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Maria Antoinette

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Title: Maria Antoinette

Author: John S. C. Abbott


        
Release date: January 6, 2010 [eBook #30875]

Language: English

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Makers of History

MARIA ANTOINETTE

by

JOHN S. C. ABBOTT

With Engravings







New York and London
Harper & Brothers Publishers
1901

Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year one thousand
eight hundred and forty-nine, by
Harper & Brothers.
in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the Southern District
of New York.




[Illustration: CHARLES MAURICE DE TALLEYRAND.]




[Illustration: VIEW OF PARIS.]




PREFACE.


In this history of Maria Antoinette it has been my endeavor to give a
faithful narrative of facts, and, so far as possible, to exhibit the
soul of history. A more mournful tragedy earth has seldom witnessed. And
yet the lesson is full of instruction to all future ages. Intelligence
and moral worth combined can be the only basis of national prosperity or
domestic happiness. But the simple story itself carries with it its own
moral, and the _reflections_ of the writer would encumber rather than
enforce its teachings.




CONTENTS.


 Chapter                                                    Page

    I. PARENTAGE AND CHILDHOOD                               13

   II. BRIDAL DAYS                                           37

  III. MARIA ANTOINETTE ENTHRONED                            78

   IV. THE DIAMOND NECKLACE                                 105

    V. THE MOB AT VERSAILLES                                131

   VI. THE PALACE A PRISON                                  164

  VII. THE FLIGHT                                           189

 VIII. THE RETURN TO PARIS                                  214

   IX. IMPRISONMENT IN THE TEMPLE                           239

    X. EXECUTION OF THE KING                                272

   XI. TRIAL AND EXECUTION OF MARIA ANTOINETTE              290

  XII. THE PRINCESS ELIZABETH, THE DAUPHIN, AND
       THE PRINCESS ROYAL                                   304




ENGRAVINGS.


                                                            Page

 VIEW OF PARIS                                   _Frontispiece._

 BRIDAL TOUR                                                 48

 VERSAILLES--FRONT VIEW}
                       }                                     65
 VERSAILLES--COURT-YARD}

 FOUNTAINS AT VERSAILLES}
                        }                                    69
 FOUNTAIN OF THE STAR   }

 LITTLE TRIANON                                              74

 GARDENS OF MARLY                                            93

 VIEW OF THE BASTILE                                        134

 GARDENS AT VERSAILLES                                      144

 MOB AT VERSAILLES                                          151

 GRAND AVENUE OF THE TUILERIES                              156

 PALACE OF ST. CLOUD                                        184

 CAPTURE AT VARENNES                                        208

 THE TUILERIES                                              221

 THE TOWER OF THE TEMPLE                                    257

 THE ROYAL FAMILY IN THE TEMPLE                             262

 MARIA ANTOINETTE IN THE CONCIERGERIE                       296




MARIA ANTOINETTE




CHAPTER I.

PARENTAGE AND CHILDHOOD.

1740-1770

Maria Theresa.--She succeeds to the throne.--Success of Maria Theresa's
enemies.--Her flight to Hungary.--The queen's firmness.--The Hungarian
barons.--The queen's appeal.--Enthusiasm of her subjects.--The queen
heads her army.--She overthrows her enemies.--Character of Maria
Theresa.--Character of her husband.--Crowning of Francis.--Maria
Theresa's renown.--Maria Theresa's sternness.--Anecdote.--Fatal
result.--Death of Francis.--Plan of the counselors.--Birth of Maria
Antoinette.--Maria Antoinette's character.--Affecting scene.--Maria
Antoinette's grief.--Maria Theresa as a mother.--Mode of
education.--Petty artifices.--Maria's proficiency in French.--She
forgets her native tongue.--Maria's taste for music.--Her ignorance
of general literature, etc.--The French teachers.--Their character.--The
Abbé de Vermond.--He shamefully abuses his trust.--Etiquette of the
French court.--Etiquette of the Austrian court.--Precepts of the
teacher.--Character of Maria Antoinette.--Maria a noble girl.--Her
virtues and her faults.--Palace of Schoenbrun.--The scenes of
Maria's childhood.--Personal appearance of Maria.--Description of
Lamartine.--Maria's betrothal.--Its motives.--Maria's feelings on
leaving Schoenbrun.--Her love for her home.


In the year 1740, Charles VI., emperor of Austria, died. He left a
daughter twenty-three years of age, Maria Theresa, to inherit the crown
of that powerful empire. She had been married about four years to
Francis, duke of Lorraine. The day after the death of Charles, Maria
Theresa ascended the throne. The treasury of Austria was empty. A
general feeling of discontent pervaded the kingdom. Several claimants
to the throne rose to dispute the succession with Maria; and France,
Spain, Prussia, and Bavaria took advantage of the new reign, and of the
embarrassments which surrounded the youthful queen, to enlarge their own
borders by wresting territory from Austria.

The young queen, harassed by dissensions at home and by the combined
armies of her powerful foes, beheld, with anguish which her proud and
imperious spirit could hardly endure, her troops defeated and scattered
in every direction, and the victorious armies of her enemies marching
almost unimpeded toward her capital. The exulting invaders, intoxicated
with unanticipated success, now contemplated the entire division of the
spoil. They decided to blot Austria from the map of Europe, and to
partition out the conglomerated nations composing the empire among the
conquerors.

Maria Theresa retired from her capital as the bayonets of France and
Bavaria gleamed from the hill-sides which environed the city. Her
retreat with a few disheartened followers, in the gloom of night, was
illumined by the flames of the bivouacs of hostile armies, with which
the horizon seemed to be girdled. The invaders had possession of every
strong post in the empire. The beleaguered city was summoned to
surrender. Resistance was unavailing. All Europe felt that Austria was
hopelessly undone. Maria fled from the dangers of captivity into the
wilds of Hungary. But in this dark hour, when the clouds of adversity
seemed to be settling in blackest masses over her whole realm, when hope
had abandoned every bosom but her own, the spirit of Maria remained as
firm and inflexible as if victory were perched upon her standards, and
her enemies were flying in dismay before her. She would not listen to
one word of compromise. She would not admit the thought of surrendering
one acre of the dominions she had inherited from her fathers. Calm,
unagitated, and determined, she summoned around her, from their feudal
castles, the wild and warlike barons of Hungary. With neighing steeds,
and flaunting banners, and steel-clad retainers, and all the
paraphernalia of barbaric pomp, these chieftains, delighting in the
excitements of war, gathered around the heroic queen. The spirit of
ancient chivalry still glowed in these fierce hearts, and they gazed
with a species of religious homage upon the young queen, who, in
distress, had fled to their wilds to invoke the aid of their strong
arms.

Maria met them in council. They assembled around her by thousands in all
the imposing splendor of the garniture of war. Maria appeared before
these stern chieftains dressed in the garb of the deepest mourning, with
the crown of her ancestors upon her brow, her right hand resting upon
the hilt of the sword of the Austrian kings, and leading by her left
hand her little daughter Maria Antoinette. The pale and pensive
features of the queen attested the resolute soul which no disasters
could subdue. Her imperial spirit entranced and overawed the bold
knights, who had ever lived in the realms of romance. Maria addressed
the Hungarian barons in an impressive speech in Latin, the language then
in use in the diets of Hungary, faithfully describing the desperate
state of her affairs. She committed herself and her children to their
protection, and urged them to drive the invaders from the land or to
perish in the attempt. It was just the appeal to rouse such hearts to a
phrensy of enthusiasm. The youth, the beauty, the calamities of the
queen roused to the utmost intensity the chivalric devotion of these
warlike magnates, and grasping their swords and waving them above their
heads, they shouted simultaneously, "Moriamur pro rege nostro, Maria
Theresa"--"_Let us die for our king, Maria Theresa._"

Until now, the queen had preserved a demeanor perfectly tranquil and
majestic. But this affectionate enthusiasm of her subjects entirely
overcame her imperious spirit, and she burst into a flood of tears. But,
apparently ashamed of this exhibition of womanly feeling she almost
immediately regained her composure, and resumed the air of the
indomitable sovereign. The war cry immediately resounded throughout
Hungary. Chieftains and vassals rallied around the banner of Maria. In
person she inspected and headed the gathering army, and her spirit
inspired them. With the ferocity of despair, these new recruits hurled
themselves upon the invaders. A few battles, desperate and sanguinary,
were fought, and the army of Maria was victorious. England and Holland,
apprehensive that the destruction of the Austrian empire would destroy
the balance of power in Europe, and encouraged by the successful
resistance which the Austrians were now making, came to the rescue of
the heroic queen. The tide of battle was turned. The armies of France,
Germany, and Spain were driven from the territory which they had
overrun. Maria, with untiring energy, followed up her successes. She
pursued her retreating foes into their own country, and finally granted
peace to her enemies only by wresting from them large portions of their
territory. The renown of these exploits resounded through Europe. The
name of Maria Theresa was embalmed throughout the civilized world. Under
her vigorous sway Austria, from the very brink of ruin, was elevated to
a degree of splendor and power it had never attained before. These
conflicts and victories inspired Maria with a haughty and imperious
spirit, and the loveliness of the female character was lost amid the
pomp of martial achievements. The proud sovereign eclipsed the woman.

It is not to be supposed that such a bosom could be the shrine of
tenderness and affection. Maria's virtues were all of the masculine
gender. She really loved, or, rather, _liked_ her husband; but it was
with the same kind of emotion with which an energetic and ambitious man
loves his wife. She cherished him, protected him, watched over him, and
loaded him with honors. He was of a mild, gentle, confiding spirit,
and would have made a lovely wife. She was ambitious, fearless, and
commanding, and would have made a noble husband. In fact, this was
essentially the relation which existed between them. Maria Theresa
governed the empire, while Francis loved and caressed the children.

The queen, by her armies and her political influence, had succeeded in
having Francis crowned Emperor of Germany. She stood upon the balcony
as the imposing ceremony was performed, and was the first to shout "Long
live the Emperor Francis I." Like Napoleon, she had become the creator
of kings. Austria was now in the greatest prosperity, and Maria Theresa
the most illustrious queen in Europe. Her renown filled the civilized
world. Through her whole reign, though she became the mother of sixteen
children, she devoted herself with untiring energy to the aggrandizement
of her empire. She united with Russia and Prussia in the infamous
partition of Poland, and in the banditti division of the spoil she
annexed to her own dominions twenty-seven thousand square miles and two
millions five hundred thousand inhabitants.

From this exhibition of the character of Maria Theresa, the mother of
Maria Antoinette, the reader will not be surprised that she should have
inspired her children with awe rather than with affection. In truth,
their imperial mother was so devoted to the cares of the empire, that
she was almost a stranger to her children, and could have known herself
but few of the emotions of maternal love. Her children were placed under
the care of nurses and governesses from their birth. Once in every eight
or ten days the queen appropriated an hour for the inspection of the
nursery and the apartments appropriated to the children; and she
performed this duty with the same fidelity with which she examined the
wards of the state hospitals and the military schools.

The following anecdote strikingly illustrates the austere and inflexible
character of the empress. The wife of her son Joseph died of the
confluent small-pox, and her body had been consigned to the vaults of
the royal tomb. Soon after this event, Josepha, one of the daughters of
the empress, was to be married to the King of Naples. The arrangements
had all been made for their approaching nuptials, and she was just on
the point of leaving Vienna to ascend the Neapolitan throne, when she
received an order from her mother that she must not depart from the
empire until she had, in accordance with the established custom,
descended into the tomb of her ancestors and offered her parting prayer.
The young princess, in an agony of consternation, received the cruel
requisition. Yet she dared not disobey her mother. She took her little
sister, Maria Antoinette, whom she loved most tenderly, upon her knee,
and, weeping bitterly, bade her farewell, saying that she was sure she
should take the dreadful disease and die. Trembling in every fiber, the
unhappy princess descended into the gloomy sepulcher, where the bodies
of generations of kings were moldering. She hurried through her short
prayer, and in the deepest agitation returned to the palace, and threw
herself in despair upon her bed.

Her worst apprehensions were realized. The fatal disease had penetrated
her veins. Soon it manifested itself in its utmost virulence. After
lingering a few days and nights in dreadful suffering, she breathed her
last, and her own loathsome remains were consigned to the same silent
chambers of the dead. Maria Theresa commanded her child to do no more
than she would have insisted upon doing herself under similar
circumstances. And when she followed her daughter to the tomb, she
probably allowed herself to indulge in no regrets in view of the course
she had pursued, but consoled herself with the reflection that she had
done her duty.

The Emperor Francis died, 1765, leaving Maria Theresa still in the
vigor of life, and quite beautiful. Three of her counselors of state,
ambitious of sharing the throne with the illustrious queen, entered into
a compact, by which they were all to endeavor to obtain her hand in
marriage, agreeing that the successful one should devote the power
thus obtained to the aggrandizement of the other two. The empress was
informed of this arrangement, and, at the close of a cabinet council,
took occasion, with great dignity and composure, to inform them that she
did not intend ever again to enter into the marriage state, but that,
should she hereafter change her mind, it would only be in favor of one
who had no ambitious desires, and who would have no inclination to
intermeddle with the affairs of state; and that, should she ever marry
one of her ministers, she should immediately remove him from all office.
Her counselors, loving power more than all things else, immediately
abandoned every thought of obtaining the hand of Maria at such a
sacrifice.

Maria Antoinette, the subject of this biography, was born on the 2d of
November, 1755. Few of the inhabitants of this world have commenced
life under circumstances of greater splendor, or with more brilliant
prospects of a life replete with happiness. She was a child of great
vivacity and beauty, full of light-heartedness, and ever prone to look
upon the sunny side of every prospect. Her disposition was frank,
cordial, and affectionate. Her mental endowments were by nature of a
very superior order. Laughing at the restraints of royal etiquette, she,
by her generous and confiding spirit, won the love of all hearts. Maria
Antoinette was but slightly acquainted with her imperial mother, and
could regard her with no other emotions than those of respect and awe;
but the mild and gentle spirit of her father took in her heart a
mother's place, and she clung to him with the most ardent affection.

When she was but ten years of age, her father was one day going to
Inspruck upon some business. The royal cavalcade was drawn up in the
court-yard of the palace. The emperor had entered his carriage,
surrounded by his retinue, and was just on the point of leaving, when he
ordered the postillions to delay, and requested an attendant to bring to
him his little daughter Maria Antoinette. The blooming child was brought
from the nursery, with her flaxen hair in ringlets clustered around her
shoulders, and presented to her father. As she entwined her arms around
his neck and clung to his embrace, he pressed her most tenderly to his
bosom, saying, "Adieu my dear little daughter. Father wished once more
to press you to his heart." The emperor and his child never met again.
At Inspruck Francis was taken suddenly ill, and, after a few days'
sickness, died. The grief of Maria Antoinette knew no bounds. But the
tears of childhood soon dried up. The parting scene, however, produced
an impression upon Maria which was never effaced, and she ever spoke of
her father in terms of the warmest affection.

Maria Theresa, half conscious of the imperfect manner in which she
performed her maternal duties, was very solicitous to have it understood
that she did not neglect her children; that she was the best _mother_
in the world as well as the most illustrious sovereign. When any
distinguished stranger from the other courts of Europe visited Vienna,
she arranged her sixteen children around the dinner-table, towering
above them in queenly majesty, and endeavored to convey the impression
that they were the especial objects of her motherly care. It was not,
however, the generous warmth of love, but the cold sense of duty, which
alone regulated her conduct in reference to them, and she had probably
convinced herself that she discharged her maternal obligations with the
most exemplary fidelity.

The family physician every morning visited each one of the children, and
then briefly reported to the empress the health of the archdukes and the
archduchesses. This report fully satisfied all the yearnings of maternal
love in the bosom of Maria Theresa; though she still, that she might not
fail in the least degree in motherly affection, endeavored to see them
with her own eyes, and to speak to them with her own lips, as often as
once in a week or ten days. The preceptors and governesses of the royal
household, being thus left very much to themselves, were far more
anxious to gratify the immediate wishes of the children, and thus to
secure their love, than to urge them to efforts for intellectual
improvement. Maria Antoinette, in subsequent life, related many amusing
anecdotes illustrative of the petty artifices by which the scrutiny of
the empress was eluded. The copies which were presented to the queen in
evidence of the progress the children were making in hand-writing were
all traced first in pencil by the governess. The children then followed
with the pen over the penciled lines. Drawings were exhibited,
beautifully executed, to show the skill Maria Antoinette had attained in
that delightful accomplishment, which drawings the pencil of Maria
had not even touched. She was also taught to address strangers of
distinction in short Latin phrases, when she did not understand the
meaning of one single word of the language. Her teacher of Italian, the
Abbé Metastasio, was the only one who was faithful in his duties, and
Maria made very great proficiency in that language. French being the
language of the nursery, Maria necessarily acquired the power of
speaking it with great fluency, though she was quite unable to write it
correctly. In the acquisition of French, her own mother tongue, the
German, was so totally neglected, that, incredible as it may seem, she
actually lost the power either of speaking or of understanding it. In
after years, chagrined at such unutterable folly, she sat down with
great resolution to the study of her own native tongue, and encountered
all the difficulties which would tax the patience of any foreigner in
the attempt. She persevered for about six weeks, and then relinquished
the enterprise in despair. The young princess was extremely fond of
music, and yet she was not taught to play well upon any instrument. This
became subsequently a source of great mortification to her, for she was
ashamed to confess her ignorance of an accomplishment deemed, in the
courts of Europe, so essential to a polished education, and yet she
dared not sit down to any instrument in the presence of others. When she
first arrived at Versailles as the bride of the heir to the throne of
France, she was so deeply mortified at this defect in her education,
that she immediately employed a teacher to give her lessons secretly for
three months. During this time she applied herself to her task with the
utmost assiduity, and at the end of the time gave surprising proof of
the skill she had so rapidly attained. Upon all the subjects of history,
science, and general literature, the princess was left entirely
uninformed. The activity and energy of her mind only led her the more
poignantly to feel the mortification to which this ignorance often
exposed her. When surrounded by the splendors of royalty, she frequently
retired to weep over deficiencies which it was too late to repair. The
wits of Paris seized upon these occasional developments of the want of
mental culture as the indication of a weak mind, and the daughter of
Maria Theresa, the descendant of the Cæsars, was the butt, in saloon and
café, of merriment and song. Maria was beautiful and graceful, and
winning in all her ways. But this imperfect education, exposing her to
contempt and ridicule in the society of intellectual men and women, was
not among the unimportant elements which conducted to her own ruin, to
the overthrow of the French throne, and to that deluge of blood which
for many years rolled its billows incarnadine over Europe.

Maria Theresa had sent to Paris for two teachers of French to instruct
her daughter in the literature of that country over which she was
destined to reign. From that pleasure-loving metropolis two play actors
were sent to take charge of her education, one of whom was a man of
notoriously dissolute character. As the connection between Maria
Antoinette and Louis, the heir apparent to the throne of France, was
already contemplated, some solicitude was felt by members of the court
of Versailles in reference to the impropriety of this selection, and the
French embassador at Vienna was requested to urge the empress to dismiss
the obnoxious teachers, and make a different choice. She immediately
complied with the request, and sent to the Duke de Choiseul, the
minister of state of Louis XV., to send a preceptor such as would be
acceptable to the court of Versailles. After no little difficulty in
finding one in whom all parties could unite, the Abbé de Vermond was
selected, a vain, ambitious, weak-minded man, who, by the most studied
artifice, insinuated himself into the good graces of Maria Theresa, and
gained a great but pernicious influence over the mind of his youthful
pupil. The cabinets of France and Austria having decided the question
that Maria Antoinette was to be the bride of Louis, who was soon to
ascend the throne of France, the Abbé de Vermond, proud of his position
as the intellectual and moral guide of the destined Queen of France,
shamefully abused his trust, and sought only to obtain an abiding
influence, which he might use for the promotion of his own ambition. He
carefully kept her in ignorance, to render himself more necessary to
her; and he was never unwilling to involve her in difficulties, that she
might be under the necessity of appealing to him for extrication.

Instead of endeavoring to prepare her for the situation she was destined
to fill, it seemed to be his aim to train her to such habits of thought
and feeling as would totally incapacitate her to be happy, or to acquire
an influence over the gay but ceremony-loving assemblages of the
Tuileries, Versailles, and St. Cloud. At this time, the fashion of the
French court led to extreme attention to all the punctilios of
etiquette. Every word, every gesture, was regulated by inflexible rule.
Every garment worn, and every act of life, was regulated by the
requisitions of the code ceremonial. Virtue was concealed and vice
garnished by the inflexible observance of stately forms. An infringement
of the laws of etiquette was deemed a far greater crime than the most
serious violation of the laws of morality. In the court of Vienna, on
the other hand, fashion ran to just the other extreme. It was
fashionable to despise fashion. It was etiquette to pay no regard to
etiquette. The haughty Austrian noble prided himself in dressing as he
pleased, and looked with contempt upon the studied attitudes and foppish
attire of the French. The Parisian courtier, on the other hand,
rejoicing in his ruffles, and ribbons, and practiced movements, despised
the boorish manners, as he deemed them, of the Austrian.

The Abbé de Vermond, to ingratiate himself with the Austrian court, did
all in his power to inspire Maria Antoinette with contempt of Parisian
manners. He zealously conformed to the customs prevailing in Vienna,
and, like all new converts, to prove the sincerity of his conversion,
went far in advance of his sect in intemperate zeal. Maria Antoinette
was but a child, mirthful, beautiful, open hearted, and, like all other
children, loving freedom from restraint. Her preceptor ridiculed
incessantly, mercilessly, the manners of the French court, where she was
soon to reign as queen, and influenced her to despise that salutary
regard to appearances so essential in all refined life. Under this
tutelage, Maria became as natural, unguarded, and free as a mountain
maid. She smiled or wept, as the mood was upon her. She was cordial
toward those she loved, and distant and reserved toward those she
despised. She cared not to repress her emotions of sadness or
mirthfulness as occasions arose to excite them. She was conscientious,
and unwilling to do that which she thought to be wrong, and still she
was imprudent, and troubled not herself with the interpretation which
others might put upon her conduct. She prided herself a little upon her
independence and recklessness of the opinions of others, and thus she
was ever incurring undeserved censure, and becoming involved in
unmerited difficulties. She was, in heart, truly a noble girl. Her
faults were the excesses of a generous and magnanimous spirit. Though
she inherited much of the imperial energy of her mother, it was tempered
and adorned with the mildness and affectionateness of her father. Her
education had necessarily tended to induce her to look down with
aristocratic pride upon those beneath her in rank in life, and to dream
that the world and all it inherits was intended for the exclusive
benefit of kings and queens. Still, the natural goodness of her heart
ever led her to acts of kindness and generosity. She thus won the love,
almost without seeking it, of all who knew her well. Her faults were the
unavoidable effect of her birth, her education, and all those nameless
but untoward influences which surrounded her from the cradle to the
grave. Her virtues were all her own, the instinctive emotions of a
frank, confiding, and magnanimous spirit.

The childhood of Maria Antoinette was probably, on the whole, as happy
as often falls to the lot of humanity. As she had never known a mother's
love, she never felt its loss. There are few more enchanting abodes upon
the surface of the globe than the pleasure palaces of the Austrian
kings. Forest and grove, garden and wild, rivulet and lake, combine all
their charms to lend fascination to those haunts of regal festivity. In
the palace of Schoenbrun, and in the imbowered gardens which surround
that world-renowned habitation of princely grandeur, Maria passed many
of the years of her childhood. Now she trod the graveled walk, pursuing
the butterfly, and gathering the flowers, with brothers and sisters
joining in the recreation. Now the feet of her pony scattered the
pebbles of the path, as the little troop of equestrians cantered beneath
the shade of majestic elms. Now the prancing steeds draw them in the
chariot, through the infinitely diversified drives, and the golden
leaves of autumn float gracefully through the still air upon their
heads. The boat, with damask cushions and silken awning, invites them
upon the lake. The strong arms of the rowers bear them with fairy motion
to sandy beach and jutting headland, to island, and rivulet, and bay,
while swans and water-fowl, of every variety of plumage, sport before
them and around them. Such were the scenes in which Maria Antoinette
passed the first fourteen years of her life. Every want which wealth
could supply was gratified. "What a destiny!" exclaimed a Frenchman, as
he looked upon one similarly situated, "what a destiny! young, rich,
beautiful, and an archduchess! Ma foi! quel destiné!"

The personal appearance of Maria Antoinette, as she bloomed into
womanhood, is thus described by Lamartine. "Her beauty dazzled the whole
kingdom. She was of a tall, graceful figure, a true daughter of the
Tyrol. The natural majesty of her carriage destroyed none of the graces
of her movements; her neck, rising elegantly and distinctly from her
shoulders, gave expression to every attitude. The woman was perceptible
beneath the queen, the tenderness of heart was not lost in the elevation
of her destiny. Her light brown hair was long and silky; her forehead,
high and rather projecting, was united to her temples by those fine
curves which give so much delicacy and expression to that seat of
thought, or the soul in woman; her eyes, of that clear blue which recall
the skies of the north or the waters of the Danube; an aquiline nose,
the nostrils open and slightly projecting, where emotions palpitate and
courage is evidenced; a large mouth, Austrian lips, that is, projecting
and well defined; an oval countenance, animated, varying, impassioned,
and the _ensemble_ of these features, replete with that expression,
impossible to describe, which emanates from the look, the shades, the
reflections of the face, which encompasses it with an iris like that of
the warm and tinted vapor, which bathes objects in full sunlight--the
extreme loveliness which the ideal conveys, and which, by giving it
life, increases its attraction. With all these charms, a soul yearning
to attach itself, a heart easily moved, but yet earnest in desire to fix
itself; a pensive and intelligent smile, with nothing of vacuity in it,
because it felt itself worthy of friendships. Such was Maria Antoinette
as a woman."

When but fourteen years of age she was affianced as the bride of young
Louis, the grandson of Louis XV., and heir apparent to the throne of
France. Neither of the youthful couple had ever seen each other, and
neither of them had any thing to do in forming the connection. It was
deemed expedient by the cabinets of Versailles and Vienna that the two
should be united, in order to promote friendly alliance between France
and Austria. Maria Antoinette had never dreamed even of questioning any
of her mother's arrangements, and consequently she had no temptation to
consider whether she liked or disliked the plan. She had been trained to
the most unhesitating submission to maternal authority. The childish
heart of the mirth-loving princess was doubtless dazzled with the
anticipations of the splendors which awaited her at Versailles and St.
Cloud. But when she bade adieu to the gardens of Schoenbrun, and left
the scenes of her childhood, she entered upon one of the wildest careers
of terror and of suffering which mortal footsteps have ever trod. The
parting from her mother gave her no especial pain, for she had ever
looked up to her as to a superior being, to whom she was bound to render
homage and obedience, rather than as to a mother around whom the
affections of her heart were entwined. But she loved her brothers and
sisters most tenderly. She was extremely attached to the happy home
where her childish heart had basked in all childish pleasures, and many
were the tears she shed when she looked back from the eminences which
surround Vienna upon those haunts to which she was destined never again
to return.




CHAPTER II.

BRIDAL DAYS.

1770-1775

Louis XV.--Prince Louis.--Madame du Barri.--Her dissolute
character.--Children of Louis XV.--Anecdote of Madame du
Barri.--Madame du Barri's beauty.--Her political influence.--Madame
du Barri's pavilion.--The Duke de Brissac.--Madame du Barri's
flight.--She is betrayed.--Condemnation of Madame du Barri.--Her
anguish and despair.--Execution of Madame du Barri.--Letter from
Maria Theresa.--Departure of Maria for Paris.--Emotions of the
populace.--Magnificent pavilion.--Singular custom.--Grand
procession.--The reception.--Young Louis's indifference.--The
marriage.--Insensibility of young Louis.--Acclamations of the
Parisians.--Maria shows herself to the populace.--She receives
their homage.--The fire-works.--Awful conflagration.--Scene of
horror.--Consternation of Maria.--Presents from Louis XV.--Malice
of Madame du Barri.--Maria's difficulties.--The Countess de
Noailles.--Laws of etiquette.--An illustration.--Countess de
Noailles's ideas of etiquette.--An anecdote.--Maria's contempt
for etiquette.--The Countess de Noailles nicknamed.--Ludicrous
scene.--Rage of the old ladies.--Habits of Maria Theresa.--The
dauphiness becomes unpopular.--Dining in public.--How it was
done.--Versailles.--Magnificence of the palace.--Gallery of paintings,
statuary, etc.--Gorgeous saloons.--Splendid gardens.--Other
palaces.--The Great and the Little Trianon.--Gardens, cascades,
etc.--Nature of Maria's mind.--Walks in the garden.--Maria's want
of education.--She attempts to supply it.--Maria's enemies.--Their
malignant slanders.--Visit of Maximilian.--A quarrel about
forms.--Unexpected tenderness of Louis.


When Maria Antoinette was fifteen years of age, a light-hearted,
blooming, beautiful girl, hardly yet emerging from the period of
childhood, all Austria, indeed all Europe, was interested in the
preparations for her nuptials with the destined King of France. Louis
XV. still sat upon the throne of Charlemagne. His eldest son had died
about ten years before, leaving a little boy, some twelve years of age,
to inherit the crown his father had lost by death. The young Louis,
grandchild of the reigning king, was mild, inoffensive, and bashful,
with but little energy of mind, with no ardor of feeling, and singularly
destitute of all passions. He was perfectly exemplary in his conduct,
perhaps not so much from inherent strength of principle as from
possessing that peculiarity of temperament, cold and phlegmatic, which
feels not the power of temptation. He submitted passively to the
arrangements for his marriage, never manifesting the slightest emotion
of pleasure or repugnance in view of his approaching alliance with one
of the most beautiful and fascinating princesses of Europe. Louis was
entirely insensible to all the charms of female beauty, and seemed
incapable of feeling the emotion of love.

Louis XV., a pleasure-loving, dissolute man, had surrounded his throne
with all the attractions of fashionable indulgence and dissipation.
There was one woman in his court, Madame du Barri, celebrated in the
annals of profligacy, who had acquired an entire ascendency over the
mind of the king. The disreputable connection existing between her and
the monarch excluded her from respect, and yet the king loaded her with
honors, received her at his table, and forced her society upon all the
inmates of the palace. The court was full of jealousies and bickerings;
and while one party were disposed to welcome Maria Antoinette, hoping
that she would espouse and strengthen their cause, the other party
looked upon her with suspicion and hostility, and prepared to meet her
with all the weapons of annoyance.

Neither morals nor religion were then of any repute in the court of
France. Vice did not even affect concealment. The children of Louis XV.
were educated, or rather not educated, in a nunnery. The Princess
Louisa, when twelve years of age, knew not the letters of her alphabet.
When the children did wrong, the sacred sisters sent them, for penance,
into the dark, damp, and gloomy sepulcher of the convent, where the
remains of the departed nuns were moldering to decay. Here the timid and
superstitious girls, in an agony of terror, were sent alone, to make
expiation for some childish offense. The little Princess Victoire, who
was of a very nervous temperament, was thrown into convulsions by this
harsh treatment, and the injury to her nervous system was so
irreparable, that during her whole life she was exposed to periodical
paroxysms of panic terror.

One day the king, when sitting with Madame du Barri, received a package
of letters. The petted favorite, suspecting that one of them was from an
enemy of hers, snatched the packet from the king's hand. As he
endeavored to regain it, she resisted, and ran two or three times around
the table, which was in the center of the room, eagerly pursued by the
irritated monarch. At length, in the excitement of this most strange
conflict, she threw the letters into the glowing fire of the grate,
where they were all consumed. The king, enraged beyond endurance,
seized her by the shoulders, and thrust her violently out of the room.
After a few hours, however, the weak-minded monarch called upon her. The
countess, trembling in view of her dismissal, with its dreadful
consequences of disgrace and beggary, threw herself at his feet, bathed
in tears, and they were reconciled.

The remaining history of this celebrated woman is so remarkable that we
can not refrain from briefly recording it. Her marvelous beauty had
inflamed the passions of the king, and she had obtained so entire an
ascendency over his mind that she was literally the monarch of France.
The treasures of the empire were emptied into her lap. Notwithstanding
the stigma attached to her position, the nation, accustomed to this
laxity of morals, submitted to the yoke. As the idol of the king, and
the dispenser of honors and powers, the clergy, the nobility, the
philosophers, all did her homage. She was still young, and in all the
splendor of her ravishing beauty, when the king died. For the sake of
appearances, she retired for a few months into a nunnery. Soon, however,
she emerged again into the gay world. Her limitless power over the
voluptuous old monarch had enabled her to amass an enormous fortune.
With this she reared and embellished for herself a magnificent retreat,
adorned with more than regal splendor, in the vicinity of Paris--the
Pavillon de Luciennes, on the borders of the forest of St. Germain. The
old Duke de Brissac, who had long been an admirer of her charms, here
lived with her in unsanctified union. Almost universal corruption at
that time pervaded the nobility of France--one of the exciting causes of
the Revolution. Though excluded from appearing at the court of Louis
XVI. and Maria Antoinette, her magnificent saloons were crowded by those
ever ready to worship at the shrine of wealth, and rank, and power. But,
as the stormy days of the Revolution shed their gloom over France, and
an infuriated populace were wrecking their vengeance upon the throne and
the nobles, Madame du Barri, terrified by the scenes of violence daily
occurring, prepared to fly from France. She invested enormous funds in
England, and one dark night went out with the Duke de Brissac alone,
and, by the dim light of a lantern, they dug a hole under the foot of a
tree in the park, and buried much of the treasure which she was unable
to take away with her. In disguise, she reached the coast of France,
and escaped across the Channel to England. Here she devoted her immense
revenue to the relief of the emigrants who were every day flying in
dismay from the horrors with which they were surrounded. The Duke de
Brissac, who was commander of the constitutional guard of the king,
appeared at Versailles in an hour of great excitement. The mob attacked
him. He was instantly assassinated. His head, covered with the white
locks of age, was cut off, and planted upon one of the palisades of the
palace gates, a fearful warning to all who were suspected of advocating
the cause of the king.

And now no one knew of the buried treasure but Madame du Barri herself.
She, anxious to regain them, ventured, in disguise, to return to France
to disinter her diamonds, and take them with her to England. A young
negro servant, whom she had pampered with every indulgence, and had
caressed with the fondness with which a mother fondles her child, whom
she had caused to be painted by her side in her portraits, saw his
mistress and betrayed her. She was immediately seized by the mob, and
dragged before the revolutionary tribunal of Luciennes. She was
condemned as a Royalist, and was hurried along in the cart of the
condemned, amid the execrations and jeers of the delirious mob, to the
guillotine. Her long hair was shorn, that the action of the knife might
be unimpeded; but the clustering ringlets, in beautiful profusion, fell
over her brow and temples, and veiled her voluptuous features and bare
bosom, from which the executioner had torn the veil. The yells of the
infuriated and deriding populace filled the air, as they danced
exultingly around the aristocratic courtesan. But the shrieks of the
unhappy victim pierced shrilly through them all. She was frantic with
terror. Her whole soul was unnerved, and not one emotion of fortitude
remained to sustain the woman of pleasure through her dreadful doom.
With floods of tears, and gestures of despair, and beseeching,
heart-rending cries, she incessantly exclaimed, "Life--life--life! O
save me! save me!" The mob jeered, and derided, and insulted her in
every conceivable way. They made themselves merry with her anguish and
terror. They shouted witticisms in her ear respecting the pillow of the
guillotine upon which she was to repose her head. Struggling and
shrieking, she was bound to the plank. Suddenly her voice was hushed.
The dissevered head, dripping with blood, fell into the basket, and her
soul was in eternity. Poor woman! It is easy to condemn. It is better
for the heart to pity. Endowed with almost celestial beauty, living in a
corrupt age, and lured, when a child, by a monarch's love, she fell. It
is well to weep over her sad fate, and to remember the prayer, "Lead us
not into temptation."

Such were the characters and such the state of morals of the court into
which this beautiful and artless princess, Maria Antoinette, but fifteen
years of age, was to be introduced. As she left the palaces of Vienna to
encounter the temptations of the Tuileries and Versailles, Maria Theresa
wrote the following characteristic letter to the future husband of her
daughter.

     "Your bride, dear dauphin, is separated from me. As she has
     ever been my delight, so will she be your happiness. For
     this purpose have I educated her; for I have long been aware
     that she was to be the companion of your life. I have
     enjoined upon her, as among her highest duties, the most
     tender attachment to your person, the greatest attention to
     every thing that can please or make you happy. Above all, I
     have recommended to her humility toward God, because I am
     convinced that it is impossible for us to contribute to the
     happiness of the subjects confided to us without love to Him
     who breaks the scepters and crushes the thrones of kings
     according to his will."

The great mass of the Austrian population, hating the French, with whom
they had long been at war, were exceedingly averse to this marriage. As
the train of royal carriages was drawn up, on the morning of her
departure, to convey the bride to Paris, an immense assemblage of the
populace of Vienna, men, women, and children, surrounded the cortège
with weeping and lamentation. Loyalty was then an emotion existing in
the popular mind with an intensity which now can hardly be conceived. At
length, in the excitement of their feelings, to save the beloved
princess from a doom which they deemed dreadful, they made a rush toward
the carriages to cut the traces and thus to prevent the departure. The
guard was compelled to interfere, and repel, with violence, the
affectionate mob. As the long and splendid train, preceded and followed
by squadrons of horse, disappeared through the gate of the city, a
universal feeling of sadness oppressed the capital. The people returned
to their homes silent and dejected, as if they had been witnessing the
obsequies rather than the nuptials of the beloved princess.

The gorgeous cavalcade proceeded to Kell, on the frontiers of Austria
and France. There a magnificent pavilion had been erected, consisting
of a vast saloon, with an apartment at either end. One of these
apartments was assigned to the lords and ladies of the court of
Vienna; the other was appropriated to the brilliant train which
had come from Paris to receive the bride. The two courts vied with
each other in the exhibition of wealth and magnificence. It was
an established law of French etiquette, always observed on such
occasions, that the royal bride should receive her wedding dress from
France, and should retain absolutely nothing belonging to a foreign
court. The princess was, consequently, in the pavilion appropriated to
the Austrian suite, unrobed of all her garments, excepting her body
linen and stockings. The door was then thrown open, and in this plight
the beautiful and blushing child advanced into the saloon. The French
ladies rushed to meet her. Maria threw herself into the arms of the
Countess de Noailles, and wept convulsively. The French were perfectly
enchanted with her beauty; and the proud position of her head and
shoulders betrayed to their eyes the daughter of the Cæsars. She was
immediately conducted to the apartment appropriated to the French
court. Here the few remaining articles of clothing were removed from
her person, and she was re-dressed in the most brilliant attire which
the wealth of the French monarchy could furnish.

[Illustration: BRIDAL TOUR.]

And now, charioted in splendor, surrounded by the homage of lords and
ladies, accompanied by all the pomp of civic and military parade, and
enlivened by the most exultant strains of martial bands, Maria was
conducted toward Paris, while her Austrian friends bade her adieu and
returned to Vienna. The horizon, by night, was illumined by bonfires,
flaming upon every hill; the church bells rang their merriest peals;
cities blazed with illuminations and fire-works; and files of maidens
lined her way, singing their songs of welcome, and carpeting her path
with roses. It was a scene to dazzle the most firm and contemplative. No
dream of romance could have been more bewildering to the ardent and
romantic princess, just emerging from the cloistered seclusion of the
palace nursery.

Louis, then a young man about twenty years of age, came from Paris with
his grandfather, King Louis XV., and a splendid retinue of courtiers, as
far as Compiègne, to meet his bride. Uninfluenced by any emotions of
tenderness, apparently entirely unconscious of all those mysterious
emotions which bind loving hearts, he saluted the stranger with cold and
distant respect. He thought not of wounding her feelings; he had no
aversion to the connection, but he seemed not even to think of any more
intimacy with Maria than with any other lady who adorned the court. The
ardent and warm-hearted princess was deeply hurt at this indifference;
but instinctive pride forbade its manifestation, except in bosom
converse to a few confiding friends.

The bride and her passive and unimpassioned bridegroom were conducted to
Versailles. It was the 16th of May, 1770, when the marriage ceremony was
performed, with all the splendor with which it could be invested. The
gorgeous palaces of Versailles were thronged with the nobility of
Europe, and filled with rejoicing. The old king was charmed with the
beauty and affability of the young bride. All hearts were filled with
happiness, except those of the newly-married couple. Louis was tranquil
and contented. He was neither allured nor repelled by his bride He
never sought her society alone, and ever approached her with the same
distance and reserve with which he would approach any other young lady
who was a visitor at the palace. He never intruded upon the privacy of
her apartments, and she was his wife but in name. While all France was
filled with the praises of her beauty, and all eyes were enchanted by
her graceful demeanor, her husband alone was insensible to her charms.
After a few days spent with the rejoicing court, amid the bowers and
fountains of Versailles, the nuptial party departed for Paris, and
entered the palace of the Tuileries, the scene of future sorrows such as
few on earth have ever experienced.

As Maria, in dazzling beauty, entered Paris, the whole city was in a
delirium of pleasure. Triumphal arches greeted her progress. The
acclamations of hundreds of thousands filled the air. The journals
exhausted the French language in extolling her loveliness. Poets sang
her charms, and painters vied with each other in transferring her
features to canvas. As Maria sat in the dining saloon of the Tuileries
at the marriage entertainment, the shouts of the immense assemblage
thronging the gardens rendered it necessary for her to present herself
to them upon the balcony. She stepped from the window, and looked out
upon the vast sea of heads which filled the garden and the Place Louis
XV. All eyes were riveted upon her as she stood before the throng upon
the balcony in dazzling beauty, and the air resounded with applauses.
She exclaimed, with astonishment, "What a concourse!" "Madame," said the
governor of Paris, "I may tell you, without fear of offending the
dauphin, that they are so many lovers." The heir apparent to the throne
of France is called the dauphin; and, until the death of Louis XV.,
Louis and Maria Antoinette were called the dauphin and dauphiness. Louis
seemed neither pleased nor displeased with the acclamations and homage
which his bride received. His singularly passionless nature led him to
retirement and his books, and he hardly heard even the acclamations with
which Paris was filled.

Arrangements had been made for a very brilliant display of fire-works,
in celebration of the marriage, at the Place Louis XV. The hundreds of
thousands of that pleasure-loving metropolis thronged the Place and all
its avenues. The dense mass was wedged as compactly as it was possible
to crowd human beings together. Not a spot of ground was left vacant
upon which a human foot could be planted. Every house top, every
balcony, every embrasure of a window swarmed with the multitude. Long
lines of omnibuses, coaches, and carriages of every description, filled
with groups of young and old, were intermingled with the countless
multitude--men and horses so crowded into contact that neither could
move. It was an impervious ocean of throbbing life. In the center of
this Place, the pride of Paris, the scene of its most triumphant
festivities and its most unutterable woe, vast scaffolds had been
reared, and they were burdened with fire-works, intended to surpass in
brilliancy and sublimity any spectacle of the kind earth had ever before
witnessed. Suddenly a bright flame was seen, a shriek was heard, and the
whole scaffolding, by some accidental spark, was enveloped in a sheet of
fire. Then ensued such a scene as no pen can describe and no imagination
paint. The awful conflagration converted all the ministers of pleasure
into messengers of death. Thousands of rockets filled the air, and, with
almost the velocity of lightning, pierced their way through the
shrieking, struggling, terror-stricken crowd. Fiery serpents, more
terrible, more deadly than the fabled dragons of old, hissed through
the air, clung to the dresses of the ladies, enveloping them in flames,
and mercilessly burning the flesh to the bone. Mines exploded under the
hoofs of the horses, scattering destruction and death on every side.
Every species of fire was rained down, a horrible tempest, upon the
immovable mass. Shrieks from the wounded and the dying filled the air;
and the mighty multitude swayed to and fro, in Herculean, yet unavailing
efforts to escape. The horses, maddened with terror, reared and plunged,
crushing indiscriminately beneath their tread the limbs of the fallen.
The young bride, in her carriage, with a brilliant retinue, and eager to
witness the splendor of the anticipated fête, had just approached the
Place, when she was struck with consternation at the shrieks of death
which filled the air, and at the scene of tumult and terror which
surrounded her. The horses were immediately turned, and driven back
again with the utmost speed to the palace. But the awful cries of the
dying followed her; and it was long ere she could efface from her
distracted imagination the impression of that hour of horror.
Fifty-three persons were killed outright by this sad casualty, and more
than three hundred were dangerously wounded. The dauphin and dauphiness
immediately sent their whole income for the year to the unfortunate
relatives of those who had perished on that disastrous day.

The old king was exceedingly pleased with the beauty and fascinating
frankness and cordiality of Maria. He made her many magnificent
presents, and, among others, with a magnificent collar of pearls, the
smallest of which was nearly as large as a walnut, which had been
brought into France by Anne of Austria. These praises and attentions on
the part of the king excited the jealousy of the petted favorite, Madame
du Barri. She consequently became, with the party under her influence,
the relentless and unprincipled enemy of Maria. She lost no opportunity
to traduce her character. She spread reports every where that Maria
hated the French; that she was an Austrian in heart; that her frankness
and freedom from the restraints of etiquette were the result of an
immoral and depraved mind. She exaggerated her extravagance, and accused
her, by whispers and insinuations spread far and near, of the most
ignoble crimes of which woman can be guilty. The young and inexperienced
dauphiness soon found herself involved in most embarrassing
difficulties. She had no kind friend to council her. Louis still
remained cold, distant, and reserved. Thus, week after week, month after
month, year after year passed on, and for eight years Louis never
approached his youthful spouse with any manifestation of confidence and
affection but those with which he would regard a mother or a sister.
Maria was a wife but in name. She did not share his apartment or his
couch. Though deeply wounded by this inexplicable neglect, she seldom
spoke of it even to her most intimate friends. The involuntary sigh, and
the tear which often moistened her cheek, proclaimed her inward
sufferings.

When Maria first arrived in France, the Countess de Noailles was
assigned to her as her lady of honor. She was somewhat advanced in life,
haughty and ceremonious, a perfect mistress of that art of etiquette so
rigidly observed in the French court. Upon her devolved the duty of
instructing the dauphiness in all the punctilios of form, then deemed
far more important than the requisitions of morality. The following
anecdote, related by Madame Campan, illustrates the ridiculous excess to
which these points of etiquette were carried. One winter's day, it
happened that Maria Antoinette, who was entirely disrobed in her
dressing-room, was just going to put on her body linen. Madame, the lady
in attendance, held it ready unfolded for her. The dame d'honneur came
in. As she was of superior rank, etiquette required that she should
enjoy the privilege of presenting the robe. She hastily slipped off her
gloves, took the garment, and at that moment a rustling was heard at the
door. It was opened, and in came the Duchess d'Orleans. She now must be
the bearer of the garment. But the laws of etiquette would not allow the
dame d'honneur to hand the linen directly to the Duchess d'Orleans. It
must pass down the various grades of rank to the lowest, and be
presented by her to the highest. The linen was consequently passed back
again from one to another, till it was placed in the hands of the
duchess. She was just on the point of conveying it to its proper
destination, when suddenly the door opened, and the Countess of Provence
entered. Again the linen passed from hand to hand, till it reached the
hands of the countess. She, perceiving the uncomfortable position of
Maria, who sat shivering with cold, with her hands crossed upon her
bosom, without stopping to remove her gloves, placed the linen upon the
shoulders of the dauphiness. She, however, was quite unable to restrain
her impatience, and exclaimed, "How disagreeable, how tiresome!"

Another anecdote illustrates the character of Madame de Noailles, who
exerted so powerful an influence upon the destiny of Maria Antoinette.
She was a woman of severe manners, but etiquette was the very atmosphere
she breathed; it was the soul of her existence. The slightest
infringement of the rules of etiquette annoyed her almost beyond
endurance. "One day," says Madame Campan, "I unintentionally threw the
poor lady into a terrible agony. The queen was receiving, I know not
whom--some persons just presented, I believe. The ladies of the
bed-chamber were behind the queen. I was near the throne, with the two
ladies on duty. All was right; at least I thought so. Suddenly I
perceived the eyes of Madame de Noailles fixed on mine. She made a sign
with her head, and then raised her eyebrows to the top of her forehead,
lowered them, raised them again, and then began to make little signs
with her hand. From all this pantomime, I could easily perceive that
something was not as it should be; and as I looked about on all sides
to find out what it was, the agitation of the countess kept increasing.
Maria Antoinette, who perceived all this, looked at me with a smile. I
found means to approach her, and she said to me, in a whisper, 'Let down
your lappets, or the countess will expire.' All this bustle rose from
two unlucky pins, which fastened up my lappets, while the etiquette of
costume said _lappets hanging down_."

One can easily imagine the contempt with which Maria, reared in the
freedom of the Austrian court, would regard these punctilios. She did
not refrain from treating them with good-natured but unsparing ridicule,
and thus she often deeply offended those stiff elderly ladies, who
regarded these trifles, which they had been studying all their lives,
with almost religious awe. She gave Madame de Noailles the nickname of
Madame Etiquette, to the great merriment of some of the courtiers and
the great indignation of others. The more grave and stately matrons were
greatly shocked by these indiscretions on the part of the mirth-loving
queen.

On one occasion, when a number of noble ladies were presented to Maria,
the ludicrous appearance of the venerable dowagers, with their little
black bonnets with great wings, and the entire of their grotesque dress
and evolutions, appealed so impressively to Maria's sense of the
ridiculous, that she, with the utmost difficulty, refrained from open
laughter. But when a young marchioness, full of fun and frolic, whose
office required that she should continue standing behind the queen,
being tired of the ceremony, seated herself upon the floor, and,
concealed behind the fence of the enormous hoops of the attendant
ladies, began to play off all imaginable pranks with the ladies' hoops,
and with the muscles of her own face, the contrast between these
childish frolics and the stately dignity of the old dowagers so
disconcerted the fun-loving Maria, that, notwithstanding all her efforts
at self-control, she could not conceal an occasional smile. The old
ladies were shocked and enraged. They declared that she had treated them
with derision, that she had no sense of decorum, and that not one of
them would ever attend her court again. The next morning a song
appeared, full of bitterness which was spread through Paris. The
following was the chorus:

     "Little queen! you must not be
     So saucy with your twenty years
     Your ill-used courtiers soon will see
     You pass once more the barriers."

While Madame de Noailles was thus torturing Maria Antoinette with her
exactions, the Abbé de Vermond, on the contrary, was exerting all the
strong influence he had acquired over her mind to induce her to despise
these requirements of etiquette, and to treat them with open contempt.
Maria Theresa, in the spirit of independence which ever characterizes a
strong mind, ordinarily lived like any other lady, attending
energetically to her duties without any ostentation. She would ride
through the streets of Vienna unaccompanied by any retinue; and the
other members of the royal family, on all ordinary occasions, dispensed
with the pomp and splendors of royalty. Maria Antoinette's education and
natural disposition led her to adhere to the customs of the court of her
ancestors. Thus was she incessantly annoyed by the diverse influences
crowding upon her. Following, however, the bent of her own inclinations,
she daily made herself more and more unpopular with the haughty dames
who surrounded her.

It was a very great annoyance to Maria that she was compelled to dine
every day as a public spectacle. It must seem almost incredible to an
American reader that such a custom could ever have existed in France.
The arrangement was this. The different members of the royal family
dined in different apartments: the king and queen, with such as were
admitted to their table, in one room, the dauphin and dauphiness in
another, and other members of the royal family in another. Portions of
these rooms were railed off, as in court-houses, police rooms, and
menageries, for spectators. The good, honest people from the country,
after visiting the menageries to see the lions, tigers, and monkeys fed,
hastened to the palace to see the king and queen take their soup. They
were always especially delighted with the skill with which Louis XV.
would strike off the top of his egg with one blow of his fork. This was
the most valuable accomplishment the monarch over thirty millions of
people possessed, and the one in which he chiefly gloried. The
spectators entered at one door and passed out at another. No respectably
dressed person was refused admission. The consequence was, that during
the dining hour an interminable throng was pouring through the
apartment; those in the advance crowded slowly along by those in the
rear, and all eyes riveted upon the royal feeders. The members of the
royal family of France, accustomed to this practice from infancy, did
not regard it at all. To Maria Antoinette it was, however, excessively
annoying, and though she submitted to it while she was dauphiness, as
soon as she ascended the throne she discontinued the practice. The
people felt that they were thus deprived of one of their inalienable
privileges, and murmurs loud and angry rose against the innovating
Austrian.

Much of the time of Louis and his bride was passed at the palaces of
Versailles. This renowned residence of the royal family of France is
situated about ten miles from Paris, in the midst of an extensive plain.
Until the middle of the seventeenth century it was only a small village.
At this time Louis XIV. determined to erect upon this solitary spot a
residence worthy of the grandeur of his throne. Seven years were
employed in completing the palace, garden, and park. No expense was
spared by him or his successors to render it the most magnificent
residence in Europe. No regal mansion or city can boast a greater
display of reservoirs, fountains, gardens, groves, cascades, and the
various other embellishments and appliances of pleasure. The situation
of the principal palace is on a gentle elevation. Its front and wings
are of polished stone, ornamented with statues, and a colonnade of the
Doric order is in the center. The grand hall is about two hundred and
twenty feet in length, with costly decorations in marble, paintings, and
gilding. The other apartments are of corresponding size and elegance.
This beautiful structure is approached by three magnificent avenues,
shaded by stately trees, leading respectively from Paris, St. Cloud, and
Versailles.

[Illustration: VERSAILLES--FRONT VIEW.]

[Illustration: VERSAILLES--COURT-YARD.]

This gorgeous mansion of the monarchs of France presents a front eight
hundred feet in length, and has connected with it fifteen projecting
buildings of spacious dimensions, decorated with Ionic columns and
pilasters, constituting almost a city in itself. One great gallery,
adorned with statuary, paintings, and architectural embellishments, is
two hundred and thirty-two feet long, thirty broad, and thirty-seven
high, and lighted by seventeen large windows. Many gorgeous saloons,
furnished with the most costly splendor, a banqueting-room of the
most spacious dimensions, where luxurious kings have long rioted in
midnight revels, an opera house and a chapel, whose beautifully fluted
pillars support a dome which is the admiration of all who look up
upon its graceful beauty, combine to lend attractions to these royal
abodes such as few other earthly mansions can rival, and none,
perhaps, eclipse. The gardens, in the midst of which this voluptuous
residence reposes, are equal in splendor to the palace they are
intended to adorn. Here the kings of France had rioted in boundless
profusion, and every conceivable appliance of pleasure was collected
in these abodes, from which all thoughts of retribution were
studiously excluded. The expense incurred in rearing and embellishing
this princely structure has amounted to uncounted millions. But we
must not forget that these millions were wrested from the toiling
multitude, who dwelt in mud hovels, and ate the coarsest food, that
their proud and licentious rulers might be "clothed in purple and fine
linen, and fare sumptuously every day." Such was the home to which the
beautiful Maria Antoinette, the bride of fifteen, was introduced; and
in the midst of temptations to which such voluptuousness exposed her,
she entered upon her dark and gloomy career. This, however, was but
one of her abodes. It was but one even of her country seats. At
Versailles there were other palaces, in the construction and the
embellishment of which the revenues of the kingdom had been lavished
and in whose luxurious chambers all the laws of God had been openly
set at defiance by those earthly kings who ever forgot that there was
one enthroned above them as the King of kings.

[Illustration: FOUNTAINS AT VERSAILLES.]

[Illustration: FOUNTAIN OF THE STAR.]

Within the circuit of the park are two smaller palaces, called the
Great and the Little Trianon. These may be called royal residences in
miniature; seats to which the king and queen retired when desirous of
laying aside their rank and state. The Little Trianon was a beautiful
palace, about eighty feet square. It was built by Louis XV. for Madame
du Barri. Its architectural style was that of a Roman pavilion, and it
was surrounded with gardens ornamented in the highest attainments of
French and English art, diversified with temples, cottages, and
cascades. This was the favorite retreat of Maria Antoinette. This she
regarded as peculiarly her home. Here she was for a time comparatively
happy. Though living in the midst of all the jealousies, and
intrigues, and bickerings of a court, and though in heart deeply
pained by the strange indifference and neglect which her husband
manifested toward her person, the buoyancy of her youthful spirit
enabled her to triumph, in a manner, over those influences of
depression, and she was the life and the ornament of every gay
scene. As her mind had been but little cultivated, she had but few
resources within herself to dispel that ennui which is the great foe
of the votaries of fashion; and, unconscious of any other sources of
enjoyment, she plunged with all the zest of novelty into an incessant
round of balls, operas, theaters, and masquerades. Her mind, by
nature, was one of the noblest texture, and by suitable culture might
have exulted in the appreciation of all that is beautiful and sublime
in the world of nature and in the realms of thought. She loved the
retirement of the Little Trianon. She loved, in the comparative
quietude of that miniature palace, of that royal home, to shake off
all the restraints of regal state, and to live with a few choice
friends in the freedom of a private lady. Unattended she rambled among
the flowers of the garden; and in the bright moonlight, leaning upon
the arm of a female friend, she forgot, as she gazed upon the moon,
and the stars, and all the somber glories of the night, that she was a
queen, and rejoiced in those emotions common to every ennobled spirit.
Here she often lingered in the midst of congenial joys, till the
murmurs of courtiers drew her away to the more exciting, but far less
satisfying scenes of fashionable pleasure. She often lamented
bitterly, and even with tears, her want of intellectual cultivation,
and so painfully felt her inferiority when in the society of ladies of
intelligence and highly-disciplined minds, that she sought to surround
herself with those whose tastes were no more intellectual than her
own. "What a resource," she once exclaimed, "amid the casualties of
life, is a well-cultivated mind! One can then be one's own companion,
and find society in one's own thoughts." Here, in her Little Trianon,
she made several unavailing attempts to retrieve, by study, those
hours of childhood which had been lost. But it was too late. For a few
days, with great zeal and self-denial, she would persevere in
secluding herself in the library with her books. But it was in vain
for the Queen of France to strive again to become a school-girl. Those
days had passed forever. The innumerable interruptions of her station
frustrated all her endeavors, and she was compelled to abandon the
attempt in sorrow and despair. We know not upon how trivial events the
great destinies of the world are suspended; and had the Queen of
France possessed a highly-disciplined mind--had she been familiar with
the teachings of history, and been capable of inspiring respect by
her intellectual attainments, it is far from impossible that she might
have lived and died in peace. But almost the only hours of enjoyment
which shone upon Maria while Queen of France, was when she forgot that
she was a queen, and, like a village maiden, loitered through the
gardens and the groves in the midst of which the Little Trianon was
embowered.

[Illustration: LITTLE TRIANON.]

The enemies of Maria had sedulously endeavored to spread the report
through France that she was still in heart an Austrian; that she loved
only the country she had left, and that she had no affection for the
country over which she was to reign as queen. They falsely and
malignantly spread the report that she had changed the name of Little
Trianon into Little Vienna. The rumor spread rapidly. It excited great
displeasure. The indignant denials of Maria were disregarded. Thus the
number of her enemies was steadily increasing.

Another unfortunate occurrence took place, which rendered her still more
unpopular at court. Her brother Maximilian, a vain and foolish young
man, made a visit to his sister at the court of Versailles, not
traveling in his own proper rank, but under an assumed name. It was
quite common with princes of the blood-royal, for various reasons, thus
to travel. The young Austrian prince insisted that the first visit was
due to him from the princes of the royal family in France. They, on the
contrary insisted that, as he was not traveling in his own name, and in
the recognition of his own proper rank, it was their duty to regard him
as of the character he had assumed, and as this was of a rank inferior
to that of a royal prince, it could not be their duty to pay the first
visit. The dispute ran high. Maria, seconded by the Abbé Vermond, took
the part of her brother. This greatly offended many of the highest
nobility of the realm. It became a family quarrel of great bitterness. A
thousand tongues were busy whispering malicious accusations against
Maria. Ribald songs to sully her name were hawked through the streets.
Care began to press heavily upon the brow of the dauphiness, and sorrow
to spread its pallor over her cheek. Her high spirit could not brook the
humility of endeavoring the refutation of the calumnies urged against
her. Still, she was too sensitive not to feel them often with the
intensest anguish. Her husband was comparatively a stranger to her. He
bowed to her with much civility when they met, but never addressed her
with a word or gesture of tenderness, or manifested the least desire to
see her alone. One evening, when walking in the garden of Little
Trianon, he astonished the courtiers, and almost overpowered Maria with
delightful emotions, by offering her his arm. This was the most
affectionate act with which he had ever approached her. Such were the
bridal days of Maria Antoinette.




CHAPTER III.

MARIA ANTOINETTE ENTHRONED.

1774-1775

Louis XV. seized with small-pox.--Flight of the courtiers.--The
Marchioness du Pompadour.--Her dissolute character.--Debauchery
of Louis XV.--He squanders the public revenue.--Remorse of the
king.--The lamp at the window.--Death of Louis XV.--Indecent haste
of the courtiers.--Emotions of the young king and queen.--Homage
of the courtiers.--Burial of Louis XV.--The king and queen leave
Versailles.--The coronation.--Enthusiasm of the people.--Maria's
grief.--The king's estrangement.--The little peasant boy.--Becomes
a monster of ingratitude.--The queen's traducers.--The Heron's
Plume.--Vile slanders.--Profligate character of De Lauzun.--Execution
of De Lauzun.--A life of pleasure.--Maria's imprudence.--Night
adventure in a hackney-coach.--The gardens of Marly.--Their unrivaled
splendor.--Maria's visits to Marly.--Heartless gayety.--Sunrise at
Marly.--More food for slander.--Simple habits of the queen.--Horror
of the courtiers and dowagers.--Sleigh riding.--Blind man's buff
and other games.--Dramatic entertainments.--Increasing affection of
the king.--Efforts to alienate the king's affections.--Agitation
of the queen.--Maria's children.--Royal visitors.--Extravagant
expenditures.--Rising discontents.--La Fayette and Franklin.--The
people begin to count the costs.--Letter from the Empress
Catharine.--The clouds thicken.


In the year 1774, about four years after the marriage of Maria
Antoinette and Louis, the dissolute old king, Louis XV., in his palace
at Versailles, surrounded by his courtiers and his lawless pleasures,
was taken sick. The disease soon developed itself as the small-pox in
its most virulent form. The physicians, knowing the terror with which
the conscience-smitten monarch regarded death, feared to inform him of
the nature of his disease.

"What are these pimples," inquired the king, "which are breaking out all
over my body?"

"They are little pustules," was the reply, "which require three days in
forming, three in suppurating, and three in drying."

The dreadful malady which had seized upon the king was soon, however,
known throughout the court, and all fled from the infection. The
miserable monarch, hated by his subjects, despised by his courtiers, and
writhing under the scorpion lash of his own conscience, was left to
groan and die alone. It was a horrible termination of a most loathsome
life.

The vices of Louis XV. sowed the seeds of the French Revolution. Two
dissolute women, notorious on the page of history, each, in their turn,
governed him and France. The Marchioness du Pompadour was his first
favorite. Ambitious, shrewd, unprincipled, and avaricious, she held the
weak-minded king entirely under her control, and spread throughout the
court an influence so contaminating that the whole empire was infected
with the demoralization. Upon this woman he squandered almost the
revenues of the kingdom. The celebrated Parc au Cerf, the scene of
almost unparalleled voluptuousness, was reared for her at an expense of
twenty millions of dollars. After her charms had faded, she still
contrived to retain her political influence over the pliant monarch,
until she died, at the age of forty-four, universally detested.

Madame du Barri, of whom we have before spoken, succeeded the
Marchioness du Pompadour in this post of infamy. The king lavished upon
her, in the short space of eight years, more than ten millions of
dollars. For her he erected the Little Trianon, with its gardens, parks,
and fountains, a temple of pleasure dedicated to lawless passion. The
king had totally neglected the interests of his majestic empire,
consecrating every moment of time to his own sensual gratification. The
revenues of the realm were squandered in the profligacy and carousings
of his court. The people were regarded merely as servants who were to
toil to minister to the voluptuous indulgence of their masters. They
lived in penury, that kings, and queens, and courtiers might revel in
all imaginable magnificence and luxury. This was the ultimate cause of
that terrible outbreak which eventually crushed Maria Antoinette beneath
the ruins of the French monarchy. Louis XV., in his shameless
debaucheries, not only expended every dollar upon which he could lay his
hands, but at his death left the kingdom involved in a debt of four
hundred millions of dollars, which was to be paid from the scanty
earnings of peasants and artisans whose condition was hardly superior to
that of the enslaved laborers on the plantations of Carolina and
Louisiana. But I am wandering from my story.

In a chamber of the palace of the Little Trianon we left the king dying
of the confluent small-pox. The courtiers have fled in consternation.
It is the hour of midnight, the 10th of May, 1774. The monarch of
France is alone as he struggles with the king of terrors. No attendants
linger around him. Two old women, in an adjoining apartment,
occasionally look in upon the mass of corruption upon the royal couch,
which had already lost every semblance of humanity. The eye is blinded.
The swollen tongue can not articulate. What thought of remorse or terror
may be rioting through the soul of the dying king, no one knows, and--no
one cares. A lamp flickers at the window, which is a signal to those at
a safe distance that the king still lives. Its feeble flame is to be
extinguished the moment life departs. The courtiers, from the windows of
the distant palace, watch with the most intense solicitude the
glimmering of that midnight taper. Should the king recover, they dreaded
the reproach of having deserted him in the hour of his extremity. They
hope, so earnestly, that he may not live. Should he die, they are
anxious to be the first in their congratulations to the new king and
queen. The hours of the night linger wearily away as expectant courtiers
gaze impatiently through the gloom upon that dim torch. The horses are
harnessed in the carriages, and waiting at the doors, that the
courtiers, without the loss of a moment, may rush to do homage to the
new sovereign.

The clock was tolling the hour of twelve at night when the lamp was
extinguished. The miserable king had ceased to breathe. The ensuing
scene no pen can delineate or pencil paint. The courtiers, totally
forgetful of French etiquette, rushed down the stairs, crowded into
their carriages, and the silence of night was disturbed by the
clattering of the horses' hoofs, as they were urged, at their utmost
speed, to the apartments of the dauphin.

There Maria Antoinette and Louis, with a few family friends, were
awaiting the anticipated intelligence of the death of their grandfather
the king. Though neither of them could have cherished any feelings of
affection for the dissolute old monarch, it was an hour to awaken in the
soul emotions of the deepest melancholy. Death had approached, in the
most frightful form, the spot on earth where, probably, of all others,
he was most dreaded. Suddenly a noise was heard, as of thunder, in the
ante-chamber of the dauphin. It was the rush of the courtiers from the
dead monarch to bow at the shrine of the new dispensors of wealth and
power. This extraordinary tumult, in the silence of midnight, conveyed
to Maria and Louis the first intelligence that the crown of France had
fallen upon their brows. Louis was then twenty-four years of age,
modest, timid, and conscientious. Maria was twenty, mirthful,
thoughtless, and shrinking from responsibility. They were both
overwhelmed, and, falling upon their knees, exclaimed, with gushing
tears, "O God! guide us, protect us; we are too young to govern."

The Countess de Noailles was the first to salute Maria Antoinette as
Queen of France. She entered the private saloon in which they were
sitting, and requested their majesties to enter the grand audience hall,
where the princes and all the great officers of state were anxious to do
homage to their new sovereigns. Maria Antoinette, leaning upon her
husband's arm, and with her handkerchief held to her eyes, which were
bathed in tears, received these first expressions of loyalty. There was,
however, not an individual found to mourn for the departed king. No one
was willing to endanger his safety by any act of respect toward his
remains. The laws of France required that the chief surgeon should open
the body of the departed monarch and embalm it, and that the first
gentleman of the bed-chamber should hold the head while the operation
was performed.

"You will see the body properly embalmed?" said the gentleman of the
bed-chamber to the surgeon.

"Certainly," was the reply; "and you will hold the head?"

Each bowed politely to the other, without the exchange of another word.
The body, unopened and unembalmed, was placed by a few under servants in
a coffin, which was filled with the spirits of wine, and hurried,
without an attendant mourner, to the tomb. Such was the earthly end of
Louis XV. In an hour he was forgotten, or remembered but to be despised.

At four o'clock of that same morning, the young king and queen, with the
whole court in retinue, left Versailles, in their carriages, for Choisy.
The morning was cold, dark, and cheerless. The awful death of the king,
and the succeeding excitements, had impressed the company with gloom.
Maria Antoinette rode in the carriage with her husband, and with one or
two other members of the royal family. For some time they rode in
silence, Maria, a child of impulse, weeping profusely from the emotions
which moved her soul. But, ere long, the morning dawned. The sun rose
bright and clear over the hills of France, and the whole beautiful
landscape glittered in the light of the most lovely of spring mornings.
Insensibly the gloom of the mind departed with the gloom of night.
Conversation commenced. The mournful past was forgotten in anticipation
of the bright future. Some jocular remark of the young king's sister
elicited a general burst of laughter, when, by common consent, they
wiped away their tears, banished all funereal looks, and, a merry party,
rode merrily along, over hill and dale, to a crown and a throne. Little
did they dream that these sunny hours and this flowery path but
conducted them to a dungeon and the guillotine.

The coronation soon took place at Rheims, with the greatest display of
festive magnificence. The novelty of a new reign, with a youthful king
and queen, elated the versatile French, and loud and enthusiastic were
the acclamations with which Louis and Maria Antoinette were greeted
whenever they appeared. They were both, for a time, very popular with
the nation at large, though there was in the court a party hostile to
the queen, who took advantage of every act of indiscretion to traduce
her character and to expose her to ignominy. In these efforts they
succeeded so effectually as to overwhelm themselves in the same ruin
which they had brought upon their victim. A deep-seated but secret grief
still preyed upon the heart of Maria. Though four years since her
marriage had now passed away, she was still comparatively a stranger to
her husband. He treated her with respect, with politeness, but with cold
reserve, never approaching her as his wife. The queen, possessing
naturally a very affectionate disposition, was extremely fond of
children. Despairing of ever becoming a mother herself, she thought of
adopting some pleasant child to be her playmate and friend. One day, as
she was riding in her carriage, a beautiful little peasant boy, about
five years of age, with large blue eyes and flaxen hair, got under the
feet of the horses, though he was extricated without having received any
injury. As the grandmother rushed from the cottage door to take the
child, the queen, standing up in her carriage, extended her arms to the
old woman, and said,

"The child is mine. God has given it to me to rear and to cherish. Is
his mother alive?"

"No, madame!" was the reply of the old woman. "My daughter died last
winter, and left five small children upon my hands."

"I will take this one," said the queen, "and will also provide for all
the rest. Will you consent?"

"Indeed, madame," exclaimed the cottager, "they are too fortunate. But I
fear Jemmie will not stay with you. He is very wayward."

The postillion handed Jemmie to the queen in the carriage, and she,
taking him upon her knee, ordered the coachman to drive immediately to
the palace. The ride, however, was any thing but a pleasant one, for the
ungoverned boy screamed and kicked with the utmost violence during the
whole of the way. The queen was quite elated with her treasure; for the
boy was extremely beautiful, and he was soon seen frolicking around her
in a white frock trimmed with lace, a rose-colored sash, with silver
fringe, and a hat decorated with feathers. I may here mention that the
petted favorite grew up into a monster of ingratitude, and became one of
the most sanguinary actors in the scenes of terror which subsequently
ensued.

One would think that the enemies of Maria Antoinette could hardly take
advantage of this circumstance to her injury; but they atrociously
affirmed that this child was her own unacknowledged offspring, whose
ignominious birth she had concealed. They represented the whole
adventure but a piece of trickery on her part, to obtain, without
suspicion, possession of her own child. Such accusations were borne upon
the wings of every wind throughout Europe, and the deeply-injured queen
could only submit in silence.

Another little incident, equally trivial, was magnified into the
grossest of crimes. The Duke de Lauzun appeared one evening at an
entertainment with a very magnificent plume of white heron's feathers.
The queen casually expressed her admiration of its beauty. A lady
immediately reported to the duke the remarks of the queen, and assured
him that it would be a great gratification to her majesty to receive a
present of the plume. He, the next morning, sent the plume to the queen.
She was quite embarrassed, being unwilling to accept the plume, and yet
fearing to wound the feelings of the duke by refusing the present. She,
on the whole, however, concluded to retain it, and wore it _once_, that
she might not seem to scorn the present, and then laid it aside. It
is difficult to conceive how the queen could have conducted more
discreetly in the affair. Such was the story of "The Heron's Plume." It
was, however, maliciously reported through Paris that the queen was
indecently receiving presents from gentlemen as her lovers. "The Heron's
Plume" figured conspicuously in many a satire in prose and verse. These
shafts, thrown from a thousand unseen hands, pierced Maria Antoinette
to the heart. This same Duke de Lauzun, a man of noted profligacy,
subsequently became one of the most unrelenting foes of the queen. He
followed La Fayette to America, and then returned to Paris, to plunge,
with the most reckless gayety, into the whirlpool of human passions
boiling and whirling there. In the conflict of parties he became a
victim. Condemned to death, he was imprisoned in the Conciergerie.
Imbruted by atheism, he entered his cell with a merry song and a joke.
He furnished a sumptuous repast for the prisoners at the hour appointed
for his execution, and invited the jailers for his guests. When the
executioners arrived, he smilingly accosted them. "Gentlemen, I am very
happy to see you; just allow me to finish these nice oysters." Then,
very politely taking a decanter of wine, he said, "Your duties will be
quite arduous to-day, gentlemen; allow me the pleasure of taking a
glass of wine with you." Thus merrily he ascended the cart, and beguiled
the ride from the prison to the guillotine with the most careless
pleasantries. Gayly tripping up the steps, he placed himself in the
fatal instrument, and a smile was upon his lips, and mirthful words were
falling upon the ears of the executioners, when the slide fell, and he
was silent in death. That soul must indeed be ignoble which can thus
enter the dread unseen of futurity.

There is no end to these acts of injustice inflicted upon the queen.
The influences which had ever surrounded her had made her very fond of
dress and gayety. She was devoted to a life of pleasure, and was hardly
conscious that there was any thing else to live for. In fêtes, balls,
theaters, operas, and masquerades, she passed night after night. Such
was the only occupation of her life. The king, on the contrary, had no
taste for any of these amusements. Uncompanionable and retiring, he
lived with his books, and in his workshop making trinkets for children.
Always retiring to rest at the early hour of eleven o'clock precisely,
he left the queen to pursue her pleasures until the dawn of the morning,
unattended by him. It was very imprudent in Maria Antoinette thus to
expose herself to the whispers of calumny. She was young, inexperienced,
and had no judicious advisers.

One evening, she had been out in her carriage, and was returning at
rather a late hour, the lady of the palace being with her, when her
carriage broke down at her entrance into Paris. The queen and the
duchess were both masked and, stepping into an adjoining shop, as they
were unknown, the queen ordered one of the footmen to call a common
hackney-coach, and they, both entering, drove to the opera-house, with
very much the same sense of the ludicrous in being found in so plebeian
a vehicle, as a New York lady would feel on passing through Broadway
in a hand-cart or on a wheel-barrow. The fun-loving queen was so
entertained with the whimsical adventure, that she could not refrain
from exclaiming, as soon as she entered the opera-house, to the intimate
friends she met there, "Only think! I came to the opera in a
hackney-coach! Was it not droll? was it not droll?" The news of the
indiscretion spread. All Paris was full of the adventure. Rumor, with
her thousand tongues, added innumerable embellishments. Neither the
delicacy nor the dignity of the queen would allow her seriously to
attempt the refutation of the calumny that, neglected by her husband,
she had been out in disguise to meet a nobleman renowned for his
gallantries.

Nothing can be more irksome than the frivolities of fashionable life. To
spend night after night, of months and years, in an incessant round of
the same trivial gayeties, so exhausts all the susceptibilities of
enjoyment that life itself becomes a burden. Louis XIV. had created for
himself a sort of elysium of voluptuousness in the celebrated gardens of
Marly. Spread out upon the gentle declivity of an extended hill were
grounds embellished in the highest style of art, and intended to rival
the garden of Eden itself in every conceivable attraction. Pavilions of
gorgeous architecture crowned the summit of the hill. Flowers, groves,
enchanting walks, and statues of most voluptuous beauty, fountains,
lakes, cascades foaming over channels of whitest marble--all the
attractions of nature and art were combined to realize the most fanciful
dreams of splendor and luxury. Pleasure was the only god here adored;
but, like all false gods, he but rewarded his votaries with satiety and
disgust.

[Illustration: GARDENS OF MARLY.]

The queen, with her brilliant retinue, made a monthly visit to these
palaces and pleasure-grounds, and with music, illumination, and dances,
endeavored to beguile life of its cares. A noisy concourse, glittering
with diamonds and all the embellishments of wealth, thronged the
embowered avenues and the sumptuous halls. And while the young, in the
mazes of the dance, and in the uneasy witchery of winning and losing
hearts, were all engrossed, the old, in the still deeper but ignoble
passion of desperate gaming, forgot gliding time and approaching
eternity. But the spirit of Maria was soon weary of this heartless
gayety. Each succeeding visit became more irksome, and at last,
in inexpressible disgust with the weary monotony of fashionable
dissipation, she declared that she would never enter the gardens of
Marly again. But she must have some occupation. What shall she do to
give wings to the lagging hours?

"Has your majesty," timidly suggests a lady of the court, "ever seen the
sun rise?"

"The sun rise!" exclaimed the queen; "no, never! What a beautiful sight
it must be! What a romantic adventure! we will go to-morrow morning."

The plan was immediately arranged. The prosaic king would take no part
in it. He preferred quietly to slumber upon his pillow. A few hours
after midnight, the queen, with several gentlemen, and her attendant
ladies, all in high glee, left the palace in their carriages to ascend
the lofty eminence of the gardens of Marly to witness the sublime
spectacle. Thousands of the humbler classes had already left their beds
and commenced their daily toil, as the brilliant cavalcade swept by
them on this novel excursion. It was, however, a freak so strange, so
unaccountable, so contrary to any thing ever known before, that this
nocturnal party became the theme of universal conversation. It was
whispered that there must have been some mysterious wickedness connected
with an adventure so marvelous. Groups upon the Boulevards inquired,
"Why is the queen thus frolicking at midnight without her husband?" In
a few days a ballad appeared, which was sung by the vilest lips in the
warehouses of infamy, full of the most malignant charges against the
queen. Maria Antoinette was imprudent, very imprudent, and that was her
only crime.

Still, the young queen must have amusements. She is weary of parade and
splendor and seeks in simplicity the novelty of enjoyment. Dressed in
white muslin, with a plain straw hat, and a little switch in her hand,
she might often be seen walking on foot, followed by a single servant,
through the embowered paths which surrounded the Petit Trianon. Through
lanes and by-ways she would chase the butterfly, and pick flowers free
as a peasant girl, and lean over the fences to chat with the country
maids as they milked the cows. This entire freedom from restraint was
etiquette in the court of Vienna; it was regarded as barbarism in the
court of Versailles. The courtiers were amazed at conduct so unqueenly.
The ceremony-stricken dowagers were shocked. Paris, France, Europe, were
filled with stories of the waywardness, and eccentricities, and
improprieties of the young queen. The loud complaints were poured so
incessantly in the ear of Maria Theresa, that at last she sent a special
embassador to Versailles, in disguise, as a spy upon her daughter. He
reported, "The queen is imprudent, that is all."

There happened, in a winter of unusual inclemency, a heavy fall of snow.
It was a rare sight at Versailles. Maria Antoinette, reminded of the
merry sleigh rides she had enjoyed in the more northern home of her
childhood, was eager to renew the pleasure. Some antiquated sledges
were found in the stables. New ones, gay and graceful, were constructed.
The horses, with nodding plumes, and gorgeous caparisons, and tinkling
bells, dazzled the eyes of the Parisians as they swept through the
Champs Elysées, drawing their loads of lords and ladies enveloped in
furs. It was a new amusement--an innovation. Envious and angry lips
declared that "the Austrian, with an Austrian heart, was intruding the
customs of Vienna upon Paris." These ungenerous complaints reached the
ear of the queen, and she instantly relinquished the amusement.

Still the queen is weary. Time hangs heavily upon her hands. All the
pleasures of the court have palled upon her appetite, and she seeks
novelty. She introduces into the retired apartments of the Little
Trianon, "blind man's buff," "fox and geese," and other similar games,
and joins heartily in the fun and the frolic. "A queen playing blind
man's buff!" Simpletons--and the world is full of simpletons--raised
their hands and eyes in affected horror. Private dramatic entertainments
were got up to relieve the tedium of unemployed time. The queen learns
her part, and appears in the character and costume of a peasant girl.
Her genius excites much admiration, and, intoxicated with this new
pleasure, she repeats the entertainment, and alike excels in all
characters, whether comic or tragic. The number of spectators is
gradually increased. Louis is not exactly pleased to see his queen
transformed into an actress, even in the presence only of the most
intimate friends of the court. Half jocosely, half seriously, amid the
rounds of applause with which the royal actress is greeted, he hisses.
It was deemed extremely derogatory to the dignity of the queen that she
should indulge in such amusements, and every gossiping tongue in Paris
was soon magnifying her indiscretions.

Eight years had now passed away since the marriage of Maria Antoinette,
and still she was in name only, the wife of Louis. She was still a young
lady, for he had never yet approached her with any familiarity with
which he would not approach any young lady of his court. But about this
time the king gradually manifested more tenderness toward her. He began
really and tenderly to love her. With tears of joy, she confided to her
friends the great change which had taken place in his conduct. The
various troubles and embarrassments which began now to lower about the
throne and to darken their path, bound their sympathies more strongly
together. Strenuous efforts were made to alienate the king from the
queen by exciting his jealousy. Maria was accused of the grossest
immoralities, and insinuations to her injury were ever whispered in to
the ear of the king.

One morning Madame Campan entered the queen's chamber when she was in
bed. Several letters were lying upon the bed by her side, and she was
weeping as though her heart would break. She immediately exclaimed,
covering her swollen eyes with her hands, "Oh! I wish that I were dead!
I wish that I were dead! The wretches! the monsters! what have I done
that they should treat me thus! it would be better to kill me at once."
Then, throwing her arms around the neck of Madame Campan, she burst more
passionately into tears. All attempts to console her were unavailing.
Neither was she willing to confide the cause of her heart-rending grief.
After some time she regained her usual serenity, and said, with an
attempted smile, "I know that I have made you very uncomfortable this
morning, and I must set your poor heart at ease. You must have seen, on
some fine summer's day, a black cloud suddenly appear, and threaten to
pour down upon the country and lay it in waste. The lightest wind drives
it away, and the blue sky and serene weather are restored. This is just
the image of what has happened to me this morning."

Notwithstanding, however, these efforts of the malignant, the king
became daily more and more strongly attached to the queen. In the
embarrassments which were gathering around him, he felt the support
of her energetic mind, and looked to her counsel with continually
increasing confidence. It was about nine years after their marriage when
their first child was born. Three others were subsequently added to
their family. Two, however, of the children, a son and a daughter, died
in early childhood, leaving two others, Maria Theresa and Louis Charles,
to share and to magnify those woes which subsequently overwhelmed the
whole royal family.

During all these early years of their reign, Versailles was their
favorite and almost constant abode. They were visited occasionally by
monarchs from the other courts of Europe, whom they entertained with the
utmost display of royal grandeur. Bonfires and illuminations turned
night into day in the groves and gardens of those gorgeous palaces.
Thousands were feasted in boundless profusion. Millions of money were
expended in the costly amusements of kings, and queens, and haughty
nobles. The people, by whose toil the revenues of the kingdom were
furnished, looked from a humble distance upon the glittering throng,
gliding through the avenues, charioted in splendor, and now and then
a deep thinker, struggling against poverty and want, would thus
soliloquize: "Why do we thus toil to minister to the useless luxury of
these our imperious masters? Why must I eat black bread, and be clothed
in the coarsest garments, that these lords and ladies may glitter in
jewelry and revel in luxury? Why must my children toil like bond slaves
through life, that the children of these nobles may be clothed in purple
and fine linen, and fare sumptuously every day?" The multitude were
bewildered by the glare of royalty. But here and there a sullen
fish-woman, leading her ragged, half-starved children, would mumble and
mutter, and curse the "Austrian," as the beautiful queen swept by in
her gorgeous equipage. These discontents and portentous murmurs were
spreading rapidly, when neither king, queen, nor courtiers dreamed of
their existence.

A few had heard of America, its freedom, its equality, its fame even for
the poorest, its competence. La Fayette had gone to help the Republicans
crush the crown and the throne. Franklin was in Paris, the embassador
from America, in garb and demeanor as simple and frugal as the humblest
citizen, and all Paris gazed upon him with wonder and admiration. A few
bold spirits began to whisper, "Let us also have no king." The fires of
a volcano were kindling under the whole structure of French society. It
was time that the mighty fabric of corruption should be tumbled into the
dust. The splendor and the extravagance of these royal festivities added
but fuel to the flame. The people began to compute the expense of
bonfires, palaces, equipages, crown jewels, and courtiers. It is
extremely impertinent, Maria thought and said, for the people to meddle
in matters with which they have no concern. Slaves have no right to
question the conduct of their masters. It was the misfortune of her
education, and of the influences which ever surrounded her, that she
never imagined that kings and queens were created for any other purpose
than to live in luxury. The Empress Catharine II. of Russia, as these
discontents were loud and threatening wrote to Maria Antoinette a
letter, in which she says, "Kings and queens ought to proceed in their
career undisturbed by the cries of the people, as the moon pursues her
course unimpeded by the howling of dogs." This was then the spirit of
the throne.

And now the days of calamity began to grow darker. Intrigues were
multiplied, involving Maria in interminable difficulties. There were
instinctive presentiments of an approaching storm. Death came into the
royal palace, and distorted the form of her eldest son, and by lingering
tortures dragged him to the grave. And then her little daughter was
taken from her. Maria watched at the couch of suffering and death with
maternal anguish. The glowing heart of a mother throbbed within the
bosom of Maria. The heartlessness and emptiness of all other pursuits
had but given intensity to the fervor of a mother's love. Though but
twenty-three years of age, she had drained every cup of pleasure to its
dregs. And now she began to enter upon a path every year more dark,
dreary, and desolate.




CHAPTER IV.

THE DIAMOND NECKLACE.

1786

Remark of Talleyrand.--The Cardinal de Rohan.--Rohan's smuggling
operations.--He is disgraced.--The Countess Lamotte.--The queen's
jewelry.--Boehmer, the crown jeweler.--The diamond ear-rings.--Change
in the queen's life.--The diamond necklace.--The queen inspects the
necklace.--Answer of their majesties.--Boehmer's embarrassment.--His
interview with the queen.--The queen's remarks.--Boehmer's
confusion.--Alleged disposal of the necklace.--Present to the king's
son.--Boehmer's note to the queen.--The queen's perplexity.--Boehmer's
interview with Madame Campan.--The necklace again.--The Cardinal de
Rohan.--Indications of a plot.--Boehmer's perplexity.--The cardinal's
embarrassment.--Boehmer's terror.--The queen's amazement.--The
cardinal before the king and queen.--His agitation.--The queen's
indignation.--The forged letter.--The cardinal's confused
statements.--He is arrested.--Arrest of Madame Lamotte.--Great
excitement.--The queen's anguish.--The cardinal's trial.--The cardinal's
acquittal.--Chagrin of the king and queen.--Trial of the Countess
Lamotte.--Her cool effrontery.--The countess found guilty.--Barbarous
sentence.--Brutal punishment of the countess.--Her unhappy
end.--Innocence of the queen.--Of de Rohan's criminality.--The three
suppositions.--Influence of the first.--The third supposition.--Probably
the true one.


About this time there occurred an event which, though apparently
trivial, involved consequences of the most momentous importance. It was
merely the fraudulent purchase of a necklace, by a profligate woman, in
the name of the queen. The circumstances were such as to throw all
France into agitation, and Europe was full of the story. "Mind that
miserable affair of the necklace," said Talleyrand; "I should be nowise
surprised if it should overturn the French monarchy." To understand this
mysterious occurrence, we must first allude to two very important
characters implicated in the conspiracy.

The Cardinal de Rohan, though one of the highest dignitaries of the
Church, and of the most illustrious rank, was a young man of vain and
shallow mind, of great profligacy of character, and perfectly prodigal
in squandering, in ostentatious pomp, all the revenues within his reach.
He had been sent an embassador to the court of Vienna. Surrounding
himself with a retinue of spendthrift gentlemen, he endeavored to dazzle
the Austrian capital with more than regal magnificence. Expending six or
seven hundred thousand dollars in the course of a few months, he soon
became involved in inextricable embarrassments. In the extremity of his
distress, he took advantage of his official station, and engaged in
smuggling with so much effrontery that he almost inundated the Austrian
capital with French goods. Maria Theresa was extremely displeased, and,
without reserve, expressed her strong disapproval of his conduct, both
as a bishop and as an embassador. The cardinal was consequently
recalled, and, disappointed and mortified, he hovered around the court
of Versailles, where he was treated with the utmost coldness. He was
extremely anxious again to bask in the beams of royal favor. But the
queen indignantly repelled all his advances. His proud spirit was
nettled to the quick by his disgrace, and he was ripe for any desperate
adventure to retrieve his ruined fortunes.

There was, at the same time, at Versailles a very beautiful woman, the
Countess Lamotte. She traced her lineage to the kings of France, and, by
her vices, struggled to sustain a style of ostentatious gentility. She
was consumed by an insatiable thirst for recognized rank and wealth, and
she had no conscience to interfere, in the slightest degree, with any
means which might lead to those results. Though somewhat notorious, as
a woman of pleasure, to the courtiers who flitted around the throne,
the queen had never seen her face, and had seldom heard even her name.
Versailles was too much thronged with such characters for any one to
attract any special attention.

Maria Antoinette, in her earlier days, had been extremely fond of dress,
and particularly of rich jewelry. She brought with her from Vienna a
large number of pearls and diamonds. Upon her accession to the throne,
she received, of course, all the crown jewels. Louis XV. had also
presented her with all the jewels belonging to his daughter, the
dauphiness, who had recently died, and also with a very magnificent
collar of pearls, of a single row, the smallest of which was as large
as a filbert. The king, her husband, had, not long before, presented
her with a set of rubies and diamonds of a fine water, and with a pair
of bracelets which cost forty thousand dollars. Boehmer, the crown
jeweler, had collected, at a great expense, six pear-formed diamonds,
of prodigious size. They were perfectly matched, and of the finest
water. They were arranged as ear-rings. He offered them to the queen for
eighty thousand dollars. The young and royal bride could not resist the
desire of adding them, costly as they were, to her casket of gems. She,
however, economically removed two of the diamonds which formed the
tops of the clusters, and replaced them by two of her own. The jeweler
consented to this arrangement, and received the reduced price of
seventy-two thousand dollars, to be paid in equal installments for five
years, from the private purse of the queen. Still the queen felt rather
uneasy in view of her unnecessary purchase. Murmurs of her extravagance
began to reach her ears. Satiated with gayety and weary of jewels, as a
child throws aside its play-things, Maria Antoinette lost all fondness
for her costly treasures, and began to seek novelty in the utmost
simplicity of attire, and in the most artless joys of rural life. Her
gorgeous dresses hung neglected in their wardrobes. Her gems, "of purest
ray serene," slept in the darkness of the unopened casket. The queen had
become a mother, and all those warm and noble affections which had been
diffused and wasted upon frivolities, were now concentrated with
intensest ardor upon her children. A new era had dawned upon Maria
Antoinette. Her soul, by nature exalted, was beginning to find objects
worthy of its energies. Rapidly she was groping her way from the
gloom of the most wretched of all lives--a life of pleasure and of
self-indulgence--to the true and ennobling happiness of benevolence
and self-sacrifice.

Boehmer, the jeweler, unaware of the great change which had taken
place in the character of the queen, resolved to form for her the most
magnificent necklace which was ever seen in Europe. He busied himself
for several years in collecting the most valuable diamonds circulating
in commerce, and thus composed a necklace of several rows, whose
attractions, he hoped, would be irresistible to the queen. In the
purchase of these brilliant gems, the jeweler had expended far more than
his own fortune. For many of them he owed large sums, and his only hope
of paying these debts was in effecting a sale to the queen.

Boehmer requested Madame Campan to inform the queen what a beautiful
necklace he had arranged, hoping that she might express a desire to see
it. This, however, Madame Campan declined doing, as she did not wish to
tempt the queen to incur the expense of three hundred and twenty
thousand dollars, the price of the glittering bawble. Boehmer, after
endeavoring for some time in vain to get the gems exposed to the eye of
the queen, induced a courtier high in rank to show the superb necklace
to his majesty. The king, now loving the queen most tenderly, wished to
see her adorned with this unparalleled ornament, and sent the case to
the queen for her inspection. Maria Antoinette replied, that she had
already as many beautiful diamonds as she desired; that jewels were now
worn but seldom at court; that she could not think it right to encourage
so great an expense for such ornaments; and that the money they would
cost would be much better expended in building a man-of-war. The king
concurred in this prudent decision, and the diamonds were returned to
the jeweler from their majesties with this answer: "We have more need of
ships than of diamonds."

Boehmer was in great trouble, and knew not what to do. He spent a year
in visiting the other courts of Europe, hoping to induce some of the
sovereigns to purchase his necklace, but in vain. Almost in despair, he
returned again to Versailles, and proposed the king should take it, and
pay for it partly in instalments and partly in life annuities. The king
mentioned it again to the queen. She replied, that if his majesty wished
to purchase the necklace, and keep it for their daughter, he might do
so. But she declared that she herself should never be willing to wear
it, for she could not expose herself to those censures for extravagance
which she knew would be lavished upon her.

The jeweler complained loudly and bitterly of his misfortune. The
necklace having been exhibited all over Europe, his troubles were a
matter of general conversation. After several months of great perplexity
and anxiety, Boehmer succeeded in gaining an audience of the queen.
Passionately throwing himself upon his knees before her, clasping his
hands and bursting into tears, he exclaimed,

"Madame, I am disgraced and ruined if you do not purchase my necklace. I
can not outlive my misfortunes. When I go hence I shall throw myself
into the river."

The queen, extremely displeased, said, "Rise, Boehmer! I do not like
these rhapsodies; honest men have no occasion to fall upon their knees
to make known their requests. If you were to destroy yourself, I should
regret you as a madman in whom I had taken an interest, but I should not
be responsible for that misfortune. I not only never ordered the article
which causes your present despair, but, whenever you have talked to me
about fine collections of jewels, I have told you that I should not add
four diamonds to those I already possessed. I told you myself that I
declined taking the necklace. The king wished to give it to me; I
refused him in the same manner. Then never mention it to me again.
Divide it, and endeavor to sell it piecemeal, and do not drown yourself.
I am very angry with you for acting this scene of despair in my
presence, and before this child. Let me never see you behave thus again.
Go!"

Boehmer, overwhelmed with confusion, retired, and the queen, oppressed
with a multitude of gathering cares, for some months thought no more of
him or of his jewels. One day the queen was reposing listlessly upon her
couch, with Madame Campan and other ladies of honor about her, when,
suddenly addressing Madame Campan, she inquired,

"Have you ever heard what poor Boehmer did with his unfortunate
necklace?"

"I have heard nothing of it since he left you," was the reply, "though
I often meet him."

"I should really like to know how the unfortunate man got extricated
from his embarrassments," rejoined the queen; "and, when you next see
him, I wish you would inquire, as if from your own interest in the
affair, without any allusion to me, how he disposed of the article."

In a few days Madame Campan met Boehmer, and, in reply to her
interrogatories, he informed her that the sultan at Constantinople had
purchased it for the favorite sultana. The queen was highly gratified
with the good fortune of the jeweler, and yet thought it very strange
how the grand seignior should have purchased his diamonds at Paris.
Matters continued in this state for some time, until the baptism of the
Duke d'Angoulême, Maria Antoinette's infant son. The king made his
idolized boy a baptismal present of a diamond epaulette and buckles,
which he purchased of Boehmer, and directed him to deliver to the
queen. As the jeweler presented them, he slipped into the queen's hand a
letter, in the form of a petition, containing the following expression:

     "I am happy to see your majesty in the possession of the
     finest diamonds in Europe; and I entreat your majesty not to
     forget me."

The queen read this strange note aloud, again and again exclaiming,
"What does the man mean? He must be insane!" She quietly lighted the
note at a wax taper which was standing near her, and burned it,
remarking that it was not worth keeping. Afterward, as she reflected
more upon the enigmatical nature of the communication, she deeply
regretted that she had not preserved the note. She pondered the matter
deeply and anxiously, and at last said to Madame Campan,

"The next time you see that man, I wish that you would tell him that I
have lost all taste for diamonds; that I never shall buy another as long
as I live; and that, if I had any money to spare, I should expend it in
purchasing lands to enlarge the grounds at St. Cloud."

A few days after this, Boehmer called upon Madame Campan at her
country house, extremely uneasy at not having received any answer from
the queen, and anxiously inquired if Madame Campan had no commission to
him from her majesty. Madame Campan faithfully repeated to him all that
the queen had requested her to say.

"But," rejoined Boehmer, "the answer to the letter I presented to her!
To whom must I apply for that?"

"To no one," was the reply; "her majesty burned your memorial, without
even comprehending its meaning."

"Ah, madame!" exclaimed the man, trembling with agitation, "that is
impossible; the queen knows that she has money to pay me."

"Money, M. Boehmer!" replied the lady, "your last accounts against the
queen were discharged long ago."

"And are you not in the secret?" he rejoined. "The queen owes me three
hundred thousand dollars, and I am ruined by her neglect to pay me."

"Three hundred thousand dollars!" exclaimed Madame Campan, in amazement;
"man, you have lost your senses! For what does she owe you that enormous
sum?"

"For the necklace, madame," replied the jeweler, now pale and trembling
with the apprehension that he had been deceived.

"The necklace again!" said Madame Campan. "How long is the queen to be
teased about that necklace? Did not you yourself tell me that you had
sold it at Constantinople?"

"The queen," added Boehmer, "requested me to make that reply to all
who inquired upon the subject, for she was not willing to have it known
that she had made the purchase. She, however, had determined to have the
necklace, and sent the Cardinal de Rohan to me to take it in her name."

"You are utterly deceived, Boehmer," Madame Campan replied; "the queen
knows nothing about your necklace. She never speaks even to the Cardinal
de Rohan, and there is no man at court more strongly disliked by her."

"You may depend upon it, madame, that you are deceived yourself,"
rejoined the jeweler. "She must hold private interviews with the
cardinal, for she gave to the cardinal six thousand dollars, which he
paid me on account, and which he assured me he saw her take from the
little porcelain secretary next the fire-place in her boudoir."

"Did the cardinal himself assure you of this?" inquired Madame Campan.

"Yes, madame," was the reply.

"What a detestable plot! There is not one word of truth in it; and you
have been miserably deceived."

"I confess," Boehmer rejoined, now trembling in every joint, "that I
have felt very anxious about it for some time; for the cardinal assured
me that the queen would wear the necklace on Whitsunday. I was, however,
alarmed in seeing that she did not wear it, and that induced me to write
the letter to her majesty. But what _shall_ I do?"

"Go immediately to Versailles, and lay the whole matter before the king.
But you have been extremely culpable, as crown jeweler, in acting in a
matter of such great importance without direct orders from the king or
queen, or their accredited minister."

"I have not acted," the unhappy man replied, "without direct orders. I
have now in my possession all the promissory notes, signed by the queen
herself; and I have been obliged to show those notes to several bankers,
my creditors, to induce them to extend the time of my payments."

Instead, however, of following Madame Campan's judicious advice,
Boehmer, half delirious with solicitude, went directly to the
cardinal, and informed him of all that had transpired. The cardinal
appeared very much embarrassed, asked a few questions, and said but
little. He, however, wrote in his diary the following memorandum:

    "On this day, August 3, Boehmer went to Madame Campan's
    country-house, and she told him that the queen had never had
    his necklace, and that he had been cheated."

Boehmer was almost frantic with terror, for the loss of the necklace
was his utter and irremediable ruin. Finding no relief in his interview
with the cardinal, he hastened to Little Trianon, and sent a message
to the queen that Madame Campan wished him to see her immediately.
The queen, who knew nothing of the occurrences we have just related,
exclaimed, "That man is surely mad. I have nothing to say to him, and I
will not see him." Madame Campan, however, immediately called upon the
queen, for she was very much alarmed by what she had heard, and related
to her the whole occurrence. The queen was exceedingly amazed and
perplexed, and feared that it was some deep-laid plot to involve her in
difficulties. She questioned Madame Campan very minutely in reference
to every particular of the interview, and insisted upon her repeating
the conversation over and over again. They then went immediately to
the king, and narrated to him the whole affair. He, aware of the
many efforts which had been made to traduce the character of Maria
Antoinette, and to expose her to public contumely, was at once convinced
that it was a treacherous plot of the cardinal in revenge for his
neglect at court.

The king instantly sent a command for the cardinal to meet him and the
queen in the king's closet. He was, apparently, anticipating the
summons, for he, without delay, appeared before them in all the pomp of
his pontifical robes, but was nevertheless so embarrassed that he could
with difficulty articulate a sentence.

"You have purchased diamonds of Boehmer?" inquired the king.

"Yes, sire," was the trembling reply.

"What have you done with them?" the king added.

"I thought," said the cardinal, "that they had been delivered to the
queen."

"Who commissioned you to make this purchase?"

"The Countess Lamotte," was the reply. "She handed me a letter from the
queen requesting me to obtain the necklace for her. I truly thought that
I was obeying her majesty's wishes, and doing her a favor, by taking
this business upon myself."

"How could you imagine, sir," indignantly interrupted the queen, "that
I should have selected _you_ for such a purpose, when I have not even
spoken to you for eight years? and how could you suppose that I should
have acted through the mediation of such a character as the Countess
Lamotte?"

The cardinal was in the most violent agitation, and, apparently hardly
knowing what he said, replied, "I see plainly that I have been duped. I
will pay for the necklace myself. I suspected no trick in the affair,
and am extremely sorry that I have had any thing to do with it."

He then took a letter from his pocket directed to the Countess Lamotte,
and signed with the queen's name, requesting her to secure the purchase
of the necklace. The king and queen looked at the letter, and instantly
pronounced it a forgery. The king then took from his own pocket a letter
addressed to the jeweler Boehmer, and, handing it to de Rohan, said,

"Are you the author of that letter?"

The cardinal turned pale, and, leaning upon his hand, appeared as though
he would fall to the floor.

"I have no wish, cardinal," the king kindly replied, "to find you
guilty. Explain to me this enigma. Account for all those maneuvers with
Boehmer. Where did you obtain these securities and these promissory
notes, signed in the queen's name, which have been given to Boehmer?"

The cardinal, trembling in every nerve, faintly replied, "Sire, I am too
much agitated now to answer your majesty. Give me a little time to
collect my thoughts."

"Compose yourself, then, cardinal," the king added. "Go into my cabinet.
You will there find papers, pens, and ink. At your leisure, _write_ what
you have to say to me."

In about half an hour the cardinal returned with a paper, covered with
erasures, and alterations, and blottings, as confused and unsatisfactory
as his verbal statements had been. An officer was then summoned into the
royal presence, and commanded to take the cardinal into custody and
conduct him to the Bastile. He was, however, permitted to visit his
home. The cardinal contrived, by the way, to scribble a line upon a
scrap of paper, and, catching the eye of a trusty servant, he,
unobserved, slipped it into his hand. It was a direction to the servant
to hasten to the palace, with the utmost possible speed, and commit to
the flames all of his private papers. The king had also sent officers
to the cardinal's palace to seize his papers and seal them for
examination. By almost superhuman exertions, the cardinal's servant
first arrived at the palace, which was at the distance of several miles.
His horse dropped dead in the court-yard. The important documents, which
might, perhaps, have shed light upon this mysterious affair, were all
consumed.

The Countess Lamotte was also arrested, and held in close confinement to
await her trial. She had just commenced living in a style of
extraordinary splendor, and had vast sums at her disposal, acquired no
one knew how. It is difficult to imagine the excitement which this story
produced all over Europe. It was represented that the queen was found
engaged in a swindling transaction with a profligate woman to cheat the
crown jeweler out of gems of inestimable value, and that, being
detected, she was employing all the influence of the crown to shield her
own reputation by consigning the innocent cardinal to infamy. The
enemies of the queen, sustained by the ecclesiastics generally, rallied
around the cardinal. The king and queen, feeling that his acquittal
would be the virtual condemnation of Maria Antoinette, and firmly
convinced of his guilt, exerted their utmost influence, in self-defense,
to bring him to punishment. Rumors and counter rumors floated through
Versailles, Paris, and all the courts of the Continent. The tale was
rehearsed in saloon and café with every conceivable addition and
exaggeration, and the queen hardly knew which way to turn from the
invectives which were so mercilessly showered upon her. Her lofty
spirit, conscious of rectitude, sustained her in public, and there she
nerved herself to appear with firmness and equanimity. But in the
retirement of her boudoir she was unable to repel the most melancholy
imaginings, and often wept with almost the anguish of a bursting heart.
The sunshine of her life had now disappeared. Each succeeding day grew
darker and darker with enveloping glooms.

The trial of the cardinal continued, with various interruptions, for
more than a year. Very powerful parties were formed for and against him.
All France was agitated by the protracted contest. The cardinal appeared
before his judges in mourning robes, but with all the pageantry of the
most imposing ecclesiastical costume. He was conducted into court with
much ceremony, and treated with the greatest deference. In the trying
moment in which he first appeared before his judges, his courage seemed
utterly to fail him. Pale and trembling with emotion, his knees bent
under him, and he had to cling to a support to prevent himself from
falling to the floor. Five or six voices immediately addressed him in
tones of sympathy, and the president said, "His eminence the cardinal is
at liberty to sit down, if he wishes it." The distinguished prisoner
immediately took his seat with the members of the court. Having soon
recovered in some degree his composure, he arose, and for half an hour
addressed his judges, with much feeling and dignity, repeating his
protestations of entire innocence in the whole affair.

At the close of this protracted trial, the cardinal was fully acquitted
of all guilt by a majority of three voices. The king and queen were
extremely chagrined at this result. During the trial, many insulting
insinuations were thrown out against the queen which could not easily be
repelled. A friend who called upon her immediately after the decision,
found her in her closet weeping bitterly. "Come," said Maria, "come and
weep for your queen, insulted and sacrificed by cabal and injustice."
The king came in at the same moment, and said, "You find the queen much
afflicted; she has great reason to be so. They were determined through
out this affair to see only an ecclesiastical prince, a Prince de Rohan,
while he is, in fact, a needy fellow, and all this was but a scheme to
put money into his pockets. It is not necessary to be an Alexander to
cut this Gordian knot." The cardinal subsequently emigrated to Germany,
where he lived in comparative obscurity till 1803, when he died.

The Countess Lamotte was brought to trial, but with a painfully
different result. Dressed in the richest and most costly robes, the
dissolute beauty appeared before her judges, and astonished them all by
her imperturbable self-possession, her talents, and her cool effrontery.
It was clearly proved that she had received the necklace; that she had
sold here and there the diamonds of which it was composed, and had thus
come into possession of large sums of money. She told all kinds of
stories, contradicting herself in a thousand ways, accusing now one and
again another as an accomplice, and unblushingly declaring that she had
no intention to tell the truth, for that neither she nor the cardinal
had uttered one single word before the court which had not been false.
She was found guilty, and the following horrible sentence was pronounced
against her: that she should be whipped upon the bare back in the
court-yard of the prison; that the letter V should be burned into the
flesh on each shoulder with a hot iron; and that she should be
imprisoned for life. The king and queen were as much displeased with the
terrible barbarity of the punishment of the countess as they were
chagrined at the acquittal of the cardinal. As the countess was a
descendant of the royal family, they felt that the ignominious character
of the punishment was intended as a stigma upon them.

As the countess was sitting one morning in the spacious room provided
for her in the prison, in a loose robe, conversing gayly with some
friends, and surrounded by all the appliances of wealth, an attendant
appeared to conduct her into the presence of the judges. Totally
unprepared for the awful doom impending over her, she rose with careless
alacrity and entered the court. The terrible sentence was pronounced.
Immediately terror, rage, and despair seized upon her, and a scene of
horror ensued which no pen can describe. Before the sentence was
finished, she threw herself upon the floor, and uttered the most
piercing shrieks and screams. The tumult of agitation into which she was
thrown, dreadful as it was, relaxed not the stern rigor of the law. The
executioner immediately seized her, and dragged her, shrieking and
struggling in a delirium of phrensy, into the court-yard of the prison.
As her eye fell upon the instruments of her ignominious and brutal
punishment, she seized upon one of her executioners with her teeth, and
tore a mouthful of flesh from his arm. She was thrown upon the ground,
her garments, with relentless violence, were stripped from her back, and
the lash mercilessly cut its way into her quivering nerves, while her
awful screams pierced the damp, chill air of the morning. The hot irons
were brought, and simmered upon her recoiling flesh. The unhappy
creature was then carried, mangled and bleeding, and half dead with
torture, and terror, and madness, to the prison hospital. After nine
months of imprisonment she was permitted to escape. She fled to England,
and was found one morning dead upon the pavements of London, having been
thrown from a third story window in a midnight carousal.

Such was the story of the Diamond Necklace. Though no one can now doubt
that Maria Antoinette was perfectly innocent in the whole affair, it, at
the time, furnished her enemies with weapons against her, which they
used with fatal efficiency. It was then represented that the Countess
Lamotte was an accomplice of the queen in the fraudulent acquisition of
the necklace, and that the Cardinal de Rohan was their deluded but
innocent victim. The horrible punishment of Madame Lamotte, who boasted
that royal blood circulated in her veins, was understood to be in
contempt of royalty, and as the expression of venomous feeling toward
the queen. Both Maria Antoinette and Louis felt it as such, and were
equally aggrieved by the acquittal of the cardinal and the barbarous
punishment of the countess.

Whether the cardinal was a victim or an accomplice is a question which
never has been, and now never can be, decided. The mystery in which the
affair is involved must remain a mystery until the secrets of all hearts
are revealed at the great day of judgment. If he was the guilty
instigator, and the poor countess but his tool and victim, how much has
he yet to be accountable for in the just retributions of eternity! There
were three suppositions adopted by the community in the attempt to
solve the mystery of this transaction:

     1. The first was, that the queen had really employed the
     Countess Lamotte to obtain the necklace by deceiving the
     cardinal. That it was a trick by which the queen and the
     countess were to obtain the necklace, and, by selling it
     piecemeal, to share the spoil, leaving the cardinal
     responsible for the payment. This was the view the enemies
     of Maria Antoinette, almost without exception, took of the
     case; and the sentence of acquittal of the cardinal, and the
     horrible condemnation of the countess, were intended to
     sustain this view. This opinion, spread through Paris and
     France, was very influential in rousing that animosity which
     conducted Maria Antoinette to sufferings more poignant and
     to a doom more awful than the Countess Lamotte could by any
     possibility endure.

     2. The second supposition was, that the cardinal and the
     countess forged the signature of the queen to defraud the
     jeweler; that they thus obtained the rich prize of three
     hundred and twenty thousand dollars, intending to divide the
     spoil between them, and throw the obloquy of the transaction
     upon the queen. The king and queen were both fully
     convinced that this was the true explanation of the fraud,
     and they retained this belief undoubted until they died.

     3. The third supposition, and that which now is almost
     universally entertained, was, that the crafty woman Lamotte,
     by forgery, and by means of an accomplice, who very much, in
     figure, resembled Maria Antoinette, completely duped the
     cardinal. His anxiety was such to be restored to the royal
     favor, that he eagerly caught at the bait which the wily
     countess presented to him. But, whoever may have been the
     guilty ones, no one now doubts that Maria Antoinette was
     entirely innocent. She, however, experienced all the
     ignominy she could have encountered had she been involved in
     the deepest guilt.




CHAPTER V.

THE MOB AT VERSAILLES.

1789

A gathering storm.--Condition of the French people.--Forces assembled
at Versailles.--The populace rise upon the troops.--Terror and
confusion.--Attack on the Bastile.--The Bastile taken.--Awful
tumult.--Energy of the queen.--Resolution of the king.--The king
visits Paris.--Strange cavalcade.--Painful suspense of the
queen.--Return of the king.--The banquet at Versailles.--Enthusiastic
loyalty.--News of the banquet.--Famine in Paris.--The mob marches to
Versailles.--Heroic reply of the queen.--Violence of the mob.--The
queen retires to rest.--Peril of the queen.--Her narrow escape.--The
mob in the palace.--Heroic conduct of the queen.--The queen appears
on the balcony.--Her composure.--The queen applauded.--The royal
family taken to Paris.--An army of vagabonds.--The royal family
grossly insulted.--The royal family in the Tuileries.--The queen's
self-sacrificing spirit.--Rioting and violence.--The dauphin's
question.--The king's explanation to his son.--Flight of the
nobility.--Inflammatory placards.--The Duke of Orleans.--The Duke
of Orlean's plans frustrated.--Rumors of an invasion.--The leaders of
the populace.--The queen urged to attend the theater.--Dignified reply
of the queen.--Her unpopularity increases.--The queen's vigorous
action.--Ultimate cause of the popular fury.--Transgressors visited
in their children.


The year 1789 opened upon France lowering with darkness and portentous
storms. The events to which we have alluded in the preceding chapters,
and various others of a similar nature, conspired to foment troubles
between the French monarch and his subjects, which were steadily and
irresistibly increasing. The great mass of the people, ignorant,
degraded, and maddened by centuries of oppression, were rising, with
delirious energy, to batter down a corrupt church and a despotic throne,
and to overwhelm the guilty and the innocent alike in indiscriminate
ruin. The storm had been gathering for ages, but those who had been
mainly instrumental in raising it were now slumbering in their graves.
Mobs began to sweep the streets of Paris, phrensied with rum and rage,
and all law was set at defiance. The king, mild in temperament, and with
no force of character, was extremely averse to any measures of violence.
The queen, far more energetic, with the spirit of her heroic mother,
would have quelled these insurrections with the strong arm of military
power.

[Illustration: VIEW OF THE BASTILE.]

The king at last was compelled, in order to protect the royal family
from insult, to encamp his army around his palaces; and long trains
of artillery and of cavalry incessantly traversed the streets of
Versailles, to prop the tottering monarchy. As Maria Antoinette, from
the windows, looked down upon these formidable bands, and saw the
crowd of generals and colonels who filled the saloons of the palace,
her fainting courage was revived. The sight of these soldiers, called
to quell the insurgent people, roused the Parisians to the intensest
fury. "To arms! to arms! the king's troops are coming to massacre us,"
resounded through the streets of Paris in the gloom of night, in tones
which caused the heart of every peaceful citizen to quake with terror.
The infuriated populace hurled themselves upon the few troops who were
in Paris. Many of the soldiers of the king threw down their arms and
fraternized with the people. Others were withdrawn, by order of Louis,
to add to the forces which were surrounding his person at Versailles.
Paris was thus left at the mercy of the mob. The arsenals were
ransacked, the powder magazines were broken open, pikes were forged,
and in a day, as it were, all Paris was in arms. Thousands of the
noble and the wealthy fled in consternation from these scenes of
ever-accumulating peril, and bands of ferocious men and women, from
all the abodes of infamy, with the aspect and the energy of demons,
ravaged the streets.

When the morning of the 14th of March, 1789, dawned upon the city,
a scene of terror and confusion was witnessed which baffles all
description. In the heart of Paris there was a prison of terrible
celebrity, in whose dark dungeons many victims of oppression and crime
had perished. The Bastile, in its gloomy strength of rock and iron, was
the great instrument of terror with which the kings of France had, for
centuries, held all restless spirits in subjection. Now, the whole
population of Paris seemed to be rolling like an inundation toward this
apparently impregnable fortress, resolved to batter down its execrated
walls. "To the Bastile! to the Bastile!" was the cry which resounded
along the banks of the Seine, and through every street of the insurgent
metropolis; and men, women, and boys poured on and poured on, an
interminable host, choking every avenue with the agitated mass, armed
with guns, knives, swords, pikes--dragging artillery bestrode by
amazons, and filling the air with the clamor of Pandemonium. A conflict,
fierce, short, bloody, ensued, and the exasperated multitude, many of
them bleeding and maddened by wounds, clambered over the walls and
rushed through the shattered gateways, and, with yells of triumph,
became masters of the Bastile. The heads of its defenders were stuck
upon poles upon the battlements, and the mob, intoxicated with the
discovery of their resistless power, were beginning to inquire in what
scenes of violence they should next engage. At midnight, couriers
arrived at Versailles, informing the king and queen of the terrible
insurrections triumphant in the capital, and that the royal troops every
where, instead of being enthusiastic for the defense of the king,
manifested the strongest disposition to fraternize with the populace.
The tumult in Paris that night was awful. The rumor had entered every
ear that the king was coming with forty thousand troops to take dreadful
vengeance in the indiscriminate massacre of the populace. It was a night
of sleeplessness and terror--the carnival of all the monsters of crime
who thronged that depraved metropolis. The streets were filled with
intoxication and blasphemy. No dwelling was secure from pillage. The
streets were barricaded; pavements torn up, and the roofs of houses
loaded with the stones.

All the energies of the queen were aroused for a vigorous and heroic
resistance. She strove to inspire the king with firmness and courage.
He, however, thought only of concessions. He wished to win back the love
of his people by favors. He declared openly that never should one drop
of blood be shed at his command; and, with the heroism of endurance,
which he abundantly possessed, and to prove that he had been grossly
calumniated, he left Versailles in his carriage to go unprotected to
Paris, into the midst of the infuriated populace. Just as he was
entering his carriage on this dangerous expedition, he received
intelligence that a plot was formed to assassinate him on the way. This,
however, did not in the slightest degree shake his resolution. The agony
of the queen was irrepressible as she bade him adieu, never expecting to
see him again.

The National Assembly, consisting of nearly twelve hundred persons, was
then in session at Versailles, the great majority of them sympathizing
with the populace, and yet were alarmed in view of the lawless violence
which their own acts had awakened, and which was every where desolating
the land. As, on the morning of the 17th of July, the king entered his
carriage with a slender retinue, and with no military protection, to
expose himself to the dangers of his tumultuous capital, this whole
body formed in procession on foot and followed him. A countless throng
of artisans and peasants flocked from all the streets of Versailles,
and poured in from the surrounding country, armed with scythes and
bludgeons, and joined the strange cavalcade. Every moment the multitude
increased, and the road, both before and behind the king, was so clogged
with the accumulating mass, that seven hours passed before the king
arrived at the gates of the city. During all this time he was exposed to
every conceivable insult. As Louis was conducted to the Hotel de Ville,
a hundred thousand armed men lined the way, and he passed along under
the arch of their sabers crossed over his head. The cup of degradation
he was compelled to drain to its dregs.

While the king was absent from Versailles on this dreadful visit,
silence and the deepest gloom pervaded the palace. The queen,
apprehensive that the king would be either massacred or retained a
prisoner in Paris, was overwhelmed with the anguish of suspense. She
retired to her chamber, and, with continually gushing tears, prepared
an appeal to the National Assembly, commencing with these words:
"Gentlemen, I come to place in your hands the wife and family of your
sovereign. Do not suffer those who have been united in heaven to be put
asunder on earth." Late in the evening the king returned, to the
inexpressible joy of his household. But the narrative he gave of the
day's adventure plunged them all again into the most profound grief.

The visit of the king had no influence in diminishing the horrors of the
scenes now hourly enacted in the French capital. His friends were openly
massacred in the streets, hung up at the lamp-posts, and roasted at slow
fires, while their dying agonies were but the subjects of derision. The
contagion of crime and cruelty spread to every other city in the empire.
The higher nobility and the more wealthy citizens began very generally
to abandon their homes, seeing no escape from these dangers but by
precipitate flight to foreign lands. Such was the state of affairs,
when the officers of some of the regiments assembled at Versailles for
the protection of the king had a public banquet in the saloon of the
opera. All the rank and elegance which had ventured yet to linger around
the court graced the feast with their presence in the surrounding boxes.
In the midst of their festivities, their chivalrous enthusiasm was
excited in behalf of the king and queen. They drank their health--they
vowed to defend them even unto death. Wine had given fervor to their
loyalty. The ladies showered upon them bouquets, waved their
handkerchiefs, and tossed to them white cockades, the emblem of Bourbon
power. And now the cry arose, loud, and long, and enthusiastic, for the
king and queen to come and show themselves to their defenders. The door
suddenly opened, and the king and queen appeared. Enthusiasm immediately
rose almost to phrensy. The hall resounded with acclamations, and the
king, entirely unmanned by these expressions of attachment, burst into
tears. The band struck up the pathetic air, "O Richard! O my king! the
world abandons you." There was no longer any bounds to the transport.
The officers and the ladies mingled together in a scene of indescribable
enthusiasm.

The tidings of this banquet spread like wildfire through Paris,
magnified by the grossest exaggerations. It was universally believed
that the officers had contemptuously trampled the tri-colored cockade,
the adopted emblem of popular power, under their feet; that they had
sharpened their sabers, and sworn to exterminate the National Assembly
and the people of Paris. All business was at a stand. No laborer was
employed. The provisions in the city were nearly all consumed. No baker
dared to appear with his cart, or farmer to send in his corn, for
pillage was the order of the day. The exasperated and starving people
hung a few bakers before their own ovens, but that did not make bread
any more plenty. The populace of Paris were now starving, literally and
truly starving. A gaunt and haggard woman seized a drum and strode
through the streets, beating it violently, and mingling with its din her
shrieks of "Bread! bread!" A few boys follow her--then a score of female
furies--and then thousands of desperate men. The swelling inundation
rolls from street to street; the alarm bells are rung; all Paris
composes one mighty, resistless mob, motiveless, aimless, but ripe
for any deed of desperation. The cry goes from mouth to mouth "To
Versailles! to Versailles!" Why, no one knows, only that the king and
queen are there. Impetuously, as by a blind instinct, the monster mass
moves on. La Fayette, at the head of the National Guard, knows not what
to do, for all the troops under his command sympathize with the people,
and will obey no orders to resist them. He therefore merely follows on
with his thirty-five thousand troops to watch the issue of events. The
king and queen are warned of the approaching danger, and Louis entreats
Maria Antoinette to take the children in the carriages and flee to some
distant place of safety. Others join most earnestly in the entreaty.
"Nothing," replies the queen, "shall induce me, in such an extremity, to
be separated from my husband. I know that they seek my life. But I am
the daughter of Maria Theresa, and have learned not to fear death."

[Illustration: GARDENS AT VERSAILLES.]

From the windows of their mansion the disorderly multitude were soon
descried, in a dense and apparently interminable mass, pouring along
through the broad avenues toward the palaces of Versailles. It was in
the evening twilight of a dark and rainy day. Like ocean tides, the
frantic mob rolled in from every direction. Their shouts and revels
swelled upon the night air. The rain began to fall in torrents. They
broke into the houses for shelter; insulted maids and matrons; tore
down every thing combustible for their watch fires; massacred a few
of the body-guard of the queen, and, with bacchanalian songs, roasted
their horses for food. And thus passed the hours of this long and
dreary night, in hideous outrages for which one can hardly find a
parallel in the annals of New Zealand cannibalism. The immense gardens
of Versailles were filled with a tumultuous ocean of half-frantic men
and women, tossed to and fro in the wildest and most reckless
excitement.

Toward morning, the queen, worn out with excitement and sleeplessness,
having received from La Fayette the assurance that he had so posted
the guard that she need be in no apprehension of personal danger, had
retired to her chamber for rest. The king had also retired to his
apartment, which was connected with that of the queen by a hall, through
which they could mutually pass. Two faithful soldiers were stationed at
the door of the queen's chamber for her defense. Hardly had the queen
placed her head upon her pillow before she heard a dreadful clamor upon
the stairs--the discharge of fire-arms, the clashing of swords, and the
shouts of the mob rushing upon her door. The faithful guard, bleeding
beneath the blows of the assailants, had only time to cry to the queen,
"Fly! fly for your life!" when they were stricken down. The queen sprang
from her bed, rushed to the door leading to the king's apartments, when,
to her dismay, she found that it was locked, and that the key was upon
the other side. With the energy of despair, she knocked and called for
help. Fortunately, some one rushed to her rescue from the king's chamber
and opened the door. The queen had just time to slip through and again
turn the key, when the whole raging mob, with oaths and imprecations,
burst into the room, and pierced her bed through and through with their
sabers and bayonets. Happy would it have been for Maria if in that short
agony she might have died. But she was reserved by a mysterious
Providence for more prolonged tortures and for a more dreadful doom.

A few of the National Guard, faithful to the king, rallied around the
royal family, and La Fayette soon appeared, and was barely able to
protect the king and queen from massacre. He had no power to effectually
resist the tempest of human passion which was raging, but was swept
along by its violence. Nearly all of the interior of the palace was
ransacked and defiled by the mob. The bloody heads of the massacred
guards, stuck upon pikes, were raised up to the windows of the king, to
insult and to terrify the royal family with these hideous trophies of
the triumph of their foes.

At length the morning succeeding this dreadful night dawned lurid and
cheerless. It was the 8th of October, 1789. Dark clouds over-shadowed
the sky, showers of mist were driven through the air, and the branches
of the trees swayed to and fro before the driving storm. Pools of water
filled the streets, and a countless multitude of drunken vagabonds, in a
mass so dense as to be almost impervious, besieged the palace, having no
definite plan or desire, only furious with the thought that now was the
hour in which they could wreak vengeance upon aristocrats for ages of
oppression. Muskets were continually discharged by the more desperate,
and bullets passed through the windows of the palace. Maria Antoinette,
in these trying scenes, indeed appeared queenly. Her conduct was heroic
in the extreme. Her soul was nerved to the very highest acts of
fearlessness and magnanimity. Seeing the mob in the court-yard below
ready to tear in pieces some of her faithful guard whom they had
captured, regardless of the shots which were whistling by her, she
persisted in exposing herself at the open window to beg for their lives;
and when a friend, M. Luzerne, placed himself before her, that his body
might be her shield from the bullets, she gently, but firmly, with her
hand, pressed him away, saying, "The king can not afford to lose so
faithful a servant as you are."

At length the crowd began vigorously to shout, "The queen! the queen!"
demanding that she should appear upon the balcony. She immediately came
forth, with her children at her side, that, as a mother, she might
appeal to their hearts. The sight moved the sympathies of the multitude;
and execrating, as they did, Maria Antoinette, whom they had long been
taught to hate, they could not have the heart, in cold blood, to
massacre these innocent children. Thousands of voices simultaneously
shouted, "Away with the children!" Maria, apparently without the tremor
of a nerve, led back her children, and again appearing upon the balcony
alone, folded her arms, and, raising her eyes to heaven, stood before
them, a self-devoted victim. The heroism of the act changed for a moment
hatred to admiration. Not a gun was fired; there was a moment of
silence, and then one spontaneous burst of applause rose apparently from
every lip, and shouts of "Vive la reine! vive la reine!" pierced the
skies.

[Illustration: MOB AT VERSAILLES.]

And now the universal cry ascends, "To Paris! to Paris!" La Fayette,
with the deepest mortification, was compelled to inform the king that
he had no force at his disposal sufficient to enable him to resist
the demands of the mob. The king, seeing that he was entirely at the
mercy of his foes, who were acting without leaders and without plan,
as the caprice of each passing moment instigated, said, "You wish, my
children, that I should accompany you to Paris. I can not go but on
condition that I shall not be separated from my wife and family." To
this proposal there was a tumultuous assent. At one o'clock, the king
and queen, with their two children, entered the royal carriage to be
escorted by the triumphant mob as captives to Paris. Behind them, in a
long train, followed the carriages of the king's suite and servants.
Then followed twenty-five carriages filled with the members of the
National Assembly. After them came the thirty-five thousand troops
of the National Guard; and before, behind, and around them all,
a hideous concourse of vagabonds, male and female, in uncounted
thousands, armed with every conceivable weapon, yelling, blaspheming,
and crowding against the carriages so that they surged to and fro like
ships in a storm. This motley multitude kept up an incessant discharge
of fire-arms loaded with bullets, and the balls often struck the
ornaments of the carriages, and the king and queen were often almost
suffocated with the smoke of powder. The two body-guard, who had been
massacred while so faithfully defending the queen at the door of her
chamber, were beheaded, and, their gory heads affixed to pikes, were
carried by the windows of the carriage, and pressed upon the view of
the wretched captives with every species of insult and derision. La
Fayette was powerless. He was borne along resistlessly by this
whirlwind of human passions. None were so malignant, so ferocious, so
merciless, as the degraded women who mingled with the throng. They
bestrode the cannon singing the most indecent and insulting songs. "We
shall now have bread," they exclaimed; "for we have with us the baker,
and the baker's wife, and the baker's boy." During seven long hours
of agony were the royal family exposed to these insults, before the
unwieldy mass had urged its slow way to Paris. The darkness of night
was settling down around the city as the royal captives were led into
the Hotel de Ville. No one seemed then to know what to do, or why the
king and queen had been brought from Versailles. The mayor of the city
received them there with the external mockery of respect and homage.
He had them then conducted to the Tuileries, the gorgeous city palace
of the kings of France, now the prison of the royal family. Soldiers
were stationed at all the avenues to the palace, ostensibly to
preserve the royal family from danger, but, in reality, to guard them
from escape.

A moment before the queen entered her carriage for this march of
humiliation, she hastily retired to her private apartment, and, bursting
into tears, surrendered herself to the most uncontrollable emotion. Then
immediately, as if relieved and strengthened by this flood of tears, she
summoned all her energies, and appeared as she had ever appeared, the
invincible sovereign. Indeed, through all these dreadful scenes she
never seemed to have a thought for herself. It was for her husband and
her children alone that she wept and suffered. Through all the long
hours of the night succeeding this day of horror, Paris was one boiling
caldron of tumult and passion. Rioting and violence filled all its
streets, and the clamor of madness and inebriation drove sleep from
every pillow. The excitement of the day had been too terrible to allow
either the king or the queen to attempt repose. The two children, in
utter exhaustion, found a few hours of agitated slumber from the terror
with which they had so long been appalled. But in the morning, when the
dauphin awoke, being but six or eight years of age, hearing the report
of musketry and the turmoil still resounding in the streets, he threw
his arms around his mother's neck, and, as he clung trembling to her
bosom, exclaimed, "O mother! mother! is to-day yesterday again?" Soon
after, his father came into the room. The little prince, to whom sorrow
had given a maturity above his years, contemplated his father for a
moment with a pensive air, went up to him and said, "Dear father, why
are your people, who formerly loved you so well, now, all of a sudden
so angry with you? And what have you done to irritate them so much?"

[Illustration: GRAND AVENUE OF THE TUILERIES.]

The king thus replied. "I wished, my dear child, to render the
people still happier than they were. I wanted money to pay the
expenses occasioned by wars. I asked the Parliament for money, as my
predecessors have always done. Magistrates composing the Parliament
opposed it, and said that the _people_ alone had a right to consent
to it. I assembled the principal inhabitants of every town, whether
distinguished by birth, fortune, or talents, at Versailles. That is
what is called the _States-General_. When they were assembled, they
required concessions of me which I could not make, either with due
respect for myself or with justice to you, who will be my successor.
Wicked men, inducing the people to rise, have occasioned the excesses
of the last few days. The _people_ must not be blamed for them."

While these terrific scenes were passing in Paris and in France, the
majority of the nobility were rapidly emigrating to find refuge in other
lands. Every night the horizon was illumined by the conflagration of
their chateaux, burned down by mobs. Many of them were mercilessly
tortured to death. Large numbers, however, gathering around them such
treasures as could easily be carried away, escaped to Germany on the
frontiers of France. Some fifteen hundred of these emigrants were
at Coblentz, organizing themselves into a military band, seeking
assistance from the Austrian monarchy, and threatening, with an
overwhelming force of invasion, to recover their homes and their
confiscated estates, and to rescue the royal family. The populace in
Paris were continually agitated with the rumors of this gathering army
at Coblentz. As Maria was an Austrian, she was accused of being in
correspondence with the emigrants, and of striving to rouse the Austrian
monarchy to make war upon France, and to deluge Paris with the blood of
its citizens. Most inflammatory placards were posted in the streets.
Speeches full of rancor and falsehood were made to exasperate the
populace. And when the fish-women wished to cast upon the queen some
epithet of peculiar bitterness, they called her "The Austrian."

It is confidently asserted that the mob was instigated to the march to
Versailles by the emissaries of the Duke of Orleans, the father of
Louis Philippe. The duke hoped that the royal family, terrified by the
approach of the infuriated multitude, would enter their carriages and
flee to join the emigrants at Coblentz. The throne would then be vacant,
and the people would make the Duke of Orleans, who, to secure this
result, had become one of the most violent of the Democrats, their king.
It was a deeply-laid plot and a very plausible enterprise. But the king
understood the plan, and refused thus to be driven from the throne of
his fathers. He, however, entreated the queen to take the children and
escape. She resolutely declared that no peril should induce her to
forsake her husband, but that she would live or die by his side. During
all the horrors of that dreadful night, when the palace at Versailles
was sacked, the duke, in disguise, with his adherents, was endeavoring
to direct the fury of the storm for the accomplishment of this purpose.
But his plans were entirely frustrated. The caprice seized the mob to
carry the king to Paris. This the Duke of Orleans of all things dreaded;
but matters had now passed entirely beyond his control. Rumors of the
approaching invasion were filling the kingdom with alarm. There was a
large minority, consisting of the most intelligent and wealthy, who were
in favor of the king, and who would eagerly join an army coming for
his rescue. Should the king escape and head that army, it would give
the invaders a vast accession of moral strength, and the insurgent
people feared a dreadful vengeance. Consequently, there were great
apprehensions entertained that the king might escape. The leaders of the
populace were not yet prepared to plunge him into prison or to load him
with chains. In fact, they had no definite plan before them. He was
still their recognized king. They even pretended that he was not their
captive--that they had politely, affectionately invited him, escorted
him on a visit to his capital. They entreated the king and queen to show
that they had no desire to escape, but were contented and happy, by
entering into all the amusements of operas, and theaters, and balls. But
in the mean time they doubled the guards around them, and drove away
their faithful servants, to place others at their tables and in their
chambers who should be their spies.

But two days after these horrid outrages, in the midst of which the king
and queen were dragged as captives to Paris, the city sent a deputation
to request the queen to appear at the theater, and thus to prove, by
participating in those gay festivities, that it was with pleasure that
she resided in her capital. With much dignity the queen replied, "I
should, with great pleasure, accede to the invitation of the people of
Paris; but time must be allowed me to soften the recollection of the
distressing events which have recently occurred, and from which I have
suffered so severely. Having come to Paris preceded by the heads of my
faithful guards, who perished before the door of their sovereign, I can
not think that such an entry into the capital ought to be followed by
rejoicings. But the happiness I have always felt in appearing in the
midst of the inhabitants of Paris is not effaced from my memory; and I
hope to enjoy that happiness again, so soon as I shall find myself able
to do so."

The queen was, however, increasingly the object of especial obloquy. She
was accused of urging the king to bombard the city, and to adopt other
most vigorous measures of resistance. It was affirmed that she held
continual correspondence with the emigrants at Coblentz, and was doing
all in her power to rouse Austria to come to the rescue of the king.
Maria would have been less than the noble woman she was if she had not
done all this, and more, for the protection of her husband, her child,
and herself. She inherited her mother's superiority of mind and mental
energy. Had Louis possessed her spirit, he might have perished
more heroically, but probably none the less surely. Maria did,
unquestionably, do every thing in her power to rouse her husband to
a more energetic and manly defense. Generations of kings, by
licentiousness, luxury, and oppression; by total disregard of the rights
of the people, and by the naughty contempt of their sufferings and
complaints, had kindled flames of implacable hatred against all kingly
power. Circumstances, over which neither Louis nor Maria had any
control, caused these flames to burst out with resistless fury around
the throne of France, at the time in which they happened to be seated
upon it. Though there never had been seated upon that throne more
upright, benevolent, and conscientious monarchs, they were compelled
to drain to the dregs the poisoned chalice which their ancestors had
mingled. Perhaps this world presents no more affecting illustration
of that mysterious principle of the divine government, by which the
transgressions of the parents are visited upon the children. Louis XIV.,
as haughty and oppressive a monarch as ever trod an enslaved people into
the dust, died peacefully in his luxurious bed. His descendant, Louis
XVI., as mild and benignant a sovereign as ever sat upon an earthly
throne, received upon his unresisting brow the doom from which his
unprincipled ancestors had escaped. It is difficult for us, in the
sympathy which is excited for the comparatively innocent Maria
Antoinette and Louis, to remember the ages of wrong and outrage by
which the popular exasperation had been raised to wreak itself in
indiscriminating atrocities. There is but one solution to these
mysteries: "After death comes the judgment."




CHAPTER VI.

THE PALACE A PRISON.

1789-1791

Condition of the royal family.--Ignominiously insulted.--The royal
family surrounded by spies.--The queen refuses to escape.--Excuse
for the emigrants.--Their plans.--Profligate women.--Their talk
with the queen.--Bravos of the women.--Plan for the queen's
escape.--Letter from the queen.--Her employments.--The king's
unwillingness to flee.--Execution of the Marquis of Favras.--Imprudence
of some of the queen's friends.--Her embarrassment.--The queen
weeps.--Present to Madame Favras.--The king continues inactive.--Plan
of Count d'Inisdal.--Indecision of the king.--The queen's
disappointment.--Displeasure of Count d'Inisdal.--An alarm.--Attempts
to assassinate the queen.--Removal to St. Cloud.--Another plan
for flight.--It is abandoned.--Exhibitions of attachment.--Emotions
of the queen.--The assassin in the garden.--Midnight
interviews.--Deliberations of the king's friends.--Taunting gift.--The
king's aunts leave France.--They are arrested.--Exciting debate.--The
ladies permitted to depart.--The royal family start for St. Cloud.--They
are compelled to return.--Preparations for flight.--Imprudence of the
king and queen.--Garments for the children.--The queen's diamonds and
jewels.--The queen's dressing-case.--The faithful Leonard.


The king and queen now found themselves in the gorgeous apartments of
the Tuileries, surrounded with all the mockery of external homage, but
incessantly exposed to the most ignominious insults, and guarded with
sleepless vigilance from the possibility of escape. The name of the
queen was the watchword of popular execration and rage. In the pride of
her lofty spirit, she spurned all apologies, explanations, or attempts
at conciliation. Inclosing herself in the recesses of her palace, she
heard with terror and resentment, but with an unyielding soul, the daily
acts of violence perpetrated against royalty and all of its friends. All
her trusty servants were removed, and spies in their stead occupied her
parlors and her chambers. Trembling far more for her husband and her
children than for herself, every noise in the streets aroused her
apprehensions of a new insurrection. And thus, for nearly two years of
melancholy days and sorrowful nights, the very nobleness of her nature,
glowing with heroic love, magnified her anguish. The terror of the times
had driven nearly all the nobility from the realm. The court was
forsaken, or attended only by the detested few who were forced as
ministers upon the royal family by the implacable populace. Every word
and every action of Maria Antoinette were watched, and reported by the
spies who surrounded her in the guise of servants. To obtain a private
interview with any of her few remaining friends, or even with her
husband, it was necessary to avail herself of private stair-cases, and
dark corridors, and the disguise of night. The queen regretted extremely
that the nobles, and others friendly to royalty, should, in these hours
of gathering danger, have fled from France. When urged to fly herself
from the dangers darkening around her, she resolutely refused, declaring
that she would never leave her husband and children, but that she would
live or die with them. The queen, convinced of the impolicy of
emigration, did every thing in her power to induce the emigrants to
return. Urgent letters were sent to them, to one of which the queen
added the following postscript with her own hand: "If you love your
king, your religion, your government, and your country, return! return!
return! Maria Antoinette." The emigrants were severely censured by many
for abandoning their king and country in such a crisis. But when all law
was overthrown, and the raging mob swayed hither and thither at its
will, and nobles were murdered on the high way or hung at lamp-posts in
the street, and each night the horizon was illumined by the
conflagration of their chateaux, a husband and father can hardly be
severely censured for endeavoring to escape with his wife and children
from such scenes of horror.

A year of gloom now slowly passed away, almost every moment of which was
embittered by disappointed hopes and gathering fears. The emigrants, who
were assembled at Coblentz, on the frontiers of Germany, were organizing
an army for the invasion of France and the restoration of the regal
power. The people were very fearful that the king and queen might
escape, and, joining the emigrants, add immeasurably to their moral
strength. There were thousands in France, overawed by the terrors of the
mob, who would most eagerly have rallied around the banners of such an
invading army, headed by their own king. Louis, however, with his
characteristic want of energy, was very unwilling to assume a hostile
attitude toward his subjects, and still vainly hoped, by concessions and
by the exhibition of a forgiving spirit, to reconcile his disaffected
people.

On the morning after the arrival of the king and queen at the Tuileries,
an occurrence took place highly characteristic of the times. A crowd of
profligate women, the same who bestrode the cannon the day before,
insulting the queen with the most abusive language, collected under the
queen's windows, upon the terrace of the palace. Maria, hearing their
outcries, came to the window. A furious termagant addressed her, telling
her that she must dismiss all such courtiers as ruin kings, and that she
must love the inhabitants of her good city. The queen replied,

"I have loved them at Versailles, and will also love them at Paris."

"Yes! yes!" answered another. "But you wanted to besiege the city and
have it bombarded. And you wanted to fly to the frontiers and join the
emigrants."

The queen mildly replied, "You have been told so, my friends, and have
believed it, and that is the cause of the unhappiness of the people and
of the best of kings."

Another addressed her in German, to which the queen answered, "I do not
understand you. I have become so entirely French as even to have
forgotten my mother tongue."

At this they all clapped their hands, and shouted, "Bravo! bravo!" They
then asked for the ribbons and flowers out of her hat. Her majesty
unfastened them herself, and then tossed them out of the window to the
women. They were received with great eagerness, and divided among the
party; and for half an hour they kept up the incessant shout, "Maria
Antoinette forever! Our good queen forever!"

In the course of a few weeks some of the devoted friends of the queen
had matured a plan by which _her_ escape could be, without difficulty,
effected. The queen, whose penetrating mind fully comprehended the peril
of her situation, replied, while expressing the deepest gratitude to her
friends for their kindness, "I will never leave either the king or my
children. If I thought that I alone were obnoxious to public hatred, I
would instantly offer my life as a sacrifice. But it is the throne which
is aimed at. In abandoning the king, no other advantage can be obtained
than merely saving my life; and I will never be guilty of such an act of
cowardice."

The following letter, which she wrote at this time to a friend, in reply
to a letter of sympathy in reference to the outrage which had torn her
from Versailles, will enable one to form a judgment of her situation and
state of mind at that time. "I shed tears of affection on reading your
sympathizing letter. You talk of my courage; it required much less to go
through the dreadful crisis of that day than is now daily necessary to
endure our situation, our own griefs, those of our friends, and those of
the persons who surround us. This is a heavy weight to sustain; and but
for the strong ties by which my heart is bound to my husband, my
children, and my friends, I should wish to sink under it. But you bear
me up. I ought to sacrifice such feelings to your friendship. But it is
I who bring misfortune on you all, and all your troubles are on my
account."

The queen now lived for some time in much retirement. She employed the
mornings in superintending the education of her son and daughter, both
of whom received all their lessons in her presence, and she endeavored
to occupy her mind, continually agitated as it was by ever-recurring
scenes of outrage and of danger, by working large pieces of tapestry.
She could not sufficiently recall her thoughts from the anxieties which
continually engrossed them to engage in reading. The king was extremely
unwilling to seek protection in flight, lest the throne should be
declared vacant, and he should thus lose his crown. He was ever hoping
that affairs would soon take such a turn that harmony would be restored
to his distracted kingdom. Maria Antoinette, however, who had a much
more clear discernment of the true state of affairs, soon felt convinced
that reconciliation, unless effected by the arm of power, was hopeless,
and she exerted all her influence to rouse the king to vigorous measures
for escape. While firmly resolved never to abandon her husband and her
family to save her own life, she still became very anxious that all
should endeavor to escape together.

About this time the Marquis of Favras was accused of having formed a
plan for the rescue of the royal family. He was very hastily tried, the
mob surrounding the tribunal and threatening the judges with instant
death unless they should condemn him. He was sentenced to be hung, and
was executed, surrounded by the insults and execrations of the populace
of Paris. The marquis left a wife and a little boy overwhelmed with
grief and in hopeless poverty. On the following Sunday morning, some
extremely injudicious friends of the queen, moved with sympathy for the
desolated family, without consulting the queen upon the subject,
presented the widow and the orphan in deepest mourning at court. The
husband and father had fallen a sacrifice to his love for the queen and
her family. The queen was extremely embarrassed. What course could she
with safety pursue? If she should yield to the dictates of her own
heart, and give expression to her emotions of sympathy and gratitude,
she would rouse to still greater fury the indignation of the populace
who were accusing her of the desire to escape, and who considered this
desire as one of the greatest of crimes. Should she, on the other hand,
surrender herself to the dictates of prudence, and neglect openly to
manifest any special interest in their behalf, how severely must she be
censured by the Loyalists for her ingratitude toward those who had been
irretrievably ruined through their love for her.

The queen was extremely pained by this unexpected and impolitic
presentation; for the fate of others, far dearer to her than her own
life, were involved in her conduct. She withdrew from the painful scene
to her private apartment, threw herself into a chair, and, weeping
bitterly, said to an intimate friend, "We must perish! We are assailed
by men who possess extraordinary talent, and who shrink from no crime.
We are defended by those who have the kindest intentions, but who have
no adequate idea of our situation. They have exposed me to the animosity
of both parties by presenting to me the widow and the son of the Marquis
of Favras. Were I free to act as my heart impels me, I should take the
child of the man who has so nobly sacrificed himself for us, and adopt
him as my own, and place him at the table between the king and myself.
But, surrounded by the assassins who have destroyed his father, I did
not dare even to cast my eyes upon him. The Royalists will blame me for
not having appeared interested in this poor child. The Revolutionists
will be enraged at the idea that his presentation should have been
thought agreeable to me." The next day the queen sent, by a confidential
friend, a purse of gold to Madame Favras, and assured her that she would
ever watch, with the deepest interest, over her fortune and that of her
son.

Innumerable plans were now formed for the rescue of the royal family,
and abandoned. The king could not be roused to energetic action. His
passive courage was indomitable, but he could not be induced to act on
the offensive, and, still hoping that by a spirit of conciliation he
might win back the affections of his people, he was extremely reluctant
to take any measures by which he should be arrayed in hostility against
them. Maria, on the contrary, knew that decisive action alone could be
of any avail. One night, about ten o'clock, the king and queen were
sitting in their private apartment of the Tuileries, endeavoring to
beguile the melancholy hours by a game of cards. The sister of the king,
Madame Elizabeth, with a very pensive countenance, was kneeling upon a
stool, by the side of the table, overlooking the game. A nobleman, Count
d'Inisdal, devotedly attached to the fortunes of the royal family,
entered, and, in a low tone of voice, informed the king and queen that a
plan was already matured to rescue them that very night; that a section
of the National Guard was gained over, that sets of fleet horses were
placed in relays at suitable distances, that carriages were ready, and
that now they only wanted the king's consent, and the scheme, at
midnight, would be carried into execution. The king listened to every
word without the movement of a muscle of his countenance, and, fixing
his eyes upon the cards in his hand, as if paying no attention to what
had been said, uttered not a syllable. For some time there was perfect
silence. At last Maria Antoinette, who was extremely anxious that the
king should avail himself of this opportunity for escape, broke the
embarrassing silence by saying, "Do you hear, sir, what is said to us?"
"Yes," replied the king, calmly, "I hear," and he continued his game.
Again there was a long silence. The queen, extremely anxious and
impatient, for the hour of midnight was drawing near, again interrupted
the silence by saying earnestly, "But, sir, some reply must be made to
this communication." The king paused for a moment, and then, still
looking upon the cards in his hand, said, "_The king can not consent to
be carried off._" Maria Antoinette was greatly disappointed at the want
of decision and of magnanimity implied in this answer. She, however,
said to the nobleman very eagerly, "Be careful and report this answer
correctly, the king can not _consent_ to be carried off." The king's
answer was doubtless intended as a tacit consent while he wished to
avoid the responsibility of participating in the design. The count,
however, was greatly displeased at this answer, and said to his
associates, "I understand it perfectly. He is willing that we should
seize and carry him, as if by violence, but wishes, in case of failure,
to throw all the blame upon those who are periling their lives to save
him." The queen hoped earnestly that the enterprise would not be
abandoned, and sat up till after midnight preparing her cases of
valuables, and anxiously watching for the coming of their deliverers.
But the hours lingered away, and the morning dawned, and the palace was
still their prison. The queen, shortly after, remarking upon this
indecision of the king, said, "We _must_ seek safety in flight. Our
peril increases every day. No one can tell to what extremities these
disturbances will lead."

La Fayette had informed the king, that, should he see any alarming
movement among the disaffected, threatening the exposure of the royal
family to new acts of violence, he would give them an intimation of
their danger by the discharge of a few cannon from the battery upon the
Pont Neuf. One night the report of guns from some casual discharge was
heard, and the king, regarding it as the warning, in great alarm flew
to the apartments of the queen. She was not there. He passed hastily
from room to room, and at last found her in the chamber of the dauphin,
with her two children in her arms. "Madame," said the king to her, "I
have been seeking you. I was very anxious about you." "You find me,"
replied the queen pointing to her children, "at my station."

Several unavailing attempts were made at this time to assassinate the
queen. These discoveries, however, seemed to cause Maria no alarm, and
she could not be induced to adopt any precautions for her personal
safety. Rarely did a day pass in which she did not encounter, in some
form, ignominy or insult. As the heat of summer came on, the royal
family removed to the palace of St. Cloud without any opposition, though
the National Guard followed them, professedly for their protection, but,
in reality, to guard against their escape. Here another plan was formed
for flight. The different members of the royal family, in disguise, were
to meet in a wood four leagues from St. Cloud. Some friends of the royal
family, who could be perfectly relied upon, were there to join them. A
large carriage was to be in attendance, sufficient to conduct the whole
family. The attendants at the palace would have no suspicion of their
escape until nine o'clock in the evening, as the royal carriages were
frequently out until that hour, and it would then take some time to send
to Paris to call together the National Assembly at midnight, and to send
couriers to overtake the fugitives. Thus, with fleet horses and fresh
relays, and having six or seven hours the start, the king and queen
might hope to escape apprehension. The queen very highly approved of
this plan, and was very anxious to have it carried into execution. But
for some unknown reason, the attempt was relinquished.

There were occasional exhibitions of strong individual attachment for
the king and queen which would, for a moment, create the illusion that a
reaction had commenced in the public mind. One day the queen was sitting
in her apartment at St. Cloud, in the deepest dejection of spirits,
mechanically working upon some tapestry to occupy the joyless and
lingering hours. It was four o'clock in the afternoon. The palace was
deserted and silent. The very earth and sky seemed mourning in sympathy
with the mourning queen. Suddenly, an unusual noise, as of many persons
conversing in an under tone, was heard beneath the window. The queen
immediately rose and went to the window; for every unaccustomed sound
was, in such perilous times, an occasion of alarm. Below the balcony,
she saw a group of some fifty persons, men and women, from the country,
apparently anxious to catch a glimpse of her. They were evidently humble
people, dressed in the costume of peasants. As soon as they saw the
queen, they gave utterance to the most passionate expressions of
attachment and devotion. The queen, who had long been accustomed only to
looks and words of defiance and insult, was entirely overpowered by
these kind words, and could not refrain from bursting into tears. The
sight of the weeping queen redoubled the affectionate emotions of the
loyal group, and, with the utmost enthusiasm, they reiterated their
assurances of love and their prayers for her safety. A lady of the
queen's household, apprehensive that the scene might arrest the
attention of the numerous spies who surrounded them, led her from the
window. The affectionate group, appreciating the prudence of the
measure, with tears of sympathy expressed their assent, and with
prayers, tears, and benedictions retired. Maria was deeply touched by
these unwonted tones of kindness, and, throwing herself into her chair,
sobbed with uncontrollable emotion. It was long before she could regain
her accustomed composure.

Many unsuccessful attempts were made at this time to assassinate the
queen. A wretch by the name of Rotondo succeeded one day in scaling the
walls of the garden, and hid himself in the shrubbery, intending to stab
the queen as she passed in her usual solitary promenade. A shower
prevented the queen from going into the garden, and thus her life was
saved. And yet, though the assassin was discovered and arrested, the
hostility of the public toward the royal family was such that he was
shielded from punishment.

The king and queen occasionally held private interviews at midnight,
with chosen friends, secretly introduced to the palace, in the apartment
of the queen. And there, in low tones of voice, and fearful of detection
by the numerous spies which infested the palace, they would deliberate
upon their peril, and upon the innumerable plans suggested for their
extrication. Some recommended the resort to violence; that the king
should gather around him as many of his faithful subjects as possible,
and settle the difficulties by an immediate appeal to arms. Others
urged further compromise, and the spirit of conciliation, hoping that
the king might thus regain his lost popularity, and re-establish his
tottering throne. Others urged, and Maria coincided most cordially in
this opinion, that it was necessary for the royal family to escape from
Paris immediately, which was the focus of disaffection, and at a safe
distance, surrounded by their armed friends, to treat with their enemies
and to compel them to reasonable terms. The indecision of the king,
however, appeared to be an insuperable obstacle in the way of any
decisive action.

One day a delegation appeared before the royal family from the
_conquerors of the Bastile_, with a new year's gift for the young
dauphin. The present consisted of a box of dominoes curiously wrought
from the stone of which that celebrated state prison was built. It was
an ingenious plan to insult the royal family under the pretense of
respect and affection, for on the lid of the box there was engraved the
following sentiment: "_These stones, from the walls which inclosed the
innocent victims of arbitrary power, have been converted into a toy, to
be presented to you, monseigneur, as an homage of the people's love,
and to teach you the extent of their power._"

About this time, the two aunts of the king left France, ostensibly for
the purpose of travelling, but, in reality, as an experiment, to see
what opposition would be made to prevent members of the royal family
from leaving the kingdom. As soon as their intention was known, it
excited the greatest popular ferment. A vast crowd of men and women
assembled at the palace, to prevent, if possible, with lawless violence,
their departure. It was merely two elderly ladies who wished to leave
France, but the excitement pervaded even the army, and many of the
soldiers joined the mob in the determination that they should not be
permitted to depart. The traces of the carriages were cut, and the
officers, who tried to protect the princesses, were nearly murdered. The
whole nation was agitated by the attempts of these two peaceful ladies
to visit Rome. When at some distance from Paris, they were arrested, and
the report of their arrest was sent to the National Assembly. The king
found the excitement so great, that he wrote a letter to the Assembly,
informing them that his aunts wished to leave France to visit other
countries, and that, though he witnessed their separation from him and
his family with much regret, he did not feel that he had any right to
deprive them of the privilege which the humblest citizens enjoyed, of
going whenever and wherever they pleased. The question of their
detention was for a long time debated in the Assembly. "What right,"
said one, "have we to prohibit these ladies from traveling." "We have a
law," another indignantly replied, "paramount to all others--the law
which commands us to take care of the public safety." The debate was
finally terminated by the caustic remark of a member who was ashamed of
the protracted discussion. "Europe," said he, "will be greatly
astonished, no doubt, on hearing that the National Assembly spent four
hours in deliberating upon the departure of two ladies who preferred
hearing mass at Rome rather than at Paris." The debate was thus
terminated, and the ladies were permitted to depart.

[Illustration: PALACE OF ST. CLOUD.]

Early in the spring of 1791, the king and queen, who had been passing
some time in Paris at the Tuileries, wished to return to their country
seat at St. Cloud. Many members of the household had already gone
there, and dinner was prepared for the royal family at the palace
for their reception. The carriages were at the door, and, as the king
and queen were descending, a great tumult in the yard arrested their
attention. They found that the guard, fearful that they might escape,
had mutinied, and closed the door of the palace, declaring that they
would not let them pass. Some of the personal friends of the king
interposed in favor of the insulted captives, and endeavored to secure
for them more respectful treatment. They were, however, seized by the
infuriated soldiers, and narrowly escaped with their lives. The king
and queen returned in humiliation to their apartments, feeling that
their palace was indeed a prison. They, however, secretly did not
regret the occurrence, as it made more public the indignities to
which they were exposed, and would aid in justifying before the
community any attempts they might hereafter make to escape.

The king had at length become thoroughly aroused to a sense of the
desperate position of his affairs. But the royal family was watched so
narrowly that it was now extremely difficult to make any preparations
for departure; and the king and queen, both having been brought up
surrounded by the luxuries and restraints of a palace, knew so little of
the world, and yet were so accustomed to have their own way, that they
were entirely incapable of forming any judicious plan for themselves,
and, at the same time, they were quite unwilling to adopt the views of
their more intelligent friends. They began, however, notwithstanding the
most earnest remonstrances, to make preparations for flight by providing
themselves with every conceivable comfort for their exile. In vain did
their friends assure them that they could purchase any thing they
desired in any part of Europe; that such quantities of luggage would be
only an encumbrance; that it was dangerous, under the eyes of their
vigilant enemies, to be making such extensive preparations. Neither the
king nor queen would heed such monitions. The queen persisted in her
resolution to send to Brussels, piece by piece, all the articles of a
complete and extensive wardrobe for herself and her children, to be
ready for them there upon their arrival. Madame Campan, the intimate
friend and companion of the queen, was extremely uneasy in view of this
imprudence; but, as she could not dissuade the queen, she went out again
and again, in the evening and in disguise, to purchase the necessary
articles and have them made up. She adopted the precaution of purchasing
but few articles at any one shop, and of employing various
seamstresses, lest suspicion should be excited. She had the garments
made for the daughter of the queen, cut by the measure of another young
lady who exactly resembled her in size. Gradually they thus filled one
large trunk with clothing, which was sent to the dwelling of a lady, one
of the friends of the queen, who was to convey it to Brussels.

The queen had a very magnificent dressing-case, which cost twelve
hundred dollars. This she also determined that she could not leave
behind. It could not be taken from the palace, and sent away out of the
country, without attracting attention, and leading at once to the
conviction that the queen was to follow it. The queen, in her innocent
simplicity of mankind, thought that the people could be blinded like
children, by telling them that she intended to send it as a present to
the Archduchess Christina. However, by the most earnest remonstrances
of her friends, she was induced only so far to change her plan as to
consent that the _chargé d'affaires_ from Vienna should ask her at her
toilet, and in the presence of all around her, to have just such a
dressing-case made for the archduchess. This plan was carried into
execution, and the dressing-case was thus publicly made; but, as it
could not be finished in season, the queen sent her own dressing-case,
saying that she would keep the new one herself. It, however, did not
deceive the spies who surrounded the queen. They noticed all these
preparations, and communicated them to the authorities. She also very
deliberately collected all her diamonds and jewels in her private
boudoir, and beguiled the anxious hours in inclosing them in cotton and
packing them away. These diamonds, carefully boxed, were placed in the
hands of the queen's hair-dresser, a man in whom she could confide, to
be carried by him to Brussels. He faithfully fulfilled his trust. But
one of the women of the queen, whom she did not suspect of treachery,
but who was a spy of the Assembly, entered her boudoir by false keys
when the queen was absent, and reported all these proceedings. The
hair-dresser perished upon the scaffold for his fidelity. Let the name
of Leonard be honored. The infamous informer has gone to oblivion, and
we will not aid even to embalm her name in contempt.




CHAPTER VII.

THE FLIGHT.

1791

Increasing excitement.--Inflammatory speech of Marat.--The king and
queen resolve to fly.--Effort's of the king's brother.--Exasperation
of the people.--Intention of the king.--Deliberations of the
emigrants.--Dangers thicken.--The plan of flight.--The Marquis
de Bouillé.--The king refuses to change his plan.--The Marquis
d'Agoult.--The Count de Fersen.--His noble character.--The king and
queen leave the palace.--The queen loses her way.--Departure from
Paris.--Arrival at Bondy.--Departure of the Count de Fersen.--The
passport.--Appearance of the fugitives.--An accident.--The journey
renewed.--Emotions of the fugitives.--Suspicions excited.--Failure
of the guard.--The king recognized.--The dragoons and National
Guard.--The post-master's son.--He forms an ambush.--Arrival at
Varennes.--Alarm of the king.--The royal family arrested.--The alarm
given.--The king discovers himself.--His affecting appeal.--An
affecting scene.--The royal group.--Appeal of the queen.--Telegraphic
dispatch to Paris.--Intense agony of the queen.--Consternation in
Paris.--The palace forced.--Insults to the royal family.--Measures
to arrest the king.--The tumult subsides.


The ferment in the National Assembly was steadily and strongly
increasing. Every day brought new rumors of the preparation of the
emigrants to invade France, aided by the armies of monarchical Europe,
and to desolate the rebellious empire with fire and sword. Tidings were
floating upon every breeze, grossly exaggerated, of the designs of the
king and queen to escape, to join the avenging army, and to wreak a
terrible vengeance upon their country. Furious speeches were made in the
Assembly and in the streets, to rouse to madness the people, now
destitute of work and of bread. "Citizens," ferociously exclaimed Marat,
"watch, with an eagle eye, that palace, the impenetrable den where plots
are ripening against the people. There a perfidious queen lords it over
a treacherous king, and rears the cubs of tyranny. Lawless priests there
consecrate the arms which are t

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