MY NEW LIFE UNDER SOPHIE’S FATHER.
The changes made by death excepted, there is this strange and
touching peculiarity of country life, that, whilst kingdoms are rent,
hedgerows, and fields, and rustics, apparently remain ever the same.
Nearly a year had passed since I last set foot in Father Gerbaut’s
house, and on entering I found everything the same as when I had last
left it; the covers laid in the same places, on the same table, and
for the same number of persons. Not only were material affairs the
same, but the affections remained unaltered. Sophie had said, “Come,
my brother,” and I came. She gave me her hand, and said, “Brother,
you are welcome!”
And yet a great agitation prevailed over the whole surface of France;
all the ancient names of the provinces had been changed. France was
divided into eighty-three departments. One part of Champagne had
taken the names of the Department of the Meuse; the part neighboring
was now the Department of the Marne. The little River Biesme, which
served as a line of demarcation between Germany and France, and,
likewise, between Champagne and Clermontois, fixed the limit of the
two departments. Les Islettes, Clermont, and Varennes were in the
Department of the Meuse.
Municipalities were constituted under the name of corporations; M.
Gerbaut was nominated municipal councillor, and our neighbor, M.
Sauce, grocer, procureur of the corporation.
I say our neighbor, because the two houses were separated only by a
lane.
The two families frequently visited each other. M. Gerbaut and M.
Sauce, with their blushing honors thick upon them, were patriots.
Madame Sauce was a fine woman, but coarse and vulgar, a veritable
dealer in candles, butter, and sugar; rather given to serving short
measure, but otherwise incapable of committing a fraud. The mother
of M. Sauce, an old lady of sixty-three or sixty-four years, was a
Royalist. The children, the eldest of whom was only twelve, were
incapable of having an opinion.
We shall see presently what Sophie’s opinions were.
Opposite us was the tavern of the “Bras d’Or,” belonging to the
brothers Leblanc. Interest made them play a little comedy. As they
had the patronage both of the patriotic young men in the town, and
the Royalist young nobles from the vicinity, the one brother was a
patriot, and the other a Royalist. The elder cried “Vive la nation”
with the young tradesmen, while the younger shouted “Vive le Roi”
with the noblesse.
In the midst of all this, a national decree was propagated, which
caused some uneasiness in the province.
It was the civil constitution of the clergy.
It created an episcopal chair in each department.
It ordered the election of bishops and priests to be conducted after
the fashion of the primitive church: that is to say, that they were
to be elected by a majority of votes; all the salaries of the clergy
were to be paid from the King’s treasury; perquisites were abolished.
The clergy were desired to take an oath to maintain that
constitution; those who would not, were compelled to resign their
benefices in favor of those who would.
If, after being dismissed, they attempted to renew their functions,
they were prosecuted as disturbers of the public peace.
From this arose the troubles in the Church, and the division between
the constitutional priests and those who refused to take the oath.
If one looks back on that great epoch, and on the two remarkable
years of ’89 and ’90, one cannot fail to be astonished. Can any one
explain the precautions taken by nature, that the men and the events
should arrive at the same time for that awful result which followed?
In 1762, M. de Choiseul suppressed the order of the Jesuits; that
is to say, deprived the Church of its wisest and most powerful
supporters.
Afterwards, in the years ’68, ’69, and ’70, the Revolution produced
Chateaubriand, Bonaparte, Hoch, Marceau, Joubert, Cuvier, Saint
Martin, Saint Simon, Lesneur, Les Cheniers, Geoffrey Saint Hilaire,
Bichat, Lainancourt, all of whom, in 1792, were in the bloom of life
and genius.
Whence came those births sublime and terrible, produced in the space
of three or four years? Whence came that burst of genius prepared
twenty-four or twenty-five years before to second political eruption?
Whence came that body of superior men who closed the eighteenth and
opened the nineteenth century? Whence came that phalanx more than
human, and who raised the hand to swear to the constitution before
the altar of their country?
Let us forget the death of Mirabeau, the last upholder of the
monarchy, whom heaven struck in an unexpected manner, at the moment
he forsook the cause of the people; and who, in dying, counselled
the flight of the king—a flight which, had it succeeded, would have
saved the life of his Majesty; but successful or unsuccessful, must
inevitably have brought the monarchy to the ground.
All knew not the cause of that reason or corruption on the part of
Mirabeau; whether it was that his aristocratic instincts, kept under
for a time by his father’s severity, had sprung into light on contact
with royalty, or not, seemed to be doubtful.
The Queen was a great enchantress. She was a Circe, fatal to those
who stopped not their ears, to avoid listening to the blandishments
of her sweet voice. She had the fatal gift, which Mary Stuart
possessed, of leading all her friends to death.
The end of Mirabeau was announced in the provinces almost at the same
time as his illness.
It was on the 20th of March that the news of his illness was bruited
about in Paris. It appeared that on the 27th, two days previous,
being at his house at Argenteuil, he was seized with a violent
cholic, accompanied with almost unendurable agony. He sent for his
friend and physician, the famous Cabanis, and distinctly refused
to see any other. This was wrong, perhaps; a hospital surgeon or a
practised physician might have saved him.
As soon as the news was received, the crowd pressed to the door of
the sick man’s house.
Barnave, his enemy, almost his rival, who would have died, slain by
the Queen, for an interview like that which Mirabeau had had with
her, came to see him conducting a deputation of Jacobins.
The priest came, and would not be denied. This was exactly what
Mirabeau feared—the influence of priests upon his dying volition.
They refused admission to the sick man’s chamber, saying that
Mirabeau wished only to see his friend M. Talleyrand, to whom,
he said, he could confess, without any great fear of virtuous
indignation.
For some months he had been suffering, he believed, from the effects
of poison. Administered by whom? He would have been puzzled to tell
that himself. All the world, except the parties interested, knew
about his interview with the Queen at St. Cloud, in the month of May,
1790. Whether his malady was natural, or the effects of a crime, he
took no measures whatever to arrest its progress.
Vigorous of body, perhaps more vigorous in imagination, he had passed
the night of the 15th of March in an orgie, the component parts of
which were women and flowers, perhaps the sole two things that he
loved. He used money simply to gratify his tastes in those respects.
On the morning of the 2nd of April, after a night of agony, which
inspired the famous prophecy, “I carry with me the mourning of
monarchy; its remains will be the prey of factions,”—awakened from
the bosom of grief, if one can use the term, by a cannon-shot, he
cried.
He summoned his valet, was shaved, washed, and perfumed all over his
body. After his last toilette was completed, opening his window to
admit the young April sun, which was brightening the first blossoms
on the trees, he murmured, smiling, “Oh, sun, if thou art not God
himself, thou art his cousin german!”
Afterwards, his last insupportable suffering seized him. He could
not speak, but snatched a pen, and wrote plainly the one word
_Dormir_—“Sleep.”
Did he ask for death, like Hamlet, or only for opium to soothe his
passage from one world into the other?
At about half-past eight, he moved, lifted his eyes to heaven, and
heaved a sigh. It was his last!
In the evening, the theatres were closed, as if some great national
calamity had occurred.
The mask was taken from that immobile face; from that powerful head
which Camille Desmoulins called a magazine of ideas exploded by
death. His placid brow expressed the serenity of his soul, and his
face bore no trace of either grief or remorse.
There is no doubt but that Mirabeau, when he promised the Queen all
his support, fully intended to keep that promise, not only as a
gentleman but as a citizen.
The funeral ceremony took place on the 4th of April; four hundred
thousand persons followed in the procession. Two instruments were
heard for the first time on that occasion, filling the breasts of the
spectators with their vibrating notes: they were the trombone, and
the tom-tom.
At eight in the evening, he was placed in the temporary tomb provided
for him in the Pantheon.
We say temporary, because his body remained there only three years.
It was removed at the time when the Convention, having slain the
Jacobins, and slain itself, having no more living to slay, determined
to dishonor the dead.
It was ordered that the corpse of Honoré Riquette de Mirabeau,
traitor to the people, traitor to his country, and sold to royalty,
should be removed from the Pantheon.
The order was executed, and the corpse of Mirabeau was thrown into
the criminals’ cemetery, at Clamart.
It is there that he now sleeps the sleep of hope, waiting the day
when France, an indulgent—nay, let us rather say an impartial mother,
will give him, not a Pantheon, but a tomb; not a temple, but a
_mausoleum_.