_THE HOSTAGE_
_From the 21st of January 1793 to three in the morning of the
2nd of August 1793_
THAT night the prisoners in the Tower did not sleep, saving the little
Dauphin: he slept soundly; and it is said of his mother that, watching
him, she murmured that he was of the age at which his brother had died,
at Meudon, and that those of her family who died earliest were the most
blessed. In the last silences of the January night, till past two in the
morning, the woman Tison, who was in part their gaoleress and in part a
spy upon them, heard them talking still, and when she came to them
Madame Elizabeth said: “For God’s sake leave us.”
[Illustration:
FIRST PAGE OF LOUIS XVI’S WILL
]
Cléry, the dead master’s valet, was taken away, still noting as he went
the new look in the Queen’s eyes. And in this same week there came the
mourning clothes which they had asked of the authorities and which had
been granted them. The Princess Royal fell ill. The Queen would no
longer walk in the garden now, and the child, lacking exercise—and with
bad blood—suffered. Her legs swelled badly. The authorities allowed the
man who had been the family doctor of the children in the old days to
come and visit them now. Brunier was his name, and in the old days Marie
Antoinette had affected to ridicule his middle-class energy: she thought
he lacked respect to the clay of which she and her children were made.
She was glad enough to see him now, and he was devoted. He was allowed
to call in a surgeon and to bring in linen. Nor was he their only
communication with the external world, for though the sound and the news
of it did not reach them, yet they were not as modern prisoners are,
denied companionship. Upon the pretext or with the real excuse that the
mourning clothes did not fit, a dressmaker whom they had known was
allowed in; and in general, as will be seen in a moment, there were
methods of communication between them and those who desired to know
every moment of their captivity and every accident of their fate. From
the close of January onwards into the summer, five months, it is
possible to establish no precise chronology of their actions, but it is
possible to decide the general tenour of their lives: save in one
particular, which is that we cannot determine to-day what exactly were
the relations between the Queen and those who would rescue her or who
could give her news of the outer world—especially Fersen.
We have of course several accounts furnished by eye-witnesses, notably
the account of Turgy, who was their sole servant in their prison; but
these accounts, and that account especially, are tinged with the very
obvious atmosphere of the Restoration. Quite poor people, writing on the
suggestion of a powerful government at a time when every laudatory or
illuminating detail upon the imprisonment of the Royal Family had its
high money value, must, however honest, be somewhat suspect. For the
most honest man or woman the conditions of the Restoration were such
that there would be an inevitable tendency to exaggeration; and we have
no evidence available of the exact characters of the witnesses. Still
the witnesses are witnesses, and though an elaborate code of signals
(which some of them pretend) probably did not exist, yet we know both
from Fersen himself and from the way in which affairs were conducted on
either side, that not a little communication was established between the
widowed Queen and the Royalists outside. To more than that general
statement no historian can commit himself, unless he be one of those
belated university types who will trust a printed or a written document
beyond their own common sense.
It must be remembered that during the first two months after the death
of the King, that is, during all February and March 1793, the exalted
and the noble minds of the Gironde were still at the head of that
executive power which is in France (since the French have no
aristocracy) the whole of government. Nay, they remained technically the
heads of the Executive until the end of May 1793, though their power was
touched by the establishment of the Revolutionary Tribunal on the
proposal of the Radicals in March, and undermined by the establishment
of the Committee of Public Safety on the proposal of Danton in early
April.
The Girondins and the Municipality of Paris were at odds. The
Municipality itself was not homogeneous. The guarding of the Queen,
which was the business of the Municipality, was not uniform. The
Municipality had to choose many men to relieve each other in relays; and
of these, two, Toulan and Lepitre, tended, at least after a little
experience of their prisoners, to show them sympathy. One of their
officers, Michonis, did more and would have saved her.
From time to time a newspaper would be smuggled in to these Princesses;
it is said that music played from a window whence they could hear it,
conveyed signals, and at any rate it is certain that Fersen had some
news of them.
Now Fersen at this moment, in early February that is, bad as his
judgment of French affairs was, appreciated their situation in a phrase.
He called the Queen “a hostage,” and this describes very accurately the
meaning of her captivity.
I repeat, no one can understand the Revolution who does not treat it as
a military thing, and no one can understand military affairs who
imagines them to be an anarchy. Of necessity a brain directs them, for
if in military affairs a plan be lacking, the weakest opposing plan can
always conquer. It was not cruelty nor love of vengeance that dominated
the position of the prisoners. They were an asset.
But though their value was recognised and their imprisonment was part of
a diplomatic arrangement, yet there were different policies regarding
them. The Radicals, the Mountain, were at once the most enthusiastic and
the most practical of the Revolutionary groups. They were not in power,
they had not a permanent majority in the Parliament though they had
Paris behind them, but they saw clearly that France was in to win: they
saw clearly (first Danton, then in succession to him Carnot) that every
general action lost, every fortress in a chain surrendered, was the
approach not of some neutral or balancing arrangement, but of a full,
complete and ruthless reaction in Europe without and in France within.
It had come to winning all or losing all. The nobler Girondin blood that
still controlled the Republic knew too little of the vices of men to
follow that calculation. The Girondins still believed that in some
mystic way a steady adherence to the Republican ideal—the volunteer
soldier as against the conscript, the citizen controlling the soldier,
the locality governing itself—man absolute—was a thing so high that no
human circumstance could wound it. They thought it bound to survive
through some force inherent in justice.
Within three weeks of the execution of Louis all Europe was banded
against the Republic, and one may say, morally, all the Christian world,
for even the distant and ill-informed Colonials of Philadelphia and
Virginia had recoiled nervously at the news of a King’s execution. The
pressure of that general war against the Republic was to give, by what
fools call the logic of events, a most powerful aid to the practical and
savage determination of the Mountain: it was to squeeze to death the
idealism of the Girondins.
While yet these last were in power there were plots for the escape of
the prisoners, plots which failed; and their treatment, even in minor
details (as the allowing them to take their own form of exercise and the
leaving of them as much as possible alone) was easy. Little objects left
by the King were conveyed to the Queen from the upper room, and
Jarjayes, a friend, saw that they reached the King’s brothers. Had the
impossible attempt of the Girondins performed the miracle which they who
had called on this miraculous war demanded, had the patchy volunteer
forces of the French found it possible to conquer in those early months
of ’93, the treatment of the prisoners would have gone from better to
better; their release by negotiation would soon have arrived, if not by
negotiation then from mere mercy. This same Jarjayes, who had been
Marshal of the camp and was husband to one of the Queen’s women, found
things so easy that he could weave a definite plot for the escape of the
Royal Prisoners. Why it failed we do not know, though of course the
Royalist evidence we have ascribes it to a special virtue in the Queen,
who refused to be separated from her children. In the first week of
March the first plan failed, on account of a violent reaction towards
severity on the part of the authorities following the first military
reverses in the Netherlands. The second plan is better attested, and
there is here a sufficient concurrence of witnesses to make us believe
that some hesitation of the Queen’s did cause its final failure. She
would have had to flee alone, and it is on the whole just to decide that
she refused; for we have it on the authority of a fairly honest man that
the Princess Royal had some memory of this incident of her childhood and
had spoken to him on it, while Chauveau-Lagarde (who was later the
Queen’s counsel during her trial) has left a copy of a note of hers
saying that she would not fly alone without her children. Of other
supposed communications between her and Jarjayes we have only his copy
of her writing.[31] At any rate, with the last days of March all this
early phase of the Queen’s widowed captivity comes to an end. Dumouriez
and the French armies lost the great and decisive action of Neerwinden
upon the 18th of the month, and in the last week of it, though the
Committee of Public Safety was not yet formed to establish martial law
throughout the Republic and to save the State, yet new rigours began.
Footnote 31:
I can pay but little attention to evidence of that kind. In the case
of Fersen there are reasons for his destroying the originals: he was
the recipient of her passionate affection. Moreover, we know his
nature well: he had all the Northern simplicity, and with that intense
passion of his, he would have thought it sacrilege to ascribe a single
word to her that she had not written or to make fiction out of her
beloved soul. Moreover, he cared little whether posterity knew or did
not know the things he chose to bequeath to his heirs. In the case of
inferior men with an obvious axe to grind, and proud, whatever their
loyalty, to be intermediaries between the Hostage and her rescuers,
the evidence of mere copies which they alone can certify is of very
little value.
The woman Tison and her husband—half the gaolers, half the spies of the
family, as I have said—were not permitted to leave the Tower of the
Temple. Pencils were forbidden. Upon the 25th of March a chimney fire
was a pretext for the appearance of Chaumette coming from the Commune of
Paris. He returned the next day with the Mayor Pache, and with Santerre,
the man of the fall of the Bastille, the rich leader of the popular
militia; in those same hours Dumouriez at the head of the defeated
French Army was receiving the general of the Austrian forces and
negotiating treason. He was about to join hands with the enemy and to
propose a march on Paris. The first demand for the Queen’s trial was
made—by Robespierre: a week and Dumouriez’ treason was accomplished: the
chief general of the Republic had despaired of France and had gone over
to the Austrian camp with the design of marching on Paris and at least
restoring order; his army had refused to follow him, but the shock was
enormous. Paris won; the Girondins lost. The Committee of Public Safety
was established.
The Terror was born; and the Revolution, acting under martial law, went
forward to loose everything at once or to survive by despotism and by
arms.
* * * * *
Thence onward Marie Antoinette’s imprisonment becomes another matter. On
the 20th of April there came into her prison men whose tone and manner
would never have been allowed before: the chief of the “Madmen,” as the
populace called them, the intense Republicans who would believe anything
of a Bourbon, Hébert, came into the prison. He came at night. By
coincidence or by design her terrors for the future were to be terrors
of the night. It was near eleven when his dandy, meagre figure and thin,
pointed face appeared to terrify her, and for five hours the whole place
was searched and ransacked. Her little son, already ailing, she had to
lift from his bed while they felt the mattress and the very walls to see
what might be hidden. They took from Madame Elizabeth her stick of
sealing-wax, her pencil—which had no lead to it—and they took with them
a little scapular of the Sacred Heart and a prayer for France—but the
France for which the Princesses had this written prayer was not the
nation.
On the 23rd they came again and found nothing but an old hat of the
King’s, which his sister kept as a sort of relic and had put under her
bed. It was taken for granted (and justly) that communication had been
established between the prisoners and the Kings outside. A denunciation
of Lepitre, Toulan and the rest, failed, but Toulan and Lepitre were
struck off the list of guards.
With the end of May the populace, supported and permitted by the new
Committee of Public Safety, conquered the lingering Moderate majority,
and the Committee of Public Safety was left without rivals; it began
from that moment to direct the war with the leonine courage and
ferocity, the new and transcendent intelligence, the ruthless French
lucidity which ultimately at Wattignies saved the State.
Upon the victory of Paris and the Mountain, the destruction of the
Moderates, the establishment of martial law, the despotism of the
Committee of Public Safety, came the last phase of the Queen’s
imprisonment—and with it, by a most evil coincidence or portent, the
growing illness of the little heir, her son. Sharp pains in his side,
convulsions, the doctor sent for in the early part of May, and again
towards its end, and again in June, things going from bad to worse with
him.
To these prisoners, shut away from men, the movement of that world was
unknown. They only knew that something was surging all round the thick,
obliterating, impenetrable walls of their Tower.[32] On the day when the
populace conquered the Girondins, all they knew was that they were not
allowed even upon the roof, from which, upon most days for some hour or
so, they might take the air and look down upon the slates of
revolutionary Paris far below; and during June when the new power of the
Committee and of martial law, of the Terror, of the determination of the
Revolution, of the city, was fixing itself firmly in the saddle, they
knew nothing of what was passing, save perhaps from a growing insolence
in their guards.
Footnote 32:
The walls, to be accurate, were nine feet thick, and the windows were
like tunnels.
In that same month yet another plot for their escape failed. It depended
upon two men; the one a certain Batz, on whom our information is most
confused and our evidence most doubtful, as indeed his own character and
his own memories were doubtful and confused (he was a sort of enthusiast
who had already attempted many impossible things); the other, a
character quite clearly comprehended, one Michonis. Batz was a kind of
baron; Michonis was, like Toulan and Lepitre, of the Municipality and
had regular authority. He will be seen again in the last plot to save
the Queen. Of whatever nature was this uncertain attempt, it also
failed. Shortly after the woman Tison diversified their lives by going
mad with great suddenness and suffering a fit. She was removed; and the
incident is only of note because certain pamphleteers have called it a
judgment of God. Yet her wage was small.
Upon the day after that unusual accident, the growing suspicion of the
popular party against what was left of Moderate administration in
Government broke out in a furious denunciation of actual and supposed
conspiracies. It was feared that the great mass of suspects now gathered
into the prisons possessed some engine for revolt. An extreme policy in
diplomacy and in arms, as in internal government, finally prevailed, and
with the 1st of July this ardent severity took the form of a decree,
passed in the now enfeebled and captured Parliament, that the
Dauphin—the greatest asset of all—should be separated from his mother
and put, though in the same building, under a different guard.
* * * * *
It is not to be imagined that so large a transformation of policy
between the execution of the King and the decree for the separation of
the Dauphin had, in any part of it, a mainspring other than the war. I
have said that the steps of the spring, the destruction of the Gironde
by the Mountain, the capture by Paris of the Parliament were but the
effects of the collapse of the Volunteer rush at Neerwinden, the treason
of Dumouriez and the new—and necessary—martial law that henceforward
bound the Republic. All the last rigours of the imprisonment depended
upon the same catastrophe.
The enemy that had been checked at Valmy, and had been attacked in the
winter but half-prepared, the enemy that had suffered the French gallop
to overwhelm the Netherlands and to occupy Mayence—was returning. The
Republicans were out of Belgium, the armies of the Kings were flooding
back upon the Rhine. The Rhine and Alsace depended upon two
things—Mayence, and, behind it, shielding Alsace, the lines of
Weissembourg that stretched from the river to the mountains. Mayence was
to fall, the lines of Weissembourg were to be pierced. As for the Belgic
frontier, there a line of fortresses could check for a moment the
advance of the Allies—for the French fortify: they are in this the heirs
of Rome; and whenever they suffer defeat the theory of fortification is
belittled; in the resurrections of their military power the spade goes
forward, borne upon the shoulders of Gaul.
In this July of 1793 the Belgic frontier only perilously held. The
sieges were at hand and the fall of the frontier strongholds was at
hand. These once conquered, it was proposed by Austria, Prussia, and
England to dismember the territory of the Republic. To all this I will
return.
* * * * *
It was upon the 1st of July, with the enemy advancing, that it was
proposed to take the Dauphin from the Queen.
Upon the evening of the 3rd the order was executed.
It was but just dark when the guard challenged a patrol at the gate of
the Tower; the patrol was the escort of six Municipals who had come from
the authorities of the city to take the person of the child.
The women within the prison had had no warning. The same Fate which had
been kind to them in making a silence all around their lives during
these dreadful months and in hiding from them the dangers that rose
around was cruel to them now, leaving them unprepared for this sudden
and tearing wound. There was a candle in the room and by its light the
little girl, the Princess Royal, read out aloud—from a book of Prayers,
it is said—to her aunt and her mother, the Queen. These two women sewed
as they listened; they were mending the clothes of the children. The
little boy slept in his bed in the same room: his mother had hung a
shawl to hide the light from his eyes. Save for his regular breathing
there was no sound to interrupt the high, monotonous voice of the little
girl as she read on, when suddenly her elders heard upon the floors
below the advent of new authorities and of a message. The steps of six
men came louder up the stone stairs, the doors opened as though to a
military command, and the Princesses saw, crowding in the corner of the
small room, a group whose presence they did not understand, though among
them the Queen recognised Michonis. The reading stopped, the women
turned round but did not rise, the child stirred in his sleep. One of
that group spoke first before the Queen could question them. “We have
come,” he said, “by order of the House, to tell you that the separation
of Capet’s son from his mother has been voted.”
Then the Queen rose. Never until now had she abandoned before any but
her husband, or perhaps in the very intimacy of the Council, the
restraint which she believed her rank to demand. The violence of her
blood had been apparent in many a petulant and many an undignified
gesture; she had raised her voice against many a deputation; she had
sneered more than once against women of a poorer kind; she had thrown at
La Fayette the keys which he demanded on their return to the palace
after the flight to Varennes; but she had never yet lost command of
herself. Upon this terrible night, for the only time in her life, she
did completely lose all her self-command. Something confused her like a
madness, and all the intensity of her spirit came out nakedly in defence
of the child.
[Illustration:
ORDER OF THE COMMITTEE OF PUBLIC SAFETY IN CAMBON’S
HANDWRITING, DIRECTING THE DAUPHIN TO BE SEPARATED FROM HIS MOTHER
]
She stood up by the little bed; all her complexity of pride and all her
training in intrigue deserted her; she cried out; she took refuge in
such weapons as the women of the poor, whom no law protects, use to
defend their sanctities. Her voice rang, became shrill and shrieked in
the little room, violent and rising; she threatened death; next moment
she implored. Her little daughter and her sister-in-law caught her
methods. They joined in the imprecations and in the prayers. The child
was awakened by the noise, by the shuffling of so many awkward and heavy
feet in the doorway, by the passionate outcries around him; he awoke and
gazed; then when he saw his mother he clung to her, and she kissed him
repeatedly and held him as though he were again part of herself and as
though none could take him from her without taking her life also, and
all the while her prayers and execrations showered upon the armed men as
they stood hesitating apart and waiting.
How long this scene continued we cannot tell; it may have been the best
part of an hour.[33] At last some one of the deputation found decision
and cried, “Why will you make this scene? No one wants to kill your son!
Let him go freely; we could take him—if you force us to that!”
Footnote 33:
The Duchesse d’Angoulême, the little girl then present, said, years
after, that it lasted a full hour, but such memories are
untrustworthy.
She lifted the little boy up and dressed him, his eyes still dazed with
sleep. She lingered over him with conventional benedictions, repeated
and prolonged. Her hands could not let him go. Fearing some further
violence, a member of the deputation muttered a suggestion for the
guard; but the Queen’s active passion was exhausted, she would be
violent no more. She herself, perhaps, loosened his little hands from
her dress and said, “Come, you must obey....” Then they took him away;
the great door was shut upon him. The women within, trembling beside the
cot, could still hear the child pleading with a lessening voice in the
distance until another door clanged below and the rest of the night was
silent.
* * * * *
God has made a law whereby women are moved by strength and by weakness,
but in different ways: by strength as a necessity for their protection,
so that they demand it in men and in things and yet perpetually rebel
against it; and by weakness as an opportunity for the exercise of all
their nature, so that suffering (if it is sudden) or disaster calls out
in women all of themselves: and this is especially true of mothers and
sons.
That child, that boy, had seemed at first so rosy and so well in the old
days at Versailles; his health had so contrasted with the sickly advance
of Death upon his elder brother; he had been the hope of the throne.
Then there had come upon him the curse of the _men_ of his family; he
had grown weaker and more weak; he had had nervous fits of rage, a
nervous fear of noise unnatural to his age. Some had thought him
deficient; all had noted with anxiety or with malice his increasing
weakness during the period of the Royal Family’s imprisonment. Fits had
seized him. But a few weeks before he had had convulsions; and all June,
during the illness of which I have spoken, fears for him had already
arisen: it was a rapid tragedy of childhood that was soon to end in
death.[34] His mother’s devotion—having him now only for its object in
the isolation of those stone walls—had become the whole of her being.
That he had grown so dull, so failing, so more than common sickly, so
odd, did but heighten in some way the mystic feeling in her. He was the
KING.... She was observed to pay him a certain reverence, and she served
him at table (as spies thought at least) with the gravity of a
ceremonial. All this at one abominable stroke she lost.
Footnote 34:
I take for granted the death of Louis XVII. in prison; it is
certified, it is clear, and even were it not so the progress of his
disease compels such a conclusion: but this book is not the place for
a discussion upon the question, nor could so considerable a debate be
discussed even in an Appendix.
She would watch him—oh, unhappy woman!—through chinks and chance places
when the little chap was taken out to get the air, with gaolers, upon
the roof for some few minutes of the day. He, of course, easily and at
once forgot. He soon learnt to repeat the phrases he heard around him,
laughed when his guardians laughed, and even asked, as he heard them
ask, “whether the women still lived?” He played at ball a little with
his gaolers; but he weakened still and he decayed. That child was the
head of an authority older than Islam, and the heir to a family name
older than the Sagas, and in his little drooping body were all the
rights of the Capetians.
The Queen saw him, I say, for a few moments—now upon one day, now upon
another—by chance, as he took the air with his gaolers. She had nothing
more to lose—and her soul was broken.
[Illustration:
July-October 1793.
ELEMENTS OF THE STRATEGIC POSITION
]
* * * * *
Those who were to destroy the new society of the French, to rescue or to
avenge the Queen, were now once more at hand and now almost arrived.
Their way to Paris lay open but for two last perilous and endangered
defences; to the right the lines of Weissembourg, to the left Maubeuge.
There are two avenues of approach westward into the heart of Gaul and
two only. The great marches of the French eastward, which are the
recurrent flood-tides of European history, pour up by every channel,
cross the Alps at every pass, utilise the narrow gate of Belfort, the
narrower gate of the Rhone, the gorge of the Meuse, the Cerdagne, the
Somport, Roncesvalles. But in the ebb, when the outer peoples of Europe
attempt invasion, two large ways alone satisfy that necessity at once
for concentration and for a wide front which is essential to any attack
upon a people permanently warlike.[35] These two ways pass, the one
between the Vosges and the Ardennes, the other between the Ardennes and
the sea. By the first of these have come hosts from Attila’s to those of
1870; by the second, hosts from the little war-band of Clovis to the
Allies of 1815. Both avenues were involved in this balancing moment of
’93: the first, the passage by Lorraine, was still blocked by the
defence of Mayence and the lines of Weissembourg;[36] the second, the
passage by the Low Countries, was all but won. Of the string of
fortresses defending that passage, Maubeuge was now almost the last,
would soon be the very last, to stand.
Footnote 35:
These words “concentration” and “a wide front” may seem
self-contradictory. I mean by concentration a massed invasion, if you
are to succeed against a military people; and by “a wide front” the
necessity for attacking such a people in several places at once, if
you are to succeed. For a force marching by a single narrow gate (such
as is the valley of the Meuse) is in peril of destruction if its
opponents are used to war.
Footnote 36:
The lines of Weissembourg did not, of course, physically block the
entry; they lay on the flank of it: but until the army behind them
could be dislodged it made impossible an advance by that way into
Lorraine.
It was not upon Mayence and the lines of Weissembourg (though these to
soldiers seemed of equal importance), it was upon the bare plains of the
north that Paris strained its eyes in these perilous hot days—the long
flat frontier of Hainault and of Flanders—and it is here that the reader
must look for his background to the last agony of the Queen.
The line of defence, stretched like a chain across that long flat
frontier, was breaking down, had almost disappeared. Point after point
upon the line had gone; it held now by one point remaining, and the ruin
of that was imminent: the Republicans were attentive, in a fever for the
final crash, when the last pin-point upon which the defence was
stretched should give way and the weight of the invaders should pour
unresisted upon Paris. When that march began there would be nothing for
those who had challenged the world but “to cover their faces and to
die.”
Of what character is that north-eastern frontier of France and what in
military terms was the nature of the blow which was about to fall?
It is a frontier drawn irregularly due south-east for a hundred miles,
from the sea to the difficult highlands of Ardennes and the waste Fagne
Land. As it runs thus irregularly, it cuts arbitrarily through a belt of
population which is one in creed, speech, and tradition: there is
therefore no moral obstacle present to the crossing of it, and to this
moral facility of passage is added the material facility that no evident
gates or narrows constrain an invading army to particular entries. From
the dead flat of the sea-coast the country rises slowly into little easy
hills and slopes of some confusion, but not till that frontier reaches
and abuts against the Ardennes does any obstacle mark it. It is
traversed by a score of main roads suitable for a parallel advance, all
excellent in surface and in bridges and other artifice; it is thickly
set with towns and villages to afford repose and supply. Lastly, it is
the nearest point of attack to Paris. Once forced, ten days’ rapid
marching from that frontier brings the invader to the capital, and there
is nothing between.
Such advantages—which, it is said, tempt unstable brains in Berlin
to-day—have rendered this line, whenever some powerful enemy held its
further side, of supreme defensive importance to the French. Until the
formation of the Belgian State it had been for centuries—from the battle
of Bouvines at least—the front of national defence; here the tradition
of the seventeenth century and the genius of Vauban and his successors
had established a network of strongholds, which formed the barrier now
so nearly destroyed in this summer of ’93.
These fortresses ran along that frontier closely interdependent, every
one a support to its neighbours, forming a narrowing wedge of
strongholds, from where Dunkirk upon the sea was supported by Gravelines
to where the whole system came to a point in the last fortress and camp
of Maubeuge, close up against the impassable Ardennes.
Maubeuge was the pivot of that door. Upon Maubeuge the last effort of
the invaders would be made. The rolling up of the defending line of
strongholds would proceed until Maubeuge alone should be left to menace
the advance of the invasion. Maubeuge once fallen, all the Revolution
also fell.
So much has been written to explain the failure of the Allies and the
ultimate triumph of France in that struggle, that this prime truth—the
all-importance of Maubeuge—clear enough to the people of the time, has
grown obscured.[37] The long debates of the Allies, the policy of the
Cabinet in London, the diversion upon Dunkirk, all these and many other
matters are given a weight far beyond their due in the military problem
of ’93. The road from the base of the Allies to their objective in Paris
lay right through the quadrilateral of fortresses, Mons, Condé,
Valenciennes, Maubeuge. Mons was theirs; Condé, Valenciennes and
Maubeuge blocked their advance at its outset. A deflection to the left
was rendered impossible by the Ardennes. A deflection to the right,
possible enough, added, for every degree of such deflection, an added
peril to the communication of the advance, laying the flank of the
communications open to attack from whatever French garrison might have
been left uncaptured. All these garrisons must be accounted for before
Coburg could march on Paris. Mons, as I have said, was in Austrian hands
and in Austrian territory; Condé, nay, Valenciennes, might fall
successively to the invader; but so long as Maubeuge remained untaken
the march upon Paris was blocked.
Footnote 37:
The great authority of Jomini laid the foundation of this
misconception, one which the reader might (perhaps erroneously) find
implied in Mr. Fortescue’s admirable account of this campaign; but the
truth is that it is impossible to accumulate detail—as a military
historian is bound to do—especially where long cordons are opposed to
each other, without danger of losing sight of the vital points of the
line.
There were not wanting at that moment critics who demanded an immediate
march on the capital, especially as the summer waxed, as the peril of
the Queen increased, and as the immobility of the Allies gave time for
the martial law of the Terror to do its work, and to raise its swarms of
recruits from all the country-sides: these critics were in error; Coburg
at the head of the Austrian army was right. Poor as was the quality of
the French troops opposed to him, and anarchic as was their constantly
changing command, to have left a place of refuge whither they could
concentrate and whence they could operate in a body upon his lengthening
communications, as he pressed on to Paris through hostile country, would
have been mad cavalry work, not generalship. Maubeuge with its
entrenched camp, Maubeuge open to continual reinforcement from all the
French country that lay south and west of it, was essential to his final
advance. That Maubeuge stood untaken transformed the war, and, in spite
of every disturbing factor in the complex problem, it should be a fixed
datum in history that the resistance of Maubeuge and the consequent
charge at Wattignies decided ’93 as surely as the German artillery at
St. Privat decided 1870. Maubeuge was the hinge of all the campaign.
Coburg, as the summer heightened, set out to pocket one by one the
supports of that last position: he easily succeeded.
* * * * *
In Paris a vague sense of doom filled all the leaders, but a fever of
violent struggle as well.... The Queen in her prison saw once again (and
shuddered at it) the dark face of Drouet and heard his threatening
voice.
All France had risen. There was civil war in the west and in the north.
A Norman woman had murdered Marat. Mayence was strictly held all round
about with the men of Marseilles raging within; and as for the Barrier
of Fortresses to the north, Coburg now held them in the hollow of his
hand.
* * * * *
A fortnight after the Dauphin had been taken from the Queen, the
fortress of Condé fell; it had fallen from lack of food. The Council of
Maubeuge heard that news. Valenciennes would come next along the
line—then, they! They wrote to the Committee of Public Safety a letter,
which may still be read in the archives of the town, demanding
provisions. None came.
It is difficult to conceive the welter of the time: distracted orders
flying here and there along the hundred miles of cordon that stretched
from Ardennes to the channel: orders contradictory, unobeyed, or, if
obeyed, fatal. Commands shifted and reshifted; civilians from the
Parliament carrying the power of life and death and muddling half they
did; levies caught up at random, bewildered, surrendering, deserting;
recruits too numerous for the army to digest; a lack of all things. No
provisions entered Maubeuge.
July dragged on, and Maubeuge could hear down the west wind the
ceaseless booming of the guns round Valenciennes. Upon July 26th, Dubay,
the Representative on mission for the Parliament, sent to and
established in Maubeuge, heard an unusual silence. As the day drew on a
dread rose in him. The guns round Valenciennes no longer boomed. Only
rare shots from this point and from that were heard: perhaps it was the
weather deceived him. But all next day the same damnable silence hung
over the west. On the 30th he wrote to the Parliament: “We hear no
firing from Valenciennes—but we are confident they cannot have
surrendered.” They had surrendered.
So Valenciennes was gone!... Condé was gone.... Maubeuge alone remained,
with the little outpost of Le Quesnoy to delay a moment its necessary
investment and sure doom.
The officer in command of Maubeuge awaited his orders. They came from
Paris in two days. Their rhetoric was of a different kind from that in
which Ministers who are gentlemen of breeding address the General
Officers of their own society to-day. The Committee of Public Safety had
written thus: “Valenciennes has fallen: you answer on your head for
Maubeuge.”
Far off in Germany, where that other second avenue of invasion was in
dispute, the French in Mayence had surrendered.
* * * * *
So July ended, and immediately, upon the 1st of August, the defiant
decree was thrown at Europe that the Queen herself should be tried. So
closely did that decision mix with the military moment that it was
almost a military thing, and at half-past two on the morning of the 2nd
the order reached her: she in turn was to go down the way so many had
begun to tread.
She showed no movement of the body or of the mind. Night had already
brought her too many terrors. The two women were awakened. The decree of
the Convention which ordered the transference of the Queen to the
Conciergerie for her trial was read. She answered not a word, but
dressed herself and made a little package of her clothes; she embraced
her daughter gently, and bade her regard Madame Elizabeth as her second
mother; then stood for a moment or two in the arms of that sister-in-law
who answered her in whispers. She turned to go and did not look
backward, but as she went out to get into the carriage which was to
carry her across the City, she struck her head violently against the low
lintel of the door. They asked her if she was hurt, and she answered in
the first and only words that she addressed to her captors that nothing
more on earth could give her pain. The carriage travelled rapidly
through the deserted streets of the night, the clattering of the mounted
guard on either side of it. It was her one brief glimpse of the world
between a prison and a prison.
As the Queen drove through the night, silent as it was, there reached
her those noises of a City which never cease, and which to prisoners in
transition (to our gagged prison victims to-day as they cross London
from one Hell to another) are a sort of gaiety or at least a whiff of
other men’s living. These noises were the more alive and the more
perpetual in this horrid August dark of ’93 because a last agony was now
risen high upon the Revolution; the news had been of defeats, of cities
fallen, of Valenciennes itself surrendered: so that the next news might
be the last. All night long men sat up in the wine-shops quarrelling on
it; even as her gaolers drove her by, she saw lights in dirty
ground-floor windows and she heard from time to time snatches of
marching songs. It was the invasion.
[Illustration:
LAST PORTRAIT OF MARIE ANTOINETTE: BY KOCHARSKI
PRESUMABLY SKETCHED IN THE TEMPLE: NOW AT VERSAILLES
]
------------------------------------------------------------------------