Marie Antoinette and Her Son Part 35

"Who of you could hinder me if I wanted to?" asked the man, with a laugh. "See here, I hold the hand of the future King of France in my fist, and I can break it if I want to, and make it so that it can never lift the sceptre of France. The little monkey thought he would take hold of my hand and make me draw it back, and now my hand has got his and holds it fast. And mark this, boy, the time is past when kings seized us and trod us down; now we seize them and hold them fast, and do not let them go unless we will."

"Sir!" cried the queen, motioning back with a commanding gesture the two lackeys who were hurrying up to release the dauphin from the hand of the man, "sir, I beg you to withdraw your hand, and not to hinder us in our walk."

"Ah! you are there, too, madame, the baker's wife, are you?" cried the man, with a horrid laugh. "We meet once more, and the eyes of our most beautiful queen fall again upon the dirty, pitiable face of such a poor, wretched creature as, in your heavenly eyes, the cobbler Simon is!"

"Are you Simon the cobbler?" asked Marie Antoinette.

"It is true, I bethink me now, I have spoken with you once before.

It was when I carried the prince here, for the first time, to Notre Dame, that G.o.d would bless him, and that the people might see him.

You stood then by my carriage, sir!"

"Yes, it is true," answered Simon, visibly flattered. "You have, at least, a good memory, queen. But you ought to have paid attention to what I said to you. I am no 'sir,' I am a simple cobbler, and earn my poor bit of bread in the sweat of my brow, while you strut about in your glory and happiness, and cheat G.o.d out of daylight. Then I held the hand of your daughter in my fist, and she cried out for fear, merely because a poor fellow like me touched her."

"But, Mr. Simon, you see very plainly that I do not cry out," said the dauphin, with a smile. "I know that you do not want to do me any harm, and I ask you to be so good as to take away your arm, that my mamma can go on in her walk."

"But, suppose that I do not do as you want me to?" asked the cobbler, defiantly. "I suppose it would come that your mamma would dictate to me, and perhaps call some soldiers, and order them to shoot the dreadful people?"

"You know, Master Simon, that I give no such command, and never gave any such," said the queen, quickly.

"The king and I love our people, and never would give orders to our soldiers to fire upon them."

"Because you would not be sure, madame, that the soldiers would obey your commands, if you should," laughed Simon. "Since we got rid of the Swiss guards, there are no soldiers left who would let themselves be torn in pieces for their king and queen; and you know well that if the soldiers should fire the first shot at us, the people would tear the soldiers in pieces afterward. Yes, yes, the fine days at Versailles are past; here, in Paris, you must accustom yourself to ask, instead of command, and the arm of a single man of the people is enough to stop the Queen and the Dauphin of France."

"You are mistaken, sir," said the queen, whose proud heart could no longer be restrained, and allow her to take this humble stand; "the Queen of France and her son will no longer be detained by you in their walk."

And with a quick movement she caught the dauphin, struck back at the same moment the fist of the cobbler, s.n.a.t.c.hed the boy away like lightning, and pa.s.sed by before Simon had time to put his arm back.

The people, delighted with this energetic and courageous action of the queen--the people, who would have howled with rage, if the queen had ordered her lackeys to push the cobbler back, now roared with admiration and with pleasure, to see the proud-hearted woman have the boldness to repel the a.s.sailant, and to free herself from him.

They applauded, they laughed, they shouted from thousands upon thousands of throats, "Long live the queen! Long live the dauphin!"

and the cry pa.s.sed along like wildfire through the whole ma.s.s of spectators behind the fence, and all eyes followed the tall and proud figure of the queen as she walked away.

Only the eyes of Simon pursued her with a malicious glare, and his clinched fists threatened her behind her back.

"She shall pay for this!" he muttered, with a withering curse. "She has struck back my hand to-day, but the day will come when she will feel it upon her neck, and when I will squeeze the hand of the little rascal so that he shall cry out with pain! I believe now, what Marat has so often told me, that the time of vengeance is come, and that we must bring the crown down and tread it under our feet, that the people may rule! I will have my share in it. I will help bring it down, and tread it under foot. I hate the handsome Austrian woman, who perks up her nose, and thinks herself better than my wife; and if the golden time has come of which Marat speaks, when the people are the master, and the king is the servant, Marie Antoinette shall be my waiting-maid, and her son shall be my ch.o.r.eboy, and his buckle shall make acquaintance with my shoe- straps!"

And while Master Simon was muttering this to himself, he was making a way through the crowd with those great elbows of his, a slipping along the fence, to be able to follow as long as possible the tall figure of the queen, who was now leading the dauphin by the hand, traversing the Arcadian Walk. At the end of it was the fence which led into the little garden reserved for the royal family. Through the iron gate, hard by, adorned with the arms of the kings of France, Marie Antoinette entered an asylum, which had been saved to the crown, free from the intrusion of the people, and she drew a free breath when one of the lackeys closed the gate, and she heard the key grate in the lock.

She stood still a moment to regain her composure, and then she felt that her feet were trembling, and that she scarcely had the power to go farther. It would have been a relief to her to have fallen there upon her knees, and poured all her sorrows and trials into the ear of G.o.d. But there were the lackeys behind her; there was her little son, looking up to her with his great eyes; and there was that dreadful cry coming up from the quay like the roaring of the sea.

The queen could not utter a word of grief or sorrow, she could not sink to the ground in her weakness; she had to show a cheerful face to her son, and a proud brow to her servants. G.o.d only could look into her heart and see the tears which glowed there like burning coals. Yet in all her sadness she had a feeling of triumph, of proud satisfaction. She had preserved her freedom, her independence; she was not Lafayette's prisoner! No, the Queen of France had not put herself under the protection of the people's general; she had not given him the power of watching her with his hated National Guard, and of saying to them: "At this or that hour the queen takes her walks, and, that she may recreate herself, we will protect her against the rage of the people!"

No, she had defended herself, she had remained the queen all the while, the free queen, and she had gained a victory over the people by showing them that she did not fear them.

"Mamma," cried the dauphin, interrupting her in her painful and proud thought--" mamma, there comes the king, there comes my papa!

Oh, he will be glad to hear that I was so courageous!"

The queen quickly stooped down and kissed him. "Yes, truly, my little Bayard, yon have done honor to your great exemplar, and you have really been a little chevalier sans peur et sans reproche. But, my child, true bravery does not glory in its great deeds, and does not desire others to admire them, but keeps silent and leaves it to others to talk about them!"

"Mamma, I will be silent, too," cried the boy, with glowing eyes.

"Oh, you shall see that I can be silent, and not talk at all about myself."

The king meanwhile, followed by some gentlemen and servants, was coming forward with unaccustomed haste, and, in his eagerness to reach his wife, he had not noticed the beds, but was treading under foot the last fading flowers of autumn.

"You are here at last, Marie," said he, when he was near enough to speak. "I wanted to go to meet you, to conduct you hither out of the park. You were gone very long, and I worried about you."

"Why worried, sire?" asked the queen. "What danger could threaten me in our garden?"

"Do not seek to hide any thing from me, Marie," said Louis, with a sigh. "I know every thing! The hate of the people denies us any longer the enjoyment of the open air! Lafayette and Bailly were with me after they were dismissed by you. They told me that you had given no favor to their united request, and that you would not grant to General Lafayette the right to protect you while you are taking your walks."

"I hope your majesty is satisfied with me," answered Marie Antoinette. "You feel, like me, that it is a new humiliation for us if we are to allow our very enjoyment of nature to be under the control of the people's general, and if even the air is no longer to be the free air for us!"

"I have only thought that in such unguarded walks you would be threatened with danger," answered the king, perplexed. "Lafayette has painted to me in such dark and dreadful colors, and I have so painfully had to confess that he speaks the truth, that I could only think of your safety, and take no other point of view than to see you sheltered from the attacks of your enemies, and from the rage of these factions. I have therefore approved Lafayette's proposal, and allowed him to protect your majesty on your walks."

"But you have not fixed definite hours for my walks? You have not done that, sire, have you?"

"I have indeed done that," answered the king, gently. "I am familiar with your habits, and know that in autumn and winter you usually take your walks between twelve and two, and in summer afternoons between five and seven. I have therefore named these hours to General Lafayette."

The queen heaved a deep sigh. "Sire," she said, softly, "you yourself are binding tighter and tighter the chains of our imprisonment. To-day you limit our freedom to two poor hours, and that will be a precedent for others to continue what you have begun.

We shall after this walk for two hours daily under the protection of M. de Lafayette, but there will come a time when this protection will not suffice, and no security will be great enough for us. For the royal authority which shows itself weak and dependent, and which does not draw power from itself--the royalty which suffers its crown to be borne up for it by the hands of others, confesses thereby that it is too weak to bear the burden itself. Oh, sire, I would rather you had let me break away from the rage of the people, while I might be walking unguarded, than be permitted to take my daily walks under the protection of M. de Lafayette!"

"You see every thing in too dark and sad a light," cried the king.

"Every thing will come out right if we are only wise and carefully conform to circ.u.mstances, and by well-timed concessions and admissions propitiate this hate and bring this enmity to silence."

The queen did not reply; she stooped down to the dauphin, and, pressing a kiss upon his locks, whispered: "Now yon may tell every thing, Louis. It is not longer necessary to keep silent about any thing, for silence were useless! So tell of your heroism, my son!"

"Is it of heroism that you talk?" said the king, whose nice ear had caught the words of the queen.

"Yes, of heroism, sire," answered Marie Antoinette. "But it is with us as with Don Quixote; we believed that we were fighting for our honor and our throne; now we must confess that we only fought against windmills. I beg you now, sire, to inform General Lafayette that it is not necessary to call out his National Guards on my account, I shall not walk again!"

And the queen kept her word. Never again during the winter did she go down into the gardens and park of the Tuileries. She never gave Lafayette occasion to protect her, but she at least gained thereby what Lafayette wanted to reach by his National Guard--she held the populace away from the Tuileries. At first they stood in dense ma.s.ses day after day along the fence of the park and the royal garden, but when they saw that Marie Antoinette would no more expose herself to their curious and evil glances, they grew tired of waiting for her, and withdrew from the neighborhood of the Tuileries,--but only to repair to their clubs and listen to the raving speeches which Marat, Santerre, and other officers, hurled like poisoned arrows at the queen-only to go into the National a.s.sembly and hear Mirabeau and Robespierre, Danton, Chenier, Petion, and all the rest, the a.s.sembled representatives of the nation, launch their thundering philippics against a royalty appointed by the grace of G.o.d, and causing the people to believe that it was a royalty appointed by the wrath of G.o.d.

CHAPTER XVI.

IN ST. CLOUD.

The winter was pa.s.sed--a sad dismal winter for the royal family, and for Marie Antoinette in particular! None of those festivities, those diversions, those simple and innocent joys, which are wont to adorn the life of a woman and of a queen!

Marie Antoinette is no more a queen who commands, who sees around her a throng of respectful courtiers, zealously listening to every word that falls from her lips; Marie Antoinette is a grave solitary woman, who works much, thinks much, makes many plans for saving the kingdom and the throne, and sees all these plans shipwrecks on the indecision and weakness of her husband.

Far away from the queen lay those happy times when every day brought new joys and new diversions; when the dawn of a summer morning made the queen happy, because it promised her a delightful evening, and one of those charming idyls at Trianon. The brothers of the king, the schoolmaster and mayor of Trianon, had left France and had located themselves at Coblentz on the Rhine; the Polignacs had fled to England; the Princess Lamballe, too, had, at the wish of the queen, gone to negotiate with Pitt, in order to implore the all- powerful minister of George III. to give to the oppressed French crown more material and effectual support than was afforded by the angry and bitter words which he hurled in Parliament against the riotous and rebellious French nation. The Counts de Besenval and Coigny, the Marquis de Lauzun, and Baron d'Adhemar, all the privileged friends of the summer days at Trianon and the winter days of Versailles, all, all, were gone.

They had fled to Coblentz, and were at the court of the French princes. There they spun their intrigues, sought to excite a European war against France; from there they hurled their flaming torches into France, their calumnies against Queen Marie Antoinette, the Austrian woman. She alone was accountable for all the misfortunes and the disturbances of France, she alone had given occasion for the distrust now felt against royalty. On her head fell the curse and the burden of all the faults and sins which the French court had for a hundred years committed. There must be a sacrificial lamb, to be thrown into the arms glistening with spears and daggers, of a revolution which thirsted for blood and vengeance, and Marie Antoinette had to be the victim. In her bleeding heart the spirits glowing with hate might cool themselves, and there the evil which her predecessors had done, was to be atoned for. Many a wrong had been done, and the French nation had, no doubt, a right to be angry and to rage as does the lion for a long time kept in subjection, when at last, touched too much by the iron of its keeper, it rises in its wildness, and with withering greed, tears him in pieces from whom it has suffered so long and so much. The French people rose just as the incensed lion does, and determined to wreak their vengeance on their keepers, on those whom they had so long called their lords and rulers.

To pacify the lion some prey must be thrown to him, and to him who thirsts for vengeance and blood, a human offering must be brought to propitiate him.