_THE TEMPLE_
THE vanguard of the mob came pouring in.
They swarmed through the arches under the Long Gallery, and the main
body of them still came swinging up to it along the river-side.
The sun, well up and brazen, touched the metal about them and sent
dancing gleams from pikes and curved hooks bound to staves. Before that
uneven crowd the long shadows of morning stood out sharply, thrown along
the uneven paving of the narrow quays. They sang or jested; they jostled
and could not order themselves. There were no soldiers among this first
batch of the insurrection, nor even a body of the half-trained Militia,
nor had they any guns. So they swarmed through the public archways under
the Long Gallery, so they packed and surged in the square of the
Carrousel. Before them were the walls of the central courtyard of the
palace and a great gate shut against them.
Of the fourteen guns that the palace commanded, five faced them in this
court, ready to fire should the crowd burst in. Three were advanced in
the emptiness of the square; two, in support, were just outside the main
door, whence the central staircase of the Tuileries swept up to the
royal rooms. At that door the lads who had climbed the outer walls of
the courtyard could also now see some few of the Guard drawn up in
formation outside the palace door and already retiring; the rest were
massed behind these in the hall: the solid body of Swiss who were the
kernel of the defence.
These thousand mercenaries and more, immovable men, had in their
attitude something at once of the grotesque and the terrible. Stiff and
strict as lifeless things in their red and white, tight hose and muskets
erect and firm, they were ready first for the volley, then for the
charge, and every man (in that time, when ten rounds was thought a day’s
provision) carried forty rounds upon him. The pale, unmoved faces of the
mountaineers were here and there diversified by some livelier face,
their rough-cut hair by the careful barbering of the wealthy, for there
were gentry of the King’s who had borrowed uniforms of the Guard and had
slipped in among them and now stood part of the silent rank.
The roaring of voices in the Carrousel beyond the walls of the courtyard
increased continually; the outer noise of the sea of Paris rose with it
every moment, and on the first floor, where the Royal Family and some
few advisers sat, all this gathering crowd outside the courtyard walls
was watched by those who were responsible for the unity of the nation in
face of the advancing invasion, and for the person of what was still the
King. Chief of those so responsible was Roederer. He stood there for
that new public authority, the elected county-body which alone had legal
power; he considered only the necessary survival of the King. Already,
at dawn, he had advised that the King should leave the defence to
others; now, hours later, as the mob and its noise swelled and swelled,
he insisted once more. It was but a personal act whose value in the
military thing that followed only those present could judge, nay, only
those who knew, as only contemporaries can know them, the personal
forces at work. There was no capitulation here.... But in the judgment
of the greatest master of war, Louis leaving the defence by those few
yards determined the issue; for it was Napoleon, himself perhaps a
witness, who said that if the King had then been seen on horseback
before the palace, his troops would have had the better of the fight.
But the King did what he thought was necessary for the moment of peril,
and guarded his family. He said, “Let us go.” As he passed through the
corridors of the palace down to the main doors upon the garden side, he
said to those who heard him, “We shall be back soon.” He believed it and
they also. None saw in this precaution an element of defeat, and yet
that sort of shadow which doom throws before itself as it advances
vaguely oppressed the palace.
The King, the Queen, and their children, Madame de Lamballe and Madame
de Tourzel, the governess, the handful of Ministers and friends, had
nothing to do with the military scheme of the defence. Louis had thought
it prudent, and his advisers also, that those few steps should be taken
between the palace and the Parliament House that lay beyond the palace
garden, and as they went along the broad garden way between the formal
trees, few thought, if any thought, that those ten minutes in the
privacy of their grounds were final. Later, all called it the beginning
or the presage of defeat.
The King walked solidly on in front by himself, murmuring from time to
time that the leaves had begun to fall very early that year. The
Dauphin, holding the Queen’s hand, trotted by her side and amused
himself by pushing away with his feet those same dead leaves, until, the
sickly little chap growing weary, a Grenadier of the Royal Militia,
which formed their escort, lifted the Prince in his arms against his
blue coat. The Queen’s face, mottled red and white in the violence she
did herself by that retreat, was now disfigured by tears, and the crowd
beyond the palisades of the garden, seeing royalty thus taking refuge,
broke through a gate and made a hubbub round the Parliament door. But a
couple of dozen members made a way through them and met the Royal party,
assuring them of an asylum within. With some little pushing, complaints
and speechifying they got them into safety, and the King so took his
place beside the Speaker in that great oval of the riding-school in the
early but hot and sunlit morning, the Queen and the children behind him
upon the Bench of the Ministers; and there the Grenadier gently put down
the child.
[Illustration:
CONTEMPORARY PRINT OF THE FIGHTING IN THE COURTYARD
]
Vergniaud was in the Chair, and, when the King had spoken his few words
to the Parliament, it was Vergniaud who assured him of the protection of
the laws. But there was a prejudice too strong in volume, of too recent
a date, and too lively in character, to permit of the open presence of
royalty at their debates. Royalty must, at least in appearance,
withdraw, and Louis and his wife and the children and some few of their
attendants consented to enter a little box where the shorthand reporters
of a certain Journal had usually their place. It overlooked the hundreds
of the Assembly from a little above their level, and was so placed at
the south-eastern corner of the great ellipse that the sun, creeping
round, was bound to beat upon it through the high-arched southern
windows as the day wore on. The grating was removed, they were
attempting some repose in that strict lodgment, when the sudden sound
which all so tensely awaited broke out beyond the garden trees. The
firing had begun. It was a little after nine.
Cabined as they were within the little box, whose outer wall gave upon
the gardens of the palace, they could hear, trembling through the stone
and noisy through the open windows, on that hot August morning the
rattle of the musketry of the defence. The Marseillais had come up in
their turn; they had come into the courtyard. They had parleyed with the
Swiss. The gentry at the broad windows of the first floor, each group
twelve front three deep, had opened fire to stop that parleying. But of
what so passed the Parliament and the little party in the reporters’ box
knew nothing. They heard but one discharge of cannon, booming dull, and
after that a silence. The debate in the hall of the Parliament ceased.
It was the moment when the Swiss had rallied and when the defenders of
the palace had swept the populace from the Carrousel, and had so thought
to have ended the day. There were many in that hall who thought it ended
also: mobs are often thus defeated in a few moments. The silence lasted.
Two more discharges of cannon might have been—and were perhaps thought
to be in the anxious house and by the much more anxious group that
strained their ears in the reporters’ box—the last volley against a
flying crowd. It was not so: those cannon were the two pieces of
Marseilles leading a return of the mob, and thenceforward, with every
moment for a quarter of an hour, for twenty minutes, the fusillade and
the roar of approaching thousands swelled like the calculated swell of
an orchestra. The Queen heard, where she sat in the corner of the tiny
lodge, the whistle of grape, the thud of solid shot against the walls,
the crash of glass, and all that increasing roar which told her that the
populace had returned like a tide, flooding the courts of the palace and
invading its very doors. For some very few moments they heard that
struggle maintained.
Then it was that Roederer, rightly or wrongly, a lawyer, not a soldier,
determined that the day was lost. In the spirit which had made him, in
his capacity as a high official of the Local Government, twice advise
the King to retire, and the second time succeed in that advice, in that
same spirit he now advised a capitulation. Perhaps he hoped by such a
compromise (could it arrive in time) to save the Monarchy. More probably
he deemed the Monarchy secure, and thought only by this capitulation to
save the House in which the Parliament sat and in which the Crown had
taken refuge from direct assault by the mob. At any rate there was
written, and presumably in the King’s presence, the hurried word or two
which ordered the Guard to cease firing, and that scrap of paper Louis
signed.[29] It was the last act of the French Monarchy.
Footnote 29:
The authenticity of this document which forms the frontispiece of this
book is discussed in Appendix A.
This order was conveyed to the upright and soldierly D’Hervilly: it
filled him with contempt and anger. He took the paper, pocketed it,
forced his way round with difficulty to the further side of the
Tuileries, saw that the defence, though now beaten back to the very
doors, was still maintained, and, so far from communicating the King’s
command, determined, as many a soldier before has done in such a fix, to
disobey. He continued to direct the battle.
Though the populace had rushed the doors and in part the river wing of
the palace, a furious hand-to-hand fight still raged. The staircase was
not yet carried; that wing of the populace which had leapt the gap in
the flooring and had boarded the Pavilion de Flore from the Long Gallery
had not yet fought its way into the Tuileries. The great body of the
insurgents was still massed outside in the square; a steady fire was
still maintained upon them from the windows of the palace. It was not
until the rooms were at last flooded by the advancing mob and the
staircase was held that D’Hervilly faltered. He was turned. The assault
had begun to verge upon a massacre. Of one half-company of the popular
Militia, all but five had been hit at one door alone in the upper rooms.
Before the main door, within a few yards of it, 400 men—if we may trust
those who most desired to hide the full numbers—400 men at least lay
heaped. Within, the mob was taking its revenge and the sacking had begun
before D’Hervilly showed that scrap of paper to the Guard. This second
command also the Swiss obeyed, as they had obeyed the first command to
die.
[Illustration:
INSCRIPTION ON THE BROKEN BUST OF THE DAUPHIN,
A RELIC OF THE SACK OF THE PALACE
]
They fell back out of the palace in order, this remnant of a high
discipline; they passed down the main broad avenue of the gardens
steadily: the covering volleys of their retreat came very sharp and
clear just outside the windows of the Parliament. Those within heard
their steady tramp, until at last that tramp turned to a scuffle; there
were crunchings upon the gravel, confused scrambles upon the lawns,
choked cries and fugitive running; they had broken by the round pond.
Far off along the river-side one could still hear a rhythm and a tramp
of men. It was the marching of the Marseillese with their prisoners: for
they had made prisoners and disdained to massacre. They had saved
somewhat more than a company of the Guard and bore them escort. The
fight was done.
It was just after ten o’clock. In those two hours, or little more, of
doubt, in that one hour of combat, there had perished many thousands of
men and the tradition of nine hundred years.
* * * * *
The day passed without wind or air, a day of increasing clamour. The
conquering populace entered by deputations, and with the rhetoric of the
poor and of their leaders before the bar of the _manège_. They demanded
and obtained the suspension of Louis “till the National Convention
should be called.” They brought spoils religiously to that bar, “lest
they should be thought thieves.” They harangued and they declaimed—by
the mouth of leaders.
Far off in the chapel of the palace a young man at the organ played the
“Dies Iræ” for his whim. Those who had so lately been the masters of the
palace sat huddled in the box of the _Logotachygraphe_.
If the modern reader would have some conception of it, this “loge” of
the shorthand reporter, let him think, if he is rich, of a box at the
opera, or, if he is poor, of a cabin upon a steamer: such was its size.
Louis XVI. and one or two of his armed gentlemen, the Queen, the little
children and their governess, sat packed hour after hour in that little
den; through the torn grating of it they could see the vast oval of the
riding-school, its sweep of benches under the candle-light. It was a
huge pit, from whence in a confusion of speech and clamour rose the
smoke of their fate.
The summer night had been so tedious and so burning that in their
ten-foot square of a hutch the refugees had hardly endured it. The
little child had fallen into a stupid sleep upon his mother’s knees, and
a sweat unnatural to childhood so bathed his exhausted face that the
Queen would not let it remain. She turned for a handkerchief to a
gentleman of theirs: he gave her his—but there was the blood of a wound
upon it.
Midnight had passed, and they still sat thus packed and buried; before
them still rose the sonorous cries of the invading mob, the
interjections of the Parliament, the rhetoric of the last speeches. The
hundreds of lights still flamed in the double chandeliers of the
enormous hall; the roof and the planks of the half-empty benches around
the arena still sent back echoes.
It was two in the morning before the doors could open on them, and with
the sweep of cooler air came the roar of the populace still on guard
after all these eighteen hours. The crowd pressed against the railings
as a strong escort hurried the King and Queen across a little corner of
the gardens to the deserted monastery next door. There were large
candles thrust into the barrels of chance muskets: the night was calm
and they could burn. By that faint and smoky light, which but just
caught the faces of the crowd beyond, they hurried into the door of the
Feuillants.
For many months no one had trodden the corridor of the place; the bricks
of the flooring beneath their feet lay unevenly. The blank and
whitewashed walls, cracked and neglected, were pierced by four such
similar little doors as monasteries use for an entrance to their cells,
and in those four bare cells the Parliament had hurriedly provided what
furniture the old house afforded.
The Dauphin had awakened for a moment in the fresh air, and had smiled;
he had said, so that those near could hear him: “I am to sleep in
mamma’s room to-night!” His mother had promised it him as a reward
during the dreadful day; he slept when the doors closed on them, and his
sister slept too. The Queen was too angry for repose.
She saw the monk’s bed of the cell, little and hard; she saw the mouldy
green paper on the wall; she stamped for one last futile time into the
King’s presence beyond the partition to cry that things should surely
have turned differently.
“The Marseillese should have been driven back!”
Louis had never failed to meet her anger when it rose by a stolid truth.
“Who was to drive them back?” he said.
Then she, who had not understood the armed nature of the struggle, but
only her own fierce desire, turned back and threw herself upon the
narrow bed of her refuge.
The day already glimmered. One could see the trees of what had been but
yesterday her royal garden, and one could see the palace beyond through
the dirty windows of the little room. The sun rose and showed her her
misery more clearly. She could not sleep. It was not till the light in
the east had risen above the many roofs of the Tuileries and had already
thrown a slit of bright shining aslant into the room, that there fell
upon her less a slumber than an unhappy trance of exhaustion.
There was silence while she slept. The mob had gone home exhausted. The
carts, which had worked all night round the palace and in the gardens
picking up the wounded and the dead, lumbered no more, and their
crunching upon the gravel of the alleys had ceased. No wheels rattled in
the Rue St. Honoré as yet, and the few that still maintained the sitting
in the Parliament were attended by no more in the Tribunes than a few
sleepy beings watching to the end. Outside in the still air all that
could be heard was the early piping of birds.
For that little space Marie Antoinette lay broken but forgetful of the
dreadful day.
Her sister-in-law, in whom self-sacrifice was permanent, watched her
pitifully so lying for one hour and another. Then she woke the children
and dressed them for the new day, silently, so as to spare their
mother’s sleep, but that sleep did not endure. The Queen raised herself
unrefreshed, and, when she saw the children, remembered their promise
and their fall and said: “It will all end with us!...”
With the morning some succour began to arrive from their own class, who
pitied them, especially from foreigners. Lady Gower’s little son,
younger than the Dauphin, was yet of the same measure. The child could
therefore wear the change that was sent him from the English Embassy.
The King was supplied by a captain of his Swiss, a man as corpulent as
himself. The Queen could get linen at least from the Duchesse de
Gramont. Her watch and purse were stolen, left behind or lost, but there
was plenty of money; one of her women had no less than twenty pounds
upon her: there was no need to look further.
At ten an escort brought that broken family back to the reporter’s box.
And so daily the long fatigue was endured and the mean lodging of the
night. All the Saturday, all the Sunday, the debates continued in their
presence. They saw, they half-understood the quarrel between the city,
which had determined to be master of their persons, and the Parliament,
which refused to forgo its sovereignty. They heard the decree passed
that overthrew the statues of the kings throughout Paris. They heard
that the palace of the Luxemburg was to be their sumptuous prison; then
the long argument against that building, the perpetual demand of the
city for their custody; the suggestion of this place and that: the
Archbishop’s palace—at last the Temple.
They saw the deputation of the city, with the Mayor at its head,
insisting; they heard the Parliament give way, and knew by Sunday
evening that Paris would hold them hostages.
On the morrow—a fatal 13th—their Court was removed from them: a few
friends only were allowed to remain. Under the wan light of evening two
great carriages—still royal, but their drivers’ livery gone and a dull
grey replacing it—stood before the door of the Feuillants. The act of
imprisonment had begun.
The heavy coaches rolled along the paving. The scene was that of a crowd
freed from labour at such an hour, thousands on either side, and a dense
escort pushing its armed column through. The sunset and the long
twilight were full of halts and summonses; Pétion, with his head thrust
through the window, was insisting on a way for Authority: there was a
noise of men struggling, sometimes to see, sometimes to save their feet,
snatches of songs, cries.
The distance was not quite a mile and a half. For over two hours the
coaches pushed and fought their passage up to the Place Vendôme, where
the statue of Louis XIV. lay fallen: past the wide boulevards whose
width did nothing to disperse the crowd: down at last along the narrow
lane of the Temple, till they came to the great pillars of the porch.
[Illustration:
THE TOWER OF THE TEMPLE
AT THE MOMENT OF THE ROYAL FAMILY’S IMPRISONMENT
]
All this while the Queen sat silent. Her husband and she and her royal
children were still given honour—sat on the front seat of the great
carriage; but the ladies who yet followed the Court, the governess of
the Children of France, were indignant that Authority should have passed
to the officials, and that these should sit wearing their hats of office
before France-in-Person. So also when the Royal Family walked across the
courtyard to the steps of what had once been Artois’ Palace of the
Temple, the deputation of the Commune there present to receive them kept
their heads covered and insisted upon their new authority, calling Louis
“Sir,” not “Sire,” and preserving in his sight that austere carriage
which he had thought the peculiar appanage of kings.
They went up the great staircase, lit splendidly as for a feast, lit as
it had been for Artois in the days she so well remembered: the doors
shut as upon guests assembled. They followed their warders down a short,
walled way through the open night, and saw before them at last, with
lamps in every old crocket of the corners, and every window ablaze, the
enormous mass of the Tower.
* * * * *
To the north of the square keep which was the main outline of the Tower,
a second building, an afterthought of the latter Middle Ages, had been
added. It leant up against its larger neighbour, forming a kind of
pent-house; its four storeys were far lower than those of the
stronghold—the rooms into which each storey was partitioned were
necessarily smaller and less convenient than those which they were to
occupy later in the main tower: it was nevertheless necessary to lodge
them here for the first few weeks, because this annex alone was
furnished. It had been the residence of the Archivist in charge; its
main room had been his drawing-room; the whole was ready for an
immediate occupation.
To these Princesses and their train there was a portentous novelty in
such a place. The King, a man, and one fond of hunting in all weathers,
self-centred, negligent of his person, careless of any luxury save that
of the table, saw nothing sharp in these surroundings: indeed, his sex,
especially when it is leisured, can take what it finds in a campaign or
accident with no great shock. But the women, who had in every moment of
their lives been moulded by magnificence and ease, could not understand
the place at all. Varennes had been a hurly-burly; the wretched three
days just ended at the Feuillants a violent interlude; for the rest
their pains and terrors of the past three years had been played upon a
gorgeous scene. They had slept for a thousand nights of peril in very
soft and bulging beds whose frames were thick with gilding, beds whose
canopies were splendidly high and curtained like thrones. They had been
surrounded for a thousand days of peril by silent servants trained and
dressed in gorgeous livery for their work. They had looked out on great
ordered gardens, and had walked over the shining floors of the palace.
That was their protection: a habit of grand circumstance and continuous
exalted experience against which the occasional horror and the strain of
their lives could make no impression.
To-night, in the unaccustomed stillness of the Temple enclosure, they
sat silent in the knowledge that these low roofs and common walls must
be a kind of home for them. All was at first insupportable; the King’s
sister, sleeping on a ground-floor, in a room which once the cooks of
the house inhabited: next to her through the wall, the Guard-Room; the
Queen, the royal children and their governess, cooped up in a couple of
small bedrooms fifteen feet square or less, preparing their own beds and
the Dauphin’s, were in a new, worse world. The poor Princesse de
Lamballe, with her own great virtue of fidelity surviving all her
inanities, put a truckle bed for herself in the dark little passage
between the two rooms and slept there, as a dog sleeps at the door of
its mistress. Nor did even this society endure. A week had not passed
when the officers came by night to read a new decree, and to separate
the Duchesse de Tourzel and the Princesse de Lamballe from their
masters, saying: “There must be no one here but Capetians.” Then the
complete isolation of their lives, a new habit, of settled hours and
monotonous exactitude, began.
This life reflected as in a quiet mirror the chaos of the enormous
struggle which was being fought out beyond the walls of the Temple. They
were prisoners and yet unrestricted; confined by public authority and
yet permitted the refinements of their rank. Surrounded by guardians,
but by guardians none of whom as yet insulted them, many of whom were
secretly their friends, some few their devoted servants, traitors to the
State in the crisis of a great war but traitors through devotion to a
national tradition.
Twenty courses at a meal were not thought too many; a dozen servants,
paid fantastic salaries, did not suffice them; their expenditure, if not
the half million voted, was yet at the rate of many thousands a year;
the doctor and the drawing master may visit them, and the Duchesse de
Gramont may send them books. Their wine, though the King alone drank it,
was of the best, commonly champagne (at that time not the fashionable
wine of the rich, but rather the ritual of feast days); they had good
furniture at their demand, an ample library of many hundred volumes; and
in general such comfort as such a situation could afford. But a violent
contrast marked their lives, the contrast between this luxury and the
anarchy of manners around them. Their guards, often gentlemen, were now
courteous, now obsequious, now offensive, according as chance sent men
of varying politics or character by turn to be on duty at the Tower.
The alternate fears and expectations of the Revolution, the doubtful
chances of the frontier battles, the unsettled quarrel of the political
parties among the conquerors—all these permit the inconsistencies of
that moment upon the part of the Commune and the Parliament. They permit
within the Tower that mixture of the prison and the home whereby an
increasing severity of rule and an increasing vexation did not forbid
the costly furniture, the very complete library, the exquisite cooking
which make up the curious contrast of their lives.
The order of their day was simple and unchangeable. The King would rise
at six, shave, dress, and read till nine. The Queen and the Dauphin were
up by eight, at which hour the servants and the guard came into the
rooms. At nine they breakfasted. During the morning great care was taken
by Louis himself with the lessons of the boy. The Queen and her
sister-in-law dressed for the day. They walked in the large gardens
where the mob from far off could watch them from behind the railings of
the Square; dined at two o’clock, played cards. The King would sleep in
the afternoon, would sup again at nine, and read till midnight.
A week after the Princesse de Lamballe and the Duchesse de Tourzel had
left them, before the end of August, the first of the indignities
offered to the person of the Monarch came to him thus: they took away
his sword. It was but an ornament, yet in all that long line of ancestry
no other had had his sword unclasped. And this man, who could never have
used a true sword, let alone that toy, felt the loss like a wound. Much
at the same time, that is before the end of August, entered three new
people into the prison—Tison and his wife, new gaolers who had to act as
spies upon them; and Cléry, who was to act as the valet of Louis, who
was devoted to him, and who has left us what is certainly the clearest
and probably the most accurate account of the prison life of the family.
In those same days they heard whispered to them by one of the guards,
Hue, the first news they had had upon the matter that never left their
thoughts. The invasion was successful. Brunswick was well on his way—it
was impossible that he should be opposed.
For yet another week no incident disturbed the common run of their
quiet; the physical impressions which build up most of life were
neighbouring and small; the daily noise of hammering in the great tower
next door where their permanent apartments were preparing; the daily
reading, the daily games of backgammon, and, daily, the sumptuous meals;
the modest dresses, changed (as is the custom of the gentry) for the
evening; the daily intercourse with such two Commissioners from the City
Council as happened to be on guard. From their windows they could see
the rapid demolition of the small huddled buildings round the Tower, and
Palloy’s great encircling wall rising between them and liberty on every
side.
But beyond these exterior things their minds dwelt continually upon the
matter which had held all their thoughts for a year. They remembered, in
their isolation, the frontier, the Argonne (which is a wall), and beyond
it the bare plains of the East: moving densely over these the convoys,
the guns, and the packed columns of the invasion. They had failed to
hold their Parisian fortress till the advent of that slow machine, but
they could still hope serenely: they had known regulars since their
childhood: they saw in the advance of Brunswick something inevitable;
they were certain of his success, and they waited.
* * * * *
[Illustration:
A ROUGH MINIATURE OF THE PRINCESS DE LAMBALLE
PRESERVED AT THE CARNAVALET
]
How truly the history of the Revolution is the history of war can never
sufficiently be stamped upon the mind of the student. The Terror when it
came was, as I shall call it, nothing but martial law established during
a reign: the steps by which the fury of the time advanced towards it
corresponded exactly to the fortune of the French armies.
Upon the 2nd of September, as the prisoners walked in the garden, they
heard a roar throughout the city. The populace beyond the railings threw
stones: they were hurried back into their prison. For a moment before
dusk they saw the wild and fanatical face of Mathieu, once a monk, who
shouted at them: “The Émigrés have taken Verdun, but if we perish you
shall perish with us.” In the increasing hubbub all around, the little
Dauphin cried and was disturbed; and all night the Queen could not
sleep. She could not sleep as the noise rose and roared throughout
Paris.... It had almost come. The armies were almost here, and once
again the dice were being shaken for the murder of the prisoners, or for
their deliverance.
It was on that day, and pricked by the spur of such news, that Marat’s
frenzied committee gathered a band, and began the massacre of those
caught in the public prisons—all those suspect of complicity with the
invasion and of the desire to help the foreigner in destroying the new
liberties of the nation. Among these hundreds, roped in suddenly upon
suspicion from among the rich or the reactionary of the older world, was
the foolish, tender and loyal woman who had determined to share the
fortunes of the Queen—the Princesse de Lamballe. When they had taken her
a fortnight before from the side of her friend she had but been thrust
into another prison to await these days.
The 3rd of September broke upon the captives, a dull uneasy morning in
which the clamour of distant disturbance still occasionally reached them
from the centre of the city southward, then came nearer.
They were told that on that day there would be no walk in the garden.
They sat therefore all the morning in their rooms. They dined as was
their custom; their dinner was over, it was not quite three o’clock, and
the King and the guard for the day stood together at one of the great
tunnel-like windows of the first floor, for the windows were not yet
blinded as they later were. The guard by his side was one Danjou, a
young man of thirty-two, very eager upon the new world which he believed
to be then arising; full of a vision of freedom, a good sculptor—for
that was his business—intense in action, he was, above all, brave.
Energy bubbled out of him, and he had, what goes with energy, a clear
head and rapid decision. The King and this man stood together exchanging
that kind of easy conversation which Louis had by this time learnt to
hold with men of every rank. They were watching the workmen pull down
the houses near by, and the rising of the wall which was built to
enclose the gardens of the Temple. Now and then, as a great beam fell
with its great clouds of dust, the honest and slow King would laugh and
say: “There goes another!” Their conversation was on this level when
they heard an increasing noise outside the gates. To the Royal Family it
meant but one more mob rolling by. Danjou, who was a free man fresh from
outside and knew better, was silent and anxious: he was aware that the
massacres had begun.
At first it was a set of drunken songs far off, and then a clamour in
the streets. At last, quite close, separate cries and loud demands, and
hammering at the gates; and next a nasty crowd burst in. They were not
very numerous, but they were drunk and mad with blood; and they dragged
with them the body of the only woman killed during all those horrors, a
corpse stripped, perhaps mutilated, and separate from it a head with
powder on the hair. This head, thrust upon a pike, some of the foremost
raised before the window; and Louis, slow of vision though he was,
recognised it for the Princesse de Lamballe’s. His wife was at the table
behind him. The window was high, deep and distant. Louis cried suddenly,
“Prevent the Queen...!” But, whether she had seen or had not seen that
dreadful thing, the Queen had fainted.
Without, Danjou, acting as promptly as a soldier, was standing on the
steps, giving the mob all the words that came to him of flattery,
rhetoric, or menace; and getting them at last to scramble down from the
heaps of broken brick and rubble they occupied, and to go, taking their
trophy with them. Within, her sister and her husband attended the Queen.
She was quite broken down. The night fell, but again she could not
sleep. She passed the dark hours sobbing with pain, until yet another
day had dawned upon her. And still a long way off in Paris the massacres
continued. Still, through the first week of September and the second,
advanced the army of the invaders which was to save them as it came
victorious; or at the worst it came at least to destroy their enemies
and the city which had dared to imprison them.
News did not reach the prisoners save at such intervals, or in such
broken whispers, or by such doubtful signs that they could make little
of it: but whether they knew much of that news or little, the army was
irresistibly advancing: the French troops which were to oppose it were
increasingly falling in value: the passes of Argonne were forced—all but
one. Dumouriez was turned; and by the 20th of September Prussia and
Austria were present, armed, four days’ march from the gates; and there
was no force at all between them and Paris. That same day the Parliament
in Paris met the menace by declaring the Republic.
Upon the morrow the most extreme of the extremists, Hébert, the cleanly
and insane, looked in to mock them coldly; while outside the booming
voice of Lubin proclaimed in a most distinct proclamation, phrase by
phrase, that the French Monarchy was no more. The King went on reading,
the Queen went on sewing; for such was the occupation of either as they
heard those words. The slow hours of the equinox passed without news or
disturbance in the city; but meanwhile, out where the armies were, a
prodigious and as yet unexplained thing had happened. Austria and
Prussia and the Emigrants had failed. The strong cities which they had
easily taken, the passes of Argonne which they had almost as easily
forced, the contemptuous and just strategy by which they had marched
round the worthless forces of the National Defence and now stood between
it and Paris—all these by some miracle of war had availed them nothing:
and in a muddy dip before the windmill of _Valmy_ the whole campaign had
failed.
* * * * *
I wish I had the space here to digress into some account of that
inexplicable day. I know the place, and I have well comprehended the
conditions of soil and of gunnery under which the Prussian charge failed
even before its onset. Nor could any study more engross, nor any
examination prove more conclusive, than an analysis of the few hours in
which this accident of European history was decided upon the ground
which, centuries before, had seen Gaul, and therefore Europe, saved from
Attila. But neither the limits nor the nature of my subject permit me;
and it must be enough to say that on the 21st of September at Valmy, a
few yards from the road whereby the King had fled to Varennes, by the
failure of one charge the invasion failed. In a few days the retreat of
the army that was to rescue or to avenge the King and the Queen had
begun; and from that moment the nature of their imprisonment changed.
* * * * *
Upon the 29th of September pens, ink and paper were taken away from the
prisoners, and on the evening of the same day there once more entered
the cleanly and insane Hébert, who read to them the order that Louis XVI
should be separated from his family and imprisoned in another set of
rooms in the Tower.
Those relations which had been at first ridiculous, later tolerated, and
though affectionate not deep, between the Queen and her husband, her
dislike of his advances towards the Liberal movement, her angry
amazement at his patriotism in the early days of the revolt,—all these
which are too often read into her last emotions in his regard, must be
in part forgotten when we consider how they all lived together behind
those thick walls. Every human soul that left the group was something
lost to them for ever. Of the two that had last left them, the head of
one, shown murdered, had been seen at the window. And moreover, this
order to separate the King meant almost certainly some form of
approaching disaster. The children also were a bond. For they knew
nothing of whatever early phantasies, whatever recent disagreements
there had been between the wife and the husband, and they must now have
their father hidden from them.
He was taken away. Upon the next day, the 30th, as once before during
their imprisonment, the Queen refused to eat and sat silent. To that
silence there succeeded a fit of violent anger in which she screamed at
the guards. It was when Cléry came to get some books for his master.
It is reported that Simon, one of the Municipals who was later to be the
gaoler of her child, said as he saw the distress of the women, that it
nearly moved him to tears, and that turning to the Queen he told her
that she had had no tears when the palace fought the people upon the
10th of August. It is said that the Queen answered: “You do not
understand.” And when he added: “You should be glad at least that the
traitors are caught,”—by which phrase he meant the popular vengeance and
the massacres in the prisons, the repulsion of the invasion and the rest
of it—the Queen would not answer a word.
Upon the 1st of November, the day before her thirty-seventh birthday,
she saw again a visitor to her prison, a dark face which it appalled her
to see: it was a face stamped with all the association of Varennes. It
was the face of Drouet.
He spoke to her as a deputy from the Municipality (to which he now
belonged), to ask whether she had anything to complain of. She
resolutely maintained her sullen silence; she turned her face away and
treated him as though he were not there, and he on his part threw his
arms up in a gesture of resignation, then bowed to her and went out.
The royal people had colds in November and waited through a shivering
month what could not but be the approach of some very evil thing. Upon
the 6th, one of those scraps of news—positive news and ill—which reached
them like patches of clear light in the midst of murky fears and
rumours, was granted to the prisoners. The Committee of Parliament had
reported upon Louis’ case: an indictment was framed; he would certainly
be tried.
To such an advance of misfortune the Queen could only oppose the fixed
hope that in some way or other the regular armies of the Old World
_must_ break through. They had been checked at Valmy, nay, they had
retreated. But surely they _could not but_ return, and brush aside at
last the raw and formless rags of the French volunteers. _They could not
but._ The old regulated armies, the peace of mind, the brilliant
uniforms, the vast prestige of German arms, the leadership of
gentlemen—sanity, cleanliness, and the approval of educated men—these
_must_ at last destroy those mere composite mobs, half regulars, half
forced levies; sodden, mutinous, ill-fed, ill-clothed, officered as best
might be, untutored and untutorable, which her gaolers had flung
together in a sort of delirium, hotch-potch, to make a confused covering
against the governing classes of Europe who were advancing in defence of
all the decencies of this world.
As the Royal Family so hoped against hope, that ill-conditioned
crowd—old soldiers relaxed in discipline, young enthusiasts who drank,
sickly and grumbling volunteers, veterans hoping for revenge against the
harsh experience of years (a dangerous type), company-officers of a
week’s standing (put side by side with others of twenty years), captains
in boyhood and lieutenants at forty—this welter was jumbled all together
under the anxious eye of Dumouriez, along a valley of the frontier, on
the muddy banks of the river called Hate—La Haine.
I know the place: low banks that rise in the distance into hills are
overlooked far up stream and down by the fantastic belfry of Mons and
its huge church dominating the plain. Dumouriez, deeply doubting his
rabble but knowing the temper of his own people, poured the young men
and the old across the line of the river, leading them with the
Marseillaise. Among the villages of the assaulted line Jemappes has
given its name to the charge. By the evening of that same day, the 6th
of November, the Austrian force was destroyed, a third of its men lay
upon the field or had deserted, the rest were beating off in a pressed
retreat, eastward and away. The rabble should have failed and had
succeeded.
I have said that for Valmy no explanation has as yet been given. For
Jemappes there are many explanations: that the Austrians had attempted
to hold too long a strategic line and were outnumbered at the chief
tactical point of the battle: that their excellent cavalry (the French
in this arm were deplorable) had not been allowed to hold their left
long enough: that one passage of the river was accidental and could not
have been foreseen (a bad commentary on any action!). But the true cause
of that temporary yet decisive achievement was to be found in two forms
of energy: rapidity in marching and in the handling of guns—but such
criticisms do not concern this book.[30]
Footnote 30:
These two military qualities are present to-day capitally among the
French, and may at any moment reappear in the discussions of modern
Europe.
Of this victory, coincident with the beginning of the King’s agony,
Marie Antoinette for days could know nothing, and even when the rumour
reached her it was but the victorious shouting in the streets and a name
or two whispered by a servant that gave her a passing impression that
her champions had suffered a further check—no more. Yet before that tide
should flow back and finally swamp the French packed in Leipsig, twenty
years must pass, and not till then should the Kings and the Lords at
last see Paris from a hill.
[Illustration:
SANSON’S LETTER ASKING THE AUTHORITIES WHAT STEPS HE IS
TO TAKE FOR THE EXECUTION OF THE KING
]
There is one detail in connection with Jemappes which the reader must
know because it does so illustrate the myriad coincidences of the
Queen’s life:—
That child whom she had seen and adopted during her early childless
years, when her fever of youth and exasperation was upon her, that child
which for a moment had supplied to the girl something of maternity, had
now grown to manhood. The birth of her own daughter had long ago driven
out any recollection of the whim: the peasant boy of St. Michel was
forgotten. He had grown into his teens full of the bitterness which
irresponsible and spasmodic patronage can so vigorously breed. During
the days of October he had been recognised among the wildest of those
who attacked the palace in Versailles; he had shouted for the Nation; he
had enlisted and was there at Jemappes, an obscure volunteer among the
thousands whom Dumouriez forced forward upon the frontier. He was
present upon the 6th of November upon the bank of the Haine when the
mixed battalions charged, singing: a bullet struck him and he fell down
dead. She, the Queen, was there a prisoner in her dimly-lit room at
night—separated from the father of the children who slept near by: her
mind was big with the new doom of his Indictment and Trial which the
dull day had brought her. Eighteen years before she had caught up that
peasant baby in the Louveciennes road and kissed it, her eyes full of
tears, and in her heart a violent yearning half-virginal, half-maternal:
he, however, lay dead that same night in the Hainault mud with the
autumn rain upon his body: his name was Jacques Amand.
* * * * *
With December there was some little respite, for a new Municipality had
been elected that was a trifle more moderate than the old; but in
general this life of hers, with its calm, its dread and its monotony,
continued. Now it contained some act of humiliation, as when all razors
and sharp-edged things were taken from the King (upon the 7th); now some
indulgence, as when (upon the 9th) a clavecin was allowed the Queen—and
it is said that from curiosity she played upon this, later, the new
notes of the Marseillaise.
For a few hours the Dauphin was taken from her. It was her turn to ask
questions of the guards, and theirs to be silent; she asked
distractedly: they did not reply: but the child returned.
The affair of the Trial proceeded rapidly. The briefs were gathered; the
King’s counsel met the King day after day in the apartment below, and
she stayed above there alone with her children and was still. She had no
communications with him at all save when at Christmas, after he had
drafted his will, he wrote to the Convention and caused a short message
to be conveyed to the Queen. It was perhaps during these days that she
wrote upon a fly-leaf which is still preserved in St. Germain, “_Oportet
unum mori pro populo_.”
Louis, as the new year broke, saluted it sadly. Within a fortnight he
had been pronounced guilty at the bar of the Parliament before which he
was arraigned—guilty, that is, of intrigue with the foreigner and of
abetting the invasion. Upon the 17th of January 1793 it was known in his
prison that his penalty would be death. Again did Marie Antoinette hear
in the room below the step of Malesherbes, her husband’s counsel, coming
upon that day to confer with the King, but this time he came to speak
not of defence but of death. A respite was denied to Louis. Upon the
20th his prayer for three days in which he might prepare to meet God was
again refused, and his execution was fixed for the morrow. His sentence
was read to him in his prison: he heard it quietly: and thus upon that
20th of January (a Sunday), a murky evening and cold, when it was quite
dark the Princesses heard in the street a newspaper-seller crying the
news that the King must die; the hollow word “_la mort_,” very deep and
lugubrious, repeated and repeated in the chanting tones of that trade,
floated up from the winter streets.
It was eight o’clock when they were told that they might go down with
the children and see the King.
The Family met together and for a little time were silent.
* * * * *
The spell was on them which we never mention—one which the inmost mind
refuses—I mean that fear....
[Illustration:
AUTOGRAPH DEMAND OF LOUIS XVI FOR A RESPITE OF THREE DAYS
]
During this long isolation of theirs they had become very fixed upon the
matter of the Catholic Faith, but that fear pervaded them as the Church
has said that it must always pervade the last hours. This human curse,
too sacred for rhetoric and too bewildering to occupy a just and
reasonable prose, I will abandon, content only to have written it
down—for it was the air and the horror of that night.
For not quite two hours they sat together, not speaking much, for all
understood, except the little boy: he was sad as children are, up to
their usual pitch of sadness, for any loss, great or small, which they
do not understand: he saw his own sister, a child older than he, and all
his grown-up elders thus crushed, and he also was full of his little
sorrow. He knew at least that his father was going away.
The King, seated with his wife on his left and his sister at his right
hand, drew the boy towards him and made him stand between his knees. He
recited to him, as it is proper to recite to children, words whose
simplicity they retain but whose full purport they cannot for the moment
understand. He told the child never to avenge his death, and, since
oaths are more sacred than repeated words, he took and lifted up his
small right hand. Then, knowing that the will of the sufferer alone can
put a due term to such scenes, he rose. His wife he pressed to his
shoulder. She caught and grasped to her body her little children—to hold
so much at least firm in this world that was breaking from around her.
She knew that Louis desired them to leave, and she said, after she had
wildly sworn that she would stay all night and the children with her
(which he would not have):
“Promise that you will see us again?”
“I will see you in the morning,” he answered, “before ... I go. At
eight.”
“It must be earlier,” she said, not yet releasing him.
“It shall be earlier, by half-an-hour.”
“Promise me.”
He repeated his promise, and the two women turned to the great oaken,
nail-studded door; helping the fainting girl, and taking the child by
the hand, they went out to the winding stair of stone. It was a little
after ten.
When the iron outer door had shut and he knew the women and the children
to be above, out of hearing, Louis turned to his guards and gave this
order, that, in spite of what he had said, the women should not be told
in the morning of his departure, for that neither he nor they could
suffer it.
Then he went into the turret chamber where the Priest was, and said:
“Let me address myself to the unique affair.”
But above, from the room whose misery could just be heard, the Queen,
when she had put her boy to bed and kissed him bitterly, threw herself
upon her own bed all dressed, and throughout the darkness of the whole
night long her daughter could hear her shuddering with cold and anguish.
That night there was a murmur all around the Tower, for very many in
Paris were watching, and through the drizzling mist there came, hour by
hour, the distant rumble of cannon, and the sharp cries of command, and
men marching by companies up the narrow Temple lane.
It was the very January dark, barely six of the morning, when a guard
from the King’s room came up the stair. The Queen from above heard him
coming. Her candle was lit—her fixed gaze expected him.... He entered,
but as he spoke her heart failed her: he had not come for the summons,
he had but come for the King’s book of prayers. She waited the full hour
until seven struck in the steeples of the town, and the pale light began
to grow: she waited past the moment of her husband’s promise, till
eight, till the full day—but no one came. Still she sat on, not knowing
what might not have come between to delay their meeting: doors opening
below, steps coming and going on the stairs, held all her mind. But no
one sent for her, no one called her. It was nine when a more general
movement made her half hope, half fear. The sound of that movement,
which was the movement of many men, passed downward to the first
storeys, to the ground, and was lost. An emptiness fell upon the Tower.
Then she knew that her hope had departed.
For a moment there were voices in the courtyard, the tramp of many men
upon the damp gravel, the creaking of the door, more distant steps in
the garden, and the wheels of the coach far away at the outer porch.
Then the confused noise of a following crowd dwindling westward till
nothing remained but a complete silence in those populous streets, now
deserted upon so great a public occasion.
[Illustration:
REPORT OF THE COMMISSIONERS THAT ALL IS DULY ARRANGED
FOR THE BURIAL OF LOUIS CAPET AFTER HIS EXECUTION
]
For yet another hour the silence endured unbroken: ten o’clock struck
amid that silence, and the quarter.... The Queen heard through the
shuttered window the curious and dreadful sound of a crowd that roars
far off, and she knew that the thing had been done.
Life returned into the streets beneath, the loud shrill call of the
news-men, crying the news accursedly, came much too shrill and too
distinct against the walls. All day long, on to the early closing of the
darkness, the mists gathered and lay thick over Paris and around her
high abandoned place.
------------------------------------------------------------------------