_THE FALL OF THE PALACE_
_From half-past eight in the evening of the 20th June 1792 to eight in
the morning of the 10th August 1792_
THE noisy, good-natured, and very dangerous mob had gone at last; their
final stragglers, gazing, curious and tired, at the pictures and the
gilding (the trappings of their Public King in his great Public Palace),
had wandered out. A few steps on the wide stone stairs of the central
pavilion were still heard lazily descending. The dishevelled family was
at rest.
A little group of Deputies remained behind, and talked in low and
careful voices to the King and Queen—principally to the Queen, for she
was voluble. She was suave, though somewhat garrulously suave. “Would
not some of these gentlemen come and see her put the Dauphin to bed?” A
familiar appeal made by the very wealthy to the middle class rarely
fails. They followed respectfully and a little awkwardly to where, in a
small bed out of her room, the child slept. She had him ready for bed in
a few moments; then she said to him, smiling:
“Tell the gentlemen you love the Nation, darling.”
The drowsy child repeated mechanically, “I love the Nation.”
The Middle Class were enchanted. She laid him down, doubtless with every
maternal charm; she turned to go before them, certainly with an
exaggeration of that excessive carriage which had delighted so many
foreigners and dependants for now twenty years and had done much to lose
her the respect of her French equals at the Court. The select committee
of the Middle Class came after.
“See what damage they have done: look at these doors!”
The Deputies stooped solemnly to examine the broken panels and the
hinges torn from their screws, the oak splinters showing dark against
the white paint and the gold. They admitted serious damage—they
regretted it.
“Who is the proper authority to take note of this?”
They looked at one another; then one of them, remembering the
Constitution, Liberty and the rest of it, said:
“Nowadays the proper authority before which to bring such misdemeanours
is a Justice of the Peace.”
“Very well, then,” she replied sharply, “send for one.”
A servant was despatched and returned with a Justice of the Peace. He
gravely took written note of all:
“_Item_: the lower left panel broken;
“_Item_: the upper left panel cracked;
“_Item_: the lower right hinge of the door torn off, and the post
splintered.”
All was done in order, and they returned to find the King. The King was
annoyed. They noticed him grumbling and moving his lips and teeth. He
was even a little excited, but his training in names and faces, which is
the one acquired talent of high functionaries, served him well. He spoke
with authority, knowing each of them and addressing them in turn, and
after speaking of the mob he particularly complained that roughs climbed
the palings of the Tuileries gardens and disturbed his privacy. The
Queen interrupted from time to time to reproach them. “Why had they not
prevented the procession of the mob through the palace? Why, at least,
had they not given warning? The Department had done its duty! Why not
they?” The King continued in another tone, till, at last, some of them
coming nearer home asked him for news of the armies. His dignity as the
Executive (which he still was) forbade him any full replies: he had good
news, very good news ... he could tell them no more.
They suspected [we _know_] that there was no news at all ... only a few
packed, ill-ordered garrisons awaiting the attack; a long line in the
field all the way from Belfort to the sea, numbering but 80,000 men, and
half of that an ill-clothed helter-skelter of broken companies: divided
counsel, no plan, and, a few marches East, that slow concentration of
the Allies upon Coblenz which now drew to its close.
So the Deputies left them: the sky was still full of light on this
shortest night of the year, and Paris after the uproar of that
bacchanalian Wednesday, the 20th of June, was silent.
* * * * *
Meanwhile the South had risen.
On that same Wednesday evening messengers from Montpellier had reached
Marseilles; on Friday they were feasted, and when the banquet was over,
one of the Montpellier men, Mireur, with a voice of bronze, rose to sing
them a new song. It had come from the frontier, he said; as for the air,
he did not know whence it was, but he thought (wrongly) from the opera
“Sargines.” He sang it, and the men that gathered outside the open
windows to hear upon that summer evening, the guests within, and soon
all the city, were swept by the MARSEILLAISE.
The next day the Municipality of Marseilles met, determined upon
spontaneous action in company with all the South: they decreed the
raising of a volunteer battalion in spite of the Crown; the next, the
Sunday, when all were abroad and could read, the walls were placarded
with the appeal to join. Monday and Tuesday the names poured in: a
committee was chosen to pick only the best in character and health. Its
work was at once accomplished; within twenty-four hours five hundred had
been so chosen out of the throng of volunteers; within forty-eight they
had been enrolled, drilled for hours, and separated by companies under
officers of their choice. Three days of rapid organisation and continued
drilling followed: the route was traced, a time-table drawn up, the
expenses estimated and provided. A section of guns (harnessed to men)
with its caisson was drafted; the stores and baggage were concentrated
too. Upon Monday, the 2nd of July, at nightfall, a week after the first
appeal, through a crowd of all the city that pressed on every side, they
marched out by the northern gate of Marseilles singing their song. Next
morning, just as the arid eastern hills began to show against the
beginnings of the dawn, they entered Aix, and had accomplished the first
stage of their advance. “The Executive”—that is, the Crown—had warned
every authority to disperse them and all such others, but the wind on
Paris was from the South, and they and their song could not be hindered.
* * * * *
Meanwhile, in the German town of Frankfort, there hummed a continually
increasing crowd: the Emperor was to be crowned. Here, therefore, were
all those who had a business with Austria, and here was, among others, a
Swiss Huguenot, Mallet du Pan, upon whom more than upon any other in
that town the King of France and the Queen in her extremity depended. He
was a journalist, very keen about accounts and probity in small money
matters, of the bourgeoisie, sedate and perpetually attempting to
understand the French people, now from this side, now from that: they
interested him hugely. His work, however, was not to pursue this
fascinating study, but to save the persons of the Royal Family which he
served: in this task he showed that same discipline and devotion which
his compatriots were later to show under arms. He bore as his chief
principles, as his last instructions, two orders: one order to keep the
farce of the war going, and never to let it be hinted publicly or
breathed that there was collusion between those who sent him and the
invading Austrian power. The other order was this: to produce a
manifesto to be signed from the camp of the invading army, and to
strike, as it was hoped, blind terror into the leaders of the National
movement: the time had come (so it was imagined at the Tuileries) to
threaten the worst and so tame Paris.
He took his journey (but was scrupulous to give an exact account), left
his family in Paris, passed through Geneva, his home, and now, by the
end of June, was here at Frankfort.
He had chosen his centre well, for upon Frankfort converged all news,
and from Frankfort went out all orders: orders to Coblenz whence the
armies were to march to the relief of the Tuileries; news from Brussels,
which was of the first moment, for here Mercy-d’Argenteau, the expert
upon France, was ready every day to advise; here was the danger of
attack from France most felt, and here, most central of all, was Fersen.
Fersen heard regularly from Paris, wrote as regularly. Since the death
of the King of Sweden his official position had been less, but those
whose business it was to discover truth, the diplomats, knew that the
last and most intimate thought of the Royal Family was to be reached
through that channel alone. Austria and Prussia, Frankfort that is,
hardly acted upon his advice as to war (and in his diary he bitterly
reproaches them for their neglect), but they sucked his knowledge—and
to-day it is through him that we know, somewhat late, the principal
truths upon those last few weeks of the French Monarchy.
What did the Court of the Tuileries demand, and what will was behind it
in so demanding?
Mallet du Pan was there at Frankfort with no credentials but a sheet of
note-paper, and written on the top of it in Louis’ hand two lines of
writing unsigned; “_The person who shall present this note knows my
intentions; entire confidence may be put in what he says._” What
instructions had he?
Fersen was stationed at Brussels with an organised letter-service
between the Tuileries and himself, written in secret ink, full,
confidential and direct. All that he told Mercy or another went to
Frankfort. What message was thus continually conveyed?
The demand from the Tuileries was an urgent demand for immediate
invasion, and fore-running it, a drastic proclamation from the armed
force at Coblenz: the wall which inspired that demand was the will of
Marie Antoinette.
A man in flight could cover the distance from Paris to Brussels in two
days; an urgent runner in three. Normally the courier with his post-bag
arrived on the morning of the fourth day. From Brussels to Frankfort
worse roads, varying frontiers, and the German lethargy between them
compelled news to a delay of close upon a week.
The ferment in Paris was rising; the Federals of the South were on their
second day’s march northward when, in the middle of the first week of
July, the Queen, whose policy, or rather passion, could bear no more
delay, wrote to Mercy and to Fersen separately two letters of great
weight. These letters have never yet been given their due. The student
should note them closely if he is to understand all that followed.
The originals have, perhaps, not come down to us, but either man, Fersen
and Mercy, noted their intents, and thus we know them.
These letters Lasserez brought into Brussels, riding, on the morning of
Sunday, the 8th of July, and on the next day Mercy and Fersen, meeting,
consulted on their purport. The Queen, with whom the project of such an
engine was familiar, now definitely demanded a separate and nominal
threat against the town of Paris, and a menace that the whole city
should be held hostage by the invading German armies against the safety
of her husband, herself and her child. This clause her judgment of the
French character assured her to be efficacious; this clause she insisted
should be added to the Manifesto which was even now preparing.
It was upon July the 9th, I say, that the two men met and consulted upon
the Queen’s orders: that day they sent off command or counsel to the
Rhine.
On the 14th, while, in that same Paris, Louis was once more swearing to
the Constitution upon the Champ de Mars, while hour for hour, far off on
the Rhone, a priest receiving the Marseillaise Battalion was adding his
famous verse “of the children”[25] to their famous hymn, in Frankfort
the last of the Emperors was receiving with incredible magnificence the
Crown of the Empire. The note inspired by Marie Antoinette was at the
gates of his town.
Footnote 25:
“Nous entrerons dans la Carrière, &c.,” the best verse and the only
poetry of the lot.
It entered: Mallet saw it. “Paris is to be destroyed by fire and the
sword if the Royal Family are harmed”: it was approved. From Frankfort
it went back as a new clause to Coblenz; there it was incorporated in
the Manifesto and signed. Immediately, the ink barely dry, it was
published (upon the 25th of July) to the world, above the signature of
the Duke of Brunswick and in the name of that perfect and mechanical
army which Prussia in especial could move with the precision of a
physical law upon the capital that phrase had doomed.
This was the origin of that famous Clause VIII. which ordered, if the
Tuileries were forced, nay, if submission to the Royal Family was not at
once made, that Prussia and Austria would take “an unforgettable
vengeance,” that Paris should be given up “to military execution and
subversion, and the guilty rebels to the death they deserve.”
Such was Marie Antoinette’s one piece of formulated policy—the first in
which she had been able to act as clearly as she saw; it was also her
last interference in political affairs. It had been lit by her hand,
this match that fired the hesitating war; it had run its train through
Brussels to Frankfort and back to Coblenz, lingering in no one place for
a full day: now it had touched powder. Three days later the Manifesto
was spoken of in Chalons; secret copies were in print; the King in Paris
had received it.
All Paris knew it, though not yet officially, when upon the evening of
Sunday, the 29th of July, the dusty 500 of Marseilles with their guns,
crossing the bridge at Charenton, saw the distant towers of Notre Dame
above the roofs of Paris and reached their goal.
Let soldiers consider the nature of this exploit, and politicians
consider what that civilisation is whose comprehension I have shown
throughout these pages to have so vainly fatigued so many Aliens.
The French of Marseilles had trained for but three days. They had left
the Mediterranean in the height of a torrid summer; their organisation
was self-made, their officers self-chosen, their discipline
self-imposed. They had covered 500 miles of route, dragging their
cannons, at the rate of precisely eighteen miles a day; they planked
across the bridge at this the end of their advance, solidly, in
formation, still singing their song, and at the roll-call every name was
answered.... Their small numbers have made them appear to some
historians insignificant (or a legend), to others a symbol rather of the
military power in the populace which was to sack the palace than the
attack itself, but they were more; they were, as tradition justly
represents them, the framework of the force that decided the critical
day of the Revolution, as their song was its soul.
They marched in next morning by the St. Antoine Gate, with their drums
and colours before them, the crowds of the suburbs blackening the site
on which the Bastille had stood; and half Paris, as it were, going out
to meet them. They passed over to the Island, formed at the Mairie where
Pétion the Mayor greeted them; re-crossed the river (followed by the
crowd) and took their places in the barracks assigned to them, upon a
corner of what is now the Boulevard des Italiens; from that evening the
struggle between the City and the Monarchy had begun, and the few days’
delay that was to follow was but a manœuvring for position on either
side, that of the populace and of the Tuileries.
This last had now for long been steadily arming and was already strong.
The King, the executive, held the arsenals, the regular army, and a good
half, even, of the autonomous Militia. What was of more importance, the
Crown and its advisers could rely not only upon the machinery but upon
the devotion of the one well-disciplined corps which had not gone to the
front: the Body-Guard. These excellent mercenaries, nearly all Swiss by
birth and nearly all ignorant of the French language, were precisely
such material, human for courage and mechanical for obedience, as should
overcome almost any proportion of civilians—especially such as might be
spoilt by playing at soldiers. A recent law passed by the Legislative
Assembly forbade their presence in Paris. The “Executive” parried such
mere word of the “Legislative” by posting them in suburbs between which
and the palace were only woods and fields. When danger was imminent, in
the last hours of the truce, they were marched in and occupied the
Tuileries, law or no law.
Two objections to the strength of the King’s position against the
populace are urged (Napoleon, no mean judge and an eye-witness, thought
it the stronger, and _his_ estimate of the King’s forces brings them to
about 6000 men); these are, first, that no building can be held in the
face of artillery, for the popular force had guns; secondly, that it was
but defensive, and that the assault, though repulsed, might return. The
first of these is based upon a misconception of the terrain and supply,
the second upon a general ignorance of arms.
For the first: there was no position whence artillery, even were it
available in time, could be used against the long walls of the palace
save by passing through narrow streets easy for infantry to defend, and
as a fact the guns were not available to the populace either in
sufficient amount or (what is of more importance) with sufficient
training and supply. Guns, popularly manned and ill supplied, emplaced
in the labyrinth which flanked the palace could be captured (and in fact
were captured) by the trained infantry defending it. The short range
alone would make certain the destruction of their teams by sharpshooting
from the upper windows.
[Illustration:
EAST FRONT OF THE TUILERIES, (THE SIDE ATTACKED BY THE MOB)
IN ITS LAST STATE BEFORE THE COMMUNE OF 1871,
AFTER THE CLEARING AWAY OF THE STREETS AND HOUSES IN FRONT OF IT
]
The second objection—a reply to which shows how considerable were the
King’s stake and chances—is met by the military consideration that
nothing more needs a special organisation and training than a successful
rally. An assault, if it is of any consequence, must be pressed hard; if
it is fully repulsed, its head and energy are crushed at their highest
vigour; the defeat is more crushing than that of a defensive which
retires in time. This is generally true of soldiers in the field; it is
always true of civilians. The doubts and defections that accompany a
civil war, the conversion of the great body of cowards and the still
larger majority of indifferent men, the claims of regular domestic life,
the absence of a commissariat, the near presence of women and children,
the contrast which the return of quiet after the blow presents to the
pain and terror of a renewed struggle, make it, as it were, impossible
for a defeated mob to return, after an interval, against the regular
force which has repelled it; moreover, the regulars, once victorious,
can pursue, scatter, and destroy the unorganised mass, while its leaders
are arrested and judged; nor is there an example in history of a popular
rising which, when it has once broken against the defence of a regular
force, has not been broken for good.
The strategy of the Court was therefore sound, their calculation of
victory was reasonable, and their chances were of the best when the
defence of the palace was organised in these first days of August. It
was calculated that the populace even with artillery could do little
against the palace; that the trained men would crush the mob once and
for all. Had that defence succeeded, the advent of the foreigner,
perhaps allied with one of the royal armies, was secure. That the
defence of the palace failed was due partly to the lack of homogeneity
in its garrison, more to a lack of united leadership, but most of all to
the unexpected, incalculable and hitherto unequalled tenacity and
determination of the insurgents.
With every day the tension increased. The Federation delegates, who had
come from all over France to the Feast of the 14th of July, many of whom
lingered in the city, clashed in the streets with courtiers, and with
those who, whether by temperament or service, were still supporters of
the Crown.
Just when the Marseillais were entering Paris, Brunswick had broken camp
and the march of the Allies into France had begun. Less than a hundred
miles of flat road along the Moselle valley separated Brunswick from the
outposts of the defence: Paris itself was hardly further from him than
is York from London. Rapidity would put the first garrison of the
frontier into his hands within a week, and even the tardiness which the
Prussian calculation and the Prussian confidence involve could hardly
(it was thought) delay for a fortnight the news that the frontier was
passed.
In the passionate quarrel the enemy’s character of invader was
forgotten. Not only to the Court but to many who could now remember
nothing but the ancient tradition of the Monarchy, the enemy seemed a
saviour. Bands parading the pavement by night threatened their
fellow-citizens with Brunswick, songs threatening vengeance against the
revolutionaries were heard abroad after carousals, and a continuous
series of petty street-fights, increasing in gravity, enlivened the
attention of either side.
Hardly were the Marseillais in Paris, for instance, when, that same
evening of their arrival, after a banquet, a violent quarrel between
them and a body of armed royalists had broken out. They carried their
side-arms only, but blood was shed, and as the victims upon the defeated
side of this brawl were carried to the Guard-Room in the palace, the
Queen, seeing blood, thought that the final struggle had begun. She was
relieved to see the King go down amongst the wounded, staunching the
blood of one with his handkerchief. Her women, fearing what she had
feared, began crying each for one of hers: “Is my husband wounded?” “Is
mine?” She could not forbear from one of those insults which had lost
her the affection of so many, and from one of those reflections which
proved how little she conceived the French nobility. “Ladies,” she said
to the noble-women about her, “your husbands were not there.” She had no
further opportunity to revile them; it was perhaps the last expression
of her contempt for a people whom she believed to have grown incapable.
Either side continued to arm. The heat, growing steadily in intensity,
had bred by the 3rd of August a very thunderous calm, when the King
announced to the Assembly the terms of Brunswick’s Manifesto. It was
received in silence, and those who least knew and know the city thought
and still think that the news was met with indifference. But during that
night, while a furious storm struck Paris time and time again with
lightning, one workman’s suburb, St. Marcel, sent word to another, St.
Antoine: “If we march to the palace, will you?” In the midst of the
thunder, messengers returned saying: “We will!” And in the night as they
went and came, they passed men bearing the dead whom the lightning had
struck and killed. Very late and before the growling of the thunder had
ceased, certain of the Marseillais must go to the walls of the palace
and shout the chorus of their song.
Next day they asked for ball-cartridge. Sergent, the official guardian
of the Militia ammunition-reserve, had been struck in the face when he
had gone, as his duty compelled him, to the palace a fortnight before;
he had been struck because his radical politics were known. Should the
insurrection fail, his signature for rebel ammunition would be his death
warrant. Nevertheless, remembering that blow, he signed; and the arsenal
served out ten rounds a man to the Battalion of Marseilles. They crossed
the river so armed, and were received at the Cordeliers,[26] which was
Danton’s fief, and Danton restrained them till such poor and hasty
organisation as could be undertaken should be effected. It was the end
of the week which had seen their entry into Paris, and nothing had been
done. The Tuileries continued to arm, the populace to convene, and
between the combatants the Parliament daily lost its power and grew
bewildered.
Footnote 26:
Now the clinical museum, opposite the faculty of medicine in the
University.
On Sunday, at Mass, always a public occasion in the palace, men passed
and re-passed each other in the gallery, and there were quarrels. This
also was the last time in which the Monarchy was treated as a general
thing—with the next morning its isolation began. On Monday the King was
begged to fly, at least to Compiègne: the road was guarded, and it was
an easy ride if he went alone round by Poissy and the north. He refused.
On Tuesday the last preparations were made in the suburban garrisons of
the Crown soldiers. On Wednesday, the 8th, in the morning, the Swiss
Guard was warned that on the morrow before dawn it must be accoutred.
The Parliament, more and more bewildered, vacillated and was hardly
heard as the two antagonists rose from their places to fight. The
deputies refused all action. It had been proposed to them to condemn La
Fayette for a hurried journey he had taken to Paris after the last
insurrection to defend the King. They had refused by a very great
majority. Now, on this 9th of August, the fatal eve of the struggle,
they debated an academic point—whether the King should abdicate or no;
they adjourned it to dine ... and after dinner they did not meet.
But all the while upon that Thursday evening troops were afoot along the
Rueil road; the doors of the palace were open to men, who entered one by
one, armed and were stationed; the sound of carpenters was heard in the
Long Gallery of the Louvre, sawing the planking of the floors, by night,
to make a gap between the Louvre and the Tuileries;[27] mounted police
rode up in squads to the courtyard and took their stations; there was
also the rumbling of waggons. In the sections south of the river and
eastwards, St. Antoine and St. Marcel were moving; wherever the people
had strained at the leash too long, the popular assemblies sat in their
close halls choosing the men who should take the Guildhall by right of
the city’s decision and in spite of the law, and proclaim the
insurrection.
Footnote 27:
The gap was six feet broad. Too narrow; for the insurgents next day
leapt it and bridged it, and by that entry forced the Tuileries.
The last of the day declined and the night came, but the unnatural heat
would not decline, and the open windows all about, the lights shining
from them, and the vigil which so many kept, gave the effect of an
illumination.
* * * * *
That night, short and stifling as it was, was drowsy; a necessity for
sleep oppressed the city. Danton himself, in the thick of the rising,
attempted a moment of repose; he had hardly lain down when he was roused
again. The watchers in the palace felt midnight upon them and would have
slept. The barrack-beds which filled the attics in their regular lines
were strewn with men; the gentry who had volunteered, certain also of
the Militia, lay silent in the darkness, their muskets slung beside
them, their large allowance of cartridges served. Below in the great
rooms and on the stairways groups of mixed soldiery lay huddled,
servants armed, and policemen: every kind of man. The Regulars who
formed the core of this force, the Swiss, lounged in their bare
guard-room or sat silent upon the stone benches of the yard; some few
files of them stood at ease upon the stairs of the lesser hall.
Upon this silence there crashed at about a quarter to one o’clock the
noise of cannon. The report was hard and close at hand—it came from the
Pont Neuf at the further end of the Louvre, and the united fabric of the
long walls trembled to it; the heavy pictures and the mirrors shook. The
six thousand who garrisoned the Tuileries expected an immediate advance
of the insurrection: for a moment the whole palace was roused. Those
battalions of Militia which had been camped in the garden for a reserve
began to file in by the central doors; the cavalry mounted to take up
their stations at the narrow issues of the Louvre, and everywhere the
lights moving before the windows of the vast façade showed the ordering
of men.
This general stir had hardly arisen when it was perceived that this
first shot had been but a signal, for to the call of that cannon no
other succeeded, but almost immediately the steeples of the city
trembled to the first notes of bells.
The deep and heavy bells, that had for centuries raised the alarm of
invasion or of fire, began to boom just east of the University; they
were answered by the peal of St. Anthony over the river, by the tocsins
of St. John and St. Gervase; St. Laurence rang, and southward upon the
night boomed the huge tower of the Abbey, which had heard the same sound
nine hundred years before, when the dust of the Barbarian march hung
over Enghien, and smoke went up from burning farms all down the Seine.
The Cathedral followed: thenceforward no one could hear the striking of
the hours, for the still air of the night pulsed everywhere with the
riot of the bells. Two sounds alone could pierce the clamour: the high
bugle-call to which the French still mobilise, and the sullen fury of
the drums. The horses, therefore, of the defenders in the courts of the
palace, the continual clattering of their hoofs upon the paving, the
clink of metal as the lines were formed, the tramp of the reinforcements
arriving—all the movement of the six thousand who gathered to support
the Crown, was set to this music, and the air they breathed was full of
the noise of the bells.
Yet for some hours after the posts had been taken the advent of the
rebels was expected in vain. Paris seemed empty, or full only of this
increasing and ominous sound. Of men there was no trace. The stone
courtyards before the palace and the streets that led to the Square of
the Carrousel were silent. They lay open and deserted under the sky, and
so remained even when the first stars paled and when there was already a
hint of dawn. A doubt rose among the Royalists, first whispered, then
openly spoken, and leading at last to jests: the insurrection had missed
fire; the bells had failed. No voice of the insurgents had been heard,
nor had any rider brought news of their approach, when the last of the
stars had gone and the Militia companies, still remaining as a reserve
in the western gardens, saw the day rise gorgeously beyond the palace
they were to defend.
In a small room whose window looked towards the east the Queen, with
some few of her women, waited for the day. The ceiling was low, and its
air of privacy gave some little respite from the strain of the eve and
of the morrow. She lay upon a sofa, but she could not sleep; she spoke
but rarely and that in low tones, and vaguely watched the night. With
the first grey of the morning she rose, unrested, and bade them dress
her boy, the child who alone in that great house had slept throughout
the alarms. Then, under the growing light, she saw the Princess
Elizabeth near her, who called her and took her to a window whence she
might watch the rising of the sun. They stood together beside the open
casement gazing at the city in silence.
Early as was the hour (it was but little past four) the tone of the air
already promised a blinding summer’s day. The end of darkness had lifted
no mist from the gardens. The last heats of yesterday blended with the
new warmth of the sunrise that stretched bright red across the far
suburbs where the populace stood to arms; behind the confused high roofs
and spires of their capital the two Princesses saw advancing at last
great beams of power and, enflaming the city, an awful daybreak. The
younger woman was afraid and spoke her thought, saying that it looked
like some great disaster, a burning spread before them.
Now that it was broad day the vigour of the Queen returned. She became
again the will of the defence, and its leader—if it had a leader. She
had not expected defeat even in the worst silences of the night; with
the new day she was confident of success.
The commander of the Paris Militia, one Mandat, who had lately come by
rote to that function, she knew to be sound. He had garrisoned the
bridge-head by which alone the transpontine mob could cross the river to
the palace; his cavalry also held the narrow arch at the Guildhall, by
which alone the east end could come. Pétion, now become the Mayor of
Paris, who had been summoned to the palace for a hostage, had gone—the
Parliament had demanded him—but Mandat remained and his presence
sufficed for her. Upon that presence she relied: when she came to seek
him she found that he too had disappeared. The Town Hall had summoned
him twice, and twice he had refused. At the third summons he had gone,
suddenly, unescorted, “to account for his municipal command.” She began
to wonder, but her hope was still maintained. She crossed to the room
where she could find her husband, and she engaged upon the last act
which freedom permitted her to command.
Still pursued by memories of what the Court had been, she determined to
show the King to his subjects, and to present a sight which should exalt
his soldiery and linger in history as the appeal which saved him.
The King obeyed her summons: he had better have remained for repose, for
she found him but recently awakened from a stupor into which he had
fallen at the end of the night when all his garrison had risen to the
alarm.
The servitors, the gentlemen, the Militia, and the strict Swiss beside
them saw, as they stood drawn up in a rambling line upon the western
garden terrace, the figure for which they were to die.
He appeared at the main central door, weary, dishevelled, and, as it
were, aged. His violet coat recalled the periods of mourning. The shadow
in which he stood enhanced the sombre colour of his clothing and the
pallor of his freckled face; his stoutness and his habitually sanguine
temper rendered that pallor unnatural and suggested catastrophe or
disease. His paunch was obvious, his hair deplorable. With such an
introduction to their loyalty he wandered heavily from end to end of the
line. There was a laugh—by one light-head he was covertly insulted as he
passed—he was certainly of less and less moment in their eyes with every
step he took in this unhappy review. When it abruptly ended, old Mailly
went down stiffly on one knee and tendered his sword, then stiffly rose
again. Again in the ranks some one laughed. From this scene the King
returned to his room in silence.
She also, the Queen, returned from it angry and in tears, the more
embittered that she herself had designed the thing.
The first news that met her on her return to the palace was the death of
Mandat. As the details were told her she understood, though vaguely,
what a blow had fallen. He had reached the Town Hall “to account for his
command,” but had found there, not the hesitating constitutional body
which he expected and which had a right to summon the head of the
Militia. He had found instead a ring of new faces, the insurrectionary
Commune: the Revolution, maddened and at bay, had glared at him across
the lights of the hall. As he went down the steps to the street, blinded
by that vision of terror, some lad shot him dead, and with that deed the
whole plan of the defence crumbled. The bridge-head and the archway were
abandoned.
The crowds of the south and east gathered as the morning advanced; their
way was now clear, and yet, to those watching from the palace windows,
it still seemed as the sun rose higher that the movement had failed.
Seven chimed above the central portico; it chimed slowly upon bells of
nearly a hundred years; the half-hour sounded, and still the courts of
the Carrousel lay empty. But the deserted air was ominous. No street
cries rose from the neighbouring market-stalls. There was no sound of
workmen upon the building of the new bridge[28] down river; the regular
sawing of stone and the ring of hammered iron were silent.
Footnote 28:
Now called the Pont de la Concorde.
* * * * *
At last a head showed above the high wooden palings that separated the
courtyard from the square. Then another, the heads of ragged
street-boys, who peered over, standing on their companions’ shoulders. A
stone was thrown. One of the sentries aimed, and in a twinkling the
dirty, beardless faces disappeared. As yet no shot had been fired.
[Illustration:
AN EARLY VIEW OF THE APPROACH TO THE TUILERIES FROM THE
CARROUSEL, SHOWING THE THREE COURTYARDS
]
A noise like that of swarming bees came confusedly from the quays,
muffled by the intervening wing of the Louvre. It approached, still dull
and blanketed by the vast building; for a moment it was swallowed up in
the deep passage beneath the Louvre; then, with an immediate and
overwhelming roar, it burst into the square of the Carrousel. Some one
in command must have dashed upstairs, to where from the higher attic
windows he could overlook the hoarding: such an one saw the Carrousel
crammed with a violent whirlpool of men that seethed and broke against
the great oaken gates of the yard. Even as he looked the gates gave way
or were opened—which he could hardly distinguish in the press. The inner
court filled as the torrent of arms surged through the entry. At a
window of the upper floor certain gentlemen who had volunteered knelt,
with their muskets upon the crowd below.
They waited for the order to fire.
------------------------------------------------------------------------