Less than a month after their marriage these young people were dressed
in black, as was all the rest of fashionable Paris. The gay spring
season had been brought to a premature and agitated end by the news
that the king lay dead of smallpox, the loathsome disease he most
dreaded.
Smallpox was distressingly common in those days before vaccination had
been discovered; but courageous people protected themselves against it
even then by deliberately contracting the disease from a mild case and
allowing it to run its course under the best possible conditions. It
was found to be much less deadly in this way, though the patients often
became very ill, and it required real courage to submit to it.
The old king had never been at all brave. He feared discomfort in this
life almost as much as he dreaded hell in the next; so he had fled the
disease instead of courting it, and in time it came to have special
terrors for him. He had been riding through the April woods with a
hunting party and had come upon a sad little funeral procession--a very
[Pg 20]humble one. Always curious, he stopped the bearers and asked
who they were carrying to the grave. "A young girl, your Majesty."
The king's watery old eyes gleamed. "Of what did she die?" "Smallpox,
Sire." In terrified anger the monarch bade them begone and bury the
corpse deep; then he dismissed the hunt and returned to the palace. Two
days later he was stricken. The disease ran its course with amazing
virulence, as though taking revenge for his misspent life. Some of the
courtiers fled from Versailles. Others, to whom the king's displeasure
seemed a worse menace than smallpox, remained. His favorites tried
to keep the truth from the public. Daily bulletins announced that he
was getting better. When it was learned that he might die the people
crowded the church of Ste.-Geneviève, the patron saint of Paris,
kissing the reliquary and raising sobs and prayers for his recovery.
When he died, on the 10th of May, his body was hastily covered with
quicklime and conveyed, by a little handful of attendants who remained
faithful, to St.-Denis, where the kings of France lie buried. It was
done without ceremony in the dead of night. Forty days later his bones
were laid in the tomb of his ancestors with all possible funeral pomp.
There was decorous official mourning for the customary length of time;
but the old king had never been an inspiring figure and most of his
subjects were secretly glad he was out of the way.
During July and August of that year Lafayette was "in service" with
the Black Mousquetaires. In September, when his period of active duty
[Pg 21]was over and he could do as he chose, he had himself exposed to
smallpox, and he and his wife and mother-in-law shut themselves up in a
house at Chaillon, hired for the occasion, where during his illness and
convalescence Madame d'Ayen devoted herself to her new son night and
day.
Even while the rafters of Ste.-Geneviève were echoing to sobs and
prayers for the old king's recovery, people whispered under their
breath what they really thought of him; and by the time Lafayette
and his wife could take their places in the world again Louis XV had
been systematically forgotten. His grandson, the new king, was a
well-meaning young man, only three years older than Lafayette. One of
the king's intimates said that the chief trouble with Louis XVI was
that he lacked self-confidence. Marie Antoinette, his queen, was fond
of pleasure, and for four long years, ever since their marriage, they
had been obliged to fill the difficult position of heirs apparent,
hampered by all the restraints of royalty while enjoying precious few
of its privileges. Like every one else, they were anxious to get the
period of mourning well over and to see the real beginning of their
reign, which promised to be long and prosperous. Nobody realized that
the time had come when the sins and abuses of previous reigns must be
paid for, and that the country was on the verge of one of the greatest
revolutions of history.
To outward appearance it was a time of hope. Population was increasing
rapidly; inventions and new discoveries were being made every day.
[Pg 22]"More truths concerning the external world were discovered in
France during the latter half of the eighteenth century than during all
preceding periods together," says Buckle. Even in the lifetime of the
old king it had been impossible to stem the tide of progress: what more
natural than to believe these blessings would continue, now that his
evil influence was removed?
Not only had discoveries been made; they had been brought within the
reach of more people than ever before. About the time Lafayette was
born the first volume of a great book called the _Encyclopedia_ had
made its appearance in the French language, modeled after one already
produced in England. Priests had denounced it; laws had been made
ordering severe penalties for its use. But it was too valuable to be
given up and volume after volume continued to appear. Voltaire wrote an
audacious imaginary account of the way it was used in the palace. The
king's favorite did not know how to mix her rouge; the king's ministers
wanted to learn about gunpowder. The forbidden book was sent for. A
procession of lackeys staggered into the room, bending under the weight
of twenty huge volumes, and everybody found the information desired.
The bit of audacity hid a great truth. The _Encyclopedia_ had brought
knowledge to the people and all were anxious to profit by it.
"The people," however, were not considered by nobles who lived
in palaces. Indeed, they were only beginning to consider
themselves--beginning dimly to comprehend that their day was dawning.
[Pg 23]Two decades would have to pass before they were fully awake,
but the scene was already being set for their great drama. Paris, the
largest city in France, had increased in size one-third during the past
twenty-five years. The old theory had been that too large a town was a
public menace, both to health and to government. Nine times already in
its history the limits of Paris had been fixed and had been outgrown.
It now held between seven hundred thousand and eight hundred thousand
souls. When viewed from the tower of Notre Dame it spread out ten or
twelve miles in circumference, round as an orange, and cut into two
nearly equal parts by the river Seine.
"One is a stranger to one's neighbor in this vast place," a man wrote
soon after this. "Sometimes one learns of his death only by receiving
the invitation to his funeral." "Two celebrated men may live in this
city twenty-five years and never meet." "So many chimneys send forth
warmth and smoke that the north wind is tempered in passing over the
town." Streets were so narrow and houses so high that dwellers on
the lower floors "lived in obscurity"; while elsewhere there were
palaces like the great house belonging to the De Noailles family with
its garden large enough to stage a small hunt. Such gardens were
carefully walled away from the public. These walled-in gardens and the
high, evil-smelling houses in which people lived "three hundred years
behind the times," crowded together and hungry from birth to death,
were equally prophetic of the awakening to come; for the improvements
[Pg 24]celebrated by this writer in describing old Paris were either
of a kind to let light in upon the people or to make conditions more
intolerable for them.
Advertising signs no longer creaked from iron gibbets, threatening to
tumble and crush the passers-by. Spurs as big as cartwheels and the
huge gloves and giant boots which formerly proclaimed the business
carried on under them had been banished or were now screwed securely
to the walls, which gave the streets a clean-shaven appearance. The
candle lanterns that used to splutter and drip and go out, leaving
Paris in darkness, were replaced, on nights when the moon was off duty,
by lamps burning "tripe-oil" and fitted with reflectors. By means of
this brilliant improvement fashionable quarters were almost safe after
nightfall, whereas in former years there had been danger of attack and
robbery, even within pistol-shot of the grand home where Lafayette
went to live after his marriage. In addition to the lights glowing
steadily under their reflectors--one light to every seventy or one
hundred inhabitants--there were many professional lantern-bearers whose
business in life was escorting wayfarers to and from their homes. Paris
after nightfall was atwinkle, for "to live by candle-light is a sign of
opulence."
There was a fire department, newly installed, ready to come on call,
and, strange to say, "it cost absolutely nothing to be rescued."
That, however, was the only cheap thing in Paris. "The poorer one
is the more it costs to live!" was a cry that rose then, as now,
[Pg 25]in all its bitterness. With money anything could be bought.
Voltaire declared that a Roman general on the day of his triumph never
approached the luxury to be found here. Wares came to the city from
the ends of the earth, and Parisians invented new wares of their own.
Somebody had contrived umbrellas like those used in the Orient, except
that these folded up when not in use. Somebody else had invented the
business of renting them at a charge of two liards to gallants crossing
the Pont Neuf who wished to shield their complexions. There were
little stations at each end of the bridge where the money could be
paid or the umbrella given up. Even seasons of the year set no limit
to extravagance in Paris. "A bouquet of violets in the dead of winter
costs two louis (about nine dollars), and some women wear them!"
Water was delivered daily to the tall houses, from carts, by a force of
twenty thousand men, who carried it as high as the seventh floor for
a trifle more than it cost to cross the Pont Neuf under the shade of
an umbrella. Drivers sent their water-carts skidding over the slime,
for the narrow, cobble-paved streets were black with slippery mud.
Coaches and other vehicles swung around corners and dashed along at
incredible speed, while pedestrians fled in every direction. There were
no sidewalks and no zones of safety. The confusion was so great that
dignified travel by sedan-chair had become well-nigh impossible. King
Louis XV once said, "If I were chief of police I would forbid coaches";
but, being only King Louis, he had done nothing. Pedestrians were often
[Pg 26]run down; then there would be even greater confusion for a few
moments, but only the shortest possible halt to traffic. "When on the
pavements of Paris it is easy to see that the people do not make the
laws," said one who had suffered.
These people who suffered in Paris at every turn were now beginning to
find a cyclopedia of their own in another invention of comparatively
recent date--the cafés, warmed and lighted, where even men who had
not sous enough to satisfy their hunger might cheat their stomachs
with a thimbleful of sour wine or a morsel of food, and sit for hours
listening and pondering the talk of others who came and went. There was
much talk, and in one part of Paris or another it touched upon every
known subject. Each café had its specialty; politics in one, philosophy
in another, science in a third. Men of the same cast of mind gravitated
toward the same spot. Cafés had already become schools. Soon they were
to become political clubs. It was a wonderful way to spread new ideas.
Some of the cafés were very humble, some very expensive, but none were
strictly fashionable. To be seen dining in such a place indicated that
a man had no invitations to dinner, so the eighteen or twenty thousand
fops who, curled and perfumed, went from house to house cared little
for cafés. They ate like grasshoppers, through the welcome of one
host on Monday and another on Tuesday, and so down the week, "knowing
neither the price of meat nor of bread, and consuming not one-quarter
of that which was set before them," while thousands went hungry--which
[Pg 27]is the reason that after a time the men in the cafés rose
and took a terrible revenge. Paris was by no means all France, but
whatever Paris did and felt the other towns were doing also; and slowly
but surely the passions animating them would make their way to the
loneliest peasant hut on the remotest edge of the kingdom.
Thus, while the nobles in their gardens still dreamed pleasantly of
the power that was passing from them, the people were slowly rousing
from torpor to resentment. It is well to linger over these conditions
in order to understand fully all that Lafayette's acts meant in the
society in which he moved. He was not one of the twenty thousand fops,
but he belonged to the fortunate class to whom every door seemed open
during the early years of the new reign. His military duties were
agreeable and light, he had plenty of money, a charming wife, powerful
family connections, and he was admitted to the inmost circle at court.
If he had longings to experiment with the democratic theories set forth
by radical authors like Rousseau, even that was not forbidden him.
Their writings had attracted much attention and had already brought
about increased liberality of manners. While the court at Versailles
and the city of Paris were very distinct, Paris being only a huge town
near at hand, the distance between them was but fourteen miles, and
it was quite possible for young men like Lafayette to go visiting, so
to speak, in circles not their own. Lafayette's friend, the Comte de
Ségur, has left a picture of life as the young men of their circle knew
it.
[Pg 28]"Devoting all our time to society, _fêtes_, and pleasure, ... we
enjoyed at one and the same time all the advantages we had inherited
from our ancient institutions, and all the liberty permitted by new
fashions. The one ministered to our vanity, the other to our love of
pleasure. In our castles, among our peasants, our guards, and our
bailiffs, we still exercised some vestiges of our ancient feudal
power. At court and in the city we enjoyed all the distinctions of
birth. In camp our illustrious names alone were enough to raise us to
superior command, while at the same time we were at perfect liberty to
mix unhindered and without ostentation with all our co-citizens and
thus to taste the pleasures of plebeian equality. The short years of
our springtime of life rolled by in a series of illusions--a kind of
well-being which could have been ours, I think, at no other age of the
world."
[Pg 29]IV