was superstitious even to puerility. He did not believe in the
Gospels, but he believed in books of magic. In a corner of his palace
he had arranged a cupboard with a censer and a pair of candlesticks,
before which he performed cabalistic operations in nothing but his
shirt. Throughout his entire reign he consulted a fortune-teller named
Madame Arfwedsson, who read the future for him in coffee-grounds.
Around his neck {35} he wore a gold box containing a sachet in which
there was a powder that, according to his belief, would drive away evil
spirits. All this apparatus of incantation and sorcery was one of the
causes of Gustavus's fall. It multiplied the snares around the
unfortunate monarch, and served to mask his enemies. Prophecies
announced his approaching end, and conspirators took care to fulfil the
prophecies.
The Duke of Sudermania, the King's brother, without being an accomplice
in the project of crime, encouraged underhand practices. Sectarians
approached Gustavus to reproach him for his luxury, his prodigalities,
his entertainments, or addressed him anonymous warnings which, in
Biblical language, declared him accursed and rejected by the Lord.
Their insolence knew no bounds. Madame Arfwedsson had counselled the
King to beware if he should meet a man dressed in red. Count de
Ribbing, one of the future conspirators, having heard of this, ordered
a red costume out of bravado, and presented himself in it before his
sovereign, whom such an apparition caused to reflect if not to tremble.
Gustavus, like Caesar, was to see his Ides of March. It had been
predicted to him that the month of March would be fatal to him. This
month approached, and the monarch diverted himself by fetes and
boisterous entertainments in order to banish the presentiments which
never ceased to assail {36} him. He said to himself that all this
phantasmagoria would probably soon vanish; that the funereal images
would of themselves depart; and that the spectres would disappear at
the sound of arms. The monarchical crusade of which he proposed to be
the leader grew upon him as the best means by which to escape the
incessant obsessions haunting his spirit. In vain was he reminded that
Sweden was in need of money, and that a war of intervention in the
affairs of France was not popular. His resolution remained unshaken.
He counted the days and hours which still separated him from the moment
of action: his sole idea was to chastise the Jacobins and avenge the
majesty of thrones.
Returned to Stockholm from Aix-la-Chapelle, at the beginning of August,
1791, the impetuous monarch began to be very active in his warlike
preparations. The Marquis de Bouille, who had been obliged to quit
France at the time of the unsuccessful journey to Varennes, had entered
his service and was to counsel him and fight at his side under the
Swedish flag. At the same time Gustavus officially renewed his
promises of aid to the King of France. Louis XVI. replied:--
"MONSIEUR MY BROTHER AND COUSIN: I have just received the lines with
which you have honored me on the occasion of your return. It is always
a great consolation to have such proofs of a friendly sentiment as are
given me by this letter. The concern, Sire, which you take in all that
relates to {37} my interest touches me more and more, and I recognize
in each word the august soul of a king whom the world admires as much
for his magnanimous heart as for his wisdom."
Meanwhile the conspirators, animated either by personal rancor or the
passions common to nobles hostile to their king, were secretly
preparing for an attack. The five leaders were Captain Ankarstroem,
Count de Ribbing, Count de Horn, Count de Lilienhorn, major of the Blue
Guards, and Baron Pechlin, an old man of seventy-two, who had been
distinguished in the civil wars, and was the soul of the plot. The
conspirators had doubts before committing the crime. During the Diet,
which met at Gefle, January 25, 1792, they refrained at the very moment
when they were about to strike.
Gustavus was in his castle of Haga, about a league from Stockholm,
without guards or attendants. Three of the conspirators approached the
castle at five in the evening. They were armed with carbines, and,
having placed themselves in ambush near the King's apartment on the
ground-floor, were awaiting an opportunity to kill their sovereign.
Gustavus coming in from a long walk, went in his dressing-gown to sit
in the library, the windows of which opened like doors into the garden.
He fell asleep in his armchair. Whether they were alarmed by the sound
of footsteps, or whether the contrast between the slumber of the
unsuspicious King and the death poising above his head awakened {38}
some remorse, the assassins once more abandoned their meditated crime.
Weary of the attempts they had been planning for six months, and which
never came to anything, the conspirators might possibly have given them
up altogether if a circumstance which they considered providential had
not come to rekindle their regicidal zeal. The last masked ball of the
season was to be given in the Opera-house on the night of March 16-17,
and it was known that Gustavus would be present. To strike the monarch
in the midst of the festival, in order to chastise him for his love of
pleasure, was an idea which charmed the assassins. Moreover, the mask
alone could embolden them; they thought that if the august victim were
enveloped in a domino they need no longer dread that royal prestige
which had more than once caused them to recoil.
Gustavus was counselled to be on his guard. The young Count Louis de
Bouille, who was then at Stockholm, and who had been informed by a
letter from Germany that the King was about to be assassinated, begged
him to profit by the warnings reaching him from every quarter.
Gustavus replied that he would rather go blindly to meet his fate than
torment himself with the numberless precautions which such suspicions
would demand. "If I listened," added he, "to all the advice I receive,
I could not even drink a glass of water; besides, I am far from
believing in the execution of such a plot. {39} My subjects, although
very brave in war, are extremely timid in politics. The successes I
expect to gain in France, the trophies of which I shall bring back to
Stockholm, will speedily augment my power by the confidence and general
respect which will be their result."
Meantime the fatal hour was approaching. The masked ball of March 16
was about to open. Before going there, Gustavus took supper with a few
of the persons belonging to his household. While he was at table he
received a note, written in French and unsigned, in which he was
entreated not to enter the playhouse, where he was about to be stricken
to death. The author of the note urgently recommended the King not to
make his appearance at the ball, and, if he persisted in going, to
suspect the crowd which would press around him, because this gathering
was to be the prelude and signal of the blow aimed at him. The really
bizarre thing about this was that the man who wrote these lines was
himself one of the conspirators, Count de Lilienhorn.
"It is impossible to tell," says the Marquis de Bouille in his Memoirs,
"whether his conscience wished to acquit itself in this manner towards
the King, to whom he owed everything, without forfeiting his word to
his party, or whether, knowing the fearless character of this prince,
he did not offer his anonymous advice as a bait to his courage. It
certainly produced the latter effect." Gustavus made no {40}
reflections on reading this note, and went fearlessly to the ball.
The orchestra is playing wildly. The dances are animated. The hall,
adorned with flowers, sparkles under the glow of the chandeliers.
Gustavus appears for a moment in his box. It is only then that he
shows to Baron d'Essen, his first equerry, the anonymous note he had
received while at supper. That faithful servant begs him not to go
down into the hall. Gustavus disregards the prudent counsel. He says
that hereafter he will wear a coat of mail, but that, for this time, he
is perfectly determined to be reckless about danger. The King and his
equerry go into the saloon in front of the royal box, where each puts
on a domino. Then they enter the hall by way of the stage. There are
men essentially courageous, who love danger for its own sake. Gustavus
is one of them. Hence he takes pleasure in braving all his assassins.
As he is crossing the greenroom with Baron d'Essen on his arm, "Let us
see," says he, "whether they will really dare to kill me." Yes, they
will dare it. The moment that the King enters he is recognized in
spite of his mask and his domino. He walks slowly around the hall, and
then goes into the pit, where he strolls about during several minutes.
He is about to retrace his steps, when he finds himself surrounded, as
had been predicted, by a group of maskers who get between him and the
officers of his suite. Several black dominos approach. They are the
assassins. One of them, {41} Count de Horn, lays a hand on his
shoulder: "Good day, fine masker!" he says. This Judas salute, this
ironical welcome given by the murderers to their victim, is the signal
for the attack. On the instant, Ankarstroem fires on the King with a
pistol loaded with old iron.
Gustavus, struck in the left hip, cries, "I am wounded!" The pistol,
which had been wrapped in wool, made only a muffled report, and the
smoke spreading throughout the room, the crowd does not think of a
murder, but a fire. Cries of "Fire! fire!" augment the confusion.
Baron d'Essen, all covered with his master's blood, helps him to gain a
little box called the OEil-de-Boeuf, and from there a salon, where he
is laid upon a sofa. Baron d'Armfelt orders the doors of the theatre
to be closed, and every one to unmask. A man, brazening it out, lifts
his mask before the officer of police, and says to him with assurance,
"As for me, sir, I hope that you will not suspect me." It is
Ankarstroem, the assassin. He goes out quietly. But, after the crime
was committed, his weapons, a pistol and a knife like that of
Ravaillac, had fallen on the floor. A gunsmith of Stockholm will
recognize the pistol and declare that he had sold it a few days before
to a former officer of the guards, Captain Ankarstroem. It is the
token which will cause the arrest of the assassin, and his punishment
by the penalty of parricides,--decapitation and the cutting off of his
right hand.
{42}
The King showed admirable calm and resignation during the thirteen days
he had still to live. He asked with anxiety if the murderer had been
arrested, and being answered that his name was not yet known: "Ah! God
grant," said he, "that he may not be discovered!" As soon as the first
bandages were put on, the wounded man was taken to his apartments at
the castle. There he received his courtiers and the foreign ministers.
When he saw the Duke d'Escars, who represented the brothers of Louis
XVI. at Stockholm: "This is a blow," said he, "which is going to
rejoice your Parisian Jacobins; but write to the Princes that if I
recover from it, it will change neither my sentiments nor my zeal for
their just cause." In the midst of his sufferings he preserved a
dignity above all praise. Neither recriminations nor murmurs issued
from his lips. He summoned to his death-bed both his friends and those
who had been among the number of his enemies, but would have been
horrified to have been accomplices in a crime. When the old Count de
Brahe, leader of the nobles of the opposition, presented himself,
Gustavus said, as he pressed him in his arms: "I bless my wound, since
it has brought back an old friend who had withdrawn from me. Embrace
me, my dear count, and let all be forgotten between us."
The fate of his son, who was about to ascend the throne at the age of
thirteen, was the chief preoccupation of the King. "Let them put me on
a litter," cried he; "I will go to the public square and speak to {43}
the people." And he said to Baron d'Armfelt: "Go, and like another
Antony, show the bloody vestments of Caesar." It was also to D'Armfelt
that he said as he was signing with his dying hand his commission as
Governor of Stockholm: "Give me your knightly word that you will serve
my son as faithfully as you have served me." He made his confession to
his grand-almoner: "I fear," he said to him, "that I have no great
merit before God, but at least I am sure that I have never done harm to
any one intentionally." He meant to receive the sacraments according
to the Lutheran form, and to have the Queen brought to him, as he had
not seen her since his illness. But while seeking sleep in order to
tranquillize his mind before this emotion, he found the slumber of
death, March 29, 1792, at eleven in the morning. He was forty-six
years old.
Thus terminated the brilliant and stormy career of the prince on whom
the Marquis de Bouille has pronounced the following judgment: "His
manners and his politeness rendered him the most amiable and attractive
man in his country, although the Swedes are naturally intelligent. He
had a vivid imagination, a mind enlightened and adorned by a taste for
letters, a masculine and persuasive eloquence, and an easy elocution
even when speaking French; useful and agreeable acquirements, a
prodigious memory, polite and affable manners, accompanied by a certain
oddity which did not displease. His strong and ardent soul was
enkindled with an inordinate love of glory; but a {44} chivalrous
spirit and loyalty dominated there. His sensitive heart rendered him
clement, when he ought, perhaps, to have been severe; he was even
susceptible of friendship, and this prince has had and has preserved
friends whom I have known, and who were worthy to be such. He had a
firm and decided character, and, above all, that resolution so
necessary to statesmen, without which wit, prudence, talents,
experience, are not only useless, but often injurious."
According to the Marquis de Bouille, Gustavus should have been the King
of France, and Louis XVI. King of Sweden. "As the sovereign of France,
Gustavus would have been, beyond all doubt, one of its greatest kings.
He would have preserved that beautiful realm from a revolution; he
would have governed with glory and with splendor.... Louis XVI., on
the other hand, placed on the throne of Sweden, would have obtained the
respect and esteem of that simple people by his moral and religious
virtues, his economy, his spirit of justice, and his good and
benevolent sentiments. He would have contributed to the happiness of
the Swedes, who would have wept above his tomb; whereas both these
monarchs perished at the hands of their subjects. But the designs of
Providence are impenetrable, and we ought, in respect and silence, to
obey its unalterable decrees."
The Jacobins of Paris, who affected to despise the projects of Gustavus
III., showed how much they had feared him by the mad joy they displayed
on {45} learning of his death. They lavished praises on "Brutus
Ankarstroem." Although it had been committed by the nobles, there was
a certain reminiscence of the French Revolution about the assault. In
their secret meetings the conspirators had agreed to carry around on
pikes the heads of Gustavus's principal friends, "in the French style,"
as was said in those days. Count de Lilienhorn, brought up, nourished,
and drawn from poverty and obscurity by Gustavus, and overwhelmed to
the last moment by the benefits of the generous monarch, explained his
monstrous ingratitude and the part he had taken in the attack, by
saying he had been led astray by the idea of commanding the National
Guards of Stockholm after the Revolution, and playing the same part as
Lafayette. The Girondin ministry attained to power in France a few
days after Gustavus had been struck down in Sweden. There was no
connecting link between the two facts; but at Paris, as at Stockholm,
the cause of kings sustained a terrible repulse. The tragic death of
their faithful friend must have caused Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette
some painful forebodings concerning their own fate. The murder of
Gustavus was the first of a series of great catastrophes. The pistol
of the Swedish regicide heralded the blade of the Parisian guillotine.
The 16th of March was the prelude of the 21st of January.
{46}
V.
THE BEGINNINGS OF MADAME ROLAND.
The moment is at hand when a woman of the middle class, born in humble
circumstances, is about to make her appearance on the scene of
politics; a woman who, after living in obscurity during thirty-eight
years, was to become famous in a few days, and attract the attention of
all France first and afterwards that of Europe entire. No figure is
more curious to study than hers, and it is not surprising that of late
years it has tempted men of great merit, such as MM. Daubant and
Faugere, whose publications have shed great light on the Egeria of the
Girondins.
At every epoch of history there are certain women who become as it were
living symbols, and sum up in their own persons the passions,
prejudices, and illusions of their time. They reflect at once its
vices and its virtues, its qualities and its defects. Such was Madame
Roland. All the distinctive characteristics of the close of the
eighteenth century are resumed in her: ardent enthusiasm, generous
ideals, aspiration towards progress, passion for liberty, heroic
courage in view of persecution, captivity, and death; an absence of
religious faith, an implacable vanity, a {47} thirst for emotions,
plagiarism of antiquity, declamatory language and sentiments, and
childish imitation of Greece and Rome. Nothing is more interesting
than to analyze the conceptions of this mind, count the pulsations of
this heart, and surprise the inmost secrets of a woman whose
psychological importance is as considerable as her place in history.
Intellectually as well as morally, Madame Roland is the daughter of
Jean-Jacques Rousseau; socially she is the personification of that
third estate which, having been nothing, wished at first to be
something and afterwards to be all; politically, she is by turns the
heroine and the victim of the Revolution, which, under pretext of
liberty, engendered tyranny, which used the guillotine and perished by
the guillotine, and which after dreaming of light expired in mire and
blood.
How was it that this little _bourgeoise_, the daughter of Philipon the
engraver, a man midway between an artisan and an artist, whose very
origin seemed to remove her so far from any political role, attained to
high renown? What influences formed this woman whose qualities were
masculine? Whence was drawn the inspiration of this siren, destined to
be taken in her own snares and die the victim of her own incantations?
A rapid glance at the earliest years of Marie-Jeanne Philipon, the
future Madame Roland, is enough to explain her passions and her hopes,
her errors and her talents, her rages and her enthusiasms.
She was born in Paris, March 18, 1754, of an intelligent but frivolous
father, and a simple, devoted, {48} honestly commonplace mother. From
infancy she felt herself superior to those by whom she was surrounded.
Thence sprang an unmeasured pride and a continual hunger to produce an
impression. The infant prodigy preluded the female politician.
Speaking of herself in her Memoirs, she becomes ecstatic over the child
who "read serious works, explained very well the circles of the
celestial globe, used crayons and the burin, found at eight years that
she was the best dancer in an assembly of young persons older than
herself," and who, nevertheless, "was often summoned to the kitchen to
make an omelette, clean the vegetables, or skim the pot." She admires
her own willingness to descend to domestic cares: "I was never out of
my element," she says; "I could make soup as skilfully as Philopoemen
could chop wood; but no one, observing me, could imagine that this was
suitable employment." Still speaking of herself, she celebrates "the
little person who on Sundays went to church or out walking in a
spick-and-span costume whose appearance was fully sustained by her
demeanor and her language." She calls attention to the contrast by
which, on week-days, the same child went out alone, in a little cloth
frock, to buy parsley and salad at a short distance from home. "It
must be owned," she adds, "that I did not like this very well; but I
did not show it, and I had the art of doing my errands in such a way as
to find some pleasure in it. I united such great politeness to a
certain dignity, that the fruit-seller or other person {49} of the
sort, took pleasure in serving me first, and even those who came before
me thought this proper."
So the little Philipon wanted to take the chief place in the
fruiterer's shop, just as, later on, she desired it on the political
stage or the Ministry of the Interior. This enemy of privileges will
admit them only for herself. In everything she made pretentions:
pretentions to elegance, beauty, distinction, talent, knowledge,
eloquence, genius, and, when she wanted to be simple, to simplicity.
In her style as in her conversation, in her public as in her private
life, what she sought before all things was effect. It was absolutely
essential that people should talk about her, that she should be playing
a part, or standing on a pedestal. Assuredly, if she had a fault, it
was not excess of modesty. She regarded herself as the flower of her
sex, a superior woman, made to be loved, flattered, and adored. She
speaks of her charms with the precision of a doctor and the enthusiasm
of a poet. Not one of her perfections escapes her. It is through a
magnifying-glass and before a mirror that she studies and admires
herself. She discovers that a society in which a woman so remarkable
and so attractive is not thoroughly well known, must be badly
organized. Middle-class by birth, and aristocratic by instinct, she
represents what one might then have called the new social strata. A
secret voice told her that the day was to come when she would make
herself feared by the powerful of the earth, those giants with feet of
clay who, at the beginning of her {50} career, were still looked at
kneeling. Banished by fate from the theatre where the human
tragi-comedy is played, she said to herself: "I too will have a part
one of these days." In the earliest stage of her existence there was
in her a confused medley of uneasiness and ambition, of spite and
anger. She had a horror of the slightly disdainful protection of
people of quality. She conceived an aversion for persons like that
Demoiselle d'Hannaches, "big, awkward, dry, and yellow," infatuated
with her nobility, annoying everybody with her titles, and yet, in
spite of her ignorance, her stiff manners, her old-fashioned dress and
her follies, well received everywhere on account of her birth.
Slowly, but steadily, the future amazon of the Revolution prepared
herself for the combat. The books which she read and re-read
incessantly were the arsenal whence she drew her weapons. One of those
presentiments which do not deceive, promised her a stormy but
illustrious destiny. More Roman than French, more pagan than
Christian, she longed for glory like that of the heroines of Plutarch,
her favorite author. In the humble dwelling of her father, situated at
the corner of the Pont-Neuf and the Quai des Orfevres, she caught a
glimpse of horizons as wide as her thoughts. "From the upper part of
our house," she says, "a great expanse offered itself to my dreamy and
romantic imagination. How often from my north window have I
contemplated with emotion the deserts of the sky, its superb azure {51}
vault splendidly outlined from the bluish dawn far behind the Pont du
Change, to the sunset gilded with a faint purplish lustre behind the
trees of the Champs Elysees and the houses of Chaillot."