Marie Antoinette and the Downfall of Royalty
by Imbert de Saint-Amand · English · Gutenberg #32408 · 597,001 chars · public domain (US)
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Marie Antoinette and the Downfall of Royalty
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: Marie Antoinette and the Downfall of Royalty
Author: Imbert de Saint-Amand
Translator: Elizabeth Gilbert Martin
Release date: May 18, 2010 [eBook #32408]
Most recently updated: January 6, 2021
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/32408
Credits: Produced by Al Haines
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARIE ANTOINETTE AND THE DOWNFALL OF ROYALTY ***
Produced by Al Haines
[Frontispiece: Marie Antoinette]
MARIE ANTOINETTE
AND
THE DOWNFALL OF ROYALTY
BY
IMBERT DE SAINT-AMAND
_TRANSLATED BY_
ELIZABETH GILBERT MARTIN
_WITH PORTRAIT_
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1899
COPYRIGHT, 1891, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS.
{v}
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. PARIS AT THE BEGINNING OF 1792 . . . . . . . . . 1
II. COUNT DE FERSON'S LAST JOURNEY TO PARIS . . . . 14
III. THE DEATH OF THE EMPEROR LEOPOLD . . . . . . . . 23
IV. THE DEATH OF GUSTAVUS III . . . . . . . . . . . 32
V. THE BEGINNINGS OF MADAME ROLAND . . . . . . . . 46
VI. MADAME ROLAND'S ENTRANCE ON THE SCENE . . . . . 60
VII. MARIE ANTOINETTE AND MADAME ROLAND . . . . . . . 73
VIII. MADAME ROLAND AT THE MINISTRY OF THE INTERIOR . 85
IX. DUMOURIEZ, MINISTER OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS . . . . . 94
X. THE COUNCIL OF MINISTERS . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
XI. THE FÊTE OF THE SWISS OF CHATEAUVIEUX . . . . . 110
XII. THE DECLARATION OF WAR . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
XIII. THE DISBANDING OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL GUARD . . . 137
XIV. THE SUFFERINGS OF LOUIS XVI . . . . . . . . . . 148
XV. ROLAND'S DISMISSAL FROM OFFICE . . . . . . . . . 158
XVI. A THREE DAYS' MINISTRY . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166
XVII. THE PROLOGUE TO JUNE TWENTIETH . . . . . . . . . 176
XVIII. THE MORNING OF JUNE TWENTIETH . . . . . . . . . 186
{vi}
XIX. THE INVASION OF THE TUILERIES . . . . . . . . . 198
XX. MARIE ANTOINETTE ON JUNE TWENTIETH . . . . . . . 210
XXI. THE MORROW OF JUNE TWENTIETH . . . . . . . . . . 219
XXII. LAFAYETTE IN PARIS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229
XXIII. THE LAMOURETTE KISS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239
XXIV. THE FÊTE OF THE FEDERATION IN 1792 . . . . . . . 248
XXV. THE LAST DAYS AT THE TUILERIES . . . . . . . . . 259
XXVI. THE PROLOGUE TO THE TENTH OF AUGUST . . . . . . 267
XXVII. THE NIGHT OF AUGUST NINTH TO TENTH . . . . . . . 275
XXVIII. THE MORNING OF AUGUST TENTH . . . . . . . . . . 284
XXIX. THE BOX OF THE LOGOGRAPH . . . . . . . . . . . . 299
XXX. THE COMBAT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 306
XXXI. THE RESULTS OF THE COMBAT . . . . . . . . . . . 316
XXXII. THE ROYAL FAMILY IN THE CONVENT OF THE FEUILLANTS 329
XXXIII. THE TEMPLE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 337
XXXIV. THE PRINCESS DE LAMBALLE'S MURDER . . . . . . . 350
XXXV. THE SEPTEMBER MASSACRES . . . . . . . . . . . . 359
XXXVI. MADAME ROLAND DURING THE MASSACRES . . . . . . . 372
XXXVII. THE PROCLAMATION OF THE REPUBLIC . . . . . . . . 384
INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 395
{1}
MARIE ANTOINETTE
AND
THE DOWNFALL OF ROYALTY.
I.
PARIS AT THE BEGINNING OF 1792.
Paris in 1792 is no longer what it was in 1789. In 1789, the old
French society was still brilliant. The past endured beside the
present. Neither names nor escutcheons, neither liveries nor places at
court, had been suppressed. The aristocracy and the Revolution lived
face to face. In 1792, the scene has changed. The Paris of the
nobility is no longer in Paris, but at Coblentz. The Faubourg
Saint-Germain is like a desert. Since June, 1790, armorial bearings
have been taken down. The blazons of ancient houses have been broken
and thrown into the gutters. No more display, no more liveries, no
more carriages with coats-of-arms on their panels. Titles and manorial
names are done away with. The Duke de Brissac is called M. Cossé; the
Duke de Caraman, M. Riquet; the Duke d'Aiguillon, M. Vignerot. The
_Almanach royal_ of 1792 mentions not a single court appointment.
{2}
In 1789, it was still an exceptional thing for the nobility to
emigrate. In 1792, it is the rule. Those among the nobles who have
had the courage to remain at Paris in the midst of the furnace, so as
to make a rampart for the King of their bodies, seem half ashamed of
their generous conduct. The illusions of worldliness have been
dispelled. Nearly every salon was open in 1789. In 1792, they are
nearly all closed; those of the magistrates and the great capitalists
as well as those of the aristocracy. Etiquette is still observed at
the Tuileries, but there is no question of fêtes; no balls, no
concerts, none of that elegance and animation which once made the court
a rendezvous of pleasures. In 1789, illusions, dreams, a naïve
expectation of the age of gold, were to be found everywhere. In 1792,
eclogues and pastoral poetry are beginning to go out of fashion. The
diapason of hatred is pitched higher. Already there is powder and a
smell of blood in the air. A general instinct forebodes that France
and Europe are on the verge of a terrible duel. On both sides passions
have touched their culminating point. Distrust and uneasiness are
universal. Every day the despotism of the clubs becomes more
threatening. The Jacobins do not reign yet, but they govern. Deputies
who, if left to their own impulses, would vote on the conservative
side, pronounce for the Revolution solely through fear of the
demagogues. In 1789, the religious sentiment still retained power
among the {3} masses. In 1792, irreligion and atheism have wrought
their havoc. In 1789, the most ardent revolutionists, Marat, Danton,
Robespierre, were all royalists. At the beginning of 1792, the
republic begins to show its face beneath the monarchical mask.
The Tuileries, menaced by the neighboring lanes of the Carrousel and
the Palais Royal, resembles a besieged fortress. The Revolution daily
augments its trenches and parallels around the sanctuary of the
monarchy. Its barracks are the faubourgs; its soldiers, red-bonneted
pikemen. Louis XVI. in his palace is like a general-in-chief in a
stronghold, who should have voluntarily dampened his powder, spiked his
cannon, and torn his flags. He no longer inspires his troops with
confidence. A capitulation seems imminent. The unfortunate monarch
still hopes vaguely for assistance from abroad, for the arrival of some
liberating army. Vain hope! He is blockaded in his castle, and the
moment is at hand when he will be compelled to play the buffoon in a
red bonnet.
Glance at the palace and see how closely it is hemmed in by the
earthworks of the Revolution. The abode of luxury and display,
intended for fêtes rather than for war, Philibert Delorme's
_chef-d'oeuvre_ has in its architecture none of those means of defence
by which the military and feudal sovereignties of old times fortified
their dwellings. On the side of the courtyards a multitude of little
{4} streets contain a hostile population ready to swell every riot.
Near the Pavilion of Marsan is the Palais Royal, that headquarters of
insurrection, with its cafés, its gambling-dens, its houses of
ill-fame, its wooden galleries which are known as the camp of the
Tartars. It is the Duke of Orleans who has democratized the Palais
Royal. In spite of the sarcasms of the aristocracy and the lawsuits of
neighboring proprietors, he has destroyed the fine gardens bounded by
the rue de Richelieu, the rue des Petit-Champs, and the rue des
Bons-Enfants. In the place it occupied he has caused the rue de
Valois, the rue de Beaujolais, and the rue de Montpensier to be opened,
all of them inhabited by a revolutionary population. The remaining
space he has surrounded on three sides with constructions pierced by
galleries, where he has built the shops that form the finest bazaar in
Europe. The fourth side of these new constructions was originally
intended to form part of the Prince's palace, and to be composed of an
open colonnade supporting suites of apartments. But this side has not
been erected. In place of it the Duke of Orleans has run up some
temporary wooden sheds, containing three rows of shops separated by two
large passage-ways, the ground of which has not even been made level.
The privileges pertaining to the Orleans family prevent the police from
entering the enclosure of the Palais Royal. Hence it becomes the
rendezvous of all conspirators. The taking of the Bastille was {5}
plotted there, and there the 20th of June and the 10th of August will
yet be organized.
A little further off is the National Assembly. Its sessions are held
in the riding-school built when the little Louis XV. was to be taught
horsemanship. It adjoins the terrace of the Feuillants. One of its
courtyards which looks towards the front of the edifice, is at the
upper end of the rue de Dauphin. The other extremity occupies the site
where the rue Castiglione will be opened later on. There, close beside
the Tuileries, sits the National Assembly, the rival and victorious
power that will overcome the monarchy.
The Assembly terrorizes the Tuileries. The Jacobin Club terrorizes the
Assembly. Close beside the Hall of the Manège, on the site to be
occupied afterward by the market of Saint-Honoré, the revolutionary
club holds its tumultuous sessions in the former convent founded in
1611 by the Jacobin, or Dominican, friars. The club meets three times
a week, at seven in the evening. The hall is a long rectangle with a
vaulted roof. Four rows of stalls occupy the longer sides, while the
two ends serve as public galleries. Nearly in the middle of the hall,
the speaker's platform and the president's writing-table stand opposite
each other. Hither come all ambitious revolutionists who desire to
talk, to agitate, to make themselves conspicuous. Here Robespierre
lords it, not being a deputy in consequence of the law forbidding
members of the {6} Constituent Assembly to belong to the legislative
body. Those who love disorder come here to seek emotions. Some find
lucrative employment, applause being paid for, and the different
parties having each its _claque_ in the galleries. Since April, 1791,
the Jacobin Club has affiliations in two thousand French towns and
villages. At its orders and in its pay is an army of agents whose
business it is to make stump speeches, to sing in the streets, to make
propositions in cafés, to applaud or to hiss in the galleries of the
National Assembly. These hirelings usually receive about five francs a
day, but as the number of the chevaliers of the revolutionary lustrum
increases, the pay diminishes, until it is finally reduced to forty
sous. Deserters and soldiers dismissed from their regiments for
misconduct are admitted by preference.
For some days past, the Club of Moderate Revolutionists, friends of
Lafayette, who might have closed the old clubs after the sanguinary
repression of the riot in the Champ-de-Mars, and who contented
themselves with opening a new one, have been meeting in the convent of
the Feuillants, rue Saint-Honoré. But this new club has not been a
great success; moderation is not the order of the day; the Jacobins
have regained their empire, and on December 26, 1791, seals are placed
on the door of the Club of the Feuillants.
At the other extremity of Paris there is a club still more inflammatory
than that of the Jacobins: {7} that of the Cordeliers. "The Jacobins,"
said Barbaroux, "have no common aim, although they act in concert. The
Cordeliers are bent on blood, gold, and offices." Speaking as a rule,
the Cordeliers belong to the Jacobin Club, while hardly a single
Jacobin is a Cordelier. The Cordeliers are the advance-guard of the
Revolution. They are, as Camille Desmoulins has said, Jacobins of the
Jacobins. The chiefs are Danton, Marat, Hébert, Chaumette. They take
their names from those religious democrats, the Minorite friars of
Saint Francis, who wear a girdle of rope over their coarse gray habit.
They meet in the Place of the School of Medicine, in a monastery whose
church was built in the reign of Saint Louis, in 1259, with the fine
paid as indemnity for a murder. In 1590, it became the resort of the
most famous Leaguers. Chateaubriand says: "There are places which seem
to be the laboratory of seditions." How well this expression of the
author of the _Mémoires d'Outre-tombe_ describes the club-room of the
Cordeliers! The pictures, the sculptured or painted images, the veils
and curtains of the convent, have been torn down. The basilica
displays nothing but its bare bones to the eyes of the spectator. At
the apse, where wind and rain enter through the unglazed rose-window,
joiners' work-benches serve as a desk for the president and as places
on which to deposit the red caps. Do you see the fallen beams, the
wooden benches, the dismantled stalls, the relics of saints pushed or
rolled against the walls {8} to serve as benches for "dirty, dusty,
drunken, sweaty spectators in torn jackets, pikes on their shoulders,
or with their bare arms crossed"? Do you hear the orators who "call
each other beggars, pickpockets, robbers, assassins, to the discordant
noise of hisses and those proper to their different groups of devils?
They find the material of their metaphors in murder, they borrow them
from the filthiest of sewers and dungheaps, and from places set apart
for the prostitution of men and women. Gestures render their figures
of speech more comprehensible; with the cynicism of dogs, they call
everything by its own name, in an impious and obscene parade of oaths
and curses. To destroy and to produce, death and generation, nothing
else can be disentangled from the savage jargon which deafens one's
ear." And what is it that interrupts the speakers? "The little black
owls of the cloister without monks and the steeple without bells,
making themselves merry in the broken windows in expectation of their
prey. At first they are called to order by the tinkling of an
ineffectual bell; but as their cries do not cease, they are shot at to
make them keep silence. They fall, palpitating, bleeding, and ominous,
into the midst of the pandemonium."
So, then, clubs take the place of convents. Since the Constituent
Assembly had decreed the abolition of monastic vows by its vote of
February 13, 1790, many persons, rudely detached from their usual way
of life and its duties, had abandoned their vocation. {9} The nun
became a working-woman; the shaved Capuchin read his journal in
suburban taverns; and grinning crowds visited the profaned and open
convents "as, in Grenada, travellers pass through the abandoned halls
of the Alhambra, or as they pause, at Tivoli, under the columns of the
Sibyl's temple."
The Jacobin Club and the Club of the Cordeliers will destroy the
monarchy. In the Memoirs of Lafayette it is remarked that "it is hard
to understand how the Jacobin minority and a handful of pretended
Marseillais made themselves masters of Paris when nearly all the forty
thousand citizens composing the National Guard desired the
Constitution; but the clubs had succeeded in scattering the true
patriots and in creating a dread of vigorous measures. Experience had
not yet taught what this feebleness and disorganization must needs
cost."
The dark side of the picture is plainly far more evident than it was in
1789. But how vivid it is still! Those who hunger after sensations
are in their element. When has there been more noise, more tumult,
more movement, more unexpected or more varied scenes? Listen once more
to Chateaubriand who, on his return from America, passed through Paris
at this epoch: "When I read the _Histoire des troubles publics ches
divers peuples_ before the Revolution, I could not conceive how it was
possible to live in those times. I was surprised that Montaigne wrote
so cheerfully in a castle which he could not walk around without risk
of being abducted by bands {10} of Leaguers or Protestants. The
Revolution has enabled me to comprehend this possibility of existence.
With us men, critical moments produce an increase of life. In a
society which is dissolving and forming itself anew, the strife between
the two tendencies, the collision of the past and the future, the
medley of ancient and modern manners, form a transitory combination
which does not admit a moment of ennui. Passions and characters, freed
from restraint, display themselves with an energy they do not possess
in well-regulated cities. The infraction of laws, the emancipation
from duties, usages, and the rules of decorum, even perils themselves,
increase the interest of this disorder."
Yes, people complain, grow angry, suffer, but they are not bored. How
many incidents, episodes, emotions, there are in this strange
tragi-comedy! Everywhere there is something to be seen; in the
Assembly, the clubs, the public places, the promenades, streets, cafés,
and theatres. Brawls and discussions are heard on every side. If by
chance a salon is still open, disputes go on there as they would at a
club. What quarrels take place in the cafés! Men stand on chairs and
tables to spout. And what dissensions in the theatres! The actors
meddle with politics as well as the spectators. In the greenroom of
the _Comédie-Française_ there is a right side, whose chief is the
royalist Naudet, and a left side led by the republican Talma. Neither
actor goes out except well armed. There are pistols {11} underneath
their togas. The kings of tragedy, threatened by their political
adversaries, have real poniards wherewith to defend themselves. _Les
Horaces, Brutus, La Mort de César, Barnevelt, Guillaume Tell, Charles
IX._, are plays containing in each tirade allusions which inflame the
boxes and the pit. The theatre is a tilting-ground. If the royalists
are there in force, they cause the orchestra to play their favorite
airs: _Charmante Gabrielle, Vive Henri Quatre! O! Richard, O! mon
roi!_ The revolutionists protest, and sing their own chosen melody,
the _Ça ira_. Sometimes they come to blows, swords are drawn, and, the
play over, elegant women are dragged through the gutters. There is a
general outbreak of insults and violence. The journals play the chief
part in this universal madness. Sometimes the press is eloquent, but
it is oftener ribald or atrocious. To borrow an expression from
Montaigne, "it lowers itself even to the worthless esteem of extreme
inferiority." The beautiful French tongue, once so correct and pure,
is no longer recognizable. Vulgar words fall thick as hail. To the
language of the Academy has succeeded the jargon of the markets.
What a swarm! what a swirl! How noisy, how restless, is this
revolutionary Paris! What excited crowds fill the clubs, the Assembly,
the Palais Royal, the gambling-houses, and the tumultuous faubourgs!
Riotous gatherings, popular deputations, detachments of cavalry,
companies of {12} foot-soldiers; gentlemen in French coats, powdered
hair, swords at their sides, hats under their arms, silk stockings and
low shoes; democrats close-cropped and unpowdered, with English frock
coats and American cravats; ragged _sans-culottes_ in red caps, weave
in and out in ceaseless motion.
Do you know what was the chief distraction of this crowd in April,
1792? The debut of that new and fashionable machine, the guillotine.
It was used for the first time on the 25th, for a criminal guilty of
rape. Sensitive people congratulated each other on the mitigated
torment, which they were pleased to consider a humanitarian
improvement. The excellent philanthropist, Doctor Guillotin, was
lauded to the skies. His machine was named guillotine in his honor,
just as the stage-coaches established by Turgot had been called
turgotines.
What enthusiasm, what infatuation, for this guillotine, already so
famous and destined to be so much more so! The editors of the
_Moniteur_ declare in a lyric outburst that it is worthy of the
approaching century. The truth is that it accelerates and makes less
difficult the executioner's task. In the end the crowd would become
disgusted with massacres. The delays of the gibbet would weary their
patience. The _sans-culottes_, who doubtless have a presentiment of
all that is going to happen, welcome the guillotine, then, with
acclamations. At the _Ambigu_ theatre a ballet-pantomime, called _Les
Quatre Fils Aymon_, is given, and all Paris runs to {13} see the heads
of all four fall at once, in the midst of loud applause, under the
blade of the good doctor's machine. People amuse themselves with their
future instrument of torture as if it were a toy. In a Girondin salon
they play at guillotine with a moveable screen that is lifted and let
fall again. At elegant dinners a little guillotine is brought in with
the dessert and takes the place of a sweet dish. A pretty woman places
a doll representing some political adversary under the knife; it is
decapitated in the neatest possible style, and out of it runs something
red that smells good, a liqueur perfumed with ambergris, into which
every lady hastens to dip her lace handkerchief. French gaiety would
make a vaudeville out of the day of judgment. Poor society, which
passes so quick from gay to grave, from lively to severe, and which,
like the Figaro of Beaumarchais, laughs at everything so that it may
not weep!
{14}
II.
COUNT DE FERSEN'S LAST JOURNEY TO PARIS.
It has been supposed until lately that after the day when he bade
farewell to the royal family at the beginning of the Varennes journey,
Count de Fersen never again saw Marie Antoinette. A new publication of
very great importance proves that this is an error, and that the
Swedish nobleman came to Paris for the last time in 1792, and had
several interviews with the King and Queen. This publication is
entitled: _Extraits des papiers du grand maréchal de Suède, Comte Jean
Axel de Fersen_, and is published by his great-nephew, Baron de
Kinckowstrom, a Swedish colonel. There is something romantic in this
episode of the mysterious journey made by Marie Antoinette's loyal
chevalier, which merits to leave a trace in history.
Fersen was one of those men whose sentiments are all the more profound
because they know how to veil them under an apparently imperturbable
calm. A soul of fire under an exterior of ice, as the Baroness de
Korff describes him, courageous to temerity, devoted to heroism, he had
conceived for Marie Antoinette one of those disinterested and ardent
{15} friendships which lie midway between love and religion. Almost as
much a Frenchman as he was a Swede, he did not forget that he had
fought in America under the standard of the Most Christian King, and
had been colonel of a regiment in the service of France. Having been
the courtier of the happy and brilliant Queen, he remained the courtier
of the Queen overcome by anguish. He had enkindled in the soul of his
sovereign, Gustavus III., the same chivalrous sentiment which animated
his own, and was impatiently awaiting the time when he could hasten to
the aid of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette under the Swedish flag. His
dearest ambition was to draw his sword in the Queen's defence. From
the Varennes journey up to the day of Marie Antoinette's execution, he
had but one thought: to rescue the woman for whom he would willingly
have shed the last drop of his blood. This fixed idea has left its
trace on every line of his journal. The sad and melancholy countenance
of Fersen, the courtier of misfortune, the friend of unhappy days, is
assuredly one of the celebrated types in the drama of Versailles and
the Tuileries. This man, who would have made no mark in history but
for the martyr Queen, is certain, thanks to her, not to be forgotten by
posterity. Marie Antoinette was to return him in glory what he gave
her in devotion.
On her return to the Tuileries after the disastrous journey to
Varennes, the Queen wrote to {16} Fersen, June 27, 1791: "Be at ease
about us; we are living," and Fersen replied: "I am well, and live only
to serve you." June 29, she wrote him another letter in which she
said: "Do not write to me; it would endanger us; and, above all, do not
return here under any pretext; all would be lost if you should make
your appearance. They never lose sight of us by night or day; which is
a matter of indifference to me. Be tranquil; nothing will happen to
me. The Assembly desires to treat us with gentleness. Adieu. I shall
not be able to write to you again."
Marie Antoinette was in error when she supposed she would not write
again. She was in error, likewise, when she imagined that Fersen, in
spite of all dangers and difficulties, would not find means to see her
again. Their correspondence was not interrupted. After the acceptance
of the Constitution, Marie Antoinette wrote to him: "Can you understand
my position and the part I am continually obliged to play? Sometimes I
do not understand myself, and am obliged to consider whether it is
really I who am speaking; but what is to be done? It is all necessary,
and be sure our position would be still worse than it is if I had not
at once assumed this attitude; we at least gain time by it, and that is
all that is required. I keep up better than could be expected, seeing
that I go out so little and endure constantly such immense fatigue of
mind. What with the persons whom I must see, my {17} writing, and the
time I spend with my children, I have not a moment to myself. The last
occupation, which is not the least, gives me my sole happiness. When I
am very sad, I take my little boy in my arms, embrace him with my whole
heart, and for a moment am consoled."
Fersen, touched and pitying, was constantly thinking of that fatal
palace of the Tuileries where the Queen was so much to be
compassionated. An invincible attraction drew him thither. There, he
thought, was the post of devotion and of honor. November 26, he wrote:
"Tell me whether there is any possibility of going to see you entirely
alone, without a servant, in case I receive the order to do so from the
King (Gustavus III.); he has already spoken to me of his desire to
bring this about." Of all the sovereigns who interested themselves in
the fate of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette, Gustavus was the most
active, brave, and resolute; he was also the only one in whom Marie
Antoinette placed absolute confidence. She expected less from her own
brother, the Emperor Leopold, and it was to Stockholm above all that
she turned her eyes. Gustavus ordered Fersen to go secretly to Paris,
and on December 22, 1791, he sent him a memoir and certain letters,
commissioning him to deliver them to Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette.
He recommended, as forcibly as he could, a new attempt at flight, but
with precautions suggested by the lesson of Varennes. He thought the
members of the royal {18} family should depart separately and in
disguise, and that, once outside of his kingdom, Louis XVI. should call
for the intervention of a congress. The following passage occurs in
the letter of the Swedish King to Marie Antoinette: "I beg Your Majesty
to consider seriously that violent disorders can only be cured by
violent remedies, and that if moderation is a virtue in the course of
ordinary life, it often becomes a vice when there is question of public
matters. The King of France can re-establish his dominion only by
resuming his former rights; every other remedy is illusory; anything
except this would merely open the way to endless discussions which
would augment the confusion instead of ending it. The King's rights
were torn from him by the sword; it is by the sword that they must be
reconquered. But I refrain; I should remember that I am addressing a
princess who, in the most terrible moments of her life, has shown the
most intrepid courage."
Fersen obtained permission from Louis XVI. to accomplish the mission
confided to him by Gustavus III. He left Stockholm under an assumed
name and with the passport of a Swedish courier, and reached Paris
without accident, February 13, 1792. He was so adroit and prudent that
no one suspected his presence. On the very evening of his arrival he
wrote in his journal: "Went to the Queen by my usual road; very few
National Guards; did not see the King." Fersen, therefore, only
reappeared at the Tuileries in the darkness, like a fugitive or {19} an
outlaw. He found the Queen pale with grief and with hair whitened by
sorrow and emotion. It was a solemn moment. The storm was raging
within France and beyond it. Terrible omens, snares, and dangers lay
on every side. One might have said that the Tuileries were about to be
swallowed up in a gulf of fire and blood.
The next day Fersen saw the King. He wrote in his journal: "Tuesday,
14. Saw the King at six in the evening. He will not go and can not,
on account of the extreme vigilance. In fact, he scruples at it,
having so often promised to remain, for he is an honest man.... He
sees that force is the only resource; but, being weak, he thinks it
impossible to resume all his authority.... Unless he were constantly
encouraged, I am not sure he would not be tempted to negotiate with the
rebels. He said to me afterwards: 'That's all very well! We are by
ourselves and we can talk; but nobody ever found himself in my
position. I know I missed the right moment; it was the 14th of July;
we ought to have gone then, and I wanted to, but how could I when
Monsieur himself begged me to stay, and Marshal de Broglie, who was in
command, said to me: "Yes, we can go to Metz. But what shall we do
when we get there?" I lost the opportunity and never found it again.
I have been abandoned by everybody.'" Louis XVI. desired Fersen to
warn the Powers that they must not be surprised at anything he might be
forced to do; that he was {20} obliged, that it was the effect of
constraint. "They must put me out of the question," he added, "and let
me do what I can."
Fersen had a long talk with Marie Antoinette the same day. She entered
into full details about the present and especially about the past. She
explained why the flight to Varennes, in which Fersen had taken such a
prominent part, and which had succeeded so well so long as he directed
it, had ended in failure. The Queen described the anguish of the
arrest and the return. To the project of a new effort to escape, she
replied by pointing out the implacable surveillance of which she was
the object, and the effervescence of popular passions, which this time
would overleap all restraint if the fugitives were taken. It would be
better for the royal family to suffer together than to expose
themselves to die separately. It would be better to die like princes,
who abdicate majesty only with life, than as vagabonds, under a vulgar
disguise. "The Queen," adds Fersen, "told me that she saw Alexander
Lameth and Duport; that they always tell her that there is no remedy
but foreign troops; failing that, all is lost, that this cannot last,
that they have gone farther than they wished to. In spite of all this,
she thinks them malicious, does not trust them, but uses them as best
she can. All the ministers are traitors who betray the King." Fersen
had a final interview with Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette on February
21, 1792. By February 24, {21} he had returned to Brussels. He was
profoundly moved on quitting the Tuileries, but, dismal and lugubrious
as his forebodings may have been, how much more sombre was the reality
to prove!
What a terrible fate was reserved for the chief actors in this drama!
Yet a few days, and the chivalrous Gustavus was to be assassinated.
The hour of execution was approaching for Louis XVI. and Marie
Antoinette. Fersen, likewise, was to have a most tragic end. From the
moment when he bade his last adieu to the unhappy Queen, his life was
but one long torment. His disposition, already inclined to melancholy,
became incurably sad. His loyal and devoted soul could not accustom
itself to the thought of the calamities weighing so cruelly upon that
good and beautiful sovereign of whom he said in 1778: "The Queen is the
prettiest and most amiable princess that I know." On October 14, 1793,
he will still be endeavoring, with the aid of Baron de Breteuil, to
bring to completion a thousandth plot to extricate the august captive
from her fate. He will learn the fatal tidings on the 20th. "I can
think of nothing but my loss," he will write in his journal. "It is
frightful to have no positive details. It is horrible that she should
have been alone in her last moments, with no one to speak to, or to
receive her last wishes. No; without vengeance, my heart will never be
content." Covered with honors under the reign of Gustavus IV.,
senator, chancellor of the Academy of {22} Upsal, member of the
Seraphim Order, grand marshal of the kingdom of Sweden, there will
remain in the depths of his heart a wound which nothing can heal. An
inveterate fatality will pursue him as it had done the unfortunate
sovereign of whom he had been the chevalier. He will perish in a riot
at Stockholm, June 20, 1810, at the time of the obsequies of the Prince
Royal. Struck down by fists and walking-sticks, his hair pulled out,
his clothes torn to rags, he will be dragged about half-naked, rolled
underfoot, assassinated by a maddened populace. Before rendering his
last sigh, he will succeed in rising to his knees, and, joining his
hands, he will utter these words from the stoning of Saint Stephen: "O
my God, who callest me to Thee, I implore Thee for my tormentors, whom
I pardon." If not the same words, they are at least the same thoughts
as those of Marie Antoinette on the platform of the scaffold.
{23}
III.
THE DEATH OF THE EMPEROR LEOPOLD.
One after another, Marie Antoinette lost her last chances of safety;
blows as unforeseen as terrible beat down the combinations on which she
had built her hopes. Within a fortnight she was to see the two
sovereigns disappear from whom she had expected succor: her brother,
the Emperor Leopold, and Gustavus III., the King of Sweden. Leopold
had not been equal to all the illusions which his sister had cherished
with regard to him, but, nevertheless, he showed great interest in
French affairs, and a lively desire to be useful to Louis XVI. Pacific
by disposition, he had temporized at first, and adopted a conciliatory
policy. He desired a reconciliation with the new principles, and,
moreover, he was not blind to the inexperience and levity of the
_émigrés_. But the obligation, to which he was bound by treaties, to
defend the rights of princes holding property in Alsace, his fear of
the propaganda of sedition, the aggressive language of the National
Assembly and the Parisian press, had ended by determining him to take a
more resolute attitude, and it was at the moment when he was {24}
seriously intending to come to his sister's aid that he was carried off
by sudden death. Though she did not desire a war between Austria and
France, the Queen had persisted in wishing for an armed congress, which
would have been a compromise between peace and war, but which the
National Assembly would have regarded as an intolerable humiliation.
It must not be denied, the situation was a false one. Between the true
sentiments of Louis XVI. and his new rôle as a constitutional
sovereign, there was a real incompatibility. As to the Queen, she was
on good terms neither with the _émigrés_ nor with the Assembly.
In order to get a just idea of the sentiments shown by the _émigrés_,
it is necessary to read a letter written from Trèves, October 16, 1791,
by Madame de Raigecourt, the friend of Madame Elisabeth, to another
friend of the Princess, the Marquise de Bombelles: "I see with pain
that Paris and Coblentz are not on good terms. The Emperor treats the
Princes like children.... The Princes cannot avoid suspecting that it
is the influence of the Queen and her agents which thwarts their plans
and causes the Emperor to behave so strangely.... Some trickery on the
part of the Tuileries is still suspected in this country. They ought
to explain themselves to each other once for all. Is the Queen afraid
lest the Count d'Artois should arrogate an authority in the realm which
would diminish her own? Let her be at ease on that score; she will
{25} always be the King's wife and always dominant. What is she afraid
of, then? She complains that she is not sufficiently respected. But
you know the good heart and the uprightness of our Prince; he is
incapable of the remarks attributed to him, and which have certainly
been reported to the Queen with the intention of estranging them
entirely." Madame de Raigecourt ends her letter with this complaint
against Louis XVI.: "Our wretched King lowers himself more and more
every day; for he is doing too much, even if he still intends to
escape.... The emigration, meanwhile, increases daily, and presently
there will be more Frenchmen than Germans in this region." At this
very time, the Queen was having recourse to her brother Leopold as to a
saviour. She wrote to him, October 4, 1791: "My only consolation is in
writing to you, my dear brother; I am surrounded by so many atrocities
that I need all your friendship to tranquillize my mind.... A point of
primary importance is to regulate the conduct of the _émigrés_. If
they re-enter France in arms, all is lost, and it will be impossible to
make it believed that we are not in connivance with them. Even the
existence of an army of _émigrés_ on the frontier would be enough to
keep up the irritation and afford ground for accusations against us; it
appears to me that a congress would make the task of restraining them
less difficult.... This idea of a congress pleases me greatly; it
would second the efforts we are {26} making to maintain confidence. In
the first place, I repeat, it would put a check on the _émigrés_, and,
moreover, it would make an impression here from which I hope much. I
submit that to your better judgment.... Adieu, my dear brother; we
love you, and my daughter has particularly charged me to embrace her
good uncle."
While Marie Antoinette was thus turning towards Austria for assistance,
the National Assembly at Paris repelled with energy all thought of any
intervention whatsoever on the part of foreign powers. January 1,
1792, it issued a decree of impeachment against the King's brothers,
the Prince de Conde, and Calonne. The confiscation of the property of
the _émigrés_ and the taxation of their revenues for the benefit of the
State had been prescribed by another decree to which Louis XVI. had
offered no opposition. January 14, Guadet said in the tribune, while
speaking of the congress: "If it is true that by delays and
discouragement they wish to bring us to accept this shameful mediation,
ought the National Assembly to close its eyes to such a danger? Let us
all swear to die here rather than--" He was not allowed to finish.
The whole assembly rose to their feet, crying: "Yes, yes; we swear it!"
And in a burst of enthusiasm, every Frenchman who would take part in a
congress having for its object the modification of the Constitution,
was declared an infamous traitor. January 17, it was decreed that the
King should require the {27} Emperor Leopold to explain himself
definitely before March 1.
By a curious coincidence, this date of March 1 was precisely that on
which the Emperor Leopold was to die of a dreadful malady. He was in
perfect health on February 27, when he gave audience to the Turkish
envoy; he was in his agony, February 28, and on March 1, he died. His
usual physician asserted that he had been poisoned. The idea that a
crime had been committed spread among the people. Vague rumors got
about concerning a woman who had caused remark at the last masked ball
at court. This unknown person, under shelter of her disguise, might
have presented the sovereign with poisoned bonbons. The Jacobins, who
might have desired to get rid of the armed chief of the empire, and the
_émigrés_, who might have reproached him as too luke-warm in his
opposition to the principles of the French Revolution, were alternately
suspected. The last hypothesis was hardly probable, nor does anything
prove that the Jacobins had any hand in the possibly natural death of
the Emperor Leopold. But minds were so overexcited at the time that
the parties mutually accused each other, on all occasions, of the most
execrable crimes. For that matter, there were Jacobins who, out of
mere bravado, would willingly have gloried in crimes of which they were
not guilty, provided that these crimes had been committed against kings.
What is certain is, that Marie Antoinette believed {28} in poison.
"The death of the Emperor Leopold," says Madame Campan, "occurred on
March 1, 1792. The Queen was out when the news arrived at the
Tuileries. On her return, I gave her the letter announcing it. She
cried out that the Emperor had been poisoned; that she had remarked and
preserved a gazette in which, in an article on the session of the
Jacobin Club at the time when Leopold had declared for the Coalition,
it was said, in speaking of him, that a bit of piecrust could settle
that affair. From that moment the Queen had regarded this phrase as an
inadvertence of the propagandists."
On the very day when Marie Antoinette's brother died, Louis XVI.'s
Minister of Foreign Affairs, De Lessart, had enraged the National
Assembly by reading them extracts from his diplomatic correspondence,
which they found not sufficiently firm. They were indignant at a
despatch in which Prince de Kaunitz said: "The latest events give us
hopes; it appears that the majority of the French nation, impressed
with the evils they have prepared, are returning to more moderate
principles, and incline to render to the throne the dignity and
authority which are the essence of monarchical government." When De
Lessart came down from the tribune, the whispering changed into cries
of rage and threats against the minister and the court, which, it was
said, was planning a counter-revolution at the Tuileries, and dictating
to the cabinet of Vienna the language by which it hoped to intimidate
France. {29} At the evening session of the same day, Rouyer, a deputy,
proposed to impeach the Minister of Foreign Affairs. "Is it possible,"
cried he, "that a perfidious minister should come here to make a parade
of his work and lay the responsibility of it on a foreign power? Will
the time never arrive when ministers shall cease to betray us? Were my
head to be the price of the denunciation I am making, I would none the
less go on with it." At the session of March 6, Guadet said: "It is
time to know whether the ministers wish to make Louis XVI. King of the
French, or the King of Coblentz."
On the 10th the storm broke. The day before, Narbonne had received his
dismission. Brissot accused De Lessart of having compromised the
safety of France, withheld from the Assembly the documents establishing
the alliance between the Emperor and the King of Prussia, discredited
the assignats, depreciated the credit, lowered the rate of exchange,
and encouraged interior disorder. Vergniaud followed him, exclaiming:
"From the tribune where I am speaking may be seen the palace where
perverse counsellors lead astray and deceive the King given to you by
the Constitution; where they forge chains for the nation, and arrange
the manoeuvres which are to deliver us up to Austria, after having
caused us to pass through the horrors of civil war. Terror and dismay
have often issued from that famous palace. Let them re-enter it to-day
in the name of the law, let them penetrate all hearts, and {30} teach
all who dwell there, that our Constitution accords inviolability to the
King alone. Let them know that the law will overtake all the guilty
without exception, and that there will not be a single head convicted
of crime which can escape its sword." The decree of impeachment
against the ministers was voted by a very large majority. De Lessart
was advised to take flight, but he refused. "I owe it to my country,"
said he, "I owe it to my King and to myself to make my innocence and
the regularity of my conduct plain before the tribunal of the high
court, and I have decided to give myself up at Orleans." He was
conducted by gendarmes to that city, where he was imprisoned. Louis
XVI. dared not do anything to save his favorite minister. On March 11,
Pétion, the mayor of Paris, came to the bar of the Assembly, and read,
in the name of the Commune, an address in which it was said: "When the
atmosphere surrounding us is heavy with noisome vapors, Nature can
relieve herself only by a thunder-storm. So, too, society can purge
itself from the abuses which disturb it only by a formidable
explosion.... It is true, then, that responsibility is not an idle
word; that all men, whatever may be their stations, are equal before
the law; that the sword of justice is poised over all heads without
distinction." Was not this language like a prognostic of the 21st of
January and the 16th of October? Encompassed by a thousand snares,
hated by each of the extreme parties, by the {31} _émigrés_ as well as
by the Jacobins, Marie Antoinette no longer beheld anything but aspects
of sorrow. Abroad, as in France, her gaze fell on dismal spectacles
only. Her imagination was affected. She hardly dared taste the dishes
served at her table. All had conspired to betray her. She had
experienced so many deceptions and so much anguish; fate had pursued
her with so much bitterness, that her heart, exhausted with emotions,
and overwhelmed with sadness, was weary of all things, even of hope.
{32}
IV.
THE DEATH OF GUSTAVUS III.
The drama of the Revolution is not French alone; it is European. It
has its afterclap in every empire, in every kingdom, even to the most
distant lands. It excites minds in Stockholm almost as much as in
Paris. Among the Swedes there are people whose greatest desire would
be to parody the October Days, and to carry about on pikes the bleeding
heads of their adversaries. The new ideas take fire and spread like a
train of gunpowder. It is the fashion to go to extremes; a nameless
frenzy and fatality seem let loose upon this epoch of agitations and
catastrophes. All those who, at one time or another, have been guests
at the palace of Versailles, are condemned, as by a mysterious
sentence, either to exile or to death.
How will terminate the career of that brilliant King of Sweden, who had
received from Versailles and from Paris, from the court and from the
city, such an enthusiastic reception? Gustavus, the idol of the great
lords, the philosophers, and the fashionable beauties, who, after being
the hero of the encyclopædists, came to hold his court at {33}
Aix-la-Chapelle amid the French _émigrés_, and who, on his return to
Stockholm, prepared there the great crusade for authority, announcing
himself as the avenger of divine right, the saviour of all thrones?
The last days of his life, his presentiments, which recall those of
Cæsar, his superstitions, his belief in prophecies, his magic
incantations, that warning which he scorns, as the Duke de Guise did at
the castle of Blois, that masked ball where the costumes, the music,
the flowers, the lights, offer a painfully strange contrast to the
horror of the attack; all is sinister, lugubrious, in these fantastic
and fatal scenes which have already tempted more than one dramatist,
more than one musician, and whose phases a Shakespeare only could
retrace. The crime of Stockholm is linked closely to the
death-struggle of French royalty. The funeral knell which tolled at
this extremity of the North had echoes in Paris. The Swedish regicides
set the example to the regicides of France.
M. Geffroy has remarked very justly in his work, _Gustave III. et la
cour de France_, that the bloody deed which put an end to the reign and
the life of Gustavus is not an isolated fact: "The faults committed by
this Prince would not have sufficed to arm his assassins. The true
source whence Ankarstroem and his accomplices drew their first
inspiration was that vertigo caused during the last years of the
century by the annihilation of all religious and even all philosophical
faith.... No moment of {34} modern history has presented an
intellectual and moral anarchy comparable to that which accompanied the
revolutionary period in Europe."
The eighteenth century was punished for incredulity by superstition.
Having refused to believe the most holy truths, it lent credence to the
most fantastic chimeras. For priests it substituted sorcerers; for
Christian ceremonies, the rites of freemasonry. The time was coming
when, because it had rejected the Sacred Heart of Jesus, it was going
to bow before the sacred heart of Marat. The adepts of Mesmer and of
De Puysegur, the seekers after the philosopher's stone, the Nicolaites
of Berlin, the illuminati of Bavaria, enlarged the boundaries of human
credulity, and the men who succumbed in the most naïve and foolish
manner to these wretched weaknesses of mind, were precisely the
haughtiest philosophers, those who had prided themselves the most on
their distinction as free-thinkers. Such a one was Gustavus III.
This Voltairean Prince, who had held the Christian verities so cheap,
was superstitious even to puerility. He did not believe in the
Gospels, but he believed in books of magic. In a corner of his palace
he had arranged a cupboard with a censer and a pair of candlesticks,
before which he performed cabalistic operations in nothing but his
shirt. Throughout his entire reign he consulted a fortune-teller named
Madame Arfwedsson, who read the future for him in coffee-grounds.
Around his neck {35} he wore a gold box containing a sachet in which
there was a powder that, according to his belief, would drive away evil
spirits. All this apparatus of incantation and sorcery was one of the
causes of Gustavus's fall. It multiplied the snares around the
unfortunate monarch, and served to mask his enemies. Prophecies
announced his approaching end, and conspirators took care to fulfil the
prophecies.
The Duke of Sudermania, the King's brother, without being an accomplice
in the project of crime, encouraged underhand practices. Sectarians
approached Gustavus to reproach him for his luxury, his prodigalities,
his entertainments, or addressed him anonymous warnings which, in
Biblical language, declared him accursed and rejected by the Lord.
Their insolence knew no bounds. Madame Arfwedsson had counselled the
King to beware if he should meet a man dressed in red. Count de
Ribbing, one of the future conspirators, having heard of this, ordered
a red costume out of bravado, and presented himself in it before his
sovereign, whom such an apparition caused to reflect if not to tremble.
Gustavus, like Cæsar, was to see his Ides of March. It had been
predicted to him that the month of March would be fatal to him. This
month approached, and the monarch diverted himself by fêtes and
boisterous entertainments in order to banish the presentiments which
never ceased to assail {36} him. He said to himself that all this
phantasmagoria would probably soon vanish; that the funereal images
would of themselves depart; and that the spectres would disappear at
the sound of arms. The monarchical crusade of which he proposed to be
the leader grew upon him as the best means by which to escape the
incessant obsessions haunting his spirit. In vain was he reminded that
Sweden was in need of money, and that a war of intervention in the
affairs of France was not popular. His resolution remained unshaken.
He counted the days and hours which still separated him from the moment
of action: his sole idea was to chastise the Jacobins and avenge the
majesty of thrones.
Returned to Stockholm from Aix-la-Chapelle, at the beginning of August,
1791, the impetuous monarch began to be very active in his warlike
preparations. The Marquis de Bouillé, who had been obliged to quit
France at the time of the unsuccessful journey to Varennes, had entered
his service and was to counsel him and fight at his side under the
Swedish flag. At the same time Gustavus officially renewed his
promises of aid to the King of France. Louis XVI. replied:--
"MONSIEUR MY BROTHER AND COUSIN: I have just received the lines with
which you have honored me on the occasion of your return. It is always
a great consolation to have such proofs of a friendly sentiment as are
given me by this letter. The concern, Sire, which you take in all that
relates to {37} my interest touches me more and more, and I recognize
in each word the august soul of a king whom the world admires as much
for his magnanimous heart as for his wisdom."
Meanwhile the conspirators, animated either by personal rancor or the
passions common to nobles hostile to their king, were secretly
preparing for an attack. The five leaders were Captain Ankarstroem,
Count de Ribbing, Count de Horn, Count de Lilienhorn, major of the Blue
Guards, and Baron Pechlin, an old man of seventy-two, who had been
distinguished in the civil wars, and was the soul of the plot. The
conspirators had doubts before committing the crime. During the Diet,
which met at Gefle, January 25, 1792, they refrained at the very moment
when they were about to strike.
Gustavus was in his castle of Haga, about a league from Stockholm,
without guards or attendants. Three of the conspirators approached the
castle at five in the evening. They were armed with carbines, and,
having placed themselves in ambush near the King's apartment on the
ground-floor, were awaiting an opportunity to kill their sovereign.
Gustavus coming in from a long walk, went in his dressing-gown to sit
in the library, the windows of which opened like doors into the garden.
He fell asleep in his armchair. Whether they were alarmed by the sound
of footsteps, or whether the contrast between the slumber of the
unsuspicious King and the death poising above his head awakened {38}
some remorse, the assassins once more abandoned their meditated crime.
Weary of the attempts they had been planning for six months, and which
never came to anything, the conspirators might possibly have given them
up altogether if a circumstance which they considered providential had
not come to rekindle their regicidal zeal. The last masked ball of the
season was to be given in the Opera-house on the night of March 16-17,
and it was known that Gustavus would be present. To strike the monarch
in the midst of the festival, in order to chastise him for his love of
pleasure, was an idea which charmed the assassins. Moreover, the mask
alone could embolden them; they thought that if the august victim were
enveloped in a domino they need no longer dread that royal prestige
which had more than once caused them to recoil.
Gustavus was counselled to be on his guard. The young Count Louis de
Bouillé, who was then at Stockholm, and who had been informed by a
letter from Germany that the King was about to be assassinated, begged
him to profit by the warnings reaching him from every quarter.
Gustavus replied that he would rather go blindly to meet his fate than
torment himself with the numberless precautions which such suspicions
would demand. "If I listened," added he, "to all the advice I receive,
I could not even drink a glass of water; besides, I am far from
believing in the execution of such a plot. {39} My subjects, although
very brave in war, are extremely timid in politics. The successes I
expect to gain in France, the trophies of which I shall bring back to
Stockholm, will speedily augment my power by the confidence and general
respect which will be their result."
Meantime the fatal hour was approaching. The masked ball of March 16
was about to open. Before going there, Gustavus took supper with a few
of the persons belonging to his household. While he was at table he
received a note, written in French and unsigned, in which he was
entreated not to enter the playhouse, where he was about to be stricken
to death. The author of the note urgently recommended the King not to
make his appearance at the ball, and, if he persisted in going, to
suspect the crowd which would press around him, because this gathering
was to be the prelude and signal of the blow aimed at him. The really
bizarre thing about this was that the man who wrote these lines was
himself one of the conspirators, Count de Lilienhorn.
"It is impossible to tell," says the Marquis de Bouillé in his Memoirs,
"whether his conscience wished to acquit itself in this manner towards
the King, to whom he owed everything, without forfeiting his word to
his party, or whether, knowing the fearless character of this prince,
he did not offer his anonymous advice as a bait to his courage. It
certainly produced the latter effect." Gustavus made no {40}
reflections on reading this note, and went fearlessly to the ball.
The orchestra is playing wildly. The dances are animated. The hall,
adorned with flowers, sparkles under the glow of the chandeliers.
Gustavus appears for a moment in his box. It is only then that he
shows to Baron d'Essen, his first equerry, the anonymous note he had
received while at supper. That faithful servant begs him not to go
down into the hall. Gustavus disregards the prudent counsel. He says
that hereafter he will wear a coat of mail, but that, for this time, he
is perfectly determined to be reckless about danger. The King and his
equerry go into the saloon in front of the royal box, where each puts
on a domino. Then they enter the hall by way of the stage. There are
men essentially courageous, who love danger for its own sake. Gustavus
is one of them. Hence he takes pleasure in braving all his assassins.
As he is crossing the greenroom with Baron d'Essen on his arm, "Let us
see," says he, "whether they will really dare to kill me." Yes, they
will dare it. The moment that the King enters he is recognized in
spite of his mask and his domino. He walks slowly around the hall, and
then goes into the pit, where he strolls about during several minutes.
He is about to retrace his steps, when he finds himself surrounded, as
had been predicted, by a group of maskers who get between him and the
officers of his suite. Several black dominos approach. They are the
assassins. One of them, {41} Count de Horn, lays a hand on his
shoulder: "Good day, fine masker!" he says. This Judas salute, this
ironical welcome given by the murderers to their victim, is the signal
for the attack. On the instant, Ankarstroem fires on the King with a
pistol loaded with old iron.
Gustavus, struck in the left hip, cries, "I am wounded!" The pistol,
which had been wrapped in wool, made only a muffled report, and the
smoke spreading throughout the room, the crowd does not think of a
murder, but a fire. Cries of "Fire! fire!" augment the confusion.
Baron d'Essen, all covered with his master's blood, helps him to gain a
little box called the OEil-de-Boeuf, and from there a salon, where he
is laid upon a sofa. Baron d'Armfelt orders the doors of the theatre
to be closed, and every one to unmask. A man, brazening it out, lifts
his mask before the officer of police, and says to him with assurance,
"As for me, sir, I hope that you will not suspect me." It is
Ankarstroem, the assassin. He goes out quietly. But, after the crime
was committed, his weapons, a pistol and a knife like that of
Ravaillac, had fallen on the floor. A gunsmith of Stockholm will
recognize the pistol and declare that he had sold it a few days before
to a former officer of the guards, Captain Ankarstroem. It is the
token which will cause the arrest of the assassin, and his punishment
by the penalty of parricides,--decapitation and the cutting off of his
right hand.
{42}
The King showed admirable calm and resignation during the thirteen days
he had still to live. He asked with anxiety if the murderer had been
arrested, and being answered that his name was not yet known: "Ah! God
grant," said he, "that he may not be discovered!" As soon as the first
bandages were put on, the wounded man was taken to his apartments at
the castle. There he received his courtiers and the foreign ministers.
When he saw the Duke d'Escars, who represented the brothers of Louis
XVI. at Stockholm: "This is a blow," said he, "which is going to
rejoice your Parisian Jacobins; but write to the Princes that if I
recover from it, it will change neither my sentiments nor my zeal for
their just cause." In the midst of his sufferings he preserved a
dignity above all praise. Neither recriminations nor murmurs issued
from his lips. He summoned to his death-bed both his friends and those
who had been among the number of his enemies, but would have been
horrified to have been accomplices in a crime. When the old Count de
Brahé, leader of the nobles of the opposition, presented himself,
Gustavus said, as he pressed him in his arms: "I bless my wound, since
it has brought back an old friend who had withdrawn from me. Embrace
me, my dear count, and let all be forgotten between us."
The fate of his son, who was about to ascend the throne at the age of
thirteen, was the chief preoccupation of the King. "Let them put me on
a litter," cried he; "I will go to the public square and speak to {43}
the people." And he said to Baron d'Armfelt: "Go, and like another
Antony, show the bloody vestments of Cæsar." It was also to D'Armfelt
that he said as he was signing with his dying hand his commission as
Governor of Stockholm: "Give me your knightly word that you will serve
my son as faithfully as you have served me." He made his confession to
his grand-almoner: "I fear," he said to him, "that I have no great
merit before God, but at least I am sure that I have never done harm to
any one intentionally." He meant to receive the sacraments according
to the Lutheran form, and to have the Queen brought to him, as he had
not seen her since his illness. But while seeking sleep in order to
tranquillize his mind before this emotion, he found the slumber of
death, March 29, 1792, at eleven in the morning. He was forty-six
years old.
Thus terminated the brilliant and stormy career of the prince on whom
the Marquis de Bouillé has pronounced the following judgment: "His
manners and his politeness rendered him the most amiable and attractive
man in his country, although the Swedes are naturally intelligent. He
had a vivid imagination, a mind enlightened and adorned by a taste for
letters, a masculine and persuasive eloquence, and an easy elocution
even when speaking French; useful and agreeable acquirements, a
prodigious memory, polite and affable manners, accompanied by a certain
oddity which did not displease. His strong and ardent soul was
enkindled with an inordinate love of glory; but a {44} chivalrous
spirit and loyalty dominated there. His sensitive heart rendered him
clement, when he ought, perhaps, to have been severe; he was even
susceptible of friendship, and this prince has had and has preserved
friends whom I have known, and who were worthy to be such. He had a
firm and decided character, and, above all, that resolution so
necessary to statesmen, without which wit, prudence, talents,
experience, are not only useless, but often injurious."
According to the Marquis de Bouillé, Gustavus should have been the King
of France, and Louis XVI. King of Sweden. "As the sovereign of France,
Gustavus would have been, beyond all doubt, one of its greatest kings.
He would have preserved that beautiful realm from a revolution; he
would have governed with glory and with splendor.... Louis XVI., on
the other hand, placed on the throne of Sweden, would have obtained the
respect and esteem of that simple people by his moral and religious
virtues, his economy, his spirit of justice, and his good and
benevolent sentiments. He would have contributed to the happiness of
the Swedes, who would have wept above his tomb; whereas both these
monarchs perished at the hands of their subjects. But the designs of
Providence are impenetrable, and we ought, in respect and silence, to
obey its unalterable decrees."
The Jacobins of Paris, who affected to despise the projects of Gustavus
III., showed how much they had feared him by the mad joy they displayed
on {45} learning of his death. They lavished praises on "Brutus
Ankarstroem." Although it had been committed by the nobles, there was
a certain reminiscence of the French Revolution about the assault. In
their secret meetings the conspirators had agreed to carry around on
pikes the heads of Gustavus's principal friends, "in the French style,"
as was said in those days. Count de Lilienhorn, brought up, nourished,
and drawn from poverty and obscurity by Gustavus, and overwhelmed to
the last moment by the benefits of the generous monarch, explained his
monstrous ingratitude and the part he had taken in the attack, by
saying he had been led astray by the idea of commanding the National
Guards of Stockholm after the Revolution, and playing the same part as
Lafayette. The Girondin ministry attained to power in France a few
days after Gustavus had been struck down in Sweden. There was no
connecting link between the two facts; but at Paris, as at Stockholm,
the cause of kings sustained a terrible repulse. The tragic death of
their faithful friend must have caused Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette
some painful forebodings concerning their own fate. The murder of
Gustavus was the first of a series of great catastrophes. The pistol
of the Swedish regicide heralded the blade of the Parisian guillotine.
The 16th of March was the prelude of the 21st of January.
{46}
V.
THE BEGINNINGS OF MADAME ROLAND.
The moment is at hand when a woman of the middle class, born in humble
circumstances, is about to make her appearance on the scene of
politics; a woman who, after living in obscurity during thirty-eight
years, was to become famous in a few days, and attract the attention of
all France first and afterwards that of Europe entire. No figure is
more curious to study than hers, and it is not surprising that of late
years it has tempted men of great merit, such as MM. Daubant and
Faugère, whose publications have shed great light on the Egeria of the
Girondins.
At every epoch of history there are certain women who become as it were
living symbols, and sum up in their own persons the passions,
prejudices, and illusions of their time. They reflect at once its
vices and its virtues, its qualities and its defects. Such was Madame
Roland. All the distinctive characteristics of the close of the
eighteenth century are resumed in her: ardent enthusiasm, generous
ideals, aspiration towards progress, passion for liberty, heroic
courage in view of persecution, captivity, and death; an absence of
religious faith, an implacable vanity, a {47} thirst for emotions,
plagiarism of antiquity, declamatory language and sentiments, and
childish imitation of Greece and Rome. Nothing is more interesting
than to analyze the conceptions of this mind, count the pulsations of
this heart, and surprise the inmost secrets of a woman whose
psychological importance is as considerable as her place in history.
Intellectually as well as morally, Madame Roland is the daughter of
Jean-Jacques Rousseau; socially she is the personification of that
third estate which, having been nothing, wished at first to be
something and afterwards to be all; politically, she is by turns the
heroine and the victim of the Revolution, which, under pretext of
liberty, engendered tyranny, which used the guillotine and perished by
the guillotine, and which after dreaming of light expired in mire and
blood.
How was it that this little _bourgeoise_, the daughter of Philipon the
engraver, a man midway between an artisan and an artist, whose very
origin seemed to remove her so far from any political rôle, attained to
high renown? What influences formed this woman whose qualities were
masculine? Whence was drawn the inspiration of this siren, destined to
be taken in her own snares and die the victim of her own incantations?
A rapid glance at the earliest years of Marie-Jeanne Philipon, the
future Madame Roland, is enough to explain her passions and her hopes,
her errors and her talents, her rages and her enthusiasms.
She was born in Paris, March 18, 1754, of an intelligent but frivolous
father, and a simple, devoted, {48} honestly commonplace mother. From
infancy she felt herself superior to those by whom she was surrounded.
Thence sprang an unmeasured pride and a continual hunger to produce an
impression. The infant prodigy preluded the female politician.
Speaking of herself in her Memoirs, she becomes ecstatic over the child
who "read serious works, explained very well the circles of the
celestial globe, used crayons and the burin, found at eight years that
she was the best dancer in an assembly of young persons older than
herself," and who, nevertheless, "was often summoned to the kitchen to
make an omelette, clean the vegetables, or skim the pot." She admires
her own willingness to descend to domestic cares: "I was never out of
my element," she says; "I could make soup as skilfully as Philopoemen
could chop wood; but no one, observing me, could imagine that this was
suitable employment." Still speaking of herself, she celebrates "the
little person who on Sundays went to church or out walking in a
spick-and-span costume whose appearance was fully sustained by her
demeanor and her language." She calls attention to the contrast by
which, on week-days, the same child went out alone, in a little cloth
frock, to buy parsley and salad at a short distance from home. "It
must be owned," she adds, "that I did not like this very well; but I
did not show it, and I had the art of doing my errands in such a way as
to find some pleasure in it. I united such great politeness to a
certain dignity, that the fruit-seller or other person {49} of the
sort, took pleasure in serving me first, and even those who came before
me thought this proper."
So the little Philipon wanted to take the chief place in the
fruiterer's shop, just as, later on, she desired it on the political
stage or the Ministry of the Interior. This enemy of privileges will
admit them only for herself. In everything she made pretentions:
pretentions to elegance, beauty, distinction, talent, knowledge,
eloquence, genius, and, when she wanted to be simple, to simplicity.
In her style as in her conversation, in her public as in her private
life, what she sought before all things was effect. It was absolutely
essential that people should talk about her, that she should be playing
a part, or standing on a pedestal. Assuredly, if she had a fault, it
was not excess of modesty. She regarded herself as the flower of her
sex, a superior woman, made to be loved, flattered, and adored. She
speaks of her charms with the precision of a doctor and the enthusiasm
of a poet. Not one of her perfections escapes her. It is through a
magnifying-glass and before a mirror that she studies and admires
herself. She discovers that a society in which a woman so remarkable
and so attractive is not thoroughly well known, must be badly
organized. Middle-class by birth, and aristocratic by instinct, she
represents what one might then have called the new social strata. A
secret voice told her that the day was to come when she would make
herself feared by the powerful of the earth, those giants with feet of
clay who, at the beginning of her {50} career, were still looked at
kneeling. Banished by fate from the theatre where the human
tragi-comedy is played, she said to herself: "I too will have a part
one of these days." In the earliest stage of her existence there was
in her a confused medley of uneasiness and ambition, of spite and
anger. She had a horror of the slightly disdainful protection of
people of quality. She conceived an aversion for persons like that
Demoiselle d'Hannaches, "big, awkward, dry, and yellow," infatuated
with her nobility, annoying everybody with her titles, and yet, in
spite of her ignorance, her stiff manners, her old-fashioned dress and
her follies, well received everywhere on account of her birth.
Slowly, but steadily, the future amazon of the Revolution prepared
herself for the combat. The books which she read and re-read
incessantly were the arsenal whence she drew her weapons. One of those
presentiments which do not deceive, promised her a stormy but
illustrious destiny. More Roman than French, more pagan than
Christian, she longed for glory like that of the heroines of Plutarch,
her favorite author. In the humble dwelling of her father, situated at
the corner of the Pont-Neuf and the Quai des Orfévres, she caught a
glimpse of horizons as wide as her thoughts. "From the upper part of
our house," she says, "a great expanse offered itself to my dreamy and
romantic imagination. How often from my north window have I
contemplated with emotion the deserts of the sky, its superb azure {51}
vault splendidly outlined from the bluish dawn far behind the Pont du
Change, to the sunset gilded with a faint purplish lustre behind the
trees of the Champs Elysées and the houses of Chaillot."
Irritated with the obscurity to which she was condemned by fate, there
was but one resource which could have consoled her for the social
inequalities which bruised her vanity and her pride. That resource
would have been religion. Nothing but an ideal of humility could have
appeased the interior revolts of this soul of fire. To such a woman,
what is lacking is heaven. Earth, no matter what happens, can give her
nothing but deceptions. The only moment of her life when she felt
herself really happy was that when she enjoyed the supreme good, peace
of heart. Of all parts of her Memoirs, the most pure and touching are
those she devotes to her recollections of the convent. One might think
that the author of _Rolla_ had remembered them when he described in
such penetrating terms the mystic poetry of the cloister, and the
regrets often engendered by the loss of faith in the minds and hearts
of people who have become unbelievers.
The little Philipon, being in her twelfth year, asked to be sent to a
convent, in order to prepare better for her first communion. She was
placed with the Ladies of the Congregation, rue Neuve-Saint-Étienne, in
the Faubourg Saint-Marcel, near Sainte-Pélagie, her future prison: "How
I pressed my dear mamma in my arms at the moment of parting {52} from
her for the first time! I was stifled, overwhelmed; but I obeyed the
voice of God, and crossed the threshold of the cloister, offering Him
with tears the greatest sacrifice that I could make. The first night I
spent at the convent was agitated: I was no longer under the paternal
roof. I felt that I was far from that good mother who was surely
thinking of me with tenderness. There was a feeble light in the room
where I had been put to bed, with four other children of my own age; I
rose quietly and went to the window. The moonlight permitted me to see
the garden upon which it looked. The most profound silence reigned; I
listened to it, so to say, with a sort of respect; great trees cast
their gigantic shadows here and there, and promised a safe refuge for
tranquil meditation. I lifted my eyes to the pure and serene sky, and
thought I felt the presence of the Divinity, who smiled at my sacrifice
and already offered me its recompense in the peace of a celestial
abode. Delicious tears flowed slowly down my cheeks; I reiterated my
vows with a holy transport, and I enjoyed the slumber of the elect."
As if in these silent cloisters, which she crossed slowly so as to
enjoy their solitude more fully, she had a presentiment of the storms
in her destiny and her heart, she sometimes stopped beside a tomb on
which was engraven the eulogy of a holy maiden. "She is happy!" she
said to herself with a sigh. While she was in prison she remembered
with emotion a novice's taking the veil: "I experience yet the {53}
thrill caused by her faintly tremulous voice when she chanted
melodiously the customary versicle: '_Elegi_: Here I have chosen my
abode, and I will not depart from it forever.' I have not forgotten
the notes of this little air; I can repeat them as exactly as if I had
heard them yesterday."
Unhappily, religious ideas were soon to undergo a change in the mind of
the future Madame Roland. Returning to the paternal dwelling, she was
badly brought up there; her mother let her read everything, even
_Candide_. Voltaire, Helvétius, Diderot, had no secrets for this young
girl. Extreme disorder and confusion in mind and heart were the
result. When she had the misfortune to lose her mother at the age of
twenty-one, the book in which she sought consolation was the _Nouvelle
Héloise_. Jean-Jacques became her god. "It seems," she says, "as if
he were my natural aliment and the interpreter of the sentiment I had
already, and which he alone knew how to explain to me.... To have the
whole of Jean-Jacques," she says again, "to be able to consult him
incessantly, to enlighten and elevate one's self with him at all times
of life, is a felicity which can only be tasted by adoring him as I
did." Such reading robbed her of faith. It made her a free-thinker
and a bluestocking. It inspired her with an unhealthy ambition,
sullied her imagination, and troubled the peace of her heart. It
deprived her of that moral delicacy, lacking which, even virtue itself
loses its charms. She was no longer anything but a young {54} girl,
well-conducted but not pure, honest but shameless.
Was not a day coming when, a prisoner and on the point of getting into
the fatal cart, she would throw off the terrible anxieties of her
situation in order to imitate the impurities of the _Confessions_ of
Jean-Jacques, and retrace indecent details with complacency? Do not
seek in her that flower of innocence which is the young girl's grace.
The charming puritan does not commit great faults, but she has
astonishing licenses of thought and speech. For her, Louvet's
_Faublas_ is "one of those charming romances known to persons of taste,
in which the graces of imagination ally themselves to the tone of
philosophy." Is not this woman, who begins her life like a saint and
ends it as a pupil of Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the symbol of
that troubled eighteenth century which opened in fidelity to religious
faith and closed in the depths of the abyss of incredulity? The
ravages caused by bad reading in the soul of this young girl explain
the catastrophes of the entire century.
From the time when she replaced the Gospels by the _Contrat Social_ and
the _Imitation of Jesus Christ_ by the _Nouvelle Héloise_, there was no
longer anything simple or natural remaining in the young philosopher.
All her thoughts and actions became declamatory. There was something
theatrical in her attitudes and gestures, and even in the sound of her
voice. Her speech was rhythmical, cadenced, marked {55} by a special
accent. Even her private letters often resemble the amplifications of
rhetoric rather than the effusions of friendship. One might say that
their author had a presentiment that they would be printed. She wrote
to Mademoiselle Sophie Cannet, January 3, 1776: "In any case, burn
nothing. Though my letters were one day to be read by all the world, I
would not hide the only monuments of my weakness, and my sentiments."
Monuments of weakness--is not the expression worthy of the bombast of
the time?
Not finding love, Mademoiselle Philipon married philosophically. Her
union bears a striking imitation to that of Héloise with M. de Volmar.
"Looking her destiny peacefully and tenderly in the face, greatly moved
but not infatuated," she united herself to a man whom she esteemed but
did not love. This was Roland de la Platière, who was descended from
an ancient and very honorable middle class family. Though not rich, he
was at least comfortably well off. "Well educated, honest, simple in
his tastes and manners, he fulfilled his duties as inspector of
manufactures in a notable way. The marriage was celebrated on February
4, 1780. Roland was forty-six years old, while his wife was not yet
twenty-six. Thin, bald, careless in his dress, the husband was not at
all an ideal person. It had taken him five years to declare his
passion, and this hesitation, as his wife was to write thirteen years
later, "left not a vestige of illusion in his sentiments." "I have
often felt," {56} says she, "that there was no similarity between us.
If we lived in retirement, I spent many painful hours; if we mingled in
society, I was loved by persons among whom I perceived there were some
who might affect me too much; I plunged into labor with my husband....
It was a long time before I gained courage to contradict him."
M. Roland was sent to Amiens, where his wife presented him with a
daughter, whom she nursed, and afterwards brought up with the utmost
tenderness and devotion. In 1784, he was summoned to Lyons, where he
found himself once more in his native region. Thenceforward he spent
two of the winter months in Lyons, and the remainder of the year on his
paternal domain, the Close of Platière, two leagues from Villefranche,
surrounded by woods and vineyards, and opposite the mountains of
Beaujolais. While her husband went to take possession of his new post,
Madame Roland, not yet a republican, remained a few weeks in Paris in
order to obtain, if possible, the patent of nobility so ardently
desired by the family. Her solicitations proved unsuccessful, and the
married pair, despairing of becoming nobles, consoled themselves by a
frank avowal of democracy.
Up to the time of the Revolution, Madame Roland's life glided
peacefully away without any remarkable incidents. In the Close of
Platière, which she calls her dovecot, she appears as a good
housekeeper who looks after everything, from the cellar to the garret;
{57} who plays the doctor among the poor villagers; who is delighted to
find in nature a savor of frank and free rusticity. The life she leads
is not merely honest, but edifying. She is very careful at this period
to hide her philosophy. She writes to Bosc, one of her friends,
February 9, 1785: "My brother-in-law, whose disposition is extremely
gentle and sensitive, is also very religious; I leave him the
satisfaction of thinking that the dogmas are as evident to me as they
appear to him, and my exterior actions are such as become the mother of
a family out in the country, who is bound to edify everybody. As I was
very devout in my early youth, I know my prayers as well as my
philosophy, and I prefer to make use of my first erudition." She wrote
again to Bosc, October 12, 1785: "I have hardly touched a pen for a
month, and I think I am acquiring some of the inclinations of the beast
whose milk refreshes me; I am extremely _asinine_, and I busy myself
with all the petty cares of the _hoggish_ country life. I make
preserved pears that are delicious; we dry grapes and plums; we wash
and make up linen; we have white wine for breakfast, and we lie down on
the grass to rest; we follow the vintagers; we repose in the woods and
fields."
Before looking at the female politician, let us glance once more at the
woman in private life, the charitable, devoted, honorable mother of a
family, such as she paints herself in a letter of November 10, 1786:
"From the corner of my fire, at eleven {58} o'clock, after a quiet
night and the various morning cares, my husband at his desk, my little
girl knitting, and I chatting with one and superintending the other's
work, enjoying the happiness of being snugly in the bosom of my dear
little family, writing to a friend, while the snow is falling on so
many wretches weighed down by poverty and sorrow, I am touched with
compassion for their fate; I turn back sweetly to my own, and at this
moment I count as nothing the annoyances of relations or circumstances
which seem occasionally to mar its felicity."
Alas, why did not Madame Roland stay in her modest country-house to dry
her grapes and plums, to superintend her washing, mend her linen, and
spread out in her garret the fruits for winter use? Were not
obscurity, repose, peace of heart, better for her than that fictitious
glory which was to pass so quickly and end upon the scaffold? One
might say that before quitting nature, that great consoler which calms
and does not betray, in order to plunge herself into the odious world
of politics, which spoils and embitters the most beautiful souls, she
experiences a certain vague regret for the sweet and tranquil joys
which her folly was about to cause her to renounce forever.
"The weather is delightful," wrote Madame Roland, May 17, 1790; "the
country has changed almost beyond recognition in only six days; the
vines and walnuts were as black as they are in winter, but a stroke of
the magic wand does not alter the aspect of {59} things more quickly
than the heat of a few fine days has done; everything turns green and
leafs out; a soft verdure is visible where there was nothing but the
dull and faded tint of torpor and inaction. I could easily forget
public affairs and men's controversies here; content to arrange the
manor, to see my fowls brood, and take care of my rabbits, I would care
nothing more about the revolutions of empires. But, as soon as I am in
the city, the poverty of the people and the insolence of the rich rouse
my hatred of injustice and oppression: I have no longer any soul or
desire except for the triumph of great truths and the success of our
regeneration."
The die is cast. The daughter of Philipon the engraver is about to
become a political woman. The hour is come when this great actress,
who has long known her part, is at last going on the stage. She has a
presentiment of the risk she is running in assuming a task which is
beyond her sex. But, like soldiers who love danger for danger's sake,
and prefer the emotions of the battle-field to garrison life, she will
joyfully quit her province and throw herself into the seething furnace
of Paris. Even though she is to meet persecution and death at the end
of her new career, she will not recoil. A short but agitated life will
seem better to her than a long and fortunate existence without violent
emotions. A clear sky pleases her no longer. She is homesick for
storms and lightning flashes.
{60}
VI.
MADAME ROLAND'S ENTRANCE ON THE SCENE.
The hour of the Revolution had struck, and, ambitious, unbelieving,
full of disdain for the leading classes, full of confidence in her own
superiority, active, eloquent, impassioned, uniting the language of an
orator to the seductions of a charming woman, Madame Roland was ripe
for the Revolution. Her epoch suited her, and she suited her epoch.
This pagan who, according to her own expression, roamed mentally in
Greece, attended the Olympic games, and despised herself for being
French; this fanatical admirer of antiquity who, at eight years of age,
carried Plutarch to church with her instead of a missal, who styled
Roland _the virtuous_ as the Athenians called Aristides the _just_, who
will die like her heroes, Socrates and Phocion; this student who, at
another period, would have been rated as an under-bred woman of the
middle class, a more or less ridiculous bluestocking, suddenly found
herself, in consequence of a general panic and circumstances as strange
as they were unforeseen, the very ideal of the society in which she
lived. For several months she was to be its fashionable type, its
favorite heroine. {61} But the Revolution was a Saturn who devoured
his children, male and female, and the Egeria of the Girondins expiated
bitterly the intoxication caused by her brief popularity.
In 1777, at the age of twenty-three, she had written: "Gay and jesting
speeches fall from this mouth which sobs at night upon its pillow; a
laugh dwells on my lips, while my tears, shut up within my heart, at
length make on it, in spite of its hardness, the effect produced by
water on a stone: falling drop by drop, they insensibly wear it away."
In 1791, when she was thirty-eight, she wrote: "The phenomena of
nature, which make the vulgar grow pale, and which are imposing even to
the philosophical eye, offer nothing to a sensitive person preoccupied
with great concerns, but scenes inferior to those of which her own
heart is the theatre." The flame consuming the eloquent and ardent
disciple of Rousseau was in need of fuel, and, finding this in
politics, she threw herself upon it with a sort of ravenous fury, just
as she had once abandoned herself to study. At twenty-two she had
written to one of her young friends: "You scold me for studying too
hard. Bear in mind, then, that unless I did so, love might perhaps
excite my imagination to frenzy. It is a necessary distraction. I am
not trying to become a learned woman; I study because I need to study,
as I do to eat." It was thus that Madame Roland plunged into politics.
All her unappeased instincts and repressed forces found their outlet in
that direction.
{62}
Woman being formed by nature to be dominated, nothing is more agreeable
to her than to invert the parts, and in her turn to domineer. To exert
influence in public affairs, to designate or support the candidates for
great offices of State, to organize or direct a ministry, to make
themselves listened to by serious men, to inspire opinions or systems,
is to ambitious women a kind of revenge for their sex. Those who have
acquired a habit of exercising this sort of power cannot relinquish it
without extreme reluctance. If they have once persuaded themselves of
their superiority to men, nothing can ever root the conviction from
their minds. To be protected humiliates them; what they long for most
of all is to be acknowledged as protectresses. Self-deluded, they
attribute to their passion for the public welfare what is, especially
in their case, the need of petty glory, the thirst for emotions, or the
amusement of pride and vanity.
The Revolutionary bluestocking, Madame Roland, was from the very start
delighted to see that her works were printed, and that they produced as
much effect as if they had been written by some great statesman. These
first successes seemed to her to justify the excellent opinion she had
always entertained of herself. She got into a habit of playing the
oracle. No sooner had her lips touched the cup containing this
poisonous but intoxicating beverage than she would have no other. That
alone could refresh, even while it killed her.
{63}
Politics has the immense defect of exasperating, troubling, and
disfiguring souls. Madame Roland was born good, sensible, and
generous. Politics made her at times wicked, vindictive, and cruel.
July 26, 1789, she wrote this odious letter: "You are nothing but
children; your enthusiasm is a fire of straw, and if the National
Assembly does not order the trial of two illustrious heads, or some
generous Decius does not strike them down, you are all ... lost"
(Madame Roland employed a more trivial expression). "If this letter
does not reach you, may the cowards who read it redden to learn that it
is from a woman, and tremble in reflecting that she can create a
hundred enthusiasts from whom will proceed a million others." Roland
had been employed by the Agricultural Society of Lyons to draw up its
reports for the States-General. Madame Roland wrote much more of them
than her husband did. She sent article on article to a journal founded
by Champagneux to forward the revolutionary propaganda. Sixty thousand
copies were printed of one of them in which she described the festival
of the Federation at Lyons. Imagine the joy felt by the
_femme-auteur_, the pupil of Jean-Jacques, the model of George Sand!
Soon afterwards, the municipality deputed Roland to the Constituent
Assembly to advocate the interests of the city, which was involved to
the extent of forty millions, and which asked to have this debt assumed
by the State. Roland and his wife arrived in Paris, February 20, 1791.
{64}
The married pair installed themselves on the third floor of the hotel
Britannique, in rue Guénégaud. There a sort of political reunion was
formed, of which Brissot was the first link. Four times a week a few
friends, and certain deputies and journalists, met around this still
unknown woman, whose wit, charm, and beauty were not long in making a
sensation. It was at this period that she made Buzot's acquaintance.
The day of her first interview with the young and brilliant deputy was
an epoch in her sentimental life. Thenceforward, two passions, love
and ambition, the one as fierce and devouring as the other, were to
occupy her ardent soul. Comparing the young orator, whom she perhaps
transformed in her imagination into the president of a more or less
Athenian republic, with the austere and prosaic companion of her
existence, she perceived that, according to her own expression, there
was no equality between her and her husband, and that "the ascendency
of a domineering character, joined to twenty years' seniority, rendered
one of these superiorities too great"--that of age. She was herself
six years older than Buzot. Even though her love for him may have
remained Platonic, she gave him all her heart and soul.
For the majority of women, still beautiful, who mingle in public
affairs, love is the principal thing; politics but the accessory, the
pretext. They imagine they are attaching themselves to ideas, and it
is to men. In this respect the heroines of the Revolution resemble
those of the Fronde. The stateswoman in {65} Madame Roland plays
second to the lover of Buzot. In her mind the Republic and the
handsome republican blend into one. Believing herself a patriot when
she is above all a woman in love, she carries the emotions, the
infatuations, the ardors and exaggerations of her private life into her
public one. With her, angers and enthusiasms rise to paroxysm. She is
extreme in all things.
She detests Louis XVI. as much as she loves Buzot. After the flight to
Varennes, she wrote: "To replace the King on the throne is a folly, an
absurdity, if it is not a horror; to declare him demented is to make
obligatory the appointment of a regent. To impeach Louis XVI. would
be, beyond all contradiction, the greatest and most righteous step, but
you are incapable of taking it. Well then, put him not exactly under
interdict, but suspend him." Here begins the influence of Madame
Roland. The suspension of the royal authority is one of her ideas.
"So long as peace lasted," she says, "I adhered to the peaceful rôle
and to that kind of influence which I thought fitting to my sex; when
war was declared by the King's departure, it appeared to me that every
one should devote himself unreservedly. I joined the fraternal
societies, being persuaded that zeal and good intentions might be very
useful in critical moments. I was unable to stay at home any longer,
and I went to the houses of worthy people of my acquaintance that we
might excite each other to great measures." One knows what the {66}
Revolution meant by that expression: great measures. Madame Roland
became furious. She wanted a freedom of the press without check or
limit. She was angry because Marat's newspapers were destroyed by the
satellites of Lafayette. "It is a cruel thing to think of," she
exclaims, "but it becomes every day more evident that peace means
retrogression, and that we can only be regenerated by blood."
Her hatred includes both Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette. June 25,
1791, she writes: "It appears to me that the King ought to be
sequestered and his wife impeached." And on July 1: "The King has sunk
to the lowest depths of degradation; his trick has exposed him
completely, and he inspires nothing but contempt. His name, his
portrait, and his arms have been effaced everywhere. Notaries have
been obliged to take down the escutcheons marked with a flower-de-luce
which served to designate their houses. He is called nothing but Louis
the False, or the great hog. Caricatures of every sort represent him
under emblems which, though not the most odious, are the most suitable
to nourish and augment popular disdain. The people tend of their own
accord to all that can express this sentiment, and it is impossible
that they should ever again be willing to see seated on the throne a
being they despise so completely."
Things did not go fast enough to suit Madame Roland's furious hatred.
The popular gathering in the Champ-de-Mars, whose aim was to bring
about {67} the deposition of the King, was forcibly dispersed on July
17. With six exceptions, all the deputies who had belonged either to
the Jacobin Club or that of the Cordeliers, left them on account of
their demand that Louis XVI. should be brought to trial. The time for
great measures, to use Madame Roland's expression, had not yet arrived.
The ardent democrat laments it. "I cannot describe our situation to
you," she writes at this moment of the revolutionary recoil; "I feel
environed by a silent horror; my heart grows steadfast in a mournful
and solemn silence, ready to sacrifice all rather than cease to defend
principles, but not knowing the moment when they can triumph, and
forming no resolution but that of giving a great example."
The mission which had kept Roland in Paris for seven months being
ended, the discouraged pair returned to their province in September.
After stopping a few days in Lyons, in order to found a popular society
affiliated to the Jacobins of the capital, they went to spend the
remainder of the autumn at their country place, the Close of Platière.
But calm and silence no longer suited Madame Roland. Repose
exasperated her. She missed the struggle and the emotions of
revolutionary Paris, of which she had said: "One lives ten years here
in twenty-four hours; events and affections blend with and succeed each
other with singular rapidity; no such great events ever occupied minds."
The pleasure of seeing her daughter again was not {68} enough to
compensate her for the chagrin of having parted from Buzot. Just as
she was despairing at the thought of sinking back into all the nullity
of the province, as she expresses it, the news came that the inspectors
of agriculture had been suppressed. Roland, no longer an official,
deliberated with his wife as to their next step. His own inclination
was to settle permanently in the country and devote himself to
agricultural labors which would surely and safely augment his fortune.
But his wife was by no means of the same mind. She must see her dear
Buzot again at any cost. She flattered the self-love of her
unsuspecting spouse, and persuaded him that Paris was the sole theatre
worthy of the virtuous Roland. Roland allowed himself to be convinced.
His wife, no longer mistress of herself, was drawn into the Parisian
abyss as by an irresistible force. And yet was it not she who had
proposed to herself this ideal, so easily to have been realized? "I
have never imagined anything more desirable than a life divided between
domestic cares and those of agriculture, spent on a healthy and fertile
farm, with a little family where the example of its heads and common
labor maintain attachment, peace, and freedom." Was it not she who had
uttered this profoundly true thought: "I see neither pleasure nor
happiness except in the reunion of that which charms the heart as well
as the senses, and costs no regrets"? In the most beautiful days of
her youth had she not written: "There was a time when I was never
content {69} except when I had a book or a pen in my hand; at present I
am as well satisfied when I have made a shirt for my father or added up
an account of expenses as if I had read something profound. I do not
care at all to be learned; I want to be good and happy; that is my
chief business. What is necessary but good, honest common sense?" Is
it not she, too, who will write at the beginning of her Memoirs: "I
have observed that in all classes, ambition is generally fatal; for the
few happy ones whom it exalts, it makes a multitude of victims." Why
did she not more frequently remind herself of the sentiment so just and
well expressed in a letter dated in 1790: "Women are not made to share
in all the occupations of men: they are altogether bound to domestic
cares and virtues, and they cannot turn away from them without
destroying their happiness." But, alas! passion does not reason.
Farewell common sense, wisdom, and experience, when ambition and love
have taken possession of a woman's heart. Returning to Paris, December
15, 1791, the Rolands established themselves in the rue de la Harpe,
and plunged head-long into politics. The wife redoubled her activity,
eloquence, and passion. The husband, instead of attending quietly to
the management of his retiring pension, was named a member of the
Jacobin corresponding committee at the beginning of 1792, a
revolutionary centre of which Brissot was the leader. At this period,
we are informed by Madame Roland, the intimidated court imagined that
the nomination of a {70} minister chosen from among the patriots of the
Assembly would cause it to regain a little popularity. Brissot
proposed Roland, who, on March 24, 1792, accepted the portfolio of the
Interior.
Madame, behold yourself, then, the wife of a minister, and in fact more
of a minister than your husband. Your ambitious projects, which have
been treated as chimerical, are now realized. You have a cortège like
Marie Antoinette. Men seek the favor of a smile, a word, from you.
They court, they solicit, they fear you. The monarchy, which you
detest, is at last obliged to reckon with you and your friends. Your
beauty, your talent, and your eloquence are boasted of. Your name is
in every mouth. You are powerful, you are celebrated. Well! you will
find out for yourself what bitterness there is at the bottom of this
cup of pride which has tempted your lips so long. You will learn at
your own expense that renown does not produce happiness, and that, for
a woman, twilight is better than the full glare of day. Yes, you will
long for the obscurity which weighed upon you. You will long for the
house of your father, the engraver, on the Quai des Orfèvres. You will
dream of the sunsets which affected you, and of the monotonous but
peaceful succession of your days. You, the deist, the female
philosopher, will recall with regret the cloisters where in your
adolescence you tasted the peace of the elect. In the time of your
supreme trial Buzot's miniature will not console you; it is not his
image you should cover with your {71} kisses. No; that miniature is
not the viaticum for eternity. What you will need is the crucifix, and
you respect the crucifix no longer. And yet your imagination will
evoke the mystic cloister, with its altars decked with flowers, its
painted windows, its penetrating and ineffable poesy. And in thought,
also, you will see the country once more, the harvest time, the month
of the vintage, the poor who come to the door asking for bread and who
go away with blessings on their lips and gratitude in their hearts.
Why have you quitted these honest people? What have you come to do in
the midst of these ferocious Jacobins, who flatter you to-day and will
assassinate you to-morrow? Do you fancy that Marie Antoinette is the
only woman who will be insulted, calumniated, and betrayed? Why do you
seat at your hospitable table this livid-faced Robespierre, who to-day,
perhaps, will address you a madrigal, and to-morrow send you to the
scaffold? You will pay very dear for these false and artificial joys,
these gusts of commonplace vanity, this pride of a parvenu, and the
pleasure of presiding for a few evenings at the dinners given to the
Minister of the Interior in Calonne's dining-room. The Legislative
Assembly, the Jacobin Club, the journals and the ministry, the
souvenirs of Plutarch and the parodies of Jean-Jacques, the noisy crowd
of flatterers who are the courtiers of demagogues as they would have
been the courtiers of kings, these adulators who are going to change
into executioners,--all are vanity! Poor {72} woman, whose power will
be so ephemeral, why do you make yourself a persecutor? You will so
soon be persecuted. Why labor so relentlessly to shake the foundations
of a throne that will bury you beneath its ruins?
{73}
VII.
MARIE ANTOINETTE AND MADAME ROLAND.
Two women find themselves confronted across the chessboard and about to
move the pieces in a terrible game in which each stakes her head, and
each is foredoomed to lose. One is the woman who represents the old
régime--the daughter of the German Cæsars, the Queen of France and
Navarre; the other stands for the new régime, the Parisian middle
classes--the daughter of the engraver of the Quai des Orfèvres. They
are nearly the same age. Madame Roland was born March 18, 1754; and
Marie Antoinette, November 2, 1755. Both are beautiful, and both are
conscious of their charm. Each exercises a sort of domination over all
who approach her.
In 1792, when Roland enters the ministry, Marie Antoinette is no longer
thinking of coquetry, luxury, or dress. The heroine of the Gallery of
the Mirrors, the crowned shepherdess of the Trianon, the queen of
elegance, pleasure, and fashion is not recognizable in her. The time
for splendors is over, like the time for pastorals. No more festivals,
no more distractions, no more theatres. Incessant anxieties and
unremitting labor; writing throughout the day and reading, {74}
meditating, and praying throughout the night, are now the unfortunate
sovereign's whole existence. She hardly sleeps. Her eyes are reddened
by tears. A single night, that of the arrest on the journey to
Varennes, had sufficed to whiten her hair. She wears mourning for her
brother, the Emperor Leopold, and for her ally, the King of Sweden,
Gustavus III., and one might say that she is also wearing it for the
French monarchy. All trace of frivolity has disappeared. The severe
and majestic countenance of the woman who suffers so cruelly as queen,
spouse, and mother, is sanctified by the double poetry of religion and
sorrow.
Madame Roland, on the other hand, is more coquettish than she has ever
been. The actress who has at last found her theatre and is very proud
to play her part, wishes to allure, desires to reign. She delights in
presiding at these political dinners where all the guests are men, and
of which her grace and eloquence constitute the charm. She has just
completed her thirty-eighth year. Her husband is nearly fifty-eight;
Buzot is only thirty-two. Possibly she is still more preoccupied with
love than with ambition. To use one of her own expressions, "her heart
swells with the desire to please," to please Buzot above all; she takes
pains to celebrate her own beauty, which, in spite of showing symptoms
of decline, has the brilliance of sunset. In her Memoirs she describes
her "large and superbly modelled bust, her light, quick step, her frank
and open glance, at once keen and {75} soft, which sometimes amazes,
but which caresses still more, and always quickens." She writes: "My
mouth is rather large; there are a thousand prettier, but none that has
a softer and more seductive smile." In prison, when she is nearly
forty, she states that if she has lost some of her attractions, yet she
needs no help from art to make her look five or six years younger.
"Even those who see me every day," she adds, "require to be told my
age, in order to believe me more than thirty-two or thirty-three."
Madame Roland had at first written thirty-three or thirty-four. But
after reflection, finding herself too modest, she made an erasure and
retrenched another year. She adds that she made very little use of her
charms; avowing at the same time, and with the most absolute frankness,
that if she could reconcile her duty with her inclination to utilize
them more fully, she would not be sorry.
Both Marie Antoinette and Madame Roland were political women. But the
one became so in her own despite, in the hope of saving the life of her
husband and the heritage of her son; the other, through ambition and
the desire to play a part for which her origin had not destined her.
In the one, everything is at once noble and simple, natural and
majestic; in the other there is always something affected and
theatrical; one scents the _parvenue_ who will never be a _grande
dame_, even in the Ministry of the Interior or at the house of Calonne.
All is unstudied in Marie Antoinette; Madame Roland, on the contrary,
is an artist in coquetry.
{76}
Bizarre caprice of fate which makes political rivals and adversaries
treating with each other on equal terms of these two women, of whom one
was so much above the other by rank and birth. The Tuileries and the
house of the Minister of the Interior are like two hostile citadels at
a stone's throw from each other. On both sides there is watchfulness
and fear. An impassable abyss, hollowed out by the vanity of the
commoner still more than by the pride of the Queen, forever separates
these two courageous women who, had they united instead of antagonizing
each other, might have saved both their country and themselves.
It is necessary to go back a few years in order to comprehend the
motive of Madame Roland's hatred for Marie Antoinette. It was inspired
in the vain commoner by envy, the worst and vilest of all counsellors.
Madame Roland's special characteristic was the passion for making an
effect. Now the effect produced by Marie Antoinette under the old
régime was immense; that produced by the future Egeria of the Girondin
group was almost null. A simple mortal, regarding Olympus from below,
she said to herself with vexation, that in spite of her talents and her
charms there was no place for her among the gods and goddesses.
Versailles was like a superior world from which it maddened her to be
excluded. She was twenty years old when, in 1774, she visited it with
her mother, her uncle, the Abbé Bimont, and an aged gentlewoman,
Mademoiselle d'Hannaches. They all lodged at the palace. One of Marie
Antoinette's {77} women, who was acquainted with the Abbé, and who was
not then on duty, lent them her apartment. The only object of the
excursion was to give the young girl a near view of the court.
In recalling this souvenir in her Memoirs, Madame Roland displays her
aversion for the old society. She is annoyed even with the companion
of her visit, because she was, according to the expression then in use,
a person of quality. "Mademoiselle d'Hannaches," she says, "went
boldly wherever she chose, ready to fling her name in the face of any
one who tried to stop her, thinking they ought to be able to read on
her grotesque visage her six hundred years of established nobility.
The fine figure of a pedantic little cleric like the Abbé Bimont, and
the imbecile pride of the ugly d'Hannaches were not out of keeping in
those scenes; but the unpainted face of my worthy mamma, and the
modesty of my dress, announced that we were commoners; if my eyes or my
youth provoked remark, it was almost patronizing, and caused me nearly
as much displeasure as Madame de Boismorel's compliments." It was this
Madame de Boismorel who, although she found the little Philipon very
pleasing, had said to the grandmother of the future Madame Roland:
"Take care that she does not become a learned woman; it would be a
great pity."
The splendors of Versailles did not dazzle the daughter of the engraver
of the Quai des Orfèvres. The apartment she occupied was at the top of
the {78} palace, in the same corridor as that of the Archbishop of
Paris, and so near it that it was necessary for the prelate to take
precautions lest she should overhear him talk. "Two poorly furnished
rooms," she says, "in the upper end of one of which space had been
contrived for a valet's bed, was the habitation which a duke and peer
of France esteemed himself honored in possessing, in order to be closer
at hand to cringe every morning at the levée of Their Majesties: and
yet he was the rigorist Beaumont.... The ordinary and the ceremonial
table-service of the entire family, eating separately or all together,
the masses, the promenades, the gaming, the presentations, had us for
spectators during a week." What impression was made on her by this
excursion to the royal palace? She herself will tell us nineteen years
later, in her prison. "I was not insensible," she says, "to the effect
of so much pomp and ceremony, but I was indignant that its object
should be to exalt certain individuals already too powerful and of very
slight personal importance: I liked much better to look at the statues
in the gardens than at the persons in the palace; and when my mother
asked if I was satisfied with my visit, 'Yes,' I replied, 'provided it
will soon be over; if I stay here many days longer, I shall detest the
people so much that I shall be unable to hide my hatred.' 'What harm
are they doing you, then?' 'Making me feel injustice, and constantly
behold absurdity.'"
How this impression is emphasized in the really {79} prophetic letter
written by the future heroine of the Revolution to her friend,
Mademoiselle Sophie Cannet, October 4, 1774: "To return to Versailles.
I cannot tell you how greatly all I have examined has made me value my
own situation, and thank Heaven that I was born in an obscure
condition. You think, perhaps, that this sentiment is based on the
slight esteem I attach to the worth of opinion, and my sense of the
reality of the penalties attached to greatness. Not at all. It is
based on the knowledge I have of my own character, which would be very
detrimental both to me and to the State if I were placed at a little
distance from the throne; because I would be keenly shocked by the
extreme inequality which sets so many thousands of men below a single
individual of the same species!" What a prediction! The most
unforeseen events were one day to bring this young plebeian near that
royalty formerly so far above her. The engraver's daughter will be the
wife of a minister of State. And then what will happen? According to
her own expression, her rôle will be very detrimental to herself and to
the State.
In the same letter she had written: "A beneficent king seems to me an
almost adorable being; but if, before coming into the world, the choice
of a government had been given me, my character would have made me
decide for a republic." She will end by hating the beneficent King,
and probably no one will contribute more than she towards establishing
the republican régime in France.
{80}
Supposing that, instead of being merely an insignificant commoner,
Madame Roland had been born in the ranks of aristocracy, had enjoyed
the right of sitting down in the presence of Their Majesties at
Versailles, and had shone at the familiar entertainments of the
Trianon, she would doubtless have shared the sentiments and ideas of
the women of the old régime, and, like the Princess de Lamballe or the
Duchess de Polignac, have shed tears of compassion over the Queen's
misfortunes. Fate, in placing her in a subordinate position, made her
an enemy and a rebel. She anathematized the society in which her rank
bore no relation to her lofty intelligence and her need of domination.
When, from the upper window of her father's house on the Quai des
Orfèvres, beside the Pont-Neuf, she saw the brilliant retinue of Marie
Antoinette pass by on their way to Notre Dame to return thanks to God
for some happy event, she grew angry at all this pomp and glitter, so
much in contrast with her own obscure condition. What crimes have been
engendered by the sentiment of envy! The furies of the guillotine were
above all things envious. They were delighted to see in the fatal cart
the woman whom they had formerly beheld in gala carriages resplendent
with gold. Madame Roland certainly ought not to have carried her
hatred to such a pitch; but had she not demanded in 1789, when speaking
of Louis XVI. and the Queen, that "two illustrious heads" should be
brought to trial? Who knows? If, in 1784, she had obtained the {81}
patent of nobility for her husband which at that period she solicited
so ardently, she might have become sincerely royalist! But having
remained, despite herself, in the citizen class, she retained and
personified, to her latest hour, its rancor, pettiness, and wrath.
What figure could she have made at Versailles, or even at the
Tuileries? In the midst of great lords and noble ladies the haughty
commoner would have been out of place; she would have stifled. It was
chiefly on that account that she attached herself to the new ideas.
She told herself that so long as royalty lasted, she would always be of
small importance; while, if the republic were established, she might
aspire to anything. Though her husband was one of the King's
ministers, she became daily more adverse to the monarchy, and Roland,
following her counsels, was like a pilot whose whole intent is to make
the vessel founder, even though he were to perish with its crew.
It is a sad thing to say, but even their community in suffering did not
disarm Madame Roland's hate for Marie Antoinette. It was in prison, on
the eve of ascending the scaffold herself, that she wrote concerning
Louis XVI. and the Queen: "He was led away by a giddy creature who
united the presumption of youth and grandeur to Austrian insolence, the
intoxication of the senses, and the heedlessness of levity, and was
herself seduced by all the vices of an Asiatic court, for which she had
been too well prepared by the example of her mother." Ah! why {82}
were not these cruel lines effaced by the tears Madame Roland shed in
floods over the pages she was writing, and of which the traces still
remain on the manuscript of her Memoirs? Why did she not sympathize in
the grief of Marie Antoinette, separated from her children, when in
speaking of her daughter Eudora, she wrote: "Good God! I am a
prisoner, and she is living far from me! I dare not even send for her
to receive my embraces; hatred pursues even the children of those whom
tyranny persecutes, and mine, with her eleven years, her virginal
figure, and her beautiful fair hair, could hardly appear in the streets
without creatures suborned or deluded by falsehood pointing her out as
the offspring of a conspirator. Cruel wretches! how well they know how
to tear a mother's heart!"
Why were these two women political adversaries? Both sensitive, both
artistic, with inexhaustible sources of poetry and tenderness at heart,
they were born for gentle emotions and not for horrible catastrophes.
Who, at their dawning, could have predicted for them such an appalling
night? Like Marie Antoinette, Madame Roland loved nature and the arts.
She felt the profound and penetrating charm of the fields. She drew,
she played on the harp, guitar, and violin, and she sang. "No one
knows," she wrote a few moments before her death, "what an alleviation
music is in solitude and anguish, nor from how many temptations it can
save one in prosperity." She had sung the same romances {83} as the
Queen. The same poets had inspired and affected each.
Does not this most feminine passage in Madame Roland's Memoirs recall
the character of the mistress of the Little Trianon? "I always
remember the singular effect produced on me by a bunch of violets at
Christmas; when I received them I was in that condition of soul often
induced by a season favorable to serious thought. My imagination
slumbered, I reflected coldly, and I hardly felt at all; suddenly the
color of these violets and their delicate perfume struck my senses; it
was an awakening to life.... A rosy tinge suffused the horizon of the
day." Would not this cry of Madame Roland in her captivity suit Marie
Antoinette as well? "Ah! when shall I breathe pure air and those soft
exhalations so agreeable to my heart?" And might not the daughter of
the great Maria Theresa have cried, like the daughter of Philipon the
engraver? "Adieu! my child, my husband, my friends. Adieu! sun whose
brilliant rays brought serenity to my soul, as if they were recalling
it to the skies. Adieu! ye solitary fields which have so often moved
me."
What must not these two keenly sensitive women have had to suffer at
the epoch when France became a hell? They have each believed in the
amelioration of the human species and the return of the golden age to
earth, and what will their awakening be, after such alluring dreams?
Men will be as unjust, as wicked, as cruel to the republican as to the
queen. {84} She, too, will be drenched with calumnies and outrages.
They will insult her also in the most cowardly and ferocious manner.
Under the very windows of her dungeon she will hear the hawkers crying:
"Great visit of Père Duchesne to Citizeness Roland, in the Abbey
prison, for the purpose of pumping her." The ignoble journalist will
call her "old sack of the counter-revolution." He will say to her with
his habitual oaths: "Weep for your crimes, old fright, before you
expiate them on the scaffold!" The wife of Louis XVI. and the wife of
Roland will die within twenty-three days of each other: one on October
16, the other on November 8, 1793. They will start from the same
prison of the Conciergerie, to be led to the same Place Louis XV., to
have their heads cut off by the blade of the same guillotine. The
commoner who had been so jealous of the Queen, can no longer complain.
If the lives of the two women have been different, they will at least
have the same death; and the doer of the noble deeds of the régime of
equality, the headsman, will make no distinction between the two
victims, between the veritable sovereign, the Queen of France and
Navarre, and the sovereign of a day, whom Père Duchesne, as insolent to
one as to the other, will no longer speak of except under the sobriquet
of Queen Coco.
{85}
VIII.
MADAME ROLAND AT THE MINISTRY OF THE INTERIOR.
Roland took the portfolio of the Interior, March 24, 1792, and
installed himself and his wife in the ministerial residence, then
occupying the site afterwards built on by the _Théâtre Italien_. This
very beautiful and luxurious mansion had formerly been the controller's
office, and both Calonne and Necker had lived in it. Madame Roland
found no small pleasure in queening it under the gilded canopies of the
old régime. It was not at all disagreeable to her to give dinners in
the sumptuous banqueting hall erected by the elegant Calonne, nor did
the austere admirer of the ancients set the black broth of Sparta
before her guests.
Once arrived at power, was this great enemy of nobility and
prescription simple, and easy of approach? Not in the least. There is
often more arrogance displayed by parvenus of both sexes than by those
who are aristocrats by birth. Madame Roland was extremely proud of her
new dignity, and at once resolved, as she tells us in her Memoirs,
neither to make nor receive visits. Her attitude and {86} manners
while at the ministry were those of an Asiatic sovereign. She secluded
herself, permitting only a small number of privileged courtiers to
enter her presence. Under the old régime, the wives of ministers and
ambassadors, dukes and peers, had never felicitated themselves on
"cultivating their private tastes" to the detriment of the proprieties
and obligations of good breeding. But the Revolution had changed all
that. French politeness was now mere old-fashioned rubbish. At the
Ministry of the Interior, the etiquette whose "severity" is vaunted by
Madame Roland was more rigorous than that of the court of Versailles,
and it was easier to see the wife of the King than the wife of the
minister. With what hauteur the latter expresses herself concerning
"the self-seeking crowds who throng about those who hold great places"!
Assuredly, the Queen had never spoken of her subjects in this tone of
disdainful patronage.
[Illustration: MADAME ROLAND]
Madame Roland, who "was tired of fools," incommoded herself for nobody.
The agreeable side of power was all she wanted. Suppressing the
receptions which annoyed her, she gave none but men's dinners, where
she perorated and paraded, and where, being the only woman present, she
had no rivals to fear. Self-sufficiency and insufficiency are, for the
most part, what fall to the share of parvenus. What would have been
said in the old days of a noble dame who did the honors of a ministry
so strangely, who never invited another woman to {87} dinner, and
admitted no one to her presence but a little clique of flatterers?
Everybody would have accused such a lady as lacking in good breeding.
But to Madame Roland all that she did was right in her own eyes. How
could a woman so superior be expected to submit to the tyranny of
polite usages? Was not the first of all despotisms the very one to be
shaken off? and ought not a person so proud of the originality of her
genius feel bound before all things, as she said herself, "to preserve
her own mode of being"? Madame Roland did at the ministry just what
she did from her cradle to her grave: she posed.
"To listen to Madame Roland," said Count Beugnot in his witty and
curious Memoirs, "you would have thought she had imbibed the passion
for liberty from reading the great writers of antiquity.... Cato the
Elder was her hero, and it was probably out of respect for this hero
that she showed a lack of courtesy towards her husband. She was
unwilling to see that there was as much difference between Roland's
wife and the Roman minister as there was between the Brutus of the
Revolutionary Tribunal and him of the Capitol. Self-love was the means
by which this woman had been elevated to the point where we have seen
her; she was incessantly actuated by it, and does not dissimulate the
fact." It was she, and not her husband, who was Minister of the
Interior. If the aristocrats treated Roland as a minister
_sans-culottes_, it might have been added that the {88} breeches which
he lacked were worn by his spouse. Out of all the rooms composing a
vast apartment, she had chosen for her own daily use the smallest that
could be converted into a study, and kept her books and writing-table
in it. It was from this boudoir, half literary, half political, that
she conducted the ministry according to her own whims. "It often
happened," says she, "that friends or colleagues desiring to speak
confidentially with the minister, instead of going to his own room,
where he was surrounded by his clerks and the public, came to mine and
begged me to have him called thither. Thus I found myself in the
stream of affairs without either intrigue or idle curiosity. Roland
took pleasure in talking these subjects over with me afterwards with
that confidence which has always reigned between us, and which has
brought our knowledge and our opinions into community."
On this head, M. Dauban makes the very just remark: "A community in
which there is no equilibrium of forces, becomes a sort of omnipotence
for the strongest." The omnipotence in this case was not on the side
of the beard, but of Madame Roland. The wife wrote, thought, and acted
for her husband. It was she who drew up his circulars and reports to
the National Assembly. "My husband," she tells us, "had nothing to
lose in passing through my hands. Roland, without me, would have been
none the less a good administrator; with me, he has made more
sensation, because I imparted to my writings {89} that mixture of force
and sweetness, that authority of reason and charm of sentiment, which
perhaps belongs only to a sensitive woman, endowed with sound
understanding." And the "virtuous" Roland took pride in the
magnificent phrases which he naïvely believed to be the expression of
his own genius, when his wife had saved him not merely the trouble of
writing, but even of thinking. "He often ended," she says, "by
persuading himself that he had really been in a good vein when he had
written such or such a passage which proceeded from my pen."
Madame Roland had at her orders a man of letters, salaried by the
Ministry of the Interior, who was the official defender of the minister
and his policy. "It had been felt," she tells us, "that it was needful
to counteract the influence of the court, the aristocracy, the civil
list and their journals, by popular instructions to which great
publicity should be given. A journal posted up in public places seemed
to be the proper thing, and a wise and enlightened man had to be found
for its editor." This wise and enlightened man was Louvet, the author
of the _Amours de Faublas_. He was the writer whom Madame Roland
esteemed most capable of instructing and of moralizing the masses.
"Men of letters and persons of taste," she says, "know his charming
romances, in which the graces of imagination are allied to lightness of
style, a philosophical tone, and the salt of criticism. He has proved
that his skilful hand could alternately shake the bells of folly, hold
the burin of history, and {90} launch the thunderbolts of eloquence.
Courageous as a lion, simple as a child, a sensible man, a good
citizen, a vigorous writer, he could make Catiline tremble from the
tribune, dine with the Graces, and sup with Bachaumont."
Madame Roland admired the author of _Faublas_, now become the
editor-in-chief of the _Sentinelle_; but among her intimates there was
a man whom she admired much more. This was Buzot. With what
complacency she draws in her Memoirs the portrait of this man "of an
elevated character, a haughty spirit, and a vehement courage,
sensitive, ardent, melancholy; an impassioned lover of nature,
nourishing his imagination with all the charms she has to offer, and
his soul with the principles of the most touching philosophy; he seems
formed to enjoy and to procure domestic happiness; he could forget the
universe in the sweetness of private virtues practised with a heart
worthy of his own." Needless to say that in Madame Roland's thought,
this heart worthy of the heart of Buzot was her own. "He is
susceptible," says she, "of the tenderest affections" (always for
Madame Roland), "capable of sublime flights and the most generous
resolutions." Into what ecstasies she falls over the noble face and
elegant figure of this handsome man, in whose costume "reigns that
care, cleanliness, and decency which manifest the spirit of order,
taste, the sentiment of decorum, and the respect of an honest man for
the public and himself"! How she contrasts with {91} men who think
patriotism consists in "swearing, drinking, and dressing like porters,
in order to fraternize with their equals," this attractive, this
irresistible Buzot, who "professes the morality of Socrates and the
politeness of Scipio"!
Clearly, the veritable idol of the Egeria of the Girondins is not the
republic, but Buzot. He is so elegant, so distinguished! His mind and
his person have so many charms! Poor Roland! You think that your
better half is solely occupied with your ministry. Alas! this learned
woman has other thoughts in her head. Your position as a minister has
not augmented your prestige in the region of sentiment. Though you
lord it in the Hotel Calonne, yet, in spite of the throng of
petitioners and flatterers who surround you, you will never be a
Lovelace, and your romantic spouse will not allow herself to be
affected by your appearance, like that of a Quaker in Sunday clothes.
You thought you were doing wonders in presenting yourself at the
council of ministers with lanky, unpowdered locks, a round hat, and
shoes minus buckles. This peasant costume, which so greatly
scandalized the master of ceremonies, doubtless made the best
impression at the Jacobin Club, but your wife prefers the careful dress
of her too dear Buzot.
Madame Roland, who had just completed her thirty-eighth year, was still
very charming. Lémontey thus paints her portrait as she appeared at
this epoch: "Her eyes and hair were remarkably {92} beautiful; her
delicate complexion had a freshness and color which made her look
singularly young. At the beginning of her husband's ministry she had
lost nothing of her air of youth and simplicity; her husband resembled
a Quaker whose daughter she might have been, and her child hovered
round her with hair floating to her waist; one might have thought them
natives of Pennsylvania transported to the drawing-room of M. de
Calonne."
Count Beugnot, who was the companion of her captivity in the
Conciergerie, is severe on the female politician, but he admires the
pretty woman. "Her figure was graceful," he says, "and her hands
perfectly modelled. Her glance was expressive, and even in repose her
face had something noble and subtly attractive in it. One surmised her
wit without needing to hear her speak, but no woman whom I have ever
listened to, spoke with more purity and elegance. She must have owed
her faculty of giving to French a rhythm and cadence veritably new, to
her familiar knowledge of Italian. The harmony of her voice was still
further heightened by graceful and appropriate gestures and the
expression of her eyes, which grew animated in conversation. I daily
experienced new charm in listening to her, less on account of what she
said than because of the magic of her delivery."
If Madame Roland, a prisoner, crushed by misfortune, on the very
threshold of the scaffold, after so many sleepless nights and so many
tears, had {93} preserved such attractions, what a charm must she not
have exercised at the Ministry of the Interior, when hope and pride
illumined her beautiful face, and when, after appearing to her
electrified adorers as the Muse of the new régime, the magician, the
Circe of the Revolution, she touched so profoundly their minds and
hearts! She who knew so well how to love and how to hate, who felt so
keenly, who had so much energy, so much vigor, what fascination must
she not have exerted with her glance of fire, her long black tresses,
her more than ornate eloquence, her inspired, lyric, enthusiastic
bearing, and that consummate art which, according to the remark of
Fontanes, made one believe that in her everything was the work of
nature!
{94}
IX.
DUMOURIEZ, MINISTER OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS.
Madam Roland had wished to reign alone. She saw an influential rival
in Dumouriez, and at once conceived for him an instinctive repugnance
and suspicion. She met him first on March 23, 1792, at the time when,
as Minister of Foreign Affairs, he came to salute Roland, just named
Minister of the Interior, as his colleague. As soon as he departed:
"There," said she to her husband, "is a man with a crafty mind and a
false glance, against whom it is probably more necessary to be on one's
guard than any other person; he expressed great satisfaction at the
patriotic choice he was deputed to announce; but I should not be at all
surprised if he were to have you dismissed some day." She thought she
recognized in Dumouriez at first sight, "a witty roué, an insolent
chevalier who makes sport of everything except his own interests and
glory."
Later on she drew the following portrait of him: "Among all his
colleagues, he had most of what is called wit, and less than any of
morality. Diligent and brave, a good general, a skilful courtier,
writing well and expressing himself with ease, capable of {95} great
enterprises, all he lacked was character enough to balance his mind, or
a cooler brain to carry out the plans he had conceived. Agreeable to
his friends, and ready to betray them, gallant to women, but not at all
suited to succeed with those among them who are susceptible to
affectionate relations, he was made for the ministerial intrigues of a
corrupt court."
The nomination of Dumouriez as Minister of Foreign Affairs is one of
the most curious and unforeseen events of this strange epoch. Few men
have had a career so adventurous and agitated as his. A complex and
mobile nature, where the intriguer and the great man were blended into
one, he never commanded esteem, but at certain moments he secured
admiration. Napoleon I. seems to have been too severe when he said of
him that he was "only a miserable intriguer." The man who opened the
series of great French victories, and who saved his country from
invasion by his admirable defence of the defiles of Argonne, merited
more than this disdainful mention. It is none the less certain,
however, that one scents, as it were, an air of Beaumarchais in the
Memoirs of Dumouriez, and that there is more than one link of character
and existence between the author of the _Mariage de Figaro_ and the
victor of Jemmapes. Both were men without principles, but full of
resource, wit, and fascination. Both were lovable in spite of their
great defects, because of their humanity and kindness. Both belonged
at the same time to the {96} old régime and the Revolution. Before
arriving at celebrity, each had a stormy youth, tormented by the love
of pleasure, the need of money, and a sort of perpetual restlessness:
they flattered every power of the time, sought fortune by the most
circuitous ways, were diplomatic couriers, and secret agents; before
coming out into open daylight, they made trial of their marvellous
address in obscurity, and signalized themselves among those men of
action and initiative whom governments, which make use of them in
occult ways, first launch, then compromise, disavow, and sometimes
imprison.
Born at Cambrai, January 25, 1739, Dumouriez belonged to a family of
the upper middle class. Entering the army early, he distinguished
himself by his high spirits and courage. As a cornet of the Penthièvre
cavalry, he served in the German campaigns from 1758 to 1761, and was
invalided in 1763. He spent twenty-four years at the wars and brought
back nothing but twenty-two wounds, the rank of captain, a decoration,
and some debts. Seeking then a new career, he entered, thanks to his
connection with Favier, the secret diplomacy of Louis XV., and was sent
to Corsica, Italy, and Portugal. He returned to the army in 1768, and
made a brilliant record in the Corsican campaign, obtaining
successively the grades of adjutant-major general,
adjutant-quartermaster, and colonel of cavalry. It was he who seized
the castle of Corte, Paoli's last asylum. In 1771, he again became a
secret agent. Louis {97} XV. wished to befriend Poland in its
death-struggle, but without betraying his hand. Dumouriez was sent to
the Polish confederates. He was reputed to be merely acting on his own
impulses. He organized troops and fought successfully against
Souvaroff, the future adversary of the French Republic, but could not
save Poland--that Asiatic nation of Europe, as he called it. He came
back to Paris in 1772, and the government, complying with the demands
of Russia, shut him up for a year in the Bastille, where he had leisure
to meditate on the ingratitude of courts. This captivity strengthened
his taste for study, and, far from allaying his ambition, gave it
renewed force.
Louis XVI. put him in command at Cherbourg, and it was he who conceived
the plan of making that town a station for the French marine. He was
fifty years old when the Revolution of 1789 broke out. At once he saw
in it an opportunity for success and glory. Full of confidence in his
own superiority, he merely awaited the hour when events should second
his ambition. He said to himself that the emigration, by making a void
in the upper ranks of the army, was going to leave him free scope, and
that he would be commander-in-chief of the French troops under the new
régime. To attain this end he decided to serve the King, the Assembly,
and the factions; to assume all parts and all masks, and to be in turn,
and simultaneously if need were, the courtier of Louis XVI. and the
favorite of the Jacobins.
As has been very well said by M. Frédéric Masson {98} in an excellent
book, as novel as it is interesting, _Le Département des affaires
étrangères sous la Revolution_, Dumouriez had been accustomed to make
his way everywhere, to eat at all tables, and listen at all doors. One
of the agents of Count d'Artois brought him into relations with
Mirabeau. He was protected by the minister Montmorin. He drew up
plans of campaign for Narbonne. He used the intimate "thou" to
Laporte, the King's confidant and intendant of the civil list. He made
use of women also. Separated from his lawful wife, he lived in marital
relations with a sister of Rivarol, the Baroness de Beauvert, a
charming person who had much intercourse with aristocratic society, who
speculated in arms, and who was pensioned by the Duke of Orleans, as
appears from a letter of Latouche de Tréville, the prince's chancellor,
dated April 17, 1789. Dumouriez, who had expensive tastes, sought at
the same time for gold and honors. Either by means of the court or the
Revolution, he desired to gain a great fortune and much glory, to
become a statesman, a minister, commander-in-chief, and realize his
great military plan, the conquest of the natural frontiers of France.
He said to himself: He who wills the end wills the means, and managed
as adroitly with parties as with soldiers. At Niort, where he was in
command at the beginning of the Revolution, he made himself remarkable
by his enthusiasm for the new ideas, and became president of the club
and honorary citizen of the town. He contracted an intimacy with
Gensonné, {99} whom the Assembly had sent into the departments of the
west to observe their spirit. In January, 1792, the emigration of
general officers had become so considerable that he rose by seniority
to the rank of lieutenant-general. Thereafter, he believed his hour
had come, and threw himself boldly into the political arena. The
Gironde and the Jacobins were the two powers then in vogue; he
flattered both the Jacobins and the Gironde. Brissot was the corypheus
of the diplomatic committee and the chief of the war party. He became
the familiar of Brissot. Already, in 1791, he had prepared a memoir on
the subject of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs which he dedicated and
read to the Jacobins. In it he announced (singular prediction for the
future minister of a king!) that before fifty years had passed, Europe
would be republican. He demanded an immediate and radical change in
the diplomatic personnel. "It is of small importance," said he in the
same memoir, "that our representatives would lack experience. In the
first place, our interests are greatly simplified; moreover, our former
representatives were young men belonging to the court who had had no
political education. In a word, it is the majesty of the nation which
gives our negotiations weight. The minister," he added, "should be a
man of approved patriotism, above all suspicion, like the wife of
Cæsar. Absolute integrity, great knowledge of men, great firmness, a
broad and upright mind, should complete his character." Dumouriez
perhaps imagined that all these qualities {100} of an ideal minister
were reunited in his person. However that may be, he accepted, without
any mistrust of his own abilities, the portfolio of Foreign Affairs,
confided to him March 15, 1792, on account of his relations with the
Gironde and his popularity with the Jacobins. He had a high opinion of
himself, and, even after his cruel disappointments, he was to write in
his Memoirs, in 1794: "Dumouriez sometimes laughs sardonically in his
retreat over the judgments passed upon him. When he arrived at the
ministry, the courtiers said and published that he was only a soldier
of fortune, incapable of conducting political affairs, in which he
would make nothing but blunders. When he commanded an army, they told
the Prussians and the German Emperor's troops that he was a mere
writer, who had never made war and understood nothing about it. Since
he retired with reputation from public employments, they have published
that up to the date of the Revolution he had been an intriguing
adventurer, a ministerial spy, an office-sweeper. Would to God, they
had employed the adventures of their youth in similar espionages! They
would not have begun the Revolution like factionists, they would have
conducted it with wisdom, they would have preserved the esteem of the
nation, they would not have been the prime authors of the King's death,
either by betraying or abandoning him."
The new Minister of Foreign Affairs began to play his rôle of leader of
French diplomacy in a {101} singular fashion. Repairing to the Jacobin
Club, he described himself as their liegeman, assumed the red bonnet in
their presence, and, with it on his head, announced that as soon as war
should be declared, he would throw away his pen in order to resume his
sword. Let us add that he was simultaneously trying to conciliate the
good graces of Louis XVI. and to persuade him that if he leaned upon
the Jacobins, it was solely in the hope of serving the King and
consolidating the throne. At the same time he appointed as director of
foreign affairs that Bonne-Carrère whose portrait has been traced in
this wise by Brissot: "Falling with all his vices and perverse habits
into the midst of a revolution whereby the people had recovered
sovereignty, he merely changed his idol without changing his idolatry.
He caressed the people instead of caressing the great, made the hall of
the Jacobins his OEil-de-Boeuf, played valet to the successful parties
one after another, the Lameths and the Mirabeaus, and succeeded in
raising himself from the secretaryship of the Jacobins to the embassy
of Liège, by the aid of that very Montmorin who detested the Jacobins,
and could but advance a man who betrayed them."
Dumouriez then, following the example of Mirabeau, was about to play a
double game; to be revolutionary with the Revolution and a courtier
with the court. As to Madame Roland, he never placed himself at her
feet. The despotism of this female minister, the pretentious of this
demagogic bluestocking, {102} her affectation of puritan rigor, her
mania for directing everything, shocked the good sense of a man who
believed that woman is made to please, not to reign. It was repugnant
to this soldier to take his orders from the Egeria of the Girondins.
On the other hand, Dumouriez was displeasing to Madame Roland. She
found him too dissolute and not sentimental enough. She could not
pardon his having Madame de Beauvert for mistress and Bonne-Carrère for
confidant. She admitted neither his free-and-easy tone, his Gallic
humor, nor his natural gaiety, so unlike the declamatory tone and
pretentious jargon of the disciples of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Moreover, she found him too much of a royalist, too accustomed to the
old régime. The ministry, apparently so homogeneous, was soon to be
divided against itself.
{103}
X.
THE COUNCIL OF MINISTERS.
Louis XVI. had been persuaded that the only means of regaining public
confidence would be to name a ministry chosen by the Gironde and
accepted by the Jacobins. The six ministers--Dumouriez of Foreign
Affairs, Roland of the Interior, De Grave of War, Claviére of Finances,
Duranton of Justice, Lacoste of Marine--formed what was called the
Girondin ministry; the reactionists named it the _sans-culottes_
ministry. The revolutionists rejoiced in its advent, while the
royalists sought to cover it with ridicule.
On the day when the Council met for the first time at the Tuileries (in
the great royal cabinet on the first floor, afterwards called the Salon
of Louis XIV.), Roland created a scandal by his plebeian dress. The
simplicity of his costume, his round hat, his shoes fastened with
ribbons instead of buckles, caused, as his wife disdainfully remarks,
"astonishment to all the valets, those creatures who, existing only for
the sake of etiquette, thought the safety of the empire depended on its
preservation." The master of ceremonies, approaching Dumouriez with an
{104} uneasy frown, glanced at Roland, and said in an undertone, "Eh!
sir, no buckles on his shoes!" "Ah! sir, all is lost!" replied
Dumouriez so coolly that it raised a laugh.
Louis XVI., who wished, as one might say, to enlarge the borders of
gentleness and resignation, displayed more than good-will towards the
ministers; he showed them deference. This was the more meritorious
because to him this ministry was like a reunion of the seditious, like
the Revolution in arms against his crown; his pretended advisers seemed
much more like enemies than auxiliaries. He tried, however, to attach
them to him by kindness, and made a sincere trial of his rights and
duties as a constitutional sovereign. Madame Roland herself, bitter
and violent as she is, renders him a certain justice. "Louis XVI.,"
says she, "showed the greatest good nature towards his new ministers;
this man was not precisely such as he has been painted by those who
seek to degrade him." As to Dumouriez, he says in his Memoirs:
"Dumouriez had been greatly deceived concerning the character of Louis
XVI., who had been represented to him as a violent and wrathful man,
who swore a great deal and maltreated his ministers. He must, on the
contrary, do him the justice to say that during three' months when he
observed him closely and in very delicate circumstances, he always
found him polite, gentle, affable, and even very patient. This prince
had a great timidity arising from his education and his distrust {105}
of himself, some difficulty in speaking, a just and dispassionate mind,
upright sentiments, great knowledge of history, geography, and the
arts, and an astonishing memory." Madame Roland also owns that he had
an excellent memory and much activity; that he was never idle; that he
read often, and had a distinct knowledge of all the different treaties
concluded by France with neighboring powers; that he knew history well,
and was the best geographer in the kingdom. "His knowledge of the
names and faces of those belonging to his court," she adds, "and the
anecdotes peculiar to each, extended to all persons who had come into
prominence during the Revolution; no subject could be mentioned to him
on which he had not some opinion founded on certain facts."
At first, the sessions of the ministry went off very tranquilly. The
King, with an accent of candor, protested his attachment to the
Constitution and his desire to see it solidly established. Often he
left his ministers to chat among themselves without taking any part in
their conversation. During such times he read his French and English
journals, or wrote letters. If a decree was presented for his
sanction, he deferred his decision until the next meeting, to which he
came with a settled opinion, concealing it carefully, none the less,
and appearing to decide only in accordance with the will of the
majority. He frequently evaded irritating questions by turning the
conversation to other subjects. If war were the {106} topic, he spoke
of travels; apropos of diplomacy, he described the manners of the
country in question; to Roland he spoke of his works, to Dumouriez of
his adventures. The Minister of Foreign Affairs, who was a first-class
story-teller, and whose freedom of speech was welcomed by the King, to
use Madame Roland's expression, amused both his colleagues and his
sovereign by his jests and anecdotes.
But all this was far from agreeable to the spiteful companion of the
Minister of the Interior. Indignant at the accord which seemed to
exist between Louis XVI. and his counsellors, she dreamed of nothing
but discussions and conflicts. All that wore the appearance of
reconciliation was repugnant to her. She made her obedient spouse
recount to her the smallest details of the sessions of the Council,
meddling with and criticising all. During the first three weeks,
Roland and Clavière, enchanted with the King's dispositions, flattered
themselves that the Revolution was at an end. Madame Roland scoffed at
their confidence. "_Bon Dieu_," she said to them, "every time I see
you start for the Council with this charming confidence, it seems to me
you are ready to commit some folly."--"I assure you," replied Clavière,
"that the King is perfectly aware that his interests are bound up with
the observance of the laws just established; he reasons too pertinently
not to be convinced of this truth."--"Well," added Roland, "if he is
not an honest man, he is the greatest rascal in the kingdom; nobody can
dissimulate {107} like that." Madame Roland rejoined that she could
not believe in love for the Constitution on the part of a man nourished
in the prejudices and accustomed to the use of despotic power. She,
who doubtless thought herself the only person capable of presiding well
at the council of ministers, treated it as a "café where they amused
themselves with idle gossip." "There was no record of their
deliberations," says she, "nor a secretary to take them down; after
sitting three or four hours, they went away without having accomplished
anything but a few signatures; it was like this three times a
week."--"This is pitiable!" she would exclaim impatiently when, on his
return, she asked her husband what had passed. "You are all in very
good humor because there have been no disputes or vexations, and you
have even been treated with civility; each of you seems to be doing
pretty much as he pleases in his own department. I am afraid you are
being made game of."--"Nevertheless, business is getting on."--"Yes,
and time is wasted, for in the torrent that is carrying you away, I
should be much better pleased to have you employ three hours in solid
meditation on great combinations than to see you spend them in useless
chatter."
It must needs be said that no person contributed more to the downfall
of royalty than Madame Roland. At the moment when the good temper and
gentleness of Louis XVI. began to gain upon his ministers, when
Dumouriez was softened by the {108} royal kindness, when minds
experienced a relaxation, and honest people, worn out by so many
political shocks, were sincerely desirous of repose, it was she who
nourished discord, made the Gironde irreconcilable, inspired the
subversive pamphlets of Louvet, embittered her husband's heart, and
invented the provocations against which the conscience of the
unfortunate monarch rebelled. This part, which would have been a sorry
one for a man to play, seems still worse in a woman. Count Beugnot has
said very justly: "I have seen that a woman can preserve only the
faults of her sex in the midst of such a frightful catastrophe, not its
virtues. The gentle, amiable, sensitive qualities grow and develop in
the shelter of peaceful domestic joys; they are lost and obliterated in
the heat of debates, the bitterness of parties, and the shock of
passions. The soft and tender foot of woman cannot tread unharmed in
paths bristling with steel and red with blood. To do so with safety
she must become a man; but to me, a man-woman seems a monster. Ah! let
them leave to us, whom nature has granted the pitiful advantage of
strength, the field of contention and the fate of war; we are adequate
to this cruel destiny; but let them keep to the easier and sweeter part
of pouring balm into wounds and staunching tears."
Roland's character was tranquil; it was his wife who made him
ambitious, haughty, and inflexible. She should have pacified her
husband, but instead of that she excited him. Never was he malevolent
and {109} spiteful enough to suit her. She would not pardon him a
single movement of compassion or respect towards the august
unfortunates. Led by her, Roland no longer dared entertain a generous
thought. He returned shamefaced to the Ministry of the Interior if he
had felt a humane sentiment while at the Tuileries. It is sad to find
tenderness and pity in the heart of a man, Dumouriez, and in the heart
of a woman, Madame Roland, nothing but malevolence and hatred.
Dumouriez wanted to put out the fire; Madame Roland, to stir it up.
Dumouriez sincerely desired the King's safety; Madame Roland swore that
he should perish. If a germ of pity woke to life in the hearts of the
ministers, Madame Roland hastened to stifle it. Her hostility towards
the royal family was more than deliberate; there was something like
ferocity in it. Her Memoirs and those of Dumouriez display two very
different minds. Sadness dominates in his; anger in hers. Even on the
steps of the scaffold, Madame Roland will not feel her hatred lessen.
Dumouriez, on the contrary, will cast a glance of melancholy respect
upon the unfortunate sovereign whose sorrows and whose resignation,
whose gentleness and uprightness, had touched him so profoundly.
{110}
XI.
THE FÊTE OF THE SWISS OF CHATEAUVIEUX.
Dumouriez, at the beginning of his ministry, was still the slave of the
Jacobins, his allies and protectors. His elevation to the ministry was
in great part due to them, and even while despising them, he felt
unable to shake off their yoke. Little by little, they inspired him
with horror, and before many weeks were over, his only idea was to free
himself from their control. But at first he treated them like a power
with which he was obliged to reckon. What proves this is his passive
attitude at the time of the celebrated fête of the Swiss of
Chateauvieux. The prologue of the bloody tragedies that were in course
of preparation, this fête shows what headway the revolutionary ideas
had made. The sinister days of the Convention were approaching, the
Terror existed in germ, and already many representatives who, on a
secret ballot, would have voted in accordance with right and honor,
were cowardly enough to do so against their conscience when they had to
answer to their names.
Things had travelled fast since the close of the Constituent Assembly.
In 1790, that Assembly, as {111} the faithful guardian of discipline,
had congratulated the Marquis de Bouillé on the energy with which he
repressed the military rebellion that broke out at Nancy, August 31.
The soldiers garrisoned at this town were guilty of the greatest
crimes. They pillaged the military chests, arrested the officers, and
fired on the troops who remained faithful. M. Desilles, an officer of
the King's regiment, conducted himself at the time in a heroic manner.
When the insurgents were about to discharge the cannon opposite the
Stainville gate, he sprang towards it, and covering it with his body,
cried: "It is your friends, your brothers, who are coming! The
National Assembly sends them. Do you mean to fire on them? Will you
disgrace your flags?" It was useless to try to hold Desilles back. He
broke away from his friends and threw himself again in front of the
rebels, falling under four wounds at the moment when the fight began.
The Constituent Assembly passed a decree by which it thanked the
Marquis de Bouillé and his troops "for having gloriously fulfilled
their duty" in repressing the military insurrection of Nancy. Its
president wrote an official letter to Desilles, soon to die in
consequence of his wounds: "The National Assembly has learned with just
admiration, mingled with profound sorrow, the danger to which your
heroic devotion has exposed you; in trying to describe it, I should
weaken the emotion by which the Assembly was penetrated. So sublime an
example of courage {112} and civic virtue is above all praise. It has
secured you a sweeter recompense and one more worthy of you; you will
find it in your own heart, and the eternal memory of the French people."
The Swiss regiment of Chateauvieux had taken part in the rebellion at
Nancy. Switzerland had reserved, by treaty, its federal jurisdiction
over such of its troops as had taken service under the King of France.
By virtue of this special jurisdiction the soldiers of the regiment of
Chateauvieux, taken arms in hand, were tried before a council of war
composed of Swiss officers. Twenty-two were condemned to death and
shot. Fifty were condemned to the galleys and sent to the convict
prison at Brest. It was in vain that Louis XVI. attempted to negotiate
their pardon with the Swiss Confederacy. It remained inflexible, and
the guilty were still undergoing their penalty when the Jacobins
resolved to release them from prison in defiance of the treaties
uniting Switzerland and France. "To deliver these condemned
prisoners," says Dumouriez in his Memoirs, "was to insult the Cantons,
attack their treaty rights, and judge their criminals. We had enemies
enough already without seeking new ones among an allied people who were
behaving wisely towards us, especially a free and republican people."
But revolutionary passions do not reason. Collot d'Herbois, a wretched
actor who had passed from the theatrical stage to that of politics, and
who, not content with having bored people, wished to terrorize them
also, {113} made himself the champion of the galley-slaves of the
regiment of Chateauvieux. He was the principal impresario of the
lugubrious fête which disgraced Paris on April 15, 1792.
The programme was not arranged without some opposition. Public opinion
was not yet ripe for saturnalia. There were still a few honest and
courageous publicists who, like André Chénier, boldly lifted their
voices to stigmatize certain infamies. In the tribune of the Assembly
some orators were to be found who expressed their minds freely and held
their own against the tempests of demagogy. There were generals and
soldiers in the army for whom discipline was not an idle word; and if
the fête of the Swiss of Chateauvieux made the future Septembrists and
furies of the guillotine utter shouts of joy, it drew from honest men a
long cry of grief and indignation.
Intimidated by the menaces of the Jacobins, the Assembly voted the
release of the Swiss incarcerated in the prison of Brest. But merely
to deliver them was not enough: the Jacobins wanted to give them an
ovation. Their march from Brest to Paris was a triumph, and Collot
d'Herbois organized a gigantic fête in their honor.
André Chénier was at this time writing weekly letters for the _Journal
de Paris_, in which he eloquently supported the principles of order and
liberty. As M. de Lamartine has said, he was the Tyrtæus of good sense
and moderation. He was indignant at {114} the threatened scandal, and,
in concert with his collaborator on the _Journal de Paris_, Roucher,
the poet of _Les Mois_, he criticised in most energetic terms the
revolutionary manifestation then organizing. At the Jacobin Club, on
April 4, Collot d'Herbois freed his mind against him. "This is not
Chénier-Gracchus," said the comedian; "it is another person, quite
another." He spoke of André as a "sterile prose writer," and pointed
him out to popular vengeance. The two brothers were in opposing camps.
While André Chénier stigmatized the fête of anarchy, his brother Joseph
was diligently manufacturing scraps of poetry, inscriptions, and
devices which were to figure in the programme. "What!" cried André,
"must we invent extravagances capable of destroying any form of
government, recompense rebellion against the laws, and crown foreign
satellites for having shot French citizens in a riot? People say that
the statues will be veiled in every place through which this procession
is to pass. Oh! if this odious orgy takes place, it will be well to
veil the whole city; but it is not the images of despots that should be
wrapt in funeral crape, but the faces of honest men. How is it that
you do not blush when a turbulent handful, who seem numerous because
they are united and make a noise, oblige you to do their will, telling
you that it is your own, and amusing your childish curiosity meanwhile
with unworthy spectacles? In a city which respected itself such a fête
would meet nothing but solitude and silence." The controversy {115}
waxed furious. The walls were covered with posters for and against the
fête. Roucher thus flagellated Collot d'Herbois: "This character out
of a comic novel, who skipped from Polichinello's booth to the platform
of the Jacobins, has sprung at me as if he were going to strike me with
the oar the Swiss brought back from the galleys!"
Pétion, then mayor of Paris, far from opposing the fête, approved and
encouraged it. "I think it my duty," he wrote, April 6, 1792, "to
explain myself briefly concerning the fête which is being arranged to
celebrate the arrival of the soldiers of Chateauvieux. Minds are
heated, passions are in ferment, and citizens hold different opinions;
everything seems to betoken disorder. It is sought to change a day of
rejoicing into a day of mourning.... What is it all about? Some
soldiers, leaders with the French guards, who have broken our chains
and afterwards been overloaded with them, are about to enter within our
walls; some citizens propose to meet and offer them a fraternal
welcome; these citizens are obeying a natural impulse and using a right
which belongs to all. The magistrates see nothing but what is simple
and innocent in all this; they see certain citizens abandoning
themselves to joy and mirth; every one is at liberty to participate or
not to participate in the fête. Public spirit rises and assumes a new
degree of energy amidst civic amusements." The municipality ordered
this letter of Pétion's to be printed, posted on the walls, and {116}
sent to the forty-eight sectional committees and the sixty battalions
of the National Guard.
Not all the members of the National Assembly shared the optimism of the
mayor of Paris. The preparations for the fête, which was announced for
April 15, occasioned, on the 9th, a session as affecting as it was
stormy. The whole debate should be read in the _Moniteur_. The
question was put whether the Swiss of Chateauvieux, then waiting
outside the doors, should be introduced and admitted to the honors of
the session. M. de Gouvion, who had been major-general of the National
Guard under Lafayette, gravely ascended the tribune. "Gentlemen," said
he, "I had a brother, a good patriot, who, through the favorable
opinion of your fellow-citizens, had been successively a commander of
the National Guard and a member from the Department. Always ready to
sacrifice himself for the Revolution and the law, it was in the name of
the Revolution and the law that he was required to march to Nancy with
the brave National Guards. There he fell, pierced by fifty bayonets in
the hands of those who.... I ask if I am condemned to look on
tranquilly while the assassins of my brother enter here?" A voice
rising from the midst of the Assembly cried: "Very well, sir, go out!"
The galleries applauded. Gouvion attempted to continue. The murmurs
redoubled. Several persons in the galleries cried: "Down! down!"
The Assembly, revolutionary though it was, felt {117} indignant at the
scandal, and called the galleries to order. The president reiterated
the injunction to keep silence. Gouvion began anew: "I treat with all
the contempt he merits, and with ... I would say the word if I did not
respect the Assembly--the coward who has been base enough to outrage a
brother's grief." The question was then put whether the Swiss of
Chateauvieux should be admitted to the honors of the session. Out of
546 votes, 288 were in the affirmative, and 265 in the negative.
Consequently, the president announced that the soldiers of
Chateauvieux, who had asked to present themselves to the Assembly,
should be admitted to the honors of the session. Gouvion went out by
one door, indignant, and swearing that he would never re-enter an
Assembly which received his brother's assassins as conquerors. By
another door, Collot d'Herbois made his entry with his protêgês, the
ex-galley slaves.
The party of the left and the spectators in the galleries burst into
transports of joy, and gave three rounds of applause. The soldiers
entered the hall to the beating of drums and cries of "Long live the
nation!" They were followed by a large procession of men and women
carrying pikes and banners. Collot d'Herbois, the showman of the
Swiss, pronounced an emphatic address in praise of the pretended
martyrs of liberty, which the Assembly ordered to be printed. One
Goachon, speaking for the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, and holding a pike
ornamented with a {118} red liberty cap, exclaimed: "The citizens of
the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, the victors of the Bastille, the men of
July 14, have charged me to warn you that they are going to make ten
thousand more pikes after the model which you see."
The fête took place on Sunday, April 15. It was the triumph of
anarchy, the glorification of indiscipline and revolt. On that day the
galley slaves were treated like heroes. The emblems adopted were a
colossal galley, ornamented with flowers, and the convicts' head gear,
that hideous red bonnet in which Dumouriez had already played the
buffoon, and which was presently to be set on the august head of Louis
XVI. The soldier galley slaves, whose chains were kissed with
transports by a swarm of harlots, came forward wearing civic crowns.
What a difference between the Constituent Assembly and the Legislative
Assembly! Under the one, a grand expiatory ceremony on the
Champ-de-Mars had honored the soldiers slain at Nancy, and the National
Guards had worn mourning for these martyrs of duty. Under the other,
it was not the victims who were lauded, but their assassins. A goddess
of Liberty in a Phrygian cap was borne in a state chariot. The
procession halted at the Bastille, the Hôtel de Ville, and the
Champ-de-Mars. The mayor and municipality of Paris were present in
their official capacity. The _Ça ira_ was sung in a frenzy of
enthusiasm. Soldiers and public women embraced each other. It was
David who had {119} designed the costumes, planned the chariot, and
organized the whole performance,--David, the revolutionary artist who
was destined by a change of fortune to paint the portrait of a Pope and
the coronation of an Emperor.
In 1791, André Chénier and David, then friends, and saluting together
the dawn of the Revolution, had celebrated with lyre and pencil the
"_Serment du Jeu de Paumé_"[1] Consecrating an ode to the painter's
magnificent tableau, the poet exclaimed:--
Resume thy golden robe, bind on thy chaplet rich,
Divine and youthful Poesy!
To David's lips, King of the skilful brush,
Bear the ambrosial cup.
How he repented his enthusiasm now! What ill-will he bore the artist
who placed his art, that sacred gift, at the service of anarchical
passions! With what irony the same pen passed from dithyramb to satire!
Arts worthy of our eyes, pomp and magnificence
Worthy of our liberty,
Worthy of the vile tyrants who are devouring France,
Worthy of the atrocious dementia
Of that stupid David whom in other days I sang!
On the very day of the fête the young poet had the courage to publish
in the _Journal de Paris_ an avenging satire, which branded the
shoulders of the ex-galley slaves as with a new hot iron. The sweet
{120} and pathetic elegiast, the Catullus, the Tibullus of France,
added a bronze chord to his lyre:--
Hail, divine triumph! Enter within our walls!
Bring us these warriors so famed
For Desilles' blood, and for the obsequies
Of many Frenchmen massacred...
One day alone could win so much renown,
And this fair day will shine upon us soon!
When thou shalt lead Jourdan to our army,
And Lafayette to the scaffold!
Jourdan was the slaughterer, the headsman, the torturer of the Glacier
of Avignon, who, coming under the provisions of the amnesty, had
arrived to take part in the triumph of the Swiss of Chateauvieux. The
acclamations were lugubrious. The lanterns and torches shed a funereal
glare. Nothing is more doleful than enthusiasm for ignominy. The
applause accorded to disgrace and crime sounds like sinister derision.
Outraged public conscience extinguishes the fires of apotheoses such as
these. Madame Elisabeth, in a letter of April 18, speaks with a sort
of pity of this odious but ridiculous fête: "The people have been to
see Dame Liberty waggling about on her triumphal car, but they shrugged
their shoulders. Three or four hundred _sans-culottes_ followed,
crying 'Long live the nation! Long live liberty! Long live the
_sans-culottes_! to the devil with Lafayette!' All this was noisy but
sad. The National Guards took no part in it; on the contrary, they
were indignant, and Pétion, they say, is ashamed of his conduct. {121}
The next day a pike surmounted by a red bonnet was carried noiselessly
through the garden, and did not remain there long." The Princess de
Lamballe, who was living at the Tuileries in the Pavilion of Flora,
could see the pike thus carried by a passer. It may, perhaps, have
been that belonging to one of the Septembrists,--that on which her own
head was to be placed.
The _Moniteur_, however, grew ecstatic over the fête. "There are
plenty of others," it said, "who will describe the march of the
triumphal cortège, the groups composing it, the car of Liberty,
conducted by Fame, drawn by twenty superb horses, preceded by ravishing
music which was sometimes listened to in religious silence and
sometimes interrupted by wild, irregular dances whose very disorder was
rendered more piquant by the fraternal union reigning in all hearts....
The people were there in all their might, and did not abuse it. There
was not a weapon to repress excesses, and not an excess to be
repressed." It concluded thus: "We say to the administration: Give
such festivals as these often. Repeat this one every year on April 15;
let the feast of Liberty be our spring festival; and let other civic
solemnities signalize the return of the other seasons. In former days
the people had none but those of their masters, and all that was
accomplished by them was their depravity and abasement. Give them some
that shall be their own, and that will elevate their souls, develop
their sensibilities, and fortify their courage. They {122} will
create, or, better, they have already created, a new people. Popular
festivals are the best education for the people."
Optimists, how will your illusions terminate? You who see nothing but
an idyl in all this, can not you perceive that such ceremonies are the
prelude to massacres, and that an odor of blood mingles with their
perfumes? All who took part on either side of the heated controversy
which preceded the ovation to the Swiss of Chateauvieux, will be
pursued by fate. Gouvion, who had sworn never again to set foot within
the precincts of the Assembly where the murderers of his brother
triumphed, kept his word. On the very day of that shameful session he
asked to be sent to the Army of the North, and three months later was
to be carried off by a cannon-ball. Still more melancholy was to be
the fate of Pétion, who showed such complaisance toward the Swiss on
this occasion. He, once so popular that in 1791 he was asked to allow
the ninth child, which a citizeness had just presented to her country,
"to be baptized in his name, revered almost as much as that of the
Divinity"; he of whom some one said at that time, "For the same reason
which would have made Jesus a suitable mayor of Jerusalem, Pétion is a
suitable mayor of Paris; there is too striking a resemblance between
them to be overlooked," was sadly to exclaim some months later: "I am
one of the most notable examples of popular inconsistency.... For a
long time I have said to myself and to my {123} friends: The people
will hate me still more than they have loved me. I can no longer
either enter or depart from the place where we hold our sessions
without being exposed to the grossest insults and the most seditious
threats. How often have I not heard them say as I was passing:
'Scoundrel! we will have your head!'"
Proscribed with the Girondins, May 31, 1793, he fled at first to
Normandy, and afterwards into the Gironde, wandering from town to town,
from field to field, and hiding for several months thirty feet under
ground, in a sort of well; the poor people who showed him hospitality
paid for it with their heads. Ah! how disenchanted he must have been
with that revolutionary policy of which he had been the enthusiastic
promoter! How sad was the farewell to life signed by him and Buzot:
"Now that it has been demonstrated that liberty is hopelessly lost;
that the principles of morality and justice are trodden under foot;
that there is nothing to choose between two despotisms,--that of the
brigands who are tearing the vitals of France and that of foreign
powers; that the nation has lost all its energy; that it lies at the
feet of the tyrants by whom it is oppressed; that we can render no
further service to our country; that, far from being able to give
happiness to the beings we hold most dear, we shall bring down hatred,
vengeance, and misfortune upon them, so long as we live,--we have
resolved to quit life and be no longer witnesses of the slavery which
is about to desolate our unhappy country."
{124}
After ending with this cry of grief and indignation: "We devote the
vile scoundrels who have destroyed liberty and plunged France into an
abyss of evils to the scorn and indignation of all time," the two
proscripts were found dead in a wheat-field about a league from
Saint-Emilion. Their bodies were half devoured by wolves.
And how will André Chénier end? On the day of the Swiss fête, the city
where such a scandal took place seemed to him insupportable. For
several days he sought refuge in the country where he could breathe a
purer air beneath the blossoming trees. But contemplation of nature
did not soothe him. Running to meet danger, he returned and threw
himself into the furnace, more ardent and indignant than before. With
manly enthusiasm he exclaimed: "It is above all when the sacrifices
which must be made to truth, liberty, and country are dangerous and
difficult, that they are accompanied by inexpressible delights. It is
in the midst of spying accusations, outrages, and proscriptions, it is
in dungeons and on scaffolds, that virtue, probity, and constancy taste
the pleasures of a proud and pure conscience." André had a
presentiment of his fate.
He was to die on the same day and the same scaffold as his friend
Roucher, a few hours earlier than the moment when Robespierre's
condemnation would have saved them. It is thus that he was to pay with
his life for his opposition to the fête of the Swiss of Chateauvieux,
and Collot d'Herbois was avenged. {125} But after the turn of the
victims came that of the headsmen. The unlucky comedian who, pursuing
even his comrades with his hatred, asked that "the head of the _Comédie
Française_ should be guillotined and the rest transported," the
impresario of the fête of the Swiss galley slaves, the organizer of the
Lyons massacres, Collot d'Herbois, cursed by friends and enemies, was
transported to Guiana and died there in 1796, just as he had lived, in
an access of burning fever.
[1] The oath taken by the deputies of the third estate in the
tennis-court of Versailles, in 1789.
{126}
XII.
THE DECLARATION OF WAR.
The wave of anarchy constantly rose higher, but the optimists,
sheltering themselves, like Pétion, in a beatific calm, obstinately
closed their eyes and would not see it. Abroad and at home there was
such a series of shocks and agitations, of struggles and emotions,
perils and troubles; things hurried on so fast, and the scenes of the
drama were so varied and so violent, that what happened to-day was
forgotten by the morrow. The noise of the fête of the Swiss of
Chateauvieux had hardly ceased when the shouts of the multitude were
heard saluting Louis XVI., who had just declared war on Austria.
In reality, the King did not desire war, but the bellicose current had
become irresistible. The court of Vienna had shown itself intractable.
It forbade the princes who owned possessions in Lorraine and Alsace to
receive the indemnities offered by France in exchange for their feudal
rights, and threatened to have the Diet of Ratisbonne annul any private
treaties they might conclude concerning them. The electors of Trèves,
Cologne, and Mayence undisguisedly favored the levying of troops by the
emigrant {127} princes, and even paid subsidies toward their support.
They refused to recognize the official ambassadors of Louis XVI., while
recognizing the plenipotentiaries of these princes. There was talk of
holding a Congress at Aix-la-Chapelle for the purpose of intimidating
the National Assembly. The successor of the Emperor Leopold, Francis
II., who, before his election to the Empire, had assumed the title of
King of Hungary and Bohemia, displayed extremely martial sentiments.
Austria, which had sent forty thousand men to the Low Countries and
twenty thousand to the Rhine, had just signed a treaty of alliance with
Prussia, "to put an end to the troubles in France." Dumouriez urgently
demanded the court of Vienna to explain itself. It finally sent the
French Ambassador, Marquis de Noailles, a dry, curt, and formal note,
naming the only conditions on which peace could be preserved. These
were: the re-establishment of the French monarchy on the bases of the
royal declaration of June 23, 1789, and, consequently, the restoration
of the nobility and clergy as orders; the restitution of Church
property; the return of Alsace to the German princes, with all their
sovereign and feudal rights; and, finally, the surrender of Avignon and
the county of Venaisson to the Holy See.
"In truth," says Dumouriez in his Memoirs, "if the Viennese minister
had slept through the entire thirty-three months that had elapsed since
the royal séance, and had dictated this note on awaking {128} without
knowledge of what had happened, he could not have proposed conditions
more incongruous with the progress of the Revolution.... The new
social compact was founded on the abolition of the orders and the
equality of all citizens. The financial system, which alone could
prevent bankruptcy, was founded on the creation of assignats. The
assignats were hypothecated on the property of the clergy, now become
the property of the nation, and the greater part of which had been
already sold. The nation, therefore, could not accept these conditions
except by violating its Constitution, destroying property, ruining its
purchasers, annulling its assignats, and declaring bankruptcy. Could
so humiliating an obedience be expected from a great nation, proud of
having conquered its liberty? and that for the sake of placing itself
once more under the yoke of nobles who, having abandoned their King
himself, now threatened to re-enter their country with sword and flame
and every scourge of vengeance?"
The entire National Assembly reasoned in the same way as Dumouriez. A
cry for war arose on all sides. The Girondins saw in it the
indispensable consecration of the Revolution. The Feuillants hoped
that besides proving creditable to the government, it would accomplish
the additional end of drawing away from Paris and other great cities a
multitude of turbulent men who, for lack of anything else to do, were
disturbing public order. Certain reactionists, stifling the sentiment
of patriotism in their hearts, {129} were equally anxious for war, in
the secret hope that it would prove disastrous for the French army, and
result in the re-establishment of the old régime. On the other hand,
there were good citizens, inclined to optimism and judging others by
themselves, who thought that when confronted with an enemy, all
intestine dissensions would vanish as by enchantment, and that the new
Constitution, hallowed by victory and glory, would ensure the country a
most brilliant destiny. Ministers were unanimous, and enthusiasm
universal. Even if he had so desired, Louis XVI. could no longer
resist it. On April 20, 1792, he went to the Assembly. The hall was
filled with a crowd which comprehended the importance and solemnity of
the act about to be accomplished.
According to Dumouriez, the King was very majestic: "I come," he said,
"in accordance with the terms of the Constitution, formally to propose
war against the King of Hungary and Bohemia." He afterwards paid the
greatest attention to the report of the Minister of Foreign Affairs,
and seemed, by the motions of his head and hands, to approve it in
every respect. He returned to the Tuileries amidst general
acclamations. War was unanimously decided on, and Dumouriez went to
the diplomatic committee in order to draw up the declaration. At ten
in the evening the decree was brought in and carried to the King, who
sanctioned it at once.
Thus commenced that gigantic war which France was to wage against all
Europe, and which ended, {130} twenty-three years later, in the
disaster of Waterloo. How many battles, what suffering, and what a
prodigious shedding of blood! And to attain what end? Simply the
point of departure; that is to say, in the political order, to
constitutional monarchy, and in territory, to the boundaries of 1792.
What! to have filled Europe with noise and renown; to have carried the
standards of France from east to west, from north to south; to have
camped victoriously in Brussels, Milan, Venice, Rome, Naples, Cairo,
Berlin, Madrid, Vienna, Moscow; to have enlarged the borders of valor,
heroism, and self-sacrifice in order to arrive, after so many efforts,
just at the spot where the strife began? Ah! how short-sighted is
human wisdom, how deceitful the previsions of mortal man, how sterile
the agitations of republics and monarchs! "Assuredly!" says Dumouriez,
"if the Emperor and the King of Prussia could have foreseen that France
was able to withstand all Europe, they would not have meddled with her
domestic quarrels; they would have treated the _émigrés_ not with
confidence, but compassion; they would have responded frankly and
without trickery to the minister's negotiation; the Revolution would
have been accomplished without cruelties; Europe would have remained at
peace, and France would be happy." What sadness underlies all history,
and what disproportion there is between man's sacrifices and their
results! The Revolution was achieved. All necessary liberties had
been conquered. Privileges {131} existed no longer. Animated by
excellent intentions, Louis XVI. would have been the best of
constitutional sovereigns, had his subjects possessed wisdom. Why this
long misunderstanding between him and his people? Why, on one side,
the insensate attitude of the _émigrés_, whose task seemed to be to
justify the revolutionists; and why, on the other, those savage
passions which seemed trying to justify the wrathful recriminations of
Coblentz? Why that untimely intervention of Austria which irritated
French national sentiment and gave a political pretext to inexcusable
violence, cruelty, and crime? Inextricable confusion of false
situations! Multitudes asked themselves in what direction right and
duty lay. A large contingent of the French nobility heartily desired
the success of foreign armies. At Coblentz a gathering of twenty-two
thousand gentlemen hastened to the side of the seven Bourbon princes:
the Comte de Provence, the Comte d'Artois, the Duc de Berry, the Duc
d'Angoulême, the Prince de Conde, the Duc de Bourbon, and the Duc
d'Enghien.
As M. de Lamartine has said: "Infidelity to the country called itself
fidelity to the King. Desertion called itself honor. Fealty to the
throne was the religion of the French nobility. To them the
sovereignty of the people seemed an insolent dogma against which it was
necessary to draw the sword under penalty of sharing the crime. There
was real devotion in the act by which these men, young and {132} old,
abandoned their rank in the army, and the ties of country and family,
and rushed into a foreign land to defend the white flag as common
soldiers.... Their country symbolized duty for the patriots; to the
_émigrés_, duty meant the throne. One of these parties deceived itself
concerning its duty, but both of them believed they were performing it."
As to the unfortunate Louis XVI., he suffered cruelly. It was like
death to him to declare war against his nephew, and at certain moments
he felt that this Austrian army against which his troops contended
might yet be his last resource. He could not even flatter himself that
the sacrifice he had made of his sympathies and family feelings would
be repaid by the love and confidence of his people.
"We have no difficulty nowadays in comprehending," says M. Geffroy very
justly, "what pure patriotism there was in that young army of 1792,
which represented new France. But this army, formed in independence of
the old regiments, was none the less, in the eyes of the Queen, a
veritable army of sedition. She thought of it as composed of the
victors of the Bastille, those whom Mirabeau styled the greatest
scoundrels of Paris; the very rabble who came to Versailles on the 6th
of October. She believed they could be crushed by the first attack at
the frontier, and that France and Paris would be rid of them." The
following reflection by M. Geffroy is very judicious: "Marie Antoinette
committed a double error, but honest men who had not the same {133}
overpowering motives as she, have committed it likewise. I do not
allude merely to those Frenchmen who, after April 20, remained in the
ranks of the Emigration, and who, apparently, did not suppose
themselves to be betraying the true interests of their country. But
look at M. de Bouillé. He even accepted a command in the foreign army
under Gustavus III. And yet M. de Bouillé is an honest man who knows
France and loves her ardently. Observe, in his Memoirs, his
involuntary pride in our success, and how he shrugs his shoulders at
the bluster of the Prussian officers."
It is not yet well understood what vigor, enthusiasm, and martial ardor
animated that brave national army, which, according to the foreigners,
was but a band of rioters, but which was suddenly to appear on the
battle-field as a people of heroes. Honor took refuge in the camps.
It was there that men whom the Jacobin Club enraged, and who had no
consolation for their patriotic grief but the virile emotions of
combat, went to fight and die. Why did not Louis XVI. call to mind
that he was the commander-in-chief of the army? Ah! had he been a
soldier, had he been accustomed to wear a uniform, to command, and,
above all, to speak to his troops, how quickly he would have come to
the end of his difficulties! Count de Vaublanc had good reason to say:
"Anything can be done with Frenchmen if one knows how to animate and
impress them with vehement ardor; otherwise, nothing need be
expected.... Never did {134} a prince merit better the eternal rewards
promised by religion to the true Christian; and yet his example should
forever teach kings that their conduct must be totally different from
his. Lacking the courage which acts, the most virtuous king cannot
achieve his own safety." Why did not Louis XVI. go amongst his
soldiers? Victory would have given him a sceptre and a crown. While
he still retained his sword, why did he leave it in the scabbard? Why
did he not remember that it might launch thunderbolts?
On the contrary, Louis XVI. hesitates, fumbles, temporizes. Count de
Vaublanc says again: "This wretched time proves thoroughly that finesse
is the most detestable means of conducting great affairs. Nothing but
finesse was opposed to the impetuous attacks of the Jacobins. All was
dissimulation; conversations, writings, measures; authority acted only
by crooked ways. With a thousand means of safety, people were lost
because they pushed prudence to excess, and extreme prudence always
degenerates into despicable means. I was in every great crisis of the
Revolution, and I have always seen the same faults produce the same
misfortunes. It is the same thing in revolution as in war; no matter
how prudent a general may be, he must take some risk. Otherwise it
would be impossible to gain a single battle."
Ah! how true and how striking is that great saying of Bossuet: "When
God wills to overthrow empires, all is feeble and irregular in their
designs." {135} Undecided and fickle, Louis XVI. does not even know
whether to desire the success or the failure of the Austrian army. He
has no plan, no steadiness of purpose. The secret mission he gives to
Mallet du Pan is a fresh proof of the irresolution of his character and
his policy. What is it he asks? To have the Powers declare that they
are making war against an anti-social faction, and not the French
nation; that they are undertaking the defence of legitimate governments
and of peoples against anarchy; that they will treat only with the
King; that they shall demand perfect liberty for him; that they convoke
a congress to which the _émigrés_ may be admitted as complainants, and
where the general scheme of claims and reclamations shall be negotiated
under the auspices and the guarantee of the great courts of Europe.
Hesitating between Austria and his own kingdom, the unhappy monarch
attempts to continue that equivocal system, that see-saw policy in
which he has succeeded so ill, and which constrains him to
dissimulation, that last resource of the feeble. Sent to Germany with
instructions written by Louis XVI., with his own hand, Mallet du Pan
recommends the sovereigns to be cautious in advancing into France, to
observe the greatest prudence in dealing with the inhabitants of the
invaded provinces, and to precede their arrival by a manifesto in which
they declare conciliatory and pacific intentions. It follows that
official ministers of the King did not possess his confidence and were
not the interpreters of his mind. A {136} sort of occult and
mysterious government existed, with a diplomacy, secret funds, and
agents abroad and at home. Such a system, lacking all grandeur and
sincerity, could accomplish nothing but catastrophes.
Meanwhile, the war had begun under the most painful conditions. The
invasion of Belgium, arranged for the end of April, failed miserably.
Near Mons, Biron's troops took to flight, threatening to fire on their
officers, and crying: "We are betrayed!" At Lille, General Theobald
Dillon was massacred by his own soldiers. Such news caused
indescribable emotion in Paris. Popular mistrust and irritation
reached their height. The different parties hurled reproaches and
accusations in each other's face. The Girondins, finding the National
Guard too conservative, demanded pikes for the men of the faubourgs who
had no guns. The _sans-culottes_ enlisted. The army of assassins was
organized. The only thing left to do before giving the signal for a
riot was to obtain from the King a last concession,--the disbanding of
his guard.
{137}
XIII.
THE DISBANDING OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL GUARD.
Louis XVI. had still some defenders, some heroes resolved to shed the
last drop of their blood for their King. Hence it was necessary to
remove them from his person. What means of doing so could be found?
Calumny. Fable on fable was spread among an always credulous public,
imaginary conspiracies invented, and the wretched monarch constrained
to deprive himself of his last resource, in order to deliver him, weak
and disarmed, into the hands of his enemies.
The Constitution provided a guard for Louis XVI. One third of it was
composed of soldiers of the line, and the remainder of National Guards,
chosen by the Departments themselves from among their best-formed,
richest, and best-bred citizens. It was commanded by one of the
greatest lords of the old régime, the Duke de Cossé-Brissac. Born in
1734, the son of a marshal of France, the Duke had been governor of
Paris, grand steward of France, and colonel of the Hundred-Switzers.
He had never been willing to leave the King since the beginning of the
Revolution. When his regiment was {138} disbanded he might have fled,
and Louis XVI. begged him to do so; but the heart of a subject so
faithful had been deaf to the entreaties of the unfortunate sovereign.
"Sire," he had answered, "if I fly, they will say that I am guilty, and
you will be considered my accomplice: my flight would be your
accusation; I would rather die." And, in fact, he did die. He had a
real devotion to the former mistress of Louis XV., the Countess du
Barry, and this latest conquest is not the least important of the
favorite's adventures. Probably Count d'Allonville exaggerates when,
in his Memoirs, he extols in Madame du Barry "that decency of tone,
that nobility of manners, that bearing equally removed from pride and
humility, from license and from prudery, that countenance which was
enough to refute all the pamphlets." Nevertheless, it is certain that
the society of the Duke de Brissac inspired the former favorite with
generous sentiments. After the October Days, she took the wounded
body-guards into her own house, and when the Queen sent to thank her
for it, she replied: "These wounded young men regret nothing except not
having died for a princess so worthy of all homage as Your Majesty....
Luciennes[1] is yours, Madame; did not your benevolence give it back to
me? ... The late King, by a sort of presentiment, forced me to accept a
thousand precious objects {139} before sending me away from his person.
I already had the honor of offering you this treasure in the time of
the Notables; I offer it again, Madame, with eagerness. You have so
many expenses to provide for, and so many favors to confer. Permit me,
I entreat you, to render to Cæsar that which belongs to Cæsar."
An enthusiastic royalist, a gentleman of the old nobility, chivalrous
and full of courtesy, bred in notions of romantic susceptibility like
those of _Clélie_ and _Astrée_, the Duke de Brissac, like a
knight-errant of former times, represented at the court of Louis XVI. a
whole past which was crumbling to decay. If the unhappy monarch had
been a man of action, he would have turned to good advantage a guard
commanded by such a champion. He could have made it the nucleus of
resistance by grouping the Swiss regiments and the well-inclined
battalions of the National Guard around it. Unfortunately, there was
nothing warlike in Louis XVI. "Among the deplorable causes which
ruined him," says the Count de Vaublanc in his Memoirs, "must be
counted the wretched education which kept him apart from every sort of
military action. I remember that in the early days of the Consulate,
after a review held on the Place of the Tuileries by Bonaparte, when
talking about this to M. Suard, of the Frenc
Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/32408