Marie Antoinette and the Downfall of Royalty Part 12

This was the only moment of the day that brought her any consolation.

By the end of July, both the Queen and her children were obliged to give up walking in the garden. She had gone out to take the air with her daughter in the Dauphin's small parterre at the extreme end of the Tuileries, close to the Place Louis XV. Some federates grossly insulted her. Four Swiss officers made their way through the crowd, and placing the Queen and the young Princess between them, brought them back to the palace. When she reached her apartments, Marie Antoinette thanked her defenders in the most affecting terms, but she never went out again.

After June 20, the garden, excepting the terrace of the Feuillants, which, by a decree of the a.s.sembly, had become a part of its precincts, had been forbidden to the populace. Posters warned the people to remain on the terrace and not go down into the garden. The terrace was called National Ground, and the garden the Land of Coblentz.

Inscriptions apprised pa.s.sers-by of this novel topography. Tri-colored ribbons had been tied to the banisters of the staircases by way of barriers. Placards were fastened at intervals to the trees bordering the terrace, whereon could be read: "Citizens, respect yourselves; give the force of bayonets to this feeble barrier. Citizens, do {262} not go into this foreign land, this Coblentz, abode of corruption." The leaders had such an empire over the crowd that no one disobeyed. And yet it was the height of summer, the trees offered their verdant shade, and the King had withdrawn all his guards and opened every gate.

n.o.body dared infringe the revolutionary mandate. One young man, paying no attention, went down into the garden. Furious clamors broke out on all sides. "To the lamp-post with him!" cried some one on the terrace.

Thereupon the young man, taking off his shoes, drew out his handkerchief and began to wipe the dust from their soles. People cried bravo, and he was carried in triumph.

Marie Antoinette could not become resigned to this hatred. Often she frightened her women by wishing to go out of the palace and address the people. "Yes," she would cry, her voice trembling, as she walked quickly to and fro in her chamber, "yes, I will say to them: Frenchmen, they have had the cruelty to persuade you that I do not love France, I, the wife of its King and the mother of a Dauphin!" Then, this brief moment of generous exaltation over, the illusion of being able to move a nation of insulters quickly vanished. Her life was a daily, hourly struggle. The wife, the mother, the queen, never ceased to contend against destiny. She hardly slept or ate; but from the very excess of danger she drew additional energy, and moral and material force. As she awoke at daybreak, she required that the {263} shutters should not be closed, so that her sleepless nights might be sooner consoled by the light of morning. The most widely diverse sentiments occupied her soul. A captive in her palace, she sometimes believed herself irrevocably condemned by fate, and sometimes hoped for deliverance.

Toward the middle of one of the last nights preceding the 10th of August, the moon shone into her bedchamber. "In a month," she said to Madame Campan, "I shall not see that moon unless I am freed from my chains." But she was not free from anxiety concerning all that might happen before that. "The King is not a poltroon," she added; "he has very great pa.s.sive courage, but he is crushed by a false shame, a doubt of himself, which arises from his education quite as much as from his character. He is afraid of commanding; he dreads above everything to speak to a.s.semblages of men. He lived uneasily and like a child, under the eyes of Louis XV. until he was twenty, and this constraint has had an effect on his timidity. In our circ.u.mstances, a few clearly spoken words addressed to the Parisians who are devoted to us would immensely strengthen our party, but he will not say them." Then Marie Antoinette explained why she did not put herself forward more: "For my part," said she, "I could act, and mount a horse if need were; but, if I acted, it would put weapons into the hands of King's enemies; a general outcry would be raised in France against the Austrian woman, against female domination; moreover, {264} I should reduce the King to nothingness by showing myself. A queen who is not regent must in such circ.u.mstances remain inactive and prepare to die."

The danger constantly increased. At four in the morning of one of the last days of July, warning was given at the palace that the faubourgs were threatening, and would doubtless march against the Tuileries.

Madame Campan went very softly into the Queen's room. For a wonder, Marie Antoinette was sleeping peacefully and profoundly. Madame Campan did not rouse her. "You were right," said Louis XVI.; "it is good to see her take a little rest. Oh! her griefs redouble mine!" At her waking the Queen, on being informed of what had pa.s.sed, began to weep, and said: "Why was I not called?" Madame Campan excused herself by saying: "It was only a false alarm. Your Majesty needed to repair your prostrate strength."--"It is not prostrate," quickly replied the courageous sovereign; "misfortune makes it all the greater. Elisabeth was with the King, and I was sleeping! I, who wish to perish beside him! I am his wife; I am not willing that he should incur the least danger without me!"

On Sunday, August 5,--the last Sunday the royal family were to spend at the Tuileries,--as they were going to the chapel to hear Ma.s.s, half the National Guards on duty cried: "Long live the King!" The others said: "No, no; no King, down with the veto!" The same day, at Vespers, the chanters had agreed to swell their tones greatly, and in a {265} menacing way, when reciting this versicle of the _Magnificat: Deposuit potentes de sede_--"He hath put down the mighty from their seat." In their turn the royalists, after the _Dominum salvum fac regem_, cried thrice, turning as they did so toward the Queen: _Et reginam_. There was a continual murmuring all through the divine office. Five days later, the same chapel was to be a pool of blood.

And yet Madame Elisabeth, always calm and always angelic, still had illusions. One morning of this terrible month of August, while in her room in the Pavilion of Flora, she thought she heard some one humming her favorite air, _Pauvre Jacques_, beneath her windows. Attracted by this refrain, which in the midst of sorrow renewed the souvenir of happier times, she half opened her window and listened attentively.

The words sung were not those of the ballad she loved, yet they were royalist in sentiment and adapted to the same air. The poor people had been subst.i.tuted for poor Jack--the poor people who were pitied for having a king no longer and for knowing nothing but wretchedness. Such marks of attachment consoled the virtuous Princess, and made her hope against all hope. She wrote, August 8, to her friend Madame de Raigecourt: "They say that the King is going to be turned out of here somewhat forcibly, and made to lodge in the Hotel-de-Ville. They say that there will be a very strong movement to that effect in Paris. Do you believe it? For my part, I do not. I believe in rumors, but not in their {266} resulting in anything. That is my profession of faith.

For the rest, everything is perfectly quiet to-day. Yesterday pa.s.sed in the same way, and I think this one will be like it." On August 9, the eve of the fatal day, Madame Elisabeth again addressed a rea.s.suring letter to one of her friends, Madame de Bombelles. Curiously enough she dated this letter August 10, no doubt by accident, and when Madame de Bombelles received it, she read these lines, which seem like the irony of fate: "This day of the 10th, which was to have been so exciting, so terrible, is as calm as possible; the a.s.sembly has decreed neither deposition nor suspension."

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XXVI.

THE PROLOGUE TO THE TENTH OF AUGUST.

The first rumblings of the storm began. People quarrelled and fought in the Palais Royal, the cafes, and the theatres. Half of the National Guard sided with the court, and the other half with the people. To seditious speeches were added songs full of insults to the King and Queen. These songs, sold on every corner, applauded in every tavern, and repeated by the wives and children of the people, propagated revolutionary fury. There was a constant succession of gatherings, brawls, and riots. The a.s.sembly had declared the country in danger.

Rumors of every sort excited popular imagination. It was said that priests who refused the oath were in hiding at the Tuileries, which was, moreover, full of arms and munitions. The Duke of Brunswick's manifesto exasperated national sentiment. It was read aloud in every street. The leaders neglected nothing likely to excite the populace, and prepared their last attack on the throne, their afterpiece of June 20, with as much audacity as skill.

In order to subdue the court, it was necessary to destroy its only remaining means of defence. To {268} leave plenty of elbow-room for the riot, the a.s.sembly, on July 15, ordered the troops of the line to be sent some thirty-five miles beyond Paris and kept there. A singular means was devised for breaking up the choice troops of the National Guard, who were royalists. They were told that it was contrary to equality for certain citizens to be more brilliantly equipped than others; that a bearskin cap humiliated those who were ent.i.tled only to a felt one; and that there was a something aristocratic about the name of grenadier which was really intolerable to a simple foot-soldier.

The choice troops were dissolved in consequence, and the grenadiers came to the a.s.sembly like good patriots to lay down their epaulettes and bearskin caps and a.s.sume the red cap. On July 30, the National Guard was reconstructed, by taking in all the vagabonds and bandits that the clubs could muster.

The famous federates of Ma.r.s.eilles, who were to take such an active part in the coming insurrection, arrived in Paris the same day. The Girondins, having failed to obtain their camp of twenty thousand men before Paris, had devised instead of it a reunion of federate volunteers, summoned from every part of France. The roads were at once thronged by future rioters whom the a.s.sembly allowed thirty cents a day.

The Jacobins of Brest and Ma.r.s.eilles distinguished themselves. Instead of a handful of volunteers they sent two battalions. That of Ma.r.s.eilles, recruited by {269} Barbaroux, comprised five hundred men and two pieces of artillery. Starting July 5, it entered Paris July 30. Excited to fanaticism by the sun and the declamations of the southern clubs, it had run over France, been received under triumphal arches, and chanted in a sort of frenzy the terrible stanzas of Rouget de l'Isle's new hymn, the _Ma.r.s.eillaise_. It was at this time that Blanc Gilli, deputy from the Bouches du Rhone department to the Legislative a.s.sembly, wrote: "These pretended Ma.r.s.eillais are the sc.u.m of the jails of Genoa, Piedmont, Sicily, and of all Italy, Spain, the Archipelago, and Barbary. I run across them every day." Rouget de l'Isle received from his old mother, a royalist and Catholic at heart, a letter in which she said: "What is this revolutionary hymn which a horde of brigands are singing as they pa.s.s through France, and in which your name is mixed up?" At Paris the accents of that terrible melody sounded like strokes of the tocsin. The men who sang it filled the conservatives with terror. They wore woollen c.o.c.kades and insulted as aristocrats those who wore silk ones.

There was no longer any dike to the torrent. August 1, Louis XVI.

nominated a cabinet composed of loyal men: Joly was Minister of Justice; Champion de Villeneuve, of the Interior; Bigot de Sainte-Croix, of Foreign Affairs; Du Bouchage, of the Marine; Leroux de la Ville, of Public Taxes; and D'Abancourt, of War. But this ministry was to last only ten days. Certain pet.i.tioners at the bar of the {270} a.s.sembly asked for the deposition of the King in most violent language.

"This measure," says Barbaroux in his Memoirs, "would have carried Philippe of Orleans to the regency, and therefore his party violently clamored for it. His creditors, his hirelings, and boon-companions, Marat and his Cordeliers, all manner of swindlers and insolvent debtors, thronged public places and incited to this deposition because they were hungry for money and positions under a regent who was their tool and their accomplice."

In vain did Louis XVI. display those sentiments of paternal kindness which had hitherto availed him so little. August 3, he sent a message to the a.s.sembly, in which he said: "I will uphold national independence to my latest breath. Personal dangers are nothing compared to public ones. Oh! what are personal dangers to a King whom men are seeking to deprive of his people's love? This is the real plague-spot in my heart. Perhaps the people will some day know how dear their welfare is to me. How many of my sorrows could be obliterated by the least evidence of a return to right feeling!"

How did they respond to this conciliatory language? After it had been read, Petion, the mayor of Paris, presented himself at the bar, and read an address from the Council General of the Commune, in which these words occur: "The chief of the executive power is the first link of the counter-revolutionary chain.... Through a lingering forbearance, we would have desired the power to ask you for the {271} suspension of Louis XVI., but to this the Const.i.tution is opposed. Louis XVI.

incessantly invokes the Const.i.tution; we invoke it in our turn, and ask you for his deposition." The next day the munic.i.p.ality distributed five thousand ball cartridges to the Ma.r.s.eillais, while refusing any to the National Guards.

Nevertheless, the Girondins still hesitated. Guadet, Vergniaud, and Gensonne would have declared themselves satisfied if the three ministers belonging to their party had been reinstated, and on July 29 they secretly despatched a letter to the sovereign, by Thierry, his valet-de-chambre, in which they said that, "attached to the interests of the nation, they would never separate them from those of the King except in so far as he separated them himself." As to Barbaroux, like a true visionary, he dreamed of I know not what rose-water insurrection. "They should not have entered the apartments of the palace," he has said, "but merely blockaded them. Had this plan been followed, the blood of Frenchmen and Swiss, ignorant victims of court perfidy, would not have been shed on the 10th of August, the republic would have been founded without convulsions or ma.s.sacres, and we, corroded by popular gangrene, should not have become the horror of all nations." The demagogues were not at all certain of success.

Robespierre was to spend the 10th of August in the discreet darkness of a cellar. Danton was prudently to await the end of the combat before arming himself with a big sabre and marching at the head of the Ma.r.s.eilles {272} battalion as the hero of the day. Barbaroux says in his Memoirs that on the 1st, 3d, and 7th of August, Marat implored him to take him to Ma.r.s.eilles, and that on the evening of the 9th he renewed this prayer more urgently than ever, adding that he would disguise himself as a jockey in order to get away.

In spite of their many weaknesses, the majority of the a.s.sembly were royalists and const.i.tutionalists still. The proof is that on August 8, in spite of the violent menaces of the galleries, they decided by 406 against 244 votes, that there was no occasion to impeach Lafayette, so abhorred by the Jacobins. This vote excited the wrath of the revolutionists to fury. The conservative deputies were insulted, pursued, and struck. Several of them barely escaped a.s.sa.s.sination.

The sessions became stormier from day to day. Not only were the large galleries of the a.s.sembly overthronged by violent crowds, but the courtyards, the approaches, and the corridors were obstructed. Many sat or stood on the exterior entablatures of the high windows. The upper part of the hall, where the Jacobins sat, received many strangers, in spite of the often-reiterated opposition of the right.

Below this Mountain sat the members of the centre, the _Ventrus_.

There were not seats enough for them, and they were crowded up in a ridiculous manner. At the bottom of the hall, almost entirely deserted, were the forty-four members of the right. They were easily marked and counted by their future executioners, who threatened them by voice and gesture. Every {273} day the pet.i.tioners who were admitted to the honors of the session avoided the empty benches of the right and seated themselves with the Mountain or the centre, where they crowded still more the already overcrowded deputies. The discussions were like formidable tempests. "The effect produced by such a spectacle," says Count de Vaublanc in his Memoirs, "was still greater on those who entered the hall during one of those terrible moments. I received this impression several times myself, and it will never be effaced from my mind; I seek vainly for expressions by which to describe it. Long afterwards, M. de Caux, then Minister of War, said to me: 'You made the profoundest impression on me which I ever received in my life. I was young at the time. I entered the galleries just as you were standing out against the furious shouts of a part of the deputies and the people in the galleries.'"

Meanwhile the end was approaching. Faithful royalists still proposed schemes of flight to Louis XVI. Bertrand de Molleville, who is so ill disposed toward Madame de Stael, says concerning this: "There was n.o.body, even to Madame de Stael, who, either in the hope of being pardoned the injury her intrigues had done the King, or else through her continual need of intrigue, had not invented some plan of escape for His Majesty." Louis XVI. declined them all. He would owe nothing to Lafayette. He relied on the money he had given to Danton and other demagogues, and hoped that the {274} insurrectionary bands would be repulsed by the royalists of the National Guard and the Swiss regiment.

August 8th, in the evening, this fine regiment left its Courbevoie barracks and arrived at the Tuileries at daybreak next morning. Under various idle pretexts it had been deprived of its twelve pieces of artillery, and also of three hundred men who had been given the commission, true or false as may be, to watch over the transportation of corn in Normandy. Only seven hundred and fifty, officers and soldiers, remained; but all of them had said: "We will let ourselves be killed to the last man rather than fail in honor or betray the sanct.i.ty of our oaths." In company with a handful of n.o.blemen, these were to be the last defenders of the throne. The fatal hour was approaching. The section of the Cordeliers had decided that if the a.s.sembly had not p.r.o.nounced the King's deposition by the evening of August 9th, the drums should beat the general alarm at the stroke of midnight, and the insurrection march against the Tuileries. The revolutionists were to carry out their plan, and the Swiss to keep their word.

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XXVII.

THE NIGHT OF AUGUST NINTH TO TENTH.

The night was serene, the sky clear and sown with stars. The calmness of nature contrasted with the revolutionary pa.s.sions that had been unchained. On account of the heat, all the windows of the Tuileries had been left open, and from a distance the palace could be seen illuminated as if for a fete. It had just struck midnight. The Revolution was executing the programme of the Cordeliers' section. The tocsin was sounding all over the city. Everybody named the church whose bell he thought he recognized. The people of the faubourgs were out of bed in their houses. The drums mingled with the tocsin. The revolutionists beat the general alarm, and the royalists the call to arms.

No one was asleep at the Tuileries. There was no further question of etiquette. The night reception in the royal bedchamber was omitted for the first time. Certain old servitors, faithful guardians of tradition, in vain recalled that it was not permissible to sit down in the sovereign's apartments. The courtiers of the last hour seated themselves in armchairs, on tables and consoles. Louis XVI. stayed sometimes {276} in his chamber and sometimes in his Great Cabinet, also called the Council Hall, where the a.s.sembled ministers received constant tidings of what was happening without. The pious monarch had summoned his confessor, Abbe Hebert, and shutting himself up with this venerable priest, he besought from Heaven the resignation and courage he needed to pa.s.s through the final crisis. Madame Elisabeth showed the faithful Madame Campan the carnelian pin which fastened her fichu.

These words, surrounding the stalk of a lily, were engraved on it: "Forget offences, pardon injuries."--"I fear much," said the virtuous Princess, "that this maxim has little influence over our enemies, but it must be none the less dear to us." Louis XVI. did not wear his padded vest. "I consented to do so on the 14th of July," said he, "because on that day I was merely going to a ceremony where an a.s.sa.s.sin's dagger might be apprehended. But on a day when my party may be forced to fight with the revolutionists, I should think it cowardly to preserve my life by such means."

Marie Antoinette was grave and tranquil in her heroism. There was nothing affected about her, nothing theatrical, neither pa.s.sion, despair, nor the spirit of revenge. According to the expressions of Roederer, who never left her, "she was a woman, a mother, a wife in peril; she feared, she hoped, she grieved, and she took heart again."

She was also a queen, and the daughter of Maria Theresa. Her anxiety and grief were restrained or concealed by {277} her respect for her rank, her dignity, and her name. When she reappeared amidst the courtiers in the Council Hall, after having dissolved in tears in Thierry's room, the redness of her cheeks and eyes had disappeared.

The courtiers said to each other: "What serenity! what courage!"

The struggle might still seem doubtful. Something like two hundred n.o.blemen who had spontaneously repaired to the King, seven hundred and fifty Swiss, and nine hundred mounted gendarmes posted at the approaches of the Tuileries were the last resources of the commander-in-chief of the French army. The Swiss, who through some one's extreme imprudence had not cartridges enough, were posted in the apartments, the chapel, and at the entry of the Royal Court. Baron de Salis, as the oldest captain of the regiment, commanded at the stairways. A reserve of three hundred men, under Captain Durler, was stationed in the Swiss Court, before the Pavilion of Marsan. The National Guards belonging to the sections _Pet.i.ts-Peres_ and the _Filles-Saint-Thomas_ showed themselves well disposed toward the King; but it was different with the other companies. As to the mounted gendarmes, Louis XVI. could not count on them, and before the riot ended they were to join the insurgents in spite of all the efforts made by their royalist officers. The artillerists of the National Guard, charged with serving the cannons placed in the courts and before the palace doors to defend the entry, were to act in the same manner.

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Like the Swiss, the two hundred n.o.blemen, martyrs to the old French ideas of honor, had resolved to be loyal unto death. With their silk coats and drawing-room swords, they seemed as if they had come to a fete instead of a combat. The servants of the chateau joined them.

Some of them had pistols and blunderbusses. Some, for lack of other weapons, had taken the tongs from the chimneys. They jested with each other over their accoutrements. No, no; there was nothing laughable in these champions of misfortune. They represented the past, with its ancient fidelity to the altar and the throne. A great poet who had the spirit of divination, Heinrich Heine, wrote on November 12, 1840, as if he foresaw February 24, 1848: "The middle cla.s.ses will possibly make less resistance than the aristocracy would do in a similar case. Even in its most pitiable weakness, its enervation by immorality and its degeneration through flattery, the old n.o.bility was still alive to a certain point of honor unknown to our middle cla.s.ses, who have become prosperous by industry, but who will perish by it also. Another 10th of August is predicted for these middle cla.s.ses; but I doubt whether the industrial Knights of the throne of July will prove themselves as heroic as the powdered marquises of the old regime who, in silk coats and flimsy dress swords, opposed the people who invaded the Tuileries."

The greater part of these n.o.blemen, volunteers for the last conflict, were old men with white hair. There were also children among them.

{279} M. Mortimer-Ternaux, author of the _Histoire de la Terreur_, has remarked: "Was not this a time to exclaim with Racine:--

"'See what avengers arm themselves for the quarrel?'

"Who could have told Louis XIV., when in the midst of the splendors of his court he was present at the performance of _Athalie_, that the poet was predicting, through the mouth of Joad, the fate reserved for his great-grandson?" The royalist National Guards who were in the apartments considered the volunteer n.o.blemen as companions in arms.

They shook hands with each other amid cries of "Long live the King!

Long live the National Guard!" But the troops outside did not share these sentiments. Jealous of the royalists a.s.sembled in the palace, they wanted to have them sent out. A regimental commander having come to make known this desire to Louis XVI., Marie Antoinette exclaimed: "Nothing can separate us from these gentlemen; they are our most faithful friends. They will share the dangers of the National Guard.

They will obey us. Put them at the cannon's mouth, and they will show you how men die for their King."

Meantime what had become of Petion, whose business it was, as mayor, to defend the palace? Summoned to the Tuileries, he arrived there at eleven in the evening. As Louis XVI. said to him: "It seems there is a great deal of commotion?"--"Yes, sire," he replied, "the excitement is great." And he {280} enlarged upon the measures he claimed that he had taken, and his pretended haste to wait upon the King. In going out, he came face to face with M. de Mandat, who, as general-in-chief of the National Guard, was in command of all military forces. "Why,"

exclaimed he, "have the police refused cartridges to the National Guard when they have wasted them on the Ma.r.s.eillais? My men have only four charges apiece; some of them have not one. No matter; I answer for everything; my measures are taken, providing I am authorized, by an order signed by you, to repel force by force." Not daring to avow his complicity with the riot, Petion signed the order demanded. Then he made his escape under pretext of inspecting the gardens, and fell amongst some royalist National Guards, who reprimanded him severely.

He began to fear being kept at the Tuileries as a hostage, to guarantee the palace against the attempts of the populace, and went to the a.s.sembly. It had adjourned at ten o'clock the evening before, but on account of the crisis had met again at two in the morning. The a.s.sembly knew the gravity of the danger as well as the King did; but through a ridiculous and culpable point of honor, it affected not to recognize it, and devoted to the reading of a colonial report the moments it should have employed in saving that Const.i.tution it had sworn to maintain. Petion merely put in an appearance in the Hall of the Manege. But he took good care not to return to the Tuileries. At half-past three in the morning the {281} rolling of a carriage was heard from the palace. It was that of the mayor, going back empty. He had not dared to get into it, and had only sent his coachman an order to return when he found himself in safety at the mayoralty, whither he had made his way on foot.