CHAPTER VI

_THE THREE YEARS_

_Tuesday, the 10th of May 1774 to Easter Sunday, April 19, 1778_

FROM the death of Louis XV. to the close of the summer of 1777 is a

period of somewhat over three years. In those three years the fates of

the French monarchy and of the Queen were decided. For though no great

catastrophe marked them nor even any considerable fruit of policy, and

though an onlooker would have said no more than that something a little

disappointing had, in the process of these years, chilled the first

enthusiasm for the new reign, yet we can to-day discover within their

limits most of those origins from which the ruin of the future was to

come.

For the Queen especially, whom hitherto her minority, her seclusion and

the deliberate silence of her childhood had guarded, the opportunities

for action which her husband’s accession suddenly offered were

opportunities of fate, and the three years with which this chapter has

to deal were for her young and exalted innocence of eighteen like that

short week of spring when seeds are sown in a garden: they were a brief

season of warmth, of vigour, and of clarity during which circumstance

sowed for her in every variety the seeds of misfortune and of death. All

is there: the advent of an uneasy gaiety; the solace of gems, of cards,

of excessive friendships; the vivid but wholly personal, erratic and

capricious intervention in matters of State; the simple confidence in

the policy of her mother’s Austrian government and the continual support

of it; the enmities which all active natures provoke, but which hers had

a talent for confirming; the friction of such an activity against the

hard and, to her, the alien qualities of the French mind—all these,

which the Princess could try to ignore when her husband was but heir and

she in her retirement, appear with the first months of her liberty as

Queen, strike root, and are seen above ground before she has completed

her twenty-second year. And with these positive irritants their negative

reactions also come: the Court assumes its divisions; the stories and

the songs and the nicknames begin against her; the popular legend

concerning her is conceived; the trend of the Orleans faction in

antagonism to her is established, and a new generation contemporary

with, or but slightly senior to, her own has become fixed within the

same three years in a direction which—though none then saw it—could not

but destroy her in the progress of years.

To understand in what way the common accidents of that brief three

years’ term moved to their great effects it is necessary to know two

things: first, the physical infirmity under which Louis XVI. suffered,

and, secondly, the nature of the Bourbon Crown he wore; for it is the

conjunction of such an infirmity with such an office that lends to the

first years of his reign and to the first errors of his wife their

capital importance in the history of that one woman and of the world.

* * * * *

Louis, it had first been whispered, and was now upon his accession

commonly asserted, could have no heir.

When first the mere form of marriage between him in his boyhood and

Marie Antoinette (a child) had been solemnised, no public and no

familiar regard was paid to the relations between them. The great

ceremony was necessarily esteemed a solemn and irrevocable betrothal

rather than a wedlock, and (as I have already said) it was taken for

granted that in some two or three years the process of nature would

continue the royal line.

But as the Princess advanced to her sixteenth, to her seventeenth year;

as her upstanding and vigorous youth achieved first a full growth, then

ripeness, then maturity, and yet provoked no issue, the common

explanation of such an accident could not but be generally given, and

the impotence of the Dauphin was universally accepted. At eighteen, in

the last autumn of the old King’s reign, the young wife had stood

apparent and triumphant, clothed with a charm which, if it was not that

of beauty, was certainly that of exuberant life; a whole ball-room had

been arrested at her entrance; the crowds of Paris had quickened at her

approach; the lively look, the deep brows, and the full hair tender and

vaguely red, which Fersen had seen suddenly revealed, were those of a

woman informed with an accumulated and expectant vitality. It was not in

her that the defect could lie. Louis, so it plainly seemed, was

deficient and was in title only her husband.

A conjunction of this kind is not uncommon even in an active, healthy,

and laborious lineage of the middle rank; among the wealthy it is

frequent; in the genealogy of families which carry a public function,

such as those of monarchs or of an oligarchy, for all the careful choice

which their marriages involve, it is often present. Such accidents are

provided for. In many cases probably, in some certainly, a

supposititious child is introduced. When that course is difficult or

repugnant the situation is acknowledged; the consort chooses between her

devotions and a lover; all the planning and all the necessary

preparation which attach to the succession regard the brother or cousin,

who is henceforward accepted as the heir, and _his_ position is the more

highly established from the contrast his vigour may afford to the defect

in the reigning incumbent.

I say such a conjunction is of a known type in history; there were

precedents for action and a certain course to be pursued. Monsieur, the

King’s brother, would have attracted the service and respect to which

his then vigorous intellect was fitted. The Queen’s vagaries would have

been contemptuously excused, for she would have stood apart from the

line of succession, and her character would have been indifferent to her

husband’s subjects. The Crown as an institution would have suffered

little, though its immediate holder would have lost personal prestige,

had the conjecture of Louis’ impotence, which was, upon the King’s

accession, common to the Court and the populace, been confirmed.

Now that conjecture was, as the future showed, erroneous. A very

careful, sceptical, and universal observer might have discovered, even

as early as this year of Louis’ accession, that it was erroneous.

In the first place the gestures, habits, and character of the King were

not such as should be associated with this kind of imbecility. His body

was indeed unhealthy and diseased; it was the body of a nervous,

overgrown, loose-limbed child, inherited from a nervous father and from

an exhausted race; a body which nature would have removed as it removed

his son’s, had not the doctors built up upon its doomed frame an

artificial bulk of flesh. I say he was diseased, but not in the manner

then believed. The febrile attachment to violence, the lack of humour,

the weary eye, which betray an insufficiency of sex and which we so

frequently suffer in political life and at the university, were quite

absent in Louis. Contrariwise he was good-humoured and kindly (saving to

cats), very fond of hard riding and capable in that exercise; he was

further of an even though astonishingly slow judgment, and possessed

that desire to _make_ (to file, saw, fit, design, ply a trade of hand

and eye) which is an invariable accompaniment of virility. He loved and

practised mechanical arts, such as the locksmith’s or the watch-maker’s.

There was nothing in him of what is nowadays called (by a French

euphemism) “The Intellectual.”

Were positive evidence lacking such general contrasts between what he

was supposed to be and what he was would still have great weight; but

evidence more exact can be discovered. The letters written by Marie

Antoinette to her mother afford it.

Maria Theresa was in an increasing torment, as each passing month

excited her bewilderment, lest her daughter should furnish no heir to

the French throne and the object at once of her strong motherly

affection and of her political scheme should fail. Her questions were

frequent, urgent and clear: her daughter replied to them in terms which

a very little reading will suffice to illumine. Marie Antoinette was

young and, as I have said, essentially pure; she did not fully

comprehend the nature of a situation which was undermining her serenity

and gravely marring her entry into life, but she was able both to

express her dissatisfaction and yet to assure the Empress upon more than

one occasion that she had at last a reasonable hope of maternity. These

hopes were in each case disappointed. That such hopes, on the one hand,

certainly existed, and that the whole atmosphere of her married life

was, upon the other, false and almost intolerable, depended upon the

fact that Louis suffered from a partial—and only a partial—mechanical

impediment. This impediment a painful operation would suffice to remove;

but the knowledge that it was but partial, the divergent advice of

doctors and the lethargy which invariably deferred his decisions, all

impelled the young man towards procrastination, with the result that in

a few months—the brief period immediately and before his accession—his

wife had learnt that fever of the mind which accompanies alternations of

nervous incertitude; she had weighing upon her a perpetual and acute

anxiety which was the more corroding in that it contained so

considerable an element of physical ill-ease.

The detail is highly intimate and would merit no place in any biography

but this. It must be fixed, and has been fixed here, first because to

neglect it is to ignore the misfortune from which (if from one origin)

flowed the destruction certainly of the Queen, and very probably of the

French monarchy itself—a matter of moment to every European; secondly,

because history has never yet given it its true place nor fully set

forth its nature and importance.

In such a situation Marie Antoinette’s quick nature took refuge in every

stimulant; wine she disliked—it was among her few but marked

eccentricities that throughout her life she would taste nothing but

water—but gaming, jewels, doubtful books, many and new voices about her,

violent contrasts, caprice upon caprice, unexpected visits, sudden

passions for this or that new friend, excessive laughter (and excessive

pique), emotions seized wherever they could be found—watching in merry

vigils for summer dawns, masked balls that took up all the winter

nights, escapades: in a word, a swirl of the fantastic and the new

became for her a necessity that—had it taken some one form—would have

been called a vice. Her dissipation was driven, as vice is driven, with

a spur; it was compatible, as vice is compatible, with her original

virtues; it produced, as vice produces, a progressive interior ill-ease.

She was a tortured woman in those years.

Children became a craving to her.

One day as she went with the lady who was supposed to control the

etiquette of her life, as she went sadly in her coach along the western

road, she turned off it along a by-lane for her pleasure, and reached

that village of St. Michel which lies upon the slope of the hill above

Bougival. As she passed through the village in her grandeur and took the

Louveciennes road, she saw a peasant child and, by a sudden but most

intense and profound impulse, caught it up and said she would make it

hers. It was a little tiny boy, still a baby, toddling upon the road; it

had been christened James; the name of its parents was Amand. The freak

was good news for them; they blessed her, and she went away. And the

child was to be adopted and brought up at her expense, and she was to

watch it in Versailles.

Very many years later his name came up again, obscure, but fixed, in the

roll-call of a battle, and we shall read it once more, stamped across

the strange sequence of her life.

* * * * *

If any one desires to see, in a very modern and tawdry mirror, what evil

had possessed the mind of this well-born lady, let him watch (from some

distance) a certain financial world in London and that cosmopolitan gang

in Paris to which that world is allied by blood and in whose

support—whenever it is endangered—they are to be found, for in Paris and

London they are one. With far more refinement and with infinitely

greater variety, she (like those modern money-dealers) sought in a rush

of fantastic and novel experience to assuage a thirst. _They_ have no

plea save the coarseness of their lineage. _She_ had for excuse the

gnawing of a position which none about her comprehended, and which she

herself, though her body resented it, saw but dimly with her young mind,

and which disturbed her as a confused, intolerable thing.

From within, therefore, she is amply to be excused; but consider the

effect of her fever upon those who saw her. Consider the effect of this

new manner of hers upon the public function of the French monarchy.

The French have, with their own hands, destroyed the conception of “a

king”: in Europe to-day we look around and find nothing of monarchy

remaining. A few impoverished symbols, a few indebted, a few

insufficiently salaried men, of whose true character the public knows

nothing, afford or do not afford unifying titles for a bureaucracy

there, an oligarchy here: in Italy a national name, in Spain a moribund

tradition. But that monarchy which the Gaulish energy had drawn out of

the stuff of old Rome was another matter; it was a sacramental alliance

between an _idea_ and a _thing_.

The _Idea_ was that of the Gallic formula “without Authority there is no

life”—for Authority is Authorship: this Gallic formula also sustains the

Faith.

The _Thing_ was one lineage of actual and living men: devoted, from

father to son—sacrificed almost as in a public sacrifice—condemned to

the perpetual burden of being mixed into this _Idea_ and of supporting

the burden of its intensity and power.

There had descended from the Merovingian and the Carolingian families to

the Capetian, bearing a power that increased with every century, the

conception of a creative executive made flesh; an executive that should

reside in the living matter of a family of men who should be seen,

known, touched, loved, or hated; who should rapidly pronounce new and

necessary laws, actively preserve the yet more necessary body of ancient

and fundamental custom, observe in public the religion of the community,

and, above all, lead in battle. That was the rôle; that was the mould.

The bond of heredity forced many an incongruity into that mould (a child

sometimes and sometimes a madman), yet—so short is one human life in the

general story of a nation—the gap thus formed was rapidly filled by a

successor, and the permanent impression remained of a soldier

incarnating a community of soldiers.

This institution had now endured for much more than a thousand years.

This Gallic institution had impressed itself (here, as in Germany, by

imitation; there, as in Britain, by direct importation) upon all the

civilisation of the West. It had grown old, as must all human

institutions that have no direct sustenance from forces outside time;

but even so it maintained a mysterious vitality. Its kings were

anointed. It held a sort of compact with the Divine, and in this its old

age was still alive with a salutary if a grotesque publicity.

The King and Queen of France were the least protected of any in the

realm from insult, satire, and gibe; even where their own law protected

them, a general conspiracy, as it were, the instinct of all society,

defended the pamphleteer.

The King and Queen were publicly owned: all they had was public money;

all they did they did before a crowd. Every week they dined at a table

in a vast hall. Their nobles stood by but did not eat—before them a

thousand or (according to the weather) ten thousand of the populace

defiled curiously and unceasingly. They prayed in public. They were

expected to receive in public the applause or the condemnation of all.

They were public for the destruction of secret things, conspiracies,

masonries, Templars, trusts, rings. They were publicly approached by any

at random and publicly claimed as the public redressers of wrong—always

in theory and often in actual fact. Nay, their physical acts were

public. They dressed and undressed before an audience—or rather _were_

dressed and undressed by these. The birth of every royal child was

witnessed by a mob crowding the Queen’s chamber.

The vast inconvenience of such a part was but one aspect of its

sanctity, and the Crown united, as in the heart of a mystery, the

functions of Victim and of Lord.

Amid the great new wealth of the eighteenth century, and in the glare of

its brilliant new intelligence, it may be imagined with what a fence of

tradition and precedent public opinion and its own nature insisted on

defending this national centre. Anecdotes of that rigid, minute, and

often inhuman etiquette are too well known to need repetition here. Two

instances may suffice.

The Queen could drink nothing by night or by day but from the hand of

the highest in rank of the women present, nor could this last accept the

glass and the water save from the hand of a page. The King must not eat

at all until he had performed an ablution like a priest: the vessels of

this and the napkin were sacred; rather than put them to a profane use,

when they had once done their service they were destroyed by fire.

Such extravagances in the old age of an institution lend themselves to

ridicule, as do (for instance) the fantastic ceremonies of the House of

Commons or the comic-opera costumes of court officials and of peers. But

though, isolated, they present this weakness, collectively, and seen in

relation to the function they serve, such survivals have a meaning, and

a consideration of such ceremonial helps men to a comprehension of the

institution it surrounds.

Conceive, then—for it is the note of all this chapter—the impact of such

a mood as that of the distracted Queen upon such a Court, stiff with

such traditions and living under such a bright beam of publicity, the

mark of a million eyes all keen to discern whatever trifle was done

between mid-day and dawn. Marie Antoinette chafed impatiently against

this central national institution. The fever now upon her caused her

always to despise and sometimes to neglect the rules that were of the

essence of her position. The moral and internal constraint which

tortured her inflamed her to “live her life”; but for those of great

wealth and opportunity such a mood is and must be dissipation;

dissipation in its fullest sense: the dispersion not only of character

and of self-discipline, but of responsibility, of externals even, and at

last of power. It meant, and necessarily meant, the patronage of those

far below her and their consequent estrangement; the contempt of those

immediately beneath her and their consequent enmity.

Just after the old King’s death the Court was at La Muette. She must

needs, to prove her liberty, go up and talk familiarly to an old

gardener like any Lady Bountiful. The old gardener’s annoyance is not

recorded; that of her ladies is. They complained to the King, who was

troubled, but who, knowing the truth, answered, “Let her be.”

That same day, when a deputation of the Burgesses’ wives paid her their

court, coming from the city at her gate and full of ceremony, she could

do nothing more dignified than giggle at their awkwardness and at their

dress. In the intervals of, according to each, a pompous greeting, she

must whisper to one or other of her ladies most unpompously; the very

servants were rendered uneasy by her manner.

In how many ways and how rapidly this mood (this physical, fatal,

necessary mood) was to wear down her position immediately after her

accession to the throne many examples will show. The best and the most

general aspect from which one may first regard it is her attempted

immixture in public affairs, for that also was a fretful and personal

thing, part of her mood.

* * * * *

The first six or seven months of the new reign cover the period which

was officially that of mourning for Louis XV. and are for the general

historian of this importance: that in them was fixed the new ministerial

tradition which culminated in the summoning of the States-General.

This new tradition owed nothing to the Queen. She was hardly aware of

its presence. For her the choice of new Ministers was a personal and

almost a domestic business in which she somehow had a right (and could

find it entertaining) to play a part—she knew not what nor how. That

part of hers turned out, as a fact, a small part and indecisive, utterly

without plan; but such as it was it marks her necessity for action and

change, and exhibits her place beside the King. In the intervals of

choosing a new hairdresser and a new dressmaker, she paused now

half-an-hour, now an hour, in the cabinet, hearing names which she

hardly knew, and giving random advice which must have strained her

audience to the very limits of toleration.

It was not mere Austrian action. Her brother the Emperor would often beg

her not to meddle; the Austrian ambassador Mercy deplored her innocence

of affairs and her inability to follow any one interest for one hour.

Her mother wrote affectionately and worriedly, giving her the stale old

advice of supporting Vienna—but fearing her capacity to do so. Meanwhile

the Queen herself acted from the simple motive of being seen about, and

added to this the equally simple motives of private tastes. Thus she

would have restored Choiseul to some office. He came up a month after

the accession, and she greeted him very kindly. He had helped to make

her Queen, he was the traditional ally of Vienna, and though Vienna

certainly did not want him now, Marie Antoinette went by the name and

its associations alone: she judged as a child would judge. The King, who

had no intention of accepting Choiseul, made a little awkward

conversation with him, the opening of which turned pleasantly upon the

old man’s baldness, and next day Choiseul went back home, “to see to the

tedding of his hay.”

Again, the choice of Maurepas for chief Minister, four weeks before, was

not—as has been represented—hers. The King chose his father’s old friend

rather for permanent adviser and companion than as a first

Minister—which title indeed he never received, and that Maurepas entered

at all was the work not even of the King himself but of his aunt, Madame

Adelaide. In the confusion of the first two days, when Sartines,

Choiseul, Machault were all possible as Prime Ministers and all

discussed, Madame Adelaide repeatedly suggested Maurepas’ name. To her

and her sisters he was a tradition, part of a time which these old maids

looked back to with regret as the last time of dignity, before

mistresses had destroyed their father’s Court and half exiled them to

their apartments.

Maurepas was seventy-three; he had left office between forty and fifty,

and had done so from a quarrel with the Pompadour. This alone

recommended him to Louis XV.’s daughter; that he should have been

untouched by the vile interregnum of the Du Barry recommended him still

more. Madame Adelaide had known him in power when, as a girl of

seventeen, the eldest of the sisters, she was certain of life, in tune

with her great position, and pleased with all she saw. Now after

twenty-five years, which had been increasingly marred by a distant and

bitter isolation from the Court, his name recurred to her as that of a

fellow-sufferer and a memory of her youth. Madame Adelaide’s devoted

service in her father’s last illness (she had caught the small-pox

herself in attending him) gravely increased the weight of her advice. It

was through her that Louis XVI. received the old man, and, once

received, he remained. True, Marie Antoinette had carried the message to

the King from his aunt, but she had done no more than this.

If it is asked why, with so little influence, the Queen’s perpetual

interference was none the less permitted, and why this girl of eighteen,

vivacious as she was ignorant, might ceaselessly bustle in and out of

the council chamber, the answer is not that she was Queen—for no Queen

had yet acted thus at Versailles, nor would any woman conscious of power

have done so—but first that her whole self was now restless beyond

bearing, and next that the King was ashamed to withstand her whom,

afflicted as he was, he could hardly propose to command or regulate.

With every fresh opening of the council door she made an enemy, with

none a friend; but Louis all the while could only answer “Let her be.”

In one thing only during these months had she a clear object—and that

was not a policy: she was determined to be rid of the Du Barry’s name.

That woman was far away, exiled to Burgundy from the moment of the

accession, to return afterwards to Louveciennes, but some of her clique

remained, hated by all the populace and half the Court as much as by the

Queen. With so much support Marie Antoinette succeeded. Three weeks

after the death of Louis XV., D’Aiguillon was relieved of the department

of Foreign Affairs: the grant of public money which he received on his

resignation—it was but £20,000—would seem to us in modern England

pitifully small, for we take it for granted that public officials should

have a share in the public funds. But it is significant of the time and

of the French temper that the grant was vigorously opposed and was

obtained only on the personal demand of old Maurepas, who (by one of

those coincidences so frequent in aristocracies) happened to be the

uncle of this his chief political opponent.

Here was Marie Antoinette’s one success. The Austrian Court and Embassy

had desired to keep D’Aiguillon—he could be played upon. Marie

Antoinette had rejected their advice; she had gone, day after day, to

the King, until he had consented to deprive D’Aiguillon of his post—and

immediately her deficiency was apparent. To deprive D’Aiguillon was, in

politics, not necessary, and, if accomplished, not final. To find some

one for the Foreign Office who should at once be able and yet work

contentedly under old Maurepas was of both immediate and of weighty

importance. She refused to interest herself in the matter!

Luckily for France, Vergennes, then the representative of Louis at the

Court of Stockholm, was chosen by the good judgment of the King, in

spite of an impossible oriental wife.

Vergennes, approaching his sixtieth year, tenacious, silent,

industrious, highly experienced, and microscopic, as it were, in the

detail of diplomacy, was just such an one as the French needed to

conserve the forces of their nation, to balance the smaller States

against the rivals of Versailles, and to choose the very moment for the

attack on England which, later, was to establish the United States. It

is probable that, but for him, in the embarrassment of French finance

and the consequent weakness of French arms, the nation would have fallen

into some German conflict or have been abused before some German

contention. As it was, the French owe in great part to Vergennes that

peaceful accumulation of energy which permitted the Revolution to

triumph.

In the nomination of this considerable diplomatic force the Queen had no

part at all.

She had no part in the nomination of Turgot.

It is difficult to write the name of “Turgot” without admitting a

digression, though such a digression adapts itself but ill to any

account of the Queen.

Turgot is the name that dominates the first two years of the reign for

every historian. The time has hardly come to criticise him. Criticism of

his faults is easy; a full appreciation is difficult, so near are we

still to his time, and so exactly did he represent the spirit which was

at that moment germinating in every intellect, so active was he in its

expression. The over-simple economies, the plain egalitarian political

theory, the positive scepticism (the Faith was then at its lowest

throughout the world), the glorious self-possession, the rectitude, yes,

and the interior glow of the “Philosophers,” all the Genius of the

Republic was incarnate in this man. When upon that singular date (it was

the 14th of July) he entered the Ministry, there entered with him the

figure, winged for victory yet austere, whose mission it was to create

the great and perilous Europe we now know. I mean the Republic. Already

Napoleon was born.

Marie Antoinette had no knowledge of this spirit. It had not approached

her. She knew vaguely that it was indifferent to her religion (to which

the very young woman was already sensibly though slightly attached). She

knew much more clearly from current talk that it (and Turgot) stood at

that moment especially for _Retrenchment_; and that word _Retrenchment_

she approved, for she had no conception of the sensations that might

ensue upon it to her own life if from a word it should become a policy.

And Turgot himself had spared her sensibilities by doubling her

pin-money.

I say she had no part in the nominating of Turgot—in his fall she was to

have too great a part.

By the end of August the new Ministry and its policy were complete. All

the Du Barry gang and all the memories of Louis XV.’s end were

gone—burnt and hanged in effigy by the populace as well. In their place

sat a Council whose actual head and principal figure was the young King,

slow, large, assiduous, freckled, pale, in a perpetual obese anxiety,

ardently seeking an issue to the entanglement of his realm; whose senior

was the chiselled old Maurepas, intensely national, witty, experienced

in men, but neither instructed nor of a recent practice in affairs;

whose foreign affairs were dealt with by the methodical gravity of

Vergennes; whose navy was in the honest hands of Sartines, and whose

finance—the pivot of every policy, but in France of ’74 life and

death—lay under the complete control of Turgot.

I have said that finance had become for the French in 1774 a matter of

life and death; and the point is of such capital importance to the

Queen’s story that I must beg the reader to consider it here, at the

outset of her reign.

What was the economic entanglement of the French Crown at this moment?

The reply to that question is not part of Marie Antoinette’s character

and conduct, but it so persistently and gravely affected her life and it

is so dominating a feature of revolutionary history that a clear

conception of it must be entertained before any general understanding of

the period can be achieved. Not that the financial difficulty was the

main cause of the Revolution—to assert as much would be to fall into the

puerile inversion which makes of history an economic phenomenon—but that

the financial difficulty was a limiting condition which perpetually

checked and warped the political thought of the time whenever that

thought attempted to express itself in action.

The clearest background against which to appreciate the finance of old

monarchical France is that of the England which was its triumphant

rival.

The United Kingdom had at that time less than half the population of

France. The territory of England was in much the same proportion—at

least, her arable and industrial territory. Her white colonial

population was larger then, in proportion to her home population, than

it is now, but she had not then the full wealth of India to tax nor the

vast revenues now drawn, both in usury and in true profit,[1] from

Australasia, Southern America, and Africa. In other words, the

prosperity of England at that time was domestic and real; it contained

no parasitic or perilous element which a war could interrupt and a

defeat destroy. This England bore with ease a national debt of over 130

million pounds. She was about to engage in a struggle which would nearly

double that debt, and yet to feel no weakness. She raised a revenue of

ten to eleven millions, which in a few years rose without effort to

fifteen—then at the end of it all she was free to triple her debt during

the great European war against Napoleon, and yet triumphantly to

increase, and, when the war was over, to survive, the only nation with a

credit, and at once the bank and the workshop of Europe.

Footnote 1:

I mean by usury interest levied upon unproductive loans; I mean by

true profit the share of produce legitimately claimed by the lender of

funds which have been put to productive use.

France, so much larger in area and population and inheriting so superior

a tradition of magnitude, had all but failed. With citizens double the

English in number, and with an arable soil in proportion, the French

Crown could only with the utmost difficulty attract to the exchequer a

sum of barely twelve—at the most, and counting every expedient,

thirteen—million pounds from the national income. Briefly, England could

support with ease a larger debt than could this neighbouring nation

twice her size; England could spend with prodigality as much as that

nation was compelled to spend with parsimony; and England could raise

without effort a revenue already equal, soon to be superior, to that

which the rival government could but barely extract from its subjects.

Nor does this comparison exhaust the contrast between financial health

and disease upon either side of the Channel. England thus prosperous was

increasingly at ease. France thus exhausted was increasingly

embarrassed. Deficit followed deficit; that expenditure should exceed

revenue had become a normal annual incident publicly discounted, nay, a

sort of fixed ratio appeared between what _should_ be and what _was_ the

income of the government, and the expenditure exceeded revenue with a

solemn regularity much in the proportion of forty-four to thirty-seven.

In the American War, which either nation was approaching, England,

defeated, was to incur 170 million of debt and yet to emerge, a few

years after the defeat, financially stronger than ever in the Wars of

the Revolution. France, victorious, was to incur but a third of that

liability, and yet in the Revolution France was compelled to declare

herself insolvent.

Why did so startling a contrast appear? To us to-day it is almost

inconceivable. The French are now somewhat less in population than the

English, they pretend to no serious empire beyond the Mediterranean, yet

they raise for national purposes a larger revenue, and they raise it

with far greater facility; they support a debt double our own, without

troubling the least gullible and most thrifty investing public in

Europe. Considerable additions to their total liability hardly affect

their credit, when ours falls by a fifth of its index upon the issue of

150 millions. The value of their agricultural land rises rapidly as does

that of their urban; they find public money for enterprises which we

starve or neglect. Their universities, though dependent on public funds,

abound; their national church, deprived of official assistance,

flourishes on but a fraction of their surplus wealth; their historical

buildings are kept up in magnificence upon public funds. It is

difficult, I say, for an Englishman to try to appreciate the

overwhelming economic advantage which, under George III., England

enjoyed over the Bourbons, who were her rivals; because in the course of

a century, and especially of the present generation, the tables have

been turned. It is England now that is in doubt as to her financial

position and her fiscal methods. It is in England that money is lacking

for necessary social reforms. It is English credit which fluctuates with

violence, and English direct taxation which is strained to

breaking-point.

In the time of which I write all these perils and disadvantages attached

to France and to France alone. The France which England faced in the

great struggle was a France labouring in anxiety for money, and the

cause of that increasing pressure is apparent to History: the _method_

of public economics had failed in France then as perhaps it is now

failing here in England.

Men inherit, and of necessity every generation is shut in with custom.

Who would in England to-day dream of taxing the mass of Englishmen—or

rather, of taxing them directly and to their own knowledge? The very

idea is laughable! There may be coming into a coal-miner’s cottage in

Durham twice the income of a clerk, but who would dare send in an

assessment or talk of a shilling in the pound? The clerk must pay; the

miner go free—for such is the tradition of the Fisc. Who would rate the

houses of the wealthiest class as the houses of the middle class are

rated? It would seem madness. So, but in a more acute fashion, did the

financial system of France suffer at the end of the eighteenth century.

Its data, its conventions were those of an older state of society long

departed. It presupposed the manor, and the manor was dead; it

presupposed the self-contained country-side at a moment when the various

provinces of the whole State had long been intimately bound together by

commerce and when strong international links of exchange had already

begun to arise. The evil was a fiscal system out of touch with the

realities of the time. The remedy was a violent and rapid remodelling of

that system. All could perceive the evil, many the remedy; but custom

and the collective force of private avarice in the individual minds

checked, and checked sharply, with the blind control of a natural force,

all reform that attempted to act and to do. The attempt at reform was

baulked, as a natural force baulks human purpose, by a million atomic

actions. The million separate interests refused it.

For such an attempt, for such audacity, Turgot with his austere,

convinced, and isolated mind was better suited than any other man; yet

even he in a very few months had refused to level the hard-grained

social knots which blunted every tool of the reformer who would level

the inequalities of the State. Within two years his attempt had failed

and he had resigned—but while the resistance of the tax-payer counted

for much in his resignation, the increasing ill-balance of his young

Queen counted for more.

During the first part of his administration of finance Marie

Antoinette’s ill-balance was not so marked as to give promise of what

was to come. No folly, no conspicuous extravagance marred the first

weeks of her reign—her inchoate and girlish irruptions into the Council

were alone of ill-omen; but as the new Court settled down into its

stride, accumulated its first traditions and began to take on a

character of its own, her aspect in the public eye was daily fixed with

greater clearness, and the impression so conveyed to a nation already in

rapid transition was a further element of irritation and confusion.

For the permanently present threat of poverty and embarrassment, which

with every year corroded more and more deeply the public service and

rendered less and less stable the general equilibrium of the State, lent

to the habits the Queen was about to form, and still more to the public

exaggeration of those habits, a gravity they could never otherwise have

assumed. It was part of her lot that she could not, from the very nature

of her position, understand the relationship between her petty

extravagances and the popular ill-ease.

She was right. Her extravagance, such as it was, came slowly—nay, though

that extravagance was a proof of excess in her character, it was never

really excessive in amount; the sums we mention when we speak of it are

trifling when we compare them with the financial debauchery of our own

age. Why, that whole annual increase in her allowance which Turgot has

been blamed for making would not have paid for one night’s riot in the

house of some one of our London Jews. Even when her expenses did exceed

the limit she should have set upon them; even when, as month followed

month, the love of jewellery and the distraction of cards involved her

in private debt, the sums so wasted in a whole year were not what some

of our moderns have scattered in a few days. Her total debts after two

years were less than £20,000! Moreover, careless and wasteful as the

girl was for those well-ordered times, her excesses never bore an

appreciable proportion to the scale of the public embarrassment. Her

difficulties were never so great but that the sale of a farm or two

could meet them. Had the Bourbon Crown enjoyed private as well as a

public revenue, her lack of economy and of order would perhaps never

have been heard of.

But it is the characteristic of any morbid condition that the slightest

irritant produces an effect vastly beyond its due consequence. The

financial embarrassment from which the Kingdom suffered may or may not

have been relievable by the plain and harsh methods of Turgot—it is a

question to which I will return—but even if they were so relievable,

their immediate application could not but be an aggravation of popular

suffering; and just in the years when increasing economic difficulty and

sharp economic remedies for it were catching the public between two

millstones of poverty below and retrenchment above, the populace had

presented to them, upon a pinnacle whence she could be observed on every

side, a young woman who in some sense summed up the State, and yet who,

in mere externals at least, showed a growing disregard for method and a

pursuit of every emotion that might distract her from what the French

thought the duty, but what she knew to be the tragedy, of her marriage.

The mourning of the Court forbade display until the autumn of 1774, and

though with the autumn and the winter there was some relaxation of

ancient rules and some revolt already observable upon Marie Antoinette’s

part against the fixed and inherited rules of her station, yet there was

nothing which had yet seized the popular imagination nor even gravely

affected her position within the narrow circle of her equals. It was not

until the next year, 1775, that the error and the misfortune began.

It had long been intended that her brother, the Emperor Joseph, should

visit France, and by his more active character persuade Louis XVI. to an

operation which he perpetually postponed. The repeated adjournment of

this visit (which was to resolve so many doubts) was among the fatal

elements of the Queen’s early life. In the place of that sovereign, the

youngest child of the Hapsburgs, Maximilian, little more than a boy,

fat, and what would have been called in a lower rank of society

deficient, waddled into the astonished Court at La Muette in the opening

of February.

The accident of his arrival did neither the Queen nor the Court any

great hurt among the crowds of the capital. His startling ignorance and

heavy lack of breeding amused the crowd; they were glad to repeat the

amusing anecdotes of his awkwardness as later in their Republican armies

they were glad to caricature his obesity when he had achieved the

ecclesiastical dignity of a princely archbishopric. But among her

intimate equals the visit was disastrous. The Princes of the Blood

insisted upon receiving his call before they paid their court to him,

since he was travelling incognito. It was a point (to them) of grave

moment. The Queen rubbed it in with spirit. She would not let him pay

such a call. She told them that her brother “had other sights to see in

Paris and could put off seeing the Princes of the Blood.” The King stood

by during the quarrel, irresolute, upon the whole supporting his wife.

The King’s brothers for the moment supported her also; but the kernel of

the affair lay in her disregard of inherited tradition, in her contempt

for those fine shades of mutual influence and deference which to the

French are all important indications of authority, but which to her were

meaningless extravaganzas of parade. Chartres, during the progress of

what he thought an insult, she a piece of common sense, deliberately

left the Court, publicly showed himself in Paris, and was applauded for

his spirit.

This wilfulness, this picked quarrel, sprang from the same root as, and

was similar to, whatever other fevers disturbed her entry into her

twentieth year.

The Queen had conceived a violent affection for the Princesse de

Lamballe, a young woman of the Blood, but Piedmontese, the widow of a

debauchee—a simpering, faithful, stupid, sentimental and most

unfortunate young woman, often gushing in her joy, next, in grief,

wringing her enormous hands. It was an attachment almost hysterical and

subject to extreme fluctuations. The Queen had conceived a second

attachment, with the opening of this year 1775, for another woman, as

good-natured indeed, but more solid and more capable of intrigue than

Madame de Lamballe, the Comtesse de Polignac. In the empty society of

the one, in the full and babbling coterie of the other, Marie Antoinette

expended the greater part of her energy. Finding to hand, as it were,

the Guémenées (and Madame de Guémenée constitutionally fixed as

“Governess to the children of France”—children that did not exist), she

plunged also into the Guémenée set, and there she discovered, for the

first time in her young life, a powerful drug for the stimulation of

whatever in adventurous youth has been wounded by disappointment and

youth’s hot despair—gambling. The gambling took root quickly in this

girl who hated wine and had desired so much of life. It was large in

’75; in ’76 it was to be ruinous to her watched and doled allowance.

Meanwhile the tailors and the milliners and all the ruck of parasites

were taking advantage of the new reign to play extravagant experiments

in fashion, to build fantastic head-dresses and to load humanity with

comic feathers. She did not create such novelties, but she was willing

to follow them.

The young bloods, in one of those recurrent fits of Anglomania to which

the wealthy among the French are subject, must introduce horse-racing.

She passionately approved. It gave her gambling the familiarity or lack

of restraint which she was determined to breathe for the solution of her

ills; it gave her the feeling of crowds about her, of pulse and of the

flesh.

Young Artois, the youngest of the King’s brothers, because he was the

most vivacious of those nearest her, must be her constant companion.

Mercy noted his “shocking familiarity”; he feared that scandals would

arise.... They did.

Again, as the new reign advanced, her unpolitical and most unwise

concern for personalities showed more vividly than ever. Because the

ambassador in London was in her set she must take up his cause with a

sort of fury, when he was accused of abusing his position for the

purposes of commerce. He was acquitted, but, much more than the trial or

any of its incidents, the open and passionate attitude of the Queen

struck the society of the time. So in the very moment of the coronation

she again openly received Choiseul, though she knew that he could never

return to Court, that her mother and all Austria disapproved.

Much worse than all of these, the constant jar upon her nerves broke

down a certain decent reticence, the barrier of silence, which should,

always in a woman of her age, and doubly in a woman of her position, be

absolutely immovable. She publicly ridiculed the painful infirmity of

the King. Her sneers at his incapacity were repeated; they crept into

malicious, unprinted songs; she permitted herself similar confidences,

or rather publicities, in her correspondence; she wrote them with her

own hand, and there is little doubt that others besides those to whom

they were addressed saw that writing. He, poor man, went on painfully

with his duty, hour by hour in his councils, considering the realm,

distantly fond of her, but necessarily feeling in her presence that

mixture of timidity, generosity and shame, the secret of which was no

longer private to his wife and him, but, through her lack of elementary

discipline, spreading grotesquely abroad in an exaggerated and false

rumour to the world.

So much had been accomplished by her own character and destiny when a

full year had passed after the old King’s death. She had made the Crown

a subject of jest, her character suspect, her husband, that is, the

foundation of her own title, ridiculous, when the date had arrived in

the summer of ’75 for the solemn coronation of Louis at Rheims.

Mercy, with an inspiration sharper than that which diplomats commonly

enjoy, had suggested her coronation side by side with that of the King.

Such a ceremony might have retrieved much. Precedent was against it, but

after so very long an interval precedent was weak; at best it could but

have afforded a spiteful and small handle for the enmities which Marie

Antoinette had already aroused. She had but to insist, or rather only to

understand, and her fate would have halted. She was indifferent. The

miraculous moment when high ceremonial and the subtle effect of historic

time combined to impress and to transform the French nation, the moment

of the unction of the King, found her nothing more than the chief

spectator in the gallery of the Cathedral transept looking down upon all

that crowd of peers and officers whose position in the ceremony was

exactly fixed.

She had come in to Rheims the night before under a brilliant moon,

driving in her carriage as might any private lady. The “chic” of such an

entry pleased her. She had allowed the King to precede her by some days,

and whatever magic attached to the ritual descended upon him alone, and

left her unsupported for the future. Her letter to her mother, written

upon the morrow of the occasion, shows how little she knew what she had

missed. The Court returned to Versailles, the careless vigour of her

life was renewed, the thread of her exaggerated friendships and her

exaggerated repulsions was caught up again.

When her young sister-in-law was married a few weeks later to the heir

of Piedmont and Savoy, she did not conceal her relief at the departure

from her Court of this child, with whom, for some reason or another, she

could not hit it off. When Madame de Dillon, with her Irish beauty,

passed through the Court, that lady moved Marie Antoinette to yet

another violent friendship—luckily of short duration. As for the

Princesse de Lamballe, she had already revived for her the post of

Superintendente of the Queen’s Household (a post that had not existed

for thirty years), and later she insisted upon there being attached to

it the salary (which France imagined enormous) of £6000 a year.

It is of great interest to note that public dissipation or abandon of

this kind, glowing familiarities, long-lit and brilliant nights, an

ardent pursuit of what had become to her a very necessity of change—all,

in a word, that was beginning to fix her subjects’ eyes upon her

doubtfully, and not a little to offend the mass of the nobility around

her, all that was found in her insufficient to the niceties and balance

of the French temper, was easily excused by foreign opinion. Just that

something which separates the French from their neighbours was lacking

to the foreign observance of this foreign woman. Her carriage, which to

the French was a trifle theatrical, seemed to foreigners queenly; her

lively temper, which the French had begun to find forward, was for the

foreigner an added charm.

There is no need to recall the rhetoric of Burke, for Burke was not by

birth or training competent to judge; but Horace Walpole, who was

present that very summer at the Court of Versailles, and saw the Queen

in all her young active presence at her sister-in-law’s wedding-feast,

writes with something of sincerity, and, what is more, with something

for once of heart in his words. He thinks there never was so gracious or

so lovely a being.

One judgment I, at least, would rather have recovered than any of

theirs. It has not been communicated. I mean that of Doctor Johnson. For

Doctor Johnson some months later stood by the side of his young girl

friend, behind the balustrade at Fontainebleau, watching curiously with

his aged and imperfect eyes this young Queen at the public ceremony of

the Sunday Feast. The old, fat, wheezy man, who now seems to us England

incarnate, stood there in the midst of the public crowd behind the

railing, blocking its shuffling way as it defiled before royalty dining,

and took in all the scene. The impression upon a man of such philosophy

must have been very deep. I believe we have no record of that impression

remaining.[2]

Footnote 2:

The life of Doctor Johnson has become an object of such wide national

study that more than one reader may be acquainted with his judgment of

the scene. If it exists, it should be published to the advantage of

history.

Though Marie Antoinette’s carriage and her manner had founded of her so

beneficent a legend abroad and had begun in her new home so much of her

future disaster, with those who knew her most intimately and who were of

her own blood, with the Hapsburgs of Vienna, her conduct, certainly not

queenly, seemed not even tragic. They scolded sharply, and the Emperor,

her brother, crowned a series of violent notes by one so violent that

Maria Theresa kept it back. To her childlessness (which was for them a

fault in her), to her conduct (which her own family who had known her as

a child exaggerated at such a distance) was added the exasperation of

remembering that with some elementary caution she might have acted as

the agent of the allied Austrian Court whose daughter she was; they were

angered in Vienna to see that, instead of so acting, she wasted her

position in private spites and private choices.

In fine, when the Day of the Dead came round and the leaves of ’75 were

falling, she could look back from her twentieth birthday to her

accession, and the view was one of eighteen months of mental chaos

wherein one emotion rapidly succeeded another, each sought for the

purposes of distraction and oblivion, and of feeding in some sort of

firework way that appetite for life which Louis could not nourish with a

steady flame. With the next year further elements were to be added to

those existing elements of dissipation. The foundations of the future

which she had already levelled out were to be strengthened. The public

judgment of her was to become more apparent, and the legend which at

last destroyed her was to take a firmer root.

The year 1776, for ever famous in the general history of the world, was

the climax and the turning-point of this early exuberance and excess. In

its first days, during the hard winter which marked the turn of the

year, she had begun amusements which for the first time permitted her to

cross the barrier which divides the reproach of one’s intimates from

public scandal. Her play had grown from mere extravagant gambling to

dangerous indebtedness, and she had been bitten by the love of jewels,

especially of diamonds. In this year, too, the simple and somewhat empty

friendship which she still slightly bore to Madame de Lamballe was

finally replaced by more violent caprices; she began to associate with

the powerful Guémenées, with the gentle but subtle and intriguing

Countess of Polignac.

Her indiscretion rose continually. In February she was seen with the

Princesse de Lamballe whirling over the snow into Paris, without an

escort, as a private woman might, to the disgust and the hatred of the

crowd.

The exhilaration of the cold—for her who was from Vienna—the

exhilaration of her twentieth year, her love of merry domination over

the timid little tall companion, whom she was so soon to abandon, drove

her from audacity to audacity. Her sledges, which had been but a

domestic scandal at Versailles, dared to reach Sèvres, St. Cloud; they

crossed the river, because the hunting wood of Boulogne invited them.

Upon one fatal morning she traversed that last screen and shot through

Paris on her shining toy.

The sledge was daringly, impudently alone. There was no guard, no decent

covering for royalty, no dignity of pace or even of ornament; its pace

was a flash, and its high gilding a theatrical _décor_; mixing with that

flash and that gilding was the jangling of a hundred little bells.

The streets were all aghast at such a sight. Sèvres and the villages

round Versailles had stared, bewildered, to see a Queen go by in such a

fashion; but Paris was too great to be merely bewildered, and Paris grew

angry, as might an individual at a personal insult offered.

The next month saw her first reckless purchase of gems; she pledged her

name for £16,000, and acquired in exchange of that debt diamonds not

only expensive beyond the means of her purse, but unworthy of her rank

and of the traditions of her office.

To such follies she added her personal interference in the matter of

Turgot. That bright-eyed, narrow, intelligent, and most un-Christian man

had missed the problem ready to his hands. In time of war, with a good

army and a soldier behind him, he might have solved it; in a time of

luxury, misery, and peace he could not. In the very days when he was

propounding his theories of unfettered exchange and of direct taxation

for the salvation of the Monarchy, the harvest of ’75 had failed. In the

one exceptional moment of famine when interference with trade was

certainly necessary to French markets, his free trade doctrine was

imposed. A popular hatred rose against him, and he was hated not only by

the populace, who felt the practical effects of his economic idealism,

but by the rich handful who were still devout and who could not tolerate

his contempt for the Faith, by the corrupt who could not tolerate his

economy, and by the vivacious who could not tolerate his sobriety. His

rapid and fundamental reforms, moreover, were opposed by the Parlement

of Paris[3] as by a wall. They refused to register the edicts. He had

still great influence with the King, though hardly with any other

effective power in the State, and in the month of March the King in a

Bed of Justice compelled the Parlement to register Turgot’s decrees and

give them the force of law. It registered them; but none the less Turgot

was doomed.

Footnote 3:

It should be made clear, though it is elementary, that the Parlement

of Paris, by nature a supreme court of law, exercised also the

anomalous but traditional function of registrar of royal decrees. Nor

was a law a law until this body had consented to enroll it or had been

overcome by a grave, rare and solemn public ritual of the King’s

called “a Bed of Justice.”

Mercy, who saw very clearly that the man must go, but who also saw

clearly the extreme danger that the Queen ran in taking upon herself any

part in his going, did all that his influence could command to prevent

her interference. He spent his energy and his considerable persuasion in

vain. The one motive force and the only one that could persuade her to

public action had already stirred the Queen; she believed herself to

have received a personal affront; the Cabinet had recalled a favourite

in her set from the Embassy of St. James’s. The girl was determined upon

revenge, and because Turgot as Comptroller-General showed most

prominently in the Cabinet, it was upon Turgot that her wrath fell, or

rather it was Turgot falling from power whom she precipitated by her

final influence. Upon the 10th of May, Guines, whom the Cabinet had

recalled from London, was raised to a Duchy in a public note; by the

12th, Maurepas had told the Comptroller-General that his office was

vacant, and Marie Antoinette talked wildly of sending him to the

Bastille.

There was at this time in Paris a man called Necker, with whom history

would have little concern had not the accident of the Revolution later

thrown his undetermined features into the limelight. He was a product of

Geneva, a money-dealer therefore, and a Calvinist by birth and trade—in

no way by individual conviction, for his energies had long been directed

to the accumulation into his own hands of the wealth of others. His

reputation as a solid business man was therefore high, and he was very

rich; of moral reputation, as the Catholic French understand the term,

he had none.[4] His dealings with the treasury had brought his name

forward, and in a few months, under a different title, he replaced

Turgot at the head of the embarrassed finances of the country!...

Societies in dissolution do such things.

Footnote 4:

His vivacious and ugly daughter was to be a catch famous throughout

Europe. Years later Fersen—of all men!—was suggested to her. Pitt in

’85 had a bite at her ill-gotten dowry. Luckily for the girl, she

escaped him, but she married De Staël, became famous, wrote her lively

and didactic comments on the Revolution, grew uglier still, showed a

small black moustache, at last wore a turban and drove Napoleon to

despair.

His conception of reform was what one might expect from such a lineage.

He cooked the public accounts, flattered all to remain in power, was

hopelessly void of any plan, and, to meet the crisis, just borrowed: the

first of modern stock-jobbers to conduct a State, and the model to all

others. He was destined to become a sort of symbol of liberty ... and

therein he is an example to democracy as well as to money-changers.

To the signal folly of precipitating Turgot’s fall the Queen was content

to add further marks of excess. As though her purchases earlier in the

year had not been sufficient, she must buy bracelets now worth three

years of her income—bracelets, the news of which reached Vienna—and she

must give rein to every conceivable indulgence in the passion of

gambling. All the world talked of it, and all that summer, as the

influence of her new friends rose and as her careless excitement reached

its limit, the fever grew.

At Marly, during the summer visit of the Court, later in the year at

Fontainebleau, she carried on the scandal. One autumn night and day in

this last place bankers from Paris kept the faro tables open for

thirty-six hours; they were the hours before her birthday, and the Mass

of All Saints was sung to a Court pale and crumpled with the lack of

sleep. The morrow, her twenty-first birthday, was sour with the memory

of the reproach against that debauch. The Court returned for the winter

to Versailles, and Maria Theresa determined that it was time for the

Queen’s brother, the Emperor Joseph, to make the journey he had long

promised, and to stem these rapids which threatened to become a cataract

in which everything might be swept away. Her scolding letters to her

daughter were accompanied by active plans for the journey of her son.

She expected, and not without reason, that that son’s advent would

change all, for she knew that he would have the direct mission to

persuade Louis to an operation, to relieve the imperfect marriage of the

burden that pressed upon it, and to remove from the life of that young

wife the intolerable nervous oppression whence all this increasing

violence proceeded.

It is to the Emperor’s journey, therefore, that all one’s attention

should be directed as one reads her life from the closing days of 1776

to his appearance in Paris, after repeated delays, in the spring of the

following year.

Meanwhile that other spirit whose action was to come in upon her life,

America, was born. The week that had seen Turgot’s dismissal had seen

passed in Philadelphia the Pennsylvania Resolution of Separation from

the English Crown, and in the keener intellectual life of Virginia it

had seen produced upon the same day the first statement of those general

principles which the Colonies had drawn from Rousseau and upon which

were to be based, for whatever good or evil fortunes still attended it,

the democracy of our time. The revolt grew from those skirmishes of ’75

that had begun a Civil War to the Separatist decisions of ’76; the

strain upon England’s tenure of her empire increased, and Vergennes all

the while watched closely, hoping from that embarrassment to find at one

moment or another the opportunity for relieving his country from the

permanent threat of an English war.

It was a difficult and a perilous game. A British success might be, or

rather would be, followed by swift vengeance against the embarrassed and

fettered Crown of France. The Cabinet of Versailles would need allies

against what was believed to be an all-powerful navy, and for eighteen

months Vergennes was working to obtain these allies, in spite of the

terror which the British fleet inspired. This policy, whose ultimate

results were to be so considerable and so unexpected, took a new shape

upon a certain day which should perhaps be more memorable in the history

of the United States than any other. I mean the 28th of November of this

year 1776.

Early that morning, the weather being clear and the wind southerly, a

pilot from the rocks of Belle Isle had made out three ships in the

offing, but they were hull-down; later, he saw one bearing a strange,

quite unknown flag. He sailed towards it. The colours were those of the

new Republic, and the stars and stripes flew above a sloop of war that

carried Franklin; she had with her two English prizes for companions.

Franklin landed. Within three weeks he was in Paris, and by the first

week of the New Year he was at Passy in the suburbs, the guest of

Chaumont, from whose great house and wide park proceeded the careful

intrigue by which the Thirteen States were finally established in their

Independence.

All who can pretend to history have respect for Vergennes, but that

respect is far heightened by the close reading of what followed.

Alone of the European States Great Britain could not be balanced but

could balance. Great Britain was secure among them and their insecurity.

Great Britain alone in her growing monopoly of industry and in her

impregnable self-sufficiency, economic and military, could not be pinned

down into a diplomatic system; she alone could afford to scorn alliance

and could in a moment change from friend to foe and strike at any

exposed and vulnerable part of the European group—especially at a

maritime neighbour. The British army maintained a proved excellence of a

hundred years; it was particularly famous for its endurance; its records

of capitulation were rarer than those of any other; it could afford to

be small; its infantry stood fire brutally and could charge after losses

that would have been fatal to its rivals; it had for framework the

squires and the yeomen of solid country-sides, for material the still

manly remains of a peasantry in the English shires, the Highlands, whose

native language, diet, and race were at that time corrupted by nothing

more alien than a little garrison. Finally, there was then available to

the full for purposes of war the vigour of an as yet unruined and not

yet wholly alienated Ireland.

A navy, adequate in numbers, but no drain upon the productive power of

the nation, gave mobility to this force, the soil of these Islands fed

the people upon it, and meanwhile an industry, textile and metallic,

such as no other country dreamed of, supplied an increasing and

overflowing resource for war. It is but a hundred and thirty years since

things were thus. A vast change has passed, and it is difficult for the

modern student, perplexed and anxious for the future of his country, to

enter into the international policy of his fathers; yet must he grasp it

if he is to understand what a revolution was effected by the issue of

the American War; for it is probable that when the first complete survey

of modern Europe is taken, the separation of the American colonies will

establish a fixed date which marks not only the division between the

monarchical and the bureaucratic, the old and the new Europe, but also,

in our province, the division between what had been England and what

later came to be called “the Empire”—with the destinies befitting such a

title and the colonies to which it is attached.

Vergennes saw that this England, free upon the flank of his embarrassed

country, was now suddenly engaged in the most entangling of nets, an

unpopular and distant civil war. He knew that with a Protestant

population of her own blood (at that time the States were in philosophy

wholly Protestant, in tradition entirely English) would only be attacked

by the governing families with the utmost reluctance. There was no fear

of extreme rigours, or of sharp, cruel, and decisive depression; there

was sympathy and relationship on both sides. Therefore the war would

drag.

Vergennes had seen, two years before, the little English garrison

permitting the inhabitants to arm and drill without interference; he

knew that opinion in England was divided upon the rebellion. His whole

attention was concentrated upon the prolongation of that struggle and

upon postponing to the last the intervention of France. His attention,

so given, was successful, and he secured his object.

At first and for as long as might be he would support, unseen, the

weaker of the combatants. He received Franklin, though privately; he

refused ships or a declaration of war. Arms and ammunition he liberally

supplied—but he did so through a private and civilian person, whom he

vigorously denounced in public, who had to go through the form of

payment from the United States, as might any other dealer, and who was

very nearly compelled to go through the form of receiving heavy

punishment as well. The private firm so chosen was “_Roderigo Hortalez

et Cie_”; the modern cheat of anonymity in commerce had begun, and

_Roderigo Hortalez_ was, in reality, that same shifty, witty,

courageous, and unsatisfied man who had already played upon Versailles

and Vienna and whose pen was later to deliver so deep a thrust at the

Monarchy. Caron, or, to call him by the title of nobility he had

purchased, “De Beaumarchais.”

* * * * *

While Vergennes was acting thus, every effort was being made at Vienna

to advance the journey of the Emperor: postponed from January to

February, from February to March, that journey was at last undertaken,

and with the first days of April 1777 Joseph was present upon French

soil, and driving down the Brussels road towards Paris.

[Illustration:

THE EMPEROR JOSEPH II

FROM THE TAPESTRY PORTRAIT WOVEN FOR MARIE ANTOINETTE

AND RECENTLY RESTORED TO VERSAILLES

]

But all that while, in spite of his advent, the rush of the Court had

increased, and to the twenty other fashions and excitements of the

moment one more had been added—enlistment for America. The youngster,

who was typical of all that wealthy youth, not yet sobered or falsified

by fame, La Fayette, was determined to go; and almost as a pastime,

though it was a generous and an enthusiastic one, the American

Revolution was the theme of the Court in general. It became the theme of

the Polignac clique in particular, a theme sometimes rivalling the high

interest of the cards, or lending an added splendour to fantastic

head-dress and to incongruous jewels.

And the Queen meanwhile, quite lost, pushed the pace of all the throng

about her, despairing of any remedy to that evil which her brother was

posting to reform.

If Fersen had been there!

* * * * *

Upon Friday evening, the 18th of April, the Emperor Joseph drove past

the barrier of St. Denis and entered Paris. It was already dark, but the

stoic was in time for dinner. He was in strict incognito, that he might

be the more admired, and had given out the arrival of “Count

Falkenstein” to all the world. He slept in the humblest way at his

Embassy; he had hired two plain rooms in Versailles by letter—at a hotel

called “the Hotel of the Just,” presumably Huguenot; next day he paraded

as The Early Riser and was off to Versailles before the gentry were out

of bed: the whole thing was as theatrical as could be. He wished to meet

his sister alone—but he let everybody know it. He came up to her room by

a private stair—and spoke of it as an act of simplicity and virtue. The

man was of the kind to whom—most unhappily for them and their

founder—Marcus Aurelius provides a model. His certitudes were in words

or negations; his pride in things facile and dry; his judgments, vapid,

determined, superficial, and false—in a manner Prussian without the

Prussian minuteness; in a manner French, but with none of the French

clear depth and breadth. Of hearty Germany he had nothing; and among all

the instruments of action designed in Gaul he could choose out only one,

the trick of sharp command, which the accident of despotic power

permitted him to use over a hotch-potch of cities and tongues.

The task before him, which was the re-establishment at Versailles of the

interests of Austria, comprised two parts: first, he must counsel or

compel the Queen—who stood for Austria at Versailles—to such conduct and

dignity as would permit her to exercise permanent political power;

secondly, and much more important, he must force the King to that

operation from which he so shrank and yet by which alone the succession

of the Crown through Marie Antoinette could be assured.

For the first of these tasks, the reform of his sister’s conduct,

Joseph’s empty character, without humour and without religion, was

wholly insufficient—nay, it provoked the opposite of its intention. The

obvious truth of his harsh criticism moved the Queen, but his bad

manners, his public rebuke, offended her more. His precise (and

written!) instructions forced upon her one irksome and priggish month of

affected rigidity; she did but react with the more violence from the

absurd restraint.

With the second and more positive task he was more fortunate. His brutal

questions, his direct affirmation and counsel, his precise instructions,

all conveyed in the sergeant-major manner which is of such effect upon

the doubtful or the lethargic, accomplished their end. Louis inclined to

the advice which had for now three years urged medical interference; he

submitted to an operation, and the principal question at issue for two

great States was in this secret manner accomplished: it was the one

success, the only one, of Joseph’s tactless and unwise career. It was of

the highest consequence to him and his house and all Europe; for, his

counsels once obeyed, the maternity of Marie Antoinette was ultimately

sure. When the Queen should have borne a child there could but follow

the rage of disappointed successors, a secure and increasing influence

upon her part over her husband, through this the antagonism of the

Monarchy to the nation, and at last the Revolution and all its wars.

The reader may inquire the precise date of so momentous a detail. It is

impossible to fix it until (if it still exist) the document once in the

hands of Lassone be published; but we can fix limits within which the

operation must have taken place. It must have been within that summer of

1777 in one of three months, June, July, or August; probably in late

August or the very beginning of September. It was certainly later than

the 14th of May, when, according to Mercy, the private interviews upon

the matter between Joseph and Louis were still unfinished. Marie

Antoinette’s letter of June 16th makes it probably later than that date.

A phrase of Maria Theresa’s on the 31st of July, referring to news of

the 15th (the last news from Mercy), makes it possible that she thought

all accomplished by 15th of July. A phrase of Mercy’s on the 15th of

August makes it more probable still. By the 10th of September a phrase

used by Marie Antoinette in her correspondence with Maria Theresa makes

it certain.[5]

Footnote 5:

See Appendix A.

Compared with this capital consequence of his journey the rest of

Joseph’s actions, opinions, and posings in France are indeed of slight

importance. His affectation of retirement and simplicity, his common

cabs, his perpetual appearance in public and as perpetual pretence of

complaint at his popularity are the tedious trappings of such men. In

some things he was real enough; in his acute annoyance with the Queen’s

set, for instance—especially with Madame de Guémenée, and her late

hours, high play and familiar, disrespectful tones. He was sincere, too,

in his astounding superficiality of judgment; he was keen on science,

eager for the Academies, and in that scientific world of Paris which

boasted Lavoisier and the immortal Lamarck discovered that “when one

looks close, nothing profound or useful is being done.”

At the end of May he left for a tour in the French provinces. His

ineptitudes continue. He has left notes of his opinions for us to enjoy.

He judges the army, and condemns it—all except the pipe-clay and white

facings of the Artois Regiment. That pleased him. He saw nothing of the

cannon which were to break Austria and capture a woman of his house for

Napoleon. He judges the navy after a minute attention, and finds it—on

the eve of the American War!—thoroughly bad. One thing he does note

clearly, that Provence, the King’s brother, has been seen going through

France in state, as though sure of the succession. After what had passed

at Versailles, such expectations on the part of Louis XVI.’s brother

must have bred in Joseph a mixture of anxiety and amusement.

He returned to Vienna, and began to address himself to his next failure

in policy and judgment—he coveted Bavaria. The death of the Elector of

Bavaria would raise the issue of his succession. That death was

approaching, and Joseph began to intrigue through Mercy, through his

mother, and as best he could through his sister, for the succession to

the Duchy and for the support of France against Prussia in his outworn,

out-dated ambition. While he still played with such toys, much larger

forces were ready to enter the scene, and changes that would make the

little balances of German States forgotten; for as that summer of 1777

heightened, dry, intensely hot, and as all the air of the life around

Versailles was cleared by the new intimate relations of the Queen and

her husband; as the chief domestic problem of the reign was resolved, as

it became increasingly certain that the royal marriage would soon be a

true marriage and the way to the succession secure, there had come also

the certitude of war with England in the matter of the American

colonies.

It is upon this latter certitude that attention must now be fixed,

before one can turn to the tardy accomplishment of the Queen’s hopes for

an heir. The foreign policy of that moment is essential to a

comprehension of her fate, for upon the unexpected turn of that

unexpected conflict with Great Britain was to depend the fatal respite

which destiny granted to the French Monarchy: a respite of years, during

whose short progress the financial tangle became hopeless, the Queen’s

ill-repute fixed, and the Crown’s last cover of ceremony destroyed.

I say there had come a certitude of war with England.

Of three things one: either England would reduce the rebels; or, having

failed so to reduce them, she would compromise with them for the

maintenance of at least a nominal sovereignty; or, she would wholly fail

and would be compelled wholly to retire. In the first case it must be

her immediate business to attack the French Government whose secret aid

had alone made the prolongation of rebellion possible; in the second

case, with still more security and a still more confident power, she

could attack an enemy which, because it had not dared openly to help her

foes, had earned their contempt and lost its own self-confidence. In the

third case she would find herself free from all embarrassment and at

liberty to destroy a rival marine, whose inferiority was incontestable

but whose presence had been sufficient to embarrass her complete control

of the North Atlantic and to sustain—however disingenuously—her

rebellious subjects.

In any one of these three issues a war with England must come. But these

three issues had not an equal chance of achievement. A complete victory

of the British troops, probable as it was, could hardly result in a

permanent military occupation of a vast district, English in blood and

speaking the English tongue. A complete defeat of British regulars at

the hands of the varied and uncertain minority of colonists, and the

acknowledgment of American independence by a Britain unembarrassed in

Europe, was an absurdity conceivable only to such enthusiastic boys as

was then the young La Fayette, to such wholly unpractical minds as that

of Turgot, or to popular journalists of the type which then, as to-day,

are uninstructed whether in historical or in military affairs.

The middle issue was so much the more probable as to appear a calculable

thing: the troops of George III. would determine the campaign, but the

settlement following the expensive success of the British army would be

a compromise whereby the colonies should be free to administer their own

affairs, should be bound in some loose way to Great Britain, and should

stand benevolently neutral towards, if not in part supporters of, her

position in Europe.

The formula which guides a commercial State such as Britain in its

colonial wars has long been familiar to its rivals; it is as simple as

it is wise. Though we give it the epithet of “generous” and speak of the

“granting of self-government,” while enemies will call it, with equal

inaccuracy, “a capitulation” followed by “an alliance,” the nature and

purpose of such compromises are those of a fixed policy and one upon

whose unalterable data the British Empire has been built up.

It was in the nature of things that the British Government in this

summer of ’77 should first seek to master the Americans in the field,

next compromise with the defeated colonials, set them up as a nation

nominally dependent, really allied, and so find itself free in Europe

for the great duel with France. At Versailles Vergennes prepared not

attack but resistance, and pulled with an accurate proportion of effort

all the strings that should delay Great Britain, on the one hand, and,

on the other, unite into one body of resistance against her the Atlantic

seaboard of Europe and the principal navies of the Continent—that is,

the Powers of France and the Peninsula; the admiralties of Versailles,

Lisbon and Madrid.

As the Emperor Joseph’s carriage rolled westward along the main road of

Brittany, approaching the gates of Brest, Vergennes was signing for

despatch to the Spanish Court that note of his which inaugurated the

active part of his plan of defence against England. Precisely a week

later, Burgoyne and his forces started southward from Canada upon what

should have been the decisive march of the British campaign in America.

A consideration of the map will at once convince the reader, first, that

Great Britain was in a position suitable to immediate victory, and

secondly, that the military advisers of her Government had formed the

best possible plan for its rapid accomplishment.

What was the military object of the war? The control of a seaboard: a

seaboard stretching indeed through fifteen degrees of latitude and

extending in its contour over far more than fifteen hundred miles, but a

seaboard only. Behind it lay districts which for military purposes did

not exist—untouched, trackless, resourceless. The life of the colonies,

especially their life during the strain of a war, flowed through the

ports.

Again, this band of territory ran from a long southern extremity, whose

climate was unsuited to active work by Europeans, through a middle

temperate interval to another extremity of winter fogs and rigorous

winter cold. A continental climate rendered the contrast of North and

South less noticeable, for the warm continental summer embraced it all,

and the cold continental winter penetrated far south; but that contrast

between the two halves of that seaboard was sufficient to afford a line

of social and political cleavage already apparent in the eighteenth

century and destined in the nineteenth to occasion a great domestic war.

Again, there lay behind this seaboard, at a distance nowhere greater

than three hundred miles nor anywhere much less than two, that valley of

the St. Lawrence which Great Britain firmly held; her tenure was secure

in the diversity of its race, religion and language from those of the

rebels and in the unity which the admirable communications of its great

waterway confirmed.

Here then was a line already wholly held, the St. Lawrence, and parallel

to it a line already partially held, and always at the mercy of the

British fleet—the ports of the sea-coast. Up and down the belt of land

between those parallel lines went the scattered bands of the rebels.

Even their organised armies were loosely co-ordinated in action and

expanded or diminished with the season.

The obvious strategy for the British was to cut that intervening belt in

a permanent fashion by establishing a line from the St. Lawrence to the

sea, so to separate for good the forces of their opponents and then to

deal with them in detail and at leisure.

An accident of topography afforded to this simple problem an obvious

key: just down that dividing-line, which separates the northern climate

and the Puritan type of colony from the rest, a sheaf of natural ways

leads from the coast to the valley of the St. Lawrence, and of these the

plainest and by far the best is the continuous and direct depression

which is afforded by the long, straight valley of the Hudson and

continued in one easy line along the depression marked by Lakes George

and Champlain. There is not upon all that march one transverse crest of

land to be defended nor one position capable of natural defence, and in

its whole extent water-carriage is available to an army save upon the

very narrow water-shed where (according to the amount and weight of

supplies) two—or at most three—days must be devoted to a land portage.

But even here, between the foot of Lake George and the Upper Hudson,

existed then what is rare even to-day in the New World, a road passable

to guns.

Under such conditions, even had the rebellion been universal and

homogeneous, the strategy imposed was evident. The sea was England’s;

the English forces had but to land in force, to occupy one or more of

the ports at the outlet of these ways leading to the valley of the St.

Lawrence, and simultaneously to march down from that valley to the sea.

They would thus cut the rebellion in half; the cut so made could easily

be permanently held, and the English henceforth could operate at their

choice and in increasing numbers from any point of the coast against

either section of a divided enemy.

I say this was the obvious plan even had the rebellion been homogeneous

or universal; but it was neither—and nowhere was it weaker or more

divided against itself than on this very line of cleavage. It was

precisely in the valley of the Hudson and at its mouth that the British

could count upon the greatest hesitation on the part of their opponents

and upon most support, sometimes ardent support, on the part of their

friends. New York was thoroughly in the Royal power, and the plan of

marching from the St. Lawrence down to that harbour seemed certain to

conclude the campaign. Leaving such garrison as New York required, Howe

sailed with 20,000 men in this opening of the summer of 1777 to attack

some one of the harbours; after a cruise of some hesitation he sailed up

the Delaware and landed to march on the rebel source of supply,

Philadelphia. At the same moment Burgoyne set out upon his march from

the St. Lawrence valley to the sea.

Each was easily successful. Washington, covering Philadelphia from a

position along the Brandywine, was completely defeated. Philadelphia was

in British hands before the close of September; an attempt at relief was

crushed in the suburbs within a week. As for Burgoyne, his force, though

it amounted to less than a division, was equally at ease. He swept

easily down Lake Champlain: the American irregulars abandoned the

isthmus and their positions near Ticonderoga, which were militarily

identical with that pass. He pursued the enemy to the extremity of the

water, and on southward up the valley, towards the water-shed, defeating

every rally and confident of immediate success.

It was but early in July, and he had already accomplished half his

route, and could boast the capture of over a hundred cannon—mainly of

French casting.

All had gone well. The news reaching London, reached Paris and Madrid by

the mouths of English Ministers and Envoys, whose tone was now of an

increasing firmness, and who, in the immediate prospect of success,

began to ask in plain terms how matters stood between France and Spain,

and whether these two Bourbon Crowns were prepared for open war.

Vergennes was in an agony of writing, of secrecy and of defence, urging

Spain to draw secretly close to France that both might stand ready for

the inevitable blow which England would deliver when the colonies were

once subdued.

What followed was Burgoyne’s woodland march of a few miles across the

portage from the lakes to the Hudson.

The cause of that march’s amazing delay, and of the disaster consequent

upon such delay, will never be fully explained; because, although not a

few acquainted with European roads and European discipline and arms are

also acquainted (as is the present writer) with the un-made country

traversed by that force, yet there was no contemporary who, by a full

double experience of American and European conditions, could present in

his account the American advantage in such a country at that time and

the corresponding difficulties of European troops. From Fort Anne, where

the last American force had been scattered, to Fort Edward, where the

Hudson is reached, is one day’s easy walking. It took Burgoyne’s army

twenty-one. I have neither space nor knowledge to say why: German

slowness (half the army was German), the painful construction of

causeways, officers (one may suppose) drinking in their tents, a vast

train, an excess of guns, a fancied leisure—all combined to protract the

delay. The month of July was at an end when the British reached the

river, and, having reached it, the men were on fatigue duty day after

day bringing in the guns and supplies that had come by water to the

extremity of Lake George.

In this way August was wasted, and an attempt to raid draught cattle a

few miles to the south-east at Bennington in Vermont was, in spite of

the active loyalty or treason of many colonists, defeated and

destroyed—a disaster due to the foreign character, the small number

employed, and the dilatory marching of the troops so detached. It was

mid-September before the army crossed the Hudson to its western bank,

where a small auxiliary force approaching from the Mohawk valley was to

have joined it. That force failed to effect a junction. All were

bewildered, and now a heavy rain began to soften the green ways and to

swallow the wheels of the guns. Burgoyne reached no further south than

to the site of a drawn struggle before the mouth of the Mohawk. And

already the American irregulars, on hearing of the British difficulties,

had gathered and grown in number; they were at last near double the

invading force, and September was ending. The woods were full of colour

as Burgoyne’s little army fell back—but a few miles, yet back; an

irresolution was upon it, because advance was no longer possible, and

yet a full retreat would mean the failure of all the large plan of

England. There was a rally, a success, a failure, and the loss of guns.

With October they were beneath the heights of Saratoga. Certain supplies

attempted to reach them by crossing the river; the far bank was found to

be held by the increasing forces of the rebellion.

It was determined to abandon the effort and to retire—at last, but too

late. The road to the lakes was blocked; more guns were lost; the enemy

were gathering and still gathering, a random farmer militia whom such an

entanglement tempted: they were soon four to one. An attempt at relief

by the force down river from New York had failed. On the 12th of

October, a Sabbath, the harassed army reposed. On the 13th, a Monday,

Burgoyne ordered an exact return of forces, forage, and supply; some

five thousand were to be found, but not four thousand men could stand to

roll-call armed; not two thousand of these were British; perhaps a

week’s supply remained; of all his park, thirty-five pieces alone were

left to him. He called a council, to which every officer above the rank

of lieutenant was summoned, and that afternoon the proposals to treat

were drawn up and despatched; by ten, Gates, in command of the American

force, had sent in his reply. Tuesday and Wednesday were taken up in the

terms of an honourable surrender—not exactly observed. On Thursday the

16th these terms were signed, and on that day, that repeated day the

16th of October, the keystone of the British plan in North America had

crumbled, and the strong arch of a wise strategy was ruined.

It was but a small force that surrendered in those lonely hills to a

herd of irregulars. The causes of the failure were many, tedious,

gradual, and therefore obscure; but the effect was solemn and of

swelling volume. It roused the colonies; it slowly echoed across the

Atlantic; it changed the face of Europe.

The French Court, at the moment of that surrender in the woods three

thousand miles away, sat at Fontainebleau decided upon pleasure.

Goltz, watching all things there for the King of Prussia his master,

wrote (on that very day, the 16th of October!) that the French had let

their moment slip: England was now secure, he thought—for one of the

great weaknesses of Prussia is that, like self-made men, she has no

instinct for fate.

Florida Blanca (upon the very day that Burgoyne’s troops piled arms) was

writing from Madrid to Vergennes that “the two Courts” (of France and

Spain) “should do all to avoid cause of complaint on the part of Great

Britain at such a time.”

Vergennes himself, gloomily alone amid the foolish noise of

Fontainebleau, in the sweat of late hours and gaming, thus abandoned by

Spain and seeing his hopes of a Spanish alliance going down, wrote (on

that same 16th of October, the day that Burgoyne’s troops piled arms!):

“The Ministers of England think her the mistress of the world.... My

patience has been hard tried ... true, the two (Bourbon) Crowns must go

warily.... I hope the constraint may end, but I have no wish for war....

I only ask that England shall not compel us to do what she dares not do

herself, that is, to treat these Americans as pirates and outlaws.”

In such a mood of despondence and of anxiety the French Foreign Office

awaited the first blow England might choose to deliver; in such a mood

of reluctance and fear Spain refused to declare herself on the side of

the French should England choose to strike; and in such a tension

Western Europe stood for one week, another, and a third, when, early in

November, came the first rumours of the truth. How they came it is

impossible to determine. They came before known or common methods could

have brought them; they came before true news, like a shadow or a

presage. On the 7th of November Vergennes had written to Noailles of a

hint of some English defeat, “not too much to be trusted.” On the 15th

he was wondering at the insistence of the English Ministers upon their

Pennsylvanian successes, at the English silence upon the Hudson march.

As the month wore on, as the English insistence grew gentler, the

English silence more profound, Vergennes determined his final policy;

but even as he was drawing up his memorandum in favour of recognition to

be granted to, and of alliance to be concluded with, the United States,

on the 4th of December, and before this document was signed, full news

came and all was known.[6] The 4th of December is a day propitious for

arms; it is the gunners’ festival.

Footnote 6:

It is important to remember that Vergennes’ report in favour of

recognising the United States was drawn up _before_, signed _after_,

the news of Saratoga had reached Versailles.

The issue was not long in doubt. Upon the 5th the story and consequence

of Saratoga were drawn up and despatched on every side. Upon the 6th the

fateful document calling the American delegates to an audience with

Louis was submitted to that King, and he wrote in his little sloping

hand at the foot of it that word “_approuvé_,” which you may still read.

Upon the 8th, Franklin at Passy drafted, Deane, Lee, and he also

_signed_, their memorable acceptance. The days that followed, to the end

of ’77 and beyond it, were occupied in nothing more than the

confirmation of this revolution in policy, and it was certain that by

the New Year the French Crown would support the Rebellion in arms.

* * * * *

Such were the three years in which the seeds of the Queen’s tragedy were

sown: they were sown deep. The stock of her disaster was established in

a vigorous soil; but during the silent period of its growth, before the

plant had come to its evil maturity, a few deceitful years were still to

hide from her the sequence of her fate. For the two glories of life were

upon her—victory and the birth of children.

In common with all her Court the Queen could now, in the hale winter of

’77-’78, imagine herself upon the threshold of a new and fruitful life.

Her chief anxiety was now dispelled, for she might await securely the

advent of an heir. Her vivacity and her distractions seemed now as

harmless as her habit of changing pleasures was now fixed; her casual

but active excursions into public affairs had now in her husband’s eyes

an excuse or motive they formerly had lacked, and her political

interference, though utterly without plan, was even destined to achieve

for a moment a peculiar, if deceptive, success.

This period of her life ends with a scene which the reader may well

retain, for it sums up the change; a scene which forms the happy

conclusion of so much unrest and the introduction to a brief, a most

uncertain, but—while it lasted—an enlarged and a conquering time.

The new year had come. The winter festivities of early ’78 were at their

height awaiting their end at the approaching carnival. It was the 21st

of January—a date thrice of great moment to the French people—and the

Queen was holding a ball (characteristically hers) in the palace. There

was a fuller life that evening, in the glare of a thousand candles, than

had yet been known, a more continuous and a more vivacious noise of

laughter and of music. Paris had come more largely than usual; there

were many strangers, and the air seemed full of an exultant

conciliation. Upon this joy and movement there fell a sudden silence; it

was a silence the Queen well comprehended and had expected too, for

Provence, coming straight from the Council, had entered the room and had

given her the message she awaited. The message was repeated, whispers

first, then louder and more eager questions and replies were everywhere

heard; voices rose louder: young Artois openly cheered.

The English ambassador had turned at the unusual scene and knew its

meaning; he despatched to his Government that night the news that the

Independence of the United States had been recognised and orders to the

French navy signed.

* * * * *

What followed may be briefly told. In somewhat over a fortnight the

treaty of recognition and of alliance with the new Republic was

concluded. The approaching affair with England began to equal, very soon

it wholly surpassed, in interest and peril the petty Bavarian quarrel,

and though war was not formally declared, French ships were in February

already attacked by English. In mid-March the treaty was notified by the

French ambassador in London to the Prime Minister of England;

forty-eight hours later Lord Stormont at Versailles had demanded and

received his papers. A month of preparation passed.

At last, upon Easter Sunday (the 19th of April in that year) two

couriers riding crossed each other at the royal gate of Versailles—the

one reaching, the other leaving, the palace. He that drew rein and was

ending his journey bore great news: D’Estaing had sailed from Toulon

with twenty ships of the fine, and the campaign was opened. He that set

spurs and was but just beginning his post bore great news also, for he

had upon him that letter (it is still preserved) in which Marie

Antoinette told her mother that now she was certainly with child.

------------------------------------------------------------------------