_WATTIGNIES_
MONDAY, the 14th of October:—
[Sidenote: Oct. 14, 1793. 6 a.m.]
The fate of the Queen and of the Republic had each come to a final and
critical issue when the light broke, dully in either place, over Paris
and over the pastures of the frontier. There the army lay to arms in the
valley, with Coburg entrenched upon the ridge above them, and beyond him
the last famine of Maubeuge: from dawn the French lines could hear, half
a day’s march to the northward, the regular boom of the bombardment. But
Carnot was now come.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Oct. 14, 1793. In Paris, 8 a.m.]
In Paris, when it was broad day, the chief Court above the prison was
prepared.
The populace had crammed the side galleries of the great room and were
forming a further throng, standing in the space between the doors and
the bar. The five Judges, Herman the chief, filed on to the Bench; a
little below them and on their right a jury of fifteen men were
empanelled. It was on the courage, the conviction or the fanaticism of
these that the result would turn.
They presented, as they sat there awaiting the prisoner, a little model
of the violent egalitarian mood which had now for a year and more driven
the military fury of the Republic. Among them would be seen the refined
and somewhat degraded face of a noble who had sat in the earlier
Parliaments and who had drifted as Orleans had drifted—but further than
had Orleans. There also were the unmistakable eyes of precision which
were those of an optician, a maker of instruments. There were, resting
on the rail of the box, the firm hands of a great surgeon
(Souberbielle). A few of the common people were mingled with these:
contractors also, prosperous men, and master-carpenters. There was a
hatter there, and a barber, a man who had made violins, and another who
painted pictures for the rich. Of such elements was the body comprised
which had now to determine so much in the history of Europe. Above them
a presiding figure, Herman the Judge, with his dark aquiline face,
controlled, them all. They looked all of them towards the door that led
from the cells below, where two warders came upward through it, leading
between them the Queen.
She also as she entered saw new things. The silence and the darkness of
her long imprisonment fell from her: the noise of the streets came in
from the windows before her; she heard the rumour and she saw the
movement of the populace which—save for that brief midnight drive two
months ago—had been quite cut off from her since last she had shrunk
from the mob on the evening when she had heard the gate of the Temple
bolted behind her carriage. After that hush which had been so dreadfully
divided by evil upon evil, she came out suddenly into the sound of the
city and into the general air. In that interval the names of months and
of days, the mutual salutations of men, religion and the very habit of
life had changed. In that interval also the nation had passed from the
shock of arms to unimagined crimes, to a most unstable victory, to a
vision of defeat and perhaps of annihilation. France was astrain upon
the edge of a final deliverance or of a final and irretrievable
disaster. Its last fortress was all but fallen, all its resources were
called out, all its men were under arms, over the fate of the frontier
hung a dreadful still silence. In the very crisis of this final doubt
and terror the Queen stood arraigned.
The women lowered their knitting-needles and kept them still. The little
knot of Commissioners sitting with Counsel for the State, the angry boys
in the crowd who could remember wounds or the death of comrades,
stretched forward to catch sight of her as she came up the stairs
between her guards: they were eager to note if there had been any
change.
She had preserved her carriage, which all who knew her had regarded
since her childhood as the chief expression of her soul. She still moved
with solemnity and with that exaggerated but unflinching poise of the
head which, in the surroundings of Versailles, had seemed to some so
queenly, to others so affected, which here, in her last hours, seemed to
all, as she still preserved it, so defiant. For the rest she was not the
same. Her glance seemed dull and full of weariness; the constant loss of
blood which she had suffered during those many weeks spent below ground
had paled her so that the artificial, painted red of her cheeks was
awful in that grey morning, and her still ample hair was ashen and
touched with white, save where some traces of its old auburn could be
perhaps distinguished.
She was in black. A little scarf of lace was laid with exactitude about
her shoulders and her breast, and on her head she wore a great cap which
a woman who loved her, the same who had served her in her cell, put on
her as she went to her passion. The pure white of this ornament hung in
great strings of lawn on either side, and round it and beneath it she
had wound the crape of her widowhood. So dressed, and so standing at the
bar, so watched in silence by so many eyes, she heard once more the new
sound which yesterday she had first learned to hate: the hard and nasal
voice of Herman. He asked her formally her name. She answered in a voice
which was no longer strong, but which was still clear and well heard in
that complete silence:
“Marie Antoinette of Austria, some thirty-eight years old, widow to
Louis Capet the King of France.”
To the second formal question on the place of her first arrest, that:
“It was in the place where the sittings of the National Assembly were
held.”
The clerk, a man of no great learning, wrote his heading: “The 23rd day
of the first month of the fourth year of Freedom,” and when he had done
this he noted her replies, and Herman’s short questions also: his
bidding to the jury that they must be firm, to the prisoner that she
must be attentive.
Into the clerk’s writing there crept, as there will into that of poor
men, certain grievous errors of grammar which in an earlier (and a
later) time would not have appeared in the record of the meanest Court
trying a tramp for hunger; but it was the Revolution and they were
trying a Queen, so everything was strange; and this clerk called himself
Fabricius, which had a noble sound—but it was not his name.
This clerk read the list of witnesses and the indictment out loud.
When these formalities were over they brought a chair. The Queen sat
down by leave of the Court and the trial began. She saw rising upon her
right a new figure of a kind which she had not known in all her life up
to the day when the door of the prison had shut her out from the noise
and change of the world. It was a figure of the Terror, Fouquier
Tinville. His eyes were steadfast, the skin of his face was brown, hard
and strong; he was a hired politician covered with the politician’s
outer mask of firmness. Within he was full of the politician’s
hesitation and nervous inconstancy. A genuine poverty and a politician’s
hunger for a salary had been satisfied by the post of Public Prosecutor.
He earned that salary with zeal and with little discernment, and
therefore, when the time came, he also was condemned to die. It was he
now in this forenoon who opened against the Queen.
His voice was harsh and mechanical: his speech was long, dull and
violent: rhetorical with that scenic and cardboard rhetoric which is the
official commonplace of all tribunals. The Widow Capet was a Messalina;
she was a leech; she was a Merovingian Tyrant; she was a Medicis. She
had held relations with the “Man called King” of Bohemia and Hungary;
she had urged Capet on to all his crimes. She had sent millions to aid
her family in their war against the French people. She had woven the
horrid plot of the 10th of August, which nothing but incredible valour
had defeated. She was the main enemy which the new and angry Freedom for
which he spoke had had to meet and to conquer.
Apart from its wearisome declamation the accusation was true; save
that—through no fault of her own, poor woman!—she had not aided the
foreign cause with gold, all the story was evident and publicly known.
She sat as near this orator as is a nurse to a bedside. She heard him
with her suffering and disdainful face quite fixed and unmoved, save at
one point: the mention of her son.
Fouquier Tinville was sane: he saw the crass absurdity of Hébert’s
horrors, he barely touched upon them very hurriedly (and as the rapid
and confused words escaped him, her lips twitched with pain), but even
as he did so he knew he had given the defence a hold.
[Illustration:
GATEWAY OF THE LAW COURTS THROUGH
WHICH THE QUEEN WENT TO HER DEATH
(THE RIGHT HAND ONE OF THE THREE GATEWAYS IN THE RAILINGS)
]
It is held on principle in French Courts that an impartial presentation
of the truth cannot be obtained unless witnesses are heard in a chance
sequence, not divided into friends and foes as with us, but each (such
is the theory) telling what he believes to be the truth. Even in these
political trials of the Terror (which were rather Courts-Martial or
condemnations than trials) the rule was observed, and when Fouquier sat
down the file of witnesses began.
The parade was futile. For plain political facts known to the whole
world no list of witnesses were needed, nor could their evidence be of
the least avail. Moreover, that evidence was lacking. The witnesses
defiled one after the other, each vaguer than the last, to prove (and
failing to prove) things that were commonplaces to all Europe. Long past
mid-day the empty procession continued through the drowsy hours past one
o’clock and two: remembering trifles of her conduct true and false. To
every assertion as the Judge repeated it (true or false) she answered
quietly by a denial: that denial was now false, now true.
Even if the Revolutionary Tribunal could have subpœnaed Mallet or the
Emperor or Fersen, it would have meant little to the result. Her guilt,
if it was guilt so to scheme against the nation, was certain: what yet
remained in doubt was the political necessity of such a trial at such a
moment, the limit of hardihood in her judges and the possible effect in
a democracy of public sympathy at some critical phase of the pleadings:
and much more potent than any of these three, because it included them
all, was the news that might come at any moment from the frontier and
from the hunger of Maubeuge—no news came.
Last of these witnesses Hébert, all neat and powdered, presented his
documents and put forward his abominations, his fixed idea of incest.
The public disgust might here have turned the trial. There was a stir
all round: her friends began to hope. As for the officials, they could
not stop Hébert’s mouth, but Herman was careful to omit the customary
repetition: he was hurrying on to the next witness when a juryman of
less wit than his fellows and filled with the enormous aberrations of
hate, pressed the charge.
The Queen would not reply. She half rose from her chair and cried in a
high voice: “I appeal to every mother here,” and then sank back again.
The crowd in the galleries began to move and murmur, the women raised
their voices against the angry orders of the ushers and of the Bench
demanding silence. Away, dining beyond the Seine, Robespierre, hearing
of it, broke a plate at table in his anger, and thought Hébert’s lunacy
had saved her. A further witness, though he spoke of the flight to
Varennes, could hardly be heard, and spoke quite unheeded; and when he
had concluded, the Court abruptly rose in the midst of the commotion,
hubbub and change.
The Queen was led to her cell, keeping as she left her place, in spite
of her hopeless fatigue, the steady step wherewith she had entered; and
as she passed she heard one woman in the press sneering at her pride.
It was three o’clock. The first act in that long agony had lasted,
without food or breathing time, for seven hours.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Oct. 14, 1793. Before Maubeuge, 8 a.m.]
While the Republic thus held the old world prisoner in Paris and
tortured it in the person of the Queen, out on the frontier in the
water-meadows of Avesnes, the Republic lay in its chief peril from the
old world free and armed. Coburg and every privilege held the crest of
the hills invincibly, and Maubeuge was caught fast, unreachable beyond
the entrenchments of that ridge.
Carnot, looking westward down the valley of the Helpe, saw the deep
orchards laden with October, nourished by the small and very winding
stream. He saw the last French frontier hamlets and their mills: St.
Hilaire, Dompierre, Tenieres, dwindling away to where, far off in its
broad trench, ran the Sambre.
Before him also in this valley, as he looked westward down it, he saw
stretched for some ten miles the encampment of his army: bivouac after
bivouac, one beyond the other along the lines, and smoke rising from
them. Tall hedges, not yet bare, divided the floor of the valley and the
village grounds: here also Cæsar had marched through against the Nervii:
for this corner of Europe is a pack of battlefields. Malplaquet lay just
before the army; within a march, Fleurus; within sound of cannon,
Jemappes.
Up above them beyond that wood of Avesnes, the line of the heights along
the sky, was the enemy. It had loomed so dark before the late, dull and
rainy dawn, that they had seen the notches in that line which were the
emplacement of guns. The early afternoon had shone upon the sides of the
hills, and the French outposts had seen the outposts of the enemy busy
in the little villages that mark the foot of the slopes: St. Vaast,
Dourlers, Foursies. And all day long boomed to the north behind the
hills the sullen guns before Maubeuge. At any hour that dull repeated
sound might cease, and it would mean that the last fortress had fallen.
All that day Carnot passed in silence. The troops, some last detachments
of which had but just marched in, lay dully in such repose as soldiers
can steal: a jumble of forty patchwork battalions, militia, regulars,
loud volunteers, old stark gunners; they listened to the distant and
regular thunder of the siege. In some stations the few horses were
grooming: in others, fewer still, the rare guns were cleaned.
[Sidenote: Oct. 14, 1793. Before Maubeuge, 4 p.m.]
An hour before dusk the six generals were called to Carnot’s tent, and
here and there the bugles roused the troops called for reconnaissance.
These few detachments crossed the woods, pierced gaps in the hedges[43]
to prepare the advance of the morrow, noted and exchanged shots with the
outposts of the evening, and at evening they retired. As they retired
Carnot gave orders to the guns. Out of effective range, vague and
careless of a target, they fired and proclaimed the presence of a
relieving army to the besieged.
Footnote 43:
So on the same field had Cæsar been compelled to clear the hedgerows.
So little does the French peasantry change in a thousand years, and so
tenacious is each French province of its customs.
Maubeuge in that still evening, during a lull of the siege-pieces, heard
those French guns, and Ferrant and the general officers with him
counselled a sortie. Only Chancel stood out; but Chancel was in command
of the camp of Maubeuge, and his authority was unassailable. He did not
distinguish the French fire, he thought it Austrian; no instinct moved
him. Therefore all the next day while the battle was engaged, the
garrison of Maubeuge failed to move; and later, for this error, Chancel
was tried and killed.[44]
Footnote 44:
And the other version is that Chancel was for moving but that Ferrant
would not. Choose.
When the guns had been thus fired, the reconnaissance ended. The troops
fell back again through the wood of Avesnes and slept the last sleep
before battle. In Paris during that same evening, the long trial of the
Queen proceeded.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Oct. 14, 1793. In Paris, 5 p.m.]
At five, just in that hour when Carnot was recalling his scouts and
ordering that warning cannon, the Court gathered and the prisoner was
recalled.
In her cell she had not been silent.
As a great actress in an interval between her hardest lines will refuse
repose and will demand rather comment or praise, so had she filled this
little respite of two hours with questions and with doubts professed.
She had dwelt upon the forms of the trial, she had begged her counsel to
reassure her. She had despised the evidence. She had said she feared but
one witness—Manuel—and indeed all who could have spoken as eye-witnesses
to a hundred notorious truths were now over the frontier or dead.
With her entry the trial was resumed and the file of witnesses
continued. It was as monotonous and as vague as before. Even Manuel,
whom she had feared, was vague, and the very servants of the prison
(though they had been witnesses to conspiracy) were uncertain and
rambling. And this fatuity of the witnesses who were so solemnly and so
strictly examined did not proceed from the turmoil of the time alone,
nor even from the certitude which all then had (and which history has
now) upon the past action of the Queen in cherishing the hope of foreign
domination and in procuring it: rather did it proceed from the fact that
these dreadful days were filled not with a judicial but with a political
action, and that the Court was met not to establish truths at once
unprovable and glaring, but to see whether or no the Revolution could
dare to condemn the prisoner. It was an act of War and a challenge to
What lay entrenched up there before Maubeuge, training its guns on the
last hope, the ragged army in the valley of Avesnes below.
If all the witnesses which history possesses to-day, if Moleville,
Fersen, Mallet, could have been brought into that Court and have had the
Truth dragged from them, it would have affected the issue very little.
One thing could alone affect that issue, the news of victory: and no
news came. All reports from the frontier had ceased.
The lights in the Court were lit, smoky and few. The air, already foul
from the large concourse, grew heavy even for the free; for the sickened
prisoner it became intolerable as the night hours drew in—six dark
interminable hours. She heard the succeeding witnesses distantly, more
distantly. Her head was troubled and her injured eyesight failed her. It
was very late. The droning of the night was in her ears. She vaguely
knew at last that there was a movement around her and that the Court was
rising. She asked faintly for water. Busne, the officer in guard of her,
brought it to her and she drank. As he supported her with some respect
down the short passage to her cell he heard her murmuring: “I cannot
see.... I cannot see.... I have come to the end....”
She lay down when her doors had received her, and just before midnight
she fell asleep. She slept deeply and for the last time.
* * * * *
Tuesday, October 15.
[Sidenote: Oct. 15, 1793. Before Maubeuge, 6 a.m.]
A little before dawn the French bugles upon the frontier roused the
troops of Avesnes; their calls ran down the line, they passed from the
Diane to the Générale, the woods before them sent back echoes, and soon
the army moved. Far off upon the left Fromentin, upon the far right
Duquesnoy, began marching forwards and inwards, converging, but the main
body in the centre took the high road, which, if they could force its
passage, would lead them straight to Maubeuge.
The sun was still level over the glinting wet fields when Carnot came to
the summit of the long swell whence could be perceived, over an
intervening hollow, the village of Dourlers, and above it the level
fringe of trees which held the Austrian cannon; an impregnable crest
upon whose security Coburg and the Allies founded the certitude of
victory. The guns began.
Among the batteries of the French (too few for their task) two
batteries, one of sixteen-pounders, the other of twelve, were the gift
of the city of Paris. By some accident these, though ill manned,
silenced the Austrian fire at one critical and central point above the
Dourlers itself and close to the high road. Whether the French aptitude
for this arm had helped to train the volunteers of the city, or whether
these had such a leaven of trained men as sufficed to turn the scale, or
whether (as is more probable) some error or difficulty upon the opposing
slope or some chance shot had put the invaders out of action, cannot be
known. Carnot seized upon the moment and ordered the charge. As his
columns advanced to carry Dourlers he sent word at full speed to either
wing that each must time itself by the centre, and forbade an advance
upon the left or right until the high road should be forced and the
centre of the Austrian position pierced or confused.
As he stood there looking down from the height where the road
bifurcates, all the battle was plain to him, but his sapper’s eye for a
plan watched the wings much more anxiously than they watched the centre
before him. The stunted spire of Wattignies a long way off to the east,
the clump that hid St. Remy to the west, marked strong bodies of the
enemy, and, in the open plateau beyond, their numerous cavalry could
crush either extremity of his line (which at either extremity was weak)
should either be tempted forward before the centre had succeeded. The
front was long—over five miles—he could not enforce sagacity nor even be
certain of intelligence, and as he doubted and feared the action of his
distant lieutenants, he saw the centre advancing beneath his eyes.
The Austrian cannon had abandoned the duel. The French fine approached
Dourlers, deployed, and began the ascent. A sudden and heavy fire of
musketry from the hollow road and from the hedges met the sixteen
thousand as they charged; they did not waver, they reached the garden
walls, and closed until, to those watching from the hill, the attempt
was confused and hidden by a rolling smoke and the clustered houses of
the village. It was past mid-morning.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Oct. 15, 1793. In Paris, 7.30 a.m.]
In Paris they had wakened the Queen, tardily. She wondered perhaps to
see Busne not there. He had suffered arrest in the night; he was
detained to see if he could tell the Court or the Committee some secret
gathered from his prisoner. It was under another guard that she left her
cell.
It was nearly nine before the Court assembled in the dull light, and
later before the futile drag of evidence was renewed.
Whether sleep had revived her, or whether some remnant of her old energy
had returned to her for such an occasion, no further weakness was
perceived in the Queen. She sat, as she had sat all the day before until
her faintness had come upon her, very ill, pale, and restrained, but
erect and ready for every reply. Moreover, in that morning the weary
monotony of such hours was broken by an incident which illuminated,
though it made more bitter, the last of her sad days; for after
D’Estaing, the Admiral, had been heard to no purpose, another noble,
also a prisoner, was called; and as she saw his face she remembered
better times, when the struggle was keen and not hopeless, and when this
bewildering Beast that called itself now “Freedom,” now “The Nation,”
had been tamed by the class which still governed Europe outside and
which in that day controlled her kingdom also. It was Latour du Pin, the
soldier who had been responsible for the repression of the Mutiny at
Nancy three years—three centuries—before.
He still lived. Against no man had ’93 a better ground for hate, and
indeed the time came when the Revolution sent him down also to meet his
victims under the earth, but so far his commanding head was firm upon
his shoulders. He enjoyed, as did all the prisoners of that time, the
full use of his wealth. He was clothed and fed in the manner of his
rank. He entered, therefore, with pride and with that mixture of gaiety
and courage upon which, since the wars of religion, all his kind had
justly plumed themselves: and as he entered he bowed with an excessive
ceremony to the Queen.
The Judge asked him the formal question: Whether he recognised the
prisoner? He bowed again and answered: “Indeed I know this Lady very
well;” and in a few moments of his examination he defended himself and
her with a disdainful ease that brought Versailles back vividly out of
its tomb.
Revived or stung by such a memory, the Queen replied to question after
question exactly and even with some power: upon her frivolities, her
expenses, her Trianon—all the legends of debauch which were based upon
that very real and very violent fugue of pleasure in which she had
wasted her brilliant years. The close of that dialogue alone has a
strict interest for history, when Herman came at last to the necklace.
Trianon had been on his lips a dozen times, and as he spoke the word he
remembered that other fatal thing:—
“Was it not in Trianon that you first came to know the woman La Motte?”
“I never saw her!”
“Was she not your victim in the affair of the necklace?”
“She could not be, for I had never known her!”
“You still deny it?”
“I have no plan to deny. It is the truth, and I shall always say the
same.”
It is a passage of great moment, for here indeed the prisoner said
precisely what was true and precisely what all, even those who would
befriend her, least believed to be true. She would pretend a love for
the French and a keen regard for their glory—even for the success of
their armies. She would pretend to have obeyed the King and not to have
led him; to have desired nothing for her son, but only the welfare of
the people. Trapped and abandoned, she thought every answer, however
false, legitimate; but in that one thing in which her very friends had
doubted her, another spirit possessed her and her words were alive with
truth.
After that episode no further movement followed. There was opened before
the Court (as the law compelled) her little pocket and the trinkets
taken from her on the day of her imprisonment: the poor relics of her
affection—the lock of hair, the miniature—were laid before the Judges.
They heard Simon, the cobbler, in whose house her son was lodged—perhaps
she looked more curiously at his face than at others—but he had nothing
to say. They heard the porter of the Temple and sundry others who had
seen, or pretended to have seen, her orders for the payments of sundry
thousands—but all that business was empty and all those hours were
wasted: it was not upon such vanities that the mind of Paris and of the
crowded Court was turned, but upon the line of Flemish hills a long way
off and upon the young men climbing up against the guns.
Paris and the mob in the street outside that Court of Justice and the
hundreds crammed within it strained to hear, not Valazé, nor Tiset, nor
any other useless witness, but some first breath of victory that might
lift off them the oppression of those days; nay, some roaring news of
defeat and of Coburg marching upon them: then at least before their
vision was scattered by the invader, they could tear this Austrian woman
from her too lenient Judges for a full vengeance before they themselves
and that which they had achieved should die. At the best or at the worst
they panted for a clear knowledge of their fortune; but on through the
day and well into the afternoon, when the Court rose for its brief
interval, no hint or rumour even had come to Paris from before Maubeuge.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Oct. 15, 1793. Before Maubeuge, 10.30 a.m.]
Carnot had come down the hill from the fork of the roads; he, and
Jourdan beside him, followed behind the assault, bringing the
headquarters of that general plan some half-mile forward. So they knew
that the village of Dourlers was held. It was noon before the place was
secured, and now all depended upon the action of the extreme wings.
It was certain that the struggle for this central village would be
desperate: all depended upon the extreme wings. If these (and both of
them) could hold hard and neither advance too far up the slope nor
suffer (either of them) a beating-in, then the work at Dourlers would be
decisive. And indeed the village was won, lost, and won and lost again:
all the hard work was there. The French carried it, they went beyond,
they were almost upon the ridge above it. In the upland field below the
crest of wood the Austrian cavalry under Nuffling struck them in flank,
and they were disordered. They were back in the village of Dourlers, and
the fight for it was from house to house and from window to window.
Twice it was cleared, twice lost. The French carry to an immortal memory
a lad of fourteen who slipped forward in those attacks, got in behind
the lines of the Hungarian Grenadiers who held the market-place, and, in
lanes beyond, drummed the charge to make his comrades think that some
were already so far forward and thus to urge them on. Many years after
in digging up that ground his little bones were found buried side-long
with the bones of the tall Hungarian men, and he has now his statue
beating the charge and looking out towards the frontier from the
gateways of Avesnes.
I have said that the horns of that crescent, the extreme wings, were
ordered to be cautious, and warned that their caution alone could save
the fight; for if they went too far while Dourlers in the centre was
still doubtful, that centre would certainly be thrown back by such a
general as Coburg, who knew very well the breaking-point of a concave
line. The fourth attack upon Dourlers was prepared and would have
succeeded when Carnot heard that Fromentin, up on the far left, up on
the extreme tip of the horn of that crescent, had carried his point of
the ridge, and, having carried it, had had the folly to pursue; he had
found himself upon the plateau above (an open plateau bare of trees and
absolutely bare of cover) with his irregulars all boiling, and even his
regulars imagining success. Weak in cavalry, commanding men untrained to
any defensive, he found opposed to him the cavalry reserve of the
enemy—a vast front of horse suddenly charging. That cavalry smashed him
all to pieces. His regulars here and there formed squares, his
irregulars tried to, they were sabred and galloped down. They lost but
four guns (though four counted in so under-gunned an army), but, much
worse, they lost their confidence altogether. They got bunched into the
combes and hollows, the plateau was cleared. They in their turn were
pursued, and it would have been a rout but for two accidents: the first
accident was the presence of a fresh reserve of French cavalry, small
indeed, but very well disciplined, strict and ready, certain Hussars who
in a red flash (their uniform was red) charged on their little horses
and for a moment stopped the flood of the enemy. The check so given
saved the lives though not the position of the French left wing. It was
beaten. It was caved in.
The second accident was the early close of an October day. The drizzling
weather, the pall of clouds, curtained in an early night, and the left
thus failing were not wholly destroyed: but their failure had ruined the
value of the central charge upon Dourlers. The final attack, upon that
central village was countermanded; the Austrians did not indeed pursue
the retreat of the French centre from its walls and lanes, but the
conception of the battle had failed.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Oct. 15, 1793. In Paris, 5 p.m.]
In the Court-room, in Paris, during those hours, while the Judges raised
the sitting, the Queen sat waiting for their return; they brought her
soup which she drank; the evening darkened, the Judges reappeared, and
the trial began anew.
The witnesses called upon that last evening, when the lights were lit
and the long night had begun, were for the most part those who had come
personally into the presence or into the service of the Queen. Michonis
especially, who was rightly under arrest for attempting her rescue,
appeared; Brunier appeared, the doctor who had attended to the children
in the Temple. The farce went on. The night grew deeper, the witnesses
succeeded each other. All that they had to say was true. Nothing they
said could be proved. One put forward that she had written some note
asking if the Swiss could be relied upon to shoot down the people. She
had said and written one hundred of such things. Her counsel, who were
mere lawyers, worried about the presentation of the document—meanwhile
night hastened onwards, and behind their veil of October cloud the stars
continually turned.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Oct. 15, 1793. Before Maubeuge, 10.30 p.m.]
Upon the frontier the damp evening and the closed night had succeeded
one the other, and all along the valley of the little river it was foggy
and dark. The dead lay twisted where they had fallen during that
unwrought fight, and a tent pitched just behind the lines held the staff
and Carnot. He did not sleep. There was brought to him in those midnight
hours a little note, galloped in from the far south; he read it and
crumpled it away. It is said to have been the news that the lines of
Weissembourg were forced—and so they were. The Prussians were free to
pass those gates between the Ardennes and the Vosges. Then Maubeuge was
the last hold remaining: the very last of all.
Jourdan proposed, in that decisive Council of a few moments, held under
that tent by lantern light in the foggy darkness while the day of their
defeat was turning into the morrow, some plan for reinforcing the
defeated left and the playing of some stalemate of check and
countercheck against the enemy; but Carnot was big with new things. He
conceived an adventure possible only from his knowledge of what he
commanded; he dismissed the mere written traditions of war which Jourdan
quoted, because he knew that now—and within twelve hours—all must
certainly be lost or won. He took counsel with his own great soul, and
called, from his knowledge of the French, upon the savagery and the
laughter of the French service. He knew what abominable pain his scheme
must determine. He knew by what wrench of discipline or rather of
cruelty the thing must be done, but more profoundly did he know the
temper of young French people under arms to whom the brutality of
superiors is native and who meet it by some miraculous reserve of energy
and of rebellious smiles.
Those young French people, many half-mutinous, most of them ill-clothed,
so many wounded, so many more palsied by the approach of death—all
drenched under the October drizzle, all by this time weary of any
struggle whatsoever, were roused in that night before their sleep was
deep upon them.
Carnot had determined to choose 7000, to forbid them rest, to march them
right along his positions and add them to the 8000 on his right extreme
wing, and then at morning, if men so treated could still charge, to
charge with such overwhelming and unexpected forces on the right, where
no such effort was imagined, and so turn the Austrian line.
There were no bugle-calls, no loud voice was permitted; but all the way
down the line for five miles orders were given by patrols whose men had
not slept for thirty hours. They roused the volunteers and the cursing
regulars from the first beginnings of their sleep; they broke into the
paltry comfort of chance bivouac fires; they routed men out of the straw
in barns and stables; they kicked up the half-dead, half-sleeping boys
who lay in the wet grass marshes of the Tarsy; and during all that
night, by the strength which only this service has found it possible to
conceive (I mean a mixture of the degrading and the exalted, of
servitude and of vision), from the centre and from the left—from the
forces which had been shot down before Dourlers and from the men who had
fled before the Austrian cavalry when Fromentin had failed—a corps was
gathered together under the thick night, drawn up in column and bidden
march through the darkness by the lane that led towards the right of the
position. With what deep-rooted hatred of commandment simmering in them
those fellows went after thirty hours of useless struggle to yet another
unknown blind attempt, not historians but only men who have suffered
such orders know. They were 7000; the thick night, I say, was upon them;
the mist lay heavy all over the wet land; and as they went through the
brushwood and chance trees that separated the centre from the right of
the French position, they heard the drip of water from the dead, hanging
leaves. Their agony seemed to them quite wanton and purposeless. They
were halted at last mechanically like sheep at various points under
various sleeping farms in various deserted, tiny, lightless villages.
The night was far spent; they could but squat despairing, each squadron
at its halting-place waiting for the dawn and for new shambles.
Meanwhile it was thick night.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Oct. 15, 1793. In Paris, 11.30 p.m.]
It was nearing midnight in Paris, but none yet felt fatigue, neither the
Judges nor their prisoner; nor did any in the straining audience that
watched the slow determination of this business suffer the approach of
sleep. The list of the witnesses was done and their tale was ended.
Herman leant forward, hawk-faced, and asked the Queen in the level
judicial manner if she had anything to add to her defence before her
advocates should plead. She answered complaining of the little time that
had been afforded her to defend—and the last words she spoke to her
Judges were still a vain repetition that she had acted only as the wife
of the King and that she had but obeyed his will.
The Bench declared the examination of the witnesses closed. For
something like an hour that bronzed and hollow-faced man next by her,
Fouquier Tinville, put forward the case for the Government; he was
careful to avoid the mad evidence Hébert had supplied. When he sat down,
the Defence spoke last—as has since Rome been the custom or rather the
obvious justice of French procedure; so that the last words a Jury may
hear shall be words for the prisoner at the bar—but this was not a
trial, though all the forms of trial were observed. Chauveau-Lagarde
spoke first, his colleague next. When they had ceased they were arrested
and forbidden to leave the building, lest certain words the Queen had
whispered should mean some communication with the invader.
The summing up (for summing up was still permitted, and a century of
Revolutionary effort was to pass before the pressure of the Bench upon
the Jury should be gradually destroyed) was what the angers of that
night expected and received. It was three o’clock in the morning before
the four questions were put to the Jury. Four questions drawn indeed
from the Indictment but avoiding its least proved or least provable
clauses. Had there been relations between the Executive and the foreign
enemies of the State, and promises of aid to facilitate the advance of
their armies? If so, was Marie Antoinette of Austria proved to have been
privy to that plan?
The Jury left the Hall. A murmur of tongues loosened rose all around.
The prisoner was led out beyond the doors of the chamber. For one long
unexpected hour she was so detained while the Jury were still absent;
then a signal was given to her guards and they led her in.
[Sidenote: Oct. 16, 1793. In Paris, 4 a.m.]
The cold violence of formal law still dominated the lawyers. Herman put
forth the common exhortation of judges against applause or blame. He
read to her the conclusions of the Jury: they were affirmative upon
every point of the four. He asked her with that same cold violence of
formality, after the Public Prosecutor had demanded the penalty of death
set down for such actions as hers in the new Penal Code, whether she had
anything to say against her sentence. She shook her head.
She was at the end of human things. She stood and saw the Judges upon
the Bench conferring for a moment, she stood to hear her sentence read
to her, and as she heard it she watched them in their strange new
head-dress all plumes, and she fingered upon the rail before her with
the gestures ladies learn in fingering the keys: she swept her fingers
gently as though over the keys of an instrument, and soon the reading of
the sentence was done and they led her away. It was past four o’clock in
the morning.
On the terrace of his castle in Germany that night George of Hesse saw
the White Lady pass, the Ghost without a face that is the warning of the
Hapsburgs, and the hair of his head stood up.
* * * * *
[Illustration:
FIRST PAGE OF MARIE ANTOINETTE’S LAST LETTER
]
[Sidenote: Oct. 16, 1793. Before Maubeuge, 4 a.m.]
The long dark hours of the morning still held the troops that had
marched over from the left to the right of the French position before
Maubeuge. The first arrivals had some moments in which to fall at full
length on the damp earth in the extremity of their fatigue, but all the
while the later contingents came marching in until, before it was yet
day but when already the farms about knew that it was morning, and when
the cocks had begun to crow in the steadings, all rose and stood to
arms. The mist was deepening upon them, a complete silence
interpenetrated the damp veil of it, nor through such weather were any
lights perceptible upon the heights above which marked the end of the
Austrian line.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Oct. 16, 1793. In Paris, a little before four in the
morning.]
The Queen went down the stone steps of the passage: she entered regally
into the cell made ready. She called without interval for pen and paper,
and she sat down to write. She felt, after the transition from the
populous Court to the silence of those walls, an energy that was not
natural and that could not endure, but that served her for an
inspiration. She had tasted but a bowl of soup since the morning—nay,
since the evening before, thirty hours—soon she must fail. Therefore she
wrote quickly while her mood was still upon her.
She sat and wrote to her dead husband’s sister the letter which, alone
of all her acts, lends something permanently noble to her name. It is a
run of words exalted, dignified, and yet tremendous, nor does any
quality about that fourfold sheet of writing, yellow with years, more
astound the reader than the quality of revelation: for here something
strong and level in her soul, something hitherto quite undiscovered, the
deepest part of all, stands and shines. The sheet is blurred—perhaps
with tears: we do not know whether ever it was signed or ended; but
before the morning came she laid herself upon her bed in her poor black
dress, her head was raised somewhat upon her right hand, and so lying
she began very bitterly to weep.
The priest of St. Landry, the parish church of the prison, entered to
minister to her: she spoke just such few words to him as might assure
her that he had sworn the civic oath and was not in communion. When she
knew this she would not hear him. But he heard her murmuring against the
bitter cold, and bade her put a pillow upon her feet. She did so and was
again silent.
The hours wore on, the scent of newly-lighted fires came from the prison
yard and the noise of men awakening. The dripping of the damp weather
sounded less in the increase of movement, and on the pavement of the
quays without began the tramp of marching and the chink of arms; from
further off came the rumble of the drums: 30,000 were assembling to line
her Way. The two candles showed paler in the wretched room. It was dawn.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Oct. 16, 1793. Before Maubeuge, half-past six in the
morning.]
The 16th of October broke upon the Flemish hills: the men who had
endured that night-march along the front of the battlefield, the men who
had received them among the positions of the extreme right, still
drooped under the growing light and were invigorated by no sun. The mist
of the evening and of the night from dripping and thin had grown dense
and whitened with the morning, so that to every soldier a new despair
and a new bewilderment were added from the very air, and the blind fog
seemed to make yet more obscure the obscure designs of their commanders.
The day of their unnatural vigil had dawned, and yet there came no
orders nor any stirring of men. Before them slow schistous slopes went
upwards and disappeared into the impenetrable weather which hid clogged
ploughland and drenched brushwood of the rounded hill; hollow lanes led
up through such a land to the summit of the little rise and the hamlet
of WATTIGNIES; this most humble and least of villages was waiting its
turn for glory.
The downward slope which formed the eastern end of the Austrian line,
the low rounded slope whose apex was the spire of the village, was but
slightly defended, for it was but the extreme of a position, and who
could imagine then—or who _now_—that march through the sleepless night,
or that men so worn should yet be ready for new action with the morning?
No reinforcement, Coburg knew, could come from behind that army: and how
should he dream that Carnot had found the power to feed the fortunes of
the French from their own vitals and to drag these shambling 7000,
wrenched from West to East during the darkness: or how, if such a thing
had been done, could any man believe that, such a torture suffered, the
7000 could still charge?
Yet, had Coburg known the desperate attempt he would have met it, he
would have covered that ultimate flank of his long ridge and reinforced
it from his large reserve. But the deep mist and the dead silence
harshly enforced during the night-march had hidden all the game, and in
front of Wattignies, holding that round of sloping fields and the low
semicircular end of the ridge before the village, there were but 3000;
the infantry of Klebek, of Hohenlohe, and of Stern; for their cavalry
they had behind them and alongside of the village farms a few dragoons;
certain Croatian battalions stood in a second line. These in that
morning, expecting nothing but perhaps the few troops as they had met
easily the day before, waited under the mist in formation and heard no
sound. The morning broadened; the white vapour seemed lighter all
around, but no voices could be heard, nor did there come up through its
curtain any rumble of limber from the roads below.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Oct. 16, 1793. In Paris, about seven in the morning.]
As the Queen so lay disconsolate and weeping bitterly, stretched in her
black gown upon the wretched bed and supporting her head upon her hand,
there came in the humble girl who had served her faithfully and who was
now almost distraught for what was to come. This child said:—
“You have not eaten all these hours.... What will you take now that it
is morning?”
The Queen answered, still crying: “My child, I need nothing more: all is
over now.” But the girl added: “Madam, I have kept warm upon the hob
some soup and vermicelli. Let me bring it you.” The Queen, weeping yet
more, assented.
She sat up a moment (but feebly—her mortal fatigue had come upon her—her
loss of blood increased and was continued), she took one spoonful and
another; soon she laid the nourishment aside, and the morning drew on to
her death.
She must change for her last exit. So much did the Revolution fear to be
cheated of its defiance to the Kings that the warders had orders not to
lose sight of her for one moment: but she would change. She would go in
white to her end.
The girl who had served her screened her a little, and in the space
between the bed and the wall she crouched and put on fresh linen, and in
place of her faded black a loose white muslin gown. Her widow’s
head-dress also, in which she had stood proudly before her Judges, she
stripped of its weeds, and kept her hair covered by no more than the
linen cap.
Her Judges came in and read to her her sentence.
The executioner, awkward and tall, came in. He must bind her hands. “Why
must you bind my hands? The King’s hands were not bound.” Yet were her
hands bound and the end of the rope left loose that her gaoler might
hold it: but she perhaps herself, before they bound her, cut off the
poor locks of her hair.
[Sidenote: Oct. 16, 1793. In Paris, at half-past ten in the morning.]
They led her out past the door of the prison: she was “delivered” and
signed for; on the steps before the archway she went up into the cart,
hearing the crowd howling beyond the great iron gates of the Law Courts,
and seeing seated beside her that forsworn priest to whom she would not
turn.... Nor were these the last humiliations: but I will not write them
here.
Up and down the passages of the prison a little dog whom she had
cherished in her loneliness ran whining and disconsolate.
[Illustration:
FACSIMILE OF THE DEATH-WARRANT OF MARIE ANTOINETTE
]
The cart went lumbering on, past the Quay, over the bridge under the
murky drizzle. The windows beyond the river were full of heads and
faces; the edges of the quays were black with the crowd. The river Seine
ran swollen with the rains; its tide and rolling made in such weather no
mark upon the water-walls of stone. The cart went lumbering on over the
rough wet paving of the northern bank. It turned into the Rue St.
Honoré, where the narrow depth was full of noise. The long line of
troops stood erect and close upon either side. The dense crowd still
roared behind them: their prey sat upon the plank, diminished, as erect
as the constraint of her bonds and her failing strength would allow. Her
lips, for all their droop of agony, were still proud; her vesture was
new; her delicate high shoes had been chosen with care for that
journey—but her face might have satisfied them all. The painted red upon
her cheeks was dreadful against her utter paleness: from beneath the
linen of her cap a few whitened wisps of hair hung dank upon her
hollowed temples: a Victim. Her eyes were sunken, and of these one dully
watched her foes, one had lost its function in the damp half-darkness of
the cells: it turned blank and blind upon the rabble that still followed
the walking jolt of the two cart-horses and the broad wheels. At the
head of those so following, an actor-fellow pranced upon a horse,
thrusting at her by way of index a sword, and shouting to the people
that they held the tigress here, the Austrian. In the midst of those so
following, an American eager to see elbowed his way and would not lose
his vantage. From the windows of the narrow gulf a continued noise of
wonder, of jeers, and of imprecations reached her. She still sat
motionless and without speech: the executioner standing behind her
holding the loose end of the cord, the forsworn priest sitting on the
plank beside her but hearing no words of hers.
It is said that as the tumbril passed certain masts whence limp
tricolour pendants hung she glanced at them and murmured a word; it is
to be believed that, a few yards further, at the turn into the Rue
Royale, she gave way at the new sight of the Machine set up for her
before the palace gardens.
[Sidenote: Oct. 16, 1793. In Paris, at a quarter past twelve, noon.]
This is known, that she went up the steps of the scaffold at liberty and
stood for a bare moment seen by the great gathering in the square, a
figure against the trees of what had been her gardens and the place
where her child had played. It was but a moment, she was bound and
thrown, and the steel fell.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Oct. 16, 1793. Before Maubeuge, about eleven in the morning.]
On the low mud and slope of Wattignies the mist began to wreathe and
thin as the hours approached high noon. Through gaps of it the three
Austrian regiments could see trees now and then in the mid-distance,
showing huge, and in a moment covered again by new whorls of vapour. But
still there was no sound. In front of them towards Dimont, to their left
round the corner of the slope in the valley of Glarges, with every lift
of vapour the landscape became apparent, when suddenly, as the mist
finally lifted, the wide plain showed below them rolling southwards, a
vast space of wind and air, and at the same moment they heard first
bugles, then the shouts of command, and lastly the rising of the
Marseillaise: Gaul was upon them.
The sleepless men had been launched at last, the hollow lanes were full
of them swarming upwards: the fields were ribbed with their open lines,
and as they charged they sang.
Immortal song! The pen has no power over colour or over music, but
though I cannot paint their lively fury or make heard their notes of
triumph, yet I have heard them singing: I know the place, and I have
seen their faces as they cleared the last hedges of the rise and struck
the 3000 upon every side.
These stood, wavered, fell back to re-form: then they saw new masses of
the Republicans roaring up from Glarges behind their flank, broke and
were scattered by the storm. The few heavy guns of the Austrians there
emplaced were trained too late to check the onrush. The little pieces of
the climbing and the surging men were dragged by laniards, unmasked
behind gaps in the hurrying advance, crashed grape and were covered
again for a moment by the living cover of the charge. The green at the
hilltop was held, the poor yards and byres of Wattignies were scoured
and thundered through, and Carnot, his hat upon his sword, and Duquesnoy
his face half blood, and all the host gloried to find before them in
their halting mid-day sweat when the great thrust was over, the level
fields of the summit, the Austrian line turned, and an open way between
them and Maubeuge.
[Sidenote: Oct. 16, 1793. Before Maubeuge, just past noon.]
Two charges disputed their certain victory. First the Hungarian cavalry
galloped and swerved and broke against the dense and ever denser bodies
that still swarmed up three ways at once and converged upon the crested
edge of the upland plain; then the Royal Bourbon, emigrants, nobles,
swept upon the French, heads down, ready to spend themselves largely
into death. They streamed with the huge white flag of the old Monarchy
above them, and on it the faint silver lilies, and from either rank the
cries that were shouted in defiance were of the same tongue which since
Christendom began has so perpetually been heard along all the battle
fronts of Christendom.
* * * * *
These also failed: a symbol in name and in flag and in valour of that
great, once good, and very ancient thing which God now disapproved.
The strong line of Coburg was turned. It was turned and must roll back
upon itself. Its strict discipline preserved it, as did the loose order
of the Republican advance and the maddened fatigue of the young men who
had just conquered: for these could work a miracle but not yet achieve a
plan. The enemy fell back in order, sombre, massed and regular,
unharassed, towards the Sambre. The straggling French soldiery,
wondering that the fighting had ceased (but wisely judged incapable of
pursuit), possessed the main road unhindered; next day they drank with
their comrades in Maubeuge.
In this way was accomplished what a principal critic of the art of
war[45] has called “The chief feat of arms of the Republic.”
Footnote 45:
Napoleon Buonaparte.
It was somewhat past noon.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Oct. 16, 1793. In Paris, just past noon.]
Upon that scaffold before the gardens which had been the gardens of her
home and in which her child had played, the Executioner showed at
deliberation and great length, this way and that on every side, the
Queen’s head to the people.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PREFACE TO APPENDICES
The practice of loading every page of a modern history with references
to authority is charlatan. Such footnotes (as was lamentably evident,
for instance, in Anatole France’s recent work upon Joan of Arc) are
usually copied from earlier authorities, and are, for the greater part,
added without any conscientious reference to the original. Moreover, in
dealing with a subject which has been as thoroughly written out by
innumerable scholars as has the life of Marie Antoinette, there are very
few new pieces of evidence which would make reference excusable.
With this in mind, I have determined to omit any note of the kind.
I had indeed in the original MS. a full series of notes rectifying the
more glaring errors of the Cambridge History, but I was so continually
discovering new ones that the task outran me, and I further remembered
that the reader of a biography of Marie Antoinette would have but little
interest in the misfortunes of official academic history. These also,
therefore, with some reluctance I deleted from this book, reserving them
for a special article upon the subject. All that could be challenged in
the book in the way of statement of fact seems to me included in the
Appendices that follow, and I am convinced that it is far preferable to
leave the pages free to the reader, even at the expense of having
perhaps to defend myself later against the criticism of certain points.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
APPENDIX A
_THE OPERATION ON LOUIS THE SIXTEENTH OF FRANCE_
THE somewhat lengthy attempt to determine the exact date which changed
the course of Louis XVI.’s life, to which I have been compelled in the
text, would have been unnecessary had the document which proves both the
operation itself and the moment of it been published.
It is certain that Maria Theresa knew in the last year of the old King’s
reign the nature of the trouble.[46]
Footnote 46:
MARIA THERESA to MERCY, _3rd January 1774_.—“Je ne compte presque plus
que sur l’entremise de l’empereur, qui à son arrivée à Versailles,
trouvera peut-être le moyen.”
Louis XVI.’s hesitation in the matter endured through the month
immediately succeeding his accession; though in the December[47] of that
year he seems to have come very near to a decision. It is certain that
the Emperor was to act with authority in the matter; and it is probable
that Louis XVI.’s long and disastrous hesitation was in part occasioned
by his brother-in-law’s delay and postponement of his voyage to
Versailles.
Footnote 47:
MARIE ANTOINETTE to MARIA THERESA, _17th December 1774_.—“Le roi a eu
il y a huit jours une grande conversation avec mon médecin; je suis
fort contente de ses dispositions et j’ai bonne espérance de suivre
bientôt l’example de ma sœur.”
Mercy was informed thoroughly of the main object of the Emperor’s visit
just before it took place,[48] and Maria Theresa at the same time
specially emphasised to her Ambassador this capital business which her
son had undertaken.[49]
Footnote 48:
MERCY to MARIA THERESA, _18th March 1777_.—“Relativement au séjour que
fera ici S.M. l’empereur, et à toutes les circonstances qui pourront
en résulter, il ne me reste pas la moindre incertitude sur les hautes
intentions de V.M., et ses ordres seront remplis avec tout le scrupule
et le soin qu’exige l’importance d’une pareille conjuncture dont il
peut résulter tant de différents effets.”
Footnote 49:
MARIA THERESA to MERCY, _31st March 1777_.—“Vous pouvez bien croire
que ce point est un des plus importants a éclaircir, s’il y a à
espérer de la succession ou point, et vous tâcherez de mettre au clair
cela avec l’empereur.”
We know that the operation was performed by the King’s surgeon, Lassone,
and the point is to determine, in the absence of direct evidence, the
date upon which Lassone operated.
I say “in the absence of direct evidence,” for, though that evidence
exists, it is not available. All papers left by Lassone, including the
_procès verbal_ of the operation on the King, were ultimately brought
into the collection of Feuillet de Conches. This collector has been dead
twenty years, and Dr. Des, among others, asked, just after his death,
for the production of this all-important document; but it was refused,
and I believe it is still refused.
It is a great loss to history. Moreover, one does not see what purpose
can be served by such reticence, if, as I believe, it is still
maintained.
As it is, we must depend upon a few veiled and discreet allusions in the
contemporary correspondence of Mercy, the Queen, and the Empress. The
principal of these consist in nine passages, the first of which is as
follows:—
“Le 27 je me rendis de grand matin à Versailles, où, après avoir
parlé d’affaires avec le comte de Vergennes, j’allai à l’hôtel
garni qu’occupait l’empereur. Le premier medécin Lassone avait
été pendant une heure chez S.M., et elle était alors dans son
cabinet avec l’abbé de Vermond.”
This letter was written on 15th June 1777. Mercy, who had been in very
bad health, sends to Maria Theresa his account of the Emperor’s visit.
In this letter he mentions, under the date Tuesday, 27th May, a long
interview which the Emperor had with Lassone, he himself, Mercy, being
present, and also Vermond, the Queen’s former tutor. Later in the day
the Emperor spent two hours alone with his brother-in-law, discussing,
in Mercy’s phrase, “confidential details.” It was at this moment,
presumably, that the Emperor persuaded the King. It will be seen,
therefore, that he put off mention of the matter until late in his
visit, at the end of the month of May. Maria Theresa, having by that
time had opportunity of hearing by word of mouth things that could
hardly be written, writes that she is content so far as things have
gone, but is waiting to hear about everything from her son on his
return.
She also writes to Marie Antoinette on the 29th June 1777, as follows:—
“J’en attends les plus heureuses suites, et même pour votre état
de mariage, sur lequel on me laisse espérance: mais on remet le
tout au retour,[50] où on pourra me parler.”
Footnote 50:
“The return,” of the Emperor, that is.
It is evident that nothing was done during the Emperor’s actual stay, or
in his presence. On the 29th of August, Maria Theresa, having seen her
son, is still by no means certain.[51] One must allow a fortnight (more
or less) for news to reach her from Versailles. We may be confident,
therefore, that whatever was written to her about the middle of the
month of August was not yet wholly reassuring, though this may not prove
that no operation had taken place; it may only go to show that success
was not yet certain.
Footnote 51:
MARIE THERESA to MERCY, _29th August 1777_.—“Je le souhaite à l’égard
du roi, mais je n’en suis pas rassurée.”
It is on the 10th of September, in a letter from Marie Antoinette to
Maria Theresa, that the first note of confidence on the part of the
Queen appears. It was premature, but matters were now certain.[52]
Footnote 52:
“Ce nouveau-né”—she writes of her sister-in-law’s child—“me fait
encore plus de plaisir par l’espérance que j’ai d’avoir bientôt le
même bonheur.”
We may, therefore, take it for certain that things were settled _not
earlier_ than the middle of August, _nor later_ than the end of the
first week of September; and it may be predicted that when Lassone’s
paper sees the light it will bear a date within those three weeks.
Mercy sees by January[53] that everything is long settled. The Queen
knew herself to be with child in the first week in April, and news was
sent to her mother on the date which I have given in the text.
Footnote 53:
“Je dois aussi ajouter la remarque très essentielle que la reine
continue à se conduire très-bien avec le roi, qui de son côté persiste
à vivre maritalement dans le sens le plus exact et le plus réel.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
APPENDIX B
_ON THE EXACT TIME AND PLACE OF DROUET’S RIDE_
THE reader or student acquainted with various records of the French
Revolution may be tempted to regard the account of Drouet’s Ride in my
text as containing too much detail for accurate history; especially as
no historian has hitherto done more than vaguely allude to it. I will
therefore in this Appendix show the way in which I found it possible to
reproduce every circumstance of Drouet’s movements from the time when he
left Ste. Menehould until the time of his arrival at Varennes.
The berline left Ste. Menehould shortly after eight. It had to climb to
Germeries Wood[54] on the crest of the forest, four hundred feet in four
miles. It could not possibly, therefore, have reached the summit till
after nine, and however fast was the run down on to Islettes (just over
five miles from Ste. Menehould) that village cannot have been reached
before 9.15. From Islettes to Clermont is just four miles, and mostly
slightly rising. The best going could not cover the distance in twenty
minutes, which puts the earliest possible entry into Clermont at
twenty-five or twenty to ten. The change of horses took from ten minutes
to a quarter of an hour. Put it at the lowest, and one has for the
earliest possible time the berline can have left Clermont that it must
have been within ten minutes of ten o’clock.
Footnote 54:
The summit is 860 feet above the sea; the town about 460 feet.
From Clermont to Varennes is nine miles: a straight road, descending
slightly on the whole, but not quite flat. Under the best conditions
that day the berline had not covered ten miles in the hour; let it
gallop at _twelve_ (a pace it was quite incapable of, save in short
spells) and Varennes would still be three-quarters of an hour off.
Now Varennes was entered just on a quarter to eleven. The berline cannot
therefore have left Clermont later than ten; and cannot have arrived
earlier than ten minutes to ten; so this departure of the Royal Family
from Clermont for Varennes, of Drouet’s postillions back from Clermont
for Ste. Menehould, took place sometime in those ten minutes.
Now Drouet reached Varennes before eleven. He reached it round about by
the forest—not by the main road—and he reached it by a gallop through a
pitch dark night in dense wood without a moon.[55] The shortest line as
the crow flies from the last bend of the road before Clermont to
Varennes Bridge is ten miles; any deviation through the wood, even in a
straight line, would make it nearly twelve. It is very difficult to
cover twelve miles in an hour under such conditions, but even if you
allow Drouet that pace he must leave the high road about ten.
Footnote 55:
The sky was overcast.
All this synchronises to within a very few minutes. The postillions
leave Clermont to turn back home in the ten minutes before ten; they go
fast, for they are riding light; a mile or so up the road they meet
their master. It is just here that the forest on the northern side of
the ravine touches the modern railway and comes nearest to the road.
Drouet takes to the forest certainly not before ten and equally
certainly not ten minutes after.
So much for the hour at which he took to the wood.
Now what road did he pursue in the forest? Only one is possible. The
forest here covers a high ridge, some three hundred feet above the open
plain. Down in the plain, parallel to this ridge and at its base, runs
the high road from Clermont to Varennes, with a row of farms and wide
fields between it and the edge of the wood. Had Drouet gone anywhere but
along the ridge he would have had to cross some twenty streams, to climb
and fall over as many ravines (_all of clay_), to flank a dozen clay
ponds and marshes, and with all this there was no continuous path. He
could not have done it in two hours, let alone one. He was compelled to
follow the ridge. It so happens that there runs all along the ridge a
green ride called “the High Ride.” It is a Gaulish track of great
antiquity, known to the peasantry as “the Roman Way.” It does not come
down as far as Clermont; it leaves the forest at the farm and huts of
Lochères. To this farm Drouet must have made his way by the lanes and
gates of Jacques and Haute Prise—once at Lochères, a hard gallop along
the High Ride brought him in six or seven miles to the Crossed Stone
(called also the Dead Girl); here another green ride crosses the main
ride of the ridge. He took this cross ride to the right hand: it leads
down and out of the forest; one comes out of the wood a mile or so from
Varennes with the town right below one and what was then a lane (now it
is a county road) through the open valley fields. Just before entering
the town a detour (by where the tile-works are now) would get him into
the Rue de Mont Blainville, and so to the Bridge: a detour serving the
double purpose of avoiding possible troops at the entry to the town and
of getting ahead of any carriage coming in from Clermont. He cannot but
have taken this detour, have noted the waggon by the bridge as he passed
it (he later used it to block the bridge), and then have come up the
main street from the river.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
APPENDIX C
_THE ORDER TO CEASE FIRE_
THE order to cease fire, which forms the frontispiece of this book, and
which is the last executive document of the French monarchy, has been
misunderstood by not a few critics, and its value thereby lessened.
It is, as I shall presently show, authentic, and therefore of the
highest possible interest to every student of history. The traveller
will find it to-day in the central glass case of the square
Revolutionary Room in the Carnavalet Museum. The body of the writing is
not in the hand of Louis himself, but the signature is undoubtedly his.
The lines were scribbled in haste by some one attendant upon the King,
signed by him, and sent to the palace.
Now no event of such importance and so recent has been more variously
described by eye-witnesses than the fall of the palace in 1792; and the
particular incident of the order to cease fire suffers, like every other
detail of those famous hours, from a plethora, and therefore a conflict,
of evidence.
It may be remarked in passing, and by way of digression, that such
difficulty cannot but attach to any episode of hard fighting, on account
of the mental condition which that exercise produces. There is exactly
the same trouble, for instance, in determining with exactitude the
all-important moment of the evening in which the Guard failed at
Waterloo.
We may confidently say, however, that two separate messages were sent to
the palace. The first was a verbal message to cease fire, which reached
Hervilly, who was directing the whole operation. Hervilly, as we know,
refused to obey, having the action well in hand, and being yet confident
of success. Either after the southern end of the Tuileries had been
forced by the populace (who, as we now know, turned the flank of the
defence by fighting their way through from the Long Gallery), or while
that capital incident was in progress, Durler, a captain of the Swiss
Guards, commanding no more than a company, but probably the company
which had the best chance of retreating, asked for orders. It is
difficult to believe that he would have done so unless the position was
already desperate. The order which reached him was a repetition of the
former one, but it was written, not verbal, and it is this second
written order the facsimile of which forms the frontispiece to this
volume. Durler did not see it written. He had gone in person to learn
what he should do, but he was back again with his men before the note
was handed to him. He was a perfectly honest and trustworthy man, and
his testimony remains. It is evident from this testimony that, by the
time the note came, all was over.
As to the pedigree of the document:—
Durler rose to the rank of general before his death. He naturally
regarded this piece of historic writing as among the most precious of
his possessions, and left it to his family, who were resident in
Lucerne. Chateaubriand, visiting Lucerne on the 15th of May 1832, saw it
in that town. From General Durler’s daughter and heiress it descended to
his grandchildren, Schimacher by name, and was in the early eighties the
property of M. Felix Schimacher of Lucerne, whose agent in Paris was a
banker, Mr. de Trooz.
M. Cousin, the curator of the Municipal Museum of Paris (the
Carnavalet), hearing of it, approached Mr. de Trooz, and offered a large
sum on behalf of the city. The offer was accepted. The pedigree of the
document was drawn up by M. Dagobert Schimacher, lawyer in Lucerne, and
the whole despatched to Paris, where the purchase was completed on the
27th July 1886, and the document deposited in the Museum, where it now
lies.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
APPENDIX D
_ON THE LOGE OF THE “LOGOTACHYGRAPHE”_
THE Manège was pulled down after the consular decree of year XI., which
originated the Rue de Rivoli; the historical reconstruction of its
arrangements on the 10th of August 1792 is the more difficult from the
fact that the only accurate plan of it which has come down to us[56]
dates from a period _earlier_ than December 1791, in which month (on the
27th) the order was given to change nearly the whole of its
dispositions. The box of the _Logographe_ can be fixed in this plan
(though not in the new place it occupied after the 5th of January
1792),[57] but not that of the _Logotachygraphe_.
Footnote 56:
In the _Histoire des Edifices_, &c., by Paris.
Footnote 57:
The work was finished by the 26th of January 1792.
We know[58] that the first was near the President’s Chair, and this was
on the south side of the Manège, in the middle. It was in this box that
the Queen had appeared when her husband had accepted the Constitution on
the return from Varennes; and it was in this box that the Royal Family
were supposed, until lately, to have stayed in the three days after the
fall of the palace.
Footnote 58:
By the 7th clause of the order cited.
There were many such grated boxes for reporters up and down the Hall:
the proximity of the _Logographe’s_ to the Chair being due to the desire
for accurate verbatim reports to be recorded from the best acoustic
position of the Hall.
Our establishment of the _Logographe’s_ box is only of value to the
history of the 10th of August because (though a confusion was till
recently made between the two) the box in which the Royal Family were
put, that of the _Logotachygraphe_, a journal not yet published, but in
preparation, and one which had already obtained leave to have its
reporting place in the Hall, must have been near by. Its exact situation
we cannot determine, but it was certainly not far from the Chair on the
south wall, and presumably in the eastern half of it.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
APPENDIX E
_UPON THE “LAST PORTRAIT OF THE QUEEN” BY KUCHARSKI_
THREE “last” portraits of Marie Antoinette, each very similar to the two
others, though not replicas, are known to exist: each is ascribed to the
painter Kucharski, who appears for a moment at the Queen’s trial, and
who is known to have painted her at Court.
These portraits are, one in Arenburg Gallery at Brussels, another in the
Carnavalet, and the third in the new Revolutionary Room on the third
floor at Versailles. This last is the one which is reproduced here,
because M. de Nolhac, by far the best authority, has assured me of its
authenticity. On the other hand, it must be mentioned that the Belgian
one was vouched for by Auguste d’Arenberg[59] who bought it in 1805, and
who quotes the testimony of the painter[60] himself, who was then alive.
Footnote 59:
See “Notes sur quelques Portraits de la Galerie d’Arenberg,” in the
_Annales de l’Académie Royale d’Archéologie de Belgique_, 4th series,
vol. x. 1897.
Footnote 60:
On this painter there exists a monograph by Mycielski (Paris, 1894),
and an article published in the December number, 1905, of the _Revue
d’ Art, Ancien et Moderne_.
He appears to have affirmed that he saw the Queen in the Temple when
he was on guard, took the sketch, noting the details of dress, &c.,
and completing the work at home.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
APPENDIX F
_ON THE AUTHENTICITY OF THE QUEEN’S LAST LETTER_
THE few doubts that some have put forward against the authenticity of
this famous document will, unless history abandons its modern vices,
increase with time, for it is a document exactly suited to the type of
minute, internal, literal, and documentary criticism by which tradition
is, to-day, commonly assailed. It will be pointed out that the
psychology of this letter differs altogether from that of the mass of
Marie Antoinette’s little scribbled notes, and equally from her serious
political drafts and despatches. Critics will very probably be found to
dispute the possibility of such a woman at such a time producing such a
document. The style fits ill with what she was in Court just before it
purports to have been written, and also with what she was on her way to
the scaffold just after. Most important of all, perhaps, the sentences
are composed in a manner quite different from that of any other letter
of hers we possess; they have a rhythm and a composition in them: the
very opening words are in a manner wholly more exalted and more
rhetorical than ever was her own.
It will be further and especially pointed out that the moment when it
was discovered was the very moment for forgery, and this point is of
such importance to the discussion that I must elaborate it.
By nightfall of June 18, 1815, the experiment of founding democracy in
Europe was imagined to be at an end: Napoleon was definitely defeated.
On the 7th of July the first forces of the Allies entered Paris, and on
the 20th of November was signed the second Treaty of Paris, whereby the
reinstatement of the old régime in France was accomplished at a price to
the nation of 700,000,000 francs and of all its conquests. All the power
of a highly centralised Government was now in the hands of Louis XVIII.,
and it was in the highest degree profitable to prove oneself a friend to
what had but a few months before seemed a lost cause. Document after
document appeared professing a special knowledge of the woes of the
Royal Family, petition after petition was presented in which the
petitioners (nearly always in the same conventional and hagiographical
style) spoke of the Royal “martyrs” in the Temple and in the
Conciergerie.
In the light of such a character attaching to this particular moment,
note the following sequence of dates in connection with the production
of the document we are discussing.
Not two months after the signing of the Treaty of Paris the French
Chamber voted the Law of Amnesty. The seventh clause of this Act
banished the regicides who had sat in the Convention. Among these was a
certain Courtois, a man now over seventy years of age, who had bought a
large country house and estate near the frontier. Note, further, that
Courtois had started as a small bootmaker and was one of the very few
politicians of the Revolution who had followed our modern practice of
making money out of politics. His honesty, therefore, was doubtful: a
thing which we cannot say of the enthusiasts of the time. Of _those_ we
can say that their imaginations or their passions may warp their
evidence, but in the case of Courtois we know that he was a professional
politician of the modern type, and would do a dishonest thing for money.
Now this Courtois had been one of a Commission named by the Convention
to examine Robespierre’s papers after the fall of Robespierre on the
28th of July 1794. He was what the French call the Reporter of the
Commission—that is, the director of it—and it was called the “Courtois
Commission.” The Commission published their report of what they had
found in Robespierre’s house. It was a report two volumes in length for
which Courtois was responsible, and of which he was practically the
author.
This minute and voluminous report _made no mention of the Queen’s
letter_. Not a word is heard of it during all those twenty-two years
until the aforesaid Bill of Amnesty is before the French Parliament of
the Restoration and the regicides, including old Courtois, passing his
last days on his comfortable estate, are to suffer exile. Then for the
first time the Queen’s letter appears. On the 25th of January 1816
Courtois writes to a prominent lawyer, an acquaintance of his wife’s, a
Royalist, and in touch with the Court, telling him that he had kept back
ten pieces among the mass of things found in Robespierre’s house, three
of them trinkets, a lock of hair, &c., one or two letters of no
importance—and the capital point of all, this letter of Marie
Antoinette’s to her sister-in-law. He offers to exchange these against a
special amnesty to himself, or at least of a year’s delay before he is
exiled, in order, presumably, to allow him to realise his fortune.
This is not all: the letter was not written until Courtois’ wife was
dead; and it was written on the very day of her death and the moment
after it—the moment, that is, after the death of the only person who
would presumably know—if he allowed any one to know—whether he had or
had not carefully concealed these documents for so many years.
The Government of Louis XVIII. offered money for the letter, and, having
so lulled the suspicions of Courtois, sent one of its officials without
warning into his house and seized his effects. Some days afterwards the
letter (which no one had yet seen or heard of) is produced by Royal
order and shown to Madame d’Angoulême (who is said to have fainted when
she saw it), and ordered to be read from every pulpit during Mass on the
16th of October of every year; a vast edition of it is brought out in
facsimile and distributed broadcast, and the letter itself is enshrined
among the public exhibits at the Archives.
A lengthy analysis of the sort just concluded is necessary to make the
reader understand how and why a strong attack upon the authenticity of
the letter will sooner or later certainly be made. I owe it to my
readers to say why the apparently strong presumption against this letter
does not in my opinion hold.
First let me recapitulate what is to be said against it:—
(1) There is no contemporary trace of it.[61]
Footnote 61:
The woman Bault, who was wardress of the Conciergerie, says that her
husband told her of such a letter, but her evidence is given after
Louis XVIII. had published it, and for all those twenty-two years she
had said nothing about it. Moreover she talked of its discovery with
the usual clap-trap phrases of “The Omnipotence of Heaven showing its
ineffable goodness by restoring us this monument in its most admirable
way, &c.” And _the only contemporary account_, while it does mention
the lock of hair which the Queen desired given to a friend, says
nothing of the letter.
(2) It appears at a moment when forged documents of that sort were of
the highest value both to a despotic Government and to the vendors or
producers of them.
(3) That moment is no less than _twenty-two years_ posterior to the
supposed writing of the letter, and, during all those twenty-two years,
of the many who should have seen it, of the _three_ public men (all
enemies) through whose hands it must have passed, no one has heard of
its existence nor mentioned it in a private correspondence, nor
apparently so much as spoken of it in a conversation to a friend.
(4) It is first heard of from a man who would have every interest in
forging it and who is known to have been very unscrupulous in political
dealings for money.
(5) He makes his offer on the very day when the last witness there could
be against him dies.
(6) The document, when it does appear, appears without any pedigree, or
chain of witnesses to vouch for it, nor even any tradition. It is
vouched for only by the people who had most interest in creating such a
relic and is forced upon the public with every apparatus at the command
of a despotic Government.
(7) Most important of all, the letter is written in a high and affecting
style wholly different from all that we know of Marie Antoinette’s
writing, and quite inconsistent with her demeanour at the moment,
consonant only with the sanctity which it was at that moment desired to
give to the Royal Family.
Nevertheless I believe the document to be without the slightest doubt
authentic, and I will give my reasons for this certitude:—
(1) To forge a letter of Marie Antoinette’s is peculiarly difficult.
There have been many such attempts. They have been discovered with an
ease familiar to all students of her life.
This difficulty lies in the great irregularity of her method of writing,
coupled with the exact persistence of certain types of letter. She never
in her life could write a line straight across a page. She never made
two “d’s” exactly the same, and yet you never can mistake one of her
“d’s.” She never crossed a “t” quite in the same manner twice, and yet
you can always tell her way of crossing it. The absence of capitals
after a full stop is a minor point but a considerable one. She always
brought the lower loop of the “b” up to the up stroke, so that it looks
like an “f”; she always separated her “l’s” from the succeeding letter.
Let the reader compare the document of which I am speaking, reproduced
in facsimile opposite page 395, and her letter of the 3rd of September
1791 to Joseph II. (opposite page 297), and he will see what I mean. The
first is reproduced on a four-fifths scale, the second in facsimile, but
the points I make can easily be followed upon them. Note the first “d”
in the first line of the letter written in prison, the second “d” and
the third “d” all in the same line. Next look down to the seventh line
and note the “d” in “tendre,” and see how the first three “d’s” though
irregular are of the same type, and how the fourth, though much less
hooked, is obviously written by the same hand. Look down two lines lower
to the “d” in “plaidoyer”; it has a complete hook and is quite different
from the other letters, and three lines lower, in the word “deux,” the
hook has a sharp angle apparent nowhere else on the page. Now if you
turn to the “d’s” in her letter to her brother of the 3rd of September
1791, you will find exactly the same characteristics. Not one “d” like
another, yet all obviously from the same hand; the “d” in the second
line with a full hook to it, the two “d’s” in the twelfth line much
vaguer.