Feelings of Marie Antoinette on coming to the Tuileries.--Her Tact in
winning the Hearts of the Common People.--Mirabeau changes his Views.--
Quarrel between La Fayette and the Duc d'Orléans.--Mirabeau desires to
offer his Services to the Queen.--Riots in Paris.--Murder of François.--
The Assembly pass a Vote prohibiting any Member from taking Office.--The
Emigration.--Death of the Emperor Joseph II.--Investigation into the Riots
of October.--The Queen refuses to give Evidence.--Violent Proceedings in
the Assembly.--Execution of the Marquis de Favras.
The comment made by Marie Antoinette on quitting Versailles was that "they
were undone; they were being dragged off, perhaps to death, which was
never far removed from captive sovereigns;[1]" and such henceforward was
her prevailing feeling. She may occasionally, prompted by her own innate
courage and sanguineness of disposition, have cherished a short-lived
hope, founded on a consciousness of the king's and her own purity of
intention, or on a belief, which she never wholly discarded, in the
natural goodness of heart of the French people when not led astray by
demagogues; and of their impulsive levity of disposition, which seemed to
make no change of temper on their part impossible; but her general feeling
was one of humiliation for the past and despair for the future. Not only
did the example of Charles I., whose fate was ever before her eyes, fill
her with dread for her husband's life (to her own danger she never gave a
thought), but she felt also that the cause and principle of royalty had
been degraded by the shameful scenes through which she had lately passed;
and we shall fail to do justice to the patience, fortitude, and energy of
her conduct during the remainder of her life, if we allow ourselves to
forget that these high qualities were maintained and exerted in spite of
the most depressing circumstances and the most discouraging convictions;
that she was struggling because it was her duty to struggle for her
husband's honor and her child's inheritance; but that she was never long
sustained by that incentive which, with so many, is absolutely
indispensable to steady and useful exertion--the anticipation of eventual
success.
A letter which the very next morning she wrote to Mercy, who fortunately
still retained his old post as embassador, shows the courage with which
she still caught at every circumstance which seemed in the least hopeful;
and with what unfaltering tact she sought every opportunity of acting on
the impulsiveness which she regarded as one chief characteristic of the
French people.
"October 7th, 1789.
"I am quite well. You may be easy about me. If we could only forget where
we are and how we came here, we ought to be satisfied with the feelings of
the people, especially this morning. I hope, if bread does not fall short,
that many things will return to their proper order. I speak to the people,
militia, fish-women, and all: all offer me their hands; I give them mine.
In the Hôtel de Ville I was personally well received. The people this
morning begged us to remain here. I answered them, speaking for the king,
who was by my side, that it depended on themselves whether we remained;
that we desired nothing better; that all animosities must be laid aside;
that the slightest renewal of bloodshed would make us flee, with horror.
Those who were nearest to me swore that all that was over. I told the
fish-women to go and tell others all that we had just said to one
another.[2]"
And a day or two later, on the 10th, even while giving fuller expression
to her feelings of unhappiness, and of disgust at the events of the past
week, as to which she assures Mercy that "no description could be
exaggerated; on the contrary, that any account must fall far short of what
the king and she had seen and experienced," she yet repeats that "she
hopes to bring back to a right feeling the honest and sound portion of the
citizens and people. Unhappily, however," as she adds, "they are not the
most numerous body. Still, with gentleness and unwearied patience, she may
hope that at least she shall succeed in doing away with the horrible
distrust which occupies every mind, and which has dragged the king and
herself into the gulf in which they are at present." So keen at this time
was her feeling that one principal cause of their miseries was the unjust
distrust which the citizens in general conceived of the views and designs
of the court, that she desires Mercy not to try to see her; and, while she
describes the scantiness of the accommodation which her attendants had as
yet been able to provide for her, so that Madame Royale had a bed in her
dressing-room, and the little dauphin was in her own room, she finds
advantage in these arrangements, inconvenient as they were, since they
prevented any suspicion from arising that she was giving audiences which
she desired to keep secret.
She did not overrate the impression which she had made on the people; and
her faithful attendant, Madame Campan, has preserved more minute details
of the events of the 7th than she herself reported to the embassador. She
was hardly dressed when a huge crowd collected on the terrace under her
window, shouting for her to show herself; and, when she came forward, they
began to accost her in a mingled tone of expostulation and menace. "She
must drive away the courtiers who were the ruin of kings. She must love
the inhabitants of her good city." She replied "that she had always felt
so toward them; she had loved them while at Versailles; she should
continue to love them at Paris." "Ah," interrupted a virago, hardier than
her companions, "but on the 14th of July you would have besieged and
bombarded the city; and on the 6th of October you wanted to flee to the
frontier." She answered, in the gentlest tone, that "these were idle
stories, which they were wrong to believe; tales like these were what
caused at once the misery of the people and that of the best of kings."
Another woman addressed her in German. Marie Antoinette declared that "she
did not understand what she said; that she had become so completely French
that she had forgotten her native language;" and the compliment to their
country fairly vanquished them. They received it with shouts of "Bravo,"
and with loud clapping of their hands. They begged the ribbons and flowers
of her bonnet. She took them off with her own hand and distributed them
among them; and they divided the spoils with thankful exultation, smiling,
waving their hands, and crying out, "Long live Marie Antoinette! Long live
our good queen![3]"
For a time it seemed as if the fortunes of the king and country were being
weighed in an uncertain balance. One day some circumstances seemed to hold
out a prospect of the re-establishment of tranquillity, and of the return
of the masses to a better feeling. The next day these favorable
appearances were more than counterbalanced by fresh evidences of the
increasing power of the factious and unscrupulous demagogues. It was
greatly in favor of the crown that the triumph of the mob on the 6th of
October had led to violent quarrels between the Duc d'Orléans, La Fayette,
and Mirabeau. La Fayette had charged the duke with having entered into a
plot to assassinate him, and threatened to impeach him formally if he did
not at once quit the kingdom.[4] The duke trembled and consented, easily
procuring from the ministers, who were glad to get rid of him, a
diplomatic mission to England as a pretext for his departure; and
Mirabeau, who despised both the duke and the marquis, full of contempt for
the pusillanimity which the former had shown in the quarrel, abandoned all
idea of placing him on his cousin's throne. "Make him my king!" he
exclaimed; "I would not have him for my valet."
Emboldened by his success with the duke, La Fayette, who had great
confidence in his own address, next tried to win over or to get rid of
Mirabeau himself. He proposed to obtain an embassy for him also. The
suggestion of what was clearly an honorable exile in disguise was at once
declined.[5] He then offered him a large sum of money, for at that moment
he had the entire disposal of the civil list; but he found that the
great orator was disinclined to connect himself with him in any way, much
more to lay himself under any obligation to him. In fact, Mirabeau was at
this moment hoping to obtain a post in the home administration, where, if
he could once succeed in procuring a footing, he had no doubt of soon
obtaining the entire mastery; and the royal family was hardly settled at
the Tuileries before he applied to his friend, the Count de la Marck, whom
he rightly believed to enjoy the queen's good opinion, begging him to
express to her his ardent wish to serve her. He even drew up a long
memorial on the existing state of affairs, indicating the line of conduct
which, in his opinion, the king ought to pursue; the leading feature of
which was an early departure from Paris to some city at no great distance,
that he might be safe and free; while in the capital it was evident that
he was neither. And the step which he thus recommended at the outset
deserves attention as being also that on which a year later he still
insisted as the indispensable preliminary to whatever line of conduct
might be decided on.
But at this moment his advice never reached those for whom it was
intended. La Marck, with all his good-will both to his friend and to the
court, could not venture to bring before the queen's notice the name of
one who, only a few days before, had denounced her in the foulest manner
in the Assembly for having appeared at the soldiers' banquet, and whom she
with her own eyes had beheld uniting with the assailants of the palace. He
thought it more politic, even for the eventual attainment of his friend's
objects, to content himself for the time with giving the memorial and
stating the views of the writer to the Count de Provence; and that prince
declared that it would be useless to bring it to the knowledge of either
king or queen: "that the queen had not sufficient influence over her
husband to induce him to adopt such a plan;" and he even hinted that at
times Louis was disposed to be jealous of her appearing to influence him.
But if these circumstances--the quarrel between the enemies of the court,
and the conversion of one more able and formidable than either--were in
the king's favor, other events which took place in the same few weeks were
full of mischief and danger. Before the end of the month fresh riots broke
out in Paris. Bread, the supply of which Marie Antoinette, as we have
seen, rightly regarded as a matter of the first importance to the
tranquillity of the city, continued scarce and dear; and the mob broke
open the bakers' shops, and murdered one baker, a man named François, with
a ferocity more terrible than they had even shown toward De Launay, or the
guards at Versailles. They tore his body to pieces, and, having cut off
his head, compelled his wife to kiss the scarcely cold lips, and then left
her fainting on the pavement still covered with his blood. Even La Fayette
was horror-stricken at such brutality. It was the only occasion on which
he did his duty during the whole progress of the Revolution. He came down
with a company of the National Guard, dispersed the rioters, seized the
ruffian who was bearing aloft, the head of the murdered man on a pole, and
caused him to be hanged the next day. And during the next few weeks he
more than once brought his soldiers to the support of the civil power, and
inflicted summary punishment on gangs of miscreants, whose idea of reform
was a state of things which should afford impunity to crime.
But in the next month the Assembly dealt a heavier blow on the king's
authority than could be inflicted by the worst excesses of an informal
mob--they passed a resolution prohibiting any of its members from
accepting any office in the administration: it was an imitation of the
self-denying ordinance into which Cromwell had tricked the English
Parliament; and, though bearing an appearance of disinterestedness in
closing the access to official emoluments and honors against themselves,
was in reality an injury to the king, as depriving him of his right to
select his ministers from the entire body of the nation; and to the nation
itself, as preventing it from obtaining the services of those who might be
presumed to be its ablest citizens, as having been already selected as its
representatives.
But a far more irreparable injury than any that could be inflicted on the
court by either populace or Assembly came from its friends. We have seen
that the Count d'Artois, with some nobles who had especial reason to fear
the enmity of the Parisians, had fled from the country in July; and now
their example was followed by a vast number of the higher classes, several
of them having hitherto been prominent as the leaders of the Moderate or
Constitutional section of the Assembly--men who had no grounds for
complaining that, except in one or two instances, at moments of
extraordinary excitement, their influence had been overborne, but who now
yielded to an infectious panic. Before the end of the year more than three
hundred deputies had resigned their seats and quit the country; salving
over to themselves the dereliction of the duties which a few months before
they had voluntarily sought, and their performance of which was now a more
imperative duty than ever, by denunciations of the crimes which had been
committed, and which they had found themselves unable to prevent. They did
not see that their pusillanimous flight must lead to a continuance of such
atrocities, leaving, as it did, the undisputed sway in the Assembly to
those very men who had been the authors of the outrages of which they
complained. They were, in fact, insuring the ruin of all that they most
wished to preserve; for, in the progress of the debates in the Assembly
during the winter, many questions of the most vital importance were
decided by very small majorities, which their presence would have turned
into minorities. The greater the danger was, the more irresistible they
ought to have felt the obligation to stand to the last by the cause of
which they were the legitimate champions; and the final triumph of the
Jacobin party owed hardly more to the energy of its leaders than to the
cowardly and inglorious flight of the princes and nobles who left the
field open without resistance to their wickedness and audacity.
It was a melancholy winter that the queen now passed. So far as she was
able, she diverted her mind from political anxieties by devoting much of
her time to the education of her children. A little plot of ground was
railed off in the garden of the Tuileries for the dauphin's[6] amusement;
and one of her favorite relaxations was to watch him working at the
flower-beds himself with his little hoe and rake; though, as if to mark
that they were in fact prisoners, both she and he were followed wherever
they went by grenadiers of the city-guard, and were not allowed to
dispense with their attendance for a single moment. Marie Antoinette had
reason to complain that she was watched as a criminal[7]. Sad as she was
at heart, she was not allowed the comfort of privacy and retirement. She
was forced to hold receptions for the nobles and chief citizens, and as
the court was now formally established at the Tuileries, she dined every
week in public with the king; but she steadily resisted the entreaties of
some of the ministers and courtiers to visit the theatres, thinking, with
great justice, that an attendance at public spectacles of that character
would have had an appearance of gayety, as unbecoming at such a period of
anxiety, as it was inconsistent with her feelings; and before the end of
the winter she sustained a fresh affliction in the loss of her brother the
emperor[8]; whose death bore with it the additional aggravation of
depriving her of a counselor whose advice she valued, and of an ally on
whose active aid she believed that she could rely far more than she could
on that of their brother Leopold, who now succeeded to the imperial
throne.
Not that Leopold can be charged with indifference to his sister's welfare.
In the very week of his accession to the throne he wrote to her with great
affection, assuring her of his devotion to her interests, and expressing
his desire to correspond with her in the most unreserved confidence. But
the same letter shows that as yet he knew but very little of her;[9] and
that he regarded the difficulties in which some of Joseph's recent
measures had involved the Imperial Government as sufficiently serious to
engross his attention. A few extracts from her reply are worth preserving,
as proving how steadily in her conduct and language to every one she
adhered to her rule of concealing her husband's defects, and putting him
forward as the first person on whose wishes and directions her own conduct
most depend. It also shows what advances she was herself making in the
perception of the true character of the crisis, so far as the objects of
the few honest members who still remained in the Assembly were concerned,
and the extent to which she was trying to reconcile herself to some
curtailment of her husband's former authority.
Thanking him for the assurance of his friendship, she says: "Believe me,
my dear brother, we shall always be worthy of it. I say we, because I do
not separate the king from myself. He was touched by your letter, as I was
myself, and bids me assure you of this. His heart is loyalty and honesty
itself; and if ever again we become, I do not say what we have been, but
at least what we ought to be, you may then depend on the entire fidelity
of a good ally.
"I do not say any thing to you of our actual position: it is too heart-
rending. It ought to afflict every sovereign in the universe, and still
more an affectionate relation like you. It is only time and patience that
can bring back men's minds to a healthy state. It is a war of opinions,
and one which is still far from being terminated. It is only the justice
of our cause and the feeling of a good conscience that can support us ...
My most sincere wish is that you may never meet with ingratitude. My own
melancholy experience proves to me that, of all evils, that is the most
terrible."
Yet no indignation at the thanklessness of the Parisians could chill her
constant benevolence toward them; and amidst all the anxieties which
filled her mind for herself, her husband, and her child, she founded an
asylum for the education of a number of orphan daughters of old soldiers,
and found time to give her careful attention to a code of regulations for
its management.[10]
Meanwhile circumstances were gradually paving the way for her accepting
the help of him who, during the earliest discussions of the Assembly, had
been, not so much through his own malice as through Necker's folly, her
worst enemy. We have seen how, immediately after the attack on Versailles,
Mirabeau had once more endeavored to find an opening through which to
place himself at her service. He alone, perhaps, of all men in the
kingdom, perceived the reality and greatness of the danger which
threatened even the lives of the sovereigns;[11] and, as amidst all the
errors into which his regard for his own interests, his vindictiveness, or
his caprice impelled him, he always preserved the perceptions and
instincts of a genuine statesman, many of the transactions of the winter
increased his conviction of the peril in which every interest in the whole
kingdom was placed, if the headlong folly of the Assembly could not be
restrained, and if even, proverbially difficult as such a course is, some
of its acts could not be rescinded; while one transaction, which, more
than any other that had yet taken place, showed the greatness of the
queen's heart, much sharpened his eagerness to prove himself a worthy
servant of so noble-minded a mistress.
Some of the magistrates who still desired to discharge their duty had
instituted an investigation into the conspiracy which had originated the
attack on Versailles, and all its multiplied horrors. They had examined a
great body of witnesses, whose evidence left no doubt of the active part
taken in it by the Duc d'Orléans and his partisans, and by Mirabeau,
whether he were to be included among that prince's adherents or not; but
they conceived it specially important to procure the testimony of the
queen herself. However, it was in vain that they applied to her for the
slightest information. Appeals to her indignation, to her pride, and to
her danger, were equally disregarded by her. No denunciation of those who,
whatever had been their crimes, were still the subjects of her husband,
could, in her eyes, be becoming to her as queen; and when those who hoped
to make a tool of her to crush their political rivals urged that no
evidence would be accepted as equally conclusive with hers, since no one
had seen so much of what had taken place, or had in so great a degree
preserved that coolness which was indispensable to a clear account of it,
and to the identification of the guilty, her reply was a dignified and
magnanimous pardon of the outrages beneath which she had so nearly
perished. "I have seen every thing; I have known every thing; I have
forgotten every thing;" and Mirabeau, not unthankful for the protection
which her magnanimity thus throw around him, was eager to make atonement
for his past insults and injuries.
And many of the recent events had convinced him that there was no time to
lose. The vote of November, debarring him, in common with all other
members of the Assembly, from office, was a severe blow to the most
important of his projects, so far as his own interests were concerned.
Within a month it had been followed by another, proposed by the Abbé
Siéyes, a busy priest who boasted that he had made himself master of the
whole science of politics, but who was in fact a mere slave of abstract
theories, the safety or even the practicability of which he was utterly
unable to estimate. On his motion, the Assembly, in a single evening,
abolished all the ancient territorial divisions of the kingdom, and the
very names of the provinces; dividing the country anew into eighty-three
departments, and coupling with this new arrangement a number of details
which were evidently calculated to wrest the whole executive authority of
the kingdom from the crown and to vest it in the populace. At another
sitting, the whole property of the Church was confiscated. On another
night, the Parliaments were abolished; and on a fourth, the party which
had carried these measures made a still more direct and audacious attack
on the royal prerogative, by passing a resolution which deprived the crown
of all power of revising the sentences of the judicial tribunals, and of
pardoning or mitigating the punishment of those who might have been
condemned. And, if to bring home to the tender-hearted monarch the full
effect of this last inroad upon his legitimate power, they at the same
time created a new crime to which they gave the name of treason against
the nation,[12] without either defining it, or specifying the kind of
evidence which should he required to prove it; and they proceeded at once
to put it in force to procure the condemnation of a nobleman of decayed
fortune, but of the highest character, the Marquis de Favras, in a manner
which showed that their real object was to strike terror into the whole
Royalist party. The charges on which he was brought to trial were not
merely unfounded, but ridiculous. He was charged with designing to raise
an army of thirty thousand men, with the object of carrying off the king
from Paris, of dissolving the Assembly by force, and putting La Fayette
and Bailly to death. The evidence with which it was pretended to support
these charges broke down on every point, and its failure of itself
established the prisoner's innocence, even without the aid of his own
defense, which was lucid and eloquent. But the marquis was known to be a
Royalist in feeling, and, though very poor, to stand high in the
confidence of the princes. The demagogues collected mobs round the
courthouse to intimidate the judges, and the judges proved as base as the
accusers themselves. They professed, indeed, to fear not so much for their
own lives as for the public tranquillity, but they pronounced him guilty.
One of them had even the effrontery to acknowledge his innocence to Favras
himself, and to affirm that his life was a necessary sacrifice to the
public peace.
No event since the attack on Versailles had caused Marie Antoinette equal
anguish. It showed that attachment to the king and herself was in itself
regarded as an inexpiable crime, and her distress was greatly augmented
when, on the Sunday following the execution of the marquis, some of his
friends brought to the table where, as usual, she was dining in public
with the king, the widowed marchioness and her orphaned son in deep
mourning, and presented them to their majesties. Their introducers
evidently expected that the king, or at least the queen, by the
distinguished reception which she would accord to them, would mark their
sense of the merits of their late husband and father, and of the indignity
of the sentence under which he had suffered.
Marie Antoinette was sadly embarrassed and distressed: she was taken
wholly by surprise; and it happened by a cruel perverseness of fortune
that Santerre, the brewer, whose ruffianly and ferocious enmity to the
whole royal family, and especially to herself, had been conspicuous
throughout the worst outrages of the past summer and autumn, was on the
same day on duty at the palace as commander of one of the battalions of
the Parisian Guard, and was standing behind her chair when the marchioness
and her son were introduced. Her embarrassment and all her feelings on the
occasion were described by herself in the course of the afternoon to
Madame Campan.
After the dinner was over, she went up to her attendant's room, saying
that it was a relief to find herself where she could weep at her ease; for
weep she must at the folly of the ultra-Royalists. "We can not but be
destroyed," she continued, "when we are attacked by people who unite every
kind of talent to every kind of wickedness; and when we are defended by
folks who are indeed very estimable, but who have no just notion of our
position. They have now compromised me with both parties, in their
presenting to me the widow and son of Favras. If I had been free to do as
I would, I should have taken the child of a man who had just been
sacrificed for us, and have placed him at table between the king and
myself; but surrounded as I was by the very murderers who had caused his
father's death, I could not venture even to bestow a glance upon him. Yet
the Royalists will blame me for not having seemed to be interested in the
poor child; while the Revolutionists will be furious, thinking that those
who presented him to me knew that it would please me." And all that she
could venture to do she did. She knew that the marchioness was very poor,
and she sent her by a trusty agent a few hundred louis, and with it a kind
message, assuring the unhappy widow that she would always watch over her
and her son's interests.