INTRODUCTION 197
THE DEATH OF LOUIS XVI 199
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
The Young Royalist _frontispiece_
_To face_ PAGE
Louis XVI 15
Louis-Stanislas-Xavier de Bourbon, Comte de
Provence, afterward Louis XVIII 18
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand 22
Jean-Sylvain Bailly, President of the Commons in
1789 27
The Commons taking the oath in the Tennis-Court
at Versailles 31
Jacques Necker, Rector-General of Finances 34
The meeting of the National Assembly at Versailles,
June, 1789 39
Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, Deputy from Paris to the
National Assembly 42
Gabriel Honoré Riquetti, Comte De Mirabeau 46
Allegory of the oath-taking in the Tennis-Court at
Versailles 51
“Vive le Roi! Vive la Nation!” 55
The National Assembly Petrified 58
The National Assembly Revivified 58
Madame Elisabeth 63
The end of the flight of the Royal Family at Varennes 66
The Royal Family at Varennes, June 22, 1791 71
Drouet, the Postmaster at Varennes 74
The return to Paris 79
The arrival of the Royal Family in Paris, June 25, 1791 82
Enrolling volunteers in Paris on the Pont Neuf, before
the statue of Henry IV 93
The Storming of the Tuileries 94
The Assault on the Tuileries 99
A Soldier of the National Guard 100
Grenadier of the Infantry of Ligné 100
Marie-Antoinette and her Children 103
Louis XVI--The Forge in the Palace at Versailles 106
The Tuileries and its Garden in 1757 111
The Struggle in the Halls of the Tuileries, August
10, 1792 114
Armand Gaston, Cardinal de Rohan 131
Cartoon of the Three Orders [The Clergy, Nobility
and the Commons] in the National Assembly
Forging the New Constitution 139
A Popular Print at the time of the Revolution 142
Maximilien Robespierre 147
Georges Jacques Danton 149
Marie Jean Paul Roch Yves Gilbert Motier, Marquis
de Lafayette 164
Ceremonial Costume of the Clergy, the Nobility and
the Commons 171
Uniforms of the Army of French Emigrants 172
Goethe, who was with the German Army at Valmy 177
Marshal François-Christophe Kellermann, Duke of
Valmy 183
A Republican General 186
A Colonel of Infantry 186
Under the Mill at Valmy 192
General Charles-François Dumouriez--In Command
of the French at Valmy 197
Lamoignon de Malesherbes, Counsel for the King
at his Trial 199
Republican soldiers in the Revolution 202
Proclamation of the Provisional Executive Council 204
The last victims of the Terror 209
King Louis taking leave of his family in the tower
of the Temple 211
A Mass under the Terror 214
The death of King Louis XVI, January 21, 1793 216
PART ONE
THE ROYAL SEANCE
[Illustration: LOUIS XVI
From a photograph by Braun, Clément & Co., New York, of the painting by
Antoine-François Callet, in Museum of Versailles
_To face p. 15_
]
THE LAST DAYS OF THE FRENCH MONARCHY
PART ONE
THE ROYAL SEANCE
Upon the crest of the steep and thickly wooded hills that rise from the
left bank of the Seine below Paris, you may find a village, the old
stones of which, and something spacious in its whole arrangement, are
consonant with its name. It is called “Marly of the King.”
There the great trees, the balustrade, and gates still standing recall
the palace to which the French monarchy retired when leisure or fatigue
or mourning withdrew it from Versailles; for it was a place more
domestic and far less burdened with state.
To the gates of that great country house there came near ten o’clock,
just after the hour when full darkness falls on a midsummer evening, a
great coach, driving from Versailles. It was the coach of the Archbishop
of Paris, coming urgently to see the king, and the day was Friday, the
nineteenth of June, 1789. They were in the full crisis that opened the
Revolution. The tall windows of the palace were fully lit as the coach
came up the drive. The night air was cold, for those June days were
rainy and full of hurrying cloud. The Archbishop of Paris and his
colleague of Rouen, who was with him, were summoned by their titles into
the room where Louis XVI sat discussing what should be done for the
throne.
Two days before, upon the Wednesday, the commons of the great
Parliament--the Commons House in that great Parliament which had met
again after a hundred years, and which now felt behind it the
nation--had taken the first revolutionary step and had usurped
authority. The quarrel which had hampered all reform since this
Parliament of the States General had met six weeks before; the refusal
of the two privileged orders and particularly of the nobles to vote with
the commons and to form with them one National Assembly; the claim of
the privileged orders and particularly of the nobles to bar whatever the
popular representatives might decide--all that had been destroyed in
spirit by a new act of sovereignty.
Using the title that was on all men’s lips and calling themselves the
“_National Assembly_,” the commons had declared that the whole assembly
was an indivisible body, and alone the organ of the nation. They had
used with conscious purpose the solemn formula “Desires and decrees,”
which hitherto throughout all these centuries had never appeared above
any seal or signature save that of a king. They clothed this spiritual
thing with body by the enormous decision that no tax should be paid in
the kingdom that had not their approval.
This was the blow that had summoned the council round the king at Marly
upon this Friday night. For now two anxious days doubtful issues and
conflicting policies had pulled Louis this way and that, whether to
yield, whether to compromise, or whether to strike back.
* * * * *
It was a fortnight since the sickly child who was heir to the throne had
died, and this retirement of the royal family to Marly, consequent upon
such mourning, was confused by the numbness of that shock also. The king
perhaps more than the queen had suffered in his powers and judgment; for
Marie Antoinette, the most vigorous and lucid of those gathered in
council at Marly, the least national, and the least wide in judgment,
was active at this moment for the full claims of the crown.
With her at the king’s side in the taking of this crucial decision stood
other advisers. The king’s two brothers, the elder and the younger, who,
as Louis XVIII and Charles X, were to rule after the restoration, and
who were now known under the titles of Provence, and Artois were in the
palace together. Provence, the elder, very dull and heartless, was the
more solid; Artois, the younger, empty, poor in judgment, was the least
unattractive. They counted for their rank, and even Provence for little
else.
Barentin was there, the keeper of the seals. He was a man of very clear
decision, of straightforward speech and manner; a man with something
sword-like about him. He thought and said that the king had only to move
troops and settle matters at once.
There also, lit by the candles of that night, was the vacuous, puffed
face of Necker, the millionaire. This man, famous through his wealth,
which was ill acquired and enormous, an alien in religion as in
[Illustration: LOUIS-STANISLAS-XAVIER DE BOURBON, COMTE DE PROVENCE,
AFTERWARD LOUIS XVIII
From a photograph by Braun, Clément & Co., New York, of a painting by
Jean-Martial Fredou, belonging to Marquis de Virieu, at the Château de
Lantilly
_To face p. 18_
]
blood, had become, by one of those ironies in which the gods delight,
the idol of the national movement. He was pitifully inferior to such an
opportunity, empty of courage, empty of decision, and almost empty of
comprehension. No idea informed him unless it was that of some vague
financial “liberalism” (rather, say, moral anarchy) suitable to the
crooked ways by which he himself had arrived. Those protruding eyes,
that loose mouth, and that lethargic, self-satisfied expression were the
idol that stood in the general mind for the giant things that were
coming. Behind such cold dross was reddening the creative fire of the
nation! Such a doorkeeper did Fate choose to open the gates for the
armies of Marceau and Napoleon! All his advice was for something
“constitutional.” In days better suited for such men as he Necker would
have been a politician, and a parliamentary politician at that.
To these, then, thus assembled entered the archbishops with their news.
The news was this: that before sunset, just before they had left
Versailles, the clergy had rallied to the commons. The bishops, indeed,
all save four, had stood out for the privileged orders; but the doubt in
which all minds had been since the revolutionary step of forty-eight
hours before was resolved. The clergy had broken rank with the nobles;
for that matter, many of the wealthier nobles were breaking rank, too.
Decision was most urgent; the moment was critical in the extreme, lest
in a few hours the National Assembly, already proclaimed, already half
formed, should arise united and in full strength over against the crown.
In not two hours after the arrival of the prelates the decision, nearly
reached before they came, was finally taken by the king. He would follow
Necker, and Necker was for a long, windy, complicated compromise. Necker
was for a constitution, large, “liberal,” strangling the action of the
popular life, dissolving the yes and no of creative creeds, leaving to
the crown as much as would preserve its power to dismiss the States
General and to summon a new body less national--and, above all, less
violent. There is an English word for this temper, the word “Whig.” But
that word is associated in the English language with the _triumph_ of
wealth. Necker’s muddy vision did not triumph.
That decision was taken upon this Friday night, the nineteenth of June,
1789--taken, I think, a little before midnight. Artois was off to bed,
and Provence, too. The council was broken up. It was full midnight now
when wheels were again heard upon the granite sets before the great
doors, and the hot arrival of horses. The name announced was that of
Talleyrand, the Bishop of Autun, and the king, perhaps angrily, refused
to see him.
This man, with eyes like a ferret and an intelligence as keen as it was
witty and narrow, a bradawl of a mind, as invincible at intrigue as in
vice, given up wholly to the search for personal advantage, had about
him all that the plain piety of Louis XVI detested, and all that Louis
XVI’s slow mind most feared. The king had made him Bishop of Autun
against his every judgment, and only at the call of Talleyrand’s
fellow-clergymen, who loved their comrade’s amusing sallies against
religion and his reputation of the brain. It was a reputation that had
led Rome to consider the making of him a cardinal, and only Louis
himself had prevented it. For Louis profoundly believed. It was Louis
who had said in those days just before the Revolution, “I will give no
man the see of Paris who denies his God.”
Such was Talleyrand, thirty-five years of age, destined to compass the
ruin of the French church, to ordain to the schismatic body which
attempted to replace it, to be picked out by Danton for his very vices
as a good emissary to Pitt, to be one of the levers of Napoleon, to be
the man that handed the crown to Louis XVIII at the restoration. Such
was the man, full of policy and of evil, whom on that midnight Louis XVI
refused to see.
The king refused to see him with the more determination that Talleyrand
had asked for a secret audience. Talleyrand sent a servant to the king’s
younger brother, Artois, who knew him well, and Artois, who was in bed,
asked him to come to the bedroom to speak to him, which he did; and
there in that incongruous place, to the empty-headed man lying abed
listening to him, Talleyrand, till well after midnight, set forth what
should be done. He also came, he said, hot-foot from Versailles, a
witness. He had twenty times the grip of any of these others (he said)
to seize what had happened.
He offered, as such men do, a bargain. He had prepared it, as such men
will, for immediate acceptance; “all thought out,” as people say to-day
of commercial “propositions.” Let him form a ministry. (He had actually
brought in his carriage
[Illustration: CHARLES MAURICE DE TALLEYRAND
_To face p. 22_
]
with him certain friends who would support him in it!) They would
rapidly summon military force, dissolve the assembly at once, erect a
new one that would be at the service of the crown. Artois dressed and
went to see the king. But his brother gave him short shrift, and bade
him tell Talleyrand to go. Then Talleyrand, with that look in his eyes,
I think, that was noted so often when, later, he found himself thwarted
in any one of his million plots and forced to creep round by some new
way, went out to serve the Revolution.
At the same time there was sent through the night to Versailles the
royal order, to be proclaimed by heralds, that no meeting of the
Parliament should take place until the Monday when, in the commons’
hall, the king would declare his will to all the three houses, clergy,
commons and nobles assembled; and that will, of course, was to be the
muddled compromise of Necker.
These things done, they slept at last in Marly, and the very early dawn
of the Saturday broke in a sky still troubled, rainy, and gray.
* * * * *
Bailly, the President of the Commons sitting at Versailles, was a man
such as float to the surface in times of peace. He was honest and rich,
a little paunchy, sober, and interested in astronomy. He was not without
courage of the less vivid sort. He was fifty-three years of age.
Bailly, the dignified spokesman of the commons in this awful crisis, was
in his bed at Versailles: like everybody else except sentries, watchmen,
and a few political intriguers, upon this very short summer night of
dull, rainy weather. They knocked at his door and woke him to bring him
a note. It was a very curt note from the Master of Ceremonies at the
court. It told him that the great hall in which the Commons met was not
to be used by them that day, that Saturday; for it was to be decorated
for the royal session of all the estates, to be held there upon the
Monday, when the king would address the whole States General gathered
together and tell them his will.
It is not a weak spur to a man of such an age, especially if he is well
to do, to have his dignity neglected and his sleep interrupted as well.
Bailly had thought the Commons worthy of more respect and of longer
notice. When, therefore, the members came, most of them under dripping
umbrellas, to the door that should admit them to their great hall,
Bailly was at their head as indignant as such a man could be. He found
the door shut, a paper pinned upon it, whereon was written the royal
order, and a sentry who told him and all his followers that no one could
come in save the workmen; for it would take all that day to prepare the
hall for the royal meeting upon Monday. They let Bailly in to fetch his
papers, no more.
The Commons went off under their umbrellas in the rain, a straggling
procession of men, mostly middle class, in good black knee-breeches and
coat, in dainty buckled shoes not meant for such weather, Bailly leading
them; they picked their way, this dripping lot of them over the puddles
of the roadway, and made history quickly and well. They found in an
adjoining street an empty tennis-court at their disposal, and there they
met, organised a session, and took the oath, with one dissentient, that
they would not disperse until they had achieved a new constitution for
the French.
The French do things themselves, a point in which they differ from the
more practical nations. For instance, Macmahon, the soldier and
president, used to brush his own coat every morning. Barentin, the
keeper of the seals, followed all this business, but he followed it in
person. From the window of a house just across the narrow way he himself
overlooked through the upper windows of the tennis-court the swarm of
the Commons within, and the public audience that thronged the galleries
or climbed to the sills of the windows. He saw the eagerness and the
resolve. He scribbled a rough note to be sent at once to Marly--a note
that has come to light only in the last few years, “_Il faut couper
court_.” That is, “End things up at once, or it will be too late.”
* * * * *
The royal session and the king’s declaration were postponed. They did
not take place upon the Monday for which they were planned; they were
put forward to the Tuesday, the twenty-third of June. What passed during
those two days men will debate according as they are biased upon one
side or the other of this great quarrel. Necker would have it in his
memoirs that he was overborne by Barentin, and, as one may say, by the
queen’s party; that his original compromise was made a little stronger
in favour of the crown. To this change, like the weak and false man he
was, he ascribed all the breakdown that followed. I do
[Illustration: JEAN-SYLVAIN BAILLY, PRESIDENT OF THE COMMONS IN 1789
_To face p. 27_
]
not believe him. I think he lied. We know how he made his fortune, and
we know how to contrast the whole being of a man like Necker with the
whole being of a man like Barentin. Read Barentin’s notes on those same
two days, and you will have little doubt that Necker lied. That he
muddled things worse through the delay and through the increasing
gravity of the menace to the throne is probable enough. That he showed
any vision or determination or propounded any strict policy is not
morally credible. The foolish document which the king was to read was
drawn up wholly in Necker’s own hand, and he was wholly responsible.
Now turn to Versailles upon the morning of that Tuesday, the
twenty-third of June, 1789, the court having come in from Marly, and all
being ready for the great occasion. Remember that in the interval the
Commons had met again; the mass of the lower clergy had joined them, not
by vote this time, but in person, and two archbishops and three bishops
with them, and even from the nobles two men had come.
It was therefore to be a set issue between the National Assembly now
rapidly forming, that is, the Commons triumphant, and the awful antique
authority of the crown.
If one had looked from the windows of the palace of Versailles upon that
morning, still gray and rainy, still cold in weather, out toward the
scene where so much was to be done, one would have caught beyond the
great paved, semi-circular place, beyond the gilded, high railings of
the courtyard, in the central one of the three diverging avenues (the
broad road leading to Paris) the roof of a great barn-like building, a
long parallelogram of stone and brick, with an oval skylight atop. There
was but little to hide it, for the ground about was only beginning to be
built over; young trees, just planted, marked each side of the road upon
which one end of this building abutted. Within this hall, ungainly, and
oddly apparent above the lower roofs about it and the unfinished lower
buildings of the quarter, was to be acted a drama which deflected and,
as some believe, destroyed the immemorial institution of personal
government in Europe, and launched those experiments by which the French
people in arms proposed to change the face of Christendom.
Under the rain and in the cold air of that morning there was not much
movement in Versailles. The great desert of hard paving-stones before
the gilded railings of the palace yard was almost empty save of troops,
and these, not yet arrived in very great numbers, seemed to be doing the
work of a police rather than of an army. They were drawn up in lines
that cut the Paris road and its approaches guarding on all sides this
hall of the Commons. The side streets which led past the back doors of
that hall, the Street of St. Martin and the Street of the Works, had
each their cordon of men. Small groups of soldiery, not patrolling, but
watching, were distributed here and there.
The eye caught in the glistening, empty spaces of that wet, gray morning
the red of the Swiss Guard and the blue and white of the militia. Beyond
these uniforms there was little else; no crowd was yet gathered. Nor was
there as yet any parade or any standing to arms.
The ear could no more judge Versailles that morning than the eye. The
rain was too soft for any noise, the early life of the town too dulled
under such weather to send up any echo from the streets. But there could
still be distinguished from that quarter of a mile away the occasional
sound of hammering where the workmen within the hall were finishing the
last of its decorations for the ceremony that was to take place that
day. It was a little before nine o’clock in the morning.
That large hall had its main entrance upon the new wide, bare Avenue de
Paris, with its sprigs of trees. Years before it had been built to house
the rackets and the tennis nets, perhaps the scenery of plays--all the
material of the lesser pleasures of the court; for which reason it was
still called the “Menus-Plaisirs,” that is, the “Petty Pleasures.” It
had stood for some forty years, and the things to be warehoused had come
in by its principal opening upon this great main road.
By this main door you might have seen, under the rain, one after another
entering as the morning wore on to ten o’clock. Some came on foot, most
in the carriages of their equipage; but every individual, driven or
walking, first halted at the line of armed men that barred the avenue,
showed a card to prove that he was a deputy of the privileged orders,
cleric, or noble, and only then was let through. But though the public
gathered slowly (in such weather!) the careful policing of the streets
by these armed men was maintained, and
[Illustration: THE COMMONS TAKING THE OATH IN THE TENNIS-COURT AT
VERSAILLES
_To face p. 31_
]
the lines of red and blue still stood across the Avenue de Paris. They
so came slowly up and in, the two privileged orders for one hour, six
hundred in all.
The hour drew to its close. Before the bugles up in the low, wooded
heights to the south had sounded for the ten o’clock meal of the camp,
before the hour had struck from the clocks of the churches, files drew
up to line the street on each side, and a guard stood before the porch.
Much farther down the road, beyond a second line of soldiery which
barred access from that far side also, a small, but gathering, crowd of
citizens showed far and small. Mixed with them and passing through them
were figures hurrying toward a narrow side street which ran to a back
entrance of the Menus-Plaisirs--men in knee-breeches and short coats,
all in black, solemn. Those distant figures in black thus mixing with
the crowd and getting in by a back way were the Commons, the men who had
just claimed to be all France, to be sovereign. They had not been
permitted to come in by the main door of their hall; they were under
orders to reach the place in this fashion by the meaner street behind
it.
Even that back door was shut against them. Of the four thousand soldiers
all told who formed the ornament, the patrol, and the barriers of those
streets, one guard was set at this closed back door forbidding entry.
The six hundred Commons, crowded and pushing under their dripping
umbrellas, began loud complaints, suggested protests, egged on their
officials and in particular their president. He, Bailly, the middle-aged
astronomer, full of rectitude, simple, and pompous, still called it an
insult to be kept thus. But the guard had no orders and would not open.
Such citizens as had assembled in the street mixed now with the Commons,
supported their indignation. The rain still fell.
It was not until nearly a full hour had passed, until a commotion
farther up toward the palace, and the shouted presenting of arms
announced the arrival of the king that these six hundred, now at the
limit of their restrained and profound exasperation, were at last
admitted to the ramshackle wooden corridor that was their only
vestibule. They folded their umbrellas, shook the rain from their
cloaks, and, hat under arm, filed through the inner way which led to the
back of the hall. Thus did they meanly enter it, at last, humiliated
and angry, they who would be the nation itself.
The Commons filed in two by two through the side door at the end of the
great hall. They saw before them, under the great veiled, oval skylight
of the place, the ranks of the clergy and of the nobles already
assembled, rows deep, upon each side of the central gangway. They saw
the throne, with its noble purple hangings roof-high and spangled with
the golden lilies, upon the raised platform at the farther end. They saw
the whole place draped and painted and upholstered as it had been for
the great ceremony of the Parliament’s opening seven weeks before. It
was eleven o’clock.
Upon the king’s right the queen, suffering somewhat from that theatrical
dignity which had been the bane of her carriage at the court, and had so
offended the French sense of measure, courtesied deep, and would not be
seated while the king still stood. Before the throne the ministry sat in
rank; but one chair was empty, and all men gazed at it. It was amazing
that this chair should be empty, for it was the chair of the chief
minister; it was Necker’s chair.
What was about to be done was Necker’s doing. It was he who had written
the words the king was to read. But that very morning he had grown
afraid. He had ordered his carriage to take him with the rest; then,
seeing how feeling had risen, persuaded partly by his women, partly by a
native duplicity, that something was to be gained by a dramatic absence
and a show of displeasure at what he knew would clash with opinion, he
had at the last moment shirked and remained at home. He betrayed the
king by that shirking. He left it to be thought that he was not the
author of his own words. Unlike most traitors, he reaped no reward.
Whether rumours of what was to come had leaked out or not we cannot
tell. Some of that great audience afterward said that they knew what was
toward, and certainly among the two privileged orders there were a few
who had heard the tenor of the speech. There were even one or two among
the Commons. But for the great bulk of those who waited curiously for
the fruition of so dreadful a moment, the fruit of that moment was still
unknown until the herald gave forth his cry, until the rustle of seating
was over, and the king spoke.
[Illustration: JACQUES NECKER, RECTOR-GENERAL OF FINANCES
_To face p. 34_
]
What he spoke in his simple, good-natured, rather thick voice was, for
those who heard it, enormous. His first words raised the issue directly,
before men had well realized the shock--the royal authority was advising
a reversal of all that had been done in the six days:
“I thought, gentlemen, that I had done all in my power for the good of
my subjects.... The States General” [not the _National Assembly_] “have
been open now near two months, and they are not yet agreed upon the
preliminaries of their business.... It is my duty, it is a duty which I
owe to the common weal, and to my realm and to myself, to end these
divisions.... I come to repress whatever has been attempted against the
laws.”
He sat down, and every phrase in the five minutes or so of the
declaration drawn up for him had seemed to the Commons and their
partizans a challenge.
The king’s face, if witnesses may be trusted, showed some surprise.
There is an air in assemblies which can be felt, though not defined, and
the dense rows in black at the end of the hall were hostile.
Barentin came up the steps of the throne and knelt, as custom demanded,
then turned and said in a loud voice, “The king orders you to be
covered.”
Bailly put on his hat, sundry of his Commons followed his example. The
privileged orders for some reason made no such gesture. In the passions
of the moment it was thought that they deliberately insulted the third
order, as though not caring for the privilege of remaining covered
before the king, if the Commons were to share that privilege. At any
rate, Bailly nervously uncovered again, and those who had first followed
his example followed it once more. There was a little laughter, a little
subdued challenging. They ceased as the articles of the king’s main
declaration--Necker’s document--were read for him by his minister.
There were twenty-five of them; each was short, and their delivery no
great matter in time. But in effect they were capital. They maintained
the separation of the three orders. They broke the unity of the National
Assembly. They permitted common sessions only to debate questions which
were common to all three.
Louis spoke again for a moment. Next were read the thirty-five articles
Necker meant for a “liberal” constitution to the nation.
Those who have attended the ritual of assemblies know how superficial
and imperfect is the effect of such a preliminary single reading. Men
strain their ears for this point and for that, but they do not grasp the
details of what has been put before them. What reaches from the lips of
the reader to his audience is not, as in book-work, a precise and
complete plan; it is only a general effect. Those thirty-five articles,
droned out in the official accent, liberally as many of them were
interpreted upon a further study, tolerably co-ordinated as they may
have seemed to Necker and to those who drafted them in the clique of the
council-chamber, were taken by the Commons as a direct challenge. And
the Commons were right. The French Revolution was not permitted for
politicians’ work of this kind. Flame is not made for pap. Yet
challenging as Necker’s futilities were to the ardour of the time, it
was not they that determined the gravity of that short hour. What
determined it was the last and third speech of the king.
Louis rose for the third time at the conclusion of this reading, and in
brief sentences told them they had heard his will. He reminded them that
they could do nothing without his specific approbation; he used the
famous phrase that, if he were abandoned in his enterprise, “he would
alone carry out the good of his peoples.” His last sentence was this:
“I order you, gentlemen, to separate at once, and to-morrow to come each
of you to the place set apart for your respective orders, there to
resume your debates. To this effect I have ordered the Grand Master of
Ceremonies to prepare the places where you are to meet.”
During each brief interlude of the king’s own speaking all had preserved
a profound attention. During the reading of the articles there had been
now and then a slight applause, especially from certain of the nobles at
the article in favour of the old feudal dues, and to that applause there
had come isolated cries of “Silence!” from the Commons. Nothing else had
disturbed the ease, the dignity, and the rapidity of this one hour
pregnant with war: one hour; for it was eleven when the king first
entered; as he rose to dismiss them and leave the hall it was noon.
[Illustration: THE MEETING OF THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY AT VERSAILLES, JUNE,
1789
_To face p. 39_
]
When the king had passed behind the glorious, roof-high curtains of the
throne, and so gone out, there was a noise of men moving.
All the three hundred of the nobility rose and followed him. A great
number of the clergy--most of that order--trooped after. The hall was
left desolate in its centre; most desolate where its great empty dais,
splendid with the purple drapings and the embroidered lilies of gold,
and the empty throne dominated the floor below.
The far end and the dark aisles behind the columns were still filled
with the Commons in a crowd. Some remained still seated, some few more
had risen; all were keeping silent, and only a very few crept
shamefacedly along the walls toward the doors.
With the Commons there now mixed such of the clergy as had dared to
remain, and not a few of the public audience; of these last many
lingered curiously, hanging on in the corners and sides of the place,
watching for what was to come.
One could not see from that hall any part of the life without. Its
windows were high. Its principal light was from the glazed, oval
skylight in the roof, covered and tempered by a veil of cloth. One
could not hear the crowd which had gathered outside in the broad avenue
to see the king and his coaches go by, and which remained in great
numbers to attend the exit of the Commons when these should leave. That
inner place was isolated. But the seven or eight hundred men standing at
bay therein could feel all about them the great mass of soldiery upon
the heights in the woods, the regiments marching in from the frontiers,
the counter-gatherings of mobs and of armed civilians down the valley in
Paris, two hours away--all the expectancy of arms.
Workmen entered to remove the hangings and to dismantle the hall. Still
the Commons kept their places, as yet undecided; no general decision
taken, none proposed; but yet the mass of them unmoving, and by their
mere unmoving refusing the command of the crown.
It was at this moment, before as yet the artisans had begun their
business of ladders and hammering, that there came out from the
robing-room and from behind the cloths of the throne a figure with which
the ceremony of the States General had already rendered them familiar:
it was young Dreux Brézé, elegant, a trifle effeminate, little more
than a boy. He carried his white wand of the master of ceremonies, as he
had carried it when the session opened, and his person was, by the
costume of his office, all gold and plumes and many diamonds.
He performed his simple duty: he came up to Bailly, the president, and
said:
“Sir, you heard the order of the king?”
Bailly answered in silence, while men craned forward to hear:
“Sir, the Assembly stands adjourned only by its own vote. I cannot
disperse it until it has debated upon that adjournment.” A pompous
rigmarole enough, but thick with coming years.
Said young Brézé:
“Am I to give that to the king as your reply?”
And Bailly answered:
“Yes.”
Then, turning to his colleagues, Bailly had begun to give his reasons to
them, when he found striding up to his side, and facing Brézé, the heavy
vigour of Mirabeau. It was Mirabeau, so striding up, who in his powerful
voice interposed. With no official right to mandate, he spoke most
famous words, of which tradition has made a varied and doubtful legend,
but which were in substance these:
“Go tell those that sent you we are here by the will of the nation.” He
added either that force alone (of bayonets or what-not) could drive the
Commons out, or, as some say, that such force was powerless.
Even as Mirabeau was speaking, Brézé, having had his answer from Bailly
the official head of the Commons, thus recalcitrant, moved away. The
custom of the court was on him, and he moved out backward with his white
wand. Of the men who saw that piece of ritual, some said within
themselves that the thing was a sign, and that sovereignty had passed
from the Bourbons.
When he had gone, there was silence again for a little while. It was
broken by the workmen setting to their labour of dismantling the hall.
Bailly ordered them to cease, and they obeyed the order.
The genius of the French people for decision and for manifold
co-operation appeared again and again throughout the Revolution, in
debate, in street fighting, upon the battle-field. Nowhere did it appear
more clearly than at this origin of all the movement.
[Illustration: EMANUEL JOSEPH SIEYES
_Député de la Ville de Paris à l’Assembleé Nationale en 1789 Elu
Président le 7 Juin 1790_
A Paru, chez l’AUTEUR, Quay des Augustins Nº. 71 an 3ᵉ.
EMMANUEL-JOSEPH SIEYÈS, DEPUTY FROM PARIS TO THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY]
_To face p. 42_
Without traditional procedure, with no waiting on initiative from above,
immediate, spontaneous and collective action decided all.
One voice, proposing an adjournment until to-morrow, was voted down at
once. Next Sieyès, with his firm, accurate mouth, pronounced a graven
phrase expressing the mind of all: “You are to-day what you were
yesterday.” Immediately, upon the motion of Camus, a man too legal, but
well able to define, the Commons and such of the clergy as had remained
with them voted unanimously their contradiction to the throne. They
voted that all that they had passed, and all that they had done, they
still maintained.
As the hands which had been raised everywhere to vote this motion fell
again, the corner of French history was turned; and those curious to
choose a precise point at which the outset of any matter may be fixed,
should choose that moment, the fall of those hundreds of hands, for the
origin of modern Europe, its vast construction, its still imperilled
experiment.
One thing more remained to be done, though the general sense of those
present did not at first grasp its necessity; the proposal and the
carrying of it proceeded from the vivid sanity of Mirabeau. He it was
who proposed that they should vote the inviolability of themselves, the
deputies of the nation.
To pass that decree meant that _if_ the Assembly should win, it would
have, for the punishment of any that had attempted to defeat it by
force, the awful weapon which a solemn declaration of intention gives.
But it also meant that if the Commons were defeated, they had been
guilty of treason.
Bailly, perhaps from confusion, perhaps from timidity, himself
hesitated, until Mirabeau, understanding well what force it is that
governs men, said:
“If you do not pass this motion, sixty of us, and you the first, will be
arrested this very night.”
A column of troops had already been formed outside the doors, though the
decision to strike at once was, perhaps in fear of Paris, not acted on
by the crown. Five hundred and twenty-seven members passed the decree,
and of these thirty-four voted “No,” four hundred and ninety-three,
“Yes.” Its operative words are significant:
“The National Assembly declares ... that every individual,
corporation, tribunal, court or commission, which may dare during
or after the present session to pursue, seek out, arrest, or cause
to be arrested ... a deputy upon the ground of any profession,
advice, opinion, or speech made by him in the States General, no
matter by whom such attempts may be ordered, is guilty of treason
and subject to capital punishment.”
This voted, there was no more to be done.
The many men who had thus risked all looked at one another; Bailly
declared the session at an end. They came out upon the crowds that still
waited in the lifting weather outside, that cheered a little, and that
wonderingly followed the dispersion of the deputies to their homes.
The king and those who had left with him had lunched at the mid-day
hour. They were past their coffee when the business of their antagonists
was thus accomplished. The Commons and the curious who had waited in the
streets for their exit were late for luncheon that day.
A week later, and two days more than a week, the battle was won. The
clergy had joined the Commons in a body, the nobles in batch after
batch. The National Assembly was fully composed at last, and Louis
himself, writing to the privileged orders--such as still refused--to bow
to the Commons, had accepted defeat. His sovereignty was from that
moment lost.
[Illustration: GABRIEL HONORÉ RIQUETTI, COMTE DE MIRABEAU
_To face p. 46_
]
PART TWO
THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES
INTRODUCTION
After the successful assertion by the Commons of their new usurped
powers over the crown, just described, a second attempt at coercion,
backed by the foreign mercenary troops in the service of the king,
failed. The depots of arms at the Invalides and the Bastille in Paris
were sacked by the populace, and the latter was taken by force upon the
same day, July 14th, 1789. The first principles of the Revolution were
laid in resolutions of the parliament at Versailles during the summer,
notably the declaration known as that of the “Rights of Man” and the
abolition of the feudal property of the nobility.
Another popular rising in the capital in the month of October brought
the court back to Paris, and the parliament followed it. For eighteen
months the tide of democratic reform rose with greater and greater
violence, and while the crown still remained the sole executive of the
nation, possessed of all immediate control over the regular armed forces
and the disbursement of public money, the personal peril of the royal
family grew greater, and the term within which it seemed certain that
the executive would lose its authority drew near.
There stood between the monarchy--the one vital institution of the
French--and its ruin no real forces save the personality of Mirabeau and
the regular troops. As against the latter there had been raised and
organized a considerable militia, duly armed by law and present in every
village and town in the country; while the mass of the regular troops
had purposely been stationed at a distance from Paris through the
growing power of the parliament.
A foreign war was threatened through the desire of every ancient
authority in Europe to repress the movement, and with this approaching
threat of invasion, which could not but serve the king, the
unpopularity, and therefore the danger, of his family grew greater
still.
Mirabeau, who dominated the parliament by his personality even more than
by his oratory and his prodigious industry, had secretly entered into
the service of the court in his determination to save the monarchy, in
the fall of which he believed would be involved the breakdown of the
country. He had drawn up a regular plan presupposing and inviting civil
war. He would have the king leave Paris for some town such as Compiègne,
not more than a day’s posting away, and from that point appeal to the
people and to the army to support him. All this work of Mirabeau was
being done in the winter of 1790-91.
Meanwhile the personal alarm of the queen,
[Illustration: ALLEGORY OF THE OATH-TAKING IN THE TENNIS-COURT AT
VERSAILLES
_To face p. 51_
]
backed by her rare energy, preferred a complete flight with her husband
and children, either to the frontier itself or beyond it, a total
undoing of the Revolution if that flight were successful, and the return
of the monarchy, backed, not only by the army, but by the threat of
foreign powers and of invasion.
In this perhaps impracticable and too heroic scheme, utterly
anti-national, her great ally was Fersen, a Swedish nobleman who had
loved her with devotion from his first youth, and whom she, since her
misfortunes began, had come to love as devotedly in return.
It seems certain that the overmastering ability of Mirabeau would have
carried his plan and would probably have saved the French monarchy had
he lived. But he died from overwork upon the second of April, 1791. With
him lacking, nothing could prevent the maturing of the queen’s plan.
A fortnight after Mirabeau’s death the mob had prevented the king from
leaving Paris, in a perfectly open manner, for a visit to one of his
suburban palaces, and the great militia guard of the palace had not
shown discipline or loyalty.
After that nothing remained but to fix a date for secret flight, and
this date was ultimately fixed for the night of the twentieth of June.
Fersen worked out all the plans in detail. He had the great
travelling-coach, or “Berline,” specially built. The commander of the
army upon the eastern frontier, Bouillé was warned and provided a
succession of cavalry outposts to receive the fugitives when they should
have proceeded a little more than a hundred miles from Paris, and to
pass them on in safety to Montmédy upon the extreme frontier. Thence,
when he should safely have reached it, the king was to issue his
proclamation to the army and to the people. The travelling disguises for
the royal family were prepared; three gentlemen of their former guard
were trusted to accompany the flight. A passport in the name of a Mme.
de Korff, a Russian lady resident in Paris, was obtained, and the queen
was to travel in that name with her two children, and her husband as a
servant.
PART TWO
THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES
Upon the evening of Monday, the twentieth of June, 1791, a little before
nine o’clock, Axel de Fersen was leaning, with his chin in his hands,
his elbows upon the parapet, looking over the bridge called the Pont
Royal, which leads from the Tuileries to the southern bank of the Seine.
He watched the dying light upon the river below, and waited with
desperate impatience in his heart, his body lounging in affected
indolence.
The sky above was cloudy. The day had been hot, but its last hours not
sunlit. A freshness was now coming up from the Seine over the town, and
the noises of life and movement that rise with the closing of the
working hours in the capital filled the streets. He was dressed in the
rough habit of a cabman, and the poor coach of which he had the driving
stood in rank with others a little way from the gate of the palace.
As he so gazed, two men, one with a sunken, long-jawed face and small,
peering eyes, the other frail, slight, and younger, both dressed in a
faded yellow livery as of servants to some rich man of a time before the
Revolution had abolished liveries, came up to him. He knew already who
they were. They were Moustier and Valory, two gentlemen of the king’s
disbanded guard who, in the disguise of servants, had volunteered to
serve Louis in his flight. Fersen gave them the instructions they
awaited. One was to find and conduct the great coach Fersen had had
built and to keep it waiting for him at the gates of the city; the other
was to act as outrider and to go before to prepare the relays. A third,
Malden, remained hidden in the apartments of the king.
Night fell, an hour passed, and two women in the conduct of a man who
hurried them across the bridge were put into a chaise that there awaited
them and drove off. Fersen knew that mission also. These were the two
waiting-women of the queen, going on ahead through the night to the
second posting-station at Claye upon the eastern road. A little while
later--it was eleven o’clock, or a little past--a woman came to him
leading two children, two girls, it seemed, one old enough
[Illustration: “VIVE LE ROI! VIVE LA NATION!”
A Cartoon of 1789
_To face p. 55_
]
to walk alone, the other whom she held by the hand. It was Mme. de
Tourzel, the governess of the royal children. The elder girl was the
princess Royal. The young child, disguised as her sister, was the
Dauphin, the little heir to the throne. Many were going in and out of
the palace at that moment. This small group in sombre clothing attracted
no one’s eye in the half-light. The children were put into the cab, the
woman followed, and Fersen, with the most cabman-like way in the world,
climbed slowly up to his box and drove at a very quiet pace westward
along the quay that flanks the Tuileries gardens. He came to the great
open place which to-day is called the Place de la Concorde, where the
half-finished bridge had only just lost its last workman with the end of
the day; he turned to the right across its paving and up the unfinished
Rue Royale until he came to the narrow Rue St. Honoré, where again he
turned his shabby team to the right and drove as leisurely eastward.
There is a place, now rebuilt out of all recognition, the ways
broadened, all the houses modern, where a street still called by the
name of “Ladder Street” (the Rue de l’Echelle) comes into the Rue St.
Honoré. It is a very short street leading toward the palace. Between
the Tuileries and those few yards of way there stood in those days a
number of great houses, the homes of certain nobles who had been about
the court, and in the midst of their confused carved fronts was an
archway that led to the royal stables, and by a narrow lane to the
courtyard of the palace itself.
In that Street of the Ladder Fersen halted, drawing his cab up toward
the curb. The long detour over which he had purposely lingered had taken
him nearly three-quarters of an hour; it was near twelve. He got down
from the box, went to the carriage window, and said a word or two,
bidding the woman and the two children wait in patience. Then he paced
up and down the rough paving as midnight deepened, sauntering in the
fashion of cabmen that await a fare.
Such light as there was between the high houses came from dim oil lamps
slung from wall to wall and far apart. There was light also in the
guardroom at the corner of the archway, and there a militiaman stood
sentry with fixed bayonet, for every issue from the palace was thus
guarded. The street was full of people coming and going from that little
town the Tuileries, and as the hour wore on, the great equipages of
those who attended court passed in to take their masters up at the royal
porch and passed out again on their way homeward.
Fersen knew that the last ceremonies would not be over until very late,
but that did not relieve his increasing anxiety. The darkness seemed to
grow more profound as he waited. He watched with as little show as might
be the throngs that passed back and forth through the archway. He saw no
figure of those he was awaiting until, when it was quite dark--for
though there was a moon, the curtain of clouds grew thick--he saw, or
thought he saw, seated upon a stone bench against one of the great
houses, a woman whose attitude even in that gloom he thought he
recognised. With the same leisurely pace of a man free from employment
he sauntered past, noted the gray dress and broad, gray veiled hat under
the dim light of the distant lamps, and the veil about the face, and
coming closer still, knew that it was Madame Elizabeth, the king’s
sister. He spoke in a whisper, without turning to her or stopping as he
went slowly by. He made an imperceptible movement of the head toward the
cab, saying, “They wait for you.” She did not move, and he feared for a
moment that she might not have understood what he had said nor
recognized him, for he dared not linger. He paced back again toward his
charge and again whispered the words as he passed, still looking down at
the ground; and this time the woman rose, went to the cab, and entered
it.
The lights behind the shutters of the great houses had gone out, the
distant noises in the palace hard by had ceased, the last of the
equipages were rumbling through the archway, and still there was no sign
of new-comers for him. It was long past midnight, nearly one o’clock.
Another of the cabmen in the rank spoke to him. He answered as best he
could with the manner, accent, and slang of the trade. He offered this
unwelcome friend a pinch of snuff from a rough box; then he went back as
though to look to his horses, felt their legs, stood about them a
little, and patted them.
There was still, but very rarely, a belated servant or so passing out
from under the arch, and at last, when his fever of expectation was at
the height, he distinguished two such, a man and a woman, coming toward
him unhurriedly. As they came nearer, and the feeble glimmer of the
lamps showed
[Illustration: THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY PETRIFIED. THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY
REVIVIFIED
Caricatures by Gillray
_To face p. 58_
]
them less confusedly, he marked the lumbering walk of the man. He wore a
round soft hat, and a big overcoat against the freshness of the night
air, and had the air of a familiar upper servant. At his side, with an
upright gait and a certain poise of the head that Fersen knew, alas! for
him, better than anything else on earth, went the woman. Fersen went
forward, mastering his respect, and led them to the carriage; and then,
without delay, but still careful to give no cause for remark by his
haste, he drove northward over the noisy granite sets of the streets.
By what tortuous ways Fersen drove the king and his family one may
hardly guess. They were puzzled to find him following many street
turnings other than those that would lead them to the nearest gate of
the city on the north and so to the great frontier road. But Fersen did
what he did knowingly. It was his business in this turn of the night to
make sure that the last point of his plan had been obeyed and that the
great travelling-carriage had gone on before and was waiting for them
outside the limits of the city. He called at the stables and found one
trusted servant of his to assure him that the thing had been sent and
that all was ready. Then only did he turn toward the east and the north
and make for the barrier at the end of the Rue St. Martin, which was
then the gate of Paris and the beginning of straggling houses and the
open country.
They did not reach that barrier till two o’clock. Already they breathed
some faint air of morning.
No one challenged them. It was one cab like another, driving to the
suburbs with some belated middle-class party that had dined in Paris
that night. There were lights and music still in the house of the
gate-keeper at the barrier, for there had been a wedding in his family
that day, and they were feasting. After the glare of that light, Fersen
looked in vain through the night for the Berline. Then, with some few
minutes so lost, he saw the black hump at last, drawn up well to the
right and close to the bordering ditch. The guardsman, Moustier, and
Balthazar, his own coachman, were sitting their horses immovable. They
had waited thus immovable for some hours. Very rapidly the travellers
passed from the cab to the coach, and leaned back in the comfortable
white velvet cushions of its upholstering. Fersen himself, sending back
the cab I know not how, took his place upon the broad box of the
Berline, and the four horses felt the traces and started. The journey
had begun.
Toward the north-east, to which the great road ran, there was already a
hint of dawn, and great Paris just behind would not sleep long into the
light. Therefore the horses, Fersen’s own, with only a short stage
before them, were urged to a vigorous pace through the short, lonely
suburb and still more lonely fields beyond, and Fersen’s coachman, who
rode as postillion upon the leader, spared them little.
It was near three o’clock when they reached the first posting-house at
Bondy, three miles from the boundary of the city, and just outside the
wall and railings of the park in that place. The guardsman Valory, who
was outrider, had been there for an hour. The six horses for the
carriage were awaiting it, as also the two horses which he and the third
guardsman, Malden were to ride, to the next stage. As they unharnessed
Fersen’s steaming beasts, Fersen himself, as coachman coming down from
the box, waited a moment until the fresh team was in and the postillions
mounted. Then he looked in at the window of the coach, and taking off
his hat to the queen, he said, “Good-bye, Madame de Korff,” and under
the growing light would no longer linger. He was off at once by the
by-lane to the Brussels road beyond. He and those whom he had so worked
to save were to meet at Montmédy.
The postillions urged on their mounts, the short whips cracked, and they
were gone. Fersen saw the great mass go swaying up the road, dark
against the growing dawn, and went off lonely upon his separate flight
to the north.
As for the travellers, touched by that effect of morning which all feel,
by the unnatural exhilaration of those strained hours of no sleep, and
of a release apparently begun, they broke into making plans for their
disguise, reassuring themselves with every mile that passed and feeling
the first sense of relief that they had known for two tortured years.
The sleepy little boy who was their fortune and the heir was set more
comfortably back against the white cushions in his girl’s clothes that
he might rest. The five others, wakeful and eager, pretended to learn
their rôles. Mme. de Tourzel was to be the mistress; the queen, the
governess Rochet; the Princess Elizabeth, a
[Illustration: MADAME ELISABETH
From a photograph by Braun, Clément & Co., New York, of a painting by
Mme. Vigée Lebrun, in the possession of Mme. la Marquise du Blaisdel
_To face p. 63_
]
companion; and the king a steward under the name of Durand. There was
almost a spirit of comedy in the coach. The king talked of his new
liberty and of riding, perhaps of the autumn hunting that he loved; and
they conversed also of the nature of their journey, where--and upon this
perhaps they were more guarded--there might be peril, especially as they
passed through the one considerable town of Châlons; but also of how,
not two hours beyond that place, at Somme-Vesle, a posting-house in the
midst of Champagne, they would meet the first troop of their chain of
mounted escorts thrust out from the army, and how with these they would
henceforward be safe.
They were late. They were already a full hour behind that time-table
which men who understood the essentials of order as the king had never
understood them had laid down for their guidance. But the pace was
brisk, the road was passing swiftly by, and the accident of such
trifling unpunctuality so early in their adventure did not oppress them.
There was no one with them accustomed to command or to understand the
all-importance of exactitude in any military affair.
That little company, if we think of it, was an isolated thing and most
imperfect for such a task: three women bred to a court and to the habits
of leisure or of successive pleasures; two children; the unwilled, heavy
king and husband, who never did or could decide, and whose judgment was
slow to the point of disease. Beyond these were only the three
guardsmen, almost servants.
At Claye, the next relay, they found the queen’s two waiting-women, who,
abandoned for hours, had awaited them in their chaise, and were
bewildered, wondering if they were lost. From Claye onward, the sun
having now risen, though hidden behind the level roof of clouds and the
day fully begun, they passed through fields without villages, with
scarcely a house, where the peasants in the eager work of the high
summer were already abroad. The fourfold rank of great trees which
dignified the road went by in monotonous procession. The quick change of
horses at Meaux raised their hopes still higher, and as they opened
their picnic-bags, bringing out bread and meat and wine to break their
fast, they spoke in jests, increasingly secure. To Malden riding by the
carriage door, the queen beckoned, and offered wine and food, and she
told him familiarly of how the king had laughed roundly, saying that
Lafayette, the master of the militia in Paris, and officially the
guardian of the court, would be woundily puzzled that day. So much for
that fresh early morning when all was well.
The wide royal road, full of the Roman inheritance, breasts beyond Meaux
a sharp, high, wooded hill, and the drag up that hill was long and slow.
Upon its farther side, on to the Marne again, goes a sharp pitch, down
which the shrieking brakes created an equal delay. It was fully eight
o’clock when they had come along the riverside to the lovely valley of
the Sellot, winding between its wooded guardian hills to join the
greater river.
There two roads part, each leading equally to Châlons and to the east;
the main one still follows the Marne, but the second, somewhat shorter,
cuts across the plateau to the south of the river, which few, even in
the travelling of to-day, know, and which those who had planned the
flight had chosen on account of its few towns and villages and less
frequented inns. Yet it was precisely in this chosen stretch of thirty
miles, by this less-frequented of the two roads to Châlons, that their
evil was to come upon them.
The hour’s delay which one accident and another--the lateness of the
moment in which the last of the court had left the palace, the slight
time lost in peering for the Berline through the darkness at the gate,
the long drag up and down the forest of Meaux--had burdened them with,
was now perhaps more nearly grown to an hour and a half; but not one of
that little company could guess how much this meant, or how such errors
breed of themselves and add, how one strained and anxious man, watching
during that Tuesday at the head of a little troop of horse in the lonely
plains beyond Châlons, would be broken, and with him all their fortunes,
by such incapacity. For save where it walked the hills, as heavy coaches
must, the Berline went bravely enough, covering its eight miles an hour
or more; and the sense of speed made up with them for the realities of
time and of co-ordinated distance wherein they were incompetent indeed.
Nor was that error, that growing error in exactitude, all that they had
to face.
[Illustration: THE END OF THE FLIGHT OF THE ROYAL FAMILY AT VARENNES
_To face p. 66_
]
THE PURSUIT
It was perhaps at eight o’clock in Paris that morning, at the most half
an hour later, that the whole populace became alive to what had
happened. The drums were beating, rallying the militia, the crowd was
filling the square in front of the palace. At that moment, when strong
action in pursuit of the fugitives could not be long delayed, they were
only just upon this upland road leaving the Marne; they had a start of,
say, forty-five miles, fifty at the most, before the first rider could
surely mount and be galloping in pursuit. The carriage rolled on fairly
with Valory, its outrider, on before, Malden trotting at the door, and
the chaise with the queen’s two waiting-women swaying in a cloud of dust
behind. It rolled on eastward through that high, little-known land of
wide, hedgeless fields; it was about ten o’clock when it came down into
a sort of shallow cup lower than the plain, wherein lies that little
place called “Old Houses”--Viels-Maisons. Very few men, I think, of
those who travel or speak of their travels know the tiny group of roofs.
It has not thirty families round its church. It meant to the travellers
nothing but an insignificant posting-house and a relay. But it was
there that their fate first touched them, for there a chance
postillion, one called Picard, glanced at their faces, and knew them for
the king and queen.
Like so many upon that full and dreadful day, he yielded entirely to
caution. The king was still the king. There was divided authority in
France; and whether reward or punishment would follow any act no man
could tell on such a day as this until it was known which of the two
combatants, the crown or the parliament, would rule at last. So Picard
said nothing; but he had seen. Others also were to prove discreet, but a
little less discreet than he.
The coach went on through the lonely land, past one small town,
Montmirail, which later Napoleon’s resistance was to render famous, and
on again into the empty fields, still eastward. It grew to be noon, hot
and almost stormy under the lowering sky. Louis the King, with his
road-book spread upon his knee, followed with curiously detached
interest the correspondence of the map with the dull landscape outside.
As the carriage stopped at one posting-house after another, and as he
would plunge his hand into his leather money-bag to give his guardsman
the wages of the postillions, he was not content thus to show his face
at the window, he would even stretch his legs a bit and get down from
the carriage to pace to and fro while each fresh team was harnessing.
“We are safe now,” he said; and again, “There is no fear of our being
recognized now.” All the air of that little company had come to be one
of security, though one man had already marked them down, and already
the galloping out in pursuit from the gates of Paris had begun.
The governess and the royal children caught that air of security, and
where a long hill put the horses at a walk, they got out and climbed it
on foot. There was only one small incident of which to this day we
cannot tell whether it was of any moment or no. The little princess had
noted it and had been disturbed. It was the presence of a traveller who
for a time rode alone upon his horse behind them, walking when they
walked, trotting when they trotted. It may have been no more than a
coincidence that his way lay with theirs. Long before Châlons he had
turned off by a by-road and disappeared.
There is, making a sort of western wall for the Champagne country, a
very sharp and even range of hills running north and south. These are
the escarpment of that plateau of which I have just spoken, and over
which for many hours the coach had been travelling on. These hills end
abruptly to the south, but just beyond the precipitous slope in which
they terminate there stands across a narrow, clean-cut valley one
isolated height called the Mont Aimé; so that the gap is a sort of gate
into the flat country below, which stretches eastward in a wide,
rolling, chalky plain, the lower Champagne, of which Châlons is the
capital and centre. Beyond that plain, eastward and very far away,
another low, level line of hills, the Forest of the Argonne, marks the
very distant horizon.
Through this gate, which is a landmark for miles throughout the plain,
passes the road; and half an hour beyond, or a little more, where the
road crosses the small water of the Soude, three or four houses round
one posting-house, by name Chaintrix, break the monotony of the fields.
The travellers reached it just in the sultriest part of the day. They
had not greatly added to their error in time; they were not much, if at
all, behind the hour and a half of debt against fate which they had
already suffered to accumulate, when fate
[Illustration: THE ROYAL FAMILY AT VARENNES, JUNE 22, 1791
_To face p. 71_
]
touched them again. This time it was with a stronger gesture than when,
four hours before, the postboy at Viels-Maisons had looked askance and
known them for what they were.
Here lived one Lagny with certain married and unmarried daughters, and
with him, by just one coincidence, his son-in-law from miles away,
Vallet by name, who for that one day was there. That son-in-law had been
to Paris the year before for the Revolutionary feast upon the
Champ-de-Mars. He had there stared at the king, and when the Berline
stopped at his father-in-law’s door, and while yet the relay was waiting
to be harnessed, he recognized his sovereign. Now it happened--so the
doom of the king willed it--that all the small household, father and
daughter and son-in-law, were Royalists of the old kind. They made
obeisance openly; the king and the queen accepted that homage with
delight, and at parting gave them gifts which still remain in testimony
to the truth of this tale. Vallet insisted upon driving them
himself,--with what consequences we shall see,--and what was more, this
spontaneous little scene of enthusiasm added by some few minutes
again--perhaps a quarter, perhaps half an hour--to the delay. The royal
children had gone in to rest a little from the heat and from their
fatigue. When they came out and the coach started, the postmaster and
his daughters openly acknowledged their Royal guests before the servants
of the farm and the postboys around.
Vallet himself rode upon the leaders--they whipped off before three
o’clock--proud to be driving his king and filled with zeal. But his zeal
was indiscreet. Twice he let the horses fall. Once his off wheel caught
the parapet of a bridge. At least twice the traces broke, and time, now
so heavily against them, turned still more heavily against them in the
necessity of finding ropes and of mending. There must have been one more
hour lost somewhere in that stage of the road.
When, well after four o’clock, the fugitives clattered into Châlons, the
whole matter was public knowledge. Whether Vallet had spoken, or whether
the news shouted across the fields had been carried by some galloper, or
in whatever other way it spread, many knew it while the two carriages
were halted for the next relay in the town. The little knot that
gathered round the carriage knew what they were gazing at; the bolder
among them murmured thanks that the king had escaped his enemies. The
postmaster of Châlons knew it, the mayor knew it, and many others whose
names have not been preserved, but whose words and attitudes have. None
would take upon himself any responsibility in the great quarrel, and
only one obscure threat reached their ears. An unknown man did say in a
low voice one thing which has been recorded: at least we have it at
second hand, but at good second hand, that the travellers heard during a
halt a passer-by cry to them that their plans had miscarried and that
sooner or later they would be held.
But this general recognition at Châlons disturbed them not at all. They
were now not only secure in mind, as they had been for many hours, but
also within touch of certain and physical security. For at the very next
relay, not two hours along the road, was not the first of those armed
posts of escort waiting for them, to surround them? To form a
rear-guard, which should forbid all pursuit? To roll up further posts as
the carriage still went eastward? And to form at last a whole body of
cavalry, leading them on to the main army beyond Varennes? At that town,
not fifty miles on, was the limit beyond which lay stationed in great
numbers the army of Bouillé, the General privy to the plot and ready to
do all things for the king.
Here, if we are to seize the last act of this disaster, we must have
some picture of the scene in which it was played.
The lower Champagne, “The Champagne of the Dust,” as the peasants call
it, heaves in wide, low billows that barely disturb the vast sameness of
its flat until the Argonne, its limit and its wall, is reached to the
east. With the Argonne are great trees again, and lively waters, and the
recovery of rich land.
That country-side of the “Champagne Pouilleuse” is strange; it has
remained for centuries thus empty to the sky, land often too poor for
the plough, everywhere hungry and half deserted. The sluggish streams
that make their way slowly through its shallow depressions are
milk-white with the worthless chalky soil, and though now too regular
plantations of stunted pines diversify it, planted in the hope of
reclamation, it is of its nature a country without trees, as almost
without men. Small, scattered villages hold its few people, and again
and again one comes to patches as great as a rich
[Illustration: DROUET, THE POSTMASTER AT VARENNES
_To face p. 74_
]
man’s estate that are left untilled and have lost almost all feature
save the records of past wars. For here has been a great battle-field
for ages. Across its flat one may still trace the lines of the Roman
military roads. Here the French have made their chief modern ranges for
the training of their gunners. Here Attila was broken in his great
defeat, and you may see his enormous oval camp still standing, so large
that it looks like the ruin of a town in the midst of the plain. Here
also in the very next year that followed the flight of the king were to
meet for the first time the armies of the Revolution and of Europe, and
from these poor fields were to retreat the forces of the invasion, which
did not return until, after twenty-two years, the republic and Napoleon
had transformed the world. Here, yesterday, the fate of the world was
decided once again in the Battle of the Marne.
Right across the sweep drives the great road from Châlons, twenty-five
miles, till it strikes Sainte-Menehould, a country town at the foot of
the Argonne. Only two relays break this long day’s stretch, Somme-Vesle
and Orbeval, each an isolated farm and standing in one of those slightly
depressed muddy-watered dips to which the road falls, and from which it
as slightly rises again in its eastward progress across the plain. And
there, at Somme-Vesle, at the Châlons end of the stretch, barely ten
miles away, should be the first cavalry awaiting them, Choiseul’s troop.
It was in the hours between half-past four and six that the Berline was
passing through this stage. That hour and a half of debt to fate which
the loyalty of Lagny at Chaintrix had increased perhaps to two, the
avoidable accidents under Vallet’s posting had stretched to nearly
three.
Young Choiseul, the duke, had come in to Somme-Vesle. He had his orders
to expect somewhat after noon at the earliest, at the latest by three,
the carriage which held his master and the queen. His exact time-table
said one, and at one that carriage had not yet reached Chaintrix! The
officer was mounted, and his troop of forty also--forty German
mercenaries esteemed more trustworthy in such a task than any troops of
the nation. From one till two they still sat their horses, waiting in
the road before the posting-house, with the width of the Champagne all
about: a strange sight to see, so considerable an escort thus gathered,
waiting for they would not say what! But here again, so oddly fast did
the news travel, one man knew. As the afternoon wore on, and men sent
riding up to the crest of the rise could see nothing coming down the
road, the postmaster, as though to make conversation, strolled up to one
man in subordinate command and said, “It seems that the king is to pass
this way?” He was answered neither yes nor no.
Peasants came in from the fields; a little knot of men gathered; rumours
went about. In those days all the French had evil words for the foreign
mercenaries in the army. Some of the more ignorant of the field-workers
began whispering that they were a press-gang, that they had come to
seize men for the service. The better instructed were far more
suspicious of something far more probable. Three o’clock passed, and
there began to be some pressure upon the mounted men. A few were
hustled; the gathering of peasants grew. Beyond all essentials was it
essential, thus far from any support, to avoid a rumour of the truth, or
at least the spreading of it; and for Choiseul to prevent any conflict
between his little line of Germans and the gathering peasantry about.
And in one of those agonies that soldiers always feel, whether the
command be great or small, when synchrony fails and when they are
waiting hopelessly for something that never comes, torn as soldiers
always are in such delays between two necessities, Choiseul as the
afternoon still drew on and the road for miles still showed quite empty,
decided for the more immediate duty. A little longer, and his troop
would have suffered assault, and the king, if after such inexplicable
delay he did come at all, would come to find a country-side beginning to
rise and his chances ruined.
But was the king coming? How often had not Choiseul been told of the
perils, of the necessities, of the last moment of the repeated
postponements! How well did he not know himself the chances of a
postponement, he who had left Paris as a forerunner just before, and who
had a good eye for the faults of the court! Hour after hour had passed;
the king could not be coming, and to linger longer with his little
German troop was in any case to ensure failure. He would ride away with
his men across Argonne and join the main body at Varennes. He would not
further rouse the growing talk of the fields by swelling the contingents
to the east with his own, and by showing more soldiers than
[Illustration: THE RETURN TO PARIS
_To face p. 78_
]
need be along the road. He would cut across the plain and through the
woods. He rode away, and his men after him.
As the horses drawing the Berline topped the slight rise which hides
from that approach the posting-house of Somme-Vesle, and as the flat
dip, with the steading and the long wall of the courtyard, appeared
before the travellers, the king from the window, the guardsmen riding at
the side, saw in one moment a sudden nothingness, which struck them as
though the whole of their chances had turned. Lounging before the gate
of the stables were the few hostlers and servants of the place. Of the
soldiers in their blue and white, and of their mounts, not a sign. It
was inexplicable, but it spoke loudly. And the emptiness of Champagne
became in that unexpected shock far emptier than before. The travellers
did not speak to one another; they did not even press the relay. For the
first time that day a sense of dread was growing in them. They went on
under the evening.
For it was now already evening. The reddening sun broke for a moment
through a rift in the western clouds; it shone upon tumbled, white
fields, bare or with a meagre harvest, and, upon its ridge to the left,
on the mill which was to be lifted into such fame fourteen months later
under the name of Valmy: they were crossing that battle-field.
One more halt, one more relay under the failing light, and the hoofs of
the horses rang over the paving of Sainte-Menehould with the high woods
of Argonne right before them. And as they came through the evening
street, with all the people out to enjoy the new coolness of the air,
that town more than any other they had yet passed knew thoroughly what
was toward.
Gossip of it had been passing in the inns for hours. The post of hussars
there waiting had angered men, but had been also too well explained, and
their captain, as the coach waited for its horses, forgot the official
secret and saluted when those within beckoned him to hear the news.
Drouet, the son of the postmaster, himself now acting as postmaster of
the place, sullenly ordered the harnessing, glancing ill-naturedly at
the huge, yellow thing, with its heaped luggage, and tarpaulin atop, and
telling his men in that hill country to spare their cattle. It was
perhaps a close thing whether, amid the growing suspicion and anger of
the place, one and then another and then a third passing the news, and
all aflame against the foreign mercenaries set there for a guard, the
coach would be allowed to start at all.
But the same fear and doubt of consequences held them here at
Sainte-Menehould as it had held the much smaller number who had
gradually heard the truth far up the road hours before. And the
travellers began their climb unmolested under the falling night up into
Argonne. One more relay in the darkness at Clermont, where the road to
Montmédy branched off from that to Metz, and they were upon the last
stage to Varennes and to safety.
But when they were gone, when they had thus been hardly allowed to go,
the captain of the little troop of cavalry, sounding the boot and
saddle, lit the flame. The militia were summoned by drummers throughout
the streets, the German soldiers, mutinous with hunger after their long
wait and supported in their mutiny by the town folk, failed to obey. The
town council met, arrested, and examined the captain in command, and
after one hour of increasing vehemence this decision was taken, which
changed the story of France and of the world, “That the fugitives
should be followed and detained.” And the two men chosen for this task
of life or death--for should they fail, it was certainly death upon the
return of the armies--were Drouet, the young postmaster, and Guillaume,
both ex-cavalrymen and both men knowing, as they had need to know, the
darkness of Argonne that night. Both were men of great courage.
The odds against them were heavy. Of eighteen miles their quarry had a
start of seven. Further, they thought, as did all to whom the plan had
not been given, that the king’s flight would be by the main Metz road.
They knew nothing of his goal at Montmédy and of the turn-off toward
Varennes which he would take at Clermont. They did not know that
Varennes meant for him safety and for themselves immediate defeat.
They rode furiously up the road, and as they neared Clermont, nine miles
on, having found in all those nine miles no sign of lights before them,
in the pass where the great woods come close on each side and through
which the road, the railway, and the stream run side by side to-day,
Drouet heard voices in the darkness. He knew them for his own servants.
[Illustration: THE ARRIVAL OF THE ROYAL FAMILY IN PARIS, JUNE 25, 1791
_To face p. 82_
]
He learned in one breathless question and answer that the coach had
turned off the Metz road after the relay down toward the north and
Varennes. He had to decide in the thick darkness, and at once, between
following by the highway and cutting through the woods. He had the
soldier in him, and he decided. He would take the chance of the woods,
though he had eleven miles to go, and only an hour to ride it in. If he
did merit anything of fate, he would come in ahead of his prey; and if
he failed, he failed.
He took the steep bank up into the trees with Guillaume, and though the
two men knew the woods well, it was miraculous that they could thus
gallop through a clouded night, through paths which I, who have followed
them in full day, found tortuous and confused and often overgrown. He
came down with his companion into Varennes town by the lane that leads
from the forest above. It was asleep save for one light where men were
sitting drinking. The hour was just on eleven. They could not tell
whether they had won or lost in that great race. But Drouet, full of
immediate decision, roused here a house and there another, blocked the
bridge that led eastward to the farther part of the town and out toward
the army by dragging across it an empty wagon that lay by, and then
strode up the main street of the place to find whether he had lost or
won.
He came upon the Berline suddenly under an arch that spanned the way
from house to house, the big thing almost filling the arch, and its two
round lamps, with their reflectors, shining like great eyes. He heard
some altercation, and shrill above the other voices one woman’s urging
the postillions. They would consent to go only a few yards farther, to
cross the river. And there was Bouillé’s son and his men waiting for
them. Drouet took the leader’s reins and threw him back on his haunches.
He had won the race.
What followed was the anticlimax and the despair: the mayor, roused and
hesitating; the hussars drifting in--Choiseul and the rest--now
powerless before an immense armed mob that had gathered under the new
day; the gallopers arrived at last from Paris; the slow, dreadful return
under the heat; and the restoration of the crown to the palace, which
was henceforeward its prison.
PART THREE
THE STORMING OF THE TUILERIES
INTRODUCTION
After the failure of the flight of the royal family, it was evident to
all men of foresight that the European governments, and in particular
the government of the empire at the head of which were the brother and
afterward the nephew of Marie Antoinette, would attempt to restrain the
Revolution by force of arms. It was not equally apparent that matters
would come to actual war, for many erroneously thought that the French
would yield to the threat of foreign intervention. At the head of those
who were guilty of this capital error was Marie Antoinette herself, who
wrote to her brother in the autumn of that same year, 1791, suggesting
that he should gather a large armed force upon the frontiers, and
declaring that it should act as a menace and a police. She was thus
principally responsible for what followed.
The winter passed with a false situation both within France and without.
There was a desperate attempt to keep the king nominally in power,
though all real authority had left him since his flight. This attempt
was resisted by the mass of opinion, but was supported by nearly all the
politicians, even the most radical. The foreign governments, meanwhile,
grew more and more threatening, and Marie Antoinette kept up a secret
correspondence with them. It became obvious as the spring of 1792
approached that if the foreign armies intervened, it would be not only
to save the monarchy, but to crush the Revolution altogether. The queen
betrayed French plans of war to the enemy. The emperor wrote a letter
demanding certain things to be done in his name that concerned French
domestic politics alone. The result was that the French Revolutionary
parliament made war in April, 1792. Prussia joined Austria in the coming
campaign.
Luckily for France, the foreign preparations were very slow; the French
forces were in a deplorable state, and the success of the foreign
invaders hardly doubtful. Meanwhile it became more and more publicly
known that the court welcomed the war as a probable or perhaps certain
deliverance of the royal family by foreign arms. The Palace of the
Tuileries in Paris was thus a sort of fortress wherein the
executive,--that is, the king and the queen at his side,--still wholly
in command of the French armies in theory, and largely in command of
them in practice, could direct operations adverse to the national
welfare.
The instinct of all the democratic leaders was in favour of taking the
Tuileries by storm, as a foreign stronghold might be taken; but for this
they had no forces save the militia, the regular forces near Paris
being in the hands of the king. The turning of the scale was due to the
arrival in Paris of armed bands from the provinces, chief among which
were the companies from Marseilles. These, with the aid of the Parisian
militia and the incompetence of the court, managed to storm the
Tuileries upon the tenth of August, 1792, and thus put an end to the
French monarchy.
PART THREE
THE STORMING OF THE TUILERIES
Upon Sunday, the twenty-ninth of July, 1792, in the late morning of that
day, the broad road that flanks the River Seine above Paris was covered
by a marching column of men. They were in number about five hundred. A
few showed uniforms grotesque with dust and grease. The most part were
in the clothes of their civil estate, a few workmen, many of the
professions, not a few from the land. For the most part they went gaily
enough, though without parade; but some were very weary, and a few
halting pitiably, though all trudged on.
This column was that of “the men of Marseilles,” and their tatters and
their fatigue were the usury of five hundred miles of blazing road. They
had been one month so marching, and behind them they still dragged two
cannon--dragged them by leather lanyards, taking turns.
This last day of their famous raid was hot and cloudless. The sight of
the river alone was cool, beyond the stubble of the baked harvested
fields; and the great road stretched on dusty hour after hour and league
after league.
They had halted for the mid-day meal; the afternoon was already
mellowing when they saw at last, far off in the north and west, the twin
towers of the cathedral, the lifted dome of the university church upon
the height to the left, the windmills upon Montmartre to the right, and
between those low and distant hills the haze of Paris.
They formed somewhat before they reached the suburbs; they took some
kind of rank, that their approach might be the more significant, and
that they might hold their companies in the press of the poor from the
eastern quarters who had come out in crowds to meet them under the
sunset. They raised their famous song; they came in through the first
houses to the noise of “La Marseillaise.”
Before them other contingents, less famous, had reached the city for the
Revolutionary feast. These had found the whole town alive with
preparation for the struggle; for the war had now run four months, or
nearly four, and it was certain that the crown was betraying the
people.
[Illustration: ENROLLING VOLUNTEERS IN PARIS ON THE PONT NEUF, BEFORE
THE STATUE OF HENRY IV
_To face p. 93_
]
Upon the morrow this battalion from Marseilles came into the town
through St. Anthony’s Gate, through the main way dense with people, past
the last foundation ruins of the Bastille. Their drums beat. They
carried their colours before them. Their cannon, now cleaned and
burnished, followed in their train.
* * * * *
In the centre of Paris there stands, the most famous, perhaps, among the
royal emblems of Europe, a great palace the construction of which is of
every age, though its outward aspect is singularly united. It is the
Louvre. This great place, more than a third of a mile in length, is in
plan two courtyards. The larger of these, as large as a little town, and
called the Carrousel, at the time of the Revolution was completed only
upon one of its branches, and was closed toward the west by the mass of
the Tuileries. Its one completed side was the southern one, that toward
the river, called “the Long Gallery.” From the end of this the Tuileries
turned away from the river at right angles. For more than forty years
the charred walls of that building, burned in the Commune, have
disappeared, and their place is taken now by an open garden. Only the
two high, flanking pavilions which closed the north and the south of its
long line still stand, each now forming one end of the completed great
courtyard of the Louvre.
In 1792 the Tuileries had upon the Carrousel side, toward the palace of
the Louvre, three smaller yards, walled and preserving its entrances
from the public of the city. Beyond these again, and filling all the
main Carrousel court of the Louvre, was a crowd of houses pierced by
tortuous lanes, and in the midst of them a little chapel to St. Thomas
of Canterbury. This mass of houses within the arms of the palace was, as
it were, a little overflow of the town into the midst of the Louvre and
its connected Tuileries. Through this built and crowded space traffic
passed and repassed between the Rue St. Honoré, to the north of the
Louvre, and the river, running along its southern side. For under the
Long Gallery of the Louvre, the only completed side of the great
Carrousel court, arches were pierced, giving access to the quays.
Behind the Tuileries to the west the gardens, which are now open to the
town and form a part of it, were then private to the king. Overlooking
[Illustration: THE STORMING OF THE TUILERIES
_To face p. 94_
]
them from the north, the great oval of the royal riding-school looked
with its tall, mournful windows, and therein, upon benches roughly
provided for the passing circumstance, sat the congress of the
Revolution. Therein were heard the declamations that hurried on the
storm, and in these hot days, when the western casements of the palace
stood open at morning, the court within could hear the distant noise of
the debates.
That court, with the heavy, lethargic king in the midst of it, still
governed in this end of July, 1792. He was still the executive; from him
and from those rooms there still proceeded all orders to the armies, all
communications with the powers of Europe. A great pomp still surrounded
these last hours of the French monarchy. Its ceremonial was still
exactly preserved amid the gold, the heavy hangings, and all the
splendour of the Bourbons. So long as that centre stood and governed, so
long as it betrayed (for it was certainly betraying) the nation in arms,
that nation and the great experiment upon which it had embarked were in
peril or doomed. For from the Tuileries could go out not only open
orders that presumed the defence of the frontiers and resistance to the
coming invasion, but secret letters also, very contradictory of these;
and one such had gone out in those very days to the peril of the French
people. The queen’s letter was an appeal for a proclamation to be issued
by the invaders, a manifesto threatening with military execution
whatever men or cities might either arrest the foreign armies or insult
the shaken and tottering throne of her husband.
The Tuileries, then, thus standing in the midst of Paris, and of Paris
armed in militia bodies, swollen with these Revolutionary volunteers
from the provinces, was morally a sort of fortress, isolated and held,
standing for the enemy in the very heart of the national capital. It
must hold out till the invader came, or, if it fell, carry with it the
crown.
The Tuileries was not only morally a fortress; it was in some measure an
effective fortress as well. A regular force, the royal guard of Swiss
mercenaries, was available for its defence; it had cannon, and save
against cannon the great building was strong; it expected and received
drafts of volunteers of its own that would support the king and could be
armed; it possessed good reserves of ammunition. A minority, but a
considerable minority, of the wealthier militia in the city, promised a
reinforcement to the king. He would have a garrison of some six thousand
men if an assault should come.
The very position of the palace strongly aided its defence. The garden
behind was well protected; no street flanked it, as the Rue de Rivoli
does to-day, but all along the north were houses, the narrow passages
through which could easily be held. Upon the south it reposed upon the
river, with only the quays between.
If the place was to be taken at all, it could be taken only from the
east, the Louvre side; and not from there, it would seem, against any
sustained musket-fire from the windows, still less against cannon
stationed in the three walled inclosures that stood out before it toward
the great courtyard of the Carrousel.
* * * * *
The sultry days with which that August opened were days of a curious
hesitation. The invaders, massed under the Duke of Brunswick, beyond the
German frontiers, were in column, marching up the Moselle Valley. They
had not yet crossed those borders. The secret messages to the enemy,
the negotiations between them and the treasonable crown, were still
proceeding. The armed militia of Paris, or that majority of it which was
ready to act for the Revolution and against the king, drilled, but did
not yet move. There was a silence, as it were, or at the most a murmur,
throughout the million populace and over all the plain that holds Paris.
Quarrels arose, indeed, violent enough, and blows were exchanged,
especially where the volunteer contingents from the provinces were
feasted. Already by that end of July the news of what the invaders
intended was abroad. Their proclamation, which the queen had inspired,
was on all men’s lips. Copies of it, printed, had come in from the
frontiers. It still suited the crown to pretend that it had not heard of
that insult which it had itself drafted.
By the third of August the pretence could be kept up no longer, and on
that day the king communicated to the congress in the riding-school, to
the National Assembly, the amazing terms of the challenge. If the French
would not undo all their Revolutionary work, if they met the invasion of
the country by resistance, if they menaced the person of the court, and
in particular the king and
[Illustration: THE ASSAULT ON THE TUILERIES
_To face p. 98_
]
his family, all so acting were punishable by death, in particular all
public officers and magistrates that should so attempt to defend the
cause of the nation. As for Paris, if it moved, Paris was to be
destroyed.
There is a temper in the French by which everything is restrained in
them until they act. It is a temper of rapid accumulation before the
moment of decision. During the week that followed, this temper was
discoverable throughout the city, very significant to certain captains
of the people and in particular to Danton; very much misunderstood by
foreigners who have left us their records, and by not a few of the court
and of the wealthier quarters of the town.
As though each party to this coming and decisive grappling was
instinctively aware of some known trysting-day, the week proceeded under
its increasing heat with orders upon each side, with the serving out of
ball-cartridge, with the rations of powder for the same, with the
sending of directions where men should gather, and where defence should
be posted. Neither side yet moved; neither side was strong enough to
prevent the preparations of the other. There was violent thunder, but
the air was not cleared. The oppression of the sky still grew heavier
as the moment of crisis drew near.
I have said that it was upon the third of August that the king had
admitted to the assembly the manifesto of Brunswick which heralded the
invasion. That day was a Friday. Exactly seven days separated it from
the crash. Upon Sunday, the fifth, when the last royal mass was said
publicly in the chapel of the Tuileries, whispers and open words among
the public in the galleries were the last expressions of civil and
unarmed resistance that the court was to hear. By Tuesday, the seventh,
every man who was to support the crown had received his orders. Upon
Wednesday the Swiss Guards, in their barracks to the west of the town,
had the command to march upon the morrow, and on Thursday, the ninth, at
evening they came marching in, no man opposing them, while during that
same evening all those of the wealthier militia, or of private gentry,
or of old servitors, that would garrison the palace and defend the
crown, passed in through its doors.
Before night the court heard the hammering and the sawing of the
carpenters in the Long Gallery of the Louvre. They were making a gap
[Illustration: A SOLDIER OF THE NATIONAL GUARD]
[Illustration: GRENADIER OF THE INFANTRY Of LIGNÉ
At the Time of the French Revolution
_To face p. 100_
]
there in the flooring, lest the Tuileries should be turned from that
end. With the fall of darkness they could also hear the rumbling wheels
of cannon going to their posts and of waggons still distributing the
arms and the munitions for the fight.
The night fell very dark and moonless, but open, in the stifling
weather, to murky stars. From the higher windows of the Tuileries one
could see in nearly all the houses around lights maintained at the
windows of the citizens; for, that night, few slept. Amid so much terror
and surmise, there was a grotesque suggestion of a city illuminated as
for a gala-day.
Garrisoned within the palace there stood to arms squads of the
volunteers along the first row of its eastern windows; the Swiss Guards
were stationed with piled muskets in the three courts before it, and in
the central hall up which the great marble stairway turned. The hours of
the night went by. Midnight was passed, but nothing stirred.
It was a little before one o’clock in the morning of Friday, August
10th, when this general silence was shattered by one loud cannon-shot
close at hand. For a moment it was thought that the popular forces were
moving. It was not so. That cannon-shot was only a signal for the bells.
The bells began to ring in steeple after steeple, dome after dome,
catching the call one from another athwart the dark town. First on the
hill of the university; then by St. Anthony’s Gate, where was the
thickest of the Revolutionary gatherings; then, nearer, by the town
hall; then from St. Martin’s to the north; from the millennial rough
tower of St. Germain to the south. For an hour or more the clamour of
the bells filled Paris. But still there was no marching or any sound of
arms, and from those high windows of the roof in the Tuileries, those
attic windows where the watchers were, the streets lay empty below,
under the dim oil-lamps that swung from cords across them and from the
brighter light of the unsleeping houses.
From one of those same windows the queen, with certain of her women,
watched through those hours of darkness. The stars began to pale, and
along the uncertain east a band of dark cloud stood motionless in the
sombre sky, like a distant coast revealed by the dawn. Behind it at last
the vivid colour of a thunderous sunrise showed. The
[Illustration: MARIE-ANTOINETTE AND HER CHILDREN
From a photograph by Braun, Clément & Co., New York, of a painting by
Mme. Vigée Lebrun, in Museum of Versailles
_To face p. 103_
]
violent red overspread all the arch above them, and so touched the roofs
of Paris that it seemed as though a great fire had come at last with the
wars and had caught all the city. Marie Antoinette called her
sister-in-law, the Princess Elizabeth, to her side, and the two women
watched this thing together. It was a little past four o’clock. The day
broadened, and at last the sun rose blinding, and still the silence
endured. The bells had long ceased, and the more careless of those
within the Tuileries jested one with another, saying, “The tocsin did
not yield this night; it has run dry.”
Before the sun had strength, and while yet the Tuileries cast a broad
shadow westward over the garden terrace and toward the garden trees,
while the streets were still quite empty, the queen unwisely bethought
her that something might be done at this last moment to lend strength
and dignity to the resistance of the palace. She would summon the king
and bring the garrison out before him, so moving their loyalty and his
too slow determination.
She went to find her husband. He had sunk into a torpor with the last
hours of the night, and when she woke him from the place where he lay
he started up dishevelled and confused. His clothes suffered through the
wearing of so many hours; his very wig was disturbed and askew. His face
was suffused. But he came down at her asking, and stood before the main
western garden door, while what could be gathered of the six thousand
were hurriedly summoned there into line to meet him and to be passed in
review. Not all of them came,--not all of them by very many,--and the
thing was so haphazard that unarmed pages slipped into the line and
played the fool, with chance tongs and shovels to take the place of
muskets when they saluted. The king, a figure not exciting loyalty on
that breakfastless morning after that sleepless night, heavy in shoulder
as in stomach, purple-coated, freckled and pale, walked up and down the
motley line. It was an unhappy business, unworthy, undignified, the true
product of an energetic woman’s misunderstanding of men. Just before the
king turned to leave them, an old and devoted courtier went down on one
rheumatic knee to offer his sword. There was a single laugh from
somewhere. Louis turned and re-entered the palace.
By this time the Friday sun had risen high. It was between six and
seven o’clock, and still the city did not move.
But there came to the queen--for it was she who was the soul of that
defence--news full of omen. The regular government of the city,
elective, popular, and resistant to the crown though it was, had not
seemed strong enough for battle: it had fallen in the night, and in the
town hall there were now in power men of some insurrectionary committee,
the leaders of the revolt. The man chiefly responsible for the militia
of the city, one who might have divided or checked its forces, by his
authority, had left the palace in the night to meet the authorities of
the city. When he reached the town hall he had found there not the
authorities of the city, but this new insurrectionary body, and as he
left the place the mob without had murdered him. It was certain now that
the attack could not be restrained.
Before the eastern front of the palace, cutting the great courtyard of
the Louvre and shutting off the houses in it from the Tuileries, ran a
high wooden paling, stretching from one lodge gate to another. Between
that paling and the Tuileries itself detachments of the guard were
waiting with muskets loaded, and sections of cannon with matches lit,
prepared to discharge at the first menace of attack.
It was about eight o’clock when the head of a street boy who had hoisted
himself up precariously from the farther side appeared above that
paling’s rim and disappeared again. Then one face, then another, as
grotesquely, as impotently showed. Some stayed so long that it seemed as
though their owners were standing upon the shoulders of companions. One
or two of these larrikins threw stones. A guard levelled his musket, and
all those faces popped down again. What a beginning for the catastrophe
of a thousand years!
At an upper window of the palace Louis, the king, watched, looking
eastward in his turn, and he and those about him heard a murmur coming
from along the river quay--a murmur not loud, but wide-spread and deep
and dull because there stood between it and the hearers the Long Gallery
of the Louvre. It was the advance of the people, of their unformed
vanguard, coming before the militia and the volunteers. In a moment that
murmur turned to vivid, immediate, and neighbouring sound, like the roar
of water which had
[Illustration:
Copyright by Manzi-Joyant Co.
LOUIS XVI
The Forge in the Palace at Versailles
_To face p. 106_
]
been heard approaching in a flume upon a mountain side and breaks
suddenly outward from its issue over the washers: so the many thousands
of the insurrectionary crowd burst through the arches under the Long
Gallery, coming from the river quays into the Carrousel of the Louvre.
Every musket and every window was ready; all the fourteen guns of the
palace were ready in rank before it. The great oaken gates of the
palisade were burst asunder; the armed mob broke through swelling in;
and at that moment the first order was given in the palace to fire.
Instantly the signal rolled along the line, and all the windows blazed
with flame. Range in those days was very short, windage very great, and
few fell; but the assault was checked, and as it halted, two guns of the
Swiss roared out together, and the grape-shot swept down perhaps thirty
men, opened a lane in the dark and shouting mass, and sent it pressing
backward through the gates and the now opened rents in the palisade.
The Swiss, both those already before the palace and those coming out
from within, formed by companies and charged. There were the shrieks and
the trampling of a herd overcome by discipline,--the Swiss were perhaps
a thousand all told,--and the whole place was cleared: the narrow and
tortuous streets between the houses of the great Carrousel of the
Louvre; and even, some say, the arches under the Long Gallery and the
quays for some yards beyond.
It was not yet nine o’clock, and the palace seemed to be already saved.
There is no other town in Europe, and only two other peoples, the Irish
and the Poles, of whom one could not say what many said in that moment
of the town of Paris and of the French people, that their fate had been
decided by this action of regulars against a mob. But Paris being Paris,
and Gaul Gaul, and the French people having beyond any other the gift
for rapid organization from below and for corporate discipline, no
victory was yet won by the regulars.
Even as the noise of the broken mob retreating died away, another new
noise, more formidable, more rhythmical, approached, and the watchers in
the Tuileries heard it. It was not an army upon the march, but it was
men determined and in some way ordered. It was the militia, it was the
contingents from the provinces, and chief among them the volunteers
from Marseilles, the five hundred with their guns.