_THE HUNGER OF MAUBEUGE_
_From the morning of August 2, 1793, to midnight of Sunday,
October 13, 1793_
THE Queen descended from her carriage. She was weak but erect. The close
heat of the night and her sleeplessness and her fatigue had caused great
beads of sweat to stand upon her forehead. Up river along the quays
there had already showed, as she crossed the bridge on to the Island of
the Cité, a faint glimmer of dawn, but here in the courtyard of the
prison all was still thick night. The gates of the Conciergerie opened
rapidly and shut behind her.
Her gaolers led the way down a long, low, and dark corridor, stiflingly
close and warm, lit here and there with smoky candles. She heard the
murmur of voices, and saw at the end of the passage a group of the
police and of magistrates at the door of the little room that was to be
her cell. She entered through the throng, saw the official papers signed
at the miserable little table, and heard the formal delivery of her
person to the authorities of the prison; then they left her, and in
their place came in a kindly woman, the wife of the porter, and with her
a young girl, whose name she heard was Rosalie. The Queen sat down on
the straw-bottomed chair and glanced round by the light of the candle
beside her.
It was a little low room, quite bare: damp walls, the paper of which,
stamped with the royal fleur de lys, hung mildewed, rose from a yet
damper floor of brick set herringbone-wise; a small camp-bed covered
with the finest linen alone relieved it, and a screen, some four feet
high, between her and the door afforded some little shelter. Above her a
small barred window gave upon the paving of the prison yard, for the
cell was half underground. Here Custine—who had lost the North and was
to be executed for the fall of Valenciennes—had been confined till his
removal but a few hours before to make way for the Queen. Here is now
the canteen of the prison.
It was very late. The new day was quite broad and full, shoving the
extreme paleness of her face and her weary eyes. She stood upon a little
stuff-covered hassock, hung her watch upon a nail, and began to undress,
to sleep if she might sleep for a few hours. A servant of the turnkey’s,
the girl called Rosalie, timidly offered her help: the Queen put her
gently aside, saying: “Since I have no maid, I have learnt to do all
myself.” They blew their candles out and left her to repose.
On the fourth day, the 6th of August, they came again and took from her
further things which a prisoner might not enjoy; among them that little
watch of hers in gold. She gave it to them. It was the little watch
which she had worn when she had come in as a child to Compiègne on her
way to the great marriage and to the throne. It was the last of her
ornaments.
A routine began and lasted unbroken almost till August ended. In that
little low cell, more than half underground, dimly lit by the barred
window that stood level with the flags outside, day succeeded day
without insult, but without relief, and here at last her strait
captivity began what the Temple hitherto could never do. Her spirit did
not fail, but her body began to weaken, and in her attitude and gesture
there had entered the appearance of despair.... Outside the Committee
wondered whether their daring might not bear fruit, and whether, to save
the Queen, the frontier might not be relieved. But no offer came from
the Kings, and the hostage of the Republicans remained useless on their
anxious hands.... In Brussels Fersen heard and went wild, talked folly
of an immediate march on Paris, cursed Coburg and all rules of war; but
Coburg was not to be moved—he knew his trade, and still prepared the
sieges.
She had no privacy. All day long a corporal of police and his man sat on
guard in a corner of the room. All night her door, in spite of its two
great bolts, was guarded. For the rest her wants were served. She asked
for a special water from the neighbourhood of what had been Versailles,
and she obtained it. They hired books for her. They permitted her good
food and the daily expense upon it of a very wealthy woman.[38] The
porter’s wife and the maid were very tender to her. They put flowers on
her small oak table and they marketed at her desire. Her other service
wounded her; first an old woman who was useless, the turnkey’s mother;
next a young virago, Havel by name, whose rudeness disturbed her. They
would let her have no steel—not even the needles with which she was
knitting for her little son, nor a knife to cut her food; but more than
all there sank into her the intolerable monotony, the fixed doubt, the
utter isolation which made the place a tomb. The smallest incident moved
her. She would watch her gaolers at their picquet and note the game, she
would listen to distant music, she would greet with a dreadful
reminiscence of her own the porter’s little son, and cry over him a
little and speak of the Dauphin—but this last scene was so vivid that at
last they dared no longer bring the child. She kept for consolation all
this while, hidden in her bosom, a little yellow glove of her boy’s, and
in it a miniature of him and a lock of his hair.
Footnote 38:
What would come to a pound a day in our money, and at our scale of
living—for the uncooked food alone.
* * * * *
Meanwhile Maubeuge:—
On the day which had seen the Queen enter the Conciergerie the Commander
of Maubeuge issued the first warning of danger. The aged, the women and
the children were invited to leave the shelter of the fortress and to
betake themselves to the open country. That order was but partially
obeyed—and still no provisions reached the town.
Now that strong Valenciennes had fallen, the Allies had their business
so thoroughly in hand that some debate arose among them whether the main
garrison of Maubeuge should be assailed at once or whether the little
outlying posts should be picked up first: the large and the small were
equally certain to capitulate: there was ample leisure to choose.
Coburg was for the main attack on Maubeuge—but he was not keen—the
wretched little force at Cambrai would do to begin with—or even the
handful in Le Quesnoy. It was simply a question of the order in which
they should be plucked.
The young Duke of York, acting as he was bidden to act from Westminster,
proposed to divert some 40,000 men to the capture of Dunkirk; for it
must be remembered that all this war was a war of Conquest, that the
frontier towns taken were to compensate the Allies after the Revolution
had been destroyed, and that Dunkirk was historically a bastion of
importance to England, and that all the advance was to end in the
annexation of French land.
This march upon Dunkirk has been condemned by most historians because it
failed: had it succeeded none could have praised it too highly.
Politically it was just in conception (for it gave Britain some
balancing advantage against the Austrians their allies), and as a
military project it was neither rash nor ill-planned. The force left
with Coburg was ample for his task, and nothing could be easier than for
the Austrian army alone to reduce (as it did reduce) the worthless
garrisons opposed to it, while the English commander was doing English
work upon the right.[39]
Footnote 39:
Even as it was, and in spite of his failure before Dunkirk, the Duke
of York had plenty of time to bring back his remnant and help Coburg
after that failure, and to have joined him in front of Maubeuge before
the French attempted the relief of that town. The English commander
could easily have been present at Wattignies, and would probably or
certainly have prevented that miracle. But no one foresaw the miracle.
Coburg did not ask York to come till the 7th of October. York did not
march till the 10th, and even then he thought he had the leisure to
waste a week in covering forty miles!
The combined forces spent the close of the week after Valenciennes had
fallen in driving off such of the French as were still in the open under
Kilmain. A few days later forty-seven battalions, of whom a full seventh
were English and Irish men, marched off under York for Dunkirk, while
Coburg at his ease sat down before the little town of Le Quesnoy, the
last fortified support of Maubeuge upon the west. Upon the same day he
brushed the French out of the wood of Mormal, the last natural obstacle
which could protect Maubeuge when Le Quesnoy should have fallen. It was
the 17th of August—but already in Paris there had passed one of the
chief accidents of History: an accident from which were to flow all the
tactics of the Great War, ultimately the successes of Napoleon, and
immediately the salvation of the Revolution: Lazare Carnot had been
admitted to the Committee of Public Safety.
* * * * *
In Paris the Queen endured that August: and, isolated from the world,
she did not know what chances of war might imperil her through the fury
of a defeated nation or might save her by the failure of the Terror and
its martial law.
As she thus waited alone and in silence the pressure upon the Republic
grew. Lyons had risen when Marat died. Vendée was not defeated: before
the month ended the English were in Toulon.
As the hot days followed each other in their awful sameness she still
declined: her loss of blood never ceased, her vigour dwindled. A doctor
of great position, the surgeon Souberbielle,[40] visited the cell and
denounced its dampness for a danger: nothing was done. She lived on,
knowing nothing of the world beyond and above those dirty walls, but
vaguely she hoped or imagined an exchange and to be reunited with her
children—to survive this unreal time and to find herself abroad again
with living men. No change or interruption touched the long watch of her
soul until, when she had already passed three weeks and more in
nothingness, that inspector of police who had already befriended her in
the Temple, Michonis, entered; and a certain companion, spare and
wild-eyed, was with him. It was a Wednesday—the last Wednesday in
August; the month had yet three days to run.
Footnote 40:
He was famous for his operations for the stone, sat upon the Jury that
condemned the Queen, was summoned for his art to Westminster Hospital,
wondered in old age why the Restoration would not give his European
fame a salaried post: thought it might be a fear of his infirmities of
age: danced high and vigorously before the committee of medical
patronage to prove, at ninety, his unimpaired vivacity, was refused
any public salary, and died—some years later—a still active but
disappointed man, “fearing that his politics had had some secret
effect in prejudicing the royal family against him.”
These two men who so visited her were in league to help her, and
fantastic fortune had put an official of the city at her disposal for
escape.
The whole scene was rapid—she had barely time to understand the
prodigious opportunity. She noticed in the hand of Michonis’s companion
a bunch of pinks—perhaps she half recognised his face (indeed, he had
fought in defence of the palace), she failed to take the flowers and he
let them fall behind the stove—and the while Michonis was covering all
by some official question or other. It was not a minute’s work and they
were gone: but in the flowers, when, after her bewilderment, she sought
them, she found a note. Its contents offered her safety. Michonis (it
ran), trusted as an official, would produce an order to transfer her
person to some other prison; in the passage he would permit her to fly.
The note asked for a reply.
She had no pen or pencil, but she found a plan for answering, for she
took a pin and pricked out painfully these words on a slip of paper: “I
am watched; I neither write nor speak; I count on you; I will come.” The
policeman of her guard—not the corporal—had been bought. He took the
pricked slip of paper from her and gave it to the porter’s wife, her
friend. Next day Michonis called for it, knew that the Queen was ready,
laid all his plans, and on the Monday, by night, appeared at the door of
the Conciergerie with his official order for the removal of the Queen.
But even in these few hours there had been time for treason. The
policeman had revealed the message to the authorities. The faces
Michonis saw at the gate of the prison by the sentry’s lamp when he came
up that Monday night were not those he expected or knew. His plot was
already in the hands of the Government and he was lost.
Within, the Queen waited in an agony of silence for the sound of her
deliverers; the hours of the morning drew on and the summer dawn of the
Tuesday broadened; no steps had sounded on the stones of the passage:
everything had failed.
Her deliverer suffered. She herself was closely examined and transferred
to another cell where she must wait under more rigid compulsion for the
end.
No other human fortune[41] came to Marie Antoinette from that day until,
seven weeks later, she died.
Footnote 41:
I reject the story of her Communion.
* * * * *
West and a little north of Maubeuge, but twenty miles away, the watchers
a month and more before had heard the ceaseless guns round Valenciennes.
Then had come the silence of the surrender. Now they heard much nearer,
west and a little to the south, the loud fury of a new and neighbouring
bombardment as the shot poured into Le Quesnoy. Soon, as they knew,
those guns would be trained on their own walls. Little Le Quesnoy was
the last of the line but one, and they, in Maubeuge, the last of all.
The Monday, the first Monday in September, the Tuesday, the Wednesday,
the Thursday, the Friday, all that week the garrison of Maubeuge
listened to the endless sound which never faltered by day or by night,
and they still wondered how long it might endure: there were but 6000 in
the little place and their doom was so certain that their endurance
seemed quite vain. Sunday and the guns never paused or weakened; the
second Monday came and they still raged—but on the ninth day when the
marvel seemed to have grown permanent, on the Tuesday (it was the day
that the Queen was thrust into her second and more rigorous
imprisonment) again—as with Valenciennes—the ominous silence came: Le
Quesnoy was treating, and Maubeuge now made ready for its end.
The free troops to the south and east (two poor divisions) moved
doubtfully towards the entrenched camp of the fortress—knowing well that
they must in a few days be contained: there was no food: there were not
even muskets for them all.
Around them by detachments the French forces were being eaten up. The
little garrison of Cambrai had marched out to relieve its neighbour—6000
men, three-quarters of the infantry regulars, three squadrons, and a
battery of guns. The Hungarians rode through that battery before it
could unlimber, refused to accept surrender, broke the line and hacked
and killed until a remnant got off at a run under the guns of Bouchain.
Declaye, their general, survived: he was in Paris within forty-eight
hours, tried within another forty-eight, and on the morrow beheaded.
For a fortnight these contemptuous successes on the fringe of Coburg’s
army continued, and the main force meanwhile was gathering supplies,
calling in detachments, organising train, and making all ready for the
last and decisive blow that should shatter Maubeuge. In Maubeuge they
hurriedly and confusedly prepared: such grain as they could gather from
neighbouring farms was seized, many of “the useless and the suspect”
were expelled, the able-bodied civilians were set to dig, to entrench,
and to complain, and over all this work was a man worthy of the place
and the occasion, for, on a high morning, the 15th of September, but a
day or two after the surrender of Le Quesnoy, there had galloped into
Maubeuge a representative of the Parliament well chosen by the Terror to
superintend such an issue: he rode straight in the long stirrups of the
cavalry with harsh, eccentric, and powerful clean face; a young man,
dark and short and square: it was Drouet.
The two divisions hung nervously, the one east, the other west of the
fortress, making a show to dispute the passage of the river against
forces three times their own in number and indefinitely their superiors
in training and every quality of arms: on the 28th[42] of September, at
dawn, Coburg crossed where he chose both above and below the town; of
the French divisions one was swept, the other hunted, into the
fortress—before noon the thing was done, and the French force—happy to
have escaped with but a partial panic—was blocked and held. With the
next day the strain began, for the Austrians drove the surrounding
peasantry within the walls and in the same hour burnt the stores
accumulated outside. On the third day the first of the horses within
Maubeuge was killed for food.
Footnote 42:
_Not_, as Jomini says, the 29th.
Drouet, for all his high heart, doubted if the Republic could deliver
them and knew the sudden extremity of the town. He imagined a bold
thing. On the 2nd of October, the fourth day of the siege, he took a
hundred dragoons—men of his own old arm—and set out across the Austrian
lines by night: he designed a long ride to the Meuse itself and the
sending of immediate news to the Committee of the hunger of Maubeuge: he
feared lest those civilians in Paris should imagine that a week, ten
days, a fortnight were all one to the beleaguered town, and lest they
should frame their plan of relief upon the false hope of a long siege.
So he rode out—and the enemy heard the hoof-beats and caught him. They
put that dark man in chains; they caged him also and made him a show. In
Brussels, Fersen, with a dreadful curiosity, went to peep at his face
behind the iron bars; in Paris the woman whose chance of flight he had
destroyed at Varennes sat and awaited her judges.
* * * * *
Three days passed in Maubeuge and all the meat, salted and fresh, was
sequestrated. The manuscripts in the monastery were torn up for
cartridges: everything was needed. On the next day, the 6th of October,
all hay and straw were commandeered. On the next, the 7th, a census of
the food remaining showed, for over 30,000 adult men and all the women
and children besides, barely 400 head, and of these more than
three-quarters were small sheep in poor condition. Upon the 10th such
little grain as the town contained was seized by the Commandant. The
next day the whole population was upon half rations and the townsmen
were struggling with the soldiery. Upon the morrow again, the 12th,
counsel was taken of the desperate need to advise the Government that
the place was all but gone, and it was designed that by night such as
might volunteer should bear the news or perish in crossing the lines.
* * * * *
That evening, the evening of the 12th, after dark, Marie Antoinette was
led out from her cell for that preliminary Interrogation which, in
French procedure, precedes the public trial. They led her from her
little cell, through the narrow passages, into a great empty hall. Two
candles, the only lights in that echoing darkness, stood upon the table.
She was in a deep ignorance of her position and of Europe. The silence
of the room corresponded to the silence within her: its darkness to the
complete loneliness of her heart. She did not know what were the
fortunes of the French army, what advance, if any, had been made by
their enemies—whom she still regarded as her rescuers. She knew nothing
of the last desperate risk upon the frontier which the Republic ran; she
knew nothing of the steps by which she had been brought to this
position, the demand in Parliament for her execution as the news from
the front got worse and worse: the summoning of the Court: the formation
of the Bench that was to try her. Least of all did she know that the
extreme mad group whom Hébert led had gone to her little sickly son
suggesting to him (probably believing what they suggested) nameless
corruptions from her hand: to these they believed he had been witness,
nay, himself a victim; she did not know that to these horrors that group
had caused the child’s trembling signature to be affixed.... He had sat
there swinging his legs in the air from the high chair in which they had
placed him to question him: he had answered “Yes” to all they suggested
... he was her little son! She, imprisoned far off from him, knew
nothing of that hellish moment. She was utterly deserted. She saw
nothing but the dark empty room and the two pale candles that shone upon
the faces of the men who were soon to try her: they marked in relief the
aquiline face of the chief judge Herman. The other faces were in
darkness.
Certain questions privately put to her were few and simple, a mere
preliminary to the trial; she answered them as simply in her own favour.
Her dress was dark and poor. She sat between two policemen upon a bench
in the vast black void of the unfurnished hall and answered, and, when
she had answered, signed. She answered conventionally that she wished
the country well, that she had never wished it ill; she signed (as they
told her to sign) under the title of the “widow of Capet.” They named
two barristers to defend her, Chauveau-Lagarde and Tronçon Ducourdray,
and she was led back to her cell and to her silence. Next day, the 13th,
these lawyers were informed, and came to consult with her.
* * * * *
Upon the 13th, by night, twelve dragoons volunteered to take news out of
Maubeuge, a sergeant leading them. They swam the Sambre and got clean
away. They rode all night; they rode by morning into Philippeville and
begged that three cannon shots might be fired, for that was the signal
by which Maubeuge was to know that they had brought news of the hard
straits of the city beyond the Austrian lines. They rode on without
sleep to Givet, and there at last they heard that an army was on the
march, straight for the relief of the siege.
Carnot had gathered that army, bringing in the scattered and broken
detachments from the right and the left, concentrating them upon
Avesnes, until at last he had there to his hand 45,000 men. Carnot was
there in Avesnes, and we have records of the ragged army, some of them
fresh from defeats, most of them worthless, pouring in. There were those
who had one shoe, there were those who had none; they were armed in
varying fashion; they were wholly under-gunned. The boys straggled,
marched, or drooped in, the gayer of them roaring marching songs, but
the greater part disconsolate. With such material, in one way or
another, Carnot designed to conquer. Maubeuge had been upon half rations
since the beginning of the week, it might ask for terms in any hour, and
between him and it stretched the long high line of wood wherein Coburg
lay entrenched impregnably.
* * * * *
The nominal command of the hosts so gathered was in the hands of
Jourdan, a travelling draper who had volunteered in the American War,
whom the Committee of Public Safety had discovered, once more a draper,
and to whom it had given first the army of the Ardennes, then this high
post before Maubeuge. He was a man of simple round features and of easy
mind; he had but just been set at the head of the Army of the North:
left to himself he would have lost it—and his head. But the true
commander was not Jourdan, it was Carnot. Carnot came to represent only
the force of the Parliament of which he was a member and the force of
the Committee of Public Safety of which he was the brain; but once on
the field he exceeded both these capacities and became, what he had
always been, a soldier. His big and ugly, bulging forehead with its lean
wisp of black hair hid the best brain and overhung the best eye for
tactics of all those that preceded and prepared the final effect of
Napoleon’s armies.
The great Carnot in Avesnes that night stood like a wrestler erect and
ready, his arms free, his hands unclenched, balancing to clutch the
invader and to try the throw. He, with that inward vision of his, saw
the whole plan of the struggle from south to north, and overlooked the
territory of the French people as a mountain bird overlooks the plain.
He knew the moment. He knew it not as a vague, intense, political fear,
nor even as a thesis for the learned arms and for the staff, but as a
visible and a real world: he saw the mountains and the rivers, the white
threads of roads radiating from Paris to all the points of peril, of
rebellion or of disaster; he saw the armies in column upon them, the
massed fronts, the guns. He saw the royal flag over Toulon and the
English fleet in harbour there, he saw the Bush and the Marsh of Vendée
still unconquered, he saw the resistance of Lyons (for he had no news of
its surrender); above all he saw those two doors against which the
invader leaned, which were now pushed so far ajar and which at any
moment might burst open—the lines of Weissembourg; and here, right to
his hand, the entrenchments that covered the last siege of the northern
frontier. He saw reeling and nearly falling the body of the Republic
that was his religion, and he saw that all the future, death or life,
lay in Maubeuge.
The Sunday night fell over Paris and over those long Flemish hills. The
morrow was to see the beginning of two things: the trial of the Queen
and the opening of a battle which was to decide the fate of the French
people.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration:
Battle of WATTIGNIES
OCT. 15^{TH.} & 16^{TH.} 1793
AND THE
_RELIEF OF MAUBEUGE_
]