In the Tuileries.
The victim having once got his stroke-of-grace, the catastrophe
can be considered as almost come. There is small interest now in
watching his long low moans: notable only are his sharper
agonies, what convulsive struggles he may take to cast the
torture off from him; and then finally the last departure of life
itself, and how he lies extinct and ended, either wrapt like
Cæsar in decorous mantle-folds, or unseemly sunk together, like
one that had not the force even to die.
Was French Royalty, when wrenched forth from its tapestries in
that fashion, on that Sixth of October 1789, such a victim?
Universal France, and Royal Proclamation to all the Provinces,
answers anxiously, _No._ Nevertheless one may fear the worst.
Royalty was beforehand so decrepit, moribund, there is little
life in it to heal an injury. How much of its strength, which was
of the imagination merely, has fled; Rascality having looked
plainly in the King’s face, and not died! When the assembled
crows can pluck up their scarecrow, and say to it, Here shalt
thou stand and not there; and can treat with it, and make it,
from an infinite, a quite finite Constitutional scarecrow,—what
is to be looked for? Not in the finite Constitutional scarecrow,
but in what still unmeasured, infinite-seeming force may rally
round it, is there thenceforth any hope. For it is most true that
all available Authority is _mystic_ in its conditions, and comes
“by the grace of God.”
Cheerfuller than watching the death-struggles of Royalism will it
be to watch the growth and gambollings of Sansculottism; for, in
human things, especially in human society, all death is but a
death-birth: thus if the sceptre is departing from Louis, it is
only that, in other forms, other sceptres, were it even
pike-sceptres, may bear sway. In a prurient element, rich with
nutritive influences, we shall find that Sansculottism grows
lustily, and even frisks in not ungraceful sport: as indeed most
young creatures are sportful; nay, may it not be noted further,
that as the grown cat, and cat-species generally, is the
cruellest thing known, so the merriest is precisely the kitten,
or growing cat?
But fancy the Royal Family risen from its truckle-beds on the
morrow of that mad day: fancy the Municipal inquiry, ‘How would
your Majesty please to lodge?’—and then that the King’s rough
answer, ‘Each may lodge as he can, I am well enough,’ is congeed
and bowed away, in expressive grins, by the Townhall
Functionaries, with obsequious upholsterers at their back; and
how the Château of the Tuileries is repainted, regarnished into a
golden Royal Residence; and Lafayette with his blue National
Guards lies encompassing it, as blue Neptune (in the language of
poets) does an island, wooingly. Thither may the wrecks of
rehabilitated Loyalty gather; if it will become Constitutional;
for Constitutionalism thinks no evil; Sansculottism itself
rejoices in the King’s countenance. The rubbish of a Menadic
Insurrection, as in this ever-kindly world all rubbish can and
must be, is swept aside; and so again, on clear arena, under new
conditions, with something even of a new stateliness, we begin a
new course of action.
Arthur Young has witnessed the strangest scene: Majesty walking
unattended in the Tuileries Gardens; and miscellaneous tricolor
crowds, who cheer it, and reverently make way for it: the very
Queen commands at lowest respectful silence, regretful
avoidance.[260] Simple ducks, in those royal waters, quackle for
crumbs from young royal fingers: the little Dauphin has a little
railed garden, where he is seen delving, with ruddy cheeks and
flaxen curled hair; also a little hutch to put his tools in, and
screen himself against showers. What peaceable simplicity! Is it
peace of a Father restored to his children? Or of a Taskmaster
who has lost his whip? Lafayette and the Municipality and
universal Constitutionalism assert the former, and do what is in
them to realise it. Such Patriotism as snarls dangerously, and
shows teeth, Patrollotism shall suppress; or far better, Royalty
shall soothe down the angry hair of it, by gentle pattings; and,
most effectual of all, by fuller diet. Yes, not only shall Paris
be fed, but the King’s hand be seen in that work. The household
goods of the Poor shall, up to a certain amount, by royal bounty,
be disengaged from pawn, and that insatiable _Mont de Piété_
disgorge: rides in the city with their _Vive-le-Roi_ need not
fail; and so by substance and show, shall Royalty, if man’s art
can popularise it, be popularised.[261]
Or, alas, is it neither restored Father nor diswhipped Taskmaster
that walks there; but an anomalous complex of both these, and of
innumerable other heterogeneities; reducible to no rubric, if not
to this newly devised one: _King Louis Restorer of French
Liberty?_ Man indeed, and King Louis like other men, lives in
this world to make rule out of the ruleless; by his living
energy, he shall force the absurd itself to become less absurd.
But then if there _be_ no living energy; living passivity only?
King Serpent, hurled into his unexpected watery dominion, did at
least bite, and assert credibly that he was there: but as for the
poor King Log, tumbled hither and thither as thousandfold chance
and other will than his might direct, how happy for him that he
was indeed wooden; and, doing nothing, could also see and suffer
nothing! It is a distracted business.
For his French Majesty, meanwhile, one of the worst things is
that he can get no hunting. Alas, no hunting henceforth; only a
fatal being-hunted! Scarcely, in the next June weeks, shall he
taste again the joys of the game-destroyer; in next June, and
never more. He sends for his smith-tools; gives, in the course of
the day, official or ceremonial business being ended, “a few
strokes of the file, _quelques coups de lime._[262] Innocent
brother mortal, why wert thou not an obscure substantial maker of
locks; but doomed in that other far-seen craft, to be a maker
only of world-follies, unrealities; things self destructive,
which no mortal hammering could rivet into coherence!
Poor Louis is not without insight, nor even without the elements
of will; some sharpness of temper, spurting at times from a
stagnating character. If harmless inertness could save him, it
were well; but he will slumber and painfully dream, and to _do_
aught is not given him. Royalist Antiquarians still shew the
rooms where Majesty and suite, in these extraordinary
circumstances, had their lodging. Here sat the Queen;
reading,—for she had her library brought hither, though the King
refused his; taking vehement counsel of the vehement
uncounselled; sorrowing over altered times; yet with sure hope of
better: in her young rosy Boy, has she not the living emblem of
hope! It is a murky, working sky; yet with golden gleams—of dawn,
or of deeper meteoric night? Here again this chamber, on the
other side of the main entrance, was the King’s: here his Majesty
breakfasted, and did official work; here daily after breakfast he
received the Queen; sometimes in pathetic friendliness; sometimes
in human sulkiness, for flesh is weak; and, when questioned about
business would answer: ‘Madame, your business is with the
children.’ Nay, Sire, were it not better you, your Majesty’s
self, took the children? So asks impartial History; scornful that
the _thicker_ vessel was not also the stronger; pity-struck for
the porcelain-clay of humanity rather than for the
tile-clay,—though indeed _both_ were broken!
So, however, in this Medicean Tuileries, shall the French King
and Queen now sit, for one-and-forty months; and see a
wild-fermenting France work out its own destiny, and theirs.
Months bleak, ungenial, of rapid vicissitude; yet with a mild
pale splendour, here and there: as of an April that were leading
to leafiest Summer; as of an October that led only to everlasting
Frost. Medicean Tuileries, how changed since it was a peaceful
Tile field! Or is the ground itself fate-stricken, accursed: an
Atreus’ Palace; for that Louvre window is still nigh, out of
which a Capet, whipt of the Furies, fired his signal of the Saint
Bartholomew! Dark is the way of the Eternal as mirrored in this
world of Time: God’s way is in the sea, and His path in the great
deep.