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Title: The last days of the French monarchy
Author: Hilaire Belloc
Release date: November 22, 2025 [eBook #77288]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Chapman & Hall, 1916
Credits: Tim Lindell, Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LAST DAYS OF THE FRENCH MONARCHY ***
THE LAST DAYS OF THE
FRENCH MONARCHY
[Illustration:
COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY MANZI-JOYANT FRONTISPIECE.
THE YOUNG ROYALIST]
ERRATA.
The author very much regrets to say that since the first edition of this
book was printed off and bound, he discovered its title was identical
with one on the same subject, written by Miss Maclehose some years ago,
and he trusts that this errata slip will correct any confusion between
the two works.
THE LAST DAYS OF THE
FRENCH MONARCHY
BY
HILAIRE BELLOC
AUTHOR OF “ROBESPIERRE,” “MARIE
ANTOINETTE,” ETC.
WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS
FROM PAINTINGS AND PRINTS
LONDON
CHAPMAN & HALL LTD.
1916
TO
JAMES MURRAY ALLISON
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PART I
PAGE
THE ROYAL SEANCE 15
PART II
INTRODUCTION 49
THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES 53
PART III
INTRODUCTION 87
THE STORMING OF THE TUILERIES 91
PART IV
INTRODUCTION 117
THE ROLE OF LAFAYETTE 119
PART V
INTRODUCTION 169
UNDER THE MILL OF VALMY 171
PART VI
INTRODUCTION 197
THE DEATH OF LOUIS XVI 199
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
The Young Royalist _frontispiece_
_To face_ PAGE
Louis XVI 15
Louis-Stanislas-Xavier de Bourbon, Comte de
Provence, afterward Louis XVIII 18
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand 22
Jean-Sylvain Bailly, President of the Commons in
1789 27
The Commons taking the oath in the Tennis-Court
at Versailles 31
Jacques Necker, Rector-General of Finances 34
The meeting of the National Assembly at Versailles,
June, 1789 39
Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, Deputy from Paris to the
National Assembly 42
Gabriel Honoré Riquetti, Comte De Mirabeau 46
Allegory of the oath-taking in the Tennis-Court at
Versailles 51
“Vive le Roi! Vive la Nation!” 55
The National Assembly Petrified 58
The National Assembly Revivified 58
Madame Elisabeth 63
The end of the flight of the Royal Family at Varennes 66
The Royal Family at Varennes, June 22, 1791 71
Drouet, the Postmaster at Varennes 74
The return to Paris 79
The arrival of the Royal Family in Paris, June 25, 1791 82
Enrolling volunteers in Paris on the Pont Neuf, before
the statue of Henry IV 93
The Storming of the Tuileries 94
The Assault on the Tuileries 99
A Soldier of the National Guard 100
Grenadier of the Infantry of Ligné 100
Marie-Antoinette and her Children 103
Louis XVI--The Forge in the Palace at Versailles 106
The Tuileries and its Garden in 1757 111
The Struggle in the Halls of the Tuileries, August
10, 1792 114
Armand Gaston, Cardinal de Rohan 131
Cartoon of the Three Orders [The Clergy, Nobility
and the Commons] in the National Assembly
Forging the New Constitution 139
A Popular Print at the time of the Revolution 142
Maximilien Robespierre 147
Georges Jacques Danton 149
Marie Jean Paul Roch Yves Gilbert Motier, Marquis
de Lafayette 164
Ceremonial Costume of the Clergy, the Nobility and
the Commons 171
Uniforms of the Army of French Emigrants 172
Goethe, who was with the German Army at Valmy 177
Marshal François-Christophe Kellermann, Duke of
Valmy 183
A Republican General 186
A Colonel of Infantry 186
Under the Mill at Valmy 192
General Charles-François Dumouriez--In Command
of the French at Valmy 197
Lamoignon de Malesherbes, Counsel for the King
at his Trial 199
Republican soldiers in the Revolution 202
Proclamation of the Provisional Executive Council 204
The last victims of the Terror 209
King Louis taking leave of his family in the tower
of the Temple 211
A Mass under the Terror 214
The death of King Louis XVI, January 21, 1793 216
PART ONE
THE ROYAL SEANCE
[Illustration: LOUIS XVI
From a photograph by Braun, Clément & Co., New York, of the painting by
Antoine-François Callet, in Museum of Versailles
_To face p. 15_
]
THE LAST DAYS OF THE FRENCH MONARCHY
PART ONE
THE ROYAL SEANCE
Upon the crest of the steep and thickly wooded hills that rise from the
left bank of the Seine below Paris, you may find a village, the old
stones of which, and something spacious in its whole arrangement, are
consonant with its name. It is called “Marly of the King.”
There the great trees, the balustrade, and gates still standing recall
the palace to which the French monarchy retired when leisure or fatigue
or mourning withdrew it from Versailles; for it was a place more
domestic and far less burdened with state.
To the gates of that great country house there came near ten o’clock,
just after the hour when full darkness falls on a midsummer evening, a
great coach, driving from Versailles. It was the coach of the Archbishop
of Paris, coming urgently to see the king, and the day was Friday, the
nineteenth of June, 1789. They were in the full crisis that opened the
Revolution. The tall windows of the palace were fully lit as the coach
came up the drive. The night air was cold, for those June days were
rainy and full of hurrying cloud. The Archbishop of Paris and his
colleague of Rouen, who was with him, were summoned by their titles into
the room where Louis XVI sat discussing what should be done for the
throne.
Two days before, upon the Wednesday, the commons of the great
Parliament--the Commons House in that great Parliament which had met
again after a hundred years, and which now felt behind it the
nation--had taken the first revolutionary step and had usurped
authority. The quarrel which had hampered all reform since this
Parliament of the States General had met six weeks before; the refusal
of the two privileged orders and particularly of the nobles to vote with
the commons and to form with them one National Assembly; the claim of
the privileged orders and particularly of the nobles to bar whatever the
popular representatives might decide--all that had been destroyed in
spirit by a new act of sovereignty.
Using the title that was on all men’s lips and calling themselves the
“_National Assembly_,” the commons had declared that the whole assembly
was an indivisible body, and alone the organ of the nation. They had
used with conscious purpose the solemn formula “Desires and decrees,”
which hitherto throughout all these centuries had never appeared above
any seal or signature save that of a king. They clothed this spiritual
thing with body by the enormous decision that no tax should be paid in
the kingdom that had not their approval.
This was the blow that had summoned the council round the king at Marly
upon this Friday night. For now two anxious days doubtful issues and
conflicting policies had pulled Louis this way and that, whether to
yield, whether to compromise, or whether to strike back.
* * * * *
It was a fortnight since the sickly child who was heir to the throne had
died, and this retirement of the royal family to Marly, consequent upon
such mourning, was confused by the numbness of that shock also. The king
perhaps more than the queen had suffered in his powers and judgment; for
Marie Antoinette, the most vigorous and lucid of those gathered in
council at Marly, the least national, and the least wide in judgment,
was active at this moment for the full claims of the crown.
With her at the king’s side in the taking of this crucial decision stood
other advisers. The king’s two brothers, the elder and the younger, who,
as Louis XVIII and Charles X, were to rule after the restoration, and
who were now known under the titles of Provence, and Artois were in the
palace together. Provence, the elder, very dull and heartless, was the
more solid; Artois, the younger, empty, poor in judgment, was the least
unattractive. They counted for their rank, and even Provence for little
else.
Barentin was there, the keeper of the seals. He was a man of very clear
decision, of straightforward speech and manner; a man with something
sword-like about him. He thought and said that the king had only to move
troops and settle matters at once.
There also, lit by the candles of that night, was the vacuous, puffed
face of Necker, the millionaire. This man, famous through his wealth,
which was ill acquired and enormous, an alien in religion as in
[Illustration: LOUIS-STANISLAS-XAVIER DE BOURBON, COMTE DE PROVENCE,
AFTERWARD LOUIS XVIII
From a photograph by Braun, Clément & Co., New York, of a painting by
Jean-Martial Fredou, belonging to Marquis de Virieu, at the Château de
Lantilly
_To face p. 18_
]
blood, had become, by one of those ironies in which the gods delight,
the idol of the national movement. He was pitifully inferior to such an
opportunity, empty of courage, empty of decision, and almost empty of
comprehension. No idea informed him unless it was that of some vague
financial “liberalism” (rather, say, moral anarchy) suitable to the
crooked ways by which he himself had arrived. Those protruding eyes,
that loose mouth, and that lethargic, self-satisfied expression were the
idol that stood in the general mind for the giant things that were
coming. Behind such cold dross was reddening the creative fire of the
nation! Such a doorkeeper did Fate choose to open the gates for the
armies of Marceau and Napoleon! All his advice was for something
“constitutional.” In days better suited for such men as he Necker would
have been a politician, and a parliamentary politician at that.
To these, then, thus assembled entered the archbishops with their news.
The news was this: that before sunset, just before they had left
Versailles, the clergy had rallied to the commons. The bishops, indeed,
all save four, had stood out for the privileged orders; but the doubt in
which all minds had been since the revolutionary step of forty-eight
hours before was resolved. The clergy had broken rank with the nobles;
for that matter, many of the wealthier nobles were breaking rank, too.
Decision was most urgent; the moment was critical in the extreme, lest
in a few hours the National Assembly, already proclaimed, already half
formed, should arise united and in full strength over against the crown.
In not two hours after the arrival of the prelates the decision, nearly
reached before they came, was finally taken by the king. He would follow
Necker, and Necker was for a long, windy, complicated compromise. Necker
was for a constitution, large, “liberal,” strangling the action of the
popular life, dissolving the yes and no of creative creeds, leaving to
the crown as much as would preserve its power to dismiss the States
General and to summon a new body less national--and, above all, less
violent. There is an English word for this temper, the word “Whig.” But
that word is associated in the English language with the _triumph_ of
wealth. Necker’s muddy vision did not triumph.
That decision was taken upon this Friday night, the nineteenth of June,
1789--taken, I think, a little before midnight. Artois was off to bed,
and Provence, too. The council was broken up. It was full midnight now
when wheels were again heard upon the granite sets before the great
doors, and the hot arrival of horses. The name announced was that of
Talleyrand, the Bishop of Autun, and the king, perhaps angrily, refused
to see him.
This man, with eyes like a ferret and an intelligence as keen as it was
witty and narrow, a bradawl of a mind, as invincible at intrigue as in
vice, given up wholly to the search for personal advantage, had about
him all that the plain piety of Louis XVI detested, and all that Louis
XVI’s slow mind most feared. The king had made him Bishop of Autun
against his every judgment, and only at the call of Talleyrand’s
fellow-clergymen, who loved their comrade’s amusing sallies against
religion and his reputation of the brain. It was a reputation that had
led Rome to consider the making of him a cardinal, and only Louis
himself had prevented it. For Louis profoundly believed. It was Louis
who had said in those days just before the Revolution, “I will give no
man the see of Paris who denies his God.”
Such was Talleyrand, thirty-five years of age, destined to compass the
ruin of the French church, to ordain to the schismatic body which
attempted to replace it, to be picked out by Danton for his very vices
as a good emissary to Pitt, to be one of the levers of Napoleon, to be
the man that handed the crown to Louis XVIII at the restoration. Such
was the man, full of policy and of evil, whom on that midnight Louis XVI
refused to see.
The king refused to see him with the more determination that Talleyrand
had asked for a secret audience. Talleyrand sent a servant to the king’s
younger brother, Artois, who knew him well, and Artois, who was in bed,
asked him to come to the bedroom to speak to him, which he did; and
there in that incongruous place, to the empty-headed man lying abed
listening to him, Talleyrand, till well after midnight, set forth what
should be done. He also came, he said, hot-foot from Versailles, a
witness. He had twenty times the grip of any of these others (he said)
to seize what had happened.
He offered, as such men do, a bargain. He had prepared it, as such men
will, for immediate acceptance; “all thought out,” as people say to-day
of commercial “propositions.” Let him form a ministry. (He had actually
brought in his carriage
[Illustration: CHARLES MAURICE DE TALLEYRAND
_To face p. 22_
]
with him certain friends who would support him in it!) They would
rapidly summon military force, dissolve the assembly at once, erect a
new one that would be at the service of the crown. Artois dressed and
went to see the king. But his brother gave him short shrift, and bade
him tell Talleyrand to go. Then Talleyrand, with that look in his eyes,
I think, that was noted so often when, later, he found himself thwarted
in any one of his million plots and forced to creep round by some new
way, went out to serve the Revolution.
At the same time there was sent through the night to Versailles the
royal order, to be proclaimed by heralds, that no meeting of the
Parliament should take place until the Monday when, in the commons’
hall, the king would declare his will to all the three houses, clergy,
commons and nobles assembled; and that will, of course, was to be the
muddled compromise of Necker.
These things done, they slept at last in Marly, and the very early dawn
of the Saturday broke in a sky still troubled, rainy, and gray.
* * * * *
Bailly, the President of the Commons sitting at Versailles, was a man
such as float to the surface in times of peace. He was honest and rich,
a little paunchy, sober, and interested in astronomy. He was not without
courage of the less vivid sort. He was fifty-three years of age.
Bailly, the dignified spokesman of the commons in this awful crisis, was
in his bed at Versailles: like everybody else except sentries, watchmen,
and a few political intriguers, upon this very short summer night of
dull, rainy weather. They knocked at his door and woke him to bring him
a note. It was a very curt note from the Master of Ceremonies at the
court. It told him that the great hall in which the Commons met was not
to be used by them that day, that Saturday; for it was to be decorated
for the royal session of all the estates, to be held there upon the
Monday, when the king would address the whole States General gathered
together and tell them his will.
It is not a weak spur to a man of such an age, especially if he is well
to do, to have his dignity neglected and his sleep interrupted as well.
Bailly had thought the Commons worthy of more respect and of longer
notice. When, therefore, the members came, most of them under dripping
umbrellas, to the door that should admit them to their great hall,
Bailly was at their head as indignant as such a man could be. He found
the door shut, a paper pinned upon it, whereon was written the royal
order, and a sentry who told him and all his followers that no one could
come in save the workmen; for it would take all that day to prepare the
hall for the royal meeting upon Monday. They let Bailly in to fetch his
papers, no more.
The Commons went off under their umbrellas in the rain, a straggling
procession of men, mostly middle class, in good black knee-breeches and
coat, in dainty buckled shoes not meant for such weather, Bailly leading
them; they picked their way, this dripping lot of them over the puddles
of the roadway, and made history quickly and well. They found in an
adjoining street an empty tennis-court at their disposal, and there they
met, organised a session, and took the oath, with one dissentient, that
they would not disperse until they had achieved a new constitution for
the French.
The French do things themselves, a point in which they differ from the
more practical nations. For instance, Macmahon, the soldier and
president, used to brush his own coat every morning. Barentin, the
keeper of the seals, followed all this business, but he followed it in
person. From the window of a house just across the narrow way he himself
overlooked through the upper windows of the tennis-court the swarm of
the Commons within, and the public audience that thronged the galleries
or climbed to the sills of the windows. He saw the eagerness and the
resolve. He scribbled a rough note to be sent at once to Marly--a note
that has come to light only in the last few years, “_Il faut couper
court_.” That is, “End things up at once, or it will be too late.”
* * * * *
The royal session and the king’s declaration were postponed. They did
not take place upon the Monday for which they were planned; they were
put forward to the Tuesday, the twenty-third of June. What passed during
those two days men will debate according as they are biased upon one
side or the other of this great quarrel. Necker would have it in his
memoirs that he was overborne by Barentin, and, as one may say, by the
queen’s party; that his original compromise was made a little stronger
in favour of the crown. To this change, like the weak and false man he
was, he ascribed all the breakdown that followed. I do
[Illustration: JEAN-SYLVAIN BAILLY, PRESIDENT OF THE COMMONS IN 1789
_To face p. 27_
]
not believe him. I think he lied. We know how he made his fortune, and
we know how to contrast the whole being of a man like Necker with the
whole being of a man like Barentin. Read Barentin’s notes on those same
two days, and you will have little doubt that Necker lied. That he
muddled things worse through the delay and through the increasing
gravity of the menace to the throne is probable enough. That he showed
any vision or determination or propounded any strict policy is not
morally credible. The foolish document which the king was to read was
drawn up wholly in Necker’s own hand, and he was wholly responsible.
Now turn to Versailles upon the morning of that Tuesday, the
twenty-third of June, 1789, the court having come in from Marly, and all
being ready for the great occasion. Remember that in the interval the
Commons had met again; the mass of the lower clergy had joined them, not
by vote this time, but in person, and two archbishops and three bishops
with them, and even from the nobles two men had come.
It was therefore to be a set issue between the National Assembly now
rapidly forming, that is, the Commons triumphant, and the awful antique
authority of the crown.
If one had looked from the windows of the palace of Versailles upon that
morning, still gray and rainy, still cold in weather, out toward the
scene where so much was to be done, one would have caught beyond the
great paved, semi-circular place, beyond the gilded, high railings of
the courtyard, in the central one of the three diverging avenues (the
broad road leading to Paris) the roof of a great barn-like building, a
long parallelogram of stone and brick, with an oval skylight atop. There
was but little to hide it, for the ground about was only beginning to be
built over; young trees, just planted, marked each side of the road upon
which one end of this building abutted. Within this hall, ungainly, and
oddly apparent above the lower roofs about it and the unfinished lower
buildings of the quarter, was to be acted a drama which deflected and,
as some believe, destroyed the immemorial institution of personal
government in Europe, and launched those experiments by which the French
people in arms proposed to change the face of Christendom.
Under the rain and in the cold air of that morning there was not much
movement in Versailles. The great desert of hard paving-stones before
the gilded railings of the palace yard was almost empty save of troops,
and these, not yet arrived in very great numbers, seemed to be doing the
work of a police rather than of an army. They were drawn up in lines
that cut the Paris road and its approaches guarding on all sides this
hall of the Commons. The side streets which led past the back doors of
that hall, the Street of St. Martin and the Street of the Works, had
each their cordon of men. Small groups of soldiery, not patrolling, but
watching, were distributed here and there.
The eye caught in the glistening, empty spaces of that wet, gray morning
the red of the Swiss Guard and the blue and white of the militia. Beyond
these uniforms there was little else; no crowd was yet gathered. Nor was
there as yet any parade or any standing to arms.
The ear could no more judge Versailles that morning than the eye. The
rain was too soft for any noise, the early life of the town too dulled
under such weather to send up any echo from the streets. But there could
still be distinguished from that quarter of a mile away the occasional
sound of hammering where the workmen within the hall were finishing the
last of its decorations for the ceremony that was to take place that
day. It was a little before nine o’clock in the morning.
That large hall had its main entrance upon the new wide, bare Avenue de
Paris, with its sprigs of trees. Years before it had been built to house
the rackets and the tennis nets, perhaps the scenery of plays--all the
material of the lesser pleasures of the court; for which reason it was
still called the “Menus-Plaisirs,” that is, the “Petty Pleasures.” It
had stood for some forty years, and the things to be warehoused had come
in by its principal opening upon this great main road.
By this main door you might have seen, under the rain, one after another
entering as the morning wore on to ten o’clock. Some came on foot, most
in the carriages of their equipage; but every individual, driven or
walking, first halted at the line of armed men that barred the avenue,
showed a card to prove that he was a deputy of the privileged orders,
cleric, or noble, and only then was let through. But though the public
gathered slowly (in such weather!) the careful policing of the streets
by these armed men was maintained, and
[Illustration: THE COMMONS TAKING THE OATH IN THE TENNIS-COURT AT
VERSAILLES
_To face p. 31_
]
the lines of red and blue still stood across the Avenue de Paris. They
so came slowly up and in, the two privileged orders for one hour, six
hundred in all.
The hour drew to its close. Before the bugles up in the low, wooded
heights to the south had sounded for the ten o’clock meal of the camp,
before the hour had struck from the clocks of the churches, files drew
up to line the street on each side, and a guard stood before the porch.
Much farther down the road, beyond a second line of soldiery which
barred access from that far side also, a small, but gathering, crowd of
citizens showed far and small. Mixed with them and passing through them
were figures hurrying toward a narrow side street which ran to a back
entrance of the Menus-Plaisirs--men in knee-breeches and short coats,
all in black, solemn. Those distant figures in black thus mixing with
the crowd and getting in by a back way were the Commons, the men who had
just claimed to be all France, to be sovereign. They had not been
permitted to come in by the main door of their hall; they were under
orders to reach the place in this fashion by the meaner street behind
it.
Even that back door was shut against them. Of the four thousand soldiers
all told who formed the ornament, the patrol, and the barriers of those
streets, one guard was set at this closed back door forbidding entry.
The six hundred Commons, crowded and pushing under their dripping
umbrellas, began loud complaints, suggested protests, egged on their
officials and in particular their president. He, Bailly, the middle-aged
astronomer, full of rectitude, simple, and pompous, still called it an
insult to be kept thus. But the guard had no orders and would not open.
Such citizens as had assembled in the street mixed now with the Commons,
supported their indignation. The rain still fell.
It was not until nearly a full hour had passed, until a commotion
farther up toward the palace, and the shouted presenting of arms
announced the arrival of the king that these six hundred, now at the
limit of their restrained and profound exasperation, were at last
admitted to the ramshackle wooden corridor that was their only
vestibule. They folded their umbrellas, shook the rain from their
cloaks, and, hat under arm, filed through the inner way which led to the
back of the hall. Thus did they meanly enter it, at last, humiliated
and angry, they who would be the nation itself.
The Commons filed in two by two through the side door at the end of the
great hall. They saw before them, under the great veiled, oval skylight
of the place, the ranks of the clergy and of the nobles already
assembled, rows deep, upon each side of the central gangway. They saw
the throne, with its noble purple hangings roof-high and spangled with
the golden lilies, upon the raised platform at the farther end. They saw
the whole place draped and painted and upholstered as it had been for
the great ceremony of the Parliament’s opening seven weeks before. It
was eleven o’clock.
Upon the king’s right the queen, suffering somewhat from that theatrical
dignity which had been the bane of her carriage at the court, and had so
offended the French sense of measure, courtesied deep, and would not be
seated while the king still stood. Before the throne the ministry sat in
rank; but one chair was empty, and all men gazed at it. It was amazing
that this chair should be empty, for it was the chair of the chief
minister; it was Necker’s chair.
What was about to be done was Necker’s doing. It was he who had written
the words the king was to read. But that very morning he had grown
afraid. He had ordered his carriage to take him with the rest; then,
seeing how feeling had risen, persuaded partly by his women, partly by a
native duplicity, that something was to be gained by a dramatic absence
and a show of displeasure at what he knew would clash with opinion, he
had at the last moment shirked and remained at home. He betrayed the
king by that shirking. He left it to be thought that he was not the
author of his own words. Unlike most traitors, he reaped no reward.
Whether rumours of what was to come had leaked out or not we cannot
tell. Some of that great audience afterward said that they knew what was
toward, and certainly among the two privileged orders there were a few
who had heard the tenor of the speech. There were even one or two among
the Commons. But for the great bulk of those who waited curiously for
the fruition of so dreadful a moment, the fruit of that moment was still
unknown until the herald gave forth his cry, until the rustle of seating
was over, and the king spoke.
[Illustration: JACQUES NECKER, RECTOR-GENERAL OF FINANCES
_To face p. 34_
]
What he spoke in his simple, good-natured, rather thick voice was, for
those who heard it, enormous. His first words raised the issue directly,
before men had well realized the shock--the royal authority was advising
a reversal of all that had been done in the six days:
“I thought, gentlemen, that I had done all in my power for the good of
my subjects.... The States General” [not the _National Assembly_] “have
been open now near two months, and they are not yet agreed upon the
preliminaries of their business.... It is my duty, it is a duty which I
owe to the common weal, and to my realm and to myself, to end these
divisions.... I come to repress whatever has been attempted against the
laws.”
He sat down, and every phrase in the five minutes or so of the
declaration drawn up for him had seemed to the Commons and their
partizans a challenge.
The king’s face, if witnesses may be trusted, showed some surprise.
There is an air in assemblies which can be felt, though not defined, and
the dense rows in black at the end of the hall were hostile.
Barentin came up the steps of the throne and knelt, as custom demanded,
then turned and said in a loud voice, “The king orders you to be
covered.”
Bailly put on his hat, sundry of his Commons followed his example. The
privileged orders for some reason made no such gesture. In the passions
of the moment it was thought that they deliberately insulted the third
order, as though not caring for the privilege of remaining covered
before the king, if the Commons were to share that privilege. At any
rate, Bailly nervously uncovered again, and those who had first followed
his example followed it once more. There was a little laughter, a little
subdued challenging. They ceased as the articles of the king’s main
declaration--Necker’s document--were read for him by his minister.
There were twenty-five of them; each was short, and their delivery no
great matter in time. But in effect they were capital. They maintained
the separation of the three orders. They broke the unity of the National
Assembly. They permitted common sessions only to debate questions which
were common to all three.
Louis spoke again for a moment. Next were read the thirty-five articles
Necker meant for a “liberal” constitution to the nation.
Those who have attended the ritual of assemblies know how superficial
and imperfect is the effect of such a preliminary single reading. Men
strain their ears for this point and for that, but they do not grasp the
details of what has been put before them. What reaches from the lips of
the reader to his audience is not, as in book-work, a precise and
complete plan; it is only a general effect. Those thirty-five articles,
droned out in the official accent, liberally as many of them were
interpreted upon a further study, tolerably co-ordinated as they may
have seemed to Necker and to those who drafted them in the clique of the
council-chamber, were taken by the Commons as a direct challenge. And
the Commons were right. The French Revolution was not permitted for
politicians’ work of this kind. Flame is not made for pap. Yet
challenging as Necker’s futilities were to the ardour of the time, it
was not they that determined the gravity of that short hour. What
determined it was the last and third speech of the king.
Louis rose for the third time at the conclusion of this reading, and in
brief sentences told them they had heard his will. He reminded them that
they could do nothing without his specific approbation; he used the
famous phrase that, if he were abandoned in his enterprise, “he would
alone carry out the good of his peoples.” His last sentence was this:
“I order you, gentlemen, to separate at once, and to-morrow to come each
of you to the place set apart for your respective orders, there to
resume your debates. To this effect I have ordered the Grand Master of
Ceremonies to prepare the places where you are to meet.”
During each brief interlude of the king’s own speaking all had preserved
a profound attention. During the reading of the articles there had been
now and then a slight applause, especially from certain of the nobles at
the article in favour of the old feudal dues, and to that applause there
had come isolated cries of “Silence!” from the Commons. Nothing else had
disturbed the ease, the dignity, and the rapidity of this one hour
pregnant with war: one hour; for it was eleven when the king first
entered; as he rose to dismiss them and leave the hall it was noon.
[Illustration: THE MEETING OF THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY AT VERSAILLES, JUNE,
1789
_To face p. 39_
]
When the king had passed behind the glorious, roof-high curtains of the
throne, and so gone out, there was a noise of men moving.
All the three hundred of the nobility rose and followed him. A great
number of the clergy--most of that order--trooped after. The hall was
left desolate in its centre; most desolate where its great empty dais,
splendid with the purple drapings and the embroidered lilies of gold,
and the empty throne dominated the floor below.
The far end and the dark aisles behind the columns were still filled
with the Commons in a crowd. Some remained still seated, some few more
had risen; all were keeping silent, and only a very few crept
shamefacedly along the walls toward the doors.
With the Commons there now mixed such of the clergy as had dared to
remain, and not a few of the public audience; of these last many
lingered curiously, hanging on in the corners and sides of the place,
watching for what was to come.
One could not see from that hall any part of the life without. Its
windows were high. Its principal light was from the glazed, oval
skylight in the roof, covered and tempered by a veil of cloth. One
could not hear the crowd which had gathered outside in the broad avenue
to see the king and his coaches go by, and which remained in great
numbers to attend the exit of the Commons when these should leave. That
inner place was isolated. But the seven or eight hundred men standing at
bay therein could feel all about them the great mass of soldiery upon
the heights in the woods, the regiments marching in from the frontiers,
the counter-gatherings of mobs and of armed civilians down the valley in
Paris, two hours away--all the expectancy of arms.
Workmen entered to remove the hangings and to dismantle the hall. Still
the Commons kept their places, as yet undecided; no general decision
taken, none proposed; but yet the mass of them unmoving, and by their
mere unmoving refusing the command of the crown.
It was at this moment, before as yet the artisans had begun their
business of ladders and hammering, that there came out from the
robing-room and from behind the cloths of the throne a figure with which
the ceremony of the States General had already rendered them familiar:
it was young Dreux Brézé, elegant, a trifle effeminate, little more
than a boy. He carried his white wand of the master of ceremonies, as he
had carried it when the session opened, and his person was, by the
costume of his office, all gold and plumes and many diamonds.
He performed his simple duty: he came up to Bailly, the president, and
said:
“Sir, you heard the order of the king?”
Bailly answered in silence, while men craned forward to hear:
“Sir, the Assembly stands adjourned only by its own vote. I cannot
disperse it until it has debated upon that adjournment.” A pompous
rigmarole enough, but thick with coming years.
Said young Brézé:
“Am I to give that to the king as your reply?”
And Bailly answered:
“Yes.”
Then, turning to his colleagues, Bailly had begun to give his reasons to
them, when he found striding up to his side, and facing Brézé, the heavy
vigour of Mirabeau. It was Mirabeau, so striding up, who in his powerful
voice interposed. With no official right to mandate, he spoke most
famous words, of which tradition has made a varied and doubtful legend,
but which were in substance these:
“Go tell those that sent you we are here by the will of the nation.” He
added either that force alone (of bayonets or what-not) could drive the
Commons out, or, as some say, that such force was powerless.
Even as Mirabeau was speaking, Brézé, having had his answer from Bailly
the official head of the Commons, thus recalcitrant, moved away. The
custom of the court was on him, and he moved out backward with his white
wand. Of the men who saw that piece of ritual, some said within
themselves that the thing was a sign, and that sovereignty had passed
from the Bourbons.
When he had gone, there was silence again for a little while. It was
broken by the workmen setting to their labour of dismantling the hall.
Bailly ordered them to cease, and they obeyed the order.
The genius of the French people for decision and for manifold
co-operation appeared again and again throughout the Revolution, in
debate, in street fighting, upon the battle-field. Nowhere did it appear
more clearly than at this origin of all the movement.
[Illustration: EMANUEL JOSEPH SIEYES
_Député de la Ville de Paris à l’Assembleé Nationale en 1789 Elu
Président le 7 Juin 1790_
A Paru, chez l’AUTEUR, Quay des Augustins Nº. 71 an 3ᵉ.
EMMANUEL-JOSEPH SIEYÈS, DEPUTY FROM PARIS TO THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY]
_To face p. 42_
Without traditional procedure, with no waiting on initiative from above,
immediate, spontaneous and collective action decided all.
One voice, proposing an adjournment until to-morrow, was voted down at
once. Next Sieyès, with his firm, accurate mouth, pronounced a graven
phrase expressing the mind of all: “You are to-day what you were
yesterday.” Immediately, upon the motion of Camus, a man too legal, but
well able to define, the Commons and such of the clergy as had remained
with them voted unanimously their contradiction to the throne. They
voted that all that they had passed, and all that they had done, they
still maintained.
As the hands which had been raised everywhere to vote this motion fell
again, the corner of French history was turned; and those curious to
choose a precise point at which the outset of any matter may be fixed,
should choose that moment, the fall of those hundreds of hands, for the
origin of modern Europe, its vast construction, its still imperilled
experiment.
One thing more remained to be done, though the general sense of those
present did not at first grasp its necessity; the proposal and the
carrying of it proceeded from the vivid sanity of Mirabeau. He it was
who proposed that they should vote the inviolability of themselves, the
deputies of the nation.
To pass that decree meant that _if_ the Assembly should win, it would
have, for the punishment of any that had attempted to defeat it by
force, the awful weapon which a solemn declaration of intention gives.
But it also meant that if the Commons were defeated, they had been
guilty of treason.
Bailly, perhaps from confusion, perhaps from timidity, himself
hesitated, until Mirabeau, understanding well what force it is that
governs men, said:
“If you do not pass this motion, sixty of us, and you the first, will be
arrested this very night.”
A column of troops had already been formed outside the doors, though the
decision to strike at once was, perhaps in fear of Paris, not acted on
by the crown. Five hundred and twenty-seven members passed the decree,
and of these thirty-four voted “No,” four hundred and ninety-three,
“Yes.” Its operative words are significant:
“The National Assembly declares ... that every individual,
corporation, tribunal, court or commission, which may dare during
or after the present session to pursue, seek out, arrest, or cause
to be arrested ... a deputy upon the ground of any profession,
advice, opinion, or speech made by him in the States General, no
matter by whom such attempts may be ordered, is guilty of treason
and subject to capital punishment.”
This voted, there was no more to be done.
The many men who had thus risked all looked at one another; Bailly
declared the session at an end. They came out upon the crowds that still
waited in the lifting weather outside, that cheered a little, and that
wonderingly followed the dispersion of the deputies to their homes.
The king and those who had left with him had lunched at the mid-day
hour. They were past their coffee when the business of their antagonists
was thus accomplished. The Commons and the curious who had waited in the
streets for their exit were late for luncheon that day.
A week later, and two days more than a week, the battle was won. The
clergy had joined the Commons in a body, the nobles in batch after
batch. The National Assembly was fully composed at last, and Louis
himself, writing to the privileged orders--such as still refused--to bow
to the Commons, had accepted defeat. His sovereignty was from that
moment lost.
[Illustration: GABRIEL HONORÉ RIQUETTI, COMTE DE MIRABEAU
_To face p. 46_
]
PART TWO
THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES
INTRODUCTION
After the successful assertion by the Commons of their new usurped
powers over the crown, just described, a second attempt at coercion,
backed by the foreign mercenary troops in the service of the king,
failed. The depots of arms at the Invalides and the Bastille in Paris
were sacked by the populace, and the latter was taken by force upon the
same day, July 14th, 1789. The first principles of the Revolution were
laid in resolutions of the parliament at Versailles during the summer,
notably the declaration known as that of the “Rights of Man” and the
abolition of the feudal property of the nobility.
Another popular rising in the capital in the month of October brought
the court back to Paris, and the parliament followed it. For eighteen
months the tide of democratic reform rose with greater and greater
violence, and while the crown still remained the sole executive of the
nation, possessed of all immediate control over the regular armed forces
and the disbursement of public money, the personal peril of the royal
family grew greater, and the term within which it seemed certain that
the executive would lose its authority drew near.
There stood between the monarchy--the one vital institution of the
French--and its ruin no real forces save the personality of Mirabeau and
the regular troops. As against the latter there had been raised and
organized a considerable militia, duly armed by law and present in every
village and town in the country; while the mass of the regular troops
had purposely been stationed at a distance from Paris through the
growing power of the parliament.
A foreign war was threatened through the desire of every ancient
authority in Europe to repress the movement, and with this approaching
threat of invasion, which could not but serve the king, the
unpopularity, and therefore the danger, of his family grew greater
still.
Mirabeau, who dominated the parliament by his personality even more than
by his oratory and his prodigious industry, had secretly entered into
the service of the court in his determination to save the monarchy, in
the fall of which he believed would be involved the breakdown of the
country. He had drawn up a regular plan presupposing and inviting civil
war. He would have the king leave Paris for some town such as Compiègne,
not more than a day’s posting away, and from that point appeal to the
people and to the army to support him. All this work of Mirabeau was
being done in the winter of 1790-91.
Meanwhile the personal alarm of the queen,
[Illustration: ALLEGORY OF THE OATH-TAKING IN THE TENNIS-COURT AT
VERSAILLES
_To face p. 51_
]
backed by her rare energy, preferred a complete flight with her husband
and children, either to the frontier itself or beyond it, a total
undoing of the Revolution if that flight were successful, and the return
of the monarchy, backed, not only by the army, but by the threat of
foreign powers and of invasion.
In this perhaps impracticable and too heroic scheme, utterly
anti-national, her great ally was Fersen, a Swedish nobleman who had
loved her with devotion from his first youth, and whom she, since her
misfortunes began, had come to love as devotedly in return.
It seems certain that the overmastering ability of Mirabeau would have
carried his plan and would probably have saved the French monarchy had
he lived. But he died from overwork upon the second of April, 1791. With
him lacking, nothing could prevent the maturing of the queen’s plan.
A fortnight after Mirabeau’s death the mob had prevented the king from
leaving Paris, in a perfectly open manner, for a visit to one of his
suburban palaces, and the great militia guard of the palace had not
shown discipline or loyalty.
After that nothing remained but to fix a date for secret flight, and
this date was ultimately fixed for the night of the twentieth of June.
Fersen worked out all the plans in detail. He had the great
travelling-coach, or “Berline,” specially built. The commander of the
army upon the eastern frontier, Bouillé was warned and provided a
succession of cavalry outposts to receive the fugitives when they should
have proceeded a little more than a hundred miles from Paris, and to
pass them on in safety to Montmédy upon the extreme frontier. Thence,
when he should safely have reached it, the king was to issue his
proclamation to the army and to the people. The travelling disguises for
the royal family were prepared; three gentlemen of their former guard
were trusted to accompany the flight. A passport in the name of a Mme.
de Korff, a Russian lady resident in Paris, was obtained, and the queen
was to travel in that name with her two children, and her husband as a
servant.
PART TWO
THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES
Upon the evening of Monday, the twentieth of June, 1791, a little before
nine o’clock, Axel de Fersen was leaning, with his chin in his hands,
his elbows upon the parapet, looking over the bridge called the Pont
Royal, which leads from the Tuileries to the southern bank of the Seine.
He watched the dying light upon the river below, and waited with
desperate impatience in his heart, his body lounging in affected
indolence.
The sky above was cloudy. The day had been hot, but its last hours not
sunlit. A freshness was now coming up from the Seine over the town, and
the noises of life and movement that rise with the closing of the
working hours in the capital filled the streets. He was dressed in the
rough habit of a cabman, and the poor coach of which he had the driving
stood in rank with others a little way from the gate of the palace.
As he so gazed, two men, one with a sunken, long-jawed face and small,
peering eyes, the other frail, slight, and younger, both dressed in a
faded yellow livery as of servants to some rich man of a time before the
Revolution had abolished liveries, came up to him. He knew already who
they were. They were Moustier and Valory, two gentlemen of the king’s
disbanded guard who, in the disguise of servants, had volunteered to
serve Louis in his flight. Fersen gave them the instructions they
awaited. One was to find and conduct the great coach Fersen had had
built and to keep it waiting for him at the gates of the city; the other
was to act as outrider and to go before to prepare the relays. A third,
Malden, remained hidden in the apartments of the king.
Night fell, an hour passed, and two women in the conduct of a man who
hurried them across the bridge were put into a chaise that there awaited
them and drove off. Fersen knew that mission also. These were the two
waiting-women of the queen, going on ahead through the night to the
second posting-station at Claye upon the eastern road. A little while
later--it was eleven o’clock, or a little past--a woman came to him
leading two children, two girls, it seemed, one old enough
[Illustration: “VIVE LE ROI! VIVE LA NATION!”
A Cartoon of 1789
_To face p. 55_
]
to walk alone, the other whom she held by the hand. It was Mme. de
Tourzel, the governess of the royal children. The elder girl was the
princess Royal. The young child, disguised as her sister, was the
Dauphin, the little heir to the throne. Many were going in and out of
the palace at that moment. This small group in sombre clothing attracted
no one’s eye in the half-light. The children were put into the cab, the
woman followed, and Fersen, with the most cabman-like way in the world,
climbed slowly up to his box and drove at a very quiet pace westward
along the quay that flanks the Tuileries gardens. He came to the great
open place which to-day is called the Place de la Concorde, where the
half-finished bridge had only just lost its last workman with the end of
the day; he turned to the right across its paving and up the unfinished
Rue Royale until he came to the narrow Rue St. Honoré, where again he
turned his shabby team to the right and drove as leisurely eastward.
There is a place, now rebuilt out of all recognition, the ways
broadened, all the houses modern, where a street still called by the
name of “Ladder Street” (the Rue de l’Echelle) comes into the Rue St.
Honoré. It is a very short street leading toward the palace. Between
the Tuileries and those few yards of way there stood in those days a
number of great houses, the homes of certain nobles who had been about
the court, and in the midst of their confused carved fronts was an
archway that led to the royal stables, and by a narrow lane to the
courtyard of the palace itself.
In that Street of the Ladder Fersen halted, drawing his cab up toward
the curb. The long detour over which he had purposely lingered had taken
him nearly three-quarters of an hour; it was near twelve. He got down
from the box, went to the carriage window, and said a word or two,
bidding the woman and the two children wait in patience. Then he paced
up and down the rough paving as midnight deepened, sauntering in the
fashion of cabmen that await a fare.
Such light as there was between the high houses came from dim oil lamps
slung from wall to wall and far apart. There was light also in the
guardroom at the corner of the archway, and there a militiaman stood
sentry with fixed bayonet, for every issue from the palace was thus
guarded. The street was full of people coming and going from that little
town the Tuileries, and as the hour wore on, the great equipages of
those who attended court passed in to take their masters up at the royal
porch and passed out again on their way homeward.
Fersen knew that the last ceremonies would not be over until very late,
but that did not relieve his increasing anxiety. The darkness seemed to
grow more profound as he waited. He watched with as little show as might
be the throngs that passed back and forth through the archway. He saw no
figure of those he was awaiting until, when it was quite dark--for
though there was a moon, the curtain of clouds grew thick--he saw, or
thought he saw, seated upon a stone bench against one of the great
houses, a woman whose attitude even in that gloom he thought he
recognised. With the same leisurely pace of a man free from employment
he sauntered past, noted the gray dress and broad, gray veiled hat under
the dim light of the distant lamps, and the veil about the face, and
coming closer still, knew that it was Madame Elizabeth, the king’s
sister. He spoke in a whisper, without turning to her or stopping as he
went slowly by. He made an imperceptible movement of the head toward the
cab, saying, “They wait for you.” She did not move, and he feared for a
moment that she might not have understood what he had said nor
recognized him, for he dared not linger. He paced back again toward his
charge and again whispered the words as he passed, still looking down at
the ground; and this time the woman rose, went to the cab, and entered
it.
The lights behind the shutters of the great houses had gone out, the
distant noises in the palace hard by had ceased, the last of the
equipages were rumbling through the archway, and still there was no sign
of new-comers for him. It was long past midnight, nearly one o’clock.
Another of the cabmen in the rank spoke to him. He answered as best he
could with the manner, accent, and slang of the trade. He offered this
unwelcome friend a pinch of snuff from a rough box; then he went back as
though to look to his horses, felt their legs, stood about them a
little, and patted them.
There was still, but very rarely, a belated servant or so passing out
from under the arch, and at last, when his fever of expectation was at
the height, he distinguished two such, a man and a woman, coming toward
him unhurriedly. As they came nearer, and the feeble glimmer of the
lamps showed
[Illustration: THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY PETRIFIED. THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY
REVIVIFIED
Caricatures by Gillray
_To face p. 58_
]
them less confusedly, he marked the lumbering walk of the man. He wore a
round soft hat, and a big overcoat against the freshness of the night
air, and had the air of a familiar upper servant. At his side, with an
upright gait and a certain poise of the head that Fersen knew, alas! for
him, better than anything else on earth, went the woman. Fersen went
forward, mastering his respect, and led them to the carriage; and then,
without delay, but still careful to give no cause for remark by his
haste, he drove northward over the noisy granite sets of the streets.
By what tortuous ways Fersen drove the king and his family one may
hardly guess. They were puzzled to find him following many street
turnings other than those that would lead them to the nearest gate of
the city on the north and so to the great frontier road. But Fersen did
what he did knowingly. It was his business in this turn of the night to
make sure that the last point of his plan had been obeyed and that the
great travelling-carriage had gone on before and was waiting for them
outside the limits of the city. He called at the stables and found one
trusted servant of his to assure him that the thing had been sent and
that all was ready. Then only did he turn toward the east and the north
and make for the barrier at the end of the Rue St. Martin, which was
then the gate of Paris and the beginning of straggling houses and the
open country.
They did not reach that barrier till two o’clock. Already they breathed
some faint air of morning.
No one challenged them. It was one cab like another, driving to the
suburbs with some belated middle-class party that had dined in Paris
that night. There were lights and music still in the house of the
gate-keeper at the barrier, for there had been a wedding in his family
that day, and they were feasting. After the glare of that light, Fersen
looked in vain through the night for the Berline. Then, with some few
minutes so lost, he saw the black hump at last, drawn up well to the
right and close to the bordering ditch. The guardsman, Moustier, and
Balthazar, his own coachman, were sitting their horses immovable. They
had waited thus immovable for some hours. Very rapidly the travellers
passed from the cab to the coach, and leaned back in the comfortable
white velvet cushions of its upholstering. Fersen himself, sending back
the cab I know not how, took his place upon the broad box of the
Berline, and the four horses felt the traces and started. The journey
had begun.
Toward the north-east, to which the great road ran, there was already a
hint of dawn, and great Paris just behind would not sleep long into the
light. Therefore the horses, Fersen’s own, with only a short stage
before them, were urged to a vigorous pace through the short, lonely
suburb and still more lonely fields beyond, and Fersen’s coachman, who
rode as postillion upon the leader, spared them little.
It was near three o’clock when they reached the first posting-house at
Bondy, three miles from the boundary of the city, and just outside the
wall and railings of the park in that place. The guardsman Valory, who
was outrider, had been there for an hour. The six horses for the
carriage were awaiting it, as also the two horses which he and the third
guardsman, Malden were to ride, to the next stage. As they unharnessed
Fersen’s steaming beasts, Fersen himself, as coachman coming down from
the box, waited a moment until the fresh team was in and the postillions
mounted. Then he looked in at the window of the coach, and taking off
his hat to the queen, he said, “Good-bye, Madame de Korff,” and under
the growing light would no longer linger. He was off at once by the
by-lane to the Brussels road beyond. He and those whom he had so worked
to save were to meet at Montmédy.
The postillions urged on their mounts, the short whips cracked, and they
were gone. Fersen saw the great mass go swaying up the road, dark
against the growing dawn, and went off lonely upon his separate flight
to the north.
As for the travellers, touched by that effect of morning which all feel,
by the unnatural exhilaration of those strained hours of no sleep, and
of a release apparently begun, they broke into making plans for their
disguise, reassuring themselves with every mile that passed and feeling
the first sense of relief that they had known for two tortured years.
The sleepy little boy who was their fortune and the heir was set more
comfortably back against the white cushions in his girl’s clothes that
he might rest. The five others, wakeful and eager, pretended to learn
their rôles. Mme. de Tourzel was to be the mistress; the queen, the
governess Rochet; the Princess Elizabeth, a
[Illustration: MADAME ELISABETH
From a photograph by Braun, Clément & Co., New York, of a painting by
Mme. Vigée Lebrun, in the possession of Mme. la Marquise du Blaisdel
_To face p. 63_
]
companion; and the king a steward under the name of Durand. There was
almost a spirit of comedy in the coach. The king talked of his new
liberty and of riding, perhaps of the autumn hunting that he loved; and
they conversed also of the nature of their journey, where--and upon this
perhaps they were more guarded--there might be peril, especially as they
passed through the one considerable town of Châlons; but also of how,
not two hours beyond that place, at Somme-Vesle, a posting-house in the
midst of Champagne, they would meet the first troop of their chain of
mounted escorts thrust out from the army, and how with these they would
henceforward be safe.
They were late. They were already a full hour behind that time-table
which men who understood the essentials of order as the king had never
understood them had laid down for their guidance. But the pace was
brisk, the road was passing swiftly by, and the accident of such
trifling unpunctuality so early in their adventure did not oppress them.
There was no one with them accustomed to command or to understand the
all-importance of exactitude in any military affair.
That little company, if we think of it, was an isolated thing and most
imperfect for such a task: three women bred to a court and to the habits
of leisure or of successive pleasures; two children; the unwilled, heavy
king and husband, who never did or could decide, and whose judgment was
slow to the point of disease. Beyond these were only the three
guardsmen, almost servants.
At Claye, the next relay, they found the queen’s two waiting-women, who,
abandoned for hours, had awaited them in their chaise, and were
bewildered, wondering if they were lost. From Claye onward, the sun
having now risen, though hidden behind the level roof of clouds and the
day fully begun, they passed through fields without villages, with
scarcely a house, where the peasants in the eager work of the high
summer were already abroad. The fourfold rank of great trees which
dignified the road went by in monotonous procession. The quick change of
horses at Meaux raised their hopes still higher, and as they opened
their picnic-bags, bringing out bread and meat and wine to break their
fast, they spoke in jests, increasingly secure. To Malden riding by the
carriage door, the queen beckoned, and offered wine and food, and she
told him familiarly of how the king had laughed roundly, saying that
Lafayette, the master of the militia in Paris, and officially the
guardian of the court, would be woundily puzzled that day. So much for
that fresh early morning when all was well.
The wide royal road, full of the Roman inheritance, breasts beyond Meaux
a sharp, high, wooded hill, and the drag up that hill was long and slow.
Upon its farther side, on to the Marne again, goes a sharp pitch, down
which the shrieking brakes created an equal delay. It was fully eight
o’clock when they had come along the riverside to the lovely valley of
the Sellot, winding between its wooded guardian hills to join the
greater river.
There two roads part, each leading equally to Châlons and to the east;
the main one still follows the Marne, but the second, somewhat shorter,
cuts across the plateau to the south of the river, which few, even in
the travelling of to-day, know, and which those who had planned the
flight had chosen on account of its few towns and villages and less
frequented inns. Yet it was precisely in this chosen stretch of thirty
miles, by this less-frequented of the two roads to Châlons, that their
evil was to come upon them.
The hour’s delay which one accident and another--the lateness of the
moment in which the last of the court had left the palace, the slight
time lost in peering for the Berline through the darkness at the gate,
the long drag up and down the forest of Meaux--had burdened them with,
was now perhaps more nearly grown to an hour and a half; but not one of
that little company could guess how much this meant, or how such errors
breed of themselves and add, how one strained and anxious man, watching
during that Tuesday at the head of a little troop of horse in the lonely
plains beyond Châlons, would be broken, and with him all their fortunes,
by such incapacity. For save where it walked the hills, as heavy coaches
must, the Berline went bravely enough, covering its eight miles an hour
or more; and the sense of speed made up with them for the realities of
time and of co-ordinated distance wherein they were incompetent indeed.
Nor was that error, that growing error in exactitude, all that they had
to face.
[Illustration: THE END OF THE FLIGHT OF THE ROYAL FAMILY AT VARENNES
_To face p. 66_
]
THE PURSUIT
It was perhaps at eight o’clock in Paris that morning, at the most half
an hour later, that the whole populace became alive to what had
happened. The drums were beating, rallying the militia, the crowd was
filling the square in front of the palace. At that moment, when strong
action in pursuit of the fugitives could not be long delayed, they were
only just upon this upland road leaving the Marne; they had a start of,
say, forty-five miles, fifty at the most, before the first rider could
surely mount and be galloping in pursuit. The carriage rolled on fairly
with Valory, its outrider, on before, Malden trotting at the door, and
the chaise with the queen’s two waiting-women swaying in a cloud of dust
behind. It rolled on eastward through that high, little-known land of
wide, hedgeless fields; it was about ten o’clock when it came down into
a sort of shallow cup lower than the plain, wherein lies that little
place called “Old Houses”--Viels-Maisons. Very few men, I think, of
those who travel or speak of their travels know the tiny group of roofs.
It has not thirty families round its church. It meant to the travellers
nothing but an insignificant posting-house and a relay. But it was
there that their fate first touched them, for there a chance
postillion, one called Picard, glanced at their faces, and knew them for
the king and queen.
Like so many upon that full and dreadful day, he yielded entirely to
caution. The king was still the king. There was divided authority in
France; and whether reward or punishment would follow any act no man
could tell on such a day as this until it was known which of the two
combatants, the crown or the parliament, would rule at last. So Picard
said nothing; but he had seen. Others also were to prove discreet, but a
little less discreet than he.
The coach went on through the lonely land, past one small town,
Montmirail, which later Napoleon’s resistance was to render famous, and
on again into the empty fields, still eastward. It grew to be noon, hot
and almost stormy under the lowering sky. Louis the King, with his
road-book spread upon his knee, followed with curiously detached
interest the correspondence of the map with the dull landscape outside.
As the carriage stopped at one posting-house after another, and as he
would plunge his hand into his leather money-bag to give his guardsman
the wages of the postillions, he was not content thus to show his face
at the window, he would even stretch his legs a bit and get down from
the carriage to pace to and fro while each fresh team was harnessing.
“We are safe now,” he said; and again, “There is no fear of our being
recognized now.” All the air of that little company had come to be one
of security, though one man had already marked them down, and already
the galloping out in pursuit from the gates of Paris had begun.
The governess and the royal children caught that air of security, and
where a long hill put the horses at a walk, they got out and climbed it
on foot. There was only one small incident of which to this day we
cannot tell whether it was of any moment or no. The little princess had
noted it and had been disturbed. It was the presence of a traveller who
for a time rode alone upon his horse behind them, walking when they
walked, trotting when they trotted. It may have been no more than a
coincidence that his way lay with theirs. Long before Châlons he had
turned off by a by-road and disappeared.
There is, making a sort of western wall for the Champagne country, a
very sharp and even range of hills running north and south. These are
the escarpment of that plateau of which I have just spoken, and over
which for many hours the coach had been travelling on. These hills end
abruptly to the south, but just beyond the precipitous slope in which
they terminate there stands across a narrow, clean-cut valley one
isolated height called the Mont Aimé; so that the gap is a sort of gate
into the flat country below, which stretches eastward in a wide,
rolling, chalky plain, the lower Champagne, of which Châlons is the
capital and centre. Beyond that plain, eastward and very far away,
another low, level line of hills, the Forest of the Argonne, marks the
very distant horizon.
Through this gate, which is a landmark for miles throughout the plain,
passes the road; and half an hour beyond, or a little more, where the
road crosses the small water of the Soude, three or four houses round
one posting-house, by name Chaintrix, break the monotony of the fields.
The travellers reached it just in the sultriest part of the day. They
had not greatly added to their error in time; they were not much, if at
all, behind the hour and a half of debt against fate which they had
already suffered to accumulate, when fate
[Illustration: THE ROYAL FAMILY AT VARENNES, JUNE 22, 1791
_To face p. 71_
]
touched them again. This time it was with a stronger gesture than when,
four hours before, the postboy at Viels-Maisons had looked askance and
known them for what they were.
Here lived one Lagny with certain married and unmarried daughters, and
with him, by just one coincidence, his son-in-law from miles away,
Vallet by name, who for that one day was there. That son-in-law had been
to Paris the year before for the Revolutionary feast upon the
Champ-de-Mars. He had there stared at the king, and when the Berline
stopped at his father-in-law’s door, and while yet the relay was waiting
to be harnessed, he recognized his sovereign. Now it happened--so the
doom of the king willed it--that all the small household, father and
daughter and son-in-law, were Royalists of the old kind. They made
obeisance openly; the king and the queen accepted that homage with
delight, and at parting gave them gifts which still remain in testimony
to the truth of this tale. Vallet insisted upon driving them
himself,--with what consequences we shall see,--and what was more, this
spontaneous little scene of enthusiasm added by some few minutes
again--perhaps a quarter, perhaps half an hour--to the delay. The royal
children had gone in to rest a little from the heat and from their
fatigue. When they came out and the coach started, the postmaster and
his daughters openly acknowledged their Royal guests before the servants
of the farm and the postboys around.
Vallet himself rode upon the leaders--they whipped off before three
o’clock--proud to be driving his king and filled with zeal. But his zeal
was indiscreet. Twice he let the horses fall. Once his off wheel caught
the parapet of a bridge. At least twice the traces broke, and time, now
so heavily against them, turned still more heavily against them in the
necessity of finding ropes and of mending. There must have been one more
hour lost somewhere in that stage of the road.
When, well after four o’clock, the fugitives clattered into Châlons, the
whole matter was public knowledge. Whether Vallet had spoken, or whether
the news shouted across the fields had been carried by some galloper, or
in whatever other way it spread, many knew it while the two carriages
were halted for the next relay in the town. The little knot that
gathered round the carriage knew what they were gazing at; the bolder
among them murmured thanks that the king had escaped his enemies. The
postmaster of Châlons knew it, the mayor knew it, and many others whose
names have not been preserved, but whose words and attitudes have. None
would take upon himself any responsibility in the great quarrel, and
only one obscure threat reached their ears. An unknown man did say in a
low voice one thing which has been recorded: at least we have it at
second hand, but at good second hand, that the travellers heard during a
halt a passer-by cry to them that their plans had miscarried and that
sooner or later they would be held.
But this general recognition at Châlons disturbed them not at all. They
were now not only secure in mind, as they had been for many hours, but
also within touch of certain and physical security. For at the very next
relay, not two hours along the road, was not the first of those armed
posts of escort waiting for them, to surround them? To form a
rear-guard, which should forbid all pursuit? To roll up further posts as
the carriage still went eastward? And to form at last a whole body of
cavalry, leading them on to the main army beyond Varennes? At that town,
not fifty miles on, was the limit beyond which lay stationed in great
numbers the army of Bouillé, the General privy to the plot and ready to
do all things for the king.
Here, if we are to seize the last act of this disaster, we must have
some picture of the scene in which it was played.
The lower Champagne, “The Champagne of the Dust,” as the peasants call
it, heaves in wide, low billows that barely disturb the vast sameness of
its flat until the Argonne, its limit and its wall, is reached to the
east. With the Argonne are great trees again, and lively waters, and the
recovery of rich land.
That country-side of the “Champagne Pouilleuse” is strange; it has
remained for centuries thus empty to the sky, land often too poor for
the plough, everywhere hungry and half deserted. The sluggish streams
that make their way slowly through its shallow depressions are
milk-white with the worthless chalky soil, and though now too regular
plantations of stunted pines diversify it, planted in the hope of
reclamation, it is of its nature a country without trees, as almost
without men. Small, scattered villages hold its few people, and again
and again one comes to patches as great as a rich
[Illustration: DROUET, THE POSTMASTER AT VARENNES
_To face p. 74_
]
man’s estate that are left untilled and have lost almost all feature
save the records of past wars. For here has been a great battle-field
for ages. Across its flat one may still trace the lines of the Roman
military roads. Here the French have made their chief modern ranges for
the training of their gunners. Here Attila was broken in his great
defeat, and you may see his enormous oval camp still standing, so large
that it looks like the ruin of a town in the midst of the plain. Here
also in the very next year that followed the flight of the king were to
meet for the first time the armies of the Revolution and of Europe, and
from these poor fields were to retreat the forces of the invasion, which
did not return until, after twenty-two years, the republic and Napoleon
had transformed the world. Here, yesterday, the fate of the world was
decided once again in the Battle of the Marne.
Right across the sweep drives the great road from Châlons, twenty-five
miles, till it strikes Sainte-Menehould, a country town at the foot of
the Argonne. Only two relays break this long day’s stretch, Somme-Vesle
and Orbeval, each an isolated farm and standing in one of those slightly
depressed muddy-watered dips to which the road falls, and from which it
as slightly rises again in its eastward progress across the plain. And
there, at Somme-Vesle, at the Châlons end of the stretch, barely ten
miles away, should be the first cavalry awaiting them, Choiseul’s troop.
It was in the hours between half-past four and six that the Berline was
passing through this stage. That hour and a half of debt to fate which
the loyalty of Lagny at Chaintrix had increased perhaps to two, the
avoidable accidents under Vallet’s posting had stretched to nearly
three.
Young Choiseul, the duke, had come in to Somme-Vesle. He had his orders
to expect somewhat after noon at the earliest, at the latest by three,
the carriage which held his master and the queen. His exact time-table
said one, and at one that carriage had not yet reached Chaintrix! The
officer was mounted, and his troop of forty also--forty German
mercenaries esteemed more trustworthy in such a task than any troops of
the nation. From one till two they still sat their horses, waiting in
the road before the posting-house, with the width of the Champagne all
about: a strange sight to see, so considerable an escort thus gathered,
waiting for they would not say what! But here again, so oddly fast did
the news travel, one man knew. As the afternoon wore on, and men sent
riding up to the crest of the rise could see nothing coming down the
road, the postmaster, as though to make conversation, strolled up to one
man in subordinate command and said, “It seems that the king is to pass
this way?” He was answered neither yes nor no.
Peasants came in from the fields; a little knot of men gathered; rumours
went about. In those days all the French had evil words for the foreign
mercenaries in the army. Some of the more ignorant of the field-workers
began whispering that they were a press-gang, that they had come to
seize men for the service. The better instructed were far more
suspicious of something far more probable. Three o’clock passed, and
there began to be some pressure upon the mounted men. A few were
hustled; the gathering of peasants grew. Beyond all essentials was it
essential, thus far from any support, to avoid a rumour of the truth, or
at least the spreading of it; and for Choiseul to prevent any conflict
between his little line of Germans and the gathering peasantry about.
And in one of those agonies that soldiers always feel, whether the
command be great or small, when synchrony fails and when they are
waiting hopelessly for something that never comes, torn as soldiers
always are in such delays between two necessities, Choiseul as the
afternoon still drew on and the road for miles still showed quite empty,
decided for the more immediate duty. A little longer, and his troop
would have suffered assault, and the king, if after such inexplicable
delay he did come at all, would come to find a country-side beginning to
rise and his chances ruined.
But was the king coming? How often had not Choiseul been told of the
perils, of the necessities, of the last moment of the repeated
postponements! How well did he not know himself the chances of a
postponement, he who had left Paris as a forerunner just before, and who
had a good eye for the faults of the court! Hour after hour had passed;
the king could not be coming, and to linger longer with his little
German troop was in any case to ensure failure. He would ride away with
his men across Argonne and join the main body at Varennes. He would not
further rouse the growing talk of the fields by swelling the contingents
to the east with his own, and by showing more soldiers than
[Illustration: THE RETURN TO PARIS
_To face p. 78_
]
need be along the road. He would cut across the plain and through the
woods. He rode away, and his men after him.
As the horses drawing the Berline topped the slight rise which hides
from that approach the posting-house of Somme-Vesle, and as the flat
dip, with the steading and the long wall of the courtyard, appeared
before the travellers, the king from the window, the guardsmen riding at
the side, saw in one moment a sudden nothingness, which struck them as
though the whole of their chances had turned. Lounging before the gate
of the stables were the few hostlers and servants of the place. Of the
soldiers in their blue and white, and of their mounts, not a sign. It
was inexplicable, but it spoke loudly. And the emptiness of Champagne
became in that unexpected shock far emptier than before. The travellers
did not speak to one another; they did not even press the relay. For the
first time that day a sense of dread was growing in them. They went on
under the evening.
For it was now already evening. The reddening sun broke for a moment
through a rift in the western clouds; it shone upon tumbled, white
fields, bare or with a meagre harvest, and, upon its ridge to the left,
on the mill which was to be lifted into such fame fourteen months later
under the name of Valmy: they were crossing that battle-field.
One more halt, one more relay under the failing light, and the hoofs of
the horses rang over the paving of Sainte-Menehould with the high woods
of Argonne right before them. And as they came through the evening
street, with all the people out to enjoy the new coolness of the air,
that town more than any other they had yet passed knew thoroughly what
was toward.
Gossip of it had been passing in the inns for hours. The post of hussars
there waiting had angered men, but had been also too well explained, and
their captain, as the coach waited for its horses, forgot the official
secret and saluted when those within beckoned him to hear the news.
Drouet, the son of the postmaster, himself now acting as postmaster of
the place, sullenly ordered the harnessing, glancing ill-naturedly at
the huge, yellow thing, with its heaped luggage, and tarpaulin atop, and
telling his men in that hill country to spare their cattle. It was
perhaps a close thing whether, amid the growing suspicion and anger of
the place, one and then another and then a third passing the news, and
all aflame against the foreign mercenaries set there for a guard, the
coach would be allowed to start at all.
But the same fear and doubt of consequences held them here at
Sainte-Menehould as it had held the much smaller number who had
gradually heard the truth far up the road hours before. And the
travellers began their climb unmolested under the falling night up into
Argonne. One more relay in the darkness at Clermont, where the road to
Montmédy branched off from that to Metz, and they were upon the last
stage to Varennes and to safety.
But when they were gone, when they had thus been hardly allowed to go,
the captain of the little troop of cavalry, sounding the boot and
saddle, lit the flame. The militia were summoned by drummers throughout
the streets, the German soldiers, mutinous with hunger after their long
wait and supported in their mutiny by the town folk, failed to obey. The
town council met, arrested, and examined the captain in command, and
after one hour of increasing vehemence this decision was taken, which
changed the story of France and of the world, “That the fugitives
should be followed and detained.” And the two men chosen for this task
of life or death--for should they fail, it was certainly death upon the
return of the armies--were Drouet, the young postmaster, and Guillaume,
both ex-cavalrymen and both men knowing, as they had need to know, the
darkness of Argonne that night. Both were men of great courage.
The odds against them were heavy. Of eighteen miles their quarry had a
start of seven. Further, they thought, as did all to whom the plan had
not been given, that the king’s flight would be by the main Metz road.
They knew nothing of his goal at Montmédy and of the turn-off toward
Varennes which he would take at Clermont. They did not know that
Varennes meant for him safety and for themselves immediate defeat.
They rode furiously up the road, and as they neared Clermont, nine miles
on, having found in all those nine miles no sign of lights before them,
in the pass where the great woods come close on each side and through
which the road, the railway, and the stream run side by side to-day,
Drouet heard voices in the darkness. He knew them for his own servants.
[Illustration: THE ARRIVAL OF THE ROYAL FAMILY IN PARIS, JUNE 25, 1791
_To face p. 82_
]
He learned in one breathless question and answer that the coach had
turned off the Metz road after the relay down toward the north and
Varennes. He had to decide in the thick darkness, and at once, between
following by the highway and cutting through the woods. He had the
soldier in him, and he decided. He would take the chance of the woods,
though he had eleven miles to go, and only an hour to ride it in. If he
did merit anything of fate, he would come in ahead of his prey; and if
he failed, he failed.
He took the steep bank up into the trees with Guillaume, and though the
two men knew the woods well, it was miraculous that they could thus
gallop through a clouded night, through paths which I, who have followed
them in full day, found tortuous and confused and often overgrown. He
came down with his companion into Varennes town by the lane that leads
from the forest above. It was asleep save for one light where men were
sitting drinking. The hour was just on eleven. They could not tell
whether they had won or lost in that great race. But Drouet, full of
immediate decision, roused here a house and there another, blocked the
bridge that led eastward to the farther part of the town and out toward
the army by dragging across it an empty wagon that lay by, and then
strode up the main street of the place to find whether he had lost or
won.
He came upon the Berline suddenly under an arch that spanned the way
from house to house, the big thing almost filling the arch, and its two
round lamps, with their reflectors, shining like great eyes. He heard
some altercation, and shrill above the other voices one woman’s urging
the postillions. They would consent to go only a few yards farther, to
cross the river. And there was Bouillé’s son and his men waiting for
them. Drouet took the leader’s reins and threw him back on his haunches.
He had won the race.
What followed was the anticlimax and the despair: the mayor, roused and
hesitating; the hussars drifting in--Choiseul and the rest--now
powerless before an immense armed mob that had gathered under the new
day; the gallopers arrived at last from Paris; the slow, dreadful return
under the heat; and the restoration of the crown to the palace, which
was henceforeward its prison.
PART THREE
THE STORMING OF THE TUILERIES
INTRODUCTION
After the failure of the flight of the royal family, it was evident to
all men of foresight that the European governments, and in particular
the government of the empire at the head of which were the brother and
afterward the nephew of Marie Antoinette, would attempt to restrain the
Revolution by force of arms. It was not equally apparent that matters
would come to actual war, for many erroneously thought that the French
would yield to the threat of foreign intervention. At the head of those
who were guilty of this capital error was Marie Antoinette herself, who
wrote to her brother in the autumn of that same year, 1791, suggesting
that he should gather a large armed force upon the frontiers, and
declaring that it should act as a menace and a police. She was thus
principally responsible for what followed.
The winter passed with a false situation both within France and without.
There was a desperate attempt to keep the king nominally in power,
though all real authority had left him since his flight. This attempt
was resisted by the mass of opinion, but was supported by nearly all the
politicians, even the most radical. The foreign governments, meanwhile,
grew more and more threatening, and Marie Antoinette kept up a secret
correspondence with them. It became obvious as the spring of 1792
approached that if the foreign armies intervened, it would be not only
to save the monarchy, but to crush the Revolution altogether. The queen
betrayed French plans of war to the enemy. The emperor wrote a letter
demanding certain things to be done in his name that concerned French
domestic politics alone. The result was that the French Revolutionary
parliament made war in April, 1792. Prussia joined Austria in the coming
campaign.
Luckily for France, the foreign preparations were very slow; the French
forces were in a deplorable state, and the success of the foreign
invaders hardly doubtful. Meanwhile it became more and more publicly
known that the court welcomed the war as a probable or perhaps certain
deliverance of the royal family by foreign arms. The Palace of the
Tuileries in Paris was thus a sort of fortress wherein the
executive,--that is, the king and the queen at his side,--still wholly
in command of the French armies in theory, and largely in command of
them in practice, could direct operations adverse to the national
welfare.
The instinct of all the democratic leaders was in favour of taking the
Tuileries by storm, as a foreign stronghold might be taken; but for this
they had no forces save the militia, the regular forces near Paris
being in the hands of the king. The turning of the scale was due to the
arrival in Paris of armed bands from the provinces, chief among which
were the companies from Marseilles. These, with the aid of the Parisian
militia and the incompetence of the court, managed to storm the
Tuileries upon the tenth of August, 1792, and thus put an end to the
French monarchy.
PART THREE
THE STORMING OF THE TUILERIES
Upon Sunday, the twenty-ninth of July, 1792, in the late morning of that
day, the broad road that flanks the River Seine above Paris was covered
by a marching column of men. They were in number about five hundred. A
few showed uniforms grotesque with dust and grease. The most part were
in the clothes of their civil estate, a few workmen, many of the
professions, not a few from the land. For the most part they went gaily
enough, though without parade; but some were very weary, and a few
halting pitiably, though all trudged on.
This column was that of “the men of Marseilles,” and their tatters and
their fatigue were the usury of five hundred miles of blazing road. They
had been one month so marching, and behind them they still dragged two
cannon--dragged them by leather lanyards, taking turns.
This last day of their famous raid was hot and cloudless. The sight of
the river alone was cool, beyond the stubble of the baked harvested
fields; and the great road stretched on dusty hour after hour and league
after league.
They had halted for the mid-day meal; the afternoon was already
mellowing when they saw at last, far off in the north and west, the twin
towers of the cathedral, the lifted dome of the university church upon
the height to the left, the windmills upon Montmartre to the right, and
between those low and distant hills the haze of Paris.
They formed somewhat before they reached the suburbs; they took some
kind of rank, that their approach might be the more significant, and
that they might hold their companies in the press of the poor from the
eastern quarters who had come out in crowds to meet them under the
sunset. They raised their famous song; they came in through the first
houses to the noise of “La Marseillaise.”
Before them other contingents, less famous, had reached the city for the
Revolutionary feast. These had found the whole town alive with
preparation for the struggle; for the war had now run four months, or
nearly four, and it was certain that the crown was betraying the
people.
[Illustration: ENROLLING VOLUNTEERS IN PARIS ON THE PONT NEUF, BEFORE
THE STATUE OF HENRY IV
_To face p. 93_
]
Upon the morrow this battalion from Marseilles came into the town
through St. Anthony’s Gate, through the main way dense with people, past
the last foundation ruins of the Bastille. Their drums beat. They
carried their colours before them. Their cannon, now cleaned and
burnished, followed in their train.
* * * * *
In the centre of Paris there stands, the most famous, perhaps, among the
royal emblems of Europe, a great palace the construction of which is of
every age, though its outward aspect is singularly united. It is the
Louvre. This great place, more than a third of a mile in length, is in
plan two courtyards. The larger of these, as large as a little town, and
called the Carrousel, at the time of the Revolution was completed only
upon one of its branches, and was closed toward the west by the mass of
the Tuileries. Its one completed side was the southern one, that toward
the river, called “the Long Gallery.” From the end of this the Tuileries
turned away from the river at right angles. For more than forty years
the charred walls of that building, burned in the Commune, have
disappeared, and their place is taken now by an open garden. Only the
two high, flanking pavilions which closed the north and the south of its
long line still stand, each now forming one end of the completed great
courtyard of the Louvre.
In 1792 the Tuileries had upon the Carrousel side, toward the palace of
the Louvre, three smaller yards, walled and preserving its entrances
from the public of the city. Beyond these again, and filling all the
main Carrousel court of the Louvre, was a crowd of houses pierced by
tortuous lanes, and in the midst of them a little chapel to St. Thomas
of Canterbury. This mass of houses within the arms of the palace was, as
it were, a little overflow of the town into the midst of the Louvre and
its connected Tuileries. Through this built and crowded space traffic
passed and repassed between the Rue St. Honoré, to the north of the
Louvre, and the river, running along its southern side. For under the
Long Gallery of the Louvre, the only completed side of the great
Carrousel court, arches were pierced, giving access to the quays.
Behind the Tuileries to the west the gardens, which are now open to the
town and form a part of it, were then private to the king. Overlooking
[Illustration: THE STORMING OF THE TUILERIES
_To face p. 94_
]
them from the north, the great oval of the royal riding-school looked
with its tall, mournful windows, and therein, upon benches roughly
provided for the passing circumstance, sat the congress of the
Revolution. Therein were heard the declamations that hurried on the
storm, and in these hot days, when the western casements of the palace
stood open at morning, the court within could hear the distant noise of
the debates.
That court, with the heavy, lethargic king in the midst of it, still
governed in this end of July, 1792. He was still the executive; from him
and from those rooms there still proceeded all orders to the armies, all
communications with the powers of Europe. A great pomp still surrounded
these last hours of the French monarchy. Its ceremonial was still
exactly preserved amid the gold, the heavy hangings, and all the
splendour of the Bourbons. So long as that centre stood and governed, so
long as it betrayed (for it was certainly betraying) the nation in arms,
that nation and the great experiment upon which it had embarked were in
peril or doomed. For from the Tuileries could go out not only open
orders that presumed the defence of the frontiers and resistance to the
coming invasion, but secret letters also, very contradictory of these;
and one such had gone out in those very days to the peril of the French
people. The queen’s letter was an appeal for a proclamation to be issued
by the invaders, a manifesto threatening with military execution
whatever men or cities might either arrest the foreign armies or insult
the shaken and tottering throne of her husband.
The Tuileries, then, thus standing in the midst of Paris, and of Paris
armed in militia bodies, swollen with these Revolutionary volunteers
from the provinces, was morally a sort of fortress, isolated and held,
standing for the enemy in the very heart of the national capital. It
must hold out till the invader came, or, if it fell, carry with it the
crown.
The Tuileries was not only morally a fortress; it was in some measure an
effective fortress as well. A regular force, the royal guard of Swiss
mercenaries, was available for its defence; it had cannon, and save
against cannon the great building was strong; it expected and received
drafts of volunteers of its own that would support the king and could be
armed; it possessed good reserves of ammunition. A minority, but a
considerable minority, of the wealthier militia in the city, promised a
reinforcement to the king. He would have a garrison of some six thousand
men if an assault should come.
The very position of the palace strongly aided its defence. The garden
behind was well protected; no street flanked it, as the Rue de Rivoli
does to-day, but all along the north were houses, the narrow passages
through which could easily be held. Upon the south it reposed upon the
river, with only the quays between.
If the place was to be taken at all, it could be taken only from the
east, the Louvre side; and not from there, it would seem, against any
sustained musket-fire from the windows, still less against cannon
stationed in the three walled inclosures that stood out before it toward
the great courtyard of the Carrousel.
* * * * *
The sultry days with which that August opened were days of a curious
hesitation. The invaders, massed under the Duke of Brunswick, beyond the
German frontiers, were in column, marching up the Moselle Valley. They
had not yet crossed those borders. The secret messages to the enemy,
the negotiations between them and the treasonable crown, were still
proceeding. The armed militia of Paris, or that majority of it which was
ready to act for the Revolution and against the king, drilled, but did
not yet move. There was a silence, as it were, or at the most a murmur,
throughout the million populace and over all the plain that holds Paris.
Quarrels arose, indeed, violent enough, and blows were exchanged,
especially where the volunteer contingents from the provinces were
feasted. Already by that end of July the news of what the invaders
intended was abroad. Their proclamation, which the queen had inspired,
was on all men’s lips. Copies of it, printed, had come in from the
frontiers. It still suited the crown to pretend that it had not heard of
that insult which it had itself drafted.
By the third of August the pretence could be kept up no longer, and on
that day the king communicated to the congress in the riding-school, to
the National Assembly, the amazing terms of the challenge. If the French
would not undo all their Revolutionary work, if they met the invasion of
the country by resistance, if they menaced the person of the court, and
in particular the king and
[Illustration: THE ASSAULT ON THE TUILERIES
_To face p. 98_
]
his family, all so acting were punishable by death, in particular all
public officers and magistrates that should so attempt to defend the
cause of the nation. As for Paris, if it moved, Paris was to be
destroyed.
There is a temper in the French by which everything is restrained in
them until they act. It is a temper of rapid accumulation before the
moment of decision. During the week that followed, this temper was
discoverable throughout the city, very significant to certain captains
of the people and in particular to Danton; very much misunderstood by
foreigners who have left us their records, and by not a few of the court
and of the wealthier quarters of the town.
As though each party to this coming and decisive grappling was
instinctively aware of some known trysting-day, the week proceeded under
its increasing heat with orders upon each side, with the serving out of
ball-cartridge, with the rations of powder for the same, with the
sending of directions where men should gather, and where defence should
be posted. Neither side yet moved; neither side was strong enough to
prevent the preparations of the other. There was violent thunder, but
the air was not cleared. The oppression of the sky still grew heavier
as the moment of crisis drew near.
I have said that it was upon the third of August that the king had
admitted to the assembly the manifesto of Brunswick which heralded the
invasion. That day was a Friday. Exactly seven days separated it from
the crash. Upon Sunday, the fifth, when the last royal mass was said
publicly in the chapel of the Tuileries, whispers and open words among
the public in the galleries were the last expressions of civil and
unarmed resistance that the court was to hear. By Tuesday, the seventh,
every man who was to support the crown had received his orders. Upon
Wednesday the Swiss Guards, in their barracks to the west of the town,
had the command to march upon the morrow, and on Thursday, the ninth, at
evening they came marching in, no man opposing them, while during that
same evening all those of the wealthier militia, or of private gentry,
or of old servitors, that would garrison the palace and defend the
crown, passed in through its doors.
Before night the court heard the hammering and the sawing of the
carpenters in the Long Gallery of the Louvre. They were making a gap
[Illustration: A SOLDIER OF THE NATIONAL GUARD]
[Illustration: GRENADIER OF THE INFANTRY Of LIGNÉ
At the Time of the French Revolution
_To face p. 100_
]
there in the flooring, lest the Tuileries should be turned from that
end. With the fall of darkness they could also hear the rumbling wheels
of cannon going to their posts and of waggons still distributing the
arms and the munitions for the fight.
The night fell very dark and moonless, but open, in the stifling
weather, to murky stars. From the higher windows of the Tuileries one
could see in nearly all the houses around lights maintained at the
windows of the citizens; for, that night, few slept. Amid so much terror
and surmise, there was a grotesque suggestion of a city illuminated as
for a gala-day.
Garrisoned within the palace there stood to arms squads of the
volunteers along the first row of its eastern windows; the Swiss Guards
were stationed with piled muskets in the three courts before it, and in
the central hall up which the great marble stairway turned. The hours of
the night went by. Midnight was passed, but nothing stirred.
It was a little before one o’clock in the morning of Friday, August
10th, when this general silence was shattered by one loud cannon-shot
close at hand. For a moment it was thought that the popular forces were
moving. It was not so. That cannon-shot was only a signal for the bells.
The bells began to ring in steeple after steeple, dome after dome,
catching the call one from another athwart the dark town. First on the
hill of the university; then by St. Anthony’s Gate, where was the
thickest of the Revolutionary gatherings; then, nearer, by the town
hall; then from St. Martin’s to the north; from the millennial rough
tower of St. Germain to the south. For an hour or more the clamour of
the bells filled Paris. But still there was no marching or any sound of
arms, and from those high windows of the roof in the Tuileries, those
attic windows where the watchers were, the streets lay empty below,
under the dim oil-lamps that swung from cords across them and from the
brighter light of the unsleeping houses.
From one of those same windows the queen, with certain of her women,
watched through those hours of darkness. The stars began to pale, and
along the uncertain east a band of dark cloud stood motionless in the
sombre sky, like a distant coast revealed by the dawn. Behind it at last
the vivid colour of a thunderous sunrise showed. The
[Illustration: MARIE-ANTOINETTE AND HER CHILDREN
From a photograph by Braun, Clément & Co., New York, of a painting by
Mme. Vigée Lebrun, in Museum of Versailles
_To face p. 103_
]
violent red overspread all the arch above them, and so touched the roofs
of Paris that it seemed as though a great fire had come at last with the
wars and had caught all the city. Marie Antoinette called her
sister-in-law, the Princess Elizabeth, to her side, and the two women
watched this thing together. It was a little past four o’clock. The day
broadened, and at last the sun rose blinding, and still the silence
endured. The bells had long ceased, and the more careless of those
within the Tuileries jested one with another, saying, “The tocsin did
not yield this night; it has run dry.”
Before the sun had strength, and while yet the Tuileries cast a broad
shadow westward over the garden terrace and toward the garden trees,
while the streets were still quite empty, the queen unwisely bethought
her that something might be done at this last moment to lend strength
and dignity to the resistance of the palace. She would summon the king
and bring the garrison out before him, so moving their loyalty and his
too slow determination.
She went to find her husband. He had sunk into a torpor with the last
hours of the night, and when she woke him from the place where he lay
he started up dishevelled and confused. His clothes suffered through the
wearing of so many hours; his very wig was disturbed and askew. His face
was suffused. But he came down at her asking, and stood before the main
western garden door, while what could be gathered of the six thousand
were hurriedly summoned there into line to meet him and to be passed in
review. Not all of them came,--not all of them by very many,--and the
thing was so haphazard that unarmed pages slipped into the line and
played the fool, with chance tongs and shovels to take the place of
muskets when they saluted. The king, a figure not exciting loyalty on
that breakfastless morning after that sleepless night, heavy in shoulder
as in stomach, purple-coated, freckled and pale, walked up and down the
motley line. It was an unhappy business, unworthy, undignified, the true
product of an energetic woman’s misunderstanding of men. Just before the
king turned to leave them, an old and devoted courtier went down on one
rheumatic knee to offer his sword. There was a single laugh from
somewhere. Louis turned and re-entered the palace.
By this time the Friday sun had risen high. It was between six and
seven o’clock, and still the city did not move.
But there came to the queen--for it was she who was the soul of that
defence--news full of omen. The regular government of the city,
elective, popular, and resistant to the crown though it was, had not
seemed strong enough for battle: it had fallen in the night, and in the
town hall there were now in power men of some insurrectionary committee,
the leaders of the revolt. The man chiefly responsible for the militia
of the city, one who might have divided or checked its forces, by his
authority, had left the palace in the night to meet the authorities of
the city. When he reached the town hall he had found there not the
authorities of the city, but this new insurrectionary body, and as he
left the place the mob without had murdered him. It was certain now that
the attack could not be restrained.
Before the eastern front of the palace, cutting the great courtyard of
the Louvre and shutting off the houses in it from the Tuileries, ran a
high wooden paling, stretching from one lodge gate to another. Between
that paling and the Tuileries itself detachments of the guard were
waiting with muskets loaded, and sections of cannon with matches lit,
prepared to discharge at the first menace of attack.
It was about eight o’clock when the head of a street boy who had hoisted
himself up precariously from the farther side appeared above that
paling’s rim and disappeared again. Then one face, then another, as
grotesquely, as impotently showed. Some stayed so long that it seemed as
though their owners were standing upon the shoulders of companions. One
or two of these larrikins threw stones. A guard levelled his musket, and
all those faces popped down again. What a beginning for the catastrophe
of a thousand years!
At an upper window of the palace Louis, the king, watched, looking
eastward in his turn, and he and those about him heard a murmur coming
from along the river quay--a murmur not loud, but wide-spread and deep
and dull because there stood between it and the hearers the Long Gallery
of the Louvre. It was the advance of the people, of their unformed
vanguard, coming before the militia and the volunteers. In a moment that
murmur turned to vivid, immediate, and neighbouring sound, like the roar
of water which had
[Illustration:
Copyright by Manzi-Joyant Co.
LOUIS XVI
The Forge in the Palace at Versailles
_To face p. 106_
]
been heard approaching in a flume upon a mountain side and breaks
suddenly outward from its issue over the washers: so the many thousands
of the insurrectionary crowd burst through the arches under the Long
Gallery, coming from the river quays into the Carrousel of the Louvre.
Every musket and every window was ready; all the fourteen guns of the
palace were ready in rank before it. The great oaken gates of the
palisade were burst asunder; the armed mob broke through swelling in;
and at that moment the first order was given in the palace to fire.
Instantly the signal rolled along the line, and all the windows blazed
with flame. Range in those days was very short, windage very great, and
few fell; but the assault was checked, and as it halted, two guns of the
Swiss roared out together, and the grape-shot swept down perhaps thirty
men, opened a lane in the dark and shouting mass, and sent it pressing
backward through the gates and the now opened rents in the palisade.
The Swiss, both those already before the palace and those coming out
from within, formed by companies and charged. There were the shrieks and
the trampling of a herd overcome by discipline,--the Swiss were perhaps
a thousand all told,--and the whole place was cleared: the narrow and
tortuous streets between the houses of the great Carrousel of the
Louvre; and even, some say, the arches under the Long Gallery and the
quays for some yards beyond.
It was not yet nine o’clock, and the palace seemed to be already saved.
There is no other town in Europe, and only two other peoples, the Irish
and the Poles, of whom one could not say what many said in that moment
of the town of Paris and of the French people, that their fate had been
decided by this action of regulars against a mob. But Paris being Paris,
and Gaul Gaul, and the French people having beyond any other the gift
for rapid organization from below and for corporate discipline, no
victory was yet won by the regulars.
Even as the noise of the broken mob retreating died away, another new
noise, more formidable, more rhythmical, approached, and the watchers in
the Tuileries heard it. It was not an army upon the march, but it was
men determined and in some way ordered. It was the militia, it was the
contingents from the provinces, and chief among them the volunteers
from Marseilles, the five hundred with their guns.
The Swiss were back, ranged before the palace and in reserve in the
central hall and by the great staircase. All the muskets were loaded
again, though the affair was thought to be finished after that first
brief and successful skirmish, when the sound of regular marching and
the rumble of cannon-wheels were heard.
At his window, overlooking the still empty enclosures beneath him, stood
Louis, heavy with insufficient sleep; by his side stood an official of
the county, Roederer. The column of the popular attack came swinging
through the arches which led from the river quay under the Long Gallery;
their cannon were ready, and their muskets charged. This time it was
war.
While each armed body facing the other held its fire, awaiting the
advantage gained by such reserve,--for in those days of short range, to
let a trained troop opposing one fire first was to have a heavy
advantage in the returning fire at close quarters,--Westermann, an
Alsatian, Danton’s friend, mounted upon a horse, rode out from the
popular ranks to parley in their own tongue with these Swiss
mercenaries, German in speech, like himself. One of these fired, I
think,--at least, so the best story goes,--and immediately a rapidly
increasing, alternative rattle of individual shots broke out from the
line of the windows, above from the militia and the volunteers below;
and unexpectedly, the ranks opening to let them through, the two cannon
from Marseilles gave tongue against the cannon of the guards. This time
there was no breaking, and the more trained firing of the militia and
the provincial volunteers permitted of no further charge from the
guards. But the reciprocal attack began to fill the space before the
palace with fallen men, neither side yet proclaiming an advantage. The
Swiss Guards still held the main door of the Tuileries; the fire from
its long tiers of windows was still well nourished; the muskets in the
hands of the half-trained populace were still regularly recharged, and
held their own.
It was in this moment of doubt that Roederer, the politician who stood
by the king at his eastern window, said to Louis that it was the duty of
a monarch not to risk the state. “Look, Sire! A whole people are
advancing! If the palace must fall, let it fall; but let the crown be
saved.” Louis
[Illustration: THE TUILERIES AND ITS GARDEN IN 1757
_To face p. 111_
]
looked dully out of that window, and thence he could see the Paris of
the kings.
This place stretched back beyond the origins of religion into the roots
of Rome; thirteen full hundred years of monarchy had sat therein. The
huge pile of the Louvre, stretching out into the morning, was the story
of Henry IV, of the Medicean woman before him, and of the Valois. The
turrets upon the more distant island were the roofs of St. Louis. Eudes,
the son of Robert, the founder of all the royal line, had beaten the
barbarian off just where the slate pinnacles of the Châtelet pierced the
sky half a mile away. Behind all these visible things were the ghosts of
Clovis and of Charlemagne.
He turned to go. He went back through the palace to the western gardens,
where the sound of the firing upon the eastern front was deadened by the
mass of the palace between. His wife and his children were with him, and
a few men of the guard. He crossed between the regular trees--his little
boy, his heir, kicking the fallen leaves before him with his foot--and
entering the riding-school, Louis took refuge with the parliament.
There stood that day upon the quays outside the southern end of the
Tuileries a young man, a young man of twenty-three, a lieutenant of
guns, Napoleon Bonaparte, on leave in Paris. He was alone. He had
watched all that business curiously, a spectator. He had already some
knowledge of what the soul is in men fighting. He has left his judgment
upon record that had Louis not turned back that day “to save the
monarchy,” the monarchy would have been saved. He believed, and his
judgment of arms is not negligible, that if the king had shown himself
even then in the open spaces before the palace and in danger, preferably
upon a horse, that would have happened to the defence which would have
saved it.
It was in the Long Gallery of the Louvre, where that arm of building
joins the Tuileries, that the weak point of the defence had been
discovered. The young men of the populace, eager and curious, had flowed
up the stairways of the Long Gallery and had found the flooring cut and
a gap between them and the entry to the Tuileries. That gap they had
fought for, conquered, leaped, and bridged with planks; and just as the
defence of the palace against the frontal attack was holding its last
desperate own before the great main portal, just as the Swiss themselves
were wondering how long the pressure they suffered could be resisted,
the upper floor of the Tuileries was enfiladed: the first contingents
from the Long Gallery were beginning to shoot down and through those
open suites of rooms; the garrison was caught in flank and wavered.
Hervilly, an officer commanding the Swiss Guards, in that desperate
moment received half a sheet of paper folded in four. The curious may
peer at it to-day under glass in the Carnavalet in Paris. It was an
order from the king to bid the guards cease fire and march out of the
palace back to their barracks to the west of the town. That order had
been sent from the place where Louis was in refuge, from the parliament
in the riding-school. Hervilly read it. He put it in his pocket again.
He still maintained the fire of the guards.
But it was too late. The Tuileries were pierced from the south: those
that had found the entry by the Long Gallery called to others behind
them; room after room was swept; hundred after hundred of the armed
populace pressed through the gap, killing and cleaning out the
garrison.
As the fire from the palace windows was thus quenched, the attack from
the open against the outer front began to triumph; the main door was
forced; the Swiss Guards were broken in the hall and upon the great
marble staircase; their remnants were driven out backward through the
western doors upon the Tuileries Gardens beyond.
There was no battle any more. The last shots died away as one hunted
refugee after another, discharging his last desperate cartridge, was run
down with the bayonet; and at last all that sound of men in arms ceased
and gave place to the muffled tumult rolling in the rooms of the palace,
a looting and a scuffling, a rumbling sound upon the many stairs.
There chimed, heard through this new lull, the strokes of ten o’clock
from the dial upon the garden front and from the church of St. Roch,
hard by. In those two hours since eight all had been accomplished.
[Illustration: THE STRUGGLE IN THE HALLS OF THE TUILERIES, AUGUST 10,
1792
_To face p. 114_
]
PART FOUR
THE ROLE OF LAFAYETTE
INTRODUCTION
After the palace had been stormed, it seemed as though Lafayette, who
was in command of the principal army toward the frontier, might change
all the destinies of France. It was a moment in which discipline had
been very badly shaken, and he had the best trained troops to his hand.
He was trusted by the wealthier classes in Paris, and though the queen
and the royal family as a whole disliked him, it was known that he would
not consent to the abolition of the monarchy. Undoubtedly if Lafayette
had been either a less scrupulous or a more energetic man, he would have
intervened; but that would have required a certain amount of
preparation. He would have had to “feel” the opinion of his
subordinates, and perhaps compromise with the new Government. He did
neither. He acted immediately, but too simply, refused to acknowledge
the new Government, failed to resist it, and was superseded by it.
Doubting his power to unite his command against the new state of
affairs, he crossed the frontier and abandoned both his country and its
king.
PART FOUR
THE ROLE OF LAFAYETTE
The life of Lafayette has one supreme critical moment, which coincides
with a supreme and critical moment in the story of our civilization. It
was that moment in the afternoon of Sunday, the nineteenth of August,
1792, when he crossed the frontier and abandoned upon one side his king,
upon the other the defence of his own country.
Both the story and the legend of Lafayette have another aspect; an
aspect more familiar in the United States than in Britain. He came there
as the leader to a rally of young Frenchmen who were enthusiastic for an
experiment in political freedom. He was immensely wealthy and the master
of his own young life, for his father and mother were long dead; there
was nothing to trammel his action; and though he was only a boy not yet
of age, his figure acquired, as was right, a simple and luminous quality
in the eyes of those whom he had joined before they had successfully
confirmed their independence.
Lafayette came back to America long after, when time had added to this
conception of him nothing that was not to his advantage. He was, in that
second coming of his, surrounded by younger men, who felt for him all
the reverence we humans feel for an older generation of heroes (he was
nearer seventy than sixty years of age). He was known to have kept
himself pure from the excesses of the French Revolution--excesses which
were nowhere more detested than in America, and which had not yet been
made explicable by the judgment of history. He came back to them,
preserving the same ideal of liberty that he had discovered among them
nearly fifty years before.
It is no wonder that the view held of him in the foreign country he had
served under arms should be what we know it to be.
Nevertheless, if his career be considered as a whole, his interior
temperament and character, as well as the external effect of these upon
his contemporaries, are best judged not by his appearance in American
history, as a boy in the War of Independence, as an old man on his
return, but by that conspicuous ordeal through which he passed in the
vigour of his manhood, when he decided neither to defend nor to coerce
the French people, but to be rid of his native soil and the obligations
of his birth. This ordeal showed Lafayette under the strongest light and
in his fullest development. Whether he was wrong or right _then_, if
wrong or right, _why_, are final answers to the problem of his place in
history.
At the moment when he deliberately abandoned the French army for exile
he was within a few weeks of his thirty-fifth birthday, and the events
which had led up to that final catastrophe had concerned the fullest and
most active years of his career. We know him most largely and we can
judge him most justly if we consider his work between the April when war
first put its novel and moulding pressure upon the French Revolution and
the August day in which he saw fit to surrender his command. That last
crisis belongs to August, 1792. Let us turn to the origin of his
political position in 1787.
Lafayette was then a man just thirty years of age, in the enjoyment of a
fame which, both in character and in extent, was unexampled, when
economic necessity, which is to great political changes what the trigger
is to the firing of a rifle, compelled the French crown to play the
experiment of summoning the Assembly of Notables.
In that futile (and necessarily barren) council he sat of right, and he
found there the atmosphere which was fated to embarrass his whole effort
among the French, his people, when once they were aroused. He found in
that assembly the enmity of many of his equals among the very small
clique of wealthy nobles of which he was a natural part, the friendship
of a few, the enthusiasm of none; he found himself possessed of a
greatly exaggerated popularity with the plebeian public outside, which
was attached to his name and his story, and knew nothing of his
character; and while he desired to erect a new state, he figured only as
one of those who in that assembly proposed financial reforms irritating
to the court and, to the appetite of the French for an ideal society, so
much chaff.
It would be a grave error in judgment to conceive of Lafayette then, or
at any subsequent period of his life, even to his extreme old age, as a
man lacking in that peculiar devotion to a political theory which
distinguishes the masters of national fate from the statesman or the
mere politician.
He _did_ enjoy, and throughout his life he displayed, a firm faith in a
certain and definite political ideal. It was a faith so clear that it
was capable of expression in a creed, and so secure that he held it
without a modification from his earliest youth to his very death; and
that through changes of fortune, and under the strain of a varying
environment more violent than any that oppressed his contemporaries.
Unfortunately for him, his creed was a creed peculiarly unacceptable to
the French people. It consisted largely of negative articles. It
proposed the exact toleration of all religion that did not offend the
current morality of his time (an attitude which he and many others
mistook for a complete scheme of toleration). It proposed an acceptation
of popular sovereignty but a popular sovereignty with Lafayette, quite
unlike the mass of Frenchmen, believed could be accurately expressed by
a representative system. This creed acquiesced in the political
privileges of wealth. It would confine civic activity and responsibility
to those citizens who happened to be possessed of certain property: no
doctrine is more odious to Catholic Europe. Finally Lafayette’s creed
was summed up in a curiously passionate attachment to the letter of
organic laws or, as men put that foible in English, “a respect for the
Constitution.”
This last article in the political faith of Lafayette was certainly that
which most strongly possessed him, and that which he most tenaciously
defended to the end. He had in his feeling for it something of religion.
Indeed, it was in part the absence of other religion from his character
which must account for so singular and so unnational an intellectual
weakness. His passion for a constitution was as little based on reason,
as unanswerable and as strong, as is the passion of any worshipper for
the object of his worship. He did not postulate a constitution as
something necessary to any state,--which it is,--nor did he accept it as
one accepts any other inevitable mechanical condition of national life:
he adored it. And he gave to his idol, as men always must to any idol,
concrete form.
He was enthusiastic for a particular and visible scheme which he
associated with the ideal of liberty: a representative assembly of
politicians, an executive cabinet nominally responsible to that
assembly, a judicature nominally independent of either: in a word he
blindly worshipped what (to speak disrespectfully) we may call to-day
the whole discredited business of parliamentarians. If the love of
country interfered with such a scheme, or a burning zeal for equality,
or deep personal love for a military leader; if an almost physical
appetite for the ancient customs of the state rooted in the very heart
of men interfered with it, if any of these human accidents were at issue
with his idol, why, then, according to him, they must be broken at the
idol’s feet.
It is this strange, and, to French eyes, grossly insufficient ideal of a
“constitution,” which explains all that was to follow.
When the National Assembly met in May, 1789, Lafayette sat in that one
of the three separate houses which represented the nobility. The mere
presence of a parliament or congress, with a crown in its neighbourhood,
was a beginning for his dream. To the rising flood of egalitarian
feeling he gave no aid. He was not a prime mover in that prime current
of the early Revolution which drew many members of the privileged
orders--the nobles and the clergy--to sit frankly with the Commons. But
when that current was in full flood he did not resist it; when it had
conquered, and when the privileged were merged in the general flood, he
found himself a vice-president of the united assembly just before the
fall of the Bastille. Of course he drew up a Declaration of Rights,
which, equally of course, concerned taxation as the chief concern of a
Statesman, took seriously “redress before supply,” and all the rest of
the parliamentary sawdust. It was removed a thousand miles from the
temper of that Gaul which had been at hard war for two thousand years,
which had made the orthodox religion of the West, the Crusades, the
Gothic, and was now about to make the epic of Napoleon.
The capture of the Bastille was the chief incident in a group of three
days that showed suddenly, as lightning shows things on a dark night,
those national characteristics which Lafayette so completely
misunderstood that he could not serve them: the extreme rapidity of
Gallic organization, its automatic and spontaneous growth from below,
its high military aptitude, the twin growths of exaltation upon the one
hand and ferocity upon the other, the effect of song and of blood upon
the populace, the temper that made it impossible for the two massed
divisions of foreign mercenaries to coerce Paris, the supreme importance
of Paris itself when in those days Paris recaptured its secular
leadership of the French people--all this was to Lafayette no more than
a violent and incomprehensible change of condition: the levelling of a
platform, as it were, upon which the constitution was to rise.
Rise it did, and on its rising he appeared in another and greater
character than he had hitherto borne; for it was more under his
direction than is commonly allowed that the New Régime took shape. It
was he who framed the armed militia which was the physical basis of the
whole construction. He was the head and the designer of that great force
in Paris, well armed, more or less trained, but remaining wholly civic
and domestic in character, which took the name of the National Guard.
A man might do worse than examine and fix finally for history the rôle
of this force during the first two years in which the Revolution was
permitted to develop its rapid progress within the frontiers of the
French monarchy, without assault from the commercial oligarchy of
England, the ancient privileges of the German states, the despotism of
Prussia, or the heterogeneous, but enormous, might of Austria and the
empire. In the opinion of the present writer the National Guard of
Paris, with Lafayette, as its commander-in-chief, was not only an
indispensable adjunct to the first phase of the French Revolution, but
was, on the material side, the instrument of it. The voluntary quality
of that force, its association with the political debates of the moment,
its long agreement with the people and its lack of opportunity for
display, its final collapse when the Revolution became a truly military
and French thing and a crusade, have tended to obscure for posterity its
true character up to the outbreak of the great war.
Had the Revolution reached its term in the Constitution of 1791, and had
war with Europe been avoided, the National Guard of Paris would easily
be apparent as the chief factor in that achievement: and Lafayette made
it. It was he who impressed it with its particular character, he who, in
consonance with his theory of the state, made it a middle class, or, as
we should say to-day, a _capitalist_ organization; he who forbade it to
develop as such French institutions normally develop, into a powerful
military instrument, and yet he who, with his considerable talent for
command, made it strong enough to act as a powerful police and to be in
his hands a real weapon of authority that gave him a permanent and high
direction in all that followed its enrolment and formation.
It is true to say that Lafayette and his National Guard saved the
monarchy in the days of October, 1789, when Paris marched upon
Versailles. It is still truer to say that throughout 1790 and early ’91
it and he were physically the masters of Paris.
Had Lafayette loathed, as the king loathed, the religious quarrel in
which the parliament of the Revolution engaged, had he with his armed
force supported the crown in its resistance to the attempted schism with
Rome, it is conceivable, or even probable, that the Revolution would
have found a peaceable futile and ignoble termination. But to Lafayette
the religious policy of the Assembly seemed the most natural of things.
Of the enduring vigour of Catholicism he knew nothing. Catholicism was
for him, as for most well-to-do and educated men of that time, a
venerable superstition, still pleasant to many women and to crowds of
the rural poor, worthy, therefore, of a comfortable decline and of
decent burial, but quite incapable of provoking a civil war. That same
violence of popular instinct which had made the St. Bartholomew in Paris
and which was now about to make a furious assault upon the priesthood,
was alien to him in either of its diverse and contradictory forms. Even
in the end of its life, when contemporary fashion gave Lafayette some
idea of religion, it was the written gospel, not the living Church, of
which he spoke; and in this early part of the Revolution he could
neither conceive the strength of the old national vision in its obscure
remnant nor the corresponding strength of the exasperation which the
resistance of the hierarchy to the revolutionary “Constitution of the
Clergy” would arouse.
The first sign that Lafayette’s middle-class “constitutional” ideal (and
the militia force which was the backing of it) might fail was his
inability to secure for the king a free passage from the Tuileries to
the suburb of St. Cloud on the Monday of Holy Week in 1791. The populace
was already half in power, the National Guard and their leader no longer
wholly masters of the
[Illustration: ARMAND GASTON, CARDINAL DE ROHAN
After Rigaud, in Museum of Versailles
_To face p. 131_
]
capital. The next much graver evidence of this change was in the flight
of the royal family upon the night of the twentieth of June immediately
succeeding; and in this the two elements fatal to Lafayette’s future in
the Revolution appeared with equal clarity. On the one hand he had
proved unable, with all his militia, to prevent the escape of the king;
on the other hand, he thought it his duty--his duty to the
Constitution--to recapture the fugitives. The king’s flight, despite
Lafayette’s presence at the head of the National Guard, despite his
personal activity in ordering the force at the palace doors and seeing
upon that very night to the position of the sentinels, made him a
suspect in the eyes of revolutionary Paris; his activity in recapturing
the king and queen made him odious to all that growing opinion in Europe
and in France which had ceased to see in the Revolution a political
experiment and had begun to see in it only a drama--a tragedy, the
pitiful victims of which were Louis and the royal family.
It is further characteristic of Lafayette’s fate that all this activity
of his counted for nothing. It was not he that effected the recapture of
the flying king; that was done, as much had hitherto been done, by the
energy of what was popular, plebeian, and, to him, incomprehensible, in
France. But as much blame as a man could gather from the issue Lafayette
most unfortunately reaped; and when the captives were brought back again
after those torturing three days of heat, it was Lafayette who, as the
general of the armed force in the capital, must ask Marie Antoinette to
give him the keys of the palace. She threw them at him; he caught them
as a man catches a ball in a game.
Of the many things he did in those days, one is sufficiently
characteristic, and marks his attitude in all that rising anger.
There was in Auvergne a family of squires called Romeuf; they were
neighbours of the powerful and wealthy Lafayettes, whose chief estate
lay at Chavagniac, close by, and Lafayette had taken one of the young
Romeufs to be his aide-de-camp when he was put at the head of the
National Guard. As one might imagine of poor squires, the Romeufs were
intensely and personally loyal to the king; yet, whether through
negligence or because his devotion to his constitutional ideal made him
forget what personal affections might mean, or from a love of power, or
from whatever cause, it was this young Romeuf whom Lafayette sent off
post-haste along the eastern road to recapture the king and queen.
From the moment of the royal family’s flight and its enforced return to
Paris, war with Europe was apparent, and the Revolution moved toward it
as toward an approaching goal. The nearer that huge and novel thing
approached, the more did Lafayette’s conception of a perfect state and
Lafayette’s militia weapon for its achievement shrivel and lose staff.
The populace demanded the disenthronement of a king who was certainly
allied with the foreigner. This threat of popular violence was
militarily suppressed by Lafayette and his middle-class militia on the
seventeenth of July, 1791, and the few dead who had been shot by
Lafayette’s guard became the symbols of an intense hatred between the
old declining Constitutionalists and the new order that was to be
established when once the cannons had begun. From that moment, despite
all his ideals, he was merged with the privileged and the few in the
eyes of his countrymen.
A month later, at Pillnitz, the Emperor of Austria and the King of
Prussia met the French emigrants to issue their threat of a coalition
against the new democracy and of armed intervention in the affairs of
France; and when at last the accomplished Constitution of 1791,
bourgeois, satisfactory, a strict deduction from principles which
nothing so vital as the French blood has ever accepted, was compiled and
sworn to, it seemed, in the presence of approaching exultation and war,
like some merchant’s villa carefully put in order in the suburbs of our
great industrial towns--a villa just settled by some careful housewife,
bound to a narrow life--but about to receive a company of soldiers, of
poets, of gods, and of demons, very ill-suited to such furniture! Even
to the men of its own time this new Constitution, the supposed fruit of
the Revolution, seemed oddly colourless as it stood contrasted against
that great dark cloud of history which was rising upon the sky. But to
Lafayette it was a perfected ideal.
Upon the last day of September, 1791, at four o’clock in the afternoon,
the National Assembly dissolved, and the speaker of it read out these
words:
“The National and Constituent Assembly declares that it has fulfilled
its mission, and that its sessions are at an end.”
A week later Lafayette resigned his command at the head of the National
Guard. Shortly afterward the three armies upon the frontier were drawn
up, and the real game, the struggle with armed and foreign conquerors,
pledged to destroy the Revolution, had begun.
The total forces at the disposal of the French crown--and it must be
remembered that the crown, not the parliament, was still master of the
armies--were, along the whole frontier from the Alps to the sea, a
trifle over 80,000 men. They were arranged in three armies. When war was
declared in the following April, all three, the army of the north, that
of the centre, and that of the Rhine, were each under the command of a
general who would certainly defend the monarchy against the
revolutionary spirit which had its centre in the populace of Paris.
The smallest army, that of the centre, a force of somewhat less than
20,000 men, was under the direct command of Lafayette, _but he was also
the chief of the three commanders_. At this moment therefore he is the
pivot upon which everything turns; nor is it possible to grasp the
nature of what follows save through an appreciation of how Lafayette
broke down.
Two-thirds of the regimental officers had emigrated, certain of the
cavalry regiments had crossed the frontier in a body; even the artillery
had suffered the loss of one-third of its commissioned ranks in this
fashion. The forces were not homogeneous, the numerous volunteers among
them were an element of weakness and disorder, the discipline was
deplorable and daily weakening. It was a general opinion throughout
Europe that the French line could not perform its task, and the first
weak attempts of the army of the north to invade the enemy’s territory
in what is now Belgium, and was then the Austrian Netherlands, resulted
in a miserable rout and a disgraceful and murderous mutiny. The Prussian
and the Austrian forces were slowly gathering for an invasion. That the
crown, still in command of those ill-equipped regiments and guns,
desired the success of the invasion was morally certain to the populace
of Paris; and the populace of Paris was right.
The king was manifestly party to a moral compact with the enemy, his
chief city was already holding him answerable for treason, when, in
June, long before the invading army had reached the frontier, but when
the terror of it was already rising high in the masses of the capital,
Lafayette moved. His move was in favour of the king.
His army was the smallest of the three, but the best provided; what was
more important in the temper of that moment, it was really attached to
its chief; for though Lafayette was prepared to defend the king against
Paris, yet the king had a traditional value in the soldiers’ eyes which
Paris had not gained, and they knew that, in the midst of much intrigue
the general’s character had nothing in it at all of intrigue; he was
known and still approved by his soldiery. Lastly, and most important, he
was, as we have seen, superior over the other generals in command.
In reply to the growing menace of the populace in Paris the king
dismissed his liberal ministers. The parliament declared that they
carried with them the regrets of the nation.
It was on the thirteenth of June, I say, that this grave act was
accomplished and that the final resistance of Louis and his wife to the
Revolution was undertaken. This premature act on the part of the
monarchy, of itself a rupture with the popular forces of Paris, was
suddenly given a new and much more violent complexion, by the decision
which Lafayette, at the head of his frontier army, awaiting the invader,
took when he heard of it.
It was on the thirteenth of June, I say, that the king so acted; the
news of it reached the army on the fifteenth; on the sixteenth Lafayette
wrote his famous letter to the parliament, denouncing the Jacobin Club,
which was, so to speak, the Headquarters-staff of the new popular
movement against the foreign intrigues of the crown.
Parliament was seized of that letter and debated it on the eighteenth,
and parliament, as “constitutional” in its mediocre and null
professional mediocrity as the parliaments of a time of peace must
always be, approved of Lafayette’s intervention.
Here let the reader pause to appreciate how decisive Lafayette’s move
was bound to be. Let him remember that the future, known to us, was
unknown to the men of that time; that their past alone was known to
them. Let him recall how widely circulated--more circulated than the
name of any other man at that moment--was the name
[Illustration: CARTOON OF THE THREE ORDERS (THE CLERGY, NOBILITY, AND
COMMONS) IN THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY FORGING THE NEW CONSTITUTION
_To face p. 139_
]
of Lafayette; let him appreciate the reputation for integrity which he
had enjoyed with the mass of the nation, and the consequent trust which
they had therefore justly placed in his liberal principles; let him
further see the foreign forces, a hundred thousand strong, marching, at
last, against the French, and the nominal head of the French state in
league with them; let him retain the master-point that Lafayette was the
military chief; finally let him not forget that a French army is to the
French, as a Roman army was to the Romans, the most living thing in the
nation, the most vital of its organs,--it is an essential point,--and he
will perceive what an enormous business must have arisen, and did arise,
about this letter. It was virtually a pronunciamento.
Lafayette talked of “his brave soldiers.” A note of menace ran
throughout the document, and it was this which kept the parliament,
despite its sympathy with the constitutional policy and its dread of a
popular rebellion, doubtful as to its vote. At first it decreed the
printing of the letter and its distribution; then Guadet, eloquent and
merciless, changed that attitude by a speech. The Assembly referred the
letter to a committee, and Robespierre that night roused the Jacobins.
This letter of Lafayette’s fell at the very moment when the king, having
dismissed his liberal ministry, chose to oppose his formal veto to the
two measures wherein the parliament was most in sympathy with the
populace--the decree against the non-juring clergy and the decree for
forming a great camp of volunteers. The reply of Paris to both was the
huge and peaceable, but very menacing, rising which is called “the Day
of the twentieth of June.” For hour after hour the radical masses poured
through the king’s palace; blood was not shed, and no actual insult was
offered, but, to use a military metaphor, Paris had proved itself
capable of mobilization in those hours, and armed conflict between it
and the court seemed as near and as inevitable as would armed conflict
between two regular forces mobilized and in contact upon the field.
A courier to the frontier, leaving Paris upon the morning of the
twenty-first, would normally reach the ultimate posts of the army late
upon the twenty-second; but Lafayette, at this moment always an active
and even officious commanding officer, was passing from post to post.
The news of the insurrection did not reach him in the camp outside
Maubeuge, where was for the moment his station, but at Bavay, an hour or
two off to the west.
Lafayette never acted with a Gallic fugue, though often with a
reasonable promptitude. He did not, as legend will have it, take horse
and make for Paris, booted and spurred. He communed with himself for
some hours before arriving at any decision, and then took, with no
particular rapidity, the road for Paris.
He did not, as legend will again have it, dash into the Assembly,
splashed and sweating, at the end of a hot ride; on the contrary, he
first carefully visited and sounded those authorities in the capital who
were in sympathy with his views, and not until the twenty-eighth did he
present himself at the bar of the Assembly; the excitement was already a
week old.
When he did appear before the parliament thus in person, it was with
singular effect. A majority, challenged by Guadet, refused to condemn
him for leaving the army without permission; he again urged the
parliament by voice and presence, as he had formerly urged it by
letter, to suppress the popular societies and especially the democratic
focus of the Jacobins. He was applauded as he walked past the members
after his speech; and it seemed for a moment as though this dramatic,
but not theatrical, intervention had achieved something.
But it was the fate of that strict character to effect nothing at all in
all his long and sterile life! A Frenchman in touch with France, finding
himself, as Lafayette found himself, cheered by numbers of his old
National Guard when leaving the parliament, would have gone straight
with the mob to the Jacobins and destroyed them, taking such
consequences as might have followed. But Lafayette loved order,
apparently for its own dull sake, and that day ended in nothing but a
further accentuation of the breach between himself and the new
Revolutionary group in Paris.
Of that group the now rising name, soon to be the leading name, was that
of Robespierre; and if you will turn to Robespierre’s writing and
speaking during those days you will find how accurately he judged the
temper of his own people despite his Picard coldness. The cruellest and
the
[Illustration: A POPULAR PRINT AT THE TIME OF THE REVOLUTION
_To face p. 142_
]
truest thing said against Lafayette in those days of failure was
Robespierre’s phrase: “Lafayette, to succeed, must first win a victory
over the enemy.”
Lafayette stayed the following day, the twenty-ninth of June, Friday, in
Paris, discovered how bitterly the old constitutional position had made
him hated at court, and learned the truth of the phrase he had
heard--the queen’s phrase--“We will not be saved twice by M. de
Lafayette.” On Saturday, the thirtieth, he took his way back to his
army.
Now, note that throughout all this, that army was still closely bound to
its general, and that Lafayette, upon his return to his camp, was still
secure in the loyalty of his regiments. It was consonant with his
character that, without caring in the least for the insults of the
court, he still worked to secure the safety of the king, for the king
was part of the Constitution. He suggested--what had long been a
commonplace--the retirement of the court to Compiègne, “a town,” he
pathetically writes, “within the limits to which the Constitution allows
the king to travel from the capital”; he promised to lend the authority
of his name and the active aid of his old National Guard to the monarch
if such an evasion were attempted. He was ready, in a word, to do all
that a soldier could do for the saving of Louis and for the crushing of
the Paris radicals--just short of acting “in an unconstitutional
manner.” That he would never do! And meanwhile Fate and Europe and the
French people between them were moving with no more care for the
Constitution than right and anger and love ever have for a letter or a
precedent.
All that first fortnight of July was full of three great things in
motion: the pomp of Austria going to the coronation of the Emperor at
Frankfort before the forces of Austria should be launched upon France;
the Federates from all the French departments (and notably the armed
battalion from Marseilles) coming up to Paris to take part in the great
feast-day of the nation; the gathering of the Prussian forces upon the
Rhine. Meanwhile two other things waited: Lafayette and his army waited
to save the crown in Paris; the court in Paris waited for the success of
the invader and for its own deliverance.
Upon Saturday, the fourteenth of July, the Federates from all over
France held their great national feast in the capital. On that same day
the emperor was crowned in Frankfort; upon the following Tuesday (it was
the anniversary of the Massacre of the Champ-de-Mars!), with Paris in
full effervescence from the arrival of the Federates, the Jacobins took
their opportunity, Robespierre leading them, and petitioned the
parliament to impeach Lafayette for treason. The parliament temporized.
Upon the nineteenth, when the question was again raised, it refused to
condemn the general. Old Dückner came from his frontier command to
Paris; he was publicly accused in Parliament of having conspired with
Lafayette to march upon the capital in favour of the king. That charge
was disproved so far as letters could disprove it; but in the midst of
the excitement which it raised yet another step was taken by Destiny.
The Army of the Allies being at last concentrated at Coblenz, the Duke
of Brunswick, its commander-in-chief, signed and issued upon the
twenty-fifth of July the manifesto which had been largely dictated from
the French court, and of which the most violent clause proceeded from
the queen herself; it threatened the parliament and the town of Paris
with military execution if the king were not restored to his
pre-revolutionary power.
That document was known in Paris upon the twenty-eighth, and for the
next few days only the time and the conditions of the last conflict
between the Royal Guards, their allied volunteers and militia upon the
one hand, and the populace upon the other, were in doubt.
The armed battalion of Federates from Marseilles had marched in upon the
thirtieth of July. Upon the eighth of August one last attempt was made
to get the parliament to impeach Lafayette, and for the last time the
parliament, in its sympathy with the crown and against the Paris
populace, refused. The motion was rejected by 406 to 224.
Robespierre had never given a better example of his sharp and piercing
judgment than when he had said at the Jacobins, “The parliament will not
save the nation; the nation must save itself.”
All the night of the ninth of August Paris watched in a vigil. We have
seen how the windows were
[Illustration: MAXIMILIEN ROBESPIERRE
_To face p. 147_
]
full of lights, how the hot darkness was filled with the sound of bells
and of the royal troops marching in to occupy their post of garrison in
the Tuileries. We have seen the assault on the palace and how the
populace conquered. The monarchy was swept away, the royal family
imprisoned, and all the power of parliament passed at the same moment
into the hands of its extreme and most democratic party.
Such was the day known in history as the Tenth of August. The army of
Brunswick was within a day’s ride of the frontier. Lafayette, whose
command stood barring Brunswick’s way, was instantly called upon by his
own conscience to determine whether he should save the soil of his
country or his constitutional king.
It was a gendarme flying from Paris, and later an officer also flying
from the capital, that brought him the news of the Tenth of August; he
so received it, probably late upon Sunday, the twelfth of August. He
guessed that a provisional, and therefore, to him, a usurping,
government had been set up in the place of the old constitutional
ministry. News came through slowly, but Lafayette learned certainly by
Monday that it was so. The old dismissed ministry had been
“unconstitutionally” recalled by the parliament, acting, of course,
under the pressure of the populace of Paris, and to these had been added
most “unconstitutionally” certain ultra-revolutionary names, notably
Danton’s. This new government and its creature, the purged and
diminished parliament, was sending out commissioners, post-haste, who
should bear its orders to the armies upon the frontiers, and obtain
their allegiance to the new and quasi-republican system which Paris and
the Jacobins had established by hard fighting upon the Friday before.
Upon Tuesday, August 14th, the three commissioners, members of the
parliament bearing such orders, arrived at Lafayette’s headquarters in
Sedan; but Lafayette had already made up his mind.
When the three members of the parliament presented their message to the
municipality of Sedan, the mayor and corporation of that town, in
agreement with Lafayette and perhaps under his orders, arrested them,
and imprisoned them in the citadel of the place; Lafayette himself
provided a guard.
On Tuesday the whole army was mustered in
[Illustration: GEORGES JACQUES DANTON
_To face p. 149_
]
the meadows which lie beyond the river before the town, the scene of the
worst sufferings after the defeat of 1870, and an oath to obey the old
Constitution was administered to them.
Three corps refused the oath; one company of grenadiers, one of the new
volunteer battalions,--that raised by the Department of the Allier,--and
most notably the gunners. They swore to obey “the representatives of the
nation and no other.” Certain, though not all, of these were put under
arrest by Lafayette, and his act of rebellion against the new government
was completed.
Here is the critical moment: here is the hour in which he might have
directed all the future.
The mass of his army was still intact, and would still have followed him
had he then broken camp and marched on Paris. But in that decisive
moment also comes the final and most characteristic act of all:
Lafayette did not march upon Paris. He “put himself at the disposition
of the civil authority of the Department of the Ardennes”; he asked the
neighbouring departments in which troops of his command were stationed
for their orders; he refused to use military force save at the orders of
authorized civilian government; he preferred his political idea and
creed to every practical necessity of the situation; or, as he would
have put it, to every temptation the situation might offer him. He did
more: he allowed letters, pamphlets, and even emissaries from Paris to
circulate freely among his men; he allowed one of the battalions in
revolt against him, and even the commander of the guns in revolt against
him, to write freely to the new government in Paris, swearing their
adhesion to it. He sent to department after department submitting the
military to the civil power and awaiting their decision, when any other
man would have marched straight upon the capital. Paris and the new
order learned how its commissioners had been treated; new commissioners
were at once sent out; upon Sunday, the nineteenth of August, the
parliament impeached the general. Meanwhile he had decided upon his own
fate.
Lafayette upon that morning judged, _first_, that he would not join in
an enterprise against its fellow-citizens; _next_, that his own
conscience would not allow him to serve the new régime.
Taking with him a handful of friends (a few who joined him against his
will raised the total of the commissioned officers with him to
twenty-three), he proceeded through the forest of Ardennes to the little
town of Bouillon, then in French territory, now in Belgian. He first
left minute orders for the disposition of his army, notably for the
safety of the outposts to prepare them against the shock of the
immediate invasion; he also left behind him all his official papers,
sealed and in good order for use of his successor, whoever that might
be. Before sunset he crossed the bridge in front of the famous little
forest town, with its enormous castle and crusading legend, and rode out
northward with his companions, twelve miles and more through the
gathering darkness, toward Rochefort, all the way in foreign land.
To that road he was compelled. Did he deviate to the left he would fall
among the French outposts in the valley of the Meuse beyond the woods;
upon his right was the line of the Austrian advance.
He did not even know whether Rochefort itself was occupied or not. He
hoped it was not, for he intended to make his way up through the
Netherlands to England, and so to America. At the very gates of
Rochefort a great fire burning warned him of an outpost, and he knew
that the place was held. Nevertheless, he hoped against hope to pass
through free. The commander of that post, a French noble who had gone
over to the enemy, gave him so much liberty as to permit him to ride on
with his companions toward Namur, or, rather, to send a messenger on
before him to obtain the passports. But Lafayette was already recognized
and known.
In Namur the Austrian commander, Motielle, was beside himself with joy
on hearing the name. He shouted and repeated to himself aloud,
“Lafayette! Lafayette!” as though he held in his power not the last sad
exile from a soil too violently in love with freedom, but the most
active of the new revolutionaries themselves; for the name of Lafayette,
execrated by all the Nationalists as that of a traitor in league with
the king, was also execrated throughout the privileged classes of Europe
as that of a rebel who had destroyed the majesty of the French crown.
Between these opposing camps he had no body of friends. It must ever be
so with principle. It was to be so with Robespierre himself at last.
The governor of Namur held him and sold him, a valuable prey, and he
passed into the prisons of the allies.
* * * * *
The grounds which history possesses upon which to base its conception of
Lafayette and therefore of this crucial refusal he made in the very
balance of the monarchy’s destiny differ from those which suffice for
most characters, and especially for most military characters, because
two divergent traditions have arisen with regard to him: the one
American, the other of Europe.
Of these two traditions, the one which sprang in the United States of
America concerns a young, enthusiastic man, so young as to be almost a
boy, but reinforced by an independent position, a brilliant fortune, and
very solid talents, who voluntarily led the rally of young Frenchmen in
support of the new republic and who differed for the better in American
eyes from most of his contemporaries in the point that he did sincerely
and from the bottom of his soul admire those main principles upon which
the Revolution in America proceeded.
The other tradition is that of a man in the flower of his age concerned
with a vast transformation of European Society--a transformation
springing directly from the energy of his own people, and one who so
undervalued or misjudged it that, after appearing continually in places
of capital importance and as continually failing to do more than
preserve his principles, he ended by neither saving the institutions to
which he was attached nor so much as delaying their destruction. At
last, equally condemned by each section of contemporary opinion and
power, he abandoned his high command upon the frontier in the first
crisis of the great war between the Revolution and the kings, and
subsequently appeared neither in the one camp nor in the other,
neglected by both in common, a prisoner in the hands of foreigners. One
picture is that of a hero; the other that of a pale figure almost guilty
of a double treason and certainly a prig.
These two traditions are easily reconcilable if we draw for ourselves
from the many sources available to us a true picture of the man. We
shall then perceive why Marie Antoinette, with her ardent, but
unsympathetic, temperament, was violently repelled by him, especially in
his maturity; we shall understand how Carlyle,--allowing for his
grossly insufficient reading--was capable of drawing only the pale
caricature which is among the worst failures of his great study; and
above all, we shall understand how, in what is for European history the
crisis of his life, Lafayette neither led nor attacked the civilian
forces of his own people, but deliberately effaced himself; and as a
consequence of his action, though not of his own volition, suffered
those years of effacement and prison. It is fortunately possible to us,
though it is not easy, to reconstruct the character which lay at the
root of these varied actions and especially of these singular inactions.
Other great names of the French Revolution are obscured by the heat of
the main struggle in 1793 by the fact that they perished or fell into
oblivion or betrayed their original convictions. The violent prejudices
that attach to the passions of such moments have made it difficult for
the chief men of 1789-95 to be rightly judged. For whether we seek the
testimony of friends or of enemies, we are aware of worthless
exaggeration. In the case of Lafayette we do not suffer from these
causes of distortion. He was indeed most bitterly denounced,--in the
crisis of his life when he abandoned his army there was hardly anyone to
praise him,--but he was not present among the French in those moments of
superhuman exaltation which followed upon the great war, and therefore
he escaped unbalanced praise and blame therein. On the other hand, he
did not perish in that storm as did countless others, nor did he deserve
or receive oblivion upon its close. On the contrary, he entered public
life again and played a great part in it. Added to such opportunities
for being rightly judged, his own rigid adherence to his original
principles has gained him the reward which always attaches to such
fidelity--an untroubled place in history. From all these causes he can,
if we take the trouble to watch him narrowly, be seen clearly by
posterity.
Let us then attempt a summary judgment of his character. The central
axis upon which that character turned may readily be perceived and
defined, for it was at once so simple and fixed within so slight an
accretion of secondary qualities that it is plainly visible through
them.
Lafayette was essentially of that type which has had for its philosophy,
perhaps from the beginning of society, the scheme to which antiquity
gave the title of “stoic.” He was immovable in the service of those
truths which he perceived; but the truths which he perceived were few,
obvious, and though of vast, yet not of the very last, importance. He
conceived that an adhesion to such truths was sufficient for man and
still more certainly sufficient for himself.
An absolute and unswerving demeanour, drawn from so strict an adherence
to so limited a creed, lent him those qualities which are not more
admirable, though they are more popular, when they are produced by
convictions larger and more comprehensive. These are, first, courage of
that rare and indomitable sort which meets with precisely the same
rigidity physical danger, corporal pain, public shame, the accidents of
loss in affection or fortune, the change of environing things, the
default of human support even where it seemed most sure; secondly, a
minute attention to duty where duty is commanded by the logical
consequences of one’s faith rather than suggested by the affections;
thirdly, a generosity in action which proceeds not from charity of any
warmth of temperament, but from an apprehension of what a creed
demands, so that if the creed demand in certain circumstances such and
such a sacrifice, the sacrifice, however great, is unhesitatingly and
immediately made.
In such adherence to fixed principle and in the consequences of that
tenacity lay the core of Lafayette’s nature; beyond that core there was
little else. We must add to it certain extraneous details not proceeding
from it, but merely aggravated to it. He was vain after that fashion of
vanity which is certainly not a vice and is almost a virtue, since it
betrays a great carelessness of power and an indifference to anything
less noble than praise. Again--what has nothing to do with his
vanity--he loved to find himself leading men, though he did not love the
act of leadership.
This last passion, the love of leadership, one might ascribe to an
energetic activity in him were such activity discoverable in other
relations of his life; but it is not so discoverable; for in
conversation, in the emission of ideas, in the criticism of others, in
writing, planning, or doing, he was not conspicuously active, nor was he
conspicuously active in the things of the body. He was not laborious; he
neither liked nor understood the expression of high energy; nor,
conversely, was he prone to be exhausted or to be tempted to lassitude
in any form.
Many sober men in a phase of their early youth present this character.
It is the same cast of mind which often makes such youth, in that early
phase, uncompromising, constantly asserting truths apparently universal
and patent, and ready to judge the enormous (and, for it, untried)
complexity of human affairs.
The long process of years usually disturbs that image: for good and for
evil it is changed: and men as they advance in experience tend also to
suffer what the poet has nobly called the “contagion of the world’s slow
stain.” But at the same time they grow to admit into their faces a
humorous charity and a confession of fellowship with the uncertain and
erring human millions of which they are each one tiny element. Repeated
anxiety and the repeated example of the pains and dishonour that follow
upon poverty make men as they grow older exaggerate the importance of
wealth and they lose the just sense of proportion in mortal
arrangements. Principle will be sacrificed in affection, especially if
that affection be the constant and glowing affection for one’s own
family involved in one’s own precarious fortune; the manifold imbecility
of men in their political action will weaken interest in, though it does
not in the same degree destroy intellectual conviction of, those prime
political truths which make of sane and just men republicans. On the
other hand, in a hundred little details which must count heavily in the
fate of the soul, men so perturbed and declined from their early
standing show comprehension, charity, a good individual judgment for
practical affairs, and commonly, as life advances, develop virile and
useful rules of action for themselves and for others. These rules are
but subconscious in their origin, they are difficult to formularize; but
they are wise and are proved wise by their fruits.
Why did Lafayette fail to acquire this enlargement--for it is an
enlargement--of the mature mind, as he failed also to suffer those
contaminations which commonly accompany it?
Interior causes were present, to preserve him unchanged. There stood in
his mind a barrier against expanding emotion. The native limitation
which made him a stoic (and through which he has been less justly called
a prig) would in all circumstances have restrained his development,
keeping him from knowing men, but also preserving intact his high
conviction and his conspicuous morals. I say a personal inhibition of
this kind was present from the beginning, native to him, and necessarily
present in his soul; but this interior preservative constraint was
powerfully aided by two external circumstances: first, he was born
immensely wealthy and therefore had not in the whole of his life
acquired one prolonged and educative experience of what the absence of
security might effect in the character of man; secondly, the strong and
moulding emotions, which come to nearly all men successively, came to
him (as did the full control of his wealth) all at once and that in very
early youth. He was married in his teens; he was a father before he was
twenty; he was a military hero with a fame not only national, but
universal, before he was of age.
In those same years he was flooded by surrounding society with every
article of his political creed, and it was stamped upon him in that
plastic period of life both by the overwhelming success of his own
efforts in the service of that creed, and by that creed’s general
success in its first undertakings.
The Declaration of Independence he had helped to make triumph; once it
had triumphed he had witnessed--from a distance it is true, and with
some of the too hopeful illusions of distance--the prosperous career of
its principles upon its native soil. Such pressure coming at such a
moment in the development of a man, crystallizes him; and for fifty
mortal years, from the achievement of American independence to his death
in 1834, Lafayette remained Lafayette without growth or change.
For pages so few as these a summary so short must suffice. The reader
will expand for himself the consequences following upon this type of
sincerity, conviction, and fixed, immutable in experience. In religion
it was inevitable that such a mind should be dry. He professed, of
course, the thin Deism which some may claim in old age to have turned to
conceptions a trifle warmer and more full of stuff; but I confess these
tinges of colour seem to me superadded from social fashions contemporary
with his later years, when the Catholic Church, which in his youth
nearly all the educated class in his country took to be a dying
superstition, had reasserted its vitality.
In politics such a man stood also, of course, for those plain and
fundamental principles which all clear thought has discovered to be the
basis of just government: that sovereignty must reside with the people;
that the usurpation of that sovereignty, whether effected in the name of
the people or in contempt of them, must be equally resisted; that laws
once fixed, having in them necessarily an element of conflicting detail,
necessarily lead to dissensions, but must be obeyed by all indifferently
until they are changed by the popular voice; that violence is
permissible only against aggression from without or illegal action from
within--and so forth.
On the other hand, through an illusion common enough in men of this
type, he confounded certain modern adjuncts of these ancient truths with
the truth themselves. Thus he thought there was something sacred in
representation and could hardly distinguish between the nation and an
electoral body proceeding from it. He believed in the equality of man
without seizing the fact that this, so far from being self evident, is a
tremendous and mystical dogma allied with a particular type of religion
and rising or perishing with it. He took for granted the necessity in
any free state of leaving the courts of justice untrammelled by the
executive, but he neither devised nor thought there needed to be devised
any scheme whereby the courts, thus untrammelled, should be kept pure.
The defects in such a character superficial critics ascribe to an excess
of the intellectual faculties. It is truer to say that they are due, not
indeed to an atrophy of these, but to a limitation of them. No man, for
instance, worked in an atmosphere more purely intellectual than St.
Thomas Aquinas, yet his most general judgments upon the principles of
government stand as firm as Aristotle’s, upon which they are based and
which they complete. That supreme intelligence also affirmed the
“General Will.”
The excellences, again, of such a character as Lafayette’s are by many
imagined to belong, and would certainly have been by himself ascribed,
to the dominating power of reason. If we look closely, it is not so.
Between his strong convictions--and they were shared by countless
thousands--whether in religion or in civic theory, between such
theories, I say, and the expression of them in life lies the function of
the will. The great
[Illustration: MARIE JEAN PAUL ROCH YVES GILBERT MOTIER, MARQUIS DE
LAFAYETTE
_To face p. 164_
]
glory of such characters as Lafayette’s lies in this, that though their
intellects may not have had the strength to grasp transcendental things
or to perceive the complexity of the material with which a politician
must deal, yet an unswerving determination to do what their conscience
dictates is discoverable throughout their lives. No greater thing can be
said of any man; and it is not upon the moral side, but rather upon the
reasonable, that such characters fail. Those who affirm the fate of the
soul to depend upon right action within its lights will be secure of
such men’s salvation.
PART FIVE
UNDER THE MILL OF VALMY
INTRODUCTION
While the popular forces were gathered in Paris for that assault on the
palace which proved so successful, the Prussian and Austrian army of
invasion, under the command of the Duke of Brunswick, was marching
against the French by the valley of the Moselle. It was accompanied by
many of the French nobles who had emigrated, and who desired by any
methods, even those of foreign invasion, the destruction of the
Revolutionary movement. We have seen how Lafayette had the supreme
opportunity of meeting that invasion and had refused it. The frontier
was not crossed until some days after the palace had fallen, and after
Lafayette had abandoned his army. The invasion was immediately
successful. The frontier fortress of Verdun fell. The French forces were
largely composed of unreliable volunteers. The regulars themselves had
been badly demoralized, and the French army under General Dumouriez,
whose task it now was to stop the invasion, lay upon the line of the
Argonne, not a week’s march from Paris, with very little hope of
defending that forest-ridge successfully. But by one of the strangest
accidents in history, under this army when Dumouriez, had been
successfully turned by the invaders and was in its most desperate
plight, an action fought near the village of Valmy changed the whole
story of Europe. The result of this action, which was in a tactical
sense indecisive, and in which the opposing forces never came to close
quarters, was that the invading army was checked in its career, was
ultimately bound to retire, and the Revolution was granted just the time
it required to raise and discipline new forces for the meeting of
further invasions which were bound to follow. This action at Valmy,
which, despite its indecisive tactical quality, was one of capital
importance in the history of the world, was fought almost coincidently
with the declaration of the Republic. On this same ground--a cannon-shot
to the North--France and Germany to-day[A] stand opposed.
[note A: Feb. 25th, 1916.]
[Illustration: CEREMONIAL COSTUME OF THE CLERGY, THE NOBILITY, AND THE
COMMONS
The three Orders in the National Assembly
_To face p. 171_
]
PART FIVE
UNDER THE MILL OF VALMY
There is a country-side in western Europe upon which the fate of the
world has twice been decided, the first time when Attila and his
Asiatics were here broken by the forces of the Roman Empire; the second
when the French Revolution was saved in the action I am about to
describe; a third decision is in the balance as I write.
This country-side is known to the French, within whose territory it
lies, as the Champagne Pouilleuse. The Romans, from its capital, called
it the Catalaunian Fields; for its capital is the town of Châlons upon
the Marne.
The plain is of a peculiar nature, difficult to be seized by those who
have not known it, but, once perceived, a thing not easily forgotten, so
distinctive is it and so much apart from all that bounds it. In
formation the soil is chalky, but not of that chalk which bears the
green swards of Sussex or Normandy; not of that chalk over which the
trout streams of the Vexin or Hampshire run so clear. It is a chalk
kneaded, as it were, with clayey thickness, so that it bears only
stunted trees or none, is sterile to the plough; and the waters which
run sluggishly in the shallow dips of it are turbid, like milk and water
mixed, and all their fords are muddy and difficult to pass. Those who
drink of these waters and who live by them are few. It is an
inhospitable land.
For the shape of it, it is of an odd, rolling, confused sort, which, in
describing it, I have often compared, and shall here compare again, to
the slightly lifted waves of a sea, rounded, and heaving
indiscriminately, where currents meet near the land a day after a gale.
You will find no direction or set of up and down in these billows.
Standing upon the summit of any one, others are seen around you as low,
as smooth, as untenanted as that one from which you gaze, and between
you and them lie broad and slight depressions a mile or two across, and
hardly deep enough to hide the sparse villages of those plains. Such is
the Champagne Pouilleuse.
If a man stands upon any one of these slight
[Illustration: UNIFORMS OF THE ARMY OF FRENCH EMIGRANTS
_To face p. 172_
]
rolls of hungry land, ploughed desperately for insufficient harvest here
and there, hedgeless, and almost featureless, and looks directly
eastward towards Germany and the roads by which invasions come, he will
perceive, running black and distinct all along the horizon, a low ridge,
even enough in outline. If the weather is clear, he may perceive it to
be wooded. It stands no more than three hundred feet above the average
level of the plain, but it bounds it absolutely. This ridge is the range
of hills that, with its forest, is called “the Argonne.”
This ridge barring the main approach to Paris along the roads from the
east, traversed in one steep pass by the main road which leads to Paris
from the Germanies, Dumouriez held with his insufficient and patchwork
forces, calling on Kellermann to bring up at all speed reinforcements
from the south, and knowing well in his heart that even with those
reinforcements he had not the quality of men who in the shock that was
coming could withstand the famous discipline of the Prussians and the
training of their Austrian allies. For Dumouriez, precise in temper, a
soldier of the old strict armies, and one in very doubtful allegiance
to the Revolutionary cause, justly doubting the temper of mere
volunteers, and misjudging what the future might make even of such
undisciplined men, thought, if anything, too little of the material, bad
as it was, which he had to his hand.
If the reader should wonder why a low ridge of this kind could prove an
obstacle to the advance of armies, and should be thought even in so
desperate a case worthy of defence, the explanation is this: armies
depend for their very lives, and equally for their offensive power, upon
a train of vehicles and guns. They are tied to roads. And such a feature
as the Argonne, low though it be, dense with wood and undergrowth, and
built of deep, damp clay, was almost as effectual a barrier to invasion
as might be an equally broad arm of water. The few roads across it, cut
through the woods and hardened, in particular the great Paris road from
Germany which crossed it at the point called “les Islettes,” are like
bridges or causeways over such an arm of water, and as necessary for the
passage of any army as are bridges over water. To hold these passes, if
it were possible, was all Dumouriez’s plan. For Verdun had fallen in
the first days of this month of September (1792), more than half of
which had now run in that week when Dumouriez lay along the hillside
with his men, every pass guarded, and awaiting the shock.
That shock came in the form of direct assaults upon the roads across the
hills, attempts to carry them with the high hand. These assaults at
first failed. An enemy attempting thus to break some link in a chain of
defence will make for the weakest. If Prussia and Austria were to cross
the Argonne, it must be by that one of the four roads where the
resistance was weakest. The direct road, the great Paris road, which was
the southernmost of the four passages, they would not first attempt.
They managed in their second effort to break the line at that point
called “The Cross in the Woods,” a day’s march to the north. They lost
but few men in this success. They gained their gate; Dumouriez’s line
was pierced. Hurriedly in the night he withdrew all those of his men
who, lying to the north, would have been isolated had they waited for
the dawn, and he fell back down the hills, standing now with his back to
Germany, his face to Paris, and knowing that his position was turned.
For though the Paris road was still held, the enemy was pouring round
through the breach in the dyke above, and the way to the capital was
open for the enemy round by that northern road.
All the weather of those few days had been drenching rain. The clay of
the hills was sodden, the autumn leaves drifting upon it throughout the
forest; the bare, rolling plains and the chalk were sodden with it, too.
It was the nineteenth of September, and Kellermann, just in time by a
few hours, but with reinforcements that could hardly save his country,
had effected his junction with his chief. So Dumouriez, with Kellermann
now linked on to him to his left and to the south, stood with his back
to the Argonne and his face to Paris, waiting for inevitable
catastrophe, while round by his right hand the enemy poured through into
the open plain.
There was present with those invading columns a man supremely gifted in
the power both to observe and to express, a young man destined soon to
bear one of the greatest of names. This was Goethe. For Goethe was with
the German armies, and we have from him some account of what he saw. We
can see through his eyes the bare, dull landscape, with low, misty
clouds hurrying above
[Illustration: GOETHE, WHO WAS WITH THE GERMAN ARMY AT VALMY
_To face p. 177_
]
it, now hiding all things in rain, now in an interval of drier weather
showing a steaming reek coming up from the drenched fields; and between
those two flats of gray earth and gray sky the dark bodies of troops
moving like ordered herds westward from the Argonne and the woods, on
over the rolling of the open land.
By this night of the nineteenth of September they had taken their full
march and were drawn up with their backs to Paris, their faces to the
Argonne, over against the French lines. The invaders could not leave
those forces of Dumouriez’s behind them upon their communications. It
was their task, now that the Argonne was forced, to clear away by
capture or by dispersal the army that was still in existence, though
doubtful, or, rather, only too certain of its fate.
Now, this long way round by the northern gate in the hills, this
lengthening of tortuous communications, and the persistent rain of those
days, made it imperative that the decision should be taken promptly.
Dysentery had been present in the Prussian and Austrian forces for some
time. In the abominable weather it had lately increased. Bread, which
was almost their only ration (until they should come out into more
favourable lands a day’s march ahead upon the road to Paris), came up
but tardily and clumsily by the long round of the muddy road. It was
imperative that Dumouriez and his checker-work hotchpotch of volunteers,
of foreign mercenaries, of old regulars, an army officered at random,
and even some units only half-officered, should be swept from the
communications if the invasion was to proceed; and therefore without
repose, and with the invading force as it found itself after fighting
through the Argonne and making the long march afterward, was to attack
at once, with the first light of the next day, the twentieth. That day
was to be decisive in the business of the modern world. For, by
coincidences upon which men still debate, but which I think can be
explained, and which I shall now present, the invaders failed in their
easy task. Dumouriez’s troops were left intact after the attempted
action, and the armed reduction of the Revolution was postponed so long
that it became at last impossible.
After all those days of cold and deadly rain the dawn broke uncertainly
through a dense mist that covered all the swellings of the tumbled land.
The extreme right of the invaders’ line, the Prussian regiments with
their king, reaching southward as far as the Paris road, was in the
thick of that fog. Northward it lay somewhat more loosely and thinly
where the Austrians formed the left extremity. But everywhere it was too
dense for any observation. Such scouting as was attempted groped
painfully yard by yard in that confusion, and there was at first no wind
at all, nor any lifting of the mist.
It was some two hours after sunrise before the first break in this veil
appeared, and that but a slight one. We have the relation from the pen
of a man who saw it. He was out with a small patrol of cavalry, feeling
and groping thus beyond the Paris road to discover what the French might
be doing under the cover of such white nothingness, when a momentary air
raised the curtain for fifty yards or so, and he found himself
point-blank against a battery of four guns, the French gunners standing
idly by. Their position was such that, had the day been clear, they
would have enfiladed the whole Prussian line. The young man set down in
his diary this commonplace, of awful meaning to a man who had had one
such glimpse in such a fog on such a morning:
“Upon what threads of chance do not the fates of empires depend!”
But this extreme battery of the French knew nothing of their
opportunity. The fog closed again immediately. The vague, mounted
figures that the gunners had seen were swallowed up at once, and the
effect of that strange encounter was to make the officer in command of
the guns withdraw them, fearing that in his feeling through the mist on
to that little height he had pushed his pieces too far. The Prussian
patrol _heard_, though they now could not see even so few yards away,
the hoofs of the horses sogging up with the limber, the clanking of the
hooked guns, and the retirement across the moist stubble. They heard the
swish of the wheels and occasional commands fainter and fainter, and
then nothing.
As the morning advanced, however, the wind which had carried the rain of
all those days--a wind from the south and east--began to blow again, and
drove the mist before it into very low, scurrying clouds, so low that
they covered the insignificant ridge of Argonne and so low that the
steeple of Sainte-Menehould, the little county town at the foot of the
hills, disappeared into them. But those low clouds left the rolls of
land in the plain itself free from their mist, and at last the armies
could see each other; and this is what the Prussian line drawn up upon
the one ridge saw as it looked eastward to the other.
There was more than half a mile, but less than a mile, of very shallow,
concave dip separating this swell, or crest, upon which the King of
Prussia and his staff had drawn up their regiments and another similar
swell, or crest, opposite where was the French left, the troops of
Kellermann.
This opposing crest beyond the very shallow and perfectly bare valley
bore, standing in the midst of the French line, a windmill--a windmill
famous now in the legends and songs of the French army, an object that
has grown symbolic, and that you will find in all the legends and
pictures of the battle. It was the Mill of Valmy. Indeed, Valmy village
was close by, but hidden by the crest, for it lay upon the farther
slope.
The French line thus strung on each side of the mill upon the crest
presented a contrast indeed to the strict rod-like files of the Prussian
infantry that watched them from over the depression. Their loose order,
their confusion, their lack of officers, their heterogeneous
composition, their doubtful discipline--all these in the soul of that
army were externally expressed by something straggling and unsure. The
very uniforms, so far as one could discern them at such a distance,
formed groups grotesque, often ragged, and sometimes interspersed with
dull, civilian clothes. A man, when he saw that sight, might have
thought, perhaps, that he was watching a crowd stretched out for a
spectacle rather than soldiers. But in one arm, by which the French have
often conquered, and to which the greatest of their captains was later
strongly attached,--I mean the guns,--something stricter prevailed;
forty pieces were drawn up on the cusp of the crescent near the mill.
For a mile or two, in various groups, northward of this position that
Kellermann had taken up, lay the French right under Dumouriez, and
opposite him in turn were the Austrians. From the Prussian ridge, which
I take for my point of view (since it was there, or rather in sight of
it, that the issue was determined) uncertain portions of Dumouriez’s
command and bodies of Austrians could be just discerned in the cloud.
But the immediate business lay between those two lines, the one so
[Illustration: MARSHAL FRANÇOIS-CHRISTOPHE KELLERMANN, DUKE OF VALMY
_To face p. 183_
]
strict, the other so loose, that faced each other from either crest of
that long, shallow trough under Valmy Mill.
The ground separating these two lines, the slight fall from the one, the
level at the bottom, the slight rise to the other, demands particular
notice. It was, as the reader will soon see, the whole matter upon which
the fate of this cannonade, and therefore of Europe, turned. Save in one
place, where a few bushes and superficial, disused diggings for marl
disturbed its even surface, it is for the most part ploughland. At this
date in the autumn, the twentieth of September, it is covered with
stubble, and the short, stiff straws, cut close to the soil by the
sickle, make it seem like the ground of any other open field. No trickle
of water runs through it even after rains. There is no appearance of
swamp or marsh. One is not warned by rushes or other water growths of
any difference between this field and any other field. So it dips and
rises again for its half or three quarters of a mile of breadth and for
its mile or so of length, almost everywhere under crop, and now under
autumn stubble, save here and there where balks of measly grass have
been left that show between their insufficient blades the dirty
gray-white of that half-chalky soil.
It was across such land, such to the eye at least, that the Prussian
assault upon the French must be made after the advance had been properly
prepared by artillery.
And prepared it was. The Prussian commanders let loose so furious a
cannonade as had not been heard by any living soldier of that day. Miles
away in the pass of les Islettes, an Englishman, who by strange
adventure was the brigadier-general, holding that position to protect
the rear of the French against attack, a man who had been through the
whole American war (a certain General Money, of whose strange fate I
have written elsewhere) marvelled at the continuity and sustainment of
all that fire. Distant Argonne shook with it, and the ground carried the
thuds mile upon mile. They felt it in Sainte-Menehould like the shocks
of falling timber.
But the range was long for the field-pieces of those days, and one’s
target at a thousand yards very uncertain. Many a missle flew over the
heads of the motley French line, many fell short, and buried themselves
in the wet bank of the slope before it. The losses so inflicted by hour
after hour of sustained battery-work were not great, nor did that loose
line upon each side of the mill seem to fluctuate or waver, nor were the
King of Prussia and his staff, or Brunswick, commanding all,
over-certain when the apt time for the critical charge and the advance
of their infantry would come.
For to the Prussian guns the French gunners replied with a fire almost
equally maintained and upon the whole of greater precision. They could
not dominate the enemy’s fire; they were, indeed, inferior to it, but
they did not allow themselves to be dominated by it. It was the remark
of all those who watched that field upon either side that the French
forces in this one respect of the guns had powerfully surprised the
invaders by their unexpected efficiency. So the cannonade went on until
men the least used to battle, the young recruits of Prussia, the young
poet Goethe himself, looking (and noting curiously and a little sickly
what “cannon fever” meant), were grown used to the roar and the blows of
sound, and had come to make it a sort of background for their mind.
It was at an hour that will never be precisely known,--so difficult is
it to determine by evidence the phases even of a single action, but
probably early in the afternoon, between one and two o’clock,--that all
this tornado of sound was hugely overborne by a crash and a thunder like
no other. A lucky shot from the Prussian batteries had fallen into the
midst of the French limbers, and in a sudden explosion great masses of
ammunition blew wheels, cases, horses, and men up in a sheaf of flame
and in plumes of smoke close by Valmy Mill. There, in the very centre of
the French line, the commanders, now watching eagerly through their
glasses from the Prussian ridge, saw the beginning of a breakdown: a
whole brigade was stampeding. It was, by a curious irony, a brigade of
German mercenaries still retained in the French service. But as they
broke, others also wavered; the line was in desperate confusion, and
might at any moment lose such formation as it had.
This was the opportunity for the charge, and Brunswick sent forward
one--slightly advanced, in front of and to the right of its neighbour,
in the formation called “echelon”--the companies of the famous Prussian
line. They began their descent into the shallow valley--a slow descent,
[Illustration:
A REPUBLICAN GENERAL A COLONEL OF INFANTRY
In the French Army
_To face p. 186_
]
their boots clogged by pounds of the field mud; a perilous advance, with
their own guns firing over their heads across the valley, but an advance
which, when it should be complete, the half-mile crossed, and the
opposing slope taken at the charge, would decide the main business of
the invasion, and would end the resistance of the Revolutionary armies.
Against them as they went forward was now directed some part of the
French artillery fire, such part as could be spared from the Prussian
guns above. The Prussian companies halted often, they were often
realigned, but their slow progress was still working, ordered, and
exactly maintained under that dramatic discipline which made in those
days, as it does now, the apparatus, perhaps, of Prussian excellence and
certainly of Prussian prestige. They reached the level between the two
lines; they touched the first rise of the opposing slope.
Meanwhile Kellermann, upon his horse, when the French line had wavered
upon the great explosion, rode suddenly along it, and with his feathered
general’s hat high upon the point of his sword, waving it, called loudly
for cheers--cheers for the nation, which was the Revolutionary cry. The
young men, emboldened, recovered some sort of formation, and loudly
responded with the cheers he had demanded; the brigade that had broken
was drawn up, put in reserve. The French guns during that critical five
minutes had behaved as though they had been veterans, nor had their fire
diminished, nor had a gunner moved save just in that central point where
the destruction of so much ammunition for a moment checked the rapidity
of fire.
The French guns, then, continually alive, turned more and more from the
distant Prussian batteries to the nearer infantry advancing against them
up the slope. The Prussian guns, as their men came nearer to the French,
had nearly to cease their fire or at least to diverge it to the left and
to the right. You could see along the French line the handling of the
muskets and the preparing to meet by infantry fire the Prussian charge
when it should come within its fifty or eighty yards.
But to that distance it never came. For at this last phase of the
battle, or, rather, of the cannonade,--it was no true battle,--there
happened the wholly unexpected, the almost miraculous and, in the eyes
of many historians, the inexplicable thing. The Prussian companies in
all their length, now within four hundred yards of the French line,
thinned a little by French cannon fire, but quite unmoved and morally
prepared for the advance, halted. Their progress, resumed, watched
anxiously by their commanders upon the height behind, grew slower and
slower, was made in jerks, checked in a yard or two, finally stood
still. There standing, one would say, within touch of victory, suffering
with admirable obedience the steady loss under the French shot, and with
admirable discipline closing its ranks, this Prussian infantry was seen
at last to fall back, to turn, and to retire. As slowly as they had
come, in the same order, with the same absence of looseness anywhere,
the files, suffering less and less with every yard of their retirement
from the French batteries, came nearly to their ancient stations, were
drawn up just below the crest from which they had started somewhat over
half an hour before. Valmy became again a cannonade and only a
cannonade; but at the sight of this returning of their foes the French
continually cheered, and the guns seemed to put on more vigour, and it
almost seemed as though the very numbers of the defenders grew.
The afternoon wore on, the cannonade slackened toward evening, and it
was one fitful shot and then another, and then none at last, and when
darkness fell the two lines stood where they had stood in the morning.
But the assault had failed.
What had happened? Why had not the Prussian charge proceeded?
Now, to that question, which has produced many and strange, false,
fantastic answers, I think a true answer can be provided, and I shall
attempt to provide it upon the authority of an observation made very
closely and with the unique intention of understanding this unique
affair in the history of arms. For when I went to make myself acquainted
with Valmy field it was in the same season, in the same weather, after
the same rains, in the same mists, and I believe that I have as much as
any man lived in the circumstances under which that issue was decided. I
believe, having myself gone over that depression from the Prussian ridge
toward the French, in just that weather and after just those rains, that
the advance was stopped by nothing more mysterious than marshy soil.
History is empty of evidence here, and we have nothing to learn from it.
Upon the French side the retirement seemed inexplicable, and upon the
Prussian the shame and failure of it seemed to have tied every man’s
tongue; yet I believe it to be due to nothing more romantic than mud.
Certain of our contemporaries in modern history have said that Brunswick
did not desire to press the action, because that his sympathy was with
the Revolutionary forces. To talk like that is to misunderstand the
whole psychology of soldiery; more--in such an action it is to
misunderstand the whole psychology of men. Brunswick could not have
recalled the charge without good cause on such a day and with such men
about him as the King of Prussia, the emigrant princes and the
commanders; but the thing is, on the face of it, absurd. A wiser guess,
but made erroneously, ascribes the retirement to the persistence and
effect of the French artillery-fire as the Prussian charge approached.
This must certainly be rejected, for we know that the advance was
steady, and the retirement too, and what is more, we know how
comparatively small were the losses. It was not due to an officer losing
his head, for the whole line retired without breaking and in consonance.
It certainly was not due to any doubt as to the moral ability of the
men to continue the ordeal that had suffered so admirably over six
hundred yards of ground and over perhaps a quarter of an hour of time.
Those who will do as I did, and visit Valmy in the autumn, and after the
rains, and walk by no path or any picking of one’s way, but straight
across the stubble, as the soldiers of those deployed companies had to
do, will, I am sure, decide as I here decide. For they will come to a
belt not upon the bottom level, but at the beginning of the opposing
slope, where, under the deceitful similarity of the unchanged stubble,
and with nothing to mark the drowned state of the soil, that soil
becomes almost impassable, certainly impassable to men under fire. The
French had before them, though they did not know it, a true obstacle,
the unwitting attempt to cross which as though it were no obstacle lost
the Prussians the battle, and with the battle lost the kings and the
aristocracies of Europe their throw against the French democracy.
Night fell, still misty, but unbroken by the sound of arms or of
marching. With the next day, when the invaders counted their losses
these, not
[Illustration: UNDER THE MILL AT VALMY
_To face p. 192_
]
over-heavy, they were appalled to find made far graver by a great
increase of dysentery, which such a night in the open after such a day
had produced. At the end of a week they fell back eastward again,
followed and hampered by the French cavalry, and when they passed the
boundaries of what was now the Republic, a blank-shot fired from the
walls of Longwy closed this great episode in the story of the Gauls.
PART SIX
THE DEATH OF LOUIS XVI
[Illustration: GENERAL CHARLES-FRANÇOIS DUMOURIEZ
In Command of the French at Valmy
_To face p. 197_
]
INTRODUCTION
After the Battle of Valmy, the French armies, with the beginning of
autumn, obtained quite unexpected and, as they were to prove, ephemeral
successes. Dumouriez, a man of vast military ability, continued to
command. The Republican armies poured over the Low Countries. Coincident
with these successes, there came a period of high political excitement
in Paris, and the rise of a sort of crusading enthusiasm, to spread the
democratic principles throughout Europe and to transform society. It is
to this more than to any other cause that we must ascribe the trial and
execution of the king. There was, indeed, from the point of view of
statesmanship alone, some excuse for the trial and fate of Louis. So
long as he lived, he was necessarily a rallying-point round which all
the counter-revolution would gather. The royal family having been kept
in strict imprisonment, but not without some state and considerable
luxury, in the Tower of the Temple (a mediæval building in the
north-eastern part of Paris), it was at first uncertain what would be
done with them. The first steps in the affair took the form of an
examination of the papers found in the palace and of a report on Louis’s
conduct. The accusations against the fallen king were formulated on the
third of November. There were debates in the Revolutionary Congress as
to the legality of trying a former head of the state. The trial was
decreed exactly a month later. Louis was to plead at the bar of the
Convention,--that is, the national congress,--which had met just before
Valmy, and which had voted the Republic. Long before his trial began, he
was already separated from the rest of his family, who were given rooms
above his own in the Temple. The indictment was framed by a committee,
which reported on the tenth of December; on the eleventh Louis appeared
at the bar of the Convention. He had three advocates, the chief being
the old and highly respected legist Malesherbes. The king appeared for
the second time on the twenty-sixth of December, and withdrew after the
speeches for the defence had been made. His guilt was pronounced by the
unanimous vote of the Parliament, no one voting against, and only five
abstaining. What followed I now describe.
[Illustration: LAMOIGNON DE MALESHERBES, COUNSEL FOR THE KING AT HIS
TRIAL
_To face p. 199_
]
PART SIX
THE DEATH OF LOUIS XVI
The long trial at the bar of the Parliament was over. The pleas had been
heard, and old Malesherbes, weighty and with the dignity at once of
ancient law, of contempt for fate, and of complete self-control, had
done all that could be done for the king. The verdict had been given.
Louis was found guilty by all of betraying the nation. He had called in
the enemy. There remained to be decided by a further vote what his
penalty should be.
It was the evening of Wednesday, January 16th, 1793. The deputies of the
nation were to vote, each publicly and by name, an enormous roll-call of
hundreds of men; each was to come up the steps to the tribune, to face
the vast audience that stretched from left to right of the
riding-school, and to pronounce clearly his decision. Each was free, if
he chose, to add to his declaration the motives that had determined it.
The three great chandeliers that hung from the roof of the place were
lit, affording a mellow, but insufficient, light in which the faces of
the great throng, small dots of white on the black background, were but
ill-distinguished. Upon the tribune itself a brighter light was turned.
The sun had long set; the evening meal was over; at eight o’clock the
interminable procession began. They came on one by one, arranged in
groups according to their constituencies. They went up in turn the steps
of the tribune from the right, voted in open voice, descended by the
left. Among the first was Robespierre, because he was of those that sat
for the capital. He made a speech (too long) to explain what he was
about to do. He protested that if the penalty of death was odious to
him, and if he had combatted it consistently as a general principle of
law, yet did he now support if for this exceptional case. “I remain
compassionate for the oppressed. I know nothing of that humanity which
is for ever sacrificing whole peoples and protecting tyrants.... I vote
for death.”
One after another the deputies for Paris, the extreme men, the men of
the Mountain, mounted those few steps, faced the great silent body of
their colleagues, while those who had just voted before them were
quietly seeking their places again, and those who were about to vote
stood lined up before the steps upon the farther side, and one after the
other gave his voice for death. Each after so declaring loudly his
responsibility, his verdict, and his name, confirmed the whole by
signing of a roll.
The voice of Danton was heard, the harsh, but deep and strong, voice
that was already the first in the country. He had sat all that day by
the bedside of his wife, who was to die. He had but just come back from
the frontiers and from the army. His huge body was broken with fatigue;
his soul was heavy with grief; his powerful brain was aching from a lack
of sleep. “I am no politician,” he shouted; “I vote for death.”
So all night long the dreadful litany proceeded. Men left the hall to
take an hour or two of sleep, a snatch of food; yet the hall seemed
always full despite the coming and going of single figures, and through
the long, cold darkness of that misty weather history heard voice after
voice, weak, strong, ashamed, defiant, pitiful, muffled, outspoken,
bass, treble, old, and young, repeating at irregular intervals: “Death
absolute”; “Death with respite”; “Banishment”; “Imprisonment.” And
history saw, after each such speech or cry (for many spoke as well
before they declared the doom), an isolated man, high upon the tribune,
beneath the candles, bending over the register and signing to what he
had determined and proclaimed.
The dull dawn of winter broke through a leaden sky. No eastern window
received it. The tall, gaunt casements of the southern wall overlooking
the Tuileries Gardens grew gradually into lighter oblongs of gray. The
candles paled and were extinguished. Hardly a third of the list was
done. All that short January day (Thursday, the seventeenth of January)
the dreadful thing proceeded until darkness fell again, until once more
the chandeliers were lit. Once more it was night, and they were still
voting, still declaring.
At last, when more than twenty-four hours had passed, the business was
over. No one was left to come forward to the tribune; and this great
sleepless mass, within which some few had noted one by one the voices as
they fell, and had already calculated the issue, waited for the counting
of the votes and for the recounting. Not only by word of
[Illustration: REPUBLICAN SOLDIERS IN THE REVOLUTION
_To face p. 202_
]
mouth, nor only by the signing of the register, had the precision of so
awful an event been secured, but one by one the votes had been written
down, folded, and sealed. The clerks of the Parliament opened each
packet and arranged the sentences in rows, according to their tenor: for
death absolute, for imprisonment, for delay. So one hour went past, and
then another; but in the third, when it was perhaps ten o’clock, at
night this silent process was interrupted, and the many that had fallen
asleep, or were nodding half asleep after such a vigil, looked up
surprised to hear that two letters had reached the assembly, one from
some agent of the Bourbon king in Spain to demand a respite; the other
from the advocates of the king, who demanded to be heard once more
before the chair should announce the result of the voting.
All was interrupted; an immediate and passionate, though short, debate
began. The intervention of the King of Spain the Convention would not
consider; upon the proposal that the king’s advocates should be heard
once more a debate was allowed. Many members joined it, though in brief
periods. Robespierre among others, spoke intensely. He demanded that
sentence should be read out and given before there could be any
consideration of appeal. That opinion (not through him) prevailed, and
the opening and arranging of the votes continued. A ceaseless little
crackling of tearing papers, the whispered comments of men in groups,
now and then some cry from the public in the galleries, broke the
silence.
It was not far from midnight when a further movement among the clerks at
the table, a comparison of sums, and heads bent together, scrutinizing
the additions, prefaced the last scene of this act. The paper, with the
figures written on it, was handed up to the chairman. That chairman was
Vergniaud; perhaps the noblest, certainly the most eloquent, of the
Girondins. He rose in his place above them, holding that paper before
him, and read out in the grave and even voice which had often moved
their debates:
“It is with profound sadness that I declare the penalty incurred by
Louis Capet to be, by the vote of the majority of this assembly, that of
death.”
Of seven hundred and twenty-one men who had voted, three hundred and
ninety-seven had demanded the scaffold, a majority of seventy-three.
[Illustration: PROCLAMATION OF THE PROVISIONAL EXECUTIVE COUNCIL
_To face p. 204_
]
It was in complete silence that this memorable sentence fell. That
silence was continued for some moments unbroken. The advocates of the
king were now permitted to enter, for sentence had been formally
delivered, and old Malesherbes, short, strong in figure for all his
years, and now so far oblivious of his dignity and name as to be
weeping, put forward his last plea. Sentence of death could not be
given, by all the traditions of their law, unless two-thirds of the
bench (for the French will have no single judges) concurred. And again,
the prisoner had not had all those guarantees which a prisoner should
have. And again, since it was as the head of the whole nation that he
had acted, and since it was by the whole nation that he was conceived to
be judged, then let the whole nation speak. He demanded an appeal to the
French people.
For a third time Robespierre spoke. He spoke with more emotion than his
peculiar academic style commonly permitted. Though he was in no way
representative as yet of public feeling, though he was still a lesser
man among those hundreds, for the third time his opinion coincided with
that which was to prevail. He implored the assembly not to reopen the
whole issue of civil war by putting this grave matter upon which they
had fixedly decided to a general vote of millions. Not for the first
time did this unalterable man betray for a moment his own unalterable
creed. Later he was himself to perish in punishment divine of such
deviations from the conscience of equality and of citizenship.
Guadet--Guadet, the Girondin--spoke for the king in the legal matter.
Merlin, a jurisconsult of some weight, replied. It was not true, he
said, that by the traditions of the common law a majority of two-thirds
was required to confirm so grave a sentence in any tribunal. Upon points
of _fact_, he urged, a majority not of two-thirds, but more,--of ten out
of twelve judges or assessors should determine,--but for the _penalty_ a
bare majority--three votes out of five given from the bench--had always
been held sufficient. The appeal of Louis was rejected, and the
Convention rose after a continued session of thirty-six hours.
There remained the question of respite. It was debated upon the next
day, Friday, the 18th of January. It was with a singular difficulty that
this second debate proceeded. Men left their places time and again
during the course of the day; there was such confusion that no vote
could be taken; and all the Saturday the thing hung in the balance right
on into the small hours--the dark and cold small hours of the January
night. It was three o’clock upon the Sunday morning before the final
vote appeared. Six hundred and ninety men decided it, and a majority of
seventy was found for immediate death.
That Sunday, Louis, in the prison of the Temple, in the great square
tower where he and his wife and his children and his sister had now for
many months been held captive, suffered his passion.
It is singular, instructive, a lesson in history, to note what the man’s
temper was during this prodigious time. The curious may examine
(displayed under glass in the archives for all to see) the note which he
wrote out with his own hand in his prison. It proves in its handwriting
and in its composition, in its very erasures, a momentous calm. If
courage in the presence of death be a chief index to character, admire
so complete a courage present in a man whose lack of judgment, torpor,
grave lethargies, whose imbecilities even, had helped to bring him where
he was. Louis, but for his death, might pass to history among the
negligible figures of her roll; but see how he died!
The note, written finely in even lines, asks for a delay of three days
“to permit me to appear before the presence of God.” It asks further for
the right to have his own confessor and for the guaranteeing of that
confessor (the Abbé Edgeworth, of course) from all anxiety. He asks to
see his family, and he recommends to the goodwill of the nation all
those who were attached to his person.
Here and there he changes a word, scratching out the original expression
deliberately, rewriting the substituted expression in a hand as firm as
the rest. It is curious to note that he twice expunges the term “the
National Convention.” He was making his address to the Convention, and
yet he would not use its title.
The night came early upon that Sunday, for the unbroken, drizzling sky
still stretched above Paris, and there was no sunset. Moreover, the
insufficient windows of the mediæval tower, sunk in their thick walls,
were partly boarded to prevent communication with friends outside. After
some
[Illustration:
Copyright, by Manzi-Joyant Co.
THE LAST VICTIMS OF THE TERROR
_To face p. 209_
]
hours had passed,--rather more than two hours in the light of the
candles (it was now eight in the evening),--the time for the supreme
ordeal was come; his family were to be admitted.
For some weeks now he had been separated from them. They had been
imprisoned in the rooms above. His demand for three days had been
rejected. He was to die upon the morrow, but he was to be permitted to
see his own before he died, and to discuss with his confessor what he
nobly called “the great business” of our passage from this life.
There gave upon the stair facing the narrow stone staircase of the
Temple a great oaken door, studded with many huge old nails. It opened,
and the queen came in. God! what must we not imagine her to have seemed
in that moment, this woman who had so despised him, and yet had been
faithful to him, and had principally ruined him; and who had, in these
last months, so marvellously changed and grown in soul. The queen came
in falteringly. She held by the hand her rickety little son; her
somewhat dull little daughter (the elder of the two children) followed.
The king’s sister, the Princess Elizabeth, of a different and more
simple bearing, and of a soul longer tried and longer purified, came in
more erect, the last of the four.
The king sat down and put his wife upon his left, his sister upon his
right. He took the boy, the last heir of the Capetian monarchy, and
stood him between his knees, and told him in a clear manner and in a low
and even tone the duties of a Christian in the difficult matter of
revenge, that it must be foregone. He lifted up the boy’s little right
hand to give to this direction the sanctity of an oath.
It seems that few words were spoken during that terrible time. The queen
clung to him somewhat. He mastered himself well. Altogether these three
and the two children were assembled for nearly two hours. A little
before ten he himself determined that the agony must end.
Marie Antoinette, as was her custom under stress, broke out into
passionate protestation. Then she checked herself and admitted doom. But
she implored him that they should see him again, and he said to her,
perhaps unwisely, that he would see her before he left for his passing.
He would see her in the morning at the hour when he was summoned to go.
She would have it earlier still.
[Illustration: KING LOUIS TAKING LEAVE OF HIS FAMILY IN THE TOWER OF THE
TEMPLE
_To face p. 211_
]
He said it should be earlier by half an hour. She made him promise
solemnly enough, and he promised her. Ten o’clock had struck, and the
chimes were sounding over Paris and from the great clock of the Temple
before she unloosed her hands.
He stood. The women passed out with weak knees (it is said that the girl
was half fainting). The oaken door shut behind them, and the iron door
outside it clanged to. He heard their soft steps, slow and creaking,
mounting the winding stone stairs without. Then they were lost, and he
was in silence. He prayed a moment and then lay down to sleep. He slept
deeply till five in the morning. The men bringing in the vessels for a
Mass awoke him. He rose and prayed.
In the full darkness, before it was yet six o’clock, the queen heard a
step approaching up the stairs. It could not be the king. She watched
from above her candle. It was a messenger come for books of devotion
which the king required at his mass and communion. Then she heard the
chimes of seven, and the day was breaking; upon her window the falling
mist had made a blur, and it was very cold. She waited on until eight
o’clock. There was no sound. Her agony was unrelieved. Yet another
hour, and she heard steps and the coming and going of many men upon the
stone stairs below. No one came up. The sounds sank away. The great door
that gave into the courtyard was heard creaking upon its hinges, there
was the pawing of horses upon the stones, and the cries of command to
the escort, a certain confused noise from the crowd outside the walls.
The tower was empty. She had not seen the king.
The king had passed through the prison door. He had gone on foot, with
the priest by his side, across the little court to the high wall which
surrounded the tower. The guards followed him.
Just before he came to the barrier he turned back to look at the prison.
He made a slight gesture as of constraint, and firmly turned again
toward the gate.
Outside this the guards were drawn up, and a roomy carriage of the sort
that was then hired in the streets by the wealthy stood at the entrance.
Two policemen armed with muskets were awaiting him at the carriage door.
As Louis appeared, one of these men got in and took his seat with his
back to the horses. Then the king entered, sitting in his proper place
upon the right, facing him, and motioned to the priest, Edgeworth, to
sit beside him. When they were both thus seated, the second policeman
took his place opposite, and he and his colleague set their guns before
them. The door was shut, the cab started at a foot’s pace.
As they came out on the broad streets (for they followed the
boulevards), they could see upon each side of the way, three or four
ranks deep, the soldiery and militia which guarded those trod miles
through the town. There was no crowd on the pavement behind the ranks of
soldiers, or at least but few spectators, and a curious observer might
have noted how few and rare were the uniforms, how many of the thousands
aligned were clothed in workman’s dress or in the mere remnants of
military coats. Even the windows of the uneven houses they passed (the
boulevards were then but half built) gaped empty, and no one stood at
the doors.
Before the carriage marched a great multitude of men, all enregimented
in some sort of troop, and the greater part of them drummers. These last
drummed incessantly, so that this long and very slow procession was
confused and deafened with a loud and ceaseless sound. Paris heard that
sound rolling up afar from the eastward, crashing past its houses, lost
again toward the west.
It was close upon eleven o’clock when the carriage came before the
unfinished columns of the Madeleine and turned into the Rue Royale.
Louis was reading from a book the Psalms which his confessor had pointed
out to him when he noticed that the carriage had stopped. He looked up,
turned to the priest, and said in a low voice:
“Unless I am mistaken, we are there?” The priest did not answer.
They had come to that wide open space which is now called the Place de
la Concorde, and as he looked quietly through the windows, the doomed
man perceived a great throng of people densely packed about a sort of
square of cannon which surrounded the scaffold and guillotine. That
fatal woodwork and the machine it bore stood near the entrance of the
Rue Royale and a little to the east. One of the executioners (who stood
at the foot of the scaffold) took the handle of the carriage door to
open it. Louis stopped him and, putting one hand on the priest’s knee
before he got out, said:
“Sirs, I recommend you this gentleman here.
[Illustration:
Copyright, by Manzi-Joyant Co.
A MASS UNDER THE TERROR
_To face p. 214_
]
See to it that after my death no insult shall be offered him.”
They said nothing in reply, but when the king would have continued, one
of them cried:
“Oh, yes, yes. We will see to it. Leave it to us.”
The king opened the door, and came out into the freshness of that damp
air. Above, the sky was still quite gray and low, but the misty drizzle
had ceased. They made as though to take off his coat and his collar. He
moved them aside, and himself disembarrassed his neck. Then one came
forward with a cord and took his hands.
“What are you at?” he cried.
“We must bind you,” said the man.
“Bind me!” answered the king. “I will never allow it! Fulfil your
orders, but you _shall_ not bind me!”
There was a struggle in which he turned to the priest as though for
counsel or for aid, but they bound his hands behind him.
The few steps up to the scaffold were very steep. The Abbé Edgeworth
supported him so bound, and thought for a moment, as he felt the weight
upon his arm, that the prisoner was losing courage. But even as he
turned to glance furtively at the king, in that crisis Louis had
strengthened himself, and stood upright upon the broad stage. With a few
rapid and determined steps he took his way toward the guillotine,
standing to the right of the instrument. Some yards in front of him and
below, a score of drummers were at the ready with sticks lifted,
balanced as drummers balance them between the knuckles of the hand. He
cried out, standing erect with his stout figure and heavy, impassive
face, “I die innocent of all the----” at which moment there came a
sudden cry of command, and the drums beat furiously. To that sound he
died; and those who were present relate that immediately afterward there
arose from the great mob about, which had hitherto held its breath, a
sort of loud moaning, not in anger or in hatred, but in astonishment of
the spectacle and of things to come.
THE END.
PRINTED BY THE WESTMINSTER PRESS LONDON, W.
[Illustration: THE DEATH OF KING LOUIS XVI, JANUARY 21, 1793
_To face p. 216_
]
Typographical error corrected by the etext transcriber:
fated to embarass his whole=> fated to embarrass his whole {pg 122}
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