheists can see no more than a number of poor men, cried out its
significant cries, against “Mr. and Mrs. Veto,” making a popular jest of
this public power. But in those moments when one jest perhaps might have
put the King at the head of popular emotion again, he and his wife
remained no more than what the decline of the Monarchy had made them;
individuals in peril, and courageous; not the Nation incarnate.
If any Angel had for its function the preservation of the French Crown
and Nation, that Angel, watching such a gulf between the people and the
Monarchy, must have despaired of the latter’s hope and of the former’s
survival: nevertheless, despite that divorce, the French people after
grievous wounds have survived.
* * * * *
The last group which that roaring torrent of the rabble saw was the
Queen and her children, her friends, especially Madame de Lamballe and
the governess, the Duchess of Tourzel, a soldier or two, a minister and
one or two others, crowded in the recess of a window behind a great
table which had been pushed into the embrasure to defend them. The
little heir to that Monarchy which had failed to understand sat on the
table, very much afraid, and the Queen put on his head with loathing the
red cap of liberty which the mob demanded. The day was sweating with
heat, the cap was thick and dirty, and Santerre, who was there, passing
them forward by bands in front of the table, a popular leader of the
crowd, seems to have ordered that it should be removed. It was already
nearly dark; it was half-past eight before that violent but not tragic
tumult had subsided, and before the last of the street people went back
out of the palace, which they thought rightly a public thing, on to the
public paving which at least was still certainly theirs.
Outside, during all that night, all the talk was of the war.
When would the invaders cross the frontier and when would the first
shock come?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XVI
_THE FALL OF THE PALACE_
_From half-past eight in the evening of the 20th June 1792 to eight in
the morning of the 10th August 1792_
THE noisy, good-natured, and very dangerous mob had gone at last; their
final stragglers, gazing, curious and tired, at the pictures and the
gilding (the trappings of their Public King in his great Public Palace),
had wandered out. A few steps on the wide stone stairs of the central
pavilion were still heard lazily descending. The dishevelled family was
at rest.
A little group of Deputies remained behind, and talked in low and
careful voices to the King and Queen—principally to the Queen, for she
was voluble. She was suave, though somewhat garrulously suave. “Would
not some of these gentlemen come and see her put the Dauphin to bed?” A
familiar appeal made by the very wealthy to the middle class rarely
fails. They followed respectfully and a little awkwardly to where, in a
small bed out of her room, the child slept. She had him ready for bed in
a few moments; then she said to him, smiling:
“Tell the gentlemen you love the Nation, darling.”
The drowsy child repeated mechanically, “I love the Nation.”
The Middle Class were enchanted. She laid him down, doubtless with every
maternal charm; she turned to go before them, certainly with an
exaggeration of that excessive carriage which had delighted so many
foreigners and dependants for now twenty years and had done much to lose
her the respect of her French equals at the Court. The select committee
of the Middle Class came after.
“See what damage they have done: look at these doors!”
The Deputies stooped solemnly to examine the broken panels and the
hinges torn from their screws, the oak splinters showing dark against
the white paint and the gold. They admitted serious damage—they
regretted it.
“Who is the proper authority to take note of this?”
They looked at one another; then one of them, remembering the
Constitution, Liberty and the rest of it, said:
“Nowadays the proper authority before which to bring such misdemeanours
is a Justice of the Peace.”
“Very well, then,” she replied sharply, “send for one.”
A servant was despatched and returned with a Justice of the Peace. He
gravely took written note of all:
“_Item_: the lower left panel broken;
“_Item_: the upper left panel cracked;
“_Item_: the lower right hinge of the door torn off, and the post
splintered.”
All was done in order, and they returned to find the King. The King was
annoyed. They noticed him grumbling and moving his lips and teeth. He
was even a little excited, but his training in names and faces, which is
the one acquired talent of high functionaries, served him well. He spoke
with authority, knowing each of them and addressing them in turn, and
after speaking of the mob he particularly complained that roughs climbed
the palings of the Tuileries gardens and disturbed his privacy. The
Queen interrupted from time to time to reproach them. “Why had they not
prevented the procession of the mob through the palace? Why, at least,
had they not given warning? The Department had done its duty! Why not
they?” The King continued in another tone, till, at last, some of them
coming nearer home asked him for news of the armies. His dignity as the
Executive (which he still was) forbade him any full replies: he had good
news, very good news ... he could tell them no more.
They suspected [we _know_] that there was no news at all ... only a few
packed, ill-ordered garrisons awaiting the attack; a long line in the
field all the way from Belfort to the sea, numbering but 80,000 men, and
half of that an ill-clothed helter-skelter of broken companies: divided
counsel, no plan, and, a few marches East, that slow concentration of
the Allies upon Coblenz which now drew to its close.
So the Deputies left them: the sky was still full of light on this
shortest night of the year, and Paris after the uproar of that
bacchanalian Wednesday, the 20th of June, was silent.
* * * * *
Meanwhile the South had risen.
On that same Wednesday evening messengers from Montpellier had reached
Marseilles; on Friday they were feasted, and when the banquet was over,
one of the Montpellier men, Mireur, with a voice of bronze, rose to sing
them a new song. It had come from the frontier, he said; as for the air,
he did not know whence it was, but he thought (wrongly) from the opera
“Sargines.” He sang it, and the men that gathered outside the open
windows to hear upon that summer evening, the guests within, and soon
all the city, were swept by the MARSEILLAISE.
The next day the Municipality of Marseilles met, determined upon
spontaneous action in company with all the South: they decreed the
raising of a volunteer battalion in spite of the Crown; the next, the
Sunday, when all were abroad and could read, the walls were placarded
with the appeal to join. Monday and Tuesday the names poured in: a
committee was chosen to pick only the best in character and health. Its
work was at once accomplished; within twenty-four hours five hundred had
been so chosen out of the throng of volunteers; within forty-eight they
had been enrolled, drilled for hours, and separated by companies under
officers of their choice. Three days of rapid organisation and continued
drilling followed: the route was traced, a time-table drawn up, the
expenses estimated and provided. A section of guns (harnessed to men)
with its caisson was drafted; the stores and baggage were concentrated
too. Upon Monday, the 2nd of July, at nightfall, a week after the first
appeal, through a crowd of all the city that pressed on every side, they
marched out by the northern gate of Marseilles singing their song. Next
morning, just as the arid eastern hills began to show against the
beginnings of the dawn, they entered Aix, and had accomplished the first
stage of their advance. “The Executive”—that is, the Crown—had warned
every authority to disperse them and all such others, but the wind on
Paris was from the South, and they and their song could not be hindered.
* * * * *
Meanwhile, in the German town of Frankfort, there hummed a continually
increasing crowd: the Emperor was to be crowned. Here, therefore, were
all those who had a business with Austria, and here was, among others, a
Swiss Huguenot, Mallet du Pan, upon whom more than upon any other in
that town the King of France and the Queen in her extremity depended. He
was a journalist, very keen about accounts and probity in small money
matters, of the bourgeoisie, sedate and perpetually attempting to
understand the French people, now from this side, now from that: they
interested him hugely. His work, however, was not to pursue this
fascinating study, but to save the persons of the Royal Family which he
served: in this task he showed that same discipline and devotion which
his compatriots were later to show under arms. He bore as his chief
principles, as his last instructions, two orders: one order to keep the
farce of the war going, and never to let it be hinted publicly or
breathed that there was collusion between those who sent him and the
invading Austrian power. The other order was this: to produce a
manifesto to be signed from the camp of the invading army, and to
strike, as it was hoped, blind terror into the leaders of the National
movement: the time had come (so it was imagined at the Tuileries) to
threaten the worst and so tame Paris.
He took his journey (but was scrupulous to give an exact account), left
his family in Paris, passed through Geneva, his home, and now, by the
end of June, was here at Frankfort.
He had chosen his centre well, for upon Frankfort converged all news,
and from Frankfort went out all orders: orders to Coblenz whence the
armies were to march to the relief of the Tuileries; news from Brussels,
which was of the first moment, for here Mercy-d’Argenteau, the expert
upon France, was ready every day to advise; here was the danger of
attack from France most felt, and here, most central of all, was Fersen.
Fersen heard regularly from Paris, wrote as regularly. Since the death
of the King of Sweden his official position had been less, but those
whose business it was to discover truth, the diplomats, knew that the
last and most intimate thought of the Royal Family was to be reached
through that channel alone. Austria and Prussia, Frankfort that is,
hardly acted upon his advice as to war (and in his diary he bitterly
reproaches them for their neglect), but they sucked his knowledge—and
to-day it is through him that we know, somewhat late, the principal
truths upon those last few weeks of the French Monarchy.
What did the Court of the Tuileries demand, and what will was behind it
in so demanding?
Mallet du Pan was there at Frankfort with no credentials but a sheet of
note-paper, and written on the top of it in Louis’ hand two lines of
writing unsigned; “_The person who shall present this note knows my
intentions; entire confidence may be put in what he says._” What
instructions had he?
Fersen was stationed at Brussels with an organised letter-service
between the Tuileries and himself, written in secret ink, full,
confidential and direct. All that he told Mercy or another went to
Frankfort. What message was thus continually conveyed?
The demand from the Tuileries was an urgent demand for immediate
invasion, and fore-running it, a drastic proclamation from the armed
force at Coblenz: the wall which inspired that demand was the will of
Marie Antoinette.
A man in flight could cover the distance from Paris to Brussels in two
days; an urgent runner in three. Normally the courier with his post-bag
arrived on the morning of the fourth day. From Brussels to Frankfort
worse roads, varying frontiers, and the German lethargy between them
compelled news to a delay of close upon a week.
The ferment in Paris was rising; the Federals of the South were on their
second day’s march northward when, in the middle of the first week of
July, the Queen, whose policy, or rather passion, could bear no more
delay, wrote to Mercy and to Fersen separately two letters of great
weight. These letters have never yet been given their due. The student
should note them closely if he is to understand all that followed.
The originals have, perhaps, not come down to us, but either man, Fersen
and Mercy, noted their intents, and thus we know them.
These letters Lasserez brought into Brussels, riding, on the morning of
Sunday, the 8th of July, and on the next day Mercy and Fersen, meeting,
consulted on their purport. The Queen, with whom the project of such an
engine was familiar, now definitely demanded a separate and nominal
threat against the town of Paris, and a menace that the whole city
should be held hostage by the invading German armies against the safety
of her husband, herself and her child. This clause her judgment of the
French character assured her to be efficacious; this clause she insisted
should be added to the Manifesto which was even now preparing.
It was upon July the 9th, I say, that the two men met and consulted upon
the Queen’s orders: that day they sent off command or counsel to the
Rhine.
On the 14th, while, in that same Paris, Louis was once more swearing to
the Constitution upon the Champ de Mars, while hour for hour, far off on
the Rhone, a priest receiving the Marseillaise Battalion was adding his
famous verse “of the children”[25] to their famous hymn, in Frankfort
the last of the Emperors was receiving with incredible magnificence the
Crown of the Empire. The note inspired by Marie Antoinette was at the
gates of his town.
Footnote 25:
“Nous entrerons dans la Carrière, &c.,” the best verse and the only
poetry of the lot.
It entered: Mallet saw it. “Paris is to be destroyed by fire and the
sword if the Royal Family are harmed”: it was approved. From Frankfort
it went back as a new clause to Coblenz; there it was incorporated in
the Manifesto and signed. Immediately, the ink barely dry, it was
published (upon the 25th of July) to the world, above the signature of
the Duke of Brunswick and in the name of that perfect and mechanical
army which Prussia in especial could move with the precision of a
physical law upon the capital that phrase had doomed.
This was the origin of that famous Clause VIII. which ordered, if the
Tuileries were forced, nay, if submission to the Royal Family was not at
once made, that Prussia and Austria would take “an unforgettable
vengeance,” that Paris should be given up “to military execution and
subversion, and the guilty rebels to the death they deserve.”
Such was Marie Antoinette’s one piece of formulated policy—the first in
which she had been able to act as clearly as she saw; it was also her
last interference in political affairs. It had been lit by her hand,
this match that fired the hesitating war; it had run its train through
Brussels to Frankfort and back to Coblenz, lingering in no one place for
a full day: now it had touched powder. Three days later the Manifesto
was spoken of in Chalons; secret copies were in print; the King in Paris
had received it.
All Paris knew it, though not yet officially, when upon the evening of
Sunday, the 29th of July, the dusty 500 of Marseilles with their guns,
crossing the bridge at Charenton, saw the distant towers of Notre Dame
above the roofs of Paris and reached their goal.
Let soldiers consider the nature of this exploit, and politicians
consider what that civilisation is whose comprehension I have shown
throughout these pages to have so vainly fatigued so many Aliens.
The French of Marseilles had trained for but three days. They had left
the Mediterranean in the height of a torrid summer; their organisation
was self-made, their officers self-chosen, their discipline
self-imposed. They had covered 500 miles of route, dragging their
cannons, at the rate of precisely eighteen miles a day; they planked
across the bridge at this the end of their advance, solidly, in
formation, still singing their song, and at the roll-call every name was
answered.... Their small numbers have made them appear to some
historians insignificant (or a legend), to others a symbol rather of the
military power in the populace which was to sack the palace than the
attack itself, but they were more; they were, as tradition justly
represents them, the framework of the force that decided the critical
day of the Revolution, as their song was its soul.
They marched in next morning by the St. Antoine Gate, with their drums
and colours before them, the crowds of the suburbs blackening the site
on which the Bastille had stood; and half Paris, as it were, going out
to meet them. They passed over to the Island, formed at the Mairie where
Pétion the Mayor greeted them; re-crossed the river (followed by the
crowd) and took their places in the barracks assigned to them, upon a
corner of what is now the Boulevard des Italiens; from that evening the
struggle between the City and the Monarchy had begun, and the few days’
delay that was to follow was but a manœuvring for position on either
side, that of the populace and of the Tuileries.
This last had now for long been steadily arming and was already strong.
The King, the executive, held the arsenals, the regular army, and a good
half, even, of the autonomous Militia. What was of more importance, the
Crown and its advisers could rely not only upon the machinery but upon
the devotion of the one well-disciplined corps which had not gone to the
front: the Body-Guard. These excellent mercenaries, nearly all Swiss by
birth and nearly all ignorant of the French language, were precisely
such material, human for courage and mechanical for obedience, as should
overcome almost any proportion of civilians—especially such as might be
spoilt by playing at soldiers. A recent law passed by the Legislative
Assembly forbade their presence in Paris. The “Executive” parried such
mere word of the “Legislative” by posting them in suburbs between which
and the palace were only woods and fields. When danger was imminent, in
the last hours of the truce, they were marched in and occupied the
Tuileries, law or no law.
Two objections to the strength of the King’s position against the
populace are urged (Napoleon, no mean judge and an eye-witness, thought
it the stronger, and _his_ estimate of the King’s forces brings them to
about 6000 men); these are, first, that no building can be held in the
face of artillery, for the popular force had guns; secondly, that it was
but defensive, and that the assault, though repulsed, might return. The
first of these is based upon a misconception of the terrain and supply,
the second upon a general ignorance of arms.
For the first: there was no position whence artillery, even were it
available in time, could be used against the long walls of the palace
save by passing through narrow streets easy for infantry to defend, and
as a fact the guns were not available to the populace either in
sufficient amount or (what is of more importance) with sufficient
training and supply. Guns, popularly manned and ill supplied, emplaced
in the labyrinth which flanked the palace could be captured (and in fact
were captured) by the trained infantry defending it. The short range
alone would make certain the destruction of their teams by sharpshooting
from the upper windows.
[Illustration:
EAST FRONT OF THE TUILERIES, (THE SIDE ATTACKED BY THE MOB)
IN ITS LAST STATE BEFORE THE COMMUNE OF 1871,
AFTER THE CLEARING AWAY OF THE STREETS AND HOUSES IN FRONT OF IT
]
The second objection—a reply to which shows how considerable were the
King’s stake and chances—is met by the military consideration that
nothing more needs a special organisation and training than a successful
rally. An assault, if it is of any consequence, must be pressed hard; if
it is fully repulsed, its head and energy are crushed at their highest
vigour; the defeat is more crushing than that of a defensive which
retires in time. This is generally true of soldiers in the field; it is
always true of civilians. The doubts and defections that accompany a
civil war, the conversion of the great body of cowards and the still
larger majority of indifferent men, the claims of regular domestic life,
the absence of a commissariat, the near presence of women and children,
the contrast which the return of quiet after the blow presents to the
pain and terror of a renewed struggle, make it, as it were, impossible
for a defeated mob to return, after an interval, against the regular
force which has repelled it; moreover, the regulars, once victorious,
can pursue, scatter, and destroy the unorganised mass, while its leaders
are arrested and judged; nor is there an example in history of a popular
rising which, when it has once broken against the defence of a regular
force, has not been broken for good.
The strategy of the Court was therefore sound, their calculation of
victory was reasonable, and their chances were of the best when the
defence of the palace was organised in these first days of August. It
was calculated that the populace even with artillery could do little
against the palace; that the trained men would crush the mob once and
for all. Had that defence succeeded, the advent of the foreigner,
perhaps allied with one of the royal armies, was secure. That the
defence of the palace failed was due partly to the lack of homogeneity
in its garrison, more to a lack of united leadership, but most of all to
the unexpected, incalculable and hitherto unequalled tenacity and
determination of the insurgents.
With every day the tension increased. The Federation delegates, who had
come from all over France to the Feast of the 14th of July, many of whom
lingered in the city, clashed in the streets with courtiers, and with
those who, whether by temperament or service, were still supporters of
the Crown.
Just when the Marseillais were entering Paris, Brunswick had broken camp
and the march of the Allies into France had begun. Less than a hundred
miles of flat road along the Moselle valley separated Brunswick from the
outposts of the defence: Paris itself was hardly further from him than
is York from London. Rapidity would put the first garrison of the
frontier into his hands within a week, and even the tardiness which the
Prussian calculation and the Prussian confidence involve could hardly
(it was thought) delay for a fortnight the news that the frontier was
passed.
In the passionate quarrel the enemy’s character of invader was
forgotten. Not only to the Court but to many who could now remember
nothing but the ancient tradition of the Monarchy, the enemy seemed a
saviour. Bands parading the pavement by night threatened their
fellow-citizens with Brunswick, songs threatening vengeance against the
revolutionaries were heard abroad after carousals, and a continuous
series of petty street-fights, increasing in gravity, enlivened the
attention of either side.
Hardly were the Marseillais in Paris, for instance, when, that same
evening of their arrival, after a banquet, a violent quarrel between
them and a body of armed royalists had broken out. They carried their
side-arms only, but blood was shed, and as the victims upon the defeated
side of this brawl were carried to the Guard-Room in the palace, the
Queen, seeing blood, thought that the final struggle had begun. She was
relieved to see the King go down amongst the wounded, staunching the
blood of one with his handkerchief. Her women, fearing what she had
feared, began crying each for one of hers: “Is my husband wounded?” “Is
mine?” She could not forbear from one of those insults which had lost
her the affection of so many, and from one of those reflections which
proved how little she conceived the French nobility. “Ladies,” she said
to the noble-women about her, “your husbands were not there.” She had no
further opportunity to revile them; it was perhaps the last expression
of her contempt for a people whom she believed to have grown incapable.
Either side continued to arm. The heat, growing steadily in intensity,
had bred by the 3rd of August a very thunderous calm, when the King
announced to the Assembly the terms of Brunswick’s Manifesto. It was
received in silence, and those who least knew and know the city thought
and still think that the news was met with indifference. But during that
night, while a furious storm struck Paris time and time again with
lightning, one workman’s suburb, St. Marcel, sent word to another, St.
Antoine: “If we march to the palace, will you?” In the midst of the
thunder, messengers returned saying: “We will!” And in the night as they
went and came, they passed men bearing the dead whom the lightning had
struck and killed. Very late and before the growling of the thunder had
ceased, certain of the Marseillais must go to the walls of the palace
and shout the chorus of their song.
Next day they asked for ball-cartridge. Sergent, the official guardian
of the Militia ammunition-reserve, had been struck in the face when he
had gone, as his duty compelled him, to the palace a fortnight before;
he had been struck because his radical politics were known. Should the
insurrection fail, his signature for rebel ammunition would be his death
warrant. Nevertheless, remembering that blow, he signed; and the arsenal
served out ten rounds a man to the Battalion of Marseilles. They crossed
the river so armed, and were received at the Cordeliers,[26] which was
Danton’s fief, and Danton restrained them till such poor and hasty
organisation as could be undertaken should be effected. It was the end
of the week which had seen their entry into Paris, and nothing had been
done. The Tuileries continued to arm, the populace to convene, and
between the combatants the Parliament daily lost its power and grew
bewildered.
Footnote 26:
Now the clinical museum, opposite the faculty of medicine in the
University.
On Sunday, at Mass, always a public occasion in the palace, men passed
and re-passed each other in the gallery, and there were quarrels. This
also was the last time in which the Monarchy was treated as a general
thing—with the next morning its isolation began. On Monday the King was
begged to fly, at least to Compiègne: the road was guarded, and it was
an easy ride if he went alone round by Poissy and the north. He refused.
On Tuesday the last preparations were made in the suburban garrisons of
the Crown soldiers. On Wednesday, the 8th, in the morning, the Swiss
Guard was warned that on the morrow before dawn it must be accoutred.
The Parliament, more and more bewildered, vacillated and was hardly
heard as the two antagonists rose from their places to fight. The
deputies refused all action. It had been proposed to them to condemn La
Fayette for a hurried journey he had taken to Paris after the last
insurrection to defend the King. They had refused by a very great
majority. Now, on this 9th of August, the fatal eve of the struggle,
they debated an academic point—whether the King should abdicate or no;
they adjourned it to dine ... and after dinner they did not meet.
But all the while upon that Thursday evening troops were afoot along the
Rueil road; the doors of the palace were open to men, who entered one by
one, armed and were stationed; the sound of carpenters was heard in the
Long Gallery of the Louvre, sawing the planking of the floors, by night,
to make a gap between the Louvre and the Tuileries;[27] mounted police
rode up in squads to the courtyard and took their stations; there was
also the rumbling of waggons. In the sections south of the river and
eastwards, St. Antoine and St. Marcel were moving; wherever the people
had strained at the leash too long, the popular assemblies sat in their
close halls choosing the men who should take the Guildhall by right of
the city’s decision and in spite of the law, and proclaim the
insurrection.
Footnote 27:
The gap was six feet broad. Too narrow; for the insurgents next day
leapt it and bridged it, and by that entry forced the Tuileries.
The last of the day declined and the night came, but the unnatural heat
would not decline, and the open windows all about, the lights shining
from them, and the vigil which so many kept, gave the effect of an
illumination.
* * * * *
That night, short and stifling as it was, was drowsy; a necessity for
sleep oppressed the city. Danton himself, in the thick of the rising,
attempted a moment of repose; he had hardly lain down when he was roused
again. The watchers in the palace felt midnight upon them and would have
slept. The barrack-beds which filled the attics in their regular lines
were strewn with men; the gentry who had volunteered, certain also of
the Militia, lay silent in the darkness, their muskets slung beside
them, their large allowance of cartridges served. Below in the great
rooms and on the stairways groups of mixed soldiery lay huddled,
servants armed, and policemen: every kind of man. The Regulars who
formed the core of this force, the Swiss, lounged in their bare
guard-room or sat silent upon the stone benches of the yard; some few
files of them stood at ease upon the stairs of the lesser hall.
Upon this silence there crashed at about a quarter to one o’clock the
noise of cannon. The report was hard and close at hand—it came from the
Pont Neuf at the further end of the Louvre, and the united fabric of the
long walls trembled to it; the heavy pictures and the mirrors shook. The
six thousand who garrisoned the Tuileries expected an immediate advance
of the insurrection: for a moment the whole palace was roused. Those
battalions of Militia which had been camped in the garden for a reserve
began to file in by the central doors; the cavalry mounted to take up
their stations at the narrow issues of the Louvre, and everywhere the
lights moving before the windows of the vast façade showed the ordering
of men.
This general stir had hardly arisen when it was perceived that this
first shot had been but a signal, for to the call of that cannon no
other succeeded, but almost immediately the steeples of the city
trembled to the first notes of bells.
The deep and heavy bells, that had for centuries raised the alarm of
invasion or of fire, began to boom just east of the University; they
were answered by the peal of St. Anthony over the river, by the tocsins
of St. John and St. Gervase; St. Laurence rang, and southward upon the
night boomed the huge tower of the Abbey, which had heard the same sound
nine hundred years before, when the dust of the Barbarian march hung
over Enghien, and smoke went up from burning farms all down the Seine.
The Cathedral followed: thenceforward no one could hear the striking of
the hours, for the still air of the night pulsed everywhere with the
riot of the bells. Two sounds alone could pierce the clamour: the high
bugle-call to which the French still mobilise, and the sullen fury of
the drums. The horses, therefore, of the defenders in the courts of the
palace, the continual clattering of their hoofs upon the paving, the
clink of metal as the lines were formed, the tramp of the reinforcements
arriving—all the movement of the six thousand who gathered to support
the Crown, was set to this music, and the air they breathed was full of
the noise of the bells.
Yet for some hours after the posts had been taken the advent of the
rebels was expected in vain. Paris seemed empty, or full only of this
increasing and ominous sound. Of men there was no trace. The stone
courtyards before the palace and the streets that led to the Square of
the Carrousel were silent. They lay open and deserted under the sky, and
so remained even when the first stars paled and when there was already a
hint of dawn. A doubt rose among the Royalists, first whispered, then
openly spoken, and leading at last to jests: the insurrection had missed
fire; the bells had failed. No voice of the insurgents had been heard,
nor had any rider brought news of their approach, when the last of the
stars had gone and the Militia companies, still remaining as a reserve
in the western gardens, saw the day rise gorgeously beyond the palace
they were to defend.
In a small room whose window looked towards the east the Queen, with
some few of her women, waited for the day. The ceiling was low, and its
air of privacy gave some little respite from the strain of the eve and
of the morrow. She lay upon a sofa, but she could not sleep; she spoke
but rarely and that in low tones, and vaguely watched the night. With
the first grey of the morning she rose, unrested, and bade them dress
her boy, the child who alone in that great house had slept throughout
the alarms. Then, under the growing light, she saw the Princess
Elizabeth near her, who called her and took her to a window whence she
might watch the rising of the sun. They stood together beside the open
casement gazing at the city in silence.
Early as was the hour (it was but little past four) the tone of the air
already promised a blinding summer’s day. The end of darkness had lifted
no mist from the gardens. The last heats of yesterday blended with the
new warmth of the sunrise that stretched bright red across the far
suburbs where the populace stood to arms; behind the confused high roofs
and spires of their capital the two Princesses saw advancing at last
great beams of power and, enflaming the city, an awful daybreak. The
younger woman was afraid and spoke her thought, saying that it looked
like some great disaster, a burning spread before them.
Now that it was broad day the vigour of the Queen returned. She became
again the will of the defence, and its leader—if it had a leader. She
had not expected defeat even in the worst silences of the night; with
the new day she was confident of success.
The commander of the Paris Militia, one Mandat, who had lately come by
rote to that function, she knew to be sound. He had garrisoned the
bridge-head by which alone the transpontine mob could cross the river to
the palace; his cavalry also held the narrow arch at the Guildhall, by
which alone the east end could come. Pétion, now become the Mayor of
Paris, who had been summoned to the palace for a hostage, had gone—the
Parliament had demanded him—but Mandat remained and his presence
sufficed for her. Upon that presence she relied: when she came to seek
him she found that he too had disappeared. The Town Hall had summoned
him twice, and twice he had refused. At the third summons he had gone,
suddenly, unescorted, “to account for his municipal command.” She began
to wonder, but her hope was still maintained. She crossed to the room
where she could find her husband, and she engaged upon the last act
which freedom permitted her to command.
Still pursued by memories of what the Court had been, she determined to
show the King to his subjects, and to present a sight which should exalt
his soldiery and linger in history as the appeal which saved him.
The King obeyed her summons: he had better have remained for repose, for
she found him but recently awakened from a stupor into which he had
fallen at the end of the night when all his garrison had risen to the
alarm.
The servitors, the gentlemen, the Militia, and the strict Swiss beside
them saw, as they stood drawn up in a rambling line upon the western
garden terrace, the figure for which they were to die.
He appeared at the main central door, weary, dishevelled, and, as it
were, aged. His violet coat recalled the periods of mourning. The shadow
in which he stood enhanced the sombre colour of his clothing and the
pallor of his freckled face; his stoutness and his habitually sanguine
temper rendered that pallor unnatural and suggested catastrophe or
disease. His paunch was obvious, his hair deplorable. With such an
introduction to their loyalty he wandered heavily from end to end of the
line. There was a laugh—by one light-head he was covertly insulted as he
passed—he was certainly of less and less moment in their eyes with every
step he took in this unhappy review. When it abruptly ended, old Mailly
went down stiffly on one knee and tendered his sword, then stiffly rose
again. Again in the ranks some one laughed. From this scene the King
returned to his room in silence.
She also, the Queen, returned from it angry and in tears, the more
embittered that she herself had designed the thing.
The first news that met her on her return to the palace was the death of
Mandat. As the details were told her she understood, though vaguely,
what a blow had fallen. He had reached the Town Hall “to account for his
command,” but had found there, not the hesitating constitutional body
which he expected and which had a right to summon the head of the
Militia. He had found instead a ring of new faces, the insurrectionary
Commune: the Revolution, maddened and at bay, had glared at him across
the lights of the hall. As he went down the steps to the street, blinded
by that vision of terror, some lad shot him dead, and with that deed the
whole plan of the defence crumbled. The bridge-head and the archway were
abandoned.
The crowds of the south and east gathered as the morning advanced; their
way was now clear, and yet, to those watching from the palace windows,
it still seemed as the sun rose higher that the movement had failed.
Seven chimed above the central portico; it chimed slowly upon bells of
nearly a hundred years; the half-hour sounded, and still the courts of
the Carrousel lay empty. But the deserted air was ominous. No street
cries rose from the neighbouring market-stalls. There was no sound of
workmen upon the building of the new bridge[28] down river; the regular
sawing of stone and the ring of hammered iron were silent.
Footnote 28:
Now called the Pont de la Concorde.
* * * * *
At last a head showed above the high wooden palings that separated the
courtyard from the square. Then another, the heads of ragged
street-boys, who peered over, standing on their companions’ shoulders. A
stone was thrown. One of the sentries aimed, and in a twinkling the
dirty, beardless faces disappeared. As yet no shot had been fired.
[Illustration:
AN EARLY VIEW OF THE APPROACH TO THE TUILERIES FROM THE
CARROUSEL, SHOWING THE THREE COURTYARDS
]
A noise like that of swarming bees came confusedly from the quays,
muffled by the intervening wing of the Louvre. It approached, still dull
and blanketed by the vast building; for a moment it was swallowed up in
the deep passage beneath the Louvre; then, with an immediate and
overwhelming roar, it burst into the square of the Carrousel. Some one
in command must have dashed upstairs, to where from the higher attic
windows he could overlook the hoarding: such an one saw the Carrousel
crammed with a violent whirlpool of men that seethed and broke against
the great oaken gates of the yard. Even as he looked the gates gave way
or were opened—which he could hardly distinguish in the press. The inner
court filled as the torrent of arms surged through the entry. At a
window of the upper floor certain gentlemen who had volunteered knelt,
with their muskets upon the crowd below.
They waited for the order to fire.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XVII
_THE TEMPLE_
THE vanguard of the mob came pouring in.
They swarmed through the arches under the Long Gallery, and the main
body of them still came swinging up to it along the river-side.
The sun, well up and brazen, touched the metal about them and sent
dancing gleams from pikes and curved hooks bound to staves. Before that
uneven crowd the long shadows of morning stood out sharply, thrown along
the uneven paving of the narrow quays. They sang or jested; they jostled
and could not order themselves. There were no soldiers among this first
batch of the insurrection, nor even a body of the half-trained Militia,
nor had they any guns. So they swarmed through the public archways under
the Long Gallery, so they packed and surged in the square of the
Carrousel. Before them were the walls of the central courtyard of the
palace and a great gate shut against them.
Of the fourteen guns that the palace commanded, five faced them in this
court, ready to fire should the crowd burst in. Three were advanced in
the emptiness of the square; two, in support, were just outside the main
door, whence the central staircase of the Tuileries swept up to the
royal rooms. At that door the lads who had climbed the outer walls of
the courtyard could also now see some few of the Guard drawn up in
formation outside the palace door and already retiring; the rest were
massed behind these in the hall: the solid body of Swiss who were the
kernel of the defence.
These thousand mercenaries and more, immovable men, had in their
attitude something at once of the grotesque and the terrible. Stiff and
strict as lifeless things in their red and white, tight hose and muskets
erect and firm, they were ready first for the volley, then for the
charge, and every man (in that time, when ten rounds was thought a day’s
provision) carried forty rounds upon him. The pale, unmoved faces of the
mountaineers were here and there diversified by some livelier face,
their rough-cut hair by the careful barbering of the wealthy, for there
were gentry of the King’s who had borrowed uniforms of the Guard and had
slipped in among them and now stood part of the silent rank.
The roaring of voices in the Carrousel beyond the walls of the courtyard
increased continually; the outer noise of the sea of Paris rose with it
every moment, and on the first floor, where the Royal Family and some
few advisers sat, all this gathering crowd outside the courtyard walls
was watched by those who were responsible for the unity of the nation in
face of the advancing invasion, and for the person of what was still the
King. Chief of those so responsible was Roederer. He stood there for
that new public authority, the elected county-body which alone had legal
power; he considered only the necessary survival of the King. Already,
at dawn, he had advised that the King should leave the defence to
others; now, hours later, as the mob and its noise swelled and swelled,
he insisted once more. It was but a personal act whose value in the
military thing that followed only those present could judge, nay, only
those who knew, as only contemporaries can know them, the personal
forces at work. There was no capitulation here.... But in the judgment
of the greatest master of war, Louis leaving the defence by those few
yards determined the issue; for it was Napoleon, himself perhaps a
witness, who said that if the King had then been seen on horseback
before the palace, his troops would have had the better of the fight.
But the King did what he thought was necessary for the moment of peril,
and guarded his family. He said, “Let us go.” As he passed through the
corridors of the palace down to the main doors upon the garden side, he
said to those who heard him, “We shall be back soon.” He believed it and
they also. None saw in this precaution an element of defeat, and yet
that sort of shadow which doom throws before itself as it advances
vaguely oppressed the palace.
The King, the Queen, and their children, Madame de Lamballe and Madame
de Tourzel, the governess, the handful of Ministers and friends, had
nothing to do with the military scheme of the defence. Louis had thought
it prudent, and his advisers also, that those few steps should be taken
between the palace and the Parliament House that lay beyond the palace
garden, and as they went along the broad garden way between the formal
trees, few thought, if any thought, that those ten minutes in the
privacy of their grounds were final. Later, all called it the beginning
or the presage of defeat.
The King walked solidly on in front by himself, murmuring from time to
time that the leaves had begun to fall very early that year. The
Dauphin, holding the Queen’s hand, trotted by her side and amused
himself by pushing away with his feet those same dead leaves, until, the
sickly little chap growing weary, a Grenadier of the Royal Militia,
which formed their escort, lifted the Prince in his arms against his
blue coat. The Queen’s face, mottled red and white in the violence she
did herself by that retreat, was now disfigured by tears, and the crowd
beyond the palisades of the garden, seeing royalty thus taking refuge,
broke through a gate and made a hubbub round the Parliament door. But a
couple of dozen members made a way through them and met the Royal party,
assuring them of an asylum within. With some little pushing, complaints
and speechifying they got them into safety, and the King so took his
place beside the Speaker in that great oval of the riding-school in the
early but hot and sunlit morning, the Queen and the children behind him
upon the Bench of the Ministers; and there the Grenadier gently put down
the child.
[Illustration:
CONTEMPORARY PRINT OF THE FIGHTING IN THE COURTYARD
]
Vergniaud was in the Chair, and, when the King had spoken his few words
to the Parliament, it was Vergniaud who assured him of the protection of
the laws. But there was a prejudice too strong in volume, of too recent
a date, and too lively in character, to permit of the open presence of
royalty at their debates. Royalty must, at least in appearance,
withdraw, and Louis and his wife and the children and some few of their
attendants consented to enter a little box where the shorthand reporters
of a certain Journal had usually their place. It overlooked the hundreds
of the Assembly from a little above their level, and was so placed at
the south-eastern corner of the great ellipse that the sun, creeping
round, was bound to beat upon it through the high-arched southern
windows as the day wore on. The grating was removed, they were
attempting some repose in that strict lodgment, when the sudden sound
which all so tensely awaited broke out beyond the garden trees. The
firing had begun. It was a little after nine.
Cabined as they were within the little box, whose outer wall gave upon
the gardens of the palace, they could hear, trembling through the stone
and noisy through the open windows, on that hot August morning the
rattle of the musketry of the defence. The Marseillais had come up in
their turn; they had come into the courtyard. They had parleyed with the
Swiss. The gentry at the broad windows of the first floor, each group
twelve front three deep, had opened fire to stop that parleying. But of
what so passed the Parliament and the little party in the reporters’ box
knew nothing. They heard but one discharge of cannon, booming dull, and
after that a silence. The debate in the hall of the Parliament ceased.
It was the moment when the Swiss had rallied and when the defenders of
the palace had swept the populace from the Carrousel, and had so thought
to have ended the day. There were many in that hall who thought it ended
also: mobs are often thus defeated in a few moments. The silence lasted.
Two more discharges of cannon might have been—and were perhaps thought
to be in the anxious house and by the much more anxious group that
strained their ears in the reporters’ box—the last volley against a
flying crowd. It was not so: those cannon were the two pieces of
Marseilles leading a return of the mob, and thenceforward, with every
moment for a quarter of an hour, for twenty minutes, the fusillade and
the roar of approaching thousands swelled like the calculated swell of
an orchestra. The Queen heard, where she sat in the corner of the tiny
lodge, the whistle of grape, the thud of solid shot against the walls,
the crash of glass, and all that increasing roar which told her that the
populace had returned like a tide, flooding the courts of the palace and
invading its very doors. For some very few moments they heard that
struggle maintained.
Then it was that Roederer, rightly or wrongly, a lawyer, not a soldier,
determined that the day was lost. In the spirit which had made him, in
his capacity as a high official of the Local Government, twice advise
the King to retire, and the second time succeed in that advice, in that
same spirit he now advised a capitulation. Perhaps he hoped by such a
compromise (could it arrive in time) to save the Monarchy. More probably
he deemed the Monarchy secure, and thought only by this capitulation to
save the House in which the Parliament sat and in which the Crown had
taken refuge from direct assault by the mob. At any rate there was
written, and presumably in the King’s presence, the hurried word or two
which ordered the Guard to cease firing, and that scrap of paper Louis
signed.[29] It was the last act of the French Monarchy.
Footnote 29:
The authenticity of this document which forms the frontispiece of this
book is discussed in Appendix A.
This order was conveyed to the upright and soldierly D’Hervilly: it
filled him with contempt and anger. He took the paper, pocketed it,
forced his way round with difficulty to the further side of the
Tuileries, saw that the defence, though now beaten back to the very
doors, was still maintained, and, so far from communicating the King’s
command, determined, as many a soldier before has done in such a fix, to
disobey. He continued to direct the battle.
Though the populace had rushed the doors and in part the river wing of
the palace, a furious hand-to-hand fight still raged. The staircase was
not yet carried; that wing of the populace which had leapt the gap in
the flooring and had boarded the Pavilion de Flore from the Long Gallery
had not yet fought its way into the Tuileries. The great body of the
insurgents was still massed outside in the square; a steady fire was
still maintained upon them from the windows of the palace. It was not
until the rooms were at last flooded by the advancing mob and the
staircase was held that D’Hervilly faltered. He was turned. The assault
had begun to verge upon a massacre. Of one half-company of the popular
Militia, all but five had been hit at one door alone in the upper rooms.
Before the main door, within a few yards of it, 400 men—if we may trust
those who most desired to hide the full numbers—400 men at least lay
heaped. Within, the mob was taking its revenge and the sacking had begun
before D’Hervilly showed that scrap of paper to the Guard. This second
command also the Swiss obeyed, as they had obeyed the first command to
die.
[Illustration:
INSCRIPTION ON THE BROKEN BUST OF THE DAUPHIN,
A RELIC OF THE SACK OF THE PALACE
]
They fell back out of the palace in order, this remnant of a high
discipline; they passed down the main broad avenue of the gardens
steadily: the covering volleys of their retreat came very sharp and
clear just outside the windows of the Parliament. Those within heard
their steady tramp, until at last that tramp turned to a scuffle; there
were crunchings upon the gravel, confused scrambles upon the lawns,
choked cries and fugitive running; they had broken by the round pond.
Far off along the river-side one could still hear a rhythm and a tramp
of men. It was the marching of the Marseillese with their prisoners: for
they had made prisoners and disdained to massacre. They had saved
somewhat more than a company of the Guard and bore them escort. The
fight was done.
It was just after ten o’clock. In those two hours, or little more, of
doubt, in that one hour of combat, there had perished many thousands of
men and the tradition of nine hundred years.
* * * * *
The day passed without wind or air, a day of increasing clamour. The
conquering populace entered by deputations, and with the rhetoric of the
poor and of their leaders before the bar of the _manège_. They demanded
and obtained the suspension of Louis “till the National Convention
should be called.” They brought spoils religiously to that bar, “lest
they should be thought thieves.” They harangued and they declaimed—by
the mouth of leaders.
Far off in the chapel of the palace a young man at the organ played the
“Dies Iræ” for his whim. Those who had so lately been the masters of the
palace sat huddled in the box of the _Logotachygraphe_.
If the modern reader would have some conception of it, this “loge” of
the shorthand reporter, let him think, if he is rich, of a box at the
opera, or, if he is poor, of a cabin upon a steamer: such was its size.
Louis XVI. and one or two of his armed gentlemen, the Queen, the little
children and their governess, sat packed hour after hour in that little
den; through the torn grating of it they could see the vast oval of the
riding-school, its sweep of benches under the candle-light. It was a
huge pit, from whence in a confusion of speech and clamour rose the
smoke of their fate.
The summer night had been so tedious and so burning that in their
ten-foot square of a hutch the refugees had hardly endured it. The
little child had fallen into a stupid sleep upon his mother’s knees, and
a sweat unnatural to childhood so bathed his exhausted face that the
Queen would not let it remain. She turned for a handkerchief to a
gentleman of theirs: he gave her his—but there was the blood of a wound
upon it.
Midnight had passed, and they still sat thus packed and buried; before
them still rose the sonorous cries of the invading mob, the
interjections of the Parliament, the rhetoric of the last speeches. The
hundreds of lights still flamed in the double chandeliers of the
enormous hall; the roof and the planks of the half-empty benches around
the arena still sent back echoes.
It was two in the morning before the doors could open on them, and with
the sweep of cooler air came the roar of the populace still on guard
after all these eighteen hours. The crowd pressed against the railings
as a strong escort hurried the King and Queen across a little corner of
the gardens to the deserted monastery next door. There were large
candles thrust into the barrels of chance muskets: the night was calm
and they could burn. By that faint and smoky light, which but just
caught the faces of the crowd beyond, they hurried into the door of the
Feuillants.
For many months no one had trodden the corridor of the place; the bricks
of the flooring beneath their feet lay unevenly. The blank and
whitewashed walls, cracked and neglected, were pierced by four such
similar little doors as monasteries use for an entrance to their cells,
and in those four bare cells the Parliament had hurriedly provided what
furniture the old house afforded.
The Dauphin had awakened for a moment in the fresh air, and had smiled;
he had said, so that those near could hear him: “I am to sleep in
mamma’s room to-night!” His mother had promised it him as a reward
during the dreadful day; he slept when the doors closed on them, and his
sister slept too. The Queen was too angry for repose.
She saw the monk’s bed of the cell, little and hard; she saw the mouldy
green paper on the wall; she stamped for one last futile time into the
King’s presence beyond the partition to cry that things should surely
have turned differently.
“The Marseillese should have been driven back!”
Louis had never failed to meet her anger when it rose by a stolid truth.
“Who was to drive them back?” he said.
Then she, who had not understood the armed nature of the struggle, but
only her own fierce desire, turned back and threw herself upon the
narrow bed of her refuge.
The day already glimmered. One could see the trees of what had been but
yesterday her royal garden, and one could see the palace beyond through
the dirty windows of the little room. The sun rose and showed her her
misery more clearly. She could not sleep. It was not till the light in
the east had risen above the many roofs of the Tuileries and had already
thrown a slit of bright shining aslant into the room, that there fell
upon her less a slumber than an unhappy trance of exhaustion.
There was silence while she slept. The mob had gone home exhausted. The
carts, which had worked all night round the palace and in the gardens
picking up the wounded and the dead, lumbered no more, and their
crunching upon the gravel of the alleys had ceased. No wheels rattled in
the Rue St. Honoré as yet, and the few that still maintained the sitting
in the Parliament were attended by no more in the Tribunes than a few
sleepy beings watching to the end. Outside in the still air all that
could be heard was the early piping of birds.
For that little space Marie Antoinette lay broken but forgetful of the
dreadful day.
Her sister-in-law, in whom self-sacrifice was permanent, watched her
pitifully so lying for one hour and another. Then she woke the children
and dressed them for the new day, silently, so as to spare their
mother’s sleep, but that sleep did not endure. The Queen raised herself
unrefreshed, and, when she saw the children, remembered their promise
and their fall and said: “It will all end with us!...”
With the morning some succour began to arrive from their own class, who
pitied them, especially from foreigners. Lady Gower’s little son,
younger than the Dauphin, was yet of the same measure. The child could
therefore wear the change that was sent him from the English Embassy.
The King was supplied by a captain of his Swiss, a man as corpulent as
himself. The Queen could get linen at least from the Duchesse de
Gramont. Her watch and purse were stolen, left behind or lost, but there
was plenty of money; one of her women had no less than twenty pounds
upon her: there was no need to look further.
At ten an escort brought that broken family back to the reporter’s box.
And so daily the long fatigue was endured and the mean lodging of the
night. All the Saturday, all the Sunday, the debates continued in their
presence. They saw, they half-understood the quarrel between the city,
which had determined to be master of their persons, and the Parliament,
which refused to forgo its sovereignty. They heard the decree passed
that overthrew the statues of the kings throughout Paris. They heard
that the palace of the Luxemburg was to be their sumptuous prison; then
the long argument against that building, the perpetual demand of the
city for their custody; the suggestion of this place and that: the
Archbishop’s palace—at last the Temple.
They saw the deputation of the city, with the Mayor at its head,
insisting; they heard the Parliament give way, and knew by Sunday
evening that Paris would hold them hostages.
On the morrow—a fatal 13th—their Court was removed from them: a few
friends only were allowed to remain. Under the wan light of evening two
great carriages—still royal, but their drivers’ livery gone and a dull
grey replacing it—stood before the door of the Feuillants. The act of
imprisonment had begun.
The heavy coaches rolled along the paving. The scene was that of a crowd
freed from labour at such an hour, thousands on either side, and a dense
escort pushing its armed column through. The sunset and the long
twilight were full of halts and summonses; Pétion, with his head thrust
through the window, was insisting on a way for Authority: there was a
noise of men struggling, sometimes to see, sometimes to save their feet,
snatches of songs, cries.
The distance was not quite a mile and a half. For over two hours the
coaches pushed and fought their passage up to the Place Vendôme, where
the statue of Louis XIV. lay fallen: past the wide boulevards whose
width did nothing to disperse the crowd: down at last along the narrow
lane of the Temple, till they came to the great pillars of the porch.
[Illustration:
THE TOWER OF THE TEMPLE
AT THE MOMENT OF THE ROYAL FAMILY’S IMPRISONMENT
]
All this while the Queen sat silent. Her husband and she and her royal
children were still given honour—sat on the front seat of the great
carriage; but the ladies who yet followed the Court, the governess of
the Children of France, were indignant that Authority should have passed
to the officials, and that these should sit wearing their hats of office
before France-in-Person. So also when the Royal Family walked across the
courtyard to the steps of what had once been Artois’ Palace of the
Temple, the deputation of the Commune there present to receive them kept
their heads covered and insisted upon their new authority, calling Louis
“Sir,” not “Sire,” and preserving in his sight that austere carriage
which he had thought the peculiar appanage of kings.
They went up the great staircase, lit splendidly as for a feast, lit as
it had been for Artois in the days she so well remembered: the doors
shut as upon guests assembled. They followed their warders down a short,
walled way through the open night, and saw before them at last, with
lamps in every old crocket of the corners, and every window ablaze, the
enormous mass of the Tower.
* * * * *
To the north of the square keep which was the main outline of the Tower,
a second building, an afterthought of the latter Middle Ages, had been
added. It leant up against its larger neighbour, forming a kind of
pent-house; its four storeys were far lower than those of the
stronghold—the rooms into which each storey was partitioned were
necessarily smaller and less convenient than those which they were to
occupy later in the main tower: it was nevertheless necessary to lodge
them here for the first few weeks, because this annex alone was
furnished. It had been the residence of the Archivist in charge; its
main room had been his drawing-room; the whole was ready for an
immediate occupation.
To these Princesses and their train there was a portentous novelty in
such a place. The King, a man, and one fond of hunting in all weathers,
self-centred, negligent of his person, careless of any luxury save that
of the table, saw nothing sharp in these surroundings: indeed, his sex,
especially when it is leisured, can take what it finds in a campaign or
accident with no great shock. But the women, who had in every moment of
their lives been moulded by magnificence and ease, could not understand
the place at all. Varennes had been a hurly-burly; the wretched three
days just ended at the Feuillants a violent interlude; for the rest
their pains and terrors of the past three years had been played upon a
gorgeous scene. They had slept for a thousand nights of peril in very
soft and bulging beds whose frames were thick with gilding, beds whose
canopies were splendidly high and curtained like thrones. They had been
surrounded for a thousand days of peril by silent servants trained and
dressed in gorgeous livery for their work. They had looked out on great
ordered gardens, and had walked over the shining floors of the palace.
That was their protection: a habit of grand circumstance and continuous
exalted experience against which the occasional horror and the strain of
their lives could make no impression.
To-night, in the unaccustomed stillness of the Temple enclosure, they
sat silent in the knowledge that these low roofs and common walls must
be a kind of home for them. All was at first insupportable; the King’s
sister, sleeping on a ground-floor, in a room which once the cooks of
the house inhabited: next to her through the wall, the Guard-Room; the
Queen, the royal children and their governess, cooped up in a couple of
small bedrooms fifteen feet square or less, preparing their own beds and
the Dauphin’s, were in a new, worse world. The poor Princesse de
Lamballe, with her own great virtue of fidelity surviving all her
inanities, put a truckle bed for herself in the dark little passage
between the two rooms and slept there, as a dog sleeps at the door of
its mistress. Nor did even this society endure. A week had not passed
when the officers came by night to read a new decree, and to separate
the Duchesse de Tourzel and the Princesse de Lamballe from their
masters, saying: “There must be no one here but Capetians.” Then the
complete isolation of their lives, a new habit, of settled hours and
monotonous exactitude, began.
This life reflected as in a quiet mirror the chaos of the enormous
struggle which was being fought out beyond the walls of the Temple. They
were prisoners and yet unrestricted; confined by public authority and
yet permitted the refinements of their rank. Surrounded by guardians,
but by guardians none of whom as yet insulted them, many of whom were
secretly their friends, some few their devoted servants, traitors to the
State in the crisis of a great war but traitors through devotion to a
national tradition.
Twenty courses at a meal were not thought too many; a dozen servants,
paid fantastic salaries, did not suffice them; their expenditure, if not
the half million voted, was yet at the rate of many thousands a year;
the doctor and the drawing master may visit them, and the Duchesse de
Gramont may send them books. Their wine, though the King alone drank it,
was of the best, commonly champagne (at that time not the fashionable
wine of the rich, but rather the ritual of feast days); they had good
furniture at their demand, an ample library of many hundred volumes; and
in general such comfort as such a situation could afford. But a violent
contrast marked their lives, the contrast between this luxury and the
anarchy of manners around them. Their guards, often gentlemen, were now
courteous, now obsequious, now offensive, according as chance sent men
of varying politics or character by turn to be on duty at the Tower.
The alternate fears and expectations of the Revolution, the doubtful
chances of the frontier battles, the unsettled quarrel of the political
parties among the conquerors—all these permit the inconsistencies of
that moment upon the part of the Commune and the Parliament. They permit
within the Tower that mixture of the prison and the home whereby an
increasing severity of rule and an increasing vexation did not forbid
the costly furniture, the very complete library, the exquisite cooking
which make up the curious contrast of their lives.
The order of their day was simple and unchangeable. The King would rise
at six, shave, dress, and read till nine. The Queen and the Dauphin were
up by eight, at which hour the servants and the guard came into the
rooms. At nine they breakfasted. During the morning great care was taken
by Louis himself with the lessons of the boy. The Queen and her
sister-in-law dressed for the day. They walked in the large gardens
where the mob from far off could watch them from behind the railings of
the Square; dined at two o’clock, played cards. The King would sleep in
the afternoon, would sup again at nine, and read till midnight.
A week after the Princesse de Lamballe and the Duchesse de Tourzel had
left them, before the end of August, the first of the indignities
offered to the person of the Monarch came to him thus: they took away
his sword. It was but an ornament, yet in all that long line of ancestry
no other had had his sword unclasped. And this man, who could never have
used a true sword, let alone that toy, felt the loss like a wound. Much
at the same time, that is before the end of August, entered three new
people into the prison—Tison and his wife, new gaolers who had to act as
spies upon them; and Cléry, who was to act as the valet of Louis, who
was devoted to him, and who has left us what is certainly the clearest
and probably the most accurate account of the prison life of the family.
In those same days they heard whispered to them by one of the guards,
Hue, the first news they had had upon the matter that never left their
thoughts. The invasion was successful. Brunswick was well on his way—it
was impossible that he should be opposed.
For yet another week no incident disturbed the common run of their
quiet; the physical impressions which build up most of life were
neighbouring and small; the daily noise of hammering in the great tower
next door where their permanent apartments were preparing; the daily
reading, the daily games of backgammon, and, daily, the sumptuous meals;
the modest dresses, changed (as is the custom of the gentry) for the
evening; the daily intercourse with such two Commissioners from the City
Council as happened to be on guard. From their windows they could see
the rapid demolition of the small huddled buildings round the Tower, and
Palloy’s great encircling wall rising between them and liberty on every
side.
But beyond these exterior things their minds dwelt continually upon the
matter which had held all their thoughts for a year. They remembered, in
their isolation, the frontier, the Argonne (which is a wall), and beyond
it the bare plains of the East: moving densely over these the convoys,
the guns, and the packed columns of the invasion. They had failed to
hold their Parisian fortress till the advent of that slow machine, but
they could still hope serenely: they had known regulars since their
childhood: they saw in the advance of Brunswick something inevitable;
they were certain of his success, and they waited.
* * * * *
[Illustration:
A ROUGH MINIATURE OF THE PRINCESS DE LAMBALLE
PRESERVED AT THE CARNAVALET
]
How truly the history of the Revolution is the history of war can never
sufficiently be stamped upon the mind of the student. The Terror when it
came was, as I shall call it, nothing but martial law established during
a reign: the steps by which the fury of the time advanced towards it
corresponded exactly to the fortune of the French armies.
Upon the 2nd of September, as the prisoners walked in the garden, they
heard a roar throughout the city. The populace beyond the railings threw
stones: they were hurried back into their prison. For a moment before
dusk they saw the wild and fanatical face of Mathieu, once a monk, who
shouted at them: “The Émigrés have taken Verdun, but if we perish you
shall perish with us.” In the increasing hubbub all around, the little
Dauphin cried and was disturbed; and all night the Queen could not
sleep. She could not sleep as the noise rose and roared throughout
Paris.... It had almost come. The armies were almost here, and once
again the dice were being shaken for the murder of the prisoners, or for
their deliverance.
It was on that day, and pricked by the spur of such news, that Marat’s
frenzied committee gathered a band, and began the massacre of those
caught in the public prisons—all those suspect of complicity with the
invasion and of the desire to help the foreigner in destroying the new
liberties of the nation. Among these hundreds, roped in suddenly upon
suspicion from among the rich or the reactionary of the older world, was
the foolish, tender and loyal woman who had determined to share the
fortunes of the Queen—the Princesse de Lamballe. When they had taken her
a fortnight before from the side of her friend she had but been thrust
into another prison to await these days.
The 3rd of September broke upon the captives, a dull uneasy morning in
which the clamour of distant disturbance still occasionally reached them
from the centre of the city southward, then came nearer.
They were told that on that day there would be no walk in the garden.
They sat therefore all the morning in their rooms. They dined as was
their custom; their dinner was over, it was not quite three o’clock, and
the King and the guard for the day stood together at one of the great
tunnel-like windows of the first floor, for the windows were not yet
blinded as they later were. The guard by his side was one Danjou, a
young man of thirty-two, very eager upon the new world which he believed
to be then arising; full of a vision of freedom, a good sculptor—for
that was his business—intense in action, he was, above all, brave.
Energy bubbled out of him, and he had, what goes with energy, a clear
head and rapid decision. The King and this man stood together exchanging
that kind of easy conversation which Louis had by this time learnt to
hold with men of every rank. They were watching the workmen pull down
the houses near by, and the rising of the wall which was built to
enclose the gardens of the Temple. Now and then, as a great beam fell
with its great clouds of dust, the honest and slow King would laugh and
say: “There goes another!” Their conversation was on this level when
they heard an increasing noise outside the gates. To the Royal Family it
meant but one more mob rolling by. Danjou, who was a free man fresh from
outside and knew better, was silent and anxious: he was aware that the
massacres had begun.
At first it was a set of drunken songs far off, and then a clamour in
the streets. At last, quite close, separate cries and loud demands, and
hammering at the gates; and next a nasty crowd burst in. They were not
very numerous, but they were drunk and mad with blood; and they dragged
with them the body of the only woman killed during all those horrors, a
corpse stripped, perhaps mutilated, and separate from it a head with
powder on the hair. This head, thrust upon a pike, some of the foremost
raised before the window; and Louis, slow of vision though he was,
recognised it for the Princesse de Lamballe’s. His wife was at the table
behind him. The window was high, deep and distant. Louis cried suddenly,
“Prevent the Queen...!” But, whether she had seen or had not seen that
dreadful thing, the Queen had fainted.
Without, Danjou, acting as promptly as a soldier, was standing on the
steps, giving the mob all the words that came to him of flattery,
rhetoric, or menace; and getting them at last to scramble down from the
heaps of broken brick and rubble they occupied, and to go, taking their
trophy with them. Within, her sister and her husband attended the Queen.
She was quite broken down. The night fell, but again she could not
sleep. She passed the dark hours sobbing with pain, until yet another
day had dawned upon her. And still a long way off in Paris the massacres
continued. Still, through the first week of September and the second,
advanced the army of the invaders which was to save them as it came
victorious; or at the worst it came at least to destroy their enemies
and the city which had dared to imprison them.
News did not reach the prisoners save at such intervals, or in such
broken whispers, or by such doubtful signs that they could make little
of it: but whether they knew much of that news or little, the army was
irresistibly advancing: the French troops which were to oppose it were
increasingly falling in value: the passes of Argonne were forced—all but
one. Dumouriez was turned; and by the 20th of September Prussia and
Austria were present, armed, four days’ march from the gates; and there
was no force at all between them and Paris. That same day the Parliament
in Paris met the menace by declaring the Republic.
Upon the morrow the most extreme of the extremists, Hébert, the cleanly
and insane, looked in to mock them coldly; while outside the booming
voice of Lubin proclaimed in a most distinct proclamation, phrase by
phrase, that the French Monarchy was no more. The King went on reading,
the Queen went on sewing; for such was the occupation of either as they
heard those words. The slow hours of the equinox passed without news or
disturbance in the city; but meanwhile, out where the armies were, a
prodigious and as yet unexplained thing had happened. Austria and
Prussia and the Emigrants had failed. The strong cities which they had
easily taken, the passes of Argonne which they had almost as easily
forced, the contemptuous and just strategy by which they had marched
round the worthless forces of the National Defence and now stood between
it and Paris—all these by some miracle of war had availed them nothing:
and in a muddy dip before the windmill of _Valmy_ the whole campaign had
failed.
* * * * *
I wish I had the space here to digress into some account of that
inexplicable day. I know the place, and I have well comprehended the
conditions of soil and of gunnery under which the Prussian charge failed
even before its onset. Nor could any study more engross, nor any
examination prove more conclusive, than an analysis of the few hours in
which this accident of European history was decided upon the ground
which, centuries before, had seen Gaul, and therefore Europe, saved from
Attila. But neither the limits nor the nature of my subject permit me;
and it must be enough to say that on the 21st of September at Valmy, a
few yards from the road whereby the King had fled to Varennes, by the
failure of one charge the invasion failed. In a few days the retreat of
the army that was to rescue or to avenge the King and the Queen had
begun; and from that moment the nature of their imprisonment changed.
* * * * *
Upon the 29th of September pens, ink and paper were taken away from the
prisoners, and on the evening of the same day there once more entered
the cleanly and insane Hébert, who read to them the order that Louis XVI
should be separated from his family and imprisoned in another set of
rooms in the Tower.
Those relations which had been at first ridiculous, later tolerated, and
though affectionate not deep, between the Queen and her husband, her
dislike of his advances towards the Liberal movement, her angry
amazement at his patriotism in the early days of the revolt,—all these
which are too often read into her last emotions in his regard, must be
in part forgotten when we consider how they all lived together behind
those thick walls. Every human soul that left the group was something
lost to them for ever. Of the two that had last left them, the head of
one, shown murdered, had been seen at the window. And moreover, this
order to separate the King meant almost certainly some form of
approaching disaster. The children also were a bond. For they knew
nothing of whatever early phantasies, whatever recent disagreements
there had been between the wife and the husband, and they must now have
their father hidden from them.
He was taken away. Upon the next day, the 30th, as once before during
their imprisonment, the Queen refused to eat and sat silent. To that
silence there succeeded a fit of violent anger in which she screamed at
the guards. It was when Cléry came to get some books for his master.
It is reported that Simon, one of the Municipals who was later to be the
gaoler of her child, said as he saw the distress of the women, that it
nearly moved him to tears, and that turning to the Queen he told her
that she had had no tears when the palace fought the people upon the
10th of August. It is said that the Queen answered: “You do not
understand.” And when he added: “You should be glad at least that the
traitors are caught,”—by which phrase he meant the popular vengeance and
the massacres in the prisons, the repulsion of the invasion and the rest
of it—the Queen would not answer a word.
Upon the 1st of November, the day before her thirty-seventh birthday,
she saw again a visitor to her prison, a dark face which it appalled her
to see: it was a face stamped with all the association of Varennes. It
was the face of Drouet.
He spoke to her as a deputy from the Municipality (to which he now
belonged), to ask whether she had anything to complain of. She
resolutely maintained her sullen silence; she turned her face away and
treated him as though he were not there, and he on his part threw his
arms up in a gesture of resignation, then bowed to her and went out.
The royal people had colds in November and waited through a shivering
month what could not but be the approach of some very evil thing. Upon
the 6th, one of those scraps of news—positive news and ill—which reached
them like patches of clear light in the midst of murky fears and
rumours, was granted to the prisoners. The Committee of Parliament had
reported upon Louis’ case: an indictment was framed; he would certainly
be tried.
To such an advance of misfortune the Queen could only oppose the fixed
hope that in some way or other the regular armies of the Old World
_must_ break through. They had been checked at Valmy, nay, they had
retreated. But surely they _could not but_ return, and brush aside at
last the raw and formless rags of the French volunteers. _They could not
but._ The old regulated armies, the peace of mind, the brilliant
uniforms, the vast prestige of German arms, the leadership of
gentlemen—sanity, cleanliness, and the approval of educated men—these
_must_ at last destroy those mere composite mobs, half regulars, half
forced levies; sodden, mutinous, ill-fed, ill-clothed, officered as best
might be, untutored and untutorable, which her gaolers had flung
together in a sort of delirium, hotch-potch, to make a confused covering
against the governing classes of Europe who were advancing in defence of
all the decencies of this world.
As the Royal Family so hoped against hope, that ill-conditioned
crowd—old soldiers relaxed in discipline, young enthusiasts who drank,
sickly and grumbling volunteers, veterans hoping for revenge against the
harsh experience of years (a dangerous type), company-officers of a
week’s standing (put side by side with others of twenty years), captains
in boyhood and lieutenants at forty—this welter was jumbled all together
under the anxious eye of Dumouriez, along a valley of the frontier, on
the muddy banks of the river called Hate—La Haine.
I know the place: low banks that rise in the distance into hills are
overlooked far up stream and down by the fantastic belfry of Mons and
its huge church dominating the plain. Dumouriez, deeply doubting his
rabble but knowing the temper of his own people, poured the young men
and the old across the line of the river, leading them with the
Marseillaise. Among the villages of the assaulted line Jemappes has
given its name to the charge. By the evening of that same day, the 6th
of November, the Austrian force was destroyed, a third of its men lay
upon the field or had deserted, the rest were beating off in a pressed
retreat, eastward and away. The rabble should have failed and had
succeeded.
I have said that for Valmy no explanation has as yet been given. For
Jemappes there are many explanations: that the Austrians had attempted
to hold too long a strategic line and were outnumbered at the chief
tactical point of the battle: that their excellent cavalry (the French
in this arm were deplorable) had not been allowed to hold their left
long enough: that one passage of the river was accidental and could not
have been foreseen (a bad commentary on any action!). But the true cause
of that temporary yet decisive achievement was to be found in two forms
of energy: rapidity in marching and in the handling of guns—but such
criticisms do not concern this book.[30]
Footnote 30:
These two military qualities are present to-day capitally among the
French, and may at any moment reappear in the discussions of modern
Europe.
Of this victory, coincident with the beginning of the King’s agony,
Marie Antoinette for days could know nothing, and even when the rumour
reached her it was but the victorious shouting in the streets and a name
or two whispered by a servant that gave her a passing impression that
her champions had suffered a further check—no more. Yet before that tide
should flow back and finally swamp the French packed in Leipsig, twenty
years must pass, and not till then should the Kings and the Lords at
last see Paris from a hill.
[Illustration:
SANSON’S LETTER ASKING THE AUTHORITIES WHAT STEPS HE IS
TO TAKE FOR THE EXECUTION OF THE KING
]
There is one detail in connection with Jemappes which the reader must
know because it does so illustrate the myriad coincidences of the
Queen’s life:—
That child whom she had seen and adopted during her early childless
years, when her fever of youth and exasperation was upon her, that child
which for a moment had supplied to the girl something of maternity, had
now grown to manhood. The birth of her own daughter had long ago driven
out any recollection of the whim: the peasant boy of St. Michel was
forgotten. He had grown into his teens full of the bitterness which
irresponsible and spasmodic patronage can so vigorously breed. During
the days of October he had been recognised among the wildest of those
who attacked the palace in Versailles; he had shouted for the Nation; he
had enlisted and was there at Jemappes, an obscure volunteer among the
thousands whom Dumouriez forced forward upon the frontier. He was
present upon the 6th of November upon the bank of the Haine when the
mixed battalions charged, singing: a bullet struck him and he fell down
dead. She, the Queen, was there a prisoner in her dimly-lit room at
night—separated from the father of the children who slept near by: her
mind was big with the new doom of his Indictment and Trial which the
dull day had brought her. Eighteen years before she had caught up that
peasant baby in the Louveciennes road and kissed it, her eyes full of
tears, and in her heart a violent yearning half-virginal, half-maternal:
he, however, lay dead that same night in the Hainault mud with the
autumn rain upon his body: his name was Jacques Amand.
* * * * *
With December there was some little respite, for a new Municipality had
been elected that was a trifle more moderate than the old; but in
general this life of hers, with its calm, its dread and its monotony,
continued. Now it contained some act of humiliation, as when all razors
and sharp-edged things were taken from the King (upon the 7th); now some
indulgence, as when (upon the 9th) a clavecin was allowed the Queen—and
it is said that from curiosity she played upon this, later, the new
notes of the Marseillaise.
For a few hours the Dauphin was taken from her. It was her turn to ask
questions of the guards, and theirs to be silent; she asked
distractedly: they did not reply: but the child returned.
The affair of the Trial proceeded rapidly. The briefs were gathered; the
King’s counsel met the King day after day in the apartment below, and
she stayed above there alone with her children and was still. She had no
communications with him at all save when at Christmas, after he had
drafted his will, he wrote to the Convention and caused a short message
to be conveyed to the Queen. It was perhaps during these days that she
wrote upon a fly-leaf which is still preserved in St. Germain, “_Oportet
unum mori pro populo_.”
Louis, as the new year broke, saluted it sadly. Within a fortnight he
had been pronounced guilty at the bar of the Parliament before which he
was arraigned—guilty, that is, of intrigue with the foreigner and of
abetting the invasion. Upon the 17th of January 1793 it was known in his
prison that his penalty would be death. Again did Marie Antoinette hear
in the room below the step of Malesherbes, her husband’s counsel, coming
upon that day to confer with the King, but this time he came to speak
not of defence but of death. A respite was denied to Louis. Upon the
20th his prayer for three days in which he might prepare to meet God was
again refused, and his execution was fixed for the morrow. His sentence
was read to him in his prison: he heard it quietly: and thus upon that
20th of January (a Sunday), a murky evening and cold, when it was quite
dark the Princesses heard in the street a newspaper-seller crying the
news that the King must die; the hollow word “_la mort_,” very deep and
lugubrious, repeated and repeated in the chanting tones of that trade,
floated up from the winter streets.
It was eight o’clock when they were told that they might go down with
the children and see the King.
The Family met together and for a little time were silent.
* * * * *
The spell was on them which we never mention—one which the inmost mind
refuses—I mean that fear....
[Illustration:
AUTOGRAPH DEMAND OF LOUIS XVI FOR A RESPITE OF THREE DAYS
]
During this long isolation of theirs they had become very fixed upon the
matter of the Catholic Faith, but that fear pervaded them as the Church
has said that it must always pervade the last hours. This human curse,
too sacred for rhetoric and too bewildering to occupy a just and
reasonable prose, I will abandon, content only to have written it
down—for it was the air and the horror of that night.
For not quite two hours they sat together, not speaking much, for all
understood, except the little boy: he was sad as children are, up to
their usual pitch of sadness, for any loss, great or small, which they
do not understand: he saw his own sister, a child older than he, and all
his grown-up elders thus crushed, and he also was full of his little
sorrow. He knew at least that his father was going away.
The King, seated with his wife on his left and his sister at his right
hand, drew the boy towards him and made him stand between his knees. He
recited to him, as it is proper to recite to children, words whose
simplicity they retain but whose full purport they cannot for the moment
understand. He told the child never to avenge his death, and, since
oaths are more sacred than repeated words, he took and lifted up his
small right hand. Then, knowing that the will of the sufferer alone can
put a due term to such scenes, he rose. His wife he pressed to his
shoulder. She caught and grasped to her body her little children—to hold
so much at least firm in this world that was breaking from around her.
She knew that Louis desired them to leave, and she said, after she had
wildly sworn that she would stay all night and the children with her
(which he would not have):
“Promise that you will see us again?”
“I will see you in the morning,” he answered, “before ... I go. At
eight.”
“It must be earlier,” she said, not yet releasing him.
“It shall be earlier, by half-an-hour.”
“Promise me.”
He repeated his promise, and the two women turned to the great oaken,
nail-studded door; helping the fainting girl, and taking the child by
the hand, they went out to the winding stair of stone. It was a little
after ten.
When the iron outer door had shut and he knew the women and the children
to be above, out of hearing, Louis turned to his guards and gave this
order, that, in spite of what he had said, the women should not be told
in the morning of his departure, for that neither he nor they could
suffer it.
Then he went into the turret chamber where the Priest was, and said:
“Let me address myself to the unique affair.”
But above, from the room whose misery could just be heard, the Queen,
when she had put her boy to bed and kissed him bitterly, threw herself
upon her own bed all dressed, and throughout the darkness of the whole
night long her daughter could hear her shuddering with cold and anguish.
That night there was a murmur all around the Tower, for very many in
Paris were watching, and through the drizzling mist there came, hour by
hour, the distant rumble of cannon, and the sharp cries of command, and
men marching by companies up the narrow Temple lane.
It was the very January dark, barely six of the morning, when a guard
from the King’s room came up the stair. The Queen from above heard him
coming. Her candle was lit—her fixed gaze expected him.... He entered,
but as he spoke her heart failed her: he had not come for the summons,
he had but come for the King’s book of prayers. She waited the full hour
until seven struck in the steeples of the town, and the pale light began
to grow: she waited past the moment of her husband’s promise, till
eight, till the full day—but no one came. Still she sat on, not knowing
what might not have come between to delay their meeting: doors opening
below, steps coming and going on the stairs, held all her mind. But no
one sent for her, no one called her. It was nine when a more general
movement made her half hope, half fear. The sound of that movement,
which was the movement of many men, passed downward to the first
storeys, to the ground, and was lost. An emptiness fell upon the Tower.
Then she knew that her hope had departed.
For a moment there were voices in the courtyard, the tramp of many men
upon the damp gravel, the creaking of the door, more distant steps in
the garden, and the wheels of the coach far away at the outer porch.
Then the confused noise of a following crowd dwindling westward till
nothing remained but a complete silence in those populous streets, now
deserted upon so great a public occasion.
[Illustration:
REPORT OF THE COMMISSIONERS THAT ALL IS DULY ARRANGED
FOR THE BURIAL OF LOUIS CAPET AFTER HIS EXECUTION
]
For yet another hour the silence endured unbroken: ten o’clock struck
amid that silence, and the quarter.... The Queen heard through the
shuttered window the curious and dreadful sound of a crowd that roars
far off, and she knew that the thing had been done.
Life returned into the streets beneath, the loud shrill call of the
news-men, crying the news accursedly, came much too shrill and too
distinct against the walls. All day long, on to the early closing of the
darkness, the mists gathered and lay thick over Paris and around her
high abandoned place.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XVIII
_THE HOSTAGE_
_From the 21st of January 1793 to three in the morning of the
2nd of August 1793_
THAT night the prisoners in the Tower did not sleep, saving the little
Dauphin: he slept soundly; and it is said of his mother that, watching
him, she murmured that he was of the age at which his brother had died,
at Meudon, and that those of her family who died earliest were the most
blessed. In the last silences of the January night, till past two in the
morning, the woman Tison, who was in part their gaoleress and in part a
spy upon them, heard them talking still, and when she came to them
Madame Elizabeth said: “For God’s sake leave us.”
[Illustration:
FIRST PAGE OF LOUIS XVI’S WILL
]
Cléry, the dead master’s valet, was taken away, still noting as he went
the new look in the Queen’s eyes. And in this same week there came the
mourning clothes which they had asked of the authorities and which had
been granted them. The Princess Royal fell ill. The Queen would no
longer walk in the garden now, and the child, lacking exercise—and with
bad blood—suffered. Her legs swelled badly. The authorities allowed the
man who had been the family doctor of the children in the old days to
come and visit them now. Brunier was his name, and in the old days Marie
Antoinette had affected to ridicule his middle-class energy: she thought
he lacked respect to the clay of which she and her children were made.
She was glad enough to see him now, and he was devoted. He was allowed
to call in a surgeon and to bring in linen. Nor was he their only
communication with the external world, for though the sound and the news
of it did not reach them, yet they were not as modern prisoners are,
denied companionship. Upon the pretext or with the real excuse that the
mourning clothes did not fit, a dressmaker whom they had known was
allowed in; and in general, as will be seen in a moment, there were
methods of communication between them and those who desired to know
every moment of their captivity and every accident of their fate. From
the close of January onwards into the summer, five months, it is
possible to establish no precise chronology of their actions, but it is
possible to decide the general tenour of their lives: save in one
particular, which is that we cannot determine to-day what exactly were
the relations between the Queen and those who would rescue her or who
could give her news of the outer world—especially Fersen.
We have of course several accounts furnished by eye-witnesses, notably
the account of Turgy, who was their sole servant in their prison; but
these accounts, and that account especially, are tinged with the very
obvious atmosphere of the Restoration. Quite poor people, writing on the
suggestion of a powerful government at a time when every laudatory or
illuminating detail upon the imprisonment of the Royal Family had its
high money value, must, however honest, be somewhat suspect. For the
most honest man or woman the conditions of the Restoration were such
that there would be an inevitable tendency to exaggeration; and we have
no evidence available of the exact characters of the witnesses. Still
the witnesses are witnesses, and though an elaborate code of signals
(which some of them pretend) probably did not exist, yet we know both
from Fersen himself and from the way in which affairs were conducted on
either side, that not a little communication was established between the
widowed Queen and the Royalists outside. To more than that general
statement no historian can commit himself, unless he be one of those
belated university types who will trust a printed or a written document
beyond their own common sense.
It must be remembered that during the first two months after the death
of the King, that is, during all February and March 1793, the exalted
and the noble minds of the Gironde were still at the head of that
executive power which is in France (since the French have no
aristocracy) the whole of government. Nay, they remained technically the
heads of the Executive until the end of May 1793, though their power was
touched by the establishment of the Revolutionary Tribunal on the
proposal of the Radicals in March, and undermined by the establishment
of the Committee of Public Safety on the proposal of Danton in early
April.
The Girondins and the Municipality of Paris were at odds. The
Municipality itself was not homogeneous. The guarding of the Queen,
which was the business of the Municipality, was not uniform. The
Municipality had to choose many men to relieve each other in relays; and
of these, two, Toulan and Lepitre, tended, at least after a little
experience of their prisoners, to show them sympathy. One of their
officers, Michonis, did more and would have saved her.
From time to time a newspaper would be smuggled in to these Princesses;
it is said that music played from a window whence they could hear it,
conveyed signals, and at any rate it is certain that Fersen had some
news of them.
Now Fersen at this moment, in early February that is, bad as his
judgment of French affairs was, appreciated their situation in a phrase.
He called the Queen “a hostage,” and this describes very accurately the
meaning of her captivity.
I repeat, no one can understand the Revolution who does not treat it as
a military thing, and no one can understand military affairs who
imagines them to be an anarchy. Of necessity a brain directs them, for
if in military affairs a plan be lacking, the weakest opposing plan can
always conquer. It was not cruelty nor love of vengeance that dominated
the position of the prisoners. They were an asset.
But though their value was recognised and their imprisonment was part of
a diplomatic arrangement, yet there were different policies regarding
them. The Radicals, the Mountain, were at once the most enthusiastic and
the most practical of the Revolutionary groups. They were not in power,
they had not a permanent majority in the Parliament though they had
Paris behind them, but they saw clearly that France was in to win: they
saw clearly (first Danton, then in succession to him Carnot) that every
general action lost, every fortress in a chain surrendered, was the
approach not of some neutral or balancing arrangement, but of a full,
complete and ruthless reaction in Europe without and in France within.
It had come to winning all or losing all. The nobler Girondin blood that
still controlled the Republic knew too little of the vices of men to
follow that calculation. The Girondins still believed that in some
mystic way a steady adherence to the Republican ideal—the volunteer
soldier as against the conscript, the citizen controlling the soldier,
the locality governing itself—man absolute—was a thing so high that no
human circumstance could wound it. They thought it bound to survive
through some force inherent in justice.
Within three weeks of the execution of Louis all Europe was banded
against the Republic, and one may say, morally, all the Christian world,
for even the distant and ill-informed Colonials of Philadelphia and
Virginia had recoiled nervously at the news of a King’s execution. The
pressure of that general war against the Republic was to give, by what
fools call the logic of events, a most powerful aid to the practical and
savage determination of the Mountain: it was to squeeze to death the
idealism of the Girondins.
While yet these last were in power there were plots for the escape of
the prisoners, plots which failed; and their treatment, even in minor
details (as the allowing them to take their own form of exercise and the
leaving of them as much as possible alone) was easy. Little objects left
by the King were conveyed to the Queen from the upper room, and
Jarjayes, a friend, saw that they reached the King’s brothers. Had the
impossible attempt of the Girondins performed the miracle which they who
had called on this miraculous war demanded, had the patchy volunteer
forces of the French found it possible to conquer in those early months
of ’93, the treatment of the prisoners would have gone from better to
better; their release by negotiation would soon have arrived, if not by
negotiation then from mere mercy. This same Jarjayes, who had been
Marshal of the camp and was husband to one of the Queen’s women, found
things so easy that he could weave a definite plot for the escape of the
Royal Prisoners. Why it failed we do not know, though of course the
Royalist evidence we have ascribes it to a special virtue in the Queen,
who refused to be separated from her children. In the first week of
March the first plan failed, on account of a violent reaction towards
severity on the part of the authorities following the first military
reverses in the Netherlands. The second plan is better attested, and
there is here a sufficient concurrence of witnesses to make us believe
that some hesitation of the Queen’s did cause its final failure. She
would have had to flee alone, and it is on the whole just to decide that
she refused; for we have it on the authority of a fairly honest man that
the Princess Royal had some memory of this incident of her childhood and
had spoken to him on it, while Chauveau-Lagarde (who was later the
Queen’s counsel during her trial) has left a copy of a note of hers
saying that she would not fly alone without her children. Of other
supposed communications between her and Jarjayes we have only his copy
of her writing.[31] At any rate, with the last days of March all this
early phase of the Queen’s widowed captivity comes to an end. Dumouriez
and the French armies lost the great and decisive action of Neerwinden
upon the 18th of the month, and in the last week of it, though the
Committee of Public Safety was not yet formed to establish martial law
throughout the Republic and to save the State, yet new rigours began.
Footnote 31:
I can pay but little attention to evidence of that kind. In the case
of Fersen there are reasons for his destroying the originals: he was
the recipient of her passionate affection. Moreover, we know his
nature well: he had all the Northern simplicity, and with that intense
passion of his, he would have thought it sacrilege to ascribe a single
word to her that she had not written or to make fiction out of her
beloved soul. Moreover, he cared little whether posterity knew or did
not know the things he chose to bequeath to his heirs. In the case of
inferior men with an obvious axe to grind, and proud, whatever their
loyalty, to be intermediaries between the Hostage and her rescuers,
the evidence of mere copies which they alone can certify is of very
little value.
The woman Tison and her husband—half the gaolers, half the spies of the
family, as I have said—were not permitted to leave the Tower of the
Temple. Pencils were forbidden. Upon the 25th of March a chimney fire
was a pretext for the appearance of Chaumette coming from the Commune of
Paris. He returned the next day with the Mayor Pache, and with Santerre,
the man of the fall of the Bastille, the rich leader of the popular
militia; in those same hours Dumouriez at the head of the defeated
French Army was receiving the general of the Austrian forces and
negotiating treason. He was about to join hands with the enemy and to
propose a march on Paris. The first demand for the Queen’s trial was
made—by Robespierre: a week and Dumouriez’ treason was accomplished: the
chief general of the Republic had despaired of France and had gone over
to the Austrian camp with the design of marching on Paris and at least
restoring order; his army had refused to follow him, but the shock was
enormous. Paris won; the Girondins lost. The Committee of Public Safety
was established.
The Terror was born; and the Revolution, acting under martial law, went
forward to loose everything at once or to survive by despotism and by
arms.
* * * * *
Thence onward Marie Antoinette’s imprisonment becomes another matter. On
the 20th of April there came into her prison men whose tone and manner
would never have been allowed before: the chief of the “Madmen,” as the
populace called them, the intense Republicans who would believe anything
of a Bourbon, Hébert, came into the prison. He came at night. By
coincidence or by design her terrors for the future were to be terrors
of the night. It was near eleven when his dandy, meagre figure and thin,
pointed face appeared to terrify her, and for five hours the whole place
was searched and ransacked. Her little son, already ailing, she had to
lift from his bed while they felt the mattress and the very walls to see
what might be hidden. They took from Madame Elizabeth her stick of
sealing-wax, her pencil—which had no lead to it—and they took with them
a little scapular of the Sacred Heart and a prayer for France—but the
France for which the Princesses had this written prayer was not the
nation.
On the 23rd they came again and found nothing but an old hat of the
King’s, which his sister kept as a sort of relic and had put under her
bed. It was taken for granted (and justly) that communication had been
established between the prisoners and the Kings outside. A denunciation
of Lepitre, Toulan and the rest, failed, but Toulan and Lepitre were
struck off the list of guards.
With the end of May the populace, supported and permitted by the new
Committee of Public Safety, conquered the lingering Moderate majority,
and the Committee of Public Safety was left without rivals; it began
from that moment to direct the war with the leonine courage and
ferocity, the new and transcendent intelligence, the ruthless French
lucidity which ultimately at Wattignies saved the State.
Upon the victory of Paris and the Mountain, the destruction of the
Moderates, the establishment of martial law, the despotism of the
Committee of Public Safety, came the last phase of the Queen’s
imprisonment—and with it, by a most evil coincidence or portent, the
growing illness of the little heir, her son. Sharp pains in his side,
convulsions, the doctor sent for in the early part of May, and again
towards its end, and again in June, things going from bad to worse with
him.
To these prisoners, shut away from men, the movement of that world was
unknown. They only knew that something was surging all round the thick,
obliterating, impenetrable walls of their Tower.[32] On the day when the
populace conquered the Girondins, all they knew was that they were not
allowed even upon the roof, from which, upon most days for some hour or
so, they might take the air and look down upon the slates of
revolutionary Paris far below; and during June when the new power of the
Committee and of martial law, of the Terror, of the determination of the
Revolution, of the city, was fixing itself firmly in the saddle, they
knew nothing of what was passing, save perhaps from a growing insolence
in their guards.
Footnote 32:
The walls, to be accurate, were nine feet thick, and the windows were
like tunnels.
In that same month yet another plot for their escape failed. It depended
upon two men; the one a certain Batz, on whom our information is most
confused and our evidence most doubtful, as indeed his own character and
his own memories were doubtful and confused (he was a sort of enthusiast
who had already attempted many impossible things); the other, a
character quite clearly comprehended, one Michonis. Batz was a kind of
baron; Michonis was, like Toulan and Lepitre, of the Municipality and
had regular authority. He will be seen again in the last plot to save
the Queen. Of whatever nature was this uncertain attempt, it also
failed. Shortly after the woman Tison diversified their lives by going
mad with great suddenness and suffering a fit. She was removed; and the
incident is only of note because certain pamphleteers have called it a
judgment of God. Yet her wage was small.
Upon the day after that unusual accident, the growing suspicion of the
popular party against what was left of Moderate administration in
Government broke out in a furious denunciation of actual and supposed
conspiracies. It was feared that the great mass of suspects now gathered
into the prisons possessed some engine for revolt. An extreme policy in
diplomacy and in arms, as in internal government, finally prevailed, and
with the 1st of July this ardent severity took the form of a decree,
passed in the now enfeebled and captured Parliament, that the
Dauphin—the greatest asset of all—should be separated from his mother
and put, though in the same building, under a different guard.
* * * * *
It is not to be imagined that so large a transformation of policy
between the execution of the King and the decree for the separation of
the Dauphin had, in any part of it, a mainspring other than the war. I
have said that the steps of the spring, the destruction of the Gironde
by the Mountain, the capture by Paris of the Parliament were but the
effects of the collapse of the Volunteer rush at Neerwinden, the treason
of Dumouriez and the new—and necessary—martial law that henceforward
bound the Republic. All the last rigours of the imprisonment depended
upon the same catastrophe.
The enemy that had been checked at Valmy, and had been attacked in the
winter but half-prepared, the enemy that had suffered the French gallop
to overwhelm the Netherlands and to occupy Mayence—was returning. The
Republicans were out of Belgium, the armies of the Kings were flooding
back upon the Rhine. The Rhine and Alsace depended upon two
things—Mayence, and, behind it, shielding Alsace, the lines of
Weissembourg that stretched from the river to the mountains. Mayence was
to fall, the lines of Weissembourg were to be pierced. As for the Belgic
frontier, there a line of fortresses could check for a moment the
advance of the Allies—for the French fortify: they are in this the heirs
of Rome; and whenever they suffer defeat the theory of fortification is
belittled; in the resurrections of their military power the spade goes
forward, borne upon the shoulders of Gaul.
In this July of 1793 the Belgic frontier only perilously held. The
sieges were at hand and the fall of the frontier strongholds was at
hand. These once conquered, it was proposed by Austria, Prussia, and
England to dismember the territory of the Republic. To all this I will
return.
* * * * *
It was upon the 1st of July, with the enemy advancing, that it was
proposed to take the Dauphin from the Queen.
Upon the evening of the 3rd the order was executed.
It was but just dark when the guard challenged a patrol at the gate of
the Tower; the patrol was the escort of six Municipals who had come from
the authorities of the city to take the person of the child.
The women within the prison had had no warning. The same Fate which had
been kind to them in making a silence all around their lives during
these dreadful months and in hiding from them the dangers that rose
around was cruel to them now, leaving them unprepared for this sudden
and tearing wound. There was a candle in the room and by its light the
little girl, the Princess Royal, read out aloud—from a book of Prayers,
it is said—to her aunt and her mother, the Queen. These two women sewed
as they listened; they were mending the clothes of the children. The
little boy slept in his bed in the same room: his mother had hung a
shawl to hide the light from his eyes. Save for his regular breathing
there was no sound to interrupt the high, monotonous voice of the little
girl as she read on, when suddenly her elders heard upon the floors
below the advent of new authorities and of a message. The steps of six
men came louder up the stone stairs, the doors opened as though to a
military command, and the Princesses saw, crowding in the corner of the
small room, a group whose presence they did not understand, though among
them the Queen recognised Michonis. The reading stopped, the women
turned round but did not rise, the child stirred in his sleep. One of
that group spoke first before the Queen could question them. “We have
come,” he said, “by order of the House, to tell you that the separation
of Capet’s son from his mother has been voted.”
Then the Queen rose. Never until now had she abandoned before any but
her husband, or perhaps in the very intimacy of the Council, the
restraint which she believed her rank to demand. The violence of her
blood had been apparent in many a petulant and many an undignified
gesture; she had raised her voice against many a deputation; she had
sneered more than once against women of a poorer kind; she had thrown at
La Fayette the keys which he demanded on their return to the palace
after the flight to Varennes; but she had never yet lost command of
herself. Upon this terrible night, for the only time in her life, she
did completely lose all her self-command. Something confused her like a
madness, and all the intensity of her spirit came out nakedly in defence
of the child.
[Illustration:
ORDER OF THE COMMITTEE OF PUBLIC SAFETY IN CAMBON’S
HANDWRITING, DIRECTING THE DAUPHIN TO BE SEPARATED FROM HIS MOTHER
]
She stood up by the little bed; all her complexity of pride and all her
training in intrigue deserted her; she cried out; she took refuge in
such weapons as the women of the poor, whom no law protects, use to
defend their sanctities. Her voice rang, became shrill and shrieked in
the little room, violent and rising; she threatened death; next moment
she implored. Her little daughter and her sister-in-law caught her
methods. They joined in the imprecations and in the prayers. The child
was awakened by the noise, by the shuffling of so many awkward and heavy
feet in the doorway, by the passionate outcries around him; he awoke and
gazed; then when he saw his mother he clung to her, and she kissed him
repeatedly and held him as though he were again part of herself and as
though none could take him from her without taking her life also, and
all the while her prayers and execrations showered upon the armed men as
they stood hesitating apart and waiting.
How long this scene continued we cannot tell; it may have been the best
part of an hour.[33] At last some one of the deputation found decision
and cried, “Why will you make this scene? No one wants to kill your son!
Let him go freely; we could take him—if you force us to that!”
Footnote 33:
The Duchesse d’Angoulême, the little girl then present, said, years
after, that it lasted a full hour, but such memories are
untrustworthy.
She lifted the little boy up and dressed him, his eyes still dazed with
sleep. She lingered over him with conventional benedictions, repeated
and prolonged. Her hands could not let him go. Fearing some further
violence, a member of the deputation muttered a suggestion for the
guard; but the Queen’s active passion was exhausted, she would be
violent no more. She herself, perhaps, loosened his little hands from
her dress and said, “Come, you must obey....” Then they took him away;
the great door was shut upon him. The women within, trembling beside the
cot, could still hear the child pleading with a lessening voice in the
distance until another door clanged below and the rest of the night was
silent.
* * * * *
God has made a law whereby women are moved by strength and by weakness,
but in different ways: by strength as a necessity for their protection,
so that they demand it in men and in things and yet perpetually rebel
against it; and by weakness as an opportunity for the exercise of all
their nature, so that suffering (if it is sudden) or disaster calls out
in women all of themselves: and this is especially true of mothers and
sons.
That child, that boy, had seemed at first so rosy and so well in the old
days at Versailles; his health had so contrasted with the sickly advance
of Death upon his elder brother; he had been the hope of the throne.
Then there had come upon him the curse of the _men_ of his family; he
had grown weaker and more weak; he had had nervous fits of rage, a
nervous fear of noise unnatural to his age. Some had thought him
deficient; all had noted with anxiety or with malice his increasing
weakness during the period of the Royal Family’s imprisonment. Fits had
seized him. But a few weeks before he had had convulsions; and all June,
during the illness of which I have spoken, fears for him had already
arisen: it was a rapid tragedy of childhood that was soon to end in
death.[34] His mother’s devotion—having him now only for its object in
the isolation of those stone walls—had become the whole of her being.
That he had grown so dull, so failing, so more than common sickly, so
odd, did but heighten in some way the mystic feeling in her. He was the
KING.... She was observed to pay him a certain reverence, and she served
him at table (as spies thought at least) with the gravity of a
ceremonial. All this at one abominable stroke she lost.
Footnote 34:
I take for granted the death of Louis XVII. in prison; it is
certified, it is clear, and even were it not so the progress of his
disease compels such a conclusion: but this book is not the place for
a discussion upon the question, nor could so considerable a debate be
discussed even in an Appendix.
She would watch him—oh, unhappy woman!—through chinks and chance places
when the little chap was taken out to get the air, with gaolers, upon
the roof for some few minutes of the day. He, of course, easily and at
once forgot. He soon learnt to repeat the phrases he heard around him,
laughed when his guardians laughed, and even asked, as he heard them
ask, “whether the women still lived?” He played at ball a little with
his gaolers; but he weakened still and he decayed. That child was the
head of an authority older than Islam, and the heir to a family name
older than the Sagas, and in his little drooping body were all the
rights of the Capetians.
The Queen saw him, I say, for a few moments—now upon one day, now upon
another—by chance, as he took the air with his gaolers. She had nothing
more to lose—and her soul was broken.
[Illustration:
July-October 1793.
ELEMENTS OF THE STRATEGIC POSITION
]
* * * * *
Those who were to destroy the new society of the French, to rescue or to
avenge the Queen, were now once more at hand and now almost arrived.
Their way to Paris lay open but for two last perilous and endangered
defences; to the right the lines of Weissembourg, to the left Maubeuge.
There are two avenues of approach westward into the heart of Gaul and
two only. The great marches of the French eastward, which are the
recurrent flood-tides of European history, pour up by every channel,
cross the Alps at every pass, utilise the narrow gate of Belfort, the
narrower gate of the Rhone, the gorge of the Meuse, the Cerdagne, the
Somport, Roncesvalles. But in the ebb, when the outer peoples of Europe
attempt invasion, two large ways alone satisfy that necessity at once
for concentration and for a wide front which is essential to any attack
upon a people permanently warlike.[35] These two ways pass, the one
between the Vosges and the Ardennes, the other between the Ardennes and
the sea. By the first of these have come hosts from Attila’s to those of
1870; by the second, hosts from the little war-band of Clovis to the
Allies of 1815. Both avenues were involved in this balancing moment of
’93: the first, the passage by Lorraine, was still blocked by the
defence of Mayence and the lines of Weissembourg;[36] the second, the
passage by the Low Countries, was all but won. Of the string of
fortresses defending that passage, Maubeuge was now almost the last,
would soon be the very last, to stand.
Footnote 35:
These words “concentration” and “a wide front” may seem
self-contradictory. I mean by concentration a massed invasion, if you
are to succeed against a military people; and by “a wide front” the
necessity for attacking such a people in several places at once, if
you are to succeed. For a force marching by a single narrow gate (such
as is the valley of the Meuse) is in peril of destruction if its
opponents are used to war.
Footnote 36:
The lines of Weissembourg did not, of course, physically block the
entry; they lay on the flank of it: but until the army behind them
could be dislodged it made impossible an advance by that way into
Lorraine.
It was not upon Mayence and the lines of Weissembourg (though these to
soldiers seemed of equal importance), it was upon the bare plains of the
north that Paris strained its eyes in these perilous hot days—the long
flat frontier of Hainault and of Flanders—and it is here that the reader
must look for his background to the last agony of the Queen.
The line of defence, stretched like a chain across that long flat
frontier, was breaking down, had almost disappeared. Point after point
upon the line had gone; it held now by one point remaining, and the ruin
of that was imminent: the Republicans were attentive, in a fever for the
final crash, when the last pin-point upon which the defence was
stretched should give way and the weight of the invaders should pour
unresisted upon Paris. When that march began there would be nothing for
those who had challenged the world but “to cover their faces and to
die.”
Of what character is that north-eastern frontier of France and what in
military terms was the nature of the blow which was about to fall?
It is a frontier drawn irregularly due south-east for a hundred miles,
from the sea to the difficult highlands of Ardennes and the waste Fagne
Land. As it runs thus irregularly, it cuts arbitrarily through a belt of
population which is one in creed, speech, and tradition: there is
therefore no moral obstacle present to the crossing of it, and to this
moral facility of passage is added the material facility that no evident
gates or narrows constrain an invading army to particular entries. From
the dead flat of the sea-coast the country rises slowly into little easy
hills and slopes of some confusion, but not till that frontier reaches
and abuts against the Ardennes does any obstacle mark it. It is
traversed by a score of main roads suitable for a parallel advance, all
excellent in surface and in bridges and other artifice; it is thickly
set with towns and villages to afford repose and supply. Lastly, it is
the nearest point of attack to Paris. Once forced, ten days’ rapid
marching from that frontier brings the invader to the capital, and there
is nothing between.
Such advantages—which, it is said, tempt unstable brains in Berlin
to-day—have rendered this line, whenever some powerful enemy held its
further side, of supreme defensive importance to the French. Until the
formation of the Belgian State it had been for centuries—from the battle
of Bouvines at least—the front of national defence; here the tradition
of the seventeenth century and the genius of Vauban and his successors
had established a network of strongholds, which formed the barrier now
so nearly destroyed in this summer of ’93.
These fortresses ran along that frontier closely interdependent, every
one a support to its neighbours, forming a narrowing wedge of
strongholds, from where Dunkirk upon the sea was supported by Gravelines
to where the whole system came to a point in the last fortress and camp
of Maubeuge, close up against the impassable Ardennes.
Maubeuge was the pivot of that door. Upon Maubeuge the last effort of
the invaders would be made. The rolling up of the defending line of
strongholds would proceed until Maubeuge alone should be left to menace
the advance of the invasion. Maubeuge once fallen, all the Revolution
also fell.
So much has been written to explain the failure of the Allies and the
ultimate triumph of France in that struggle, that this prime truth—the
all-importance of Maubeuge—clear enough to the people of the time, has
grown obscured.[37] The long debates of the Allies, the policy of the
Cabinet in London, the diversion upon Dunkirk, all these and many other
matters are given a weight far beyond their due in the military problem
of ’93. The road from the base of the Allies to their objective in Paris
lay right through the quadrilateral of fortresses, Mons, Condé,
Valenciennes, Maubeuge. Mons was theirs; Condé, Valenciennes and
Maubeuge blocked their advance at its outset. A deflection to the left
was rendered impossible by the Ardennes. A deflection to the right,
possible enough, added, for every degree of such deflection, an added
peril to the communication of the advance, laying the flank of the
communications open to attack from whatever French garrison might have
been left uncaptured. All these garrisons must be accounted for before
Coburg could march on Paris. Mons, as I have said, was in Austrian hands
and in Austrian territory; Condé, nay, Valenciennes, might fall
successively to the invader; but so long as Maubeuge remained untaken
the march upon Paris was blocked.
Footnote 37:
The great authority of Jomini laid the foundation of this
misconception, one which the reader might (perhaps erroneously) find
implied in Mr. Fortescue’s admirable account of this campaign; but the
truth is that it is impossible to accumulate detail—as a military
historian is bound to do—especially where long cordons are opposed to
each other, without danger of losing sight of the vital points of the
line.
There were not wanting at that moment critics who demanded an immediate
march on the capital, especially as the summer waxed, as the peril of
the Queen increased, and as the immobility of the Allies gave time for
the martial law of the Terror to do its work, and to raise its swarms of
recruits from all the country-sides: these critics were in error; Coburg
at the head of the Austrian army was right. Poor as was the quality of
the French troops opposed to him, and anarchic as was their constantly
changing command, to have left a place of refuge whither they could
concentrate and whence they could operate in a body upon his lengthening
communications, as he pressed on to Paris through hostile country, would
have been mad cavalry work, not generalship. Maubeuge with its
entrenched camp, Maubeuge open to continual reinforcement from all the
French country that lay south and west of it, was essential to his final
advance. That Maubeuge stood untaken transformed the war, and, in spite
of every disturbing factor in the complex problem, it should be a fixed
datum in history that the resistance of Maubeuge and the consequent
charge at Wattignies decided ’93 as surely as the German artillery at
St. Privat decided 1870. Maubeuge was the hinge of all the campaign.
Coburg, as the summer heightened, set out to pocket one by one the
supports of that last position: he easily succeeded.
* * * * *
In Paris a vague sense of doom filled all the leaders, but a fever of
violent struggle as well.... The Queen in her prison saw once again (and
shuddered at it) the dark face of Drouet and heard his threatening
voice.
All France had risen. There was civil war in the west and in the north.
A Norman woman had murdered Marat. Mayence was strictly held all round
about with the men of Marseilles raging within; and as for the Barrier
of Fortresses to the north, Coburg now held them in the hollow of his
hand.
* * * * *
A fortnight after the Dauphin had been taken from the Queen, the
fortress of Condé fell; it had fallen from lack of food. The Council of
Maubeuge heard that news. Valenciennes would come next along the
line—then, they! They wrote to the Committee of Public Safety a letter,
which may still be read in the archives of the town, demanding
provisions. None came.
It is difficult to conceive the welter of the time: distracted orders
flying here and there along the hundred miles of cordon that stretched
from Ardennes to the channel: orders contradictory, unobeyed, or, if
obeyed, fatal. Commands shifted and reshifted; civilians from the
Parliament carrying the power of life and death and muddling half they
did; levies caught up at random, bewildered, surrendering, deserting;
recruits too numerous for the army to digest; a lack of all things. No
provisions entered Maubeuge.
July dragged on, and Maubeuge could hear down the west wind the
ceaseless booming of the guns round Valenciennes. Upon July 26th, Dubay,
the Representative on mission for the Parliament, sent to and
established in Maubeuge, heard an unusual silence. As the day drew on a
dread rose in him. The guns round Valenciennes no longer boomed. Only
rare shots from this point and from that were heard: perhaps it was the
weather deceived him. But all next day the same damnable silence hung
over the west. On the 30th he wrote to the Parliament: “We hear no
firing from Valenciennes—but we are confident they cannot have
surrendered.” They had surrendered.
So Valenciennes was gone!... Condé was gone.... Maubeuge alone remained,
with the little outpost of Le Quesnoy to delay a moment its necessary
investment and sure doom.
The officer in command of Maubeuge awaited his orders. They came from
Paris in two days. Their rhetoric was of a different kind from that in
which Ministers who are gentlemen of breeding address the General
Officers of their own society to-day. The Committee of Public Safety had
written thus: “Valenciennes has fallen: you answer on your head for
Maubeuge.”
Far off in Germany, where that other second avenue of invasion was in
dispute, the French in Mayence had surrendered.
* * * * *
So July ended, and immediately, upon the 1st of August, the defiant
decree was thrown at Europe that the Queen herself should be tried. So
closely did that decision mix with the military moment that it was
almost a military thing, and at half-past two on the morning of the 2nd
the order reached her: she in turn was to go down the way so many had
begun to tread.
She showed no movement of the body or of the mind. Night had already
brought her too many terrors. The two women were awakened. The decree of
the Convention which ordered the transference of the Queen to the
Conciergerie for her trial was read. She answered not a word, but
dressed herself and made a little package of her clothes; she embraced
her daughter gently, and bade her regard Madame Elizabeth as her second
mother; then stood for a moment or two in the arms of that sister-in-law
who answered her in whispers. She turned to go and did not look
backward, but as she went out to get into the carriage which was to
carry her across the City, she struck her head violently against the low
lintel of the door. They asked her if she was hurt, and she answered in
the first and only words that she addressed to her captors that nothing
more on earth could give her pain. The carriage travelled rapidly
through the deserted streets of the night, the clattering of the mounted
guard on either side of it. It was her one brief glimpse of the world
between a prison and a prison.
As the Queen drove through the night, silent as it was, there reached
her those noises of a City which never cease, and which to prisoners in
transition (to our gagged prison victims to-day as they cross London
from one Hell to another) are a sort of gaiety or at least a whiff of
other men’s living. These noises were the more alive and the more
perpetual in this horrid August dark of ’93 because a last agony was now
risen high upon the Revolution; the news had been of defeats, of cities
fallen, of Valenciennes itself surrendered: so that the next news might
be the last. All night long men sat up in the wine-shops quarrelling on
it; even as her gaolers drove her by, she saw lights in dirty
ground-floor windows and she heard from time to time snatches of
marching songs. It was the invasion.
[Illustration:
LAST PORTRAIT OF MARIE ANTOINETTE: BY KOCHARSKI
PRESUMABLY SKETCHED IN THE TEMPLE: NOW AT VERSAILLES
]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XIX
_THE HUNGER OF MAUBEUGE_
_From the morning of August 2, 1793, to midnight of Sunday,
October 13, 1793_
THE Queen descended from her carriage. She was weak but erect. The close
heat of the night and her sleeplessness and her fatigue had caused great
beads of sweat to stand upon her forehead. Up river along the quays
there had already showed, as she crossed the bridge on to the Island of
the Cité, a faint glimmer of dawn, but here in the courtyard of the
prison all was still thick night. The gates of the Conciergerie opened
rapidly and shut behind her.
Her gaolers led the way down a long, low, and dark corridor, stiflingly
close and warm, lit here and there with smoky candles. She heard the
murmur of voices, and saw at the end of the passage a group of the
police and of magistrates at the door of the little room that was to be
her cell. She entered through the throng, saw the official papers signed
at the miserable little table, and heard the formal delivery of her
person to the authorities of the prison; then they left her, and in
their place came in a kindly woman, the wife of the porter, and with her
a young girl, whose name she heard was Rosalie. The Queen sat down on
the straw-bottomed chair and glanced round by the light of the candle
beside her.
It was a little low room, quite bare: damp walls, the paper of which,
stamped with the royal fleur de lys, hung mildewed, rose from a yet
damper floor of brick set herringbone-wise; a small camp-bed covered
with the finest linen alone relieved it, and a screen, some four feet
high, between her and the door afforded some little shelter. Above her a
small barred window gave upon the paving of the prison yard, for the
cell was half underground. Here Custine—who had lost the North and was
to be executed for the fall of Valenciennes—had been confined till his
removal but a few hours before to make way for the Queen. Here is now
the canteen of the prison.
It was very late. The new day was quite broad and full, shoving the
extreme paleness of her face and her weary eyes. She stood upon a little
stuff-covered hassock, hung her watch upon a nail, and began to undress,
to sleep if she might sleep for a few hours. A servant of the turnkey’s,
the girl called Rosalie, timidly offered her help: the Queen put her
gently aside, saying: “Since I have no maid, I have learnt to do all
myself.” They blew their candles out and left her to repose.
On the fourth day, the 6th of August, they came again and took from her
further things which a prisoner might not enjoy; among them that little
watch of hers in gold. She gave it to them. It was the little watch
which she had worn when she had come in as a child to Compiègne on her
way to the great marriage and to the throne. It was the last of her
ornaments.
A routine began and lasted unbroken almost till August ended. In that
little low cell, more than half underground, dimly lit by the barred
window that stood level with the flags outside, day succeeded day
without insult, but without relief, and here at last her strait
captivity began what the Temple hitherto could never do. Her spirit did
not fail, but her body began to weaken, and in her attitude and gesture
there had entered the appearance of despair.... Outside the Committee
wondered whether their daring might not bear fruit, and whether, to save
the Queen, the frontier might not be relieved. But no offer came from
the Kings, and the hostage of the Republicans remained useless on their
anxious hands.... In Brussels Fersen heard and went wild, talked folly
of an immediate march on Paris, cursed Coburg and all rules of war; but
Coburg was not to be moved—he knew his trade, and still prepared the
sieges.
She had no privacy. All day long a corporal of police and his man sat on
guard in a corner of the room. All night her door, in spite of its two
great bolts, was guarded. For the rest her wants were served. She asked
for a special water from the neighbourhood of what had been Versailles,
and she obtained it. They hired books for her. They permitted her good
food and the daily expense upon it of a very wealthy woman.[38] The
porter’s wife and the maid were very tender to her. They put flowers on
her small oak table and they marketed at her desire. Her other service
wounded her; first an old woman who was useless, the turnkey’s mother;
next a young virago, Havel by name, whose rudeness disturbed her. They
would let her have no steel—not even the needles with which she was
knitting for her little son, nor a knife to cut her food; but more than
all there sank into her the intolerable monotony, the fixed doubt, the
utter isolation which made the place a tomb. The smallest incident moved
her. She would watch her gaolers at their picquet and note the game, she
would listen to distant music, she would greet with a dreadful
reminiscence of her own the porter’s little son, and cry over him a
little and speak of the Dauphin—but this last scene was so vivid that at
last they dared no longer bring the child. She kept for consolation all
this while, hidden in her bosom, a little yellow glove of her boy’s, and
in it a miniature of him and a lock of his hair.
Footnote 38:
What would come to a pound a day in our money, and at our scale of
living—for the uncooked food alone.
* * * * *
Meanwhile Maubeuge:—
On the day which had seen the Queen enter the Conciergerie the Commander
of Maubeuge issued the first warning of danger. The aged, the women and
the children were invited to leave the shelter of the fortress and to
betake themselves to the open country. That order was but partially
obeyed—and still no provisions reached the town.
Now that strong Valenciennes had fallen, the Allies had their business
so thoroughly in hand that some debate arose among them whether the main
garrison of Maubeuge should be assailed at once or whether the little
outlying posts should be picked up first: the large and the small were
equally certain to capitulate: there was ample leisure to choose.
Coburg was for the main attack on Maubeuge—but he was not keen—the
wretched little force at Cambrai would do to begin with—or even the
handful in Le Quesnoy. It was simply a question of the order in which
they should be plucked.
The young Duke of York, acting as he was bidden to act from Westminster,
proposed to divert some 40,000 men to the capture of Dunkirk; for it
must be remembered that all this war was a war of Conquest, that the
frontier towns taken were to compensate the Allies after the Revolution
had been destroyed, and that Dunkirk was historically a bastion of
importance to England, and that all the advance was to end in the
annexation of French land.
This march upon Dunkirk has been condemned by most historians because it
failed: had it succeeded none could have praised it too highly.
Politically it was just in conception (for it gave Britain some
balancing advantage against the Austrians their allies), and as a
military project it was neither rash nor ill-planned. The force left
with Coburg was ample for his task, and nothing could be easier than for
the Austrian army alone to reduce (as it did reduce) the worthless
garrisons opposed to it, while the English commander was doing English
work upon the right.[39]
Footnote 39:
Even as it was, and in spite of his failure before Dunkirk, the Duke
of York had plenty of time to bring back his remnant and help Coburg
after that failure, and to have joined him in front of Maubeuge before
the French attempted the relief of that town. The English commander
could easily have been present at Wattignies, and would probably or
certainly have prevented that miracle. But no one foresaw the miracle.
Coburg did not ask York to come till the 7th of October. York did not
march till the 10th, and even then he thought he had the leisure to
waste a week in covering forty miles!
The combined forces spent the close of the week after Valenciennes had
fallen in driving off such of the French as were still in the open under
Kilmain. A few days later forty-seven battalions, of whom a full seventh
were English and Irish men, marched off under York for Dunkirk, while
Coburg at his ease sat down before the little town of Le Quesnoy, the
last fortified support of Maubeuge upon the west. Upon the same day he
brushed the French out of the wood of Mormal, the last natural obstacle
which could protect Maubeuge when Le Quesnoy should have fallen. It was
the 17th of August—but already in Paris there had passed one of the
chief accidents of History: an accident from which were to flow all the
tactics of the Great War, ultimately the successes of Napoleon, and
immediately the salvation of the Revolution: Lazare Carnot had been
admitted to the Committee of Public Safety.
* * * * *
In Paris the Queen endured that August: and, isolated from the world,
she did not know what chances of war might imperil her through the fury
of a defeated nation or might save her by the failure of the Terror and
its martial law.
As she thus waited alone and in silence the pressure upon the Republic
grew. Lyons had risen when Marat died. Vendée was not defeated: before
the month ended the English were in Toulon.
As the hot days followed each other in their awful sameness she still
declined: her loss of blood never ceased, her vigour dwindled. A doctor
of great position, the surgeon Souberbielle,[40] visited the cell and
denounced its dampness for a danger: nothing was done. She lived on,
knowing nothing of the world beyond and above those dirty walls, but
vaguely she hoped or imagined an exchange and to be reunited with her
children—to survive this unreal time and to find herself abroad again
with living men. No change or interruption touched the long watch of her
soul until, when she had already passed three weeks and more in
nothingness, that inspector of police who had already befriended her in
the Temple, Michonis, entered; and a certain companion, spare and
wild-eyed, was with him. It was a Wednesday—the last Wednesday in
August; the month had yet three days to run.
Footnote 40:
He was famous for his operations for the stone, sat upon the Jury that
condemned the Queen, was summoned for his art to Westminster Hospital,
wondered in old age why the Restoration would not give his European
fame a salaried post: thought it might be a fear of his infirmities of
age: danced high and vigorously before the committee of medical
patronage to prove, at ninety, his unimpaired vivacity, was refused
any public salary, and died—some years later—a still active but
disappointed man, “fearing that his politics had had some secret
effect in prejudicing the royal family against him.”
These two men who so visited her were in league to help her, and
fantastic fortune had put an official of the city at her disposal for
escape.
The whole scene was rapid—she had barely time to understand the
prodigious opportunity. She noticed in the hand of Michonis’s companion
a bunch of pinks—perhaps she half recognised his face (indeed, he had
fought in defence of the palace), she failed to take the flowers and he
let them fall behind the stove—and the while Michonis was covering all
by some official question or other. It was not a minute’s work and they
were gone: but in the flowers, when, after her bewilderment, she sought
them, she found a note. Its contents offered her safety. Michonis (it
ran), trusted as an official, would produce an order to transfer her
person to some other prison; in the passage he would permit her to fly.
The note asked for a reply.
She had no pen or pencil, but she found a plan for answering, for she
took a pin and pricked out painfully these words on a slip of paper: “I
am watched; I neither write nor speak; I count on you; I will come.” The
policeman of her guard—not the corporal—had been bought. He took the
pricked slip of paper from her and gave it to the porter’s wife, her
friend. Next day Michonis called for it, knew that the Queen was ready,
laid all his plans, and on the Monday, by night, appeared at the door of
the Conciergerie with his official order for the removal of the Queen.
But even in these few hours there had been time for treason. The
policeman had revealed the message to the authorities. The faces
Michonis saw at the gate of the prison by the sentry’s lamp when he came
up that Monday night were not those he expected or knew. His plot was
already in the hands of the Government and he was lost.
Within, the Queen waited in an agony of silence for the sound of her
deliverers; the hours of the morning drew on and the summer dawn of the
Tuesday broadened; no steps had sounded on the stones of the passage:
everything had failed.
Her deliverer suffered. She herself was closely examined and transferred
to another cell where she must wait under more rigid compulsion for the
end.
No other human fortune[41] came to Marie Antoinette from that day until,
seven weeks later, she died.
Footnote 41:
I reject the story of her Communion.
* * * * *
West and a little north of Maubeuge, but twenty miles away, the watchers
a month and more before had heard the ceaseless guns round Valenciennes.
Then had come the silence of the surrender. Now they heard much nearer,
west and a little to the south, the loud fury of a new and neighbouring
bombardment as the shot poured into Le Quesnoy. Soon, as they knew,
those guns would be trained on their own walls. Little Le Quesnoy was
the last of the line but one, and they, in Maubeuge, the last of all.
The Monday, the first Monday in September, the Tuesday, the Wednesday,
the Thursday, the Friday, all that week the garrison of Maubeuge
listened to the endless sound which never faltered by day or by night,
and they still wondered how long it might endure: there were but 6000 in
the little place and their doom was so certain that their endurance
seemed quite vain. Sunday and the guns never paused or weakened; the
second Monday came and they still raged—but on the ninth day when the
marvel seemed to have grown permanent, on the Tuesday (it was the day
that the Queen was thrust into her second and more rigorous
imprisonment) again—as with Valenciennes—the ominous silence came: Le
Quesnoy was treating, and Maubeuge now made ready for its end.
The free troops to the south and east (two poor divisions) moved
doubtfully towards the entrenched camp of the fortress—knowing well that
they must in a few days be contained: there was no food: there were not
even muskets for them all.
Around them by detachments the French forces were being eaten up. The
little garrison of Cambrai had marched out to relieve its neighbour—6000
men, three-quarters of the infantry regulars, three squadrons, and a
battery of guns. The Hungarians rode through that battery before it
could unlimber, refused to accept surrender, broke the line and hacked
and killed until a remnant got off at a run under the guns of Bouchain.
Declaye, their general, survived: he was in Paris within forty-eight
hours, tried within another forty-eight, and on the morrow beheaded.
For a fortnight these contemptuous successes on the fringe of Coburg’s
army continued, and the main force meanwhile was gathering supplies,
calling in detachments, organising train, and making all ready for the
last and decisive blow that should shatter Maubeuge. In Maubeuge they
hurriedly and confusedly prepared: such grain as they could gather from
neighbouring farms was seized, many of “the useless and the suspect”
were expelled, the able-bodied civilians were set to dig, to entrench,
and to complain, and over all this work was a man worthy of the place
and the occasion, for, on a high morning, the 15th of September, but a
day or two after the surrender of Le Quesnoy, there had galloped into
Maubeuge a representative of the Parliament well chosen by the Terror to
superintend such an issue: he rode straight in the long stirrups of the
cavalry with harsh, eccentric, and powerful clean face; a young man,
dark and short and square: it was Drouet.
The two divisions hung nervously, the one east, the other west of the
fortress, making a show to dispute the passage of the river against
forces three times their own in number and indefinitely their superiors
in training and every quality of arms: on the 28th[42] of September, at
dawn, Coburg crossed where he chose both above and below the town; of
the French divisions one was swept, the other hunted, into the
fortress—before noon the thing was done, and the French force—happy to
have escaped with but a partial panic—was blocked and held. With the
next day the strain began, for the Austrians drove the surrounding
peasantry within the walls and in the same hour burnt the stores
accumulated outside. On the third day the first of the horses within
Maubeuge was killed for food.
Footnote 42:
_Not_, as Jomini says, the 29th.
Drouet, for all his high heart, doubted if the Republic could deliver
them and knew the sudden extremity of the town. He imagined a bold
thing. On the 2nd of October, the fourth day of the siege, he took a
hundred dragoons—men of his own old arm—and set out across the Austrian
lines by night: he designed a long ride to the Meuse itself and the
sending of immediate news to the Committee of the hunger of Maubeuge: he
feared lest those civilians in Paris should imagine that a week, ten
days, a fortnight were all one to the beleaguered town, and lest they
should frame their plan of relief upon the false hope of a long siege.
So he rode out—and the enemy heard the hoof-beats and caught him. They
put that dark man in chains; they caged him also and made him a show. In
Brussels, Fersen, with a dreadful curiosity, went to peep at his face
behind the iron bars; in Paris the woman whose chance of flight he had
destroyed at Varennes sat and awaited her judges.
* * * * *
Three days passed in Maubeuge and all the meat, salted and fresh, was
sequestrated. The manuscripts in the monastery were torn up for
cartridges: everything was needed. On the next day, the 6th of October,
all hay and straw were commandeered. On the next, the 7th, a census of
the food remaining showed, for over 30,000 adult men and all the women
and children besides, barely 400 head, and of these more than
three-quarters were small sheep in poor condition. Upon the 10th such
little grain as the town contained was seized by the Commandant. The
next day the whole population was upon half rations and the townsmen
were struggling with the soldiery. Upon the morrow again, the 12th,
counsel was taken of the desperate need to advise the Government that
the place was all but gone, and it was designed that by night such as
might volunteer should bear the news or perish in crossing the lines.
* * * * *
That evening, the evening of the 12th, after dark, Marie Antoinette was
led out from her cell for that preliminary Interrogation which, in
French procedure, precedes the public trial. They led her from her
little cell, through the narrow passages, into a great empty hall. Two
candles, the only lights in that echoing darkness, stood upon the table.
She was in a deep ignorance of her position and of Europe. The silence
of the room corresponded to the silence within her: its darkness to the
complete loneliness of her heart. She did not know what were the
fortunes of the French army, what advance, if any, had been made by
their enemies—whom she still regarded as her rescuers. She knew nothing
of the last desperate risk upon the frontier which the Republic ran; she
knew nothing of the steps by which she had been brought to this
position, the demand in Parliament for her execution as the news from
the front got worse and worse: the summoning of the Court: the formation
of the Bench that was to try her. Least of all did she know that the
extreme mad group whom Hébert led had gone to her little sickly son
suggesting to him (probably believing what they suggested) nameless
corruptions from her hand: to these they believed he had been witness,
nay, himself a victim; she did not know that to these horrors that group
had caused the child’s trembling signature to be affixed.... He had sat
there swinging his legs in the air from the high chair in which they had
placed him to question him: he had answered “Yes” to all they suggested
... he was her little son! She, imprisoned far off from him, knew
nothing of that hellish moment. She was utterly deserted. She saw
nothing but the dark empty room and the two pale candles that shone upon
the faces of the men who were soon to try her: they marked in relief the
aquiline face of the chief judge Herman. The other faces were in
darkness.
Certain questions privately put to her were few and simple, a mere
preliminary to the trial; she answered them as simply in her own favour.
Her dress was dark and poor. She sat between two policemen upon a bench
in the vast black void of the unfurnished hall and answered, and, when
she had answered, signed. She answered conventionally that she wished
the country well, that she had never wished it ill; she signed (as they
told her to sign) under the title of the “widow of Capet.” They named
two barristers to defend her, Chauveau-Lagarde and Tronçon Ducourdray,
and she was led back to her cell and to her silence. Next day, the 13th,
these lawyers were informed, and came to consult with her.
* * * * *
Upon the 13th, by night, twelve dragoons volunteered to take news out of
Maubeuge, a sergeant leading them. They swam the Sambre and got clean
away. They rode all night; they rode by morning into Philippeville and
begged that three cannon shots might be fired, for that was the signal
by which Maubeuge was to know that they had brought news of the hard
straits of the city beyond the Austrian lines. They rode on without
sleep to Givet, and there at last they heard that an army was on the
march, straight for the relief of the siege.
Carnot had gathered that army, bringing in the scattered and broken
detachments from the right and the left, concentrating them upon
Avesnes, until at last he had there to his hand 45,000 men. Carnot was
there in Avesnes, and we have records of the ragged army, some of them
fresh from defeats, most of them worthless, pouring in. There were those
who had one shoe, there were those who had none; they were armed in
varying fashion; they were wholly under-gunned. The boys straggled,
marched, or drooped in, the gayer of them roaring marching songs, but
the greater part disconsolate. With such material, in one way or
another, Carnot designed to conquer. Maubeuge had been upon half rations
since the beginning of the week, it might ask for terms in any hour, and
between him and it stretched the long high line of wood wherein Coburg
lay entrenched impregnably.
* * * * *
The nominal command of the hosts so gathered was in the hands of
Jourdan, a travelling draper who had volunteered in the American War,
whom the Committee of Public Safety had discovered, once more a draper,
and to whom it had given first the army of the Ardennes, then this high
post before Maubeuge. He was a man of simple round features and of easy
mind; he had but just been set at the head of the Army of the North:
left to himself he would have lost it—and his head. But the true
commander was not Jourdan, it was Carnot. Carnot came to represent only
the force of the Parliament of which he was a member and the force of
the Committee of Public Safety of which he was the brain; but once on
the field he exceeded both these capacities and became, what he had
always been, a soldier. His big and ugly, bulging forehead with its lean
wisp of black hair hid the best brain and overhung the best eye for
tactics of all those that preceded and prepared the final effect of
Napoleon’s armies.
The great Carnot in Avesnes that night stood like a wrestler erect and
ready, his arms free, his hands unclenched, balancing to clutch the
invader and to try the throw. He, with that inward vision of his, saw
the whole plan of the struggle from south to north, and overlooked the
territory of the French people as a mountain bird overlooks the plain.
He knew the moment. He knew it not as a vague, intense, political fear,
nor even as a thesis for the learned arms and for the staff, but as a
visible and a real world: he saw the mountains and the rivers, the white
threads of roads radiating from Paris to all the points of peril, of
rebellion or of disaster; he saw the armies in column upon them, the
massed fronts, the guns. He saw the royal flag over Toulon and the
English fleet in harbour there, he saw the Bush and the Marsh of Vendée
still unconquered, he saw the resistance of Lyons (for he had no news of
its surrender); above all he saw those two doors against which the
invader leaned, which were now pushed so far ajar and which at any
moment might burst open—the lines of Weissembourg; and here, right to
his hand, the entrenchments that covered the last siege of the northern
frontier. He saw reeling and nearly falling the body of the Republic
that was his religion, and he saw that all the future, death or life,
lay in Maubeuge.
The Sunday night fell over Paris and over those long Flemish hills. The
morrow was to see the beginning of two things: the trial of the Queen
and the opening of a battle which was to decide the fate of the French
people.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration:
Battle of WATTIGNIES
OCT. 15^{TH.} & 16^{TH.} 1793
AND THE
_RELIEF OF MAUBEUGE_
]
CHAPTER XX
_WATTIGNIES_
MONDAY, the 14th of October:—
[Sidenote: Oct. 14, 1793. 6 a.m.]
The fate of the Queen and of the Republic had each come to a final and
critical issue when the light broke, dully in either place, over Paris
and over the pastures of the frontier. There the army lay to arms in the
valley, with Coburg entrenched upon the ridge above them, and beyond him
the last famine of Maubeuge: from dawn the French lines could hear, half
a day’s march to the northward, the regular boom of the bombardment. But
Carnot was now come.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Oct. 14, 1793. In Paris, 8 a.m.]
In Paris, when it was broad day, the chief Court above the prison was
prepared.
The populace had crammed the side galleries of the great room and were
forming a further throng, standing in the space between the doors and
the bar. The five Judges, Herman the chief, filed on to the Bench; a
little below them and on their right a jury of fifteen men were
empanelled. It was on the courage, the conviction or the fanaticism of
these that the result would turn.
They presented, as they sat there awaiting the prisoner, a little model
of the violent egalitarian mood which had now for a year and more driven
the military fury of the Republic. Among them would be seen the refined
and somewhat degraded face of a noble who had sat in the earlier
Parliaments and who had drifted as Orleans had drifted—but further than
had Orleans. There also were the unmistakable eyes of precision which
were those of an optician, a maker of instruments. There were, resting
on the rail of the box, the firm hands of a great surgeon
(Souberbielle). A few of the common people were mingled with these:
contractors also, prosperous men, and master-carpenters. There was a
hatter there, and a barber, a man who had made violins, and another who
painted pictures for the rich. Of such elements was the body comprised
which had now to determine so much in the history of Europe. Above them
a presiding figure, Herman the Judge, with his dark aquiline face,
controlled, them all. They looked all of them towards the door that led
from the cells below, where two warders came upward through it, leading
between them the Queen.
She also as she entered saw new things. The silence and the darkness of
her long imprisonment fell from her: the noise of the streets came in
from the windows before her; she heard the rumour and she saw the
movement of the populace which—save for that brief midnight drive two
months ago—had been quite cut off from her since last she had shrunk
from the mob on the evening when she had heard the gate of the Temple
bolted behind her carriage. After that hush which had been so dreadfully
divided by evil upon evil, she came out suddenly into the sound of the
city and into the general air. In that interval the names of months and
of days, the mutual salutations of men, religion and the very habit of
life had changed. In that interval also the nation had passed from the
shock of arms to unimagined crimes, to a most unstable victory, to a
vision of defeat and perhaps of annihilation. France was astrain upon
the edge of a final deliverance or of a final and irretrievable
disaster. Its last fortress was all but fallen, all its resources were
called out, all its men were under arms, over the fate of the frontier
hung a dreadful still silence. In the very crisis of this final doubt
and terror the Queen stood arraigned.
The women lowered their knitting-needles and kept them still. The little
knot of Commissioners sitting with Counsel for the State, the angry boys
in the crowd who could remember wounds or the death of comrades,
stretched forward to catch sight of her as she came up the stairs
between her guards: they were eager to note if there had been any
change.
She had preserved her carriage, which all who knew her had regarded
since her childhood as the chief expression of her soul. She still moved
with solemnity and with that exaggerated but unflinching poise of the
head which, in the surroundings of Versailles, had seemed to some so
queenly, to others so affected, which here, in her last hours, seemed to
all, as she still preserved it, so defiant. For the rest she was not the
same. Her glance seemed dull and full of weariness; the constant loss of
blood which she had suffered during those many weeks spent below ground
had paled her so that the artificial, painted red of her cheeks was
awful in that grey morning, and her still ample hair was ashen and
touched with white, save where some traces of its old auburn could be
perhaps distinguished.
She was in black. A little scarf of lace was laid with exactitude about
her shoulders and her breast, and on her head she wore a great cap which
a woman who loved her, the same who had served her in her cell, put on
her as she went to her passion. The pure white of this ornament hung in
great strings of lawn on either side, and round it and beneath it she
had wound the crape of her widowhood. So dressed, and so standing at the
bar, so watched in silence by so many eyes, she heard once more the new
sound which yesterday she had first learned to hate: the hard and nasal
voice of Herman. He asked her formally her name. She answered in a voice
which was no longer strong, but which was still clear and well heard in
that complete silence:
“Marie Antoinette of Austria, some thirty-eight years old, widow to
Louis Capet the King of France.”
To the second formal question on the place of her first arrest, that:
“It was in the place where the sittings of the National Assembly were
held.”
The clerk, a man of no great learning, wrote his heading: “The 23rd day
of the first month of the fourth year of Freedom,” and when he had done
this he noted her replies, and Herman’s short questions also: his
bidding to the jury that they must be firm, to the prisoner that she
must be attentive.
Into the clerk’s writing there crept, as there will into that of poor
men, certain grievous errors of grammar which in an earlier (and a
later) time would not have appeared in the record of the meanest Court
trying a tramp for hunger; but it was the Revolution and they were
trying a Queen, so everything was strange; and this clerk called himself
Fabricius, which had a noble sound—but it was not his name.
This clerk read the list of witnesses and the indictment out loud.
When these formalities were over they brought a chair. The Queen sat
down by leave of the Court and the trial began. She saw rising upon her
right a new figure of a kind which she had not known in all her life up
to the day when the door of the prison had shut her out from the noise
and change of the world. It was a figure of the Terror, Fouquier
Tinville. His eyes were steadfast, the skin of his face was brown, hard
and strong; he was a hired politician covered with the politician’s
outer mask of firmness. Within he was full of the politician’s
hesitation and nervous inconstancy. A genuine poverty and a politician’s
hunger for a salary had been satisfied by the post of Public Prosecutor.
He earned that salary with zeal and with little discernment, and
therefore, when the time came, he also was condemned to die. It was he
now in this forenoon who opened against the Queen.
His voice was harsh and mechanical: his speech was long, dull and
violent: rhetorical with that scenic and cardboard rhetoric which is the
official commonplace of all tribunals. The Widow Capet was a Messalina;
she was a leech; she was a Merovingian Tyrant; she was a Medicis. She
had held relations with the “Man called King” of Bohemia and Hungary;
she had urged Capet on to all his crimes. She had sent millions to aid
her family in their war against the French people. She had woven the
horrid plot of the 10th of August, which nothing but incredible valour
had defeated. She was the main enemy which the new and angry Freedom for
which he spoke had had to meet and to conquer.
Apart from its wearisome declamation the accusation was true; save
that—through no fault of her own, poor woman!—she had not aided the
foreign cause with gold, all the story was evident and publicly known.
She sat as near this orator as is a nurse to a bedside. She heard him
with her suffering and disdainful face quite fixed and unmoved, save at
one point: the mention of her son.
Fouquier Tinville was sane: he saw the crass absurdity of Hébert’s
horrors, he barely touched upon them very hurriedly (and as the rapid
and confused words escaped him, her lips twitched with pain), but even
as he did so he knew he had given the defence a hold.
[Illustration:
GATEWAY OF THE LAW COURTS THROUGH
WHICH THE QUEEN WENT TO HER DEATH
(THE RIGHT HAND ONE OF THE THREE GATEWAYS IN THE RAILINGS)
]
It is held on principle in French Courts that an impartial presentation
of the truth cannot be obtained unless witnesses are heard in a chance
sequence, not divided into friends and foes as with us, but each (such
is the theory) telling what he believes to be the truth. Even in these
political trials of the Terror (which were rather Courts-Martial or
condemnations than trials) the rule was observed, and when Fouquier sat
down the file of witnesses began.
The parade was futile. For plain political facts known to the whole
world no list of witnesses were needed, nor could their evidence be of
the least avail. Moreover, that evidence was lacking. The witnesses
defiled one after the other, each vaguer than the last, to prove (and
failing to prove) things that were commonplaces to all Europe. Long past
mid-day the empty procession continued through the drowsy hours past one
o’clock and two: remembering trifles of her conduct true and false. To
every assertion as the Judge repeated it (true or false) she answered
quietly by a denial: that denial was now false, now true.
Even if the Revolutionary Tribunal could have subpœnaed Mallet or the
Emperor or Fersen, it would have meant little to the result. Her guilt,
if it was guilt so to scheme against the nation, was certain: what yet
remained in doubt was the political necessity of such a trial at such a
moment, the limit of hardihood in her judges and the possible effect in
a democracy of public sympathy at some critical phase of the pleadings:
and much more potent than any of these three, because it included them
all, was the news that might come at any moment from the frontier and
from the hunger of Maubeuge—no news came.
Last of these witnesses Hébert, all neat and powdered, presented his
documents and put forward his abominations, his fixed idea of incest.
The public disgust might here have turned the trial. There was a stir
all round: her friends began to hope. As for the officials, they could
not stop Hébert’s mouth, but Herman was careful to omit the customary
repetition: he was hurrying on to the next witness when a juryman of
less wit than his fellows and filled with the enormous aberrations of
hate, pressed the charge.
The Queen would not reply. She half rose from her chair and cried in a
high voice: “I appeal to every mother here,” and then sank back again.
The crowd in the galleries began to move and murmur, the women raised
their voices against the angry orders of the ushers and of the Bench
demanding silence. Away, dining beyond the Seine, Robespierre, hearing
of it, broke a plate at table in his anger, and thought Hébert’s lunacy
had saved her. A further witness, though he spoke of the flight to
Varennes, could hardly be heard, and spoke quite unheeded; and when he
had concluded, the Court abruptly rose in the midst of the commotion,
hubbub and change.
The Queen was led to her cell, keeping as she left her place, in spite
of her hopeless fatigue, the steady step wherewith she had entered; and
as she passed she heard one woman in the press sneering at her pride.
It was three o’clock. The first act in that long agony had lasted,
without food or breathing time, for seven hours.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Oct. 14, 1793. Before Maubeuge, 8 a.m.]
While the Republic thus held the old world prisoner in Paris and
tortured it in the person of the Queen, out on the frontier in the
water-meadows of Avesnes, the Republic lay in its chief peril from the
old world free and armed. Coburg and every privilege held the crest of
the hills invincibly, and Maubeuge was caught fast, unreachable beyond
the entrenchments of that ridge.
Carnot, looking westward down the valley of the Helpe, saw the deep
orchards laden with October, nourished by the small and very winding
stream. He saw the last French frontier hamlets and their mills: St.
Hilaire, Dompierre, Tenieres, dwindling away to where, far off in its
broad trench, ran the Sambre.
Before him also in this valley, as he looked westward down it, he saw
stretched for some ten miles the encampment of his army: bivouac after
bivouac, one beyond the other along the lines, and smoke rising from
them. Tall hedges, not yet bare, divided the floor of the valley and the
village grounds: here also Cæsar had marched through against the Nervii:
for this corner of Europe is a pack of battlefields. Malplaquet lay just
before the army; within a march, Fleurus; within sound of cannon,
Jemappes.
Up above them beyond that wood of Avesnes, the line of the heights along
the sky, was the enemy. It had loomed so dark before the late, dull and
rainy dawn, that they had seen the notches in that line which were the
emplacement of guns. The early afternoon had shone upon the sides of the
hills, and the French outposts had seen the outposts of the enemy busy
in the little villages that mark the foot of the slopes: St. Vaast,
Dourlers, Foursies. And all day long boomed to the north behind the
hills the sullen guns before Maubeuge. At any hour that dull repeated
sound might cease, and it would mean that the last fortress had fallen.
All that day Carnot passed in silence. The troops, some last detachments
of which had but just marched in, lay dully in such repose as soldiers
can steal: a jumble of forty patchwork battalions, militia, regulars,
loud volunteers, old stark gunners; they listened to the distant and
regular thunder of the siege. In some stations the few horses were
grooming: in others, fewer still, the rare guns were cleaned.
[Sidenote: Oct. 14, 1793. Before Maubeuge, 4 p.m.]
An hour before dusk the six generals were called to Carnot’s tent, and
here and there the bugles roused the troops called for reconnaissance.
These few detachments crossed the woods, pierced gaps in the hedges[43]
to prepare the advance of the morrow, noted and exchanged shots with the
outposts of the evening, and at evening they retired. As they retired
Carnot gave orders to the guns. Out of effective range, vague and
careless of a target, they fired and proclaimed the presence of a
relieving army to the besieged.
Footnote 43:
So on the same field had Cæsar been compelled to clear the hedgerows.
So little does the French peasantry change in a thousand years, and so
tenacious is each French province of its customs.
Maubeuge in that still evening, during a lull of the siege-pieces, heard
those French guns, and Ferrant and the general officers with him
counselled a sortie. Only Chancel stood out; but Chancel was in command
of the camp of Maubeuge, and his authority was unassailable. He did not
distinguish the French fire, he thought it Austrian; no instinct moved
him. Therefore all the next day while the battle was engaged, the
garrison of Maubeuge failed to move; and later, for this error, Chancel
was tried and killed.[44]
Footnote 44:
And the other version is that Chancel was for moving but that Ferrant
would not. Choose.
When the guns had been thus fired, the reconnaissance ended. The troops
fell back again through the wood of Avesnes and slept the last sleep
before battle. In Paris during that same evening, the long trial of the
Queen proceeded.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Oct. 14, 1793. In Paris, 5 p.m.]
At five, just in that hour when Carnot was recalling his scouts and
ordering that warning cannon, the Court gathered and the prisoner was
recalled.
In her cell she had not been silent.
As a great actress in an interval between her hardest lines will refuse
repose and will demand rather comment or praise, so had she filled this
little respite of two hours with questions and with doubts professed.
She had dwelt upon the forms of the trial, she had begged her counsel to
reassure her. She had despised the evidence. She had said she feared but
one witness—Manuel—and indeed all who could have spoken as eye-witnesses
to a hundred notorious truths were now over the frontier or dead.
With her entry the trial was resumed and the file of witnesses
continued. It was as monotonous and as vague as before. Even Manuel,
whom she had feared, was vague, and the very servants of the prison
(though they had been witnesses to conspiracy) were uncertain and
rambling. And this fatuity of the witnesses who were so solemnly and so
strictly examined did not proceed from the turmoil of the time alone,
nor even from the certitude which all then had (and which history has
now) upon the past action of the Queen in cherishing the hope of foreign
domination and in procuring it: rather did it proceed from the fact that
these dreadful days were filled not with a judicial but with a political
action, and that the Court was met not to establish truths at once
unprovable and glaring, but to see whether or no the Revolution could
dare to condemn the prisoner. It was an act of War and a challenge to
What lay entrenched up there before Maubeuge, training its guns on the
last hope, the ragged army in the valley of Avesnes below.
If all the witnesses which history possesses to-day, if Moleville,
Fersen, Mallet, could have been brought into that Court and have had the
Truth dragged from them, it would have affected the issue very little.
One thing could alone affect that issue, the news of victory: and no
news came. All reports from the frontier had ceased.
The lights in the Court were lit, smoky and few. The air, already foul
from the large concourse, grew heavy even for the free; for the sickened
prisoner it became intolerable as the night hours drew in—six dark
interminable hours. She heard the succeeding witnesses distantly, more
distantly. Her head was troubled and her injured eyesight failed her. It
was very late. The droning of the night was in her ears. She vaguely
knew at last that there was a movement around her and that the Court was
rising. She asked faintly for water. Busne, the officer in guard of her,
brought it to her and she drank. As he supported her with some respect
down the short passage to her cell he heard her murmuring: “I cannot
see.... I cannot see.... I have come to the end....”
She lay down when her doors had received her, and just before midnight
she fell asleep. She slept deeply and for the last time.
* * * * *
Tuesday, October 15.
[Sidenote: Oct. 15, 1793. Before Maubeuge, 6 a.m.]
A little before dawn the French bugles upon the frontier roused the
troops of Avesnes; their calls ran down the line, they passed from the
Diane to the Générale, the woods before them sent back echoes, and soon
the army moved. Far off upon the left Fromentin, upon the far right
Duquesnoy, began marching forwards and inwards, converging, but the main
body in the centre took the high road, which, if they could force its
passage, would lead them straight to Maubeuge.
The sun was still level over the glinting wet fields when Carnot came to
the summit of the long swell whence could be perceived, over an
intervening hollow, the village of Dourlers, and above it the level
fringe of trees which held the Austrian cannon; an impregnable crest
upon whose security Coburg and the Allies founded the certitude of
victory. The guns began.
Among the batteries of the French (too few for their task) two
batteries, one of sixteen-pounders, the other of twelve, were the gift
of the city of Paris. By some accident these, though ill manned,
silenced the Austrian fire at one critical and central point above the
Dourlers itself and close to the high road. Whether the French aptitude
for this arm had helped to train the volunteers of the city, or whether
these had such a leaven of trained men as sufficed to turn the scale, or
whether (as is more probable) some error or difficulty upon the opposing
slope or some chance shot had put the invaders out of action, cannot be
known. Carnot seized upon the moment and ordered the charge. As his
columns advanced to carry Dourlers he sent word at full speed to either
wing that each must time itself by the centre, and forbade an advance
upon the left or right until the high road should be forced and the
centre of the Austrian position pierced or confused.
As he stood there looking down from the height where the road
bifurcates, all the battle was plain to him, but his sapper’s eye for a
plan watched the wings much more anxiously than they watched the centre
before him. The stunted spire of Wattignies a long way off to the east,
the clump that hid St. Remy to the west, marked strong bodies of the
enemy, and, in the open plateau beyond, their numerous cavalry could
crush either extremity of his line (which at either extremity was weak)
should either be tempted forward before the centre had succeeded. The
front was long—over five miles—he could not enforce sagacity nor even be
certain of intelligence, and as he doubted and feared the action of his
distant lieutenants, he saw the centre advancing beneath his eyes.
The Austrian cannon had abandoned the duel. The French fine approached
Dourlers, deployed, and began the ascent. A sudden and heavy fire of
musketry from the hollow road and from the hedges met the sixteen
thousand as they charged; they did not waver, they reached the garden
walls, and closed until, to those watching from the hill, the attempt
was confused and hidden by a rolling smoke and the clustered houses of
the village. It was past mid-morning.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Oct. 15, 1793. In Paris, 7.30 a.m.]
In Paris they had wakened the Queen, tardily. She wondered perhaps to
see Busne not there. He had suffered arrest in the night; he was
detained to see if he could tell the Court or the Committee some secret
gathered from his prisoner. It was under another guard that she left her
cell.
It was nearly nine before the Court assembled in the dull light, and
later before the futile drag of evidence was renewed.
Whether sleep had revived her, or whether some remnant of her old energy
had returned to her for such an occasion, no further weakness was
perceived in the Queen. She sat, as she had sat all the day before until
her faintness had come upon her, very ill, pale, and restrained, but
erect and ready for every reply. Moreover, in that morning the weary
monotony of such hours was broken by an incident which illuminated,
though it made more bitter, the last of her sad days; for after
D’Estaing, the Admiral, had been heard to no purpose, another noble,
also a prisoner, was called; and as she saw his face she remembered
better times, when the struggle was keen and not hopeless, and when this
bewildering Beast that called itself now “Freedom,” now “The Nation,”
had been tamed by the class which still governed Europe outside and
which in that day controlled her kingdom also. It was Latour du Pin, the
soldier who had been responsible for the repression of the Mutiny at
Nancy three years—three centuries—before.
He still lived. Against no man had ’93 a better ground for hate, and
indeed the time came when the Revolution sent him down also to meet his
victims under the earth, but so far his commanding head was firm upon
his shoulders. He enjoyed, as did all the prisoners of that time, the
full use of his wealth. He was clothed and fed in the manner of his
rank. He entered, therefore, with pride and with that mixture of gaiety
and courage upon which, since the wars of religion, all his kind had
justly plumed themselves: and as he entered he bowed with an excessive
ceremony to the Queen.
The Judge asked him the formal question: Whether he recognised the
prisoner? He bowed again and answered: “Indeed I know this Lady very
well;” and in a few moments of his examination he defended himself and
her with a disdainful ease that brought Versailles back vividly out of
its tomb.
Revived or stung by such a memory, the Queen replied to question after
question exactly and even with some power: upon her frivolities, her
expenses, her Trianon—all the legends of debauch which were based upon
that very real and very violent fugue of pleasure in which she had
wasted her brilliant years. The close of that dialogue alone has a
strict interest for history, when Herman came at last to the necklace.
Trianon had been on his lips a dozen times, and as he spoke the word he
remembered that other fatal thing:—
“Was it not in Trianon that you first came to know the woman La Motte?”
“I never saw her!”
“Was she not your victim in the affair of the necklace?”
“She could not be, for I had never known her!”
“You still deny it?”
“I have no plan to deny. It is the truth, and I shall always say the
same.”
It is a passage of great moment, for here indeed the prisoner said
precisely what was true and precisely what all, even those who would
befriend her, least believed to be true. She would pretend a love for
the French and a keen regard for their glory—even for the success of
their armies. She would pretend to have obeyed the King and not to have
led him; to have desired nothing for her son, but only the welfare of
the people. Trapped and abandoned, she thought every answer, however
false, legitimate; but in that one thing in which her very friends had
doubted her, another spirit possessed her and her words were alive with
truth.
After that episode no further movement followed. There was opened before
the Court (as the law compelled) her little pocket and the trinkets
taken from her on the day of her imprisonment: the poor relics of her
affection—the lock of hair, the miniature—were laid before the Judges.
They heard Simon, the cobbler, in whose house her son was lodged—perhaps
she looked more curiously at his face than at others—but he had nothing
to say. They heard the porter of the Temple and sundry others who had
seen, or pretended to have seen, her orders for the payments of sundry
thousands—but all that business was empty and all those hours were
wasted: it was not upon such vanities that the mind of Paris and of the
crowded Court was turned, but upon the line of Flemish hills a long way
off and upon the young men climbing up against the guns.
Paris and the mob in the street outside that Court of Justice and the
hundreds crammed within it strained to hear, not Valazé, nor Tiset, nor
any other useless witness, but some first breath of victory that might
lift off them the oppression of those days; nay, some roaring news of
defeat and of Coburg marching upon them: then at least before their
vision was scattered by the invader, they could tear this Austrian woman
from her too lenient Judges for a full vengeance before they themselves
and that which they had achieved should die. At the best or at the worst
they panted for a clear knowledge of their fortune; but on through the
day and well into the afternoon, when the Court rose for its brief
interval, no hint or rumour even had come to Paris from before Maubeuge.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Oct. 15, 1793. Before Maubeuge, 10.30 a.m.]
Carnot had come down the hill from the fork of the roads; he, and
Jourdan beside him, followed behind the assault, bringing the
headquarters of that general plan some half-mile forward. So they knew
that the village of Dourlers was held. It was noon before the place was
secured, and now all depended upon the action of the extreme wings.
It was certain that the struggle for this central village would be
desperate: all depended upon the extreme wings. If these (and both of
them) could hold hard and neither advance too far up the slope nor
suffer (either of them) a beating-in, then the work at Dourlers would be
decisive. And indeed the village was won, lost, and won and lost again:
all the hard work was there. The French carried it, they went beyond,
they were almost upon the ridge above it. In the upland field below the
crest of wood the Austrian cavalry under Nuffling struck them in flank,
and they were disordered. They were back in the village of Dourlers, and
the fight for it was from house to house and from window to window.
Twice it was cleared, twice lost. The French carry to an immortal memory
a lad of fourteen who slipped forward in those attacks, got in behind
the lines of the Hungarian Grenadiers who held the market-place, and, in
lanes beyond, drummed the charge to make his comrades think that some
were already so far forward and thus to urge them on. Many years after
in digging up that ground his little bones were found buried side-long
with the bones of the tall Hungarian men, and he has now his statue
beating the charge and looking out towards the frontier from the
gateways of Avesnes.
I have said that the horns of that crescent, the extreme wings, were
ordered to be cautious, and warned that their caution alone could save
the fight; for if they went too far while Dourlers in the centre was
still doubtful, that centre would certainly be thrown back by such a
general as Coburg, who knew very well the breaking-point of a concave
line. The fourth attack upon Dourlers was prepared and would have
succeeded when Carnot heard that Fromentin, up on the far left, up on
the extreme tip of the horn of that crescent, had carried his point of
the ridge, and, having carried it, had had the folly to pursue; he had
found himself upon the plateau above (an open plateau bare of trees and
absolutely bare of cover) with his irregulars all boiling, and even his
regulars imagining success. Weak in cavalry, commanding men untrained to
any defensive, he found opposed to him the cavalry reserve of the
enemy—a vast front of horse suddenly charging. That cavalry smashed him
all to pieces. His regulars here and there formed squares, his
irregulars tried to, they were sabred and galloped down. They lost but
four guns (though four counted in so under-gunned an army), but, much
worse, they lost their confidence altogether. They got bunched into the
combes and hollows, the plateau was cleared. They in their turn were
pursued, and it would have been a rout but for two accidents: the first
accident was the presence of a fresh reserve of French cavalry, small
indeed, but very well disciplined, strict and ready, certain Hussars who
in a red flash (their uniform was red) charged on their little horses
and for a moment stopped the flood of the enemy. The check so given
saved the lives though not the position of the French left wing. It was
beaten. It was caved in.
The second accident was the early close of an October day. The drizzling
weather, the pall of clouds, curtained in an early night, and the left
thus failing were not wholly destroyed: but their failure had ruined the
value of the central charge upon Dourlers. The final attack, upon that
central village was countermanded; the Austrians did not indeed pursue
the retreat of the French centre from its walls and lanes, but the
conception of the battle had failed.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Oct. 15, 1793. In Paris, 5 p.m.]
In the Court-room, in Paris, during those hours, while the Judges raised
the sitting, the Queen sat waiting for their return; they brought her
soup which she drank; the evening darkened, the Judges reappeared, and
the trial began anew.
The witnesses called upon that last evening, when the lights were lit
and the long night had begun, were for the most part those who had come
personally into the presence or into the service of the Queen. Michonis
especially, who was rightly under arrest for attempting her rescue,
appeared; Brunier appeared, the doctor who had attended to the children
in the Temple. The farce went on. The night grew deeper, the witnesses
succeeded each other. All that they had to say was true. Nothing they
said could be proved. One put forward that she had written some note
asking if the Swiss could be relied upon to shoot down the people. She
had said and written one hundred of such things. Her counsel, who were
mere lawyers, worried about the presentation of the document—meanwhile
night hastened onwards, and behind their veil of October cloud the stars
continually turned.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Oct. 15, 1793. Before Maubeuge, 10.30 p.m.]
Upon the frontier the damp evening and the closed night had succeeded
one the other, and all along the valley of the little river it was foggy
and dark. The dead lay twisted where they had fallen during that
unwrought fight, and a tent pitched just behind the lines held the staff
and Carnot. He did not sleep. There was brought to him in those midnight
hours a little note, galloped in from the far south; he read it and
crumpled it away. It is said to have been the news that the lines of
Weissembourg were forced—and so they were. The Prussians were free to
pass those gates between the Ardennes and the Vosges. Then Maubeuge was
the last hold remaining: the very last of all.
Jourdan proposed, in that decisive Council of a few moments, held under
that tent by lantern light in the foggy darkness while the day of their
defeat was turning into the morrow, some plan for reinforcing the
defeated left and the playing of some stalemate of check and
countercheck against the enemy; but Carnot was big with new things. He
conceived an adventure possible only from his knowledge of what he
commanded; he dismissed the mere written traditions of war which Jourdan
quoted, because he knew that now—and within twelve hours—all must
certainly be lost or won. He took counsel with his own great soul, and
called, from his knowledge of the French, upon the savagery and the
laughter of the French service. He knew what abominable pain his scheme
must determine. He knew by what wrench of discipline or rather of
cruelty the thing must be done, but more profoundly did he know the
temper of young French people under arms to whom the brutality of
superiors is native and who meet it by some miraculous reserve of energy
and of rebellious smiles.
Those young French people, many half-mutinous, most of them ill-clothed,
so many wounded, so many more palsied by the approach of death—all
drenched under the October drizzle, all by this time weary of any
struggle whatsoever, were roused in that night before their sleep was
deep upon them.
Carnot had determined to choose 7000, to forbid them rest, to march them
right along his positions and add them to the 8000 on his right extreme
wing, and then at morning, if men so treated could still charge, to
charge with such overwhelming and unexpected forces on the right, where
no such effort was imagined, and so turn the Austrian line.
There were no bugle-calls, no loud voice was permitted; but all the way
down the line for five miles orders were given by patrols whose men had
not slept for thirty hours. They roused the volunteers and the cursing
regulars from the first beginnings of their sleep; they broke into the
paltry comfort of chance bivouac fires; they routed men out of the straw
in barns and stables; they kicked up the half-dead, half-sleeping boys
who lay in the wet grass marshes of the Tarsy; and during all that
night, by the strength which only this service has found it possible to
conceive (I mean a mixture of the degrading and the exalted, of
servitude and of vision), from the centre and from the left—from the
forces which had been shot down before Dourlers and from the men who had
fled before the Austrian cavalry when Fromentin had failed—a corps was
gathered together under the thick night, drawn up in column and bidden
march through the darkness by the lane that led towards the right of the
position. With what deep-rooted hatred of commandment simmering in them
those fellows went after thirty hours of useless struggle to yet another
unknown blind attempt, not historians but only men who have suffered
such orders know. They were 7000; the thick night, I say, was upon them;
the mist lay heavy all over the wet land; and as they went through the
brushwood and chance trees that separated the centre from the right of
the French position, they heard the drip of water from the dead, hanging
leaves. Their agony seemed to them quite wanton and purposeless. They
were halted at last mechanically like sheep at various points under
various sleeping farms in various deserted, tiny, lightless villages.
The night was far spent; they could but squat despairing, each squadron
at its halting-place waiting for the dawn and for new shambles.
Meanwhile it was thick night.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Oct. 15, 1793. In Paris, 11.30 p.m.]
It was nearing midnight in Paris, but none yet felt fatigue, neither the
Judges nor their prisoner; nor did any in the straining audience that
watched the slow determination of this business suffer the approach of
sleep. The list of the witnesses was done and their tale was ended.
Herman leant forward, hawk-faced, and asked the Queen in the level
judicial manner if she had anything to add to her defence before her
advocates should plead. She answered complaining of the little time that
had been afforded her to defend—and the last words she spoke to her
Judges were still a vain repetition that she had acted only as the wife
of the King and that she had but obeyed his will.
The Bench declared the examination of the witnesses closed. For
something like an hour that bronzed and hollow-faced man next by her,
Fouquier Tinville, put forward the case for the Government; he was
careful to avoid the mad evidence Hébert had supplied. When he sat down,
the Defence spoke last—as has since Rome been the custom or rather the
obvious justice of French procedure; so that the last words a Jury may
hear shall be words for the prisoner at the bar—but this was not a
trial, though all the forms of trial were observed. Chauveau-Lagarde
spoke first, his colleague next. When they had ceased they were arrested
and forbidden to leave the building, lest certain words the Queen had
whispered should mean some communication with the invader.
The summing up (for summing up was still permitted, and a century of
Revolutionary effort was to pass before the pressure of the Bench upon
the Jury should be gradually destroyed) was what the angers of that
night expected and received. It was three o’clock in the morning before
the four questions were put to the Jury. Four questions drawn indeed
from the Indictment but avoiding its least proved or least provable
clauses. Had there been relations between the Executive and the foreign
enemies of the State, and promises of aid to facilitate the advance of
their armies? If so, was Marie Antoinette of Austria proved to have been
privy to that plan?
The Jury left the Hall. A murmur of tongues loosened rose all around.
The prisoner was led out beyond the doors of the chamber. For one long
unexpected hour she was so detained while the Jury were still absent;
then a signal was given to her guards and they led her in.
[Sidenote: Oct. 16, 1793. In Paris, 4 a.m.]
The cold violence of formal law still dominated the lawyers. Herman put
forth the common exhortation of judges against applause or blame. He
read to her the conclusions of the Jury: they were affirmative upon
every point of the four. He asked her with that same cold violence of
formality, after the Public Prosecutor had demanded the penalty of death
set down for such actions as hers in the new Penal Code, whether she had
anything to say against her sentence. She shook her head.
She was at the end of human things. She stood and saw the Judges upon
the Bench conferring for a moment, she stood to hear her sentence read
to her, and as she heard it she watched them in their strange new
head-dress all plumes, and she fingered upon the rail before her with
the gestures ladies learn in fingering the keys: she swept her fingers
gently as though over the keys of an instrument, and soon the reading of
the sentence was done and they led her away. It was past four o’clock in
the morning.
On the terrace of his castle in Germany that night George of Hesse saw
the White Lady pass, the Ghost without a face that is the warning of the
Hapsburgs, and the hair of his head stood up.
* * * * *
[Illustration:
FIRST PAGE OF MARIE ANTOINETTE’S LAST LETTER
]
[Sidenote: Oct. 16, 1793. Before Maubeuge, 4 a.m.]
The long dark hours of the morning still held the troops that had
marched over from the left to the right of the French position before
Maubeuge. The first arrivals had some moments in which to fall at full
length on the damp earth in the extremity of their fatigue, but all the
while the later contingents came marching in until, before it was yet
day but when already the farms about knew that it was morning, and when
the cocks had begun to crow in the steadings, all rose and stood to
arms. The mist was deepening upon them, a complete silence
interpenetrated the damp veil of it, nor through such weather were any
lights perceptible upon the heights above which marked the end of the
Austrian line.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Oct. 16, 1793. In Paris, a little before four in the
morning.]
The Queen went down the stone steps of the passage: she entered regally
into the cell made ready. She called without interval for pen and paper,
and she sat down to write. She felt, after the transition from the
populous Court to the silence of those walls, an energy that was not
natural and that could not endure, but that served her for an
inspiration. She had tasted but a bowl of soup since the morning—nay,
since the evening before, thirty hours—soon she must fail. Therefore she
wrote quickly while her mood was still upon her.
She sat and wrote to her dead husband’s sister the letter which, alone
of all her acts, lends something permanently noble to her name. It is a
run of words exalted, dignified, and yet tremendous, nor does any
quality about that fourfold sheet of writing, yellow with years, more
astound the reader than the quality of revelation: for here something
strong and level in her soul, something hitherto quite undiscovered, the
deepest part of all, stands and shines. The sheet is blurred—perhaps
with tears: we do not know whether ever it was signed or ended; but
before the morning came she laid herself upon her bed in her poor black
dress, her head was raised somewhat upon her right hand, and so lying
she began very bitterly to weep.
The priest of St. Landry, the parish church of the prison, entered to
minister to her: she spoke just such few words to him as might assure
her that he had sworn the civic oath and was not in communion. When she
knew this she would not hear him. But he heard her murmuring against the
bitter cold, and bade her put a pillow upon her feet. She did so and was
again silent.
The hours wore on, the scent of newly-lighted fires came from the prison
yard and the noise of men awakening. The dripping of the damp weather
sounded less in the increase of movement, and on the pavement of the
quays without began the tramp of marching and the chink of arms; from
further off came the rumble of the drums: 30,000 were assembling to line
her Way. The two candles showed paler in the wretched room. It was dawn.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Oct. 16, 1793. Before Maubeuge, half-past six in the
morning.]
The 16th of October broke upon the Flemish hills: the men who had
endured that night-march along the front of the battlefield, the men who
had received them among the positions of the extreme right, still
drooped under the growing light and were invigorated by no sun. The mist
of the evening and of the night from dripping and thin had grown dense
and whitened with the morning, so that to every soldier a new despair
and a new bewilderment were added from the very air, and the blind fog
seemed to make yet more obscure the obscure designs of their commanders.
The day of their unnatural vigil had dawned, and yet there came no
orders nor any stirring of men. Before them slow schistous slopes went
upwards and disappeared into the impenetrable weather which hid clogged
ploughland and drenched brushwood of the rounded hill; hollow lanes led
up through such a land to the summit of the little rise and the hamlet
of WATTIGNIES; this most humble and least of villages was waiting its
turn for glory.
The downward slope which formed the eastern end of the Austrian line,
the low rounded slope whose apex was the spire of the village, was but
slightly defended, for it was but the extreme of a position, and who
could imagine then—or who _now_—that march through the sleepless night,
or that men so worn should yet be ready for new action with the morning?
No reinforcement, Coburg knew, could come from behind that army: and how
should he dream that Carnot had found the power to feed the fortunes of
the French from their own vitals and to drag these shambling 7000,
wrenched from West to East during the darkness: or how, if such a thing
had been done, could any man believe that, such a torture suffered, the
7000 could still charge?
Yet, had Coburg known the desperate attempt he would have met it, he
would have covered that ultimate flank of his long ridge and reinforced
it from his large reserve. But the deep mist and the dead silence
harshly enforced during the night-march had hidden all the game, and in
front of Wattignies, holding that round of sloping fields and the low
semicircular end of the ridge before the village, there were but 3000;
the infantry of Klebek, of Hohenlohe, and of Stern; for their cavalry
they had behind them and alongside of the village farms a few dragoons;
certain Croatian battalions stood in a second line. These in that
morning, expecting nothing but perhaps the few troops as they had met
easily the day before, waited under the mist in formation and heard no
sound. The morning broadened; the white vapour seemed lighter all
around, but no voices could be heard, nor did there come up through its
curtain any rumble of limber from the roads below.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Oct. 16, 1793. In Paris, about seven in the morning.]
As the Queen so lay disconsolate and weeping bitterly, stretched in her
black gown upon the wretched bed and supporting her head upon her hand,
there came in the humble girl who had served her faithfully and who was
now almost distraught for what was to come. This child said:—
“You have not eaten all these hours.... What will you take now that it
is morning?”
The Queen answered, still crying: “My child, I need nothing more: all is
over now.” But the girl added: “Madam, I have kept warm upon the hob
some soup and vermicelli. Let me bring it you.” The Queen, weeping yet
more, assented.
She sat up a moment (but feebly—her mortal fatigue had come upon her—her
loss of blood increased and was continued), she took one spoonful and
another; soon she laid the nourishment aside, and the morning drew on to
her death.
She must change for her last exit. So much did the Revolution fear to be
cheated of its defiance to the Kings that the warders had orders not to
lose sight of her for one moment: but she would change. She would go in
white to her end.
The girl who had served her screened her a little, and in the space
between the bed and the wall she crouched and put on fresh linen, and in
place of her faded black a loose white muslin gown. Her widow’s
head-dress also, in which she had stood proudly before her Judges, she
stripped of its weeds, and kept her hair covered by no more than the
linen cap.
Her Judges came in and read to her her sentence.
The executioner, awkward and tall, came in. He must bind her hands. “Why
must you bind my hands? The King’s hands were not bound.” Yet were her
hands bound and the end of the rope left loose that her gaoler might
hold it: but she perhaps herself, before they bound her, cut off the
poor locks of her hair.
[Sidenote: Oct. 16, 1793. In Paris, at half-past ten in the morning.]
They led her out past the door of the prison: she was “delivered” and
signed for; on the steps before the archway she went up into the cart,
hearing the crowd howling beyond the great iron gates of the Law Courts,
and seeing seated beside her that forsworn priest to whom she would not
turn.... Nor were these the last humiliations: but I will not write them
here.
Up and down the passages of the prison a little dog whom she had
cherished in her loneliness ran whining and disconsolate.
[Illustration:
FACSIMILE OF THE DEATH-WARRANT OF MARIE ANTOINETTE
]
The cart went lumbering on, past the Quay, over the bridge under the
murky drizzle. The windows beyond the river were full of heads and
faces; the edges of the quays were black with the crowd. The river Seine
ran swollen with the rains; its tide and rolling made in such weather no
mark upon the water-walls of stone. The cart went lumbering on over the
rough wet paving of the northern bank. It turned into the Rue St.
Honoré, where the narrow depth was full of noise. The long line of
troops stood erect and close upon either side. The dense crowd still
roared behind them: their prey sat upon the plank, diminished, as erect
as the constraint of her bonds and her failing strength would allow. Her
lips, for all their droop of agony, were still proud; her vesture was
new; her delicate high shoes had been chosen with care for that
journey—but her face might have satisfied them all. The painted red upon
her cheeks was dreadful against her utter paleness: from beneath the
linen of her cap a few whitened wisps of hair hung dank upon her
hollowed temples: a Victim. Her eyes were sunken, and of these one dully
watched her foes, one had lost its function in the damp half-darkness of
the cells: it turned blank and blind upon the rabble that still followed
the walking jolt of the two cart-horses and the broad wheels. At the
head of those so following, an actor-fellow pranced upon a horse,
thrusting at her by way of index a sword, and shouting to the people
that they held the tigress here, the Austrian. In the midst of those so
following, an American eager to see elbowed his way and would not lose
his vantage. From the windows of the narrow gulf a continued noise of
wonder, of jeers, and of imprecations reached her. She still sat
motionless and without speech: the executioner standing behind her
holding the loose end of the cord, the forsworn priest sitting on the
plank beside her but hearing no words of hers.
It is said that as the tumbril passed certain masts whence limp
tricolour pendants hung she glanced at them and murmured a word; it is
to be believed that, a few yards further, at the turn into the Rue
Royale, she gave way at the new sight of the Machine set up for her
before the palace gardens.
[Sidenote: Oct. 16, 1793. In Paris, at a quarter past twelve, noon.]
This is known, that she went up the steps of the scaffold at liberty and
stood for a bare moment seen by the great gathering in the square, a
figure against the trees of what had been her gardens and the place
where her child had played. It was but a moment, she was bound and
thrown, and the steel fell.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Oct. 16, 1793. Before Maubeuge, about eleven in the morning.]
On the low mud and slope of Wattignies the mist began to wreathe and
thin as the hours approached high noon. Through gaps of it the three
Austrian regiments could see trees now and then in the mid-distance,
showing huge, and in a moment covered again by new whorls of vapour. But
still there was no sound. In front of them towards Dimont, to their left
round the corner of the slope in the valley of Glarges, with every lift
of vapour the landscape became apparent, when suddenly, as the mist
finally lifted, the wide plain showed below them rolling southwards, a
vast space of wind and air, and at the same moment they heard first
bugles, then the shouts of command, and lastly the rising of the
Marseillaise: Gaul was upon them.
The sleepless men had been launched at last, the hollow lanes were full
of them swarming upwards: the fields were ribbed with their open lines,
and as they charged they sang.
Immortal song! The pen has no power over colour or over music, but
though I cannot paint their lively fury or make heard their notes of
triumph, yet I have heard them singing: I know the place, and I have
seen their faces as they cleared the last hedges of the rise and struck
the 3000 upon every side.
These stood, wavered, fell back to re-form: then they saw new masses of
the Republicans roaring up from Glarges behind their flank, broke and
were scattered by the storm. The few heavy guns of the Austrians there
emplaced were trained too late to check the onrush. The little pieces of
the climbing and the surging men were dragged by laniards, unmasked
behind gaps in the hurrying advance, crashed grape and were covered
again for a moment by the living cover of the charge. The green at the
hilltop was held, the poor yards and byres of Wattignies were scoured
and thundered through, and Carnot, his hat upon his sword, and Duquesnoy
his face half blood, and all the host gloried to find before them in
their halting mid-day sweat when the great thrust was over, the level
fields of the summit, the Austrian line turned, and an open way between
them and Maubeuge.
[Sidenote: Oct. 16, 1793. Before Maubeuge, just past noon.]
Two charges disputed their certain victory. First the Hungarian cavalry
galloped and swerved and broke against the dense and ever denser bodies
that still swarmed up three ways at once and converged upon the crested
edge of the upland plain; then the Royal Bourbon, emigrants, nobles,
swept upon the French, heads down, ready to spend themselves largely
into death. They streamed with the huge white flag of the old Monarchy
above them, and on it the faint silver lilies, and from either rank the
cries that were shouted in defiance were of the same tongue which since
Christendom began has so perpetually been heard along all the battle
fronts of Christendom.
* * * * *
These also failed: a symbol in name and in flag and in valour of that
great, once good, and very ancient thing which God now disapproved.
The strong line of Coburg was turned. It was turned and must roll back
upon itself. Its strict discipline preserved it, as did the loose order
of the Republican advance and the maddened fatigue of the young men who
had just conquered: for these could work a miracle but not yet achieve a
plan. The enemy fell back in order, sombre, massed and regular,
unharassed, towards the Sambre. The straggling French soldiery,
wondering that the fighting had ceased (but wisely judged incapable of
pursuit), possessed the main road unhindered; next day they drank with
their comrades in Maubeuge.
In this way was accomplished what a principal critic of the art of
war[45] has called “The chief feat of arms of the Republic.”
Footnote 45:
Napoleon Buonaparte.
It was somewhat past noon.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Oct. 16, 1793. In Paris, just past noon.]
Upon that scaffold before the gardens which had been the gardens of her
home and in which her child had played, the Executioner showed at
deliberation and great length, this way and that on every side, the
Queen’s head to the people.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PREFACE TO APPENDICES
The practice of loading every page of a modern history with references
to authority is charlatan. Such footnotes (as was lamentably evident,
for instance, in Anatole France’s recent work upon Joan of Arc) are
usually copied from earlier authorities, and are, for the greater part,
added without any conscientious reference to the original. Moreover, in
dealing with a subject which has been as thoroughly written out by
innumerable scholars as has the life of Marie Antoinette, there are very
few new pieces of evidence which would make reference excusable.
With this in mind, I have determined to omit any note of the kind.
I had indeed in the original MS. a full series of notes rectifying the
more glaring errors of the Cambridge History, but I was so continually
discovering new ones that the task outran me, and I further remembered
that the reader of a biography of Marie Antoinette would have but little
interest in the misfortunes of official academic history. These also,
therefore, with some reluctance I deleted from this book, reserving them
for a special article upon the subject. All that could be challenged in
the book in the way of statement of fact seems to me included in the
Appendices that follow, and I am convinced that it is far preferable to
leave the pages free to the reader, even at the expense of having
perhaps to defend myself later against the criticism of certain points.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
APPENDIX A
_THE OPERATION ON LOUIS THE SIXTEENTH OF FRANCE_
THE somewhat lengthy attempt to determine the exact date which changed
the course of Louis XVI.’s life, to which I have been compelled in the
text, would have been unnecessary had the document which proves both the
operation itself and the moment of it been published.
It is certain that Maria Theresa knew in the last year of the old King’s
reign the nature of the trouble.[46]
Footnote 46:
MARIA THERESA to MERCY, _3rd January 1774_.—“Je ne compte presque plus
que sur l’entremise de l’empereur, qui à son arrivée à Versailles,
trouvera peut-être le moyen.”
Louis XVI.’s hesitation in the matter endured through the month
immediately succeeding his accession; though in the December[47] of that
year he seems to have come very near to a decision. It is certain that
the Emperor was to act with authority in the matter; and it is probable
that Louis XVI.’s long and disastrous hesitation was in part occasioned
by his brother-in-law’s delay and postponement of his voyage to
Versailles.
Footnote 47:
MARIE ANTOINETTE to MARIA THERESA, _17th December 1774_.—“Le roi a eu
il y a huit jours une grande conversation avec mon médecin; je suis
fort contente de ses dispositions et j’ai bonne espérance de suivre
bientôt l’example de ma sœur.”
Mercy was informed thoroughly of the main object of the Emperor’s visit
just before it took place,[48] and Maria Theresa at the same time
specially emphasised to her Ambassador this capital business which her
son had undertaken.[49]
Footnote 48:
MERCY to MARIA THERESA, _18th March 1777_.—“Relativement au séjour que
fera ici S.M. l’empereur, et à toutes les circonstances qui pourront
en résulter, il ne me reste pas la moindre incertitude sur les hautes
intentions de V.M., et ses ordres seront remplis avec tout le scrupule
et le soin qu’exige l’importance d’une pareille conjuncture dont il
peut résulter tant de différents effets.”
Footnote 49:
MARIA THERESA to MERCY, _31st March 1777_.—“Vous pouvez bien croire
que ce point est un des plus importants a éclaircir, s’il y a à
espérer de la succession ou point, et vous tâcherez de mettre au clair
cela avec l’empereur.”
We know that the operation was performed by the King’s surgeon, Lassone,
and the point is to determine, in the absence of direct evidence, the
date upon which Lassone operated.
I say “in the absence of direct evidence,” for, though that evidence
exists, it is not available. All papers left by Lassone, including the
_procès verbal_ of the operation on the King, were ultimately brought
into the collection of Feuillet de Conches. This collector has been dead
twenty years, and Dr. Des, among others, asked, just after his death,
for the production of this all-important document; but it was refused,
and I believe it is still refused.
It is a great loss to history. Moreover, one does not see what purpose
can be served by such reticence, if, as I believe, it is still
maintained.
As it is, we must depend upon a few veiled and discreet allusions in the
contemporary correspondence of Mercy, the Queen, and the Empress. The
principal of these consist in nine passages, the first of which is as
follows:—
“Le 27 je me rendis de grand matin à Versailles, où, après avoir
parlé d’affaires avec le comte de Vergennes, j’allai à l’hôtel
garni qu’occupait l’empereur. Le premier medécin Lassone avait
été pendant une heure chez S.M., et elle était alors dans son
cabinet avec l’abbé de Vermond.”
This letter was written on 15th June 1777. Mercy, who had been in very
bad health, sends to Maria Theresa his account of the Emperor’s visit.
In this letter he mentions, under the date Tuesday, 27th May, a long
interview which the Emperor had with Lassone, he himself, Mercy, being
present, and also Vermond, the Queen’s former tutor. Later in the day
the Emperor spent two hours alone with his brother-in-law, discussing,
in Mercy’s phrase, “confidential details.” It was at this moment,
presumably, that the Emperor persuaded the King. It will be seen,
therefore, that he put off mention of the matter until late in his
visit, at the end of the month of May. Maria Theresa, having by that
time had opportunity of hearing by word of mouth things that could
hardly be written, writes that she is content so far as things have
gone, but is waiting to hear about everything from her son on his
return.
She also writes to Marie Antoinette on the 29th June 1777, as follows:—
“J’en attends les plus heureuses suites, et même pour votre état
de mariage, sur lequel on me laisse espérance: mais on remet le
tout au retour,[50] où on pourra me parler.”
Footnote 50:
“The return,” of the Emperor, that is.
It is evident that nothing was done during the Emperor’s actual stay, or
in his presence. On the 29th of August, Maria Theresa, having seen her
son, is still by no means certain.[51] One must allow a fortnight (more
or less) for news to reach her from Versailles. We may be confident,
therefore, that whatever was written to her about the middle of the
month of August was not yet wholly reassuring, though this may not prove
that no operation had taken place; it may only go to show that success
was not yet certain.
Footnote 51:
MARIE THERESA to MERCY, _29th August 1777_.—“Je le souhaite à l’égard
du roi, mais je n’en suis pas rassurée.”
It is on the 10th of September, in a letter from Marie Antoinette to
Maria Theresa, that the first note of confidence on the part of the
Queen appears. It was premature, but matters were now certain.[52]
Footnote 52:
“Ce nouveau-né”—she writes of her sister-in-law’s child—“me fait
encore plus de plaisir par l’espérance que j’ai d’avoir bientôt le
même bonheur.”
We may, therefore, take it for certain that things were settled _not
earlier_ than the middle of August, _nor later_ than the end of the
first week of September; and it may be predicted that when Lassone’s
paper sees the light it will bear a date within those three weeks.
Mercy sees by January[53] that everything is long settled. The Queen
knew herself to be with child in the first week in April, and news was
sent to her mother on the date which I have given in the text.
Footnote 53:
“Je dois aussi ajouter la remarque très essentielle que la reine
continue à se conduire très-bien avec le roi, qui de son côté persiste
à vivre maritalement dans le sens le plus exact et le plus réel.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
APPENDIX B
_ON THE EXACT TIME AND PLACE OF DROUET’S RIDE_
THE reader or student acquainted with various records of the French
Revolution may be tempted to regard the account of Drouet’s Ride in my
text as containing too much detail for accurate history; especially as
no historian has hitherto done more than vaguely allude to it. I will
therefore in this Appendix show the way in which I found it possible to
reproduce every circumstance of Drouet’s movements from the time when he
left Ste. Menehould until the time of his arrival at Varennes.
The berline left Ste. Menehould shortly after eight. It had to climb to
Germeries Wood[54] on the crest of the forest, four hundred feet in four
miles. It could not possibly, therefore, have reached the summit till
after nine, and however fast was the run down on to Islettes (just over
five miles from Ste. Menehould) that village cannot have been reached
before 9.15. From Islettes to Clermont is just four miles, and mostly
slightly rising. The best going could not cover the distance in twenty
minutes, which puts the earliest possible entry into Clermont at
twenty-five or twenty to ten. The change of horses took from ten minutes
to a quarter of an hour. Put it at the lowest, and one has for the
earliest possible time the berline can have left Clermont that it must
have been within ten minutes of ten o’clock.
Footnote 54:
The summit is 860 feet above the sea; the town about 460 feet.
From Clermont to Varennes is nine miles: a straight road, descending
slightly on the whole, but not quite flat. Under the best conditions
that day the berline had not covered ten miles in the hour; let it
gallop at _twelve_ (a pace it was quite incapable of, save in short
spells) and Varennes would still be three-quarters of an hour off.
Now Varennes was entered just on a quarter to eleven. The berline cannot
therefore have left Clermont later than ten; and cannot have arrived
earlier than ten minutes to ten; so this departure of the Royal Family
from Clermont for Varennes, of Drouet’s postillions back from Clermont
for Ste. Menehould, took place sometime in those ten minutes.
Now Drouet reached Varennes before eleven. He reached it round about by
the forest—not by the main road—and he reached it by a gallop through a
pitch dark night in dense wood without a moon.[55] The shortest line as
the crow flies from the last bend of the road before Clermont to
Varennes Bridge is ten miles; any deviation through the wood, even in a
straight line, would make it nearly twelve. It is very difficult to
cover twelve miles in an hour under such conditions, but even if you
allow Drouet that pace he must leave the high road about ten.
Footnote 55:
The sky was overcast.
All this synchronises to within a very few minutes. The postillions
leave Clermont to turn back home in the ten minutes before ten; they go
fast, for they are riding light; a mile or so up the road they meet
their master. It is just here that the forest on the northern side of
the ravine touches the modern railway and comes nearest to the road.
Drouet takes to the forest certainly not before ten and equally
certainly not ten minutes after.
So much for the hour at which he took to the wood.
Now what road did he pursue in the forest? Only one is possible. The
forest here covers a high ridge, some three hundred feet above the open
plain. Down in the plain, parallel to this ridge and at its base, runs
the high road from Clermont to Varennes, with a row of farms and wide
fields between it and the edge of the wood. Had Drouet gone anywhere but
along the ridge he would have had to cross some twenty streams, to climb
and fall over as many ravines (_all of clay_), to flank a dozen clay
ponds and marshes, and with all this there was no continuous path. He
could not have done it in two hours, let alone one. He was compelled to
follow the ridge. It so happens that there runs all along the ridge a
green ride called “the High Ride.” It is a Gaulish track of great
antiquity, known to the peasantry as “the Roman Way.” It does not come
down as far as Clermont; it leaves the forest at the farm and huts of
Lochères. To this farm Drouet must have made his way by the lanes and
gates of Jacques and Haute Prise—once at Lochères, a hard gallop along
the High Ride brought him in six or seven miles to the Crossed Stone
(called also the Dead Girl); here another green ride crosses the main
ride of the ridge. He took this cross ride to the right hand: it leads
down and out of the forest; one comes out of the wood a mile or so from
Varennes with the town right below one and what was then a lane (now it
is a county road) through the open valley fields. Just before entering
the town a detour (by where the tile-works are now) would get him into
the Rue de Mont Blainville, and so to the Bridge: a detour serving the
double purpose of avoiding possible troops at the entry to the town and
of getting ahead of any carriage coming in from Clermont. He cannot but
have taken this detour, have noted the waggon by the bridge as he passed
it (he later used it to block the bridge), and then have come up the
main street from the river.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
APPENDIX C
_THE ORDER TO CEASE FIRE_
THE order to cease fire, which forms the frontispiece of this book, and
which is the last executive document of the French monarchy, has been
misunderstood by not a few critics, and its value thereby lessened.
It is, as I shall presently show, authentic, and therefore of the
highest possible interest to every student of history. The traveller
will find it to-day in the central glass case of the square
Revolutionary Room in the Carnavalet Museum. The body of the writing is
not in the hand of Louis himself, but the signature is undoubtedly his.
The lines were scribbled in haste by some one attendant upon the King,
signed by him, and sent to the palace.
Now no event of such importance and so recent has been more variously
described by eye-witnesses than the fall of the palace in 1792; and the
particular incident of the order to cease fire suffers, like every other
detail of those famous hours, from a plethora, and therefore a conflict,
of evidence.
It may be remarked in passing, and by way of digression, that such
difficulty cannot but attach to any episode of hard fighting, on account
of the mental condition which that exercise produces. There is exactly
the same trouble, for instance, in determining with exactitude the
all-important moment of the evening in which the Guard failed at
Waterloo.
We may confidently say, however, that two separate messages were sent to
the palace. The first was a verbal message to cease fire, which reached
Hervilly, who was directing the whole operation. Hervilly, as we know,
refused to obey, having the action well in hand, and being yet confident
of success. Either after the southern end of the Tuileries had been
forced by the populace (who, as we now know, turned the flank of the
defence by fighting their way through from the Long Gallery), or while
that capital incident was in progress, Durler, a captain of the Swiss
Guards, commanding no more than a company, but probably the company
which had the best chance of retreating, asked for orders. It is
difficult to believe that he would have done so unless the position was
already desperate. The order which reached him was a repetition of the
former one, but it was written, not verbal, and it is this second
written order the facsimile of which forms the frontispiece to this
volume. Durler did not see it written. He had gone in person to learn
what he should do, but he was back again with his men before the note
was handed to him. He was a perfectly honest and trustworthy man, and
his testimony remains. It is evident from this testimony that, by the
time the note came, all was over.
As to the pedigree of the document:—
Durler rose to the rank of general before his death. He naturally
regarded this piece of historic writing as among the most precious of
his possessions, and left it to his family, who were resident in
Lucerne. Chateaubriand, visiting Lucerne on the 15th of May 1832, saw it
in that town. From General Durler’s daughter and heiress it descended to
his grandchildren, Schimacher by name, and was in the early eighties the
property of M. Felix Schimacher of Lucerne, whose agent in Paris was a
banker, Mr. de Trooz.
M. Cousin, the curator of the Municipal Museum of Paris (the
Carnavalet), hearing of it, approached Mr. de Trooz, and offered a large
sum on behalf of the city. The offer was accepted. The pedigree of the
document was drawn up by M. Dagobert Schimacher, lawyer in Lucerne, and
the whole despatched to Paris, where the purchase was completed on the
27th July 1886, and the document deposited in the Museum, where it now
lies.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
APPENDIX D
_ON THE LOGE OF THE “LOGOTACHYGRAPHE”_
THE Manège was pulled down after the consular decree of year XI., which
originated the Rue de Rivoli; the historical reconstruction of its
arrangements on the 10th of August 1792 is the more difficult from the
fact that the only accurate plan of it which has come down to us[56]
dates from a period _earlier_ than December 1791, in which month (on the
27th) the order was given to change nearly the whole of its
dispositions. The box of the _Logographe_ can be fixed in this plan
(though not in the new place it occupied after the 5th of January
1792),[57] but not that of the _Logotachygraphe_.
Footnote 56:
In the _Histoire des Edifices_, &c., by Paris.
Footnote 57:
The work was finished by the 26th of January 1792.
We know[58] that the first was near the President’s Chair, and this was
on the south side of the Manège, in the middle. It was in this box that
the Queen had appeared when her husband had accepted the Constitution on
the return from Varennes; and it was in this box that the Royal Family
were supposed, until lately, to have stayed in the three days after the
fall of the palace.
Footnote 58:
By the 7th clause of the order cited.
There were many such grated boxes for reporters up and down the Hall:
the proximity of the _Logographe’s_ to the Chair being due to the desire
for accurate verbatim reports to be recorded from the best acoustic
position of the Hall.
Our establishment of the _Logographe’s_ box is only of value to the
history of the 10th of August because (though a confusion was till
recently made between the two) the box in which the Royal Family were
put, that of the _Logotachygraphe_, a journal not yet published, but in
preparation, and one which had already obtained leave to have its
reporting place in the Hall, must have been near by. Its exact situation
we cannot determine, but it was certainly not far from the Chair on the
south wall, and presumably in the eastern half of it.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
APPENDIX E
_UPON THE “LAST PORTRAIT OF THE QUEEN” BY KUCHARSKI_
THREE “last” portraits of Marie Antoinette, each very similar to the two
others, though not replicas, are known to exist: each is ascribed to the
painter Kucharski, who appears for a moment at the Queen’s trial, and
who is known to have painted her at Court.
These portraits are, one in Arenburg Gallery at Brussels, another in the
Carnavalet, and the third in the new Revolutionary Room on the third
floor at Versailles. This last is the one which is reproduced here,
because M. de Nolhac, by far the best authority, has assured me of its
authenticity. On the other hand, it must be mentioned that the Belgian
one was vouched for by Auguste d’Arenberg[59] who bought it in 1805, and
who quotes the testimony of the painter[60] himself, who was then alive.
Footnote 59:
See “Notes sur quelques Portraits de la Galerie d’Arenberg,” in the
_Annales de l’Académie Royale d’Archéologie de Belgique_, 4th series,
vol. x. 1897.
Footnote 60:
On this painter there exists a monograph by Mycielski (Paris, 1894),
and an article published in the December number, 1905, of the _Revue
d’ Art, Ancien et Moderne_.
He appears to have affirmed that he saw the Queen in the Temple when
he was on guard, took the sketch, noting the details of dress, &c.,
and completing the work at home.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
APPENDIX F
_ON THE AUTHENTICITY OF THE QUEEN’S LAST LETTER_
THE few doubts that some have put forward against the authenticity of
this famous document will, unless history abandons its modern vices,
increase with time, for it is a document exactly suited to the type of
minute, internal, literal, and documentary criticism by which tradition
is, to-day, commonly assailed. It will be pointed out that the
psychology of this letter differs altogether from that of the mass of
Marie Antoinette’s little scribbled notes, and equally from her serious
political drafts and despatches. Critics will very probably be found to
dispute the possibility of such a woman at such a time producing such a
document. The style fits ill with what she was in Court just before it
purports to have been written, and also with what she was on her way to
the scaffold just after. Most important of all, perhaps, the sentences
are composed in a manner quite different from that of any other letter
of hers we possess; they have a rhythm and a composition in them: the
very opening words are in a manner wholly more exalted and more
rhetorical than ever was her own.
It will be further and especially pointed out that the moment when it
was discovered was the very moment for forgery, and this point is of
such importance to the discussion that I must elaborate it.
By nightfall of June 18, 1815, the experiment of founding democracy in
Europe was imagined to be at an end: Napoleon was definitely defeated.
On the 7th of July the first forces of the Allies entered Paris, and on
the 20th of November was signed the second Treaty of Paris, whereby the
reinstatement of the old régime in France was accomplished at a price to
the nation of 700,000,000 francs and of all its conquests. All the power
of a highly centralised Government was now in the hands of Louis XVIII.,
and it was in the highest degree profitable to prove oneself a friend to
what had but a few months before seemed a lost cause. Document after
document appeared professing a special knowledge of the woes of the
Royal Family, petition after petition was presented in which the
petitioners (nearly always in the same conventional and hagiographical
style) spoke of the Royal “martyrs” in the Temple and in the
Conciergerie.
In the light of such a character attaching to this particular moment,
note the following sequence of dates in connection with the production
of the document we are discussing.
Not two months after the signing of the Treaty of Paris the French
Chamber voted the Law of Amnesty. The seventh clause of this Act
banished the regicides who had sat in the Convention. Among these was a
certain Courtois, a man now over seventy years of age, who had bought a
large country house and estate near the frontier. Note, further, that
Courtois had started as a small bootmaker and was one of the very few
politicians of the Revolution who had followed our modern practice of
making money out of politics. His honesty, therefore, was doubtful: a
thing which we cannot say of the enthusiasts of the time. Of _those_ we
can say that their imaginations or their passions may warp their
evidence, but in the case of Courtois we know that he was a professional
politician of the modern type, and would do a dishonest thing for money.
Now this Courtois had been one of a Commission named by the Convention
to examine Robespierre’s papers after the fall of Robespierre on the
28th of July 1794. He was what the French call the Reporter of the
Commission—that is, the director of it—and it was called the “Courtois
Commission.” The Commission published their report of what they had
found in Robespierre’s house. It was a report two volumes in length for
which Courtois was responsible, and of which he was practically the
author.
This minute and voluminous report _made no mention of the Queen’s
letter_. Not a word is heard of it during all those twenty-two years
until the aforesaid Bill of Amnesty is before the French Parliament of
the Restoration and the regicides, including old Courtois, passing his
last days on his comfortable estate, are to suffer exile. Then for the
first time the Queen’s letter appears. On the 25th of January 1816
Courtois writes to a prominent lawyer, an acquaintance of his wife’s, a
Royalist, and in touch with the Court, telling him that he had kept back
ten pieces among the mass of things found in Robespierre’s house, three
of them trinkets, a lock of hair, &c., one or two letters of no
importance—and the capital point of all, this letter of Marie
Antoinette’s to her sister-in-law. He offers to exchange these against a
special amnesty to himself, or at least of a year’s delay before he is
exiled, in order, presumably, to allow him to realise his fortune.
This is not all: the letter was not written until Courtois’ wife was
dead; and it was written on the very day of her death and the moment
after it—the moment, that is, after the death of the only person who
would presumably know—if he allowed any one to know—whether he had or
had not carefully concealed these documents for so many years.
The Government of Louis XVIII. offered money for the letter, and, having
so lulled the suspicions of Courtois, sent one of its officials without
warning into his house and seized his effects. Some days afterwards the
letter (which no one had yet seen or heard of) is produced by Royal
order and shown to Madame d’Angoulême (who is said to have fainted when
she saw it), and ordered to be read from every pulpit during Mass on the
16th of October of every year; a vast edition of it is brought out in
facsimile and distributed broadcast, and the letter itself is enshrined
among the public exhibits at the Archives.
A lengthy analysis of the sort just concluded is necessary to make the
reader understand how and why a strong attack upon the authenticity of
the letter will sooner or later certainly be made. I owe it to my
readers to say why the apparently strong presumption against this letter
does not in my opinion hold.
First let me recapitulate what is to be said against it:—
(1) There is no contemporary trace of it.[61]
Footnote 61:
The woman Bault, who was wardress of the Conciergerie, says that her
husband told her of such a letter, but her evidence is given after
Louis XVIII. had published it, and for all those twenty-two years she
had said nothing about it. Moreover she talked of its discovery with
the usual clap-trap phrases of “The Omnipotence of Heaven showing its
ineffable goodness by restoring us this monument in its most admirable
way, &c.” And _the only contemporary account_, while it does mention
the lock of hair which the Queen desired given to a friend, says
nothing of the letter.
(2) It appears at a moment when forged documents of that sort were of
the highest value both to a despotic Government and to the vendors or
producers of them.
(3) That moment is no less than _twenty-two years_ posterior to the
supposed writing of the letter, and, during all those twenty-two years,
of the many who should have seen it, of the _three_ public men (all
enemies) through whose hands it must have passed, no one has heard of
its existence nor mentioned it in a private correspondence, nor
apparently so much as spoken of it in a conversation to a friend.
(4) It is first heard of from a man who would have every interest in
forging it and who is known to have been very unscrupulous in political
dealings for money.
(5) He makes his offer on the very day when the last witness there could
be against him dies.
(6) The document, when it does appear, appears without any pedigree, or
chain of witnesses to vouch for it, nor even any tradition. It is
vouched for only by the people who had most interest in creating such a
relic and is forced upon the public with every apparatus at the command
of a despotic Government.
(7) Most important of all, the letter is written in a high and affecting
style wholly different from all that we know of Marie Antoinette’s
writing, and quite inconsistent with her demeanour at the moment,
consonant only with the sanctity which it was at that moment desired to
give to the Royal Family.
Nevertheless I believe the document to be without the slightest doubt
authentic, and I will give my reasons for this certitude:—
(1) To forge a letter of Marie Antoinette’s is peculiarly difficult.
There have been many such attempts. They have been discovered with an
ease familiar to all students of her life.
This difficulty lies in the great irregularity of her method of writing,
coupled with the exact persistence of certain types of letter. She never
in her life could write a line straight across a page. She never made
two “d’s” exactly the same, and yet you never can mistake one of her
“d’s.” She never crossed a “t” quite in the same manner twice, and yet
you can always tell her way of crossing it. The absence of capitals
after a full stop is a minor point but a considerable one. She always
brought the lower loop of the “b” up to the up stroke, so that it looks
like an “f”; she always separated her “l’s” from the succeeding letter.
Let the reader compare the document of which I am speaking, reproduced
in facsimile opposite page 395, and her letter of the 3rd of September
1791 to Joseph II. (opposite page 297), and he will see what I mean. The
first is reproduced on a four-fifths scale, the second in facsimile, but
the points I make can easily be followed upon them. Note the first “d”
in the first line of the letter written in prison, the second “d” and
the third “d” all in the same line. Next look down to the seventh line
and note the “d” in “tendre,” and see how the first three “d’s” though
irregular are of the same type, and how the fourth, though much less
hooked, is obviously written by the same hand. Look down two lines lower
to the “d” in “plaidoyer”; it has a complete hook and is quite different
from the other letters, and three lines lower, in the word “deux,” the
hook has a sharp angle apparent nowhere else on the page. Now if you
turn to the “d’s” in her letter to her brother of the 3rd of September
1791, you will find exactly the same characteristics. Not one “d” like
another, yet all obviously from the same hand; the “d” in the second
line with a full hook to it, the two “d’s” in the twelfth line much
vaguer.
So with the “t’s,” they are crossed in every kind of way with a short
straight line, a long curved one, a little jab followed by a straight,
now with a slope downward, now with a slope upward, but all evidently
from the same hand, and their very variety makes it impossible for them
to be a forgery. The “l’s,” written separately from the letter following
each, are obvious everywhere, so is that irregularity of line of which I
have spoken. Let the reader look at the third line of the letter of the
3rd of September 1791 (opposite page 297) and at the seventh line of the
letter written in prison, and ask himself whether it would have been
possible to copy such native irregularity.
The identity of handwriting is apparent even from these two documents.
It is absolutely convincing to any one who has seen much of her
penmanship.
(2) To the faults in grammar and in spelling I should pay little
attention—those things are easily copied; but it is worth remarking that
on the third line of the letter written in prison she spells the
infinitive of “montrer” without the final “r” as though it were a
participle, while in the letter written to her brother in 1791 she makes
no such error. She puts an “e” in “Jouis,” and so forth. All these
discrepancies are a proof of the authenticity of the letter. She spelt
at random, and her grammar was at random, though she got a little more
accurate as she grew older. It would, on the contrary, be an argument
_against_ the authenticity of the letter if particular mistakes,
discovered in a particular document of hers, were repeated in this last
letter from the Conciergerie.
(3) The letter was immediately exposed to public view; the paper was
grown yellow, the writing was apparently old, the ink in places faded,
the creases deep and worn. Now all these accidental features could no
doubt be reproduced by a modern forger with the advantage of modern
methods, modern mechanical appliances, modern chemical science and
photography. They could not have been achieved by a forger of 1816.
It seems to me, therefore, a document absolutely unassailable. The
arguments against it are of the same sort which modern scepticism
perpetually brings against every form of historical evidence that does
not fit in with some favourite modern theory. I must believe the
evidence of my senses, and I am compelled to admit that a woman, every
expression of whose soul was different from this, and whose whole
demeanour before and after writing the letter betrayed a mental
condition quite inconsistent with the writing of it, was granted for
perhaps an hour (in spite of a full day’s fast, the fear of imminent
death and the breakdown of her health and of all her power), an
exaltation sufficient to produce this wonderful piece of prose, and a
steadfast control of language and a discovery of language miraculously
exceptional to her character and experience.
No other conclusion is possible to a student unless, like any Don, he
prefers a sceptical hypothesis to the testimony of his eyes and the
judgment of his common sense.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
APPENDIX G
THE cautious student will attach considerable importance to the account
given by Dumas, and to the account given by the Abbé Gabriel, especially
to the former, in his _La Route de Varennes_. Dumas was a novelist. His
contribution to history will therefore seem suspect, but it must be
remembered that he had the whole story from Choiseul himself. The
motives to which he ascribes Choiseul’s departure are substantially
those given in the text; but he particularly adds that the number of
peasants crowding round the Hussars greatly outnumbered those soldiers;
that the local villages were rising, and that a special reason for their
anxiety was discoverable in the fact that the recently emancipated
copyholders of a local noblewoman were on that particular day in dread
of distraint upon their goods at the hands of a military force.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
INDEX
Adelaide, Madame, the eldest of Louis XV.’s daughters, her influence on
Marie Antoinette, 61;
her influence in making Maurepas Chief Minister, 82, 83;
catches small-pox in nursing her father, 83
Aire, the river of Varennes, tactical advantages of, to Nationalists,
279, 282
Aix-la-Chapelle, treaty of, 8
Amand, Jacques, peasant child adopted by Marie Antoinette, 78;
his death as a soldier at Jemappes, 343
America, United States of. _See also_ United States
—— tea tax imposed in Boston coincidently with Louis XV.’s death, 72;
British colonies in, origin of their revolt, 100;
arrival of delegates to France from, 100;
British colonies in, character of population forbids extreme policy
of war in, 102;
rebellion of colonies in, England’s certain policy towards, 106-7;
failure of Burgoyne’s campaign in, 108-12;
rebellion of colonies in, strategical position at time of Burgoyne’s
march, 108-10
Anne, Fort, Burgoyne captures, 111
“Antoinette,” first use of this French form of the Queen’s name, 30
Antwerp, commerce of, dependent on opening of the Scheldt, 145-46
Archbishop’s Palace. _See_ Archeveché
Archeveché, National Assembly installed in, on coming to Paris in Days
of October, 232
Argonne, hills of, their position on the eastern road, 270;
Royal carriage begins ascent of, in flight to Varennes, 276;
Drouet’s ride through forest of, 277-78;
forced by the invaders in 1792, 339
Army, British, its excellence in 1776, 101
Army, French, deplorable condition of, in 1792, 296
Army of the East, most reliable force for Crown in 1789, 216;
pointed out by Mirabeau as support of the Crown, 246
Artois, Comte d’, Louis XVI.’s youngest brother, his admiration of
Marie Antoinette, 65;
his “shocking familiarity” with the Queen in early days of her
marriage, 92;
scandal of Queen’s association with, 123;
receives Queen in his palace at the Temple, 164;
her superstition, 164;
his appearance at the Royal Session, 206;
emigration after fall of Bastille, 213
Assignats, creation of, 238
Auctoritas, “_Sine auctoritate nulla vita_,” Gallic formula, 78
Austria, extreme peril of, on partition of Poland, 61-63
—— foreign policy of, Joseph II. arrives at Versailles to influence
Queen in favour of, 103
Authority, “without it no life,” 78
“Autrichienne,” nickname given Marie Antoinette by Mesdames, 64
Bailly, his role on 20th June 1789, 206;
first Mayor of Paris, 212
Ball, Court, on Marie Antoinette’s marriage, 53;
masked, an especial diversion of Marie Antoinette as Dauphine, 65;
Fersen first meets her at one, 66;
of 21st January 1778, independence of United States recognised at,
114-15;
on Shrove Tuesday, at the Opera, 1779, Queen’s undignified adventure
in connection with, 121;
the last held in Versailles, winter of 1786, 178
Bankruptcy of the Guémenées disastrous to the Queen, 144;
part of Queen’s plan for defeat of States-General, 210
Barentin, Keeper of the Seals
announces fatal decision as to vote by orders at opening of
States-General, 201;
advises shutting of doors against Tiers État, 204;
watches the Oath in the Tennis Court, 205;
gives the seated leave to be seated, 207
Barnave, nominated to bring King back to Paris, 285;
captured by the Queen on return from Varennes, 288-89
Barry, Madame Du. _See_ Du Barry
Bastille, Marie Antoinette talks wildly of sending Turgot to, 98;
Cardinal Rohan at, 176;
captured, news of in Versailles, 211-12
Batz, his plan for helping the Queen to escape, 354
Bavaria, Joseph II. first covets, 105;
diplomatic affair of, 116-18;
Marie Antoinette’s interference in, 116, 117;
death of Elector of, 116;
Prussia supports the heir of, against Austria, 117;
Joseph II.’s policy in, 117;
French money paid to Austria on account of, 118
Bayon and Romeuf, their ride in pursuit of the King to Varennes, 283,
284
Beauharnais, in the Chair of the Assembly when news of the King’s
arrest at Varennes is brought, 285
Beaumarchais, de, title purchased by Caron, 102;
assumes trading alias of Roderigo Hortalez, 102;
his birth and character, 135, 136;
his _Mariage de Figaro_ (_see_ Figaro), reads his play in private in
Princesse de Lamballe’s rooms, 136
Bed of Justice, Louis XVI.’s first recourse to, in registering Turgot’s
decrees, 97, 98;
last, held to coerce the Parlement under influence of the Queen, 189
Bells, of Paris, sound the attack on the palace, 319
Bernis, Cardinal de, negotiates the diplomatic revolution, 22
Berthier, murder of, after fall of Bastille, 213
Bodyguard. _See_ Garde au Corps
Boehmer and Bassange, jewellers and partners, owners of the Diamond
Necklace, 159;
show it to Mme. de La Motte, 162;
appeal to the Queen for payment, 165;
draw up a report, 167
Bondy, first post-house on the Eastern road, Fersen leaves Royal Family
at, 262-63
Boston, British man-of-war arrives in harbour of, to impose tea tax, at
same hour as Louis XV.’s death, 72;
English fleet fails to blockade French fleet in harbour of, 121
Bouillé, in command of Army of the East in ’89, 216;
in command of Army of the East, pointed out by Mirabeau as the
support of the Crown, 246;
his cavalry arrive at Varennes just too late to save the King, 282-83
Bouillon, Duke of, officially announces accession of Louis XVI., 72
Brandweiss, Countess of, first governess of Marie Antoinette and her
sister Caroline, 24
Brandywine, Washington’s defeat on, 110
Breteuil, orders the arrest of Cardinal de Rohan, 159
Brienne. _See_ Loménie
Broglie, in “Ministry of Resistance,” to lead army for coercion of
Paris, 210
Brunier, family doctor of the Queen, admitted to the Temple, 348
Brunswick, breaks camp at end of July 1792 and marches on Paris, 315
Burgoyne’s, his campaign and surrender, 108-12
Burke, his lack of judgment on the Queen, 94, 95
Busne, officer guarding the Queen during her trial, 385
Byron, fails to blockade d’Estaing in Boston harbour, 121
Cagliostro, his influence over Cardinal de Rohan, 156
Calonne, his appointment and character, 149, 150;
his loans 151;
designs the harbour of Cherbourg, 177;
summons the Notables, 178;
failure of his experiment of the assembly of the Notables, 180;
his fall, April 1787, due to Marie Antoinette, 187
Cambrai, garrison of, cut to pieces, 371
Campaign of American Rebellion, Burgoyne’s failure, 108-12;
surrender of Cornwallis, 127-28
Carnot, joins the Committee of Public Safety, 368;
appears before Maubeuge with the army, 374;
his plan in Avesnes before the battle of Wattignies, 375;
prepares for the attack, 382;
his first reconnaissance before the battle of Wattignies, Oct. 14,
383;
orders the charge upon Dourlers, 386;
brings troops over from left of French position to the right, before
Wattignies, 392, 394;
leads the charge at Wattignies, 400
Caroline, daughter of Maria Theresa, later Queen of Naples, educated
with Marie Antoinette, 24
Caron. _See_ Beaumarchais
Catholicism, decay of, in France before Revolution, 250
Cats, Louis XVI.’s aversion to, 76
Cease fire, order to, signed by Louis XVI., 328
Cell, Queen’s first, in the Conciergerie, 365, 366
Chaintry, posting station of, Royal Family recognised at, in flight to
Varennes, 268
Chalons, King recognised at, in flight to Varennes, 269;
historical character of neighbourhood of, 270
Champ de Mars, massacre of, 301
Champlain, Lake, strategical value of, in Burgoyne’s campaign, 109
Chancel, hesitates to make a sortie from Maubeuge, 383
Chartres, Duc de, later Duke of Orleans, first meeting with Marie
Antoinette, 40;
dances with Marie Antoinette at her first ball, 53;
his theatrical absence from the Court on visit of Maximilian, 91
Chaumont, his house and park in Passy, the refuge of American
delegates, 100
Chauveau-Lagarde, named to defend the Queen, 374
Chauvelin, his death at Louis XV.’s card-table, 67
Cherbourg, harbour of, visited by Louis XVI., 177, 178
Child, early craving of Marie Antoinette for a, 77;
she adopts a peasant, 77, 78;
last of Marie Antoinette, a girl, birth of, 178;
death at age of eleven months, 188
Childbed, first, of Marie Antoinette, 119-20;
second birth of an heir, 129;
third, 163;
fourth, 178
Choiseul, principal Minister of Louis XV., Maria Theresa’s reliance
upon him before her daughter’s marriage, 26;
his fall, 55-58;
meets Marie Antoinette on her journey to her marriage, 38;
recalled at beginning of Louis XVI.’s reign through influence of
Marie Antoinette, but dismissed again, 82
Choiseul, Junior (nephew of former), at the post of Somme-Vesle,
271-272;
abandons post of Somme-Vesle, 273, 274
Chorez, Mayor of Chalons, 270
Church, Catholic, in France, attitude of Revolution towards revenues
of, 237;
constitution of, 238
Churching, first, of Marie Antoinette, 120, 121;
second, 135;
third, her unpopularity evident in the street, 164
Civil Constitution of the Clergy, disastrous character of, 249-50;
Mirabeau’s attitude towards, 251
Civilisation, European (_see_ Europe),
threatened by Reformation, 3
Claye, Queen’s waiting-women join Royal Family in flight at, 265
Clergy, summoned to grant taxes before Revolution, refuse, 192;
civil constitution of (_see_ Civil Constitution),
confiscation of goods of, 237, 238;
unpopularity of, 257
Cléry, Louis XVI.’s valet in the Temple, 336;
is taken from the Temple, 348
Coburg, determines to besiege Maubeuge, 367
Commons. _See_ Tiers État
Compiègne, place of meeting of Louis XV. with Marie Antoinette, 38-40
Conciergerie, Queen removed to, from Temple, 364
Condé, emigration of, after fall of Bastille, 213;
town of, surrender of, 363
Conflans, country-seat of Mercy, 124
Cornwallis enters Yorktown, 126;
his campaign and surrender, 127, 128
Coronation, of Louis XVI., 93-95;
Queen’s presence at, 94
Council, Marie Antoinette’s first interference with, 83;
King’s assiduity in attending, 93;
Queen virtually the head of, after January 1787, 179, 187-88;
during “Days of October,” Marie Antoinette present at, 225, 226
Crown, quarrel between, and States-General opens, 204;
advises Union of Orders, 209
Cubieres brings news of Paris marching on Versailles to Louis XVI., 221
D’Aiguillon, Duc de, chief Minister at end of Louis XV.’s reign after
Choiseul’s fall, made by the Du Barry, 55, 58, 59;
befriends the Du Barry at the end, 70;
his fall, 70;
dismissed from Foreign Affairs by Louis XVI., 83;
receives grant of public money on dismissal in the modern English
fashion, 83;
fall of, largely due to Marie Antoinette, 84
D’Angoulême, Duchess of (_see also_ Madame Royale), birth of, 120
Danjou during massacres of September, 338
Dauphin, son of Louis XV., his death in 1765, 26
Dauphin, first, Louis XVI.’s eldest son, birth of, 129;
effect of his birth on politics, 130;
illness of, 160;
dying, watches opening of States-General, 200
Dauphin, second (Duke of Normandy), his birth, 163;
during invasion of Tuileries by mob, on 20th June, 306;
taken from the Queen, 355-359;
evidence extracted from him against the Queen by Hébert, 373
Dead, Day of, November 2, coincidence of Marie Antoinette’s birth with,
21;
situation of Marie Antoinette upon, in 1775, 95, 96;
in 1789, coincidence of, 235
Deane, delegate of the revolted British colonists in America, received
by Louis XVI., 114
D’Epresmenil affirms the revolutionary principles of national
government in the Parlement, 191
D’Estaing sails from Toulon to attack the English fleet in 1778, 115;
escapes from Byron’s blockade in Boston harbour, 121;
appears at Queen’s Trial, 387
D’Hervilly refuses to cease fire, 328
Diamond Necklace, La Motte first introduced to Cardinal Rohan, 127;
the Cardinal de Rohan begins his advances to the Queen (early 1782),
she avoids him, 138;
Mme. de La Motte present at Court in 1782, 138, 139;
Cardinal de Rohan, bribing a porter, is present at a fête at Trianon,
141, 142;
Mme. de La Motte presents petition to the Queen, 147;
he sees Mme. de La Motte in his country house in Alsace in 1783, 149;
in his palace in Paris in March 1784 she tells him she is now an
intimate friend of the Queen’s, 151-52;
he receives from La Motte letters which he believes to be written by
the Queen, 155;
is further encouraged by Cagliostro, and writes letters to the Queen
which he gives to La Motte, 156;
Mme. de La Motte’s husband hires the girl d’Oliva to act the part of
the Queen, 157;
supposed meeting of Cardinal de Rohan and the Queen in the park of
Versailles July 24, 1784, 159;
Necklace possibly offered to Queen in 1779, 159;
Bassange, the jeweller, shows it to Mme. de La Motte, 162;
purchased by Cardinal de Rohan on supposed authority of the Queen,
163;
is taken by the male La Motte to London, 163;
Boehmer, Bassange’s partner, begs Queen for payment, 165;
suspicions of the Cardinal aroused, 166;
Mme. de La Motte confesses her forgery, the Queen discovers the plot,
168;
Rohan is arrested, 169;
tried, 170-75;
and acquitted, 176
Dillon, Madame de, Queen’s violent and ephemeral friendship for, 94
Dissipation, early cause of Marie Antoinette’s, 77;
origins of coincident with accession, 90, 91;
Joseph I.’s plan of reform for, 103;
of Queen continued after birth of second child, 135
D’Oliva. _See_ Oliva
Dourlers, French objective on first day of battle of Wattignies, 385,
383;
French carry, 389;
and retire from, 390
Dreux Brézé, Master of Ceremonies at opening of States-General,
200-201;
his famous order to the Commons, 208
Dreyfus Case, parallel between, and affair of Diamond Necklace,
174-175, 177
Drouet, sees the Royal Family in flight to Varennes, 275-76;
his gallop to intercept them, 277-79;
sees Queen in Temple, 341;
sees Queen in prison for last time, 362;
rides into Maubeuge, 371;
carries news from Maubeuge and is captured, 372
Du Barry, her name first mentioned to Maria Theresa, 32;
disastrous influence upon Louis XV.’s reign, 40-44;
her character and appearance, 45-46;
first meets Marie Antoinette at La Muette, 48-49;
Marie Antoinette’s antipathy to her, 54-56;
Maria Theresa attempts to break down that antipathy, 58-62;
Marie Antoinette’s single speech to, 61;
her devotion to Louis XV. at the end of his life, 69;
she leaves the Court, 70;
exiled to Burgundy on accession of Louis XVI., 83
Dufort, French Ambassador at Vienna at time of Marie Antoinette’s
marriage, 30
Dumouriez, chief man in the War Ministry of ’92, 300;
Queen obtains his plans and betrays them to the enemy, 300;
at battle of Jemappes, 342;
defeated at Neerwinden, 352;
betrays the country, 352
Dunquerque, Duke of York’s march upon, 368
Earthquake of Lisbon. _See_ Lisbon
Ecclesiastical rights of Rohan, 171
Education of Marie Antoinette, 24-27, 33-36
Edward, Fort, Burgoyne’s tardy advance upon, 111
Elector of Bavaria, his death precipitates the Bavarian diplomatic
quarrel, 116
Elizabeth, Madame, Marie Antoinette’s relations with, 122;
brought to Paris by mob in Days of October, 230, 231
Emigration, first, 213
Émigrés, disturbing element in the Allies’ camp, 296;
their charge at Wattignies, 400
Enghien, emigration after fall of Bastille, 213
England, fiscal position of, during pre-revolutionary and revolutionary
period, 86, 87;
contrast between fiscal position in eighteenth century and to-day,
88;
dominates foreign policy of France on accession of Louis XVI., 100-2;
constant colonial policy of, 107;
foreign policy of, bound up with closing of the Scheldt, 146
Episcopacy, French, corrupt condition of, before Revolution, 181-82
Etiquette, rigidity of French Courts, 37;
strictness and publicity of, on accession of Louis XVI., 80
Europe, civilisation of, peculiar in all history, 1, 2
Extravagance of Marie Antoinette, character of rather than amount
remarkable, 89, 90;
Marie Antoinette’s first considerable purchase of jewellery, 97
Falkenstein, Count, incognito of Joseph II., in Paris, 103
Fersen, Axel de, first meets Marie Antoinette, 66;
revisits Versailles, 118;
Marie Antoinette obviously in love with him, 118, 119;
leaves her for American War, 119;
marches south with Washington to join the French at Yorktown, 126;
negotiates surrender of Yorktown, 128;
comes again to Versailles in 1784 with King of Sweden, 155;
revisits Versailles in 1787, 183;
his return to Versailles just before Revolution, 193-95;
story of his presence in Queen’s room during days of October, 227
_n._;
Bouillé’s son received by, 253;
organises the flight of the Royal Family, 260, 261;
drives the Royal Family out of Paris in the flight to Varennes, 261,
262;
his farewell to the Queen in flight to Varennes, 263;
story of ring given him by the Queen, and of his death, 263, 265;
the Queen’s letters to him after the failure of the flight to
Varennes, 292-93;
the Queen’s letter to, in September 1791, 303;
his last journey to Paris to help the Royal Family, 303-4;
in regular communication with Royal Family to arrange invasion, 310,
311;
his communications with the Queen in prison, 349-50
Feuillants, disused monastery, Royal Family lodged in, 330-32
_Figaro, Mariage de_, play by Beaumarchais, its political character,
135-36;
popularity among smart set of the time, 140;
King refuses permission to act, 145, 147;
it is played before the Court, 148;
Paris insists on a public performance of, 151;
King yields, and public performance takes place on 27th April 1784,
152;
its effect upon the régime, 153
Finance. _See_ Fiscal Problem
Finances, French, Calonne appointed to the head of, 149, 150;
his loans, 151
Financiers, modern, their vulgar expenditure compared with that of the
Court of Versailles, 78, 79
Fiscal Problem of the French preceding the Revolution, 86;
contrasted with contemporary fiscal position of England, 86, 87;
effect of tradition upon, 88
Flanders, Regiment of, marches into Versailles, 215;
its character, 216;
banquet given to, 217-20;
before the palace on advance of mob, 222
Fleury, exact coincidence of his life with the transition between the
anti-Austrian policy of France and diplomatic revolution, 6;
at the Exchequer during bankruptcy of the Guémenées, 144
Flight of Royal Family, Mirabeau’s plan for, 252;
Bouillé is asked to advise on, 253;
how affected by death of Mirabeau, 255, 256;
precipitated by the riot of April 17, 1791, 260;
Fersen’s rôle in, 260-65;
description of, 263-91
Florida Blanca, Spanish Minister, his terror of Great Britain at moment
of Burgoyne’s surrender, 112, 113
Fontainebleau, Court gambling at, on accession of Queen, 99;
French Court there at moment of Burgoyne’s surrender, 112
Foreign Policy, French, D’Aiguillon ceases to control, on Louis XVI.’s
accession, 83, 84;
Vergennes controls, on accession of Louis XVI., 84;
dominated by the fear of England on accession of Louis XVI., 100-2,
106-8;
eagerly seeks Spanish alliance against England, 107;
Spanish dread of England forbids this, 112-13;
final determination to accept the English challenge, 113;
this determination confirmed by Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga,
113-14;
refuses to support Austria in Bavarian claim, but under pressure from
Marie Antoinette pays compensation to Vienna, 116-18;
Marie Antoinette’s increasing power over, after Maurepas’ death, 134;
attitude of, towards opening of Scheldt, 148, 149;
payment of Dutch indemnity to Austria under pressure from the Queen,
161, 165-66, 174
Foulon, murder of, after fall of Bastille, 213
Fouquier Tinville, his speech for the prosecution of the Queen, 380
France, hesitation of, upon the Reformation, 3-5;
generally thought in decline during early eighteenth century, 16
France and Austria, causes of original antagonism between, and their
final reconciliation in the eighteenth century, 2-9.
Francis of Lorraine, husband of Maria Theresa, his happy marriage, 15;
his superstition at Marie Antoinette’s birth, 21;
his death, 25
Frankfort, the crowning of the Emperor, the Queen’s nephew there in
1792, 309, 312
Franklin, lands in France, 100;
received by Louis XVI., 114
Frederick the Great, his power first apparent at Mollwitz, 6;
his betrayal of the Hapsburgs, 8;
emotion of Kaunitz on hearing of his death, 14;
betrays Louis XV., 21;
his initiative in partition of Poland, 62
French Guards. _See_ Gardes Françaises
French Ministerial Tradition. _See_ Ministerial Tradition
Fontainebleau, Dr. Johnson sees the Queen at, 95
Frontier, north-eastern, strategical nature of, 360
Gardes du Corps, their banquet to the Regiment of Flanders, 217-25
Gardes Françaises, almost only French troops in Paris at opening of
Revolution, 209
Gates, commanding American forces, receives Burgoyne’s surrender, 112
Geoffrin, Madame, visits Vienna before Marie Antoinette’s marriage, 28
George, Lake, strategical value of, in Burgoyne’s campaign, 109
Girondins, their appearance in the Revolution, 301, 302
Goethe, his judgment on the household of Maria Theresa, 15
Goguelat, second in command of Choiseul’s Hussars, 272;
shot at Varennes, 282
Goltz, Prussian Minister at Versailles, his letter on the date of
Burgoyne’s surrender, 112
Government, nature of all, 195-96
Guémenée, Madame de, governess to the children of France, Marie
Antoinette’s friendship with, 92;
bankruptcy of, 142-44
Guillaume, companion of Drouet in his famous ride, 277
Guines, French Ambassador in London, protected by Marie Antoinette, 98
Haga, Comte de, incognito of King of Sweden, 155
Handwriting of Marie Antoinette, quite unformed, 50
Harvest, failure of, in 1775, a cause of Turgot’s unpopularity, 97;
difficulty of bringing to Paris in 1789, 216
Hébert visits the Temple, 339;
again, 340;
again, 353;
obtains the Dauphin’s evidence, 373;
produces it in Court against the Queen, 381;
is passed over in the summing up against the Queen, 394
Henry of Prussia, Prince, visits Versailles in 1784, 160
Herman, chief judge of the Queen at her trial, 374;
cross-examines Queen on the affair of the Necklace, 387-88;
sums up against the Queen, 393;
pronounces sentence of death, 394
Howe sails with 20,000 men to attack Philadelphia, 110
Hudson, Valley of, strategical value of, in Burgoyne’s campaign, 109
Hue, friendly guard of the Royal Family in the Temple, 336
Huguenots, exceptionally tolerated in France, 5-7;
contrast of their toleration with persecution of English Catholics,
5-7
Hungary, Joseph II.’s blundering attempt to suppress language of, 131
Invasion, two principal avenues of, into France, 359
Jacobin Society, nature of, 251, 252;
Mirabeau subservient to, 251
Jarjayes, his plot to rescue the Queen, 351, 352
Jemappes, battle of, 342
Jewellery. _See_ Extravagance, _also_ Diamond Necklace
Johnson, Doctor, sees Marie Antoinette at Fontainebleau, 95
Joseph II., son of Maria Theresa, first associated with her in the
empire, 23;
hastens the conclusion of Marie Antoinette’s marriage, 30, 31;
accompanies Marie Antoinette for the first day on her journey to
Versailles before her marriage, 36;
his visit to Versailles and France, 99, 103-6;
his insufficient character, 103;
his ignorance of La Marck and Lavoisier, 105;
his ludicrous misjudgment of French military power, 105;
revisits Versailles July 1781, 126;
his bungling in religion, 131;
summons French to abandon Revolution, 238;
dies, 238
Jourdan, description of, 375;
in command at Wattignies, overruled by Carnot, 391
June the Twentieth, rising of, in 1792, 305
Jury to try the Queen, 377-78
Kaunitz, origin of his career, 9;
makes Marie Antoinette the pledge of diplomatic revolution, 9;
his character and appearance, 9-11;
his early diplomatic work for Maria Theresa, 12;
takes up the Austrian Embassy in Paris, 12;
his French tastes, 12-13
Korff, Baroness de, alias of Duchesse de Tourzel in flight to Varennes,
261
La Fayette volunteers for the American War, 103;
leaves Richmond, 126;
Marie Antoinette visits wife of, as a compliment after surrender of
Yorktown, 135;
marching from Paris to help the Court in Days of October, 226;
his lack of judgment in defending the palace, 227;
advises the Royal Family after victory of the mob, 229;
fails to restrain mob on 18th April 1791, 259;
his action in massacre of Champ de Mars, 301
Lagny, post-master of Chaintry, 268
La Marck, founder of the evolutionary theory, Joseph II.’s ignorance
of, 105;
friend of Mirabeau, introduces him to the Crown, 242, 243;
visits Mirabeau’s deathbed, 255
Lamballe, Princesse de, first meeting with Marie Antoinette, 40;
post of Superintendente created for her, with salary, 94;
Queen’s friendship for, 92;
companion of the Queen in her escapade upon the sledge, 96, 97;
accompanies Marie Antoinette in her first retirement to the
Tuileries, 122;
removed from Royal Family in Temple, 335, 336;
her murder, 338
La Motte, Madame de (_see_ Diamond Necklace), escapes from prison and
flies to London, 179;
her supposed innocence and martyrdom, 180
La Muette, palace or royal hunting-box of, scene of Marie Antoinette’s
first meeting with Madame du Barry before marriage, 47;
scene of Marie Antoinette’s condescension and patronage on accession,
81;
Maximilian’s arrival at, 91;
Marie Antoinette visits, after her first churching, 121;
Queen foolishly present at, during Parisian excitement upon
bankruptcy of the Guémenées, 144
Latour du Pin bears witness for the Queen at her trial, 387
Lavoisier, Joseph II.’s ignorance of, 105
L’Echelle, Rue de, rendezvous of Royal Family and Fersen for flight to
Varennes, 261
Lee, delegate of the revolted British colonists in America, received by
Louis XVI., 114
Legislative Assembly, receives the Royal Family on retirement from
Tuileries, 326;
permits the imprisonment of the Royal Family in the Temple, 332
Leonard, the Queen’s hairdresser, contributes to disaster of Varennes,
272 _n._;
takes note from Choiseul to commanders of various posts, 274
Leopold, Emperor, brother of the Queen, accession of, 238;
receives at Padua false news of the success of the flight to
Varennes, 292-93;
Queen’s decisive letter to, in 1791, 297;
his death, 299
Le Quay, real name of the woman Oliva, _q.v._
Lequesnoy surrenders, 371
Lisbon, character of town of, in eighteenth century, 19;
earthquake of, coincident with Marie Antoinette’s birth, 20-21
_Logotachygraphe_, Revolutionary journal, Royal Family lodged in the
reporters’ box of, 329, 330
Loménie de Brienne, proposed by the Queen as successor to Calonne,
April 1787, 181;
his character, 182-83;
acting with the Queen, attempts to adjourn the States-General, 189;
fall of, 195
Lorraine (Francis of, _see_ Francis), princesses of, umbrage given by
their precedence at the Court ballon Marie Antoinette’s marriage,
52-53
Louis XV. at opening of diplomatic revolution, 16;
his reticence and hesitation in the matter of his grandson’s
marriage, 27-31;
his appearance on Marie Antoinette’s first meeting with him, 38-40;
feels the approach of death, 67;
effect of Court sermon on, before death, 67;
falls ill of small-pox, 68;
his strong Christian faith, 69;
dismisses Madame du Barry, 70;
receives the Last Sacrament, 70-72;
his death, 72
Louis XVI. left heir on his father’s death, 26;
his appearance at that moment, 26;
his mother, after the death of the Dauphin her husband, opposes the
Austrian marriage, 28;
her death, 29;
ceremony of his marriage as Dauphin to Marie Antoinette, 50, 51;
his accession, 73;
supposed impotence, 74-77;
publicly ridiculed by his wife in early days of his marriage, 93;
coronation of, 93-95;
Joseph II. visits Versailles to effect cure of, 104, 105;
date of operation upon, 105 (_see also_ Appendix A);
consents to receive delegates of United States, 114;
influence of Maurepas upon, 133;
grants _Moratorium_ on Marie Antoinette’s express prayer in the
Guémenée bankruptcy, ill effect of this, 144;
visits Cherbourg, 177, 178;
one of very small minority that practised religion before Revolution,
182;
his appearance at opening of States-General, 201;
fails to receive deputation of Tiers État, 202;
quarrel with States-General opens, 204;
at Royal Session of, 23rd June 1789, 206-7;
his final decision on Votes by Order, 207;
flight debated during capture of Bastille, 212;
his Veto discussed, 214;
his flight again urged by the Queen, in October 1789, 217;
shooting at Chatillon when Paris was marching on Versailles, 220-22;
hesitates to fly in Days of October, 226;
brought to Paris by mob in Days of October, 230, 231;
Marie Antoinette ridicules him in a letter to her relatives after
Days of October, 233;
his rôle in flight to Varennes, 261;
first recognised during flight at Viels-Maisons, 267;
and again at Chaintry, 268;
and once more at Chalons, 269;
recognised in Ste. Menehould, 276;
vetoes prosecution of non-juring clergy and formation of volunteer
camp, 304;
his note of credentials to Mallet du Pan, 311;
ridiculed at his last review, 321;
retires from Tuileries, 325;
signs order to cease fire, 328;
his sword removed in the Temple, 336;
separated from his family in the Temple, 340;
condemned to death, 344;
last interview with his family, 345;
his execution, 346, 347
Madame. _See_ Adelaide
Madame Elizabeth, her passage of arms with Pétion, 287-88;
watches sun rise with the Queen before attack upon the palace, 320.
_See also_ Elizabeth
Madame Royale, the Queen’s daughter, her first Communion, 232, 234-35.
_See also_ D’Angoulême
Maillard leads march of Paris on Versailles, 223
Mallet du Pan negotiates with the enemy for the King, 310, 311, 312
Mandat, head of the Paris Militia, his organisation of defence of the
palace in August 1792, 320, 321;
murder of, 322
Manège, the Riding-school of the Tuileries, National Assembly installed
in, 232
Mangin, his ride to carry news to Paris of the arrest of the King,
284-85
Manifesto of Brunswick, the Queen the author of its threat against
Paris, 310-12;
(Clause VIII.) known in Paris, 312;
announced to the Assembly, 316
Manuel bears evidence against the Queen, 384
Mareuil, Commissioners meet Royal Family at, returning to Paris from
Varennes, 285-86
Maria of Saxony, widow of the first Dauphin, and mother of Louis XVI.,
her opposition to Austrian marriage, 28;
her death, 29
Maria Theresa, devotion of Kaunitz to, 11;
character of, 13, 14;
married life of, 15;
her negotiation for French alliance, 18;
health at birth of Marie Antoinette, 21;
her negotiations for Marie Antoinette’s marriage, 27, 28;
associates her son Joseph with her government, 30;
hears of the Du Barry, 32;
letter to Marie Antoinette on her leaving Vienna, 36;
her judgment of a happy marriage, 37;
early letters of Marie Antoinette to her, 54;
her repeated letters to Marie Antoinette as Dauphine, urging
reconciliation with Du Barry, 59, 61, 63;
her anxiety as to Louis XVI.’s condition, 65, 76, 77, 105, also
Appendix A;
her letters advising Marie Antoinette’s policy, 82;
she hears news of Marie Antoinette’s first pregnancy, 115;
her last illness and death, 125
Marie Theresa Charlotte. _See_ Madame Royale
Marly, Court gambling at, 99
Marriage, slowness of negotiations for Marie Antoinette’s, 27-31;
Maria Theresa’s judgment upon a happy, 37;
ceremony of Marie Antoinette’s, at Versailles, 49-51;
great storm coincident with, 51;
public disaster in Paris on occasion of, 53-54;
doubts upon, 74-77
Marseillaise, first sung in Marseilles, 309;
at Wattignies, 399
Marseilles, Battalion of, organised, 309;
marched into Paris, 313;
brawl with Paris troops, 316;
their artillery against the palace, 327;
their capture of prisoners from the Guard, 329;
parley with Swiss before attacking Tuileries, 327
Martin, d’Auch, refuses oath in Tennis Court, 205
Maubeuge, its position on the first line of invasion, 359;
last stronghold against invasion on north-eastern frontier, 361, 362;
threatened by Coburg, 367;
Drouet arrives in, 371, 372;
lack of provisions in, 373;
cavalry patrol cut their way out of, 374;
hears the guns of the French advance, 383;
attempt to force passage to, on 15th of October fails, 385-90;
extreme peril of, in consequence of this, 391;
relieved by French victory at Wattignies, 401
Maubourg nominated to bring the King back to Paris, 285
Maurepas, chosen to be Minister on accession of Louis XVI., 82;
his death, 132;
character of, 133
Maury, example of French hierarchy before Revolution, 182
Maximilian, Marie Antoinette’s youngest brother, visits Paris in 1775,
91
Mayence, siege of, prevents invasion, 355
Mayor of Paris, Bailly the first, 212
Measles, Queen suffers from, in spring of 1779, 121
Meaux, first passage of Royal Family through, in flight to Varennes,
266;
Marie Antoinette and Barnave at, during return journey, 288, 289
Mercenaries, most troops in Paris in 1789 foreign, 209
Mercy, d’Argenteau, becomes Ambassador at Versailles for Maria Theresa
in 1766, 27;
notes Artois’ “shocking familiarity” with the Queen, 92;
desires the Queen to be crowned with the King, 93;
tries to dissuade Queen from opposing Turgot, 98;
intrigues for Marie Antoinette to support Austria’s Bavarian policy,
105, 106;
influences Marie Antoinette in favour of Austrian policy on the
Bavarian succession, 117-18;
a description of him and his household, 124-25;
clumsily pressed by Joseph II. to influence Queen in affair of
Scheldt, 137;
meets Mirabeau in La Marck’s house, 243;
Queen betrays to him the plans of the French defence in 1792, 300;
in regular communication with Royal Family to arrange invasion, 311
Mesdames, Louis XV.’s daughters, Marie Antoinette first meets at
Compiègne, 39;
support Marie Antoinette as Dauphine against the Du Barry, 60;
gradually lose their influence over the Dauphine, 63;
give the name of “Autrichienne” to Marie Antoinette, 64
Michonis, the Municipal, sympathetic jailer of the Queen, 350;
helps the Batz plot, 354;
his plot to help the Queen out of the Conciergerie, 369-370
Militia, new popular, of Paris, after July ’89, La Fayette at head of,
212;
of Versailles, their part in the Days of October, 218-19;
new of Paris, their failure to restrain the mob on 18th April 1791,
259
Ministerial tradition, French, its transformation in early years of
Louis XVI. produces the Revolution, 81, 82
Ministry, French, permanent character of, 148
Ministry of Resistance, Queen’s plan to destroy States-General, 210-13;
fails, 213
Mirabeau, noted by populace at opening of States-General, 200;
reluctantly accepts oath in Tennis Court, 205;
his doubtful reply to Dreux Brézé, 208;
during Days of October, 223;
his influence on the Court, 239-56;
his position in 1790, 241, 242;
La Marck, friend of, introduces to the Crown, 242;
his debts and subsidy, 243, 244;
his interview with the Queen, 245;
his written advice to the Crown, 246, 247;
his attitude towards Civil Constitution of the Clergy, 250, 251;
his plan for the flight of the Royal Family and Civil War, 251-53;
his death, 255
Mireur, from Montpellier, sings the Marseillaise in Marseilles, 309
Mohawk Valley, British force in, marching to join Burgoyne, repulsed,
111
Monarchy, French, its national nature, 41;
publicity of, 41-42;
mystical quality of, 78-80;
publicity of, 80;
fate of, had Mirabeau survived, 240
Monsieur. _See_ Provence
Montmédy decided on as refuge for the Royal Family, 260
_Moratorium_, or stay of legal proceedings, granted by King to the
Guémenées on their bankruptcy, 144
Mounier, in chair of Assembly during Days of October, 223
Mollwitz, first great Prussian victory, 6
Mozart meets little Marie Antoinette, 28
Nancy, mutiny at, 247, 248
Napoleon, his verdict upon the affair of the Diamond Necklace, 177;
his judgment of power to defend the Tuileries, 325;
upon Wattignies, 401
Narbonne, Archbishop of, example of French hierarchy before the
Revolution, 182
National Assembly (before p. 218, _see_ States-General) passes last
clauses of new Constitution coincidently with Banquet of the Body
Guard, October 1789, 218;
votes thanks for suppression of mutiny at Nancy, 248;
installed in Manège after Days of October, 232
Navy, British, terror inspired by, in 1776, 100;
French, Sartines, Minister of, on accession of Louis XVI., 85;
sails from Toulon to attack English forces in America, 1778, 115
Necker, his character and religion, 98, 99;
his daughter, offered in marriage to Fersen and to Pitt, finally
marries M. de Staël, 98;
fails to administrate finances, and is dismissed for the first time
in 1781, 127;
Queen responsible for his return to the Finances after fall of
Loménie, 195;
character of, 197;
ostensibly fixes number of Tiers État, 197;
re-summons Notables in late 1788, 198;
abandons question of “Vote by Orders,” 198;
his appearance and long speech at opening of States-General, 201-2;
calculated absence from Royal Session, 206;
dismissal of, July 11, 1789, 210;
recalled by Louis XVI., 213;
flight of, 248
Neerwinden, Dumouriez’ defeat at, 352
New Order, the Queen’s plan for efficient despotic government before
Revolution, 190-92;
its breakdown, 192
Noailles, Madame de, Mistress of the Ceremonies to Marie Antoinette as
Dauphine, 37, 48
Nobles, minority of, joins Commons led by Orleans, 209
Nord, Comte du, incognito of the Grand-Duke Paul, 139
Notables, Assembly of, summoned by Calonne, 178;
failure of the experiment of, 180;
stupidly re-summoned by Necker, 198
Oath of Tennis Court. _See_ Tennis Court
October, Days of, 215-32
Œil de Bœuf during Days of October, 228
Oliva or “d’Oliva,” employed by Mme. de La Motte to represent the
Queen, 157;
plays the part of the Queen in the meeting with Rohan, 158-59;
arrested in Brussels, winter of 1785, 175;
acquitted, 176
Orleans, Duke of. _See also_ Chartres
—— Duke of (formerly Duc de Chartres), his opposition to the Queen’s
government before the Revolution, 190;
cheered by mob at opening of States-General, 200;
ambition for throne, supports Paris against Crown in first movement
of Revolution, 209
Pannizardi, destruction of the original telegram in Dreyfus Case
compared to Vergennes’ action in Diamond Necklace case, 168
Paris, Marie Antoinette’s entry to, as Dauphine, 65;
supported by Duke of Orleans in 1789, 209;
Queen’s plan for coercion of, in July 1789, 210;
names of regiments coercing, 210;
rises and captures Bastille, 210-12;
new municipality of, Bailly elected Mayor, 212;
marches on Versailles in October 1789, 220-22, 225;
Royal Family brought to, by the mob in the Days of October, 230, 231;
re-entry of Royal fugitives from Varennes into, 289-291;
Queen’s attitude towards, after return from Varennes, 298;
threat to destroy, in Brunswick’s Manifesto, drawn up by the Queen,
310-13
Parlement of Paris exiled by Louis XV., 59;
nature of, 97; its opposition to Turgot’s reforms, 97, 98;
demand the States-General, 183-84;
refuses to accept Loménie’s reforms, 189;
makes a final appeal for the States-General, 191
Passy, Chaumont’s house in, the refuge of the American delegates, 100
Paul, Grand-Duke, heir to Catherine of Russia, visits Versailles,
139-42;
hears Beaumarchais read _Figaro_, 140
Persuasion the only instrument of Government, 40, 41
Pétion nominated to bring King back to Paris, 285;
his adventure with Madame Elizabeth, 287-88;
as Mayor of Paris in 1792 receives the Marseillese, 313
Philadelphia attacked successfully by Howe, contemporaneously with
Burgoyne’s advance, 110
Picard recognises the King during flight at Viels-Maisons, 267
Pillnitz, Declaration of, its exact significance, 302
Pinks, affair of the, plot to get the Queen out of the Conciergerie,
369, 370
Planta, a gentleman follower of Cardinal de Rohan’s, present at the
supposititious interview with the Queen, 159
Poland, its partition, character of, 61-63
Polignac, Comtesse de, friendship of Marie Antoinette with, 92;
Queen quarrels with, 179;
her clique, scandal of public subsidies to, 123;
emigration after fall of Bastille, 213
Pompadour, Madame de, Mistress of Louis XV., her rôle in diplomatic
revolution, 18;
her character and dignity, 43, 44
Portugal, King and Queen of, chosen as god-parents of Marie Antoinette,
18-19
Pot, first holder of post of Master of Ceremonies, 208 _n._
Premonition of Marie Antoinette relative to Temple, 164
Protestant States of Europe, French diplomatic support of, after
Reformation, 5-6
Provence, Comtesse de, unintentional insult to, at birth of the
Dauphine, 129;
possibly protects Mme. de La Motte, 139
Provence, Monsieur, Comte de, present at the first playing of _Figaro_,
152;
brought to Paris by the mob in Days of October, 230, 231
Prussia, revelation of power of, at Mollwitz, 6;
growing menace of Poland to, in modern times, 62
Racing introduced into France on accession of Louis XVI., 92
Red Book, publication of, 239
Reformation, origin of the cycle which closes with the Diplomatic
Revolution, 2;
its probable effect if universal, 3;
French hesitation upon, 3, 4
Religious Orders, Joseph II.’s suppression of, 131
Representation never so full as in States-General of 1789, 198
Representative System, its character and origin in Europe, 184-87
Resistance, Ministry of. _See_ Ministry
Rheims, Louis XVI.’s coronation at, 93-95;
flight by way of, rejected by King, 260
Rhodes, title of Pot, 208 _n._
Riding-school. _See_ Manège
Ring, the Queen’s, story of, 263-65
Robespierre at Oath in Tennis Court, 205;
during Days of October, 223;
demands the Queen’s trial on the breakdown of French armies in
Holland, 352
Roderigo Hortalez. _See_ Beaumarchais
Roederer advises King to retire from Tuileries, 325
Rohan, Bishop, coadjutor of, later Cardinal de, Marie Antoinette’s
first meeting with, 38
(_see_ Diamond Necklace; after acquittal King strips him of his
functions and exiles him);
his later career and death, 177
Rohan, Cardinal de, example of French hierarchy before the Revolution,
182
Romeuf. _See_ Bayon
Rosalie, name of the girl who served the Queen in the Conciergerie, 365
Rothschild, difficulty of trying one to-day compared with difficulty of
trying a Rohan in eighteenth century, 171
Royal Session. _See_ Session
Royale, Madame. _See_ Madame Royale
Sacrament, Last, received by Louis XV., 71;
parallel between it and the French Monarchy, 78
St. Antoine, Gate of, Marseillese march in by, 313;
workmen’s quarter of, join St. Marcel in insurrection of Aug. 10,
316, 317
St. Cloud, Palace of, bought for first Dauphin in his illness, 160;
scene of Mirabeau’s interview with the Queen, 244, 245;
Louis’ abortive attempt to reach, on 18th April 1791, 259
St. Germain l’Auxerrois, Church of, Madame Royale’s communion in, 234
St. Landry, schismatic priest of, appointed to accompany Queen at her
execution, 395
St. Lawrence, Valley of, strategical value during rebellion of American
colonies, 108, 109
St. Marcel. _See_ St. Antoine
Ste. Menehould, its position, 270;
Royal Family at, in flight to Varennes, 275-76
Saratoga, Burgoyne blockaded near, and surrenders, 112;
news of Burgoyne’s capitulation at, reaches Versailles, after
Vergennes had determined to recognise United States, 113
Sauce, official at Varennes, his action in detaining the King, 279-81
Scheldt, opening of the, first mentioned, 134;
Marie Antoinette supports her brother in, 137;
character of quarrel over, explained, 145, 146;
Joseph II.’s increasing irritation over, 148;
Vergennes refuses to support Austria in, 149;
the Dutch fire on one of Joseph II.’s ships in, 4th October 1784,
160;
French Cabinet again, under pressure from Queen, pay the Dutch
indemnity to Austria for this incident, 161;
money actually paid over, 164-65;
and is received in cash by Austria when affair of Diamond Necklace is
at its height; consequent unpopularity of Queen, 174
September, Massacres of, 337, 338
Sergent serves out ammunition to the rebels, 317
Session, Royal, summoned for 22nd of June 1789, 204;
held, June 23rd, 206-7
Siéyès at Oath in Tennis Court, 205
Silesia, forcible occupation of, by Prussia, moral revolution involved
by this, 8
Simon, reputed tenderness of, in the Temple, 341
Sledge, Queen’s escapade upon, 96, 97
Soissons, Marie Antoinette’s arrival at, on her journey to her
marriage, 38
Solstice, summer, date unlucky for the Bourbons, 261-63, 305
Somme-Vesle, posting station of, place arranged for the first cavalry
guard during flight to Varennes, 271;
Choiseul’s hussars at, 272;
abandoned by Choiseul, 273, 274
Souberbielle visits Queen in Conciergerie, 369;
on jury that tries her, 377
Spain, greatness of, in sixteenth century, difficulty of understanding
to-day, 4;
French maintain their independence against, 5
Stahrenberg, Austrian Ambassador in Paris after Kaunitz, 18;
his last letter to Maria Theresa announces certitude of Marie
Antoinette’s marriage, 27
Stars and Stripes first seen in Europe, 100
States-General, Crown of mediæval representative system in Europe, 185;
Parlement insists on their being summoned, 184-89;
Loménie and the Queen propose calling them within five years with the
object of adjourning and nullifying the summons, 189;
summoned by administrative order, accepted by the Queen, on 8th
August 1788, 192 (after October 1789 and p. 222, _see_ National
Assembly);
number of Tiers État in, ostensibly fixed by Necker, 197;
only fully representative assembly in Europe, 198;
opening of, 198-202;
declared “National Assembly,” 204;
Royal session of, June 23, 1789, 206-7;
under military threat declare themselves “inviolable,” 209;
permanent sitting of, during capture of Bastille, 211-12
Stormont, Lord, English Ambassador at Versailles, present at the ball
where news of the Independence of the United States was received,
leaves Versailles, 115
Strasburg, Marie Antoinette’s arrival at, on her journey to her
marriage, 37;
Bishop of, _see_ Rohan
Sweden, Gustavus, King of, visits Versailles in 1784;
his Quixotic character, 155;
his death, 300
Swiss Guard before palace of Versailles in Days of October, 1789, 222;
their mutiny at Nancy, 247;
their character and position before the fall of the palace, 314;
turned through long gallery and forced out of the Tuileries by the
mob, 328
Talleyrand, example of French Hierarchy before the Revolution, 182;
proposes confiscation of the goods of the Clergy, 237;
visits Mirabeau’s deathbed, 255
Tea Tax. _See_ Boston and America
Temple, Artois receives Marie Antoinette at, her premonitions with
regard to, 164;
Royal Family first lodged in, 333-35
Tennis Court, Oath of, 205
Theatre, Marie Antoinette’s, at Trianon inaugurated, 123;
Mercy’s disapproval of, 124
Ticonderoga abandoned by American forces, before Burgoyne, 110
Tiers État, number of, ostensibly fixed by Necker, 197;
Louis XVI. fails to receive deputation of, 202;
affirms in May ’89 principle of voting in One Assembly, 202;
summons Clergy and Nobles, 203;
committed to first revolutionary act by declaring themselves the
National Assembly, 204;
remain in Hall after order to disperse, 23rd June 1789, 207
Tison, jailor and spy upon the Royal Family in the Temple, 336;
wife of, goes mad, 354
Toulouse, Archbishop of, Confessor of Marie Antoinette, 244
Tourzel, Madame de, made governess of children of France after Mme. de
Polignac’s emigration, 214
—— Duchess of, her rôle during flight to Varennes, 261;
Duchesse de, removed from Royal Family in Temple, 335
Trial of the Queen, preliminary interrogation, 373-74;
main trial, 377-400
Trianon, public exaggeration of its real cost, theatre started in, 123;
theatre at, thrown open to large audience, 135;
Queen retires to, after death of her last child, 188;
theatre at, re-opened with a new play of Beaumarchais’ in the midst
of the Diamond Necklace affair, 172;
Marie Antoinette at, during Days of October, 224
Tronçon Ducourdray named to defend the Queen, 374
Tuileries, arrival of Royal Family at, in Days of October, 231;
invaded by mob on 20th June 1792, 305, 306;
fall of, 307-29;
extent of armed force in defence of, 313, 315;
condition and garrison of, just before the attack upon, 318-320;
last review before defence of, 321;
beginning of attack upon, 322, 323;
Napoleon’s judgment of power to defend, 325
Turgot, enters Ministry after accession of Louis XVI., 84;
Marie Antoinette not connected with nomination of, 84;
policy and character of, 85;
fiscal problem presented to him, 86-88;
his way of dealing with it, 89;
is lavish with funds to the Queen, 85, 89-90;
his reforms cause popular suffering, 90;
their unwise side, 97;
opposed by the Parlement of Paris, 97;
his fall largely due to the Queen, 98;
servant of the Queen in the Temple and authority for history of
period, 349
United States of America recognised by Vergennes before the news of
Saratoga, 113;
delegates of, received by Louis XVI., 114;
formally recognised by France, 21st of January 1778, 115;
France goes to war to support, 115
Valenciennes, surrender of, 363
Vallet, son-in-law of post-master at Chaintry, recognises King, 268
Valmy, battle of, 339, 340;
mill of, passed by fugitives in flight to Varennes, 275
Varennes, flight to, described, 263-291;
town of, Drouet enters, 278;
Royal Family detained in, 279-81;
departure of Royal Family from, 282, 283
Vergennes, becomes director of foreign policy on accession of Louis
XVI., his great abilities, 84;
his acute panic just before Burgoyne’s surrender, 110;
caution and fear of England at moment of Burgoyne’s surrender, 113;
determines to recognise United States before hearing news of
Saratoga, 113;
refuses to support Austria in Bavarian claim, but under pressure from
Queen pays compensation to Vienna, 116-18;
practically first Minister after Maurepas’ death, 133;
his patriotic refusal to support Joseph II. in the affair of the
Scheldt, 149;
but consents to pay indemnity, 161;
his policy of silence in the case of the Diamond Necklace compared to
the French modern Foreign Office destroying the Pannizardi
telegram, 168;
death of, 179
Vermond (physician), brother of Abbé, attends Queen’s first childbirth,
120
Vermond (Abbé), Marie Antoinette’s tutor, librarian of Mazarin
collection and protégé of Loménie de Brienne, 33;
attempts to educate Marie Antoinette, 33-36;
emigration after fall of Bastille, 213
Versailles, palace of, eruption of mob into, in Days of October,
227-229
Veto of Crown over legislation, discussion on, 214
—— of Louis XVI. against prosecution of non-juring Clergy and formation
of volunteer camp, 304
Viels-Maisons, posting station, Louis XVI. first recognised at, in
flight to Varennes, 267
Viet, post-master at Chalons, 269
Vilette, Rétaux de, an old soldier, forges the so-called Queen’s
letters for the La Motte, 155, 156;
writes a letter, purporting to be from Queen, asking Rohan for money,
162;
takes Diamond Necklace from Rohan acting as supposed Queen’s
messenger, 163;
arrested at Geneva in the spring of 1786, 175;
condemned to transportation, 176
Vote by Order, prime question before States-General, 198;
decision as to, announced by Barentin, 201;
decision as to, in Royal Session, 207;
Crown advises Union of Orders, 209
Walpole, Horace, his admiration for Marie Antoinette, 95
War, first declaration of, between Europe and Revolution,
responsibility for, 293-95;
advance towards, originates in Queen’s letter to her brother, 297;
declared on 20th April 1792, 300
Washington, his defeat on the Brandywine, 110;
marches south to join the French before Yorktown, 126
Weissembourg, lines of, their strategical importance, 355
Wattignies, battle of, described, 385-401;
village of, scene of final charge against Austrians before Maubeuge,
396
Weber, family of, Marie Antoinette put out to nurse with, 23
Wine, Marie Antoinette’s curious aversion to, 77, 92;
Mercy, an excellent judge of, 124
York, Duke of, marches on Dunquerque, 368
Yorktown, Cornwallis surrenders at, 128;
coincident with Joseph II.’s “Edict of Toleration” and birth of Marie
Antoinette’s heir, 131, 132
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