Feelings of Marie Antoinette.--Different Plans are formed for her Escape.
--She hopes for Aid from Austria and Prussia.--La Fayette comes to Paris.
--His Mismanagement.--An Attempt is made to assassinate the Queen.--The
Motion of Bishop Lamourette.--The Feast of the Federation.--La Fayette
proposes a Plan for the King's Escape.--Bertrand proposes Another.--Both
are rejected by the Queen.
We can do little more than guess at the feelings of Marie Antoinette after
such a day of horrors. She could scarcely venture to write a letter, lest
it should fall into hands for which it was not intended, and be
misinterpreted so as to be mischievous to herself and to her
correspondents. And two brief notes--one on the 4th of July to Mercy, and
one written a day or two later to the Landgravine of Hesse-Darmstadt--are
all that, so far as we know, proceeded from her pen in the sad period
between the two attacks on the palace. Brief as they are, they are
characteristic as showing her unshaken resolution to perform her duty to
her family, and proving at the same time how absolutely free she was from
any delusion as to the certain event of the struggle in which she was
engaged. No courage was ever more entirely founded on high and virtuous
principle, for no one was ever less sustained by hope. To Mercy she says:
"July 4th, 1792.
"You know the occurrences of the 20th of June. Our position becomes every
day more critical. There is nothing but violence and rage on one side,
weakness and inactivity on the other. We can reckon neither on the
National Guard nor on the army. We do not know whether to remain in Paris,
or to throw ourselves into some other place. It is more than time for the
powers to speak out boldly. The 14th of July and the days which will
follow it may become days of general mourning for France, and of regret to
the powers who will have been too slow in explaining themselves. All is
lost if the factions are not arrested in their wickedness by fear of
impending chastisement. They are resolved on a republic at all risks. To
arrive at that, they have determined to assassinate the king. It would be
necessary that any manifesto[1] should make the National Assembly and
Paris responsible for his life and the lives of his family.
"In spite of all these dangers, we will not change our resolution. You may
depend on this as much as I depend on your attachment. It is a pleasure to
me to believe that you allow me a share of the attachment which bound you
to my mother. And this is a moment to give me a great proof of it, in
saving me and mine, if there be still time.[2]"
The letter to the landgravine was one of reply to a proposal which that
princess, who had long been one of her most attached friends, had lately
made to her, that she should allow her brother, Prince George of
Darmstadt, to carry out a plan by which, as he conceived, he could convey
the queen and her children safely out of Paris; the enterprise being, as
both he and his sister flattered themselves, greatly facilitated by the
circumstance that the prince's person was wholly unknown in the French
capital.
"July, 1792.[3]
"Your friendship and your anxiety for me have touched my very inmost soul.
The person[4] who is about to return to you will explain the reasons which
have detained him so long. He will also tell you that at present I do not
dare to receive him in my own apartment. Yet it would have been very
pleasant to talk to him about you, to whom I am so tenderly attached. No,
my princess, while I feel all the kindness of your offers, I can not
accept them. I am vowed for life to my duties, and to those beloved
persons whose misfortunes I share, and who, whatever people may say of
them, deserve to be regarded with interest by all the world for the
courage with which they support their position. The bearer of this letter
will be able to give you a detailed account of what is going on at
present, and of the spirit of this place where we are living. I hear that
he has seen much, and has formed very correct ideas. May all that we are
now doing and suffering one day make our children happy! This is the only
wish that I allow myself. Farewell, my princess; they have taken from me
every thing except my heart, which will always remain constant in its love
for you. Be sure of this; the loss of your love would be an evil which I
could not endure. I embrace you tenderly. A thousand compliments to all
yours. I am prouder than ever of having been born a German."
In her mention of the 14th of July as likely to bring fresh dangers, she
is alluding to the announcement of an intention of the Jacobins to hold a
fresh festival to commemorate the destruction of the Bastile on the
anniversary of that exploit; a celebration which she had ample reason to
expect would furnish occasion for some fresh tumult and outrage. And we
may remark that in one of these letters she rests her whole hope on
foreign assistance; while in the other, she rejects foreign aid to escape
from her almost hopeless position. But the key to her feeling in both
cases is one and the same. Above all things she was a devoted, faithful
wife and mother. To herself and her own safety she never gave a thought.
Her first duty, she rightly judged, was to the king, and she looked to
such a manifesto as she desired Austria and Prussia to issue, backed by
the movements of a powerful army, as the measure which afforded the best
prospect of saving her husband, who could hardly be trusted to save
himself; while, for the very same reason, she refused to fly without him,
even though flight might have saved her children, her son and heir, as
well as herself, because it would have increased her husband's danger. In
each case her decision was that of a brave and devoted wife, not perhaps
in both instances judicious; for when Prussia did mingle in the contest,
as it did in the first week in July, it evidently increased the perils of
Louis, if indeed they were capable of aggravation, by giving the Jacobins
a plea for raising the cry "that the country was in danger." But in the
second case, in her refusal to flee, and to leave her husband by himself
to confront the existing and impending dangers, she judged rightly and
worthily of herself; and the only circumstance that has prevented her from
receiving the credit due for her refusal to avail herself of Prince
George's offer is that throughout the whole period of the Revolution her
acts of disinterestedness and heroism are so incessant that single deeds
of the kind are lost in the contemplation of her entire career during this
long period of trial.
It was the peculiar ill-fortune of Louis that more than once the very
efforts made by people who desired to assist him increased his perils. The
events of the 20th of June had shocked and alarmed even La Fayette. From
the beginning of the Revolution he had vacillated between a desire for a
republic and for a limited monarchy on something like the English pattern,
without being able to decide which to prefer. He had shown himself willing
to court a base popularity with the mob by heaping uncalled-for insults on
the king and queen. But though he had coquetted with the ultra-
revolutionists, and allowed them to make a tool of him, he had not nerve
for the villainies which it was now clear that they meditated. He had no
taste for bloodshed; and, though gifted with but little acuteness, he saw
that the success of the Jacobins and Girondins would lead neither to a
republic nor to a limited monarchy, but to anarchy; and he had discernment
enough to dread that. He therefore now sincerely desired to save the
king's life, and even what remained of his authority, especially if he
could so order matters that their preservation should be seen to be his
own work. He was conscious also that he could reckon on many allies in any
effort which he might make for the prevention of further outrages. The
more respectable portion of the Parisians viewed the recent outrages with
disgust, sharpened by personal alarm. The dominion of Santerre and his
gangs of destitute desperadoes was manifestly fraught with destruction to
themselves as well as to the king. The greater part of the army under his
command shared these feelings, and would gladly have followed him to Paris
to crush the revolutionary clubs, and to inflict condign punishment on the
authors and chief agents in the late insurrection. If he had but had the
skill to avail himself of this favorable state of feeling, there can be
little doubt that it was in his power at this moment to have established
the king in the full exercise of all the authority vested in him by the
Constitution, or even to have induced the Assembly to enlarge that
authority. He so mismanaged matters that he only increased the king's
danger, and brought general contempt and imminent danger on himself
likewise. His enemies had more than once accused him of wishing to copy
Cromwell. His friends had boasted that he would emulate Monk. But if he
was too scrupulous for the audacious wickedness of the one, he proved
himself equally devoid of the well-calculating shrewdness of the other.
If, subsequently, he had any reason to congratulate himself on the result
of his conduct, it was that, like the stork in the fable, after be had
thrust his head into the mouth of the wolf, he was allowed to draw it out
again in safety.
Louis's enemies had abundantly shown that they did not lack boldness. If
they were to be defeated, it could only be by action as bold as their own.
Unhappily, La Fayette's courage had usually found vent rather in
blustering words than in stout deeds; and those were the only weapons he
could bring himself to employ now. He resolved to remonstrate with the
Assembly; but instead of bringing up his army, or even a detachment, to
back his remonstrance, he came to Paris with a single aid-de-camp, and, on
the 28th of June, presented himself at the bar of the Assembly and
demanded an audience. A fortnight before he had written a letter to the
president, in which he had denounced alike the Jacobin leaders of the
clubs and the Girondin ministers, and had called on the Assembly to
suppress the clubs; a letter which had produced no effect except to unite
the two parties against whom it was aimed more closely together, and also
to give them a warning of his hostility to them, which, till he was in a
position to show it by deeds, it would have been wiser to have avoided.
He now repeated by word of mouth the statements and arguments which he had
previously advanced in writing, with the addition of a denunciation of the
recent insurrection and its authors, whom, he insisted, the Assembly was
bound instantly to prosecute. His speech was not ill received; for the
Constitutionalists, who knew what he designed to say, had mustered in full
force, and had packed the galleries beforehand with hired clappers; and
many even of the Deputies who did not belong to that party cheered him, so
obvious to all but the most desperate was the danger to the whole State,
if Santerre and his brigands should be allowed to become its masters. But
they cared little for a barren indignation which had no more effectual
weapon than reproaches. He had said enough to exasperate, but had not done
enough to intimidate; while those whom he denounced had greater boldness
and presence of mind than he, and had the forces on which they relied for
support at hand and available. They instantly turned the latter on
himself, and in their turn denounced him for having left his army without
leave. He was frightened, or at least perplexed, by such a charge. He made
no reply, but seemed like one stupefied; and it was only through the
eloquence of one of his friends, M. Ramond, that he was saved from the
impeachment with which Guadet and Vergniaud openly threatened him for
quitting the army without leave.
Ramond's oratory succeeded in carrying through the Assembly a motion in
his favor, and several companies of the National Guard and a vast
multitude of the citizens showed their sympathy with his views by
escorting him with acclamations to his hotel. But neither their evident
inclination to support him, nor even the danger with which he himself had
been threatened, could give him resolution and firmness in action. For a
moment he made a demonstration as if he were prepared to secure the
success of his designs by force. He proposed that the king should the next
morning review Acloque's companies of the National Guard, after which he
himself would harangue them on their duty to the king and Constitution.
But the Girondins persuaded Pétion to exert his authority, as mayor, to
prohibit the review. La Fayette was weak enough to submit to the
prohibition; and, quickened, it is said, by intelligence that Pétion was
preparing to arrest him, the next day retired in haste from Paris and
rejoined the army.
He had done the king nothing but harm. He had shown to all the world that
though the Royalists and Constitutionalists might still be numerically the
stronger party, for all purposes of action they were by far the weaker. He
had encouraged those whom he had intended to daunt, and strengthened those
whom he had hoped to crush; and they, in consequence, proceeded in their
treasons with greater boldness and openness than ever. Marie Antoinette,
as we have seen, had expressed her belief that they designed to
assassinate Louis, and she now employed herself, as she had done once
before, in quilting him a waistcoat of thickness sufficient to resist a
dagger or a bullet; though so incessant was the watch which was set on all
their movements that it was with the greatest difficulty that she could
find an opportunity of trying it on him. But it was not the king, but she
herself, who was the victim whom the traitors proposed to take off in such
a manner; and in the second week of July a man was detected at the foot of
the staircase leading to her apartments, disguised as a grenadier, and
sufficiently equipped with murderous weapons. He was seized by the guard,
who had previous warning of his design; but was instantly rescued by a
gang of ruffians like himself, who were on the watch to take advantage of
the confusion which might be expected to arise from the accomplishment of
his crime.
Meanwhile the Assembly wavered, hesitated, and did nothing; the Girondins
and Jacobins were fertile in devising plots, and active in carrying them
out. One day, as if seized with a panic at some report of the strength of
the Austrian and Prussian armies, the Assembly again passed a vote
declaring the country in danger; on another, roused by a letter which a
Madame Gouges, a daughter of a fashionable dress-maker, a lady of more
notoriety than reputation, but who cultivated a character for philosophy,
took upon herself to write to them, and still more by a curiously
sentimental speech of the Bishop of Lyons, with the appropriate name of
Lamourette,[5] the members bound themselves to have for the future but one
heart and one sentiment; and for some minutes Jacobins, Girondins,
Constitutionalists, and Royalists were rushing to and fro across the floor
of the hall in a frenzy of mutual benevolence, embracing and kissing one
another, and swearing an eternal friendship. They even sent a message to
Louis to beg him to come and witness this new harmony. He came at once.
With his disposition, it was not strange that he yielded to the illusion
of the strange spectacle which he beheld. He shed tears of joy, declared
the complete agreement of his sentiments with theirs, and predicted that
their union would save France. They escorted him back to the Tuileries
with cheers, and the very same evening, after a stormy debate, which was a
remarkable commentary on the affection which they had just vowed to one
another, they set him at defiance, insulting him by annulling some decrees
to which he had given his assent, and passing a vote of confidence in
Pétion as mayor.
The Feast of the Federation, as it was called, passed off quietly. The
king again recognized the Constitution before the altar erected in the
Champ de Mars, and, as he drove back to the palace, the populace
accompanied him the whole way, never ceasing their acclamations of "Vivent
le roi et la reine![6]" till they had dismounted and returned to their
apartments. Such a close of the day had been expected by no one. La
Fayette, who seems at last to have become really anxious to save the lives
of the king and queen, and to have been seriously convinced that they were
in danger, had now formally opened a communication with the court. He
concerted his plans with Marshal Luckner, and had learned so much wisdom
from his recent failure that he now placed no reliance on any thing but a
display of superior force. He accordingly proposed to Louis to bring up a
battalion of picked men from his and the marshal's armies to escort him to
the Champ de Mars; and, judging that, even if the feast should pass off
without any fresh danger, the king could never be considered permanently
safe while he remained in Paris, he recommended that on the next day,
Louis, still under the protection of the same troops, should announce to
the Assembly his departure for Compiègne, and should at once quit the
capital for that town, to which trusty officers would in the mean time
have brought up other divisions of the army in sufficient strength to set
all disaffected and seditious spirits at defiance.
The plan was at all events well conceived, but it was declined. Louis did
not apparently distrust the marquis's good faith, but he doubted his
ability to carry out an enterprise requiring an energy and decision of
which no part of La Fayette's career had given any indication; while the
queen distrusted his loyalty even more than his capacity. One of those
with whom she took counsel expressed his opinion of the marquis's real
object by saying that he might save the monarch, but not the monarchy; and
she replied that his head was still full of republican notions which he
had brought from America, and refused to place the slightest confidence in
him. We may suspect that she did not do him entire justice, and may rather
believe, with Louis, that he was now acting in good faith; but, with a
recollection of all that she had suffered at his hands, we can not wonder
at her continued distrust of him.[A7]
But his was not the only plan proposed for the escape of the royal family.
Bertrand de Moleville, though no longer Louis's minister, retained his
undiminished confidence, and he had found a place which he regarded as
admirably suited for a temporary retreat--the Castle of Gaillon, near the
left bank of the Seine, in Normandy, the people of which province were
almost universally loyal. It was within the twenty leagues from Paris
which the Assembly had fixed for the limit of the royal journeys; while
yet, in case of the worst, it was likewise within easy distance of the
coast. An able engineer officer had pronounced it to be thoroughly
defensible; and the Count d'Hervilly, with other officers of proved
courage and presence of mind, undertook the arrangement of all the
military measures necessary for the safe escort of the entire royal
family, which they themselves were willing to conduct, with the aid of
some detachments of the Swiss Guards; while the necessary funds were
provided by the loyal devotion of the Duke de Liancourt, who placed a
million of francs at his sovereign's disposal, and of one or two other
nobles who came forward with almost equally lavish offerings. Louis
certainly at first regarded the plan with favor, and, in the opinion of M.
Bertrand, it would not have been difficult to induce him to adopt it, if
the queen could have been brought over to a similar view.
Unhappily several motives combined to disincline her to it. The
insurrection which the Girondins[8] were preparing had originally been
fixed for the 29th of July; but, a few days before, M. Bertrand learned
that it had been postponed till the 10th of August. This gave him time to
mature his arrangements, all of which, as he reckoned, could be completed
in time for the king to leave Paris on the evening of the 8th. But before
that day arrived news had reached the court that the Duke of Brunswick,
the Prussian commander-in-chief, had put his army in motion, and that he
was not likely to meet any obstacle sufficient to prevent him from
marching at once on Paris; a measure which, to quote the language of M.
Bertrand, "the queen was too anxious to see accomplished to hesitate at
believing in its execution.[9]" And at the same time some of the Jacobin
leaders--Danton, Pétion, and Santerre--had opened communications with the
Government, and had undertaken for a large bribe to prevent the threatened
outbreak. The money had been paid to them, and Marie Antoinette more than
once boasted to her attendants that they were now safe, as having gained
over Danton; placing the firmer reliance on this mode of extrication
because it coincided with her belief that the mutual jealousy of the two
parties would dispose one of them at least eventually to embrace the cause
of the king, as their beat ally against the other. The result seems to
show that the Jacobins only took the bribe the more effectually to lull
their destined victims into a false security.
A third consideration, and that apparently not the weakest, was Marie
Antoinette's rooted dislike of the Constitutionalist party. In their rants
the Duc de Liancourt had taken his seat in the first Assembly; though, as
he assured M. Bertrand, the king himself was aware that his object in so
doing had been to serve his majesty in the most effectual manner; and he
was also the statesman whose advice had mainly contributed to induce the
king to visit Paris after the destruction of the Bastile, a step which she
had always regarded as the forerunner and cause of some of the most
irremediable encroachments of the Revolutionists. Even the duke's present
devotion to the king's cause could not entirely efface from her mind the
impression that he was not in his heart friendly to the royal authority.
She urged these arguments on the king. The last probably weighed with him
but little: the two former he felt as strongly as the queen herself; and
he delayed his decision, sending word to M. Bertrand that he had resolved
to defer his departure "till the last extremity.[10]" His faithful servant
was in amazement. "When," he exclaimed, "was the last extremity to be
looked for, if it had not already come?" But his astonishment was turned
to absolute despair when the next day M. Montmorin informed him that the
project had been entirely given up, the queen herself remarking "that M.
Bertrand overlooked the circumstance that he was throwing them altogether
into the hands of the Constitutionalists."
She has been commonly blamed for this decision, as that which was the
chief cause of all the subsequent calamities which overwhelmed her and the
whole family. Yet it is not difficult to understand the motives which
influenced her, and it is impossible to refrain from regarding them with
sympathy. She was now at the decisive moment of a crisis which might well
perplex the clearest head. There could be no doubt that the coming
insurrection would be the turning-point of the long conflict which had now
lasted three years; and it was a conflict in which her husband's throne
was certainly at stake, perhaps even his and her own life. They had indeed
been so for three years; and throughout the whole contest her view had
constantly been that honor was still dearer than life; and honor she
identified with the preservation of her husband's crown, her children's
inheritance. Mirabeau had said that she would not care to save her life if
she could not save the crown also; and, though she can not have decided
without a terrible conflict of feeling, her decision was now in conformity
with Mirabeau's judgment of her. In the preceding year the journey to
Varennes had been treated by the Republicans as a plea for pronouncing the
deposition of the king; and, though they were defeated then, they were
undoubtedly stronger in the new Assembly. On the other hand, she suspected
that they themselves had some misgivings as to the chance of a second
attack on the palace being more successful than the former one had proved;
and that the openness with which the preparations for it were announced
was intended to terrify Louis and herself into a second flight; and she
might not unreasonably infer that what their enemies desired was not the
wisest course for them to adopt. To fly would evidently be to leave the
whole field in both the Assembly and the city open to their enemies. It
might save their lives, but it would almost to a certainty forfeit the
crown. To stay and face the coming danger might indeed lose both, but it
might also save both; and she determined rather to risk all, both crown
and life, in the endeavor to save all, rather than to save the one by the
deliberate sacrifice of the other. It was a gallant and unselfish
determination: if in one point of view it was unwise, it was at least
becoming her lofty lineage, and consistent with her heroic character.