_THE WAR_
_From Saturday, June 25, 1791, to half-past eight on the evening
of June 20, 1792_
A MAN, callous or wearied by study, might still discover in the pursuit
of History one last delight: the presence in all its record of a
superhuman irony.
In Padua, where the Polignacs had taken refuge with their loot, the
Emperor Leopold, returning from Tuscany, was at that moment their host
and guest. With them and their circle he discussed the enormities of the
French and the approaching escape of his sister and the King; for he was
cognisant of their plan: he knew that since the death of Mirabeau the
idea of relying upon French arms against the Parliament had been
abandoned, and that an invasion by foreign allies was the scheme of the
Court.
Leopold certainly designed, when the first part of that scheme was
accomplished and the King was in safety on the frontier, to strengthen
the royal armies with his own and to advance upon the Revolution.
Varennes, I repeat, was everything. The King once free of Paris, and the
armies would have been over the frontier. The King a captive in Paris,
and compelled to pose as the acting and national Executive, war was
another matter. The French nation could act as one force.
So insecure and dilatory were the communications of the time that for a
whole fortnight nothing but guesses reached Padua. Upon the 2nd of July
these guesses urged Leopold to write; but at last upon the 5th, a
fortnight after the flight, came definite and official news. The King
had succeeded. He was safe in Metz with the army of Bouillé. The Queen
was safe beyond the frontier in Luxemburg.
Leopold sat down and wrote at once a sort of pæan, a cry of triumph and
of immediate action, and offered his treasury, his army, his everything
to his sister for the immediate march against the French people.
She, in Paris, watched and guarded every way, had found it possible to
write to Fersen two notes which, when he destroyed these many monuments
of her love for him, he copied with his own hand. Her main preoccupation
is that he should not return by stealth. She tells him he is discovered,
and that his part in the flight is known; she begs him to keep safe. But
it is probable or certain from one phrase in these notes that in the
bitter anger of the moment she desired to be rescued by a chivalry under
arms, and would appeal to war.
That determination in turn she abandoned, and from the month of August
onwards, until nine months later the armed struggle began, one plan,
lucid, and especially lucid when one considers that it proceeded from so
imperfect a judgment as hers, possessed her and was continually
expressed: she demanded an International Congress backed by arms, the
immediate threat of a vast but silent force, and no word of hostilities.
Nevertheless and largely, as we shall see, through her war came. It came
with the spring, and these few months after Varennes are but the lull
before the noise of the first guns.
I would here admit into the text of this book one of those discussions
which, in History of a living sort, should but rarely be admitted, and
belong rather to an appendix. I admit it because a conclusion upon it is
vital to any comprehension of the Queen and of the European position
which ended in the struggle between France and Europe.
No historical quarrel has been more warmly debated than this. Did the
old society, notably the Germanies, and at last all the privileged of
Europe, down to the very merchants of the city of London, attack the
Revolution to destroy it? Or did the Revolution break out in a flame
against them, and compel them to the action they took and to the
generation of war which ended in Waterloo?
In the current negation of morals the question has been thought by many
to lack reality. Yet such is the nature of man that if he cannot give a
human answer upon the matter of right and wrong, and a decision upon
_motive_, all his action turns to dust, and he can neither approve nor
disapprove any human act. Now when man can neither approve nor
disapprove, things cease to be, so far as his intelligence is concerned;
and without morals even his senses are dead. Therefore is it, and has it
always been, of supreme importance to every great conflict of History
that the one side or other should justify itself in motive. And
therefore has this discussion raged around the origins of the Great War.
There is one sense in which the debate can never be resolved. It can be
argued for ever as a metaphysical proposition, just as a man may argue
whether a spherical surface is concave or convex, and fall at last into
mere legomachy, so it may be eternally debated as to which of the two
combatants was legitimately defending his existence. It is evident that
both were in this position.
Again, there is a fruitless and eternal debate opened if we are to
consider separately every chief personality concerned. Did Brissot
really want war? Did Danton want it? Did the Emperor want it? Did Berlin
want it? Did Spain? Did the King, Louis? Did Dumouriez? The varying
ignorance of each character named, the varying intensity of the emotions
and necessities of each, the divergence of particular objects in each
individual case make such a synthesis impossible. But if one looks at
the field in general and considers the common action of men between the
return from Varennes and that April day when Louis was compelled to read
out the Declaration of War before the French Parliament, a true picture,
I think, arises in the mind, which—when, if ever, the Revolution ceases
to incline the judgment—will be the final judgment of History. It is as
follows:—
All desired war: all feared it. All attempted to postpone it. But, as
all energy of its nature polarises, these energetic hatreds and fears
gathered round two centres. The one in France had for its heart the
young men from the south and all their group, soon to be called the
“Girondins,” who, when the new Parliament gathered at the close of the
summer of Varennes, rapidly came to lead it. These men, Gallic in
temper, more and more desired to bring to the issue of arms sooner
rather than later what they thought must end—could not but end—in war.
Round this clear opinion, by the time winter had come, what was living
and active in France increasingly gathered. It is a phenomenon repeated
a hundred times in the history of the French people. We shall certainly
see an example of it in our own generation. The hand once upon the hilt
of the sword draws it.
Over against this current of opinion the Emperor (Marie Antoinette’s
brother), the King of Prussia, the English oligarchy, the Spanish
Bourbons also tended to war; their decision was not due to an increase
of determination—they were determined on the main question all along—but
to the gradual settlement of details long in negotiation between them.
These details settled, and the mutual suspicions and jealousies of the
Allies sufficiently though partially appeased, the privileged bodies of
Europe certainly marched against France, and to the Girondin crusade was
opposed something which was intended not to be resistance but rather a
rapid and successful act of police. The thing had got to end, and,
though the Powers only crossed the frontier in the succeeding summer,
all the Courts of Europe and all the privileged bodies of the old
Society were contented and glad that the fight was on. Nor were any more
contented than the governing class in England, who had helped to
engineer the campaign and who could not but reap the fruit of it, though
it was profoundly to their interest not to bring into the field the
insufficient armed forces at their command.
In the appreciation of this situation an element must be remembered
without which the modern student goes all astray. The Allies seemed
bound to win. We to-day, looking back upon those amazing twenty years,
forget that truth. Valmy, though still almost inexplicable, has
happened, and we take it for granted. The long straggling regiments of
Napoleon, the butchers’ boys turned generals, the vulgarian dukes and
marshals, the volunteer gunners and the rest of it, won; and their
victory is now part of the European mind. In that winter before the war
broke out, as ’91 turned into ’92, it was not so.
The elements obvious to every thinking man, especially to the cold and
therefore profoundly insufficient judgment of alien observers in Paris
itself (of such coxcombs as Gouverneur Morris, for instance), were
elements which made the final and rapid defeat of the Revolution
certain, and gave that approaching defeat all the qualities of what I
have called it, an act of police. The Allies might be jealous and
suspicious one of the other, but there can be no doubt once an accord
was come to—and it was reached in the early months of ’92—that against
the anarchy into which the French people had fallen, and the hopeless
indiscipline of their swollen armies, the operations of the invaders
would soon become but a series of executions and a summary and severe
suppression of armed mobs. The enthusiasm of the Girondins, and soon of
all France, was the enthusiasm of rhetoricians and that self-doubting
expectation of the impossible which is proper to inebriate moods. Nor
was there one commander of experience west of the Rhine who anticipated
victory for the French, nor one commander east of the Rhine who dreaded
the failure of the kings. It was mere sound—as poetry and music are mere
sound—that urged the French to war. And those who in theory combated the
policy of war, of whom Robespierre was the most remarkable, those who,
from their concrete experience, desired to fend it off (with the army in
such a state! with the military temper of the people so hopelessly
wild!)—that is, you may say, every general officer—foresaw at the best
some sort of compromise whereby the Revolution would end, after some few
battles lost, in some sort of Limited Monarchy. It was the appetite for
a Limited Monarchy which made so many acquiesce in such a campaign in
spite of the certainty of defeat. It was the fear that the great ideal
of the Revolution might tail off into a Limited Monarchy that made the
most ardent democrats oppose the policy of what could not but be a
disastrous war.
[Illustration:
FACSIMILE OF THE FIRST PAGE OF THE LETTER WRITTEN ON THE 3RD
SEPTEMBER, 1791, BY MARIE ANTOINETTE TO THE EMPEROR,
HER BROTHER, PROPOSING ARMED INTERVENTION
]
Meanwhile, during the earlier months of this development, the French
nobles who had crossed the frontier (the Émigrés), and notably the
brothers of the King, were an element of peril to either side, lest, a
small and irresponsible body, they should provoke hostilities before
either side demanded them. The Émigrés were active because they had
nothing to lose, and careless of the moment because for them negotiation
was unnecessary. To restrain this activity was the chief anxiety of the
great interests which were slowly coalescing into that invincible
instrument of war whose mission it was to restore order under the King
of Prussia and the Duke of Brunswick. As the months proceed, as the
coalition forms, this disturbing element is of less and less importance.
In the early summer of ’92, when war is once declared, the Émigrés fall
into line with the rest of the Allies; and when the invading army
crosses the frontier, the Émigrés cross with it in the natural course of
things and merge in the advancing flood.
* * * * *
Such was the general development of the European situation between the
month of July 1791 and the month of April 1792.
What, during that period, was the particular disposition of the Queen?
She was very active. She had determined upon a lucid plan, and of all
the brains that were thinking out how and when, if ever, the struggle
should come, hers was perhaps the most tenacious of its purpose.
We have a dozen letters of hers between the return from Varennes and the
end of the year. One of great length, written to her brother in
September, is accompanied by a memorandum and exactly details her plan.
With the exception of two which were written, as a blind, for
publication, and which in a private note she ridicules and disowns,
every word she writes is consistent with her thesis. She proposes again
that the International Congress should be called. In her later letters
she begs that it may be called near the frontier, as, for instance, at
Cologne. Before it is summoned, and during its session, there must be
gathered an overwhelming military force ready to invade at once. But not
a syllable must be breathed that could be taken as menace. In this plan
Marie Antoinette was considering the personal safety of her husband and
her child; and the whole theory of the action she advised pivoted upon a
certain conception of the French people which was now so fixed in her
mind that nothing could dissolve it; her theory was the French were not
a military people; that they spent energy in words, and that before a
plain evidence of force they would always give way; she carried that
theory of hers, little as it later accorded with the brute facts of
actual war, unmodified to the scaffold.
I have repeatedly insisted in this book upon the inability of Marie
Antoinette to perceive the French mind. As a young woman her
misconception of her husband’s people dealt with no more than
personalities, ladies’ maids, duchesses, and the rest. When Gaul moved,
and when she began her attempt at power in 1787, along through the
communal millioned action of the Revolution, this misconception became a
strong creed, a vision, as it were. She saw the French people intensely
active, cruel, cowardly, and unstable: much in them of the cat and the
fox, nothing of the eagle. She perceived their great mobs and their
sudden united actions—but these phenomena were to her sporadic; she saw
them—she did not reason upon them nor argue from them some peculiar
regimental talent in the populace; and if you had told her that these
appearances of marching thousands were due to a power of organisation
from below—a national aptitude for the machinery necessary to arms and
to diplomacy—the words would have seemed to her simply meaningless. She
could not so much as conceive humanity to be capable of organisation
save by the direct action of a few placed above it.
Of military qualities she understood nothing. She confused order,
silence, and similarity of buttons with discipline. She had no
conception of ferocity as the raw material of valour. Safe out of Paris
she would without a moment’s hesitation have ordered the invasion, and
she would have expected its successful issue in less than six weeks.
Even in Paris she would have bargained to conquer with a “whiff of
grape-shot” or some such rubbish; but in Paris, without one regiment to
hand _and without regular artillery_, she felt that the very bodies of
her family were in peril from “monsters and from tigers”—the words are
her own: hence only did she hesitate and demand an armed congress rather
than an invasion. To that armed congress and its menace she had no doubt
at all that the French would yield.
A metaphor will explain the situation clearly. A human being, caught by
some fierce animal but not yet mauled, appeals in a whisper to a comrade
near by to load, and, if possible, by some demonstration of human force
and of intelligent will to make the wild beast loose its hold; he begs
that comrade to do nothing merely provocative lest the animal should
rend him upon whom it has pounced: but, of course, that comrade is to
fire at the first active gesture of attack the brute may deliver. Of the
ultimate victory of his armed comrade the man in peril feels there can
be no doubt at all; he only advises a particular caution on account of
his own situation and impotence.
Moreover, she was convinced, and says it in so many words, that the
French would give way at once before the presence of a great and silent
but determined force upon their frontier.
So clear is the plan in her mind that she is bitterly impatient of the
necessary caution and delay of diplomacy, and of the long process of
negotiation whereby Berlin is brought into the agreement, the
tergiversations of Madrid are discounted and the exact balance between
desire for war and power to wage it are sounded. Here and there the
peevishness of her early womanhood appears in the complaints she makes,
almost as though she had been abandoned by her brother and his armies.
At last, in February 1792, this long correspondence is ended. The French
nation has, upon the whole, accepted, its young rhetoricians have
enthusiastically acclaimed, the approach of war. She, true to her plan,
proposes that her brother shall meet this growing enthusiasm by positive
demands, definitely formulated, dealing with the internal affairs of the
French people, proceeding from Vienna and demanding instant reply. We
now know that she herself drafted these demands, and on the 16th of
February Mercy writes to tell her that the Emperor will order the French
Parliament to maintain the French Monarchy in its full rights and
liberty, to withdraw the French armies from the frontier, to respect the
imperial rights of the Alsatian feudatories; and that he will at once
back up this ultimatum with an additional force, beyond that already
gathering, of 40,000 men. She acknowledges the plan and confirms it. A
fortnight later, upon the 1st of March, Mercy can give her the last
great news: Prussia has formally consented to move, though demanding, of
course, from the French Monarchy after its victory compensation for the
cost of the campaign—which will surely be willingly accorded.
It was on the 1st of March, I say, that this final news was written,
when, as so continually chances throughout Marie Antoinette’s life, a
special fate appears and intervenes.
On the 1st of March the King of Prussia has agreed to march with
Leopold, and all is ready for that armed demonstration which would, as
she was convinced, calm this great storm about her. On that same day,
the 1st of March, Leopold lay dead. Doctors assure us that he was not
poisoned.
Two things followed upon that death: first, the heir, her nephew, a
sickly boy of twenty-four, now held in Vienna all the power that in
those days accompanied a Crown, and he in his weakness was now the
master of the armies his father had summoned.
Secondly, there must be a long delay for the business and the trapping
of his election and his crowning.
Her plan meanwhile had failed. It was to be not a silent threat of arms,
but war. The French temper had taken Leopold’s command as a challenge.
The ultimatum she had suggested or drafted was met by a total change in
the Executive of France. Dumouriez was made the chief man in the new
Ministry and was put personally in charge of Foreign Affairs. The guns
were certainly ready. For ten days after Dumouriez’ nomination the Queen
drew from him his designs; and on the tenth day wrote secretly to Mercy
in cipher betraying the French plan of campaign upon the Meuse. Three
days later the last of her friends who could command an army, the King
of Sweden, stabbed a fortnight earlier, died; and on the 20th of April
her husband, as “the Head of the French Executive,” read out in a firm
voice a declaration of war against her nephew “the King of Hungary”—for
he was not yet crowned Emperor. Having so read it in a firm voice he
went back home, and Marie Antoinette and he must now bethink themselves
how the madness of the Parisians, when the invasion should begin, might
be fended off—at least from their own persons and from their heir, until
their saviours should show the white Austrian uniforms in Paris and
march the grotesque Prussian march within sight and hearing of the
Tuileries. On the 30th of the month she advised Mercy that the first
proclamation of the invaders had best be mild.
* * * * *
Such had been the plan of the Queen, and such its fortune; and by such a
fate had she been shadowed. For the sake of clarity I have omitted
during this recital all save her negotiation. I will briefly return to
the drift of the Revolutionary progress around her, and show how this
also led up to that fatal conclusion, from the failure of the flight to
Varennes at the end of June 1791 to the declaration of war in the
following April.
* * * * *
When spirits are at high tension and in full vision, as it were, often a
shock brings back the old, sober, and incomplete experience of living.
Such a shock the flight to Varennes had afforded. While the royal family
were yet absent there had been talk against the very institution of the
Crown; some rich men had spoken of the Republic; the Revolutionary
exultation ran very high. The flight was arrested: the royal family were
brought back, and in a sort of mechanical, unconscious way reaction
gathered force; after all (the politicians thought) the nation must not
lose, could not afford to lose, might lose its very soul in losing, the
web of inheritance which had come to it from so many centuries.
This force of reaction exploded when, during the Feasts of the
Federation, three weeks after the return of the royal family, a popular
outbreak upon the Champ de Mars was repressed by the declaration of
martial law, the use of the Militia under La Fayette, and the authority
of the Mayor of Paris.
The Revolution, going the way we know it did, the hatreds, the threats
of vengeance covertly growing from that day (which the poor and their
champions had already christened among themselves the “Massacre of the
Champ de Mars”), take on a great importance; but to the people of the
time the tumult and its armed repression did not seem of any great
consequence save as the beginning of quieter things. The end of the
summer was principally occupied in some speculation as to what the new
Parliament would do when it should be convened in the autumn. That
Parliament was restricted in power: the National Assembly which had made
the Revolution was to be dissolved. This second body was to do no more
than elaborate the details of laws; it was called, and remains to
history, “The Legislative.”
By an ironical accident, this very Parliament of one year, from which
the great and by this time well-known leaders of the early Revolutionary
movement were specifically excluded (for no man might sit in it who had
sat in the National Assembly), had thrust upon it the duty or the burden
of the Great War. Such was the Revolutionary time and air, that from
anywhere genius sprang; and through these men of the Legislative—so many
of them young, nearly all of them unknown, chosen only to sit in an
ephemeral assembly for a year—there blew such inspiration as Plato
thought to blow through poets, but which, in times of social creation,
blows through rhetoricians too, Chief among these was the group of men
from the South who were later called the Gironde. It was their business
to demand and to withstand the first assault of Europe, and indeed
before the Parliament met at all, it was certain that the assault would
come, for in the August of 1791, in the midst of the reaction which
overshadowed Paris, and while the principal leaders of the Revolution
were exiled or in hiding, there was drawn up that compact between the
German monarchs which is called the Declaration of Pillnitz.
This document has too often been put forward as an example of the
hesitation and moderation of the Kings. Such a view of it is an academic
reaction from the old, popular, and vague but in the main just
conception that privilege made deliberate war upon the Revolution: a
conception which often took Pillnitz for the inception of that
counter-crusade.
The matter can be presented quite simply to the reader. The Emperor,
Marie Antoinette’s brother, whom we have seen so eager, had the flight
to Varennes succeeded, to move his armies at once, combined at Pillnitz
with the King of Prussia in an appeal to all monarchical governments
that they should use such strength as might give back to the King of
France his old arbitrary power, and re-establish him therein. The two
allies swear publicly that they will use all necessary force, when such
an appeal bears fruit, to support this universal assault upon the French
people, and meanwhile they will direct their troops to the best striking
points from which the military action of that people may be paralysed.
There is the Declaration of Pillnitz in a few words; and while one
partisan may insist upon its caution or nullity, another upon its
insolence and provocation, all must agree who read history quietly and
without a brief, that it was a violent and public declaration of hostile
intention as it was also the first definite public act from which
hostilities sprang.
The Parliament met in September. Its proposed secondary value soon
proved to be primary; the splendid definition, rapidity and precision of
the National Assembly was well reflected among these younger and less
tried men: but much more powerful than Parliament was the growing
exaltation of the populace.
_That_ had many roots: the oblivion of the French (after forty years) of
what war might mean, the impatient passion for _any_ solution which all
feel during a moment of strain, most of all the moral certitude (and how
well founded!) that if the enemy delayed they delayed only for their own
purpose, and that war must certainly come—all these pressed to the final
issue: the noise of the cataract could already be heard.
As to the acceptation of the Constitution by the royal family, their
reluctance, the Queen’s anger, it but little concerns the story of her
fate. At bottom she and Louis also were willing enough by this time to
sign anything and to swear anything. The war must come, and the war
would solve all. The Queen herself, who was now, as I have shown, in the
thick of the intrigue, put it simply enough to the man she most loved,
to Fersen, in a note that has been preserved and which she wrote before
the end of September. “It would have been more noble to refuse (the
Constitution) ... it is essential to accept (it), in order to destroy
any suspicion that we are not acting in good faith.”
So far as concerns that unhappy and devoted life, one incident deserves
a very special mention. Twice in the autumn there had been talk of yet
another flight: the plan was not impossible, but it had been dropped,
partly because the King might have had to fly alone, partly because the
Queen was confident that a show of strength and a vigorous menace upon
the frontier would be enough to change all. In the new year the proposal
for their escape took on a more serious form, and Fersen reappeared for
the last time, and for the last time saw the Queen.
It was upon Saturday morning, the 11th of February 1792, that he started
upon that perilous journey, and it was his business to discuss in detail
and by word of mouth whether escape were still possible. Upon Monday,
the 13th, at evening, he passed the barrier of Paris. He saw the Queen
before he slept, and next day at midnight spoke secretly to her and to
her husband together. He carefully noted before them the routes that
might be followed: the method of escape: perhaps (as had appeared in
several plans) the string of forests that runs up from Paris
north-eastward toward the marches of Flanders.
The King and the Queen wasted no little time in that midnight hurried
parley in reproaches against the ingratitude of all and in bewailing
their isolation. The next day Fersen left with nothing done. He returned
indeed to Paris four days later, but he dared not enter the palace. The
whole thing was futile and every plan had broken down.
He never saw her again.
A fortnight later he wrote his King in Sweden, detailing all that they
had told him.
Before he could reply or act, the King of Sweden had been shot in a
masked ball at Stockholm, and some days later, as the reader knows, he
had died.
* * * * *
The Declaration of War had not only broken the original plan of the
Queen; it had changed from a general and partly passive to a particular
and active terror the life of Paris around her. Nothing had yet appeared
to show as a reality what all knew in theory, the extreme peril of the
nation, the military certitude inspiring the Allies, the despair
increasing among what was left of the French Regulars. There had indeed
been desertions immediately following the declaration of war, especially
desertions of the German mercenaries, in bulk. A skirmish, or rather a
panic upon the frontier, had also given evidence of the rot in the
jumble of armed men whom the Revolution could summon. The first tiny
action—it was hardly an action at all—had seen mutinies and the massacre
of officers. Paris once more rose and fermented, and there was a surging
around the walls of the palace. The enemy had not yet crossed the
frontier; but in the short breathing space before he should appear, and
while the royal family were holding a fortress, as it were, for their
own security until that enemy should arrive, Parliament put as a sort of
ultimatum to the King a demand for the execution of two decrees: one
against the Clergy who would not subscribe to the Civic Oath; a second
in favour of the formation of a camp of 20,000 volunteers under the
walls of Paris.
The error of uniting in one requisition two such diverse pleas only
posterity can recognise. For the men of the time there was a plain link
between either demand, for the recalcitrant Clergy seemed to them
nothing more than anti-nationalists, and it seemed to them that nothing
but an anti-national desire for the occupation of Paris by the foreigner
could make the King hesitate to permit the formation of the camp of
volunteers.
It was upon the 19th of June that the King published his veto against
both these bills or projects of the Parliament, behind which lay the
violent opinion of active Paris.[24]
Footnote 24:
And what was more significative, the whole of the little wealthy
reactionary minority was opposed to the projects, and signed a
petition in proof of its opposition.
What follows is well known. Paris rose, and rising poured into the
palace. It was the 20th of June: the anniversary of the flight: the
summer solstice fatal to the Bourbons.
It has been said that the rising was artificial and arranged. The same
nonsense is talked of the St. Bartholomew. No one who has seen such
things can believe them artificial. They are corporate things. There was
little violence, though there were many arms among those thousands upon
thousands; and as they poured through the rooms, which opened one into
the other like a gallery, they were not much more (save for their rough
clothes and their arms) than the same populace which had demanded for
generation after generation, and had obtained, the right to see, to
visit, to touch their public King.
The Court had forgotten the popular conception of the Monarchy; but the
populace necessarily preserves a longer memory than the rich. The thing
was a menace, upon the whole not ill-humoured: a violent recollection
that the King was the servant of the common weal, and its symbol,
something to be handled, met, and perhaps ordered. The mob, in whom
atheists can see no more than a number of poor men, cried out its
significant cries, against “Mr. and Mrs. Veto,” making a popular jest of
this public power. But in those moments when one jest perhaps might have
put the King at the head of popular emotion again, he and his wife
remained no more than what the decline of the Monarchy had made them;
individuals in peril, and courageous; not the Nation incarnate.
If any Angel had for its function the preservation of the French Crown
and Nation, that Angel, watching such a gulf between the people and the
Monarchy, must have despaired of the latter’s hope and of the former’s
survival: nevertheless, despite that divorce, the French people after
grievous wounds have survived.
* * * * *
The last group which that roaring torrent of the rabble saw was the
Queen and her children, her friends, especially Madame de Lamballe and
the governess, the Duchess of Tourzel, a soldier or two, a minister and
one or two others, crowded in the recess of a window behind a great
table which had been pushed into the embrasure to defend them. The
little heir to that Monarchy which had failed to understand sat on the
table, very much afraid, and the Queen put on his head with loathing the
red cap of liberty which the mob demanded. The day was sweating with
heat, the cap was thick and dirty, and Santerre, who was there, passing
them forward by bands in front of the table, a popular leader of the
crowd, seems to have ordered that it should be removed. It was already
nearly dark; it was half-past eight before that violent but not tragic
tumult had subsided, and before the last of the street people went back
out of the palace, which they thought rightly a public thing, on to the
public paving which at least was still certainly theirs.
Outside, during all that night, all the talk was of the war.
When would the invaders cross the frontier and when would the first
shock come?
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