XIV.
Whilst humiliated liberty was threatened by fanaticism in the south, it, in its turn, carried on the work of assassination in the north. Brest was the very focus of Jacobinism—the close proximity of La Vendeé gave this city reason to apprehend the counter-revolution that constantly threatened them—the presence of the fleet, commanded by officers suspected of favouring the aristocratic part—a population greatly composed of strangers and sailors, accessible to corruption, and capable of being readily excited to crime—rendered this city more turbulent and more agitated than any other port in the kingdom. The clubs constantly strove to work on the sailors to mutiny against their officers, whilst the revolutionists mistrusted the navy, as that was far more independent of the people than the army, for the court could at a moment change the station of the fleet, and turn their cannon against the constitution, and the feeling of discipline, of aristocracy, and of the colonies, were all contrary to the new school of ideas; and for this reason the Jacobins had for some time striven to disorganise the fleet. The appointment of M. de Lajaille to the command of one of the vessels destined to carry assistance to San Domingo, caused an outbreak of the suspicions infused into the minds of the inhabitants of Brest, and of the officers of the navy. M. de Lajaille was designated by the clubs as a traitor to the nation, who was about to introduce the counter-revolutionary feeling in the colonies. Attacked at the moment he was about to embark, by a crowd of nearly three thousand persons, he was covered with wounds, stretched senseless on the ground, and would have been killed, but for the heroic devotion of a workman, who shielded him with his own body, and defended him until the arrival of the civic guard. M. de Lajaille was, however, to appease popular feeling, imprisoned: in vain did the king order the municipal authorities of Brest to set this innocent and valuable officer free; in vain did the minister of justice demand chastisement for this attempted murder, committed in broad daylight, in the presence of the whole town; in vain was a sabre and a gold medal voted to the courageous Lanvergent, who had saved de Lajaille; the dread of a more formidable outbreak assured the guilty of impunity, and detained the innocent in prison. On the eve of war the naval officers, threatened with mutiny on board their vessels, and assassination on shore, had as much to apprehend from their crews as from the enemy.
XV.
The same discords were fomented in all the garrisons between the soldiers and the officers, and the insubordination of the troops was, in the eyes of the clubs, the chief virtue of the army. The people every where sided with the soldiers, and the officers were constantly disturbed by conspiracies and revolts in the regiments. The fortified towns were the theatres of military outbreaks, which invariably terminated in the impunity of the soldier, and the imprisonment or the forced emigration of the officers. The Assembly, the supreme and partial judge, always decided in favour of insubordination: unable to restrain the people, it flattered their excesses. Perpignan was a new proof of this.
In the night of the 6th of December, the officers of the regiment of Cambrésis, in garrison in this town, went in a body to M. de Chollet, the general who commanded the division, and urged him to retire into the citadel, as they had learnt that a conspiracy was formed in the regiment, which threatened alike his and their lives. M. de Chollet complied with their earnest request, whilst they went to the barracks, and ordered the men to follow them to the citadel. The soldiers replied that they would only obey M. Desbordes, their lieutenant-colonel, in whose patriotism they had the greatest confidence. M. Desbordes came, and read to the soldiers the order of the general; but the inflexion of his voice, the expression of his face, his glance, alike seemed to protest against the order which his duty as a soldier compelled him to communicate to them. The troops understood this mute appeal, and declared that they would not quit their quarters, because the municipal authorities had forbidden them: the national guard joined them and patrolled the streets: the officers shut themselves up in the citadel, and shots were fired from the ramparts. Lieutenant-Colonel Desbordes, the national guard, the gendarmerie, and the regiments, stormed the citadel. The officers of the regiment of Cambrésis were imprisoned by their soldiers; one, however, escaped, and committed suicide on the frontiers of Spain. The unfortunate general, Chollet, victim of the violence of the officers and soldiers, was impeached with fifty officers, or inhabitants of Perpignan. They were ordered before the high national court of Orleans; and thus were fifty victims predestined to perish in the massacre at Versailles.
XVI.
Blood flowed every where. The clubs seduced the regiments; patriotic motions, denunciations against the generals, perfidious insinuations against the fidelity of the officers, were constantly instilled into the minds of the army by the people. The officer was a prey to terror, the soldier to mistrust. The premeditated plan of the Jacobins and Girondists was to destroy in concert this body that was yet attached to the king, deprive the nobility of their command, substitute plebeians for nobles as officers, and thus give the army to the nation. In the meantime they surrendered it to anarchy and sedition; but these two parties finding that the disorganisation was not sufficiently rapid, wished to sum up in one act the systematic corruption of the army, the ruin of all military discipline, and the legal triumph of the insurrection.
We have already mentioned how prominent a part the Swiss regiment of Châteauvieux had taken in the famous insurrection of Nancy during the latter period of the existence of the Constituent Assembly. An army under M. de Bouillé had been necessary to repress the armed revolt of several regiments that threatened all France with the rule of the tyrannical soldiery. M. de Bouillé, at the head of a body of troops from Metz, and the battalions of the national guard, had surrounded Nancy, and after a desperate contest at the gates, and in the streets of the town, forced the rebels to lay down their arms. These vigorous measures for the restoration of order were applauded by all parties, and reflected equal glory on M. de Bouillé and disgrace on the soldiers. Switzerland, by virtue of her treaties with France, preserved her right of federal justice over the regiments of her nation, and this essentially military country had tried by court-martial the regiment of Châteauvieux. Twenty-four of the ringleaders had been condemned and executed in expiation of the blood they had shed, and the fidelity they had violated, the remainder had been decimated, and forty-one soldiers now were undergoing their sentence on board the galleys at Brest. The amnesty proclaimed by the king for the crimes committed during the civil troubles, when he accepted the constitution, could not be applied to these foreign soldiers, for the right to pardon belongs alone to those who have the right to punish.
Sentenced by the judgment of the Helvetian jurisdiction, neither the king nor the Assembly could invalidate the judgment, or annul its effects. The king had, at the entreaty of the Constituent Assembly, in vain attempted to obtain the pardon of these soldiers from the Swiss confederation.
These fruitless negotiations served the Jacobins and the National Assembly as food for accusation against M. de Montmorin. In vain did he justify himself by alleging the impossibility of obtaining such an amnesty from Switzerland, at a moment when this country, who had suffered from civil commotions, sought to restore order by the laws of Draco. "We shall be then the compulsory gaolers of this ferocious people," cried Guadet and Collot d'Herbois. "France must then degrade herself so far as to punish in her very ports those heroes who have gained the people a triumph over the aristocratic officers, and shed their blood for the nation instead of pouring it out in the cause of despotism."
Pastoret, an influential member of the moderate party, and who was said to concert all his measures with the king, supported Guadet's motion, in order to give the king popularity by an act agreeable to the nation; and the freedom of the soldiers of Châteauvieux was voted by the Assembly. The king, having delayed his sanction for some time, in order not to wound the cantons by this violent usurpation of their rights over their own countrymen, afforded the Jacobins fresh ground for imprecation and invective against the court and the ministers. "The moment is come when one man must perish for the safety of all," cried Manuel, "and this man must be a minister; they all appear to me so guilty, that I firmly believe the Assembly would be free from crime did it cause them to draw lots for who should perish on the scaffold," "All, all," vociferated the tribunes. But at this very moment Collot d'Herbois mounted the tribune, and announced, amidst loud applause, that the royal assent to the decree for their liberation had been given the previous evening, and that in a few days he should present to his brother deputies these victims of discipline.
The soldiers of Châteauvieux were in reality advancing to Paris, having been liberated from the galleys at Brest, and their march was one continued triumph, but Paris prepared for them a still more brilliant one through the exertions of the Jacobins. In vain did the Feuillants and the Constitutionalists energetically protest, through the mouth of André Chénier, the Tyrtæus of moderation and good sense, of Dupont de Nemours, and the poet Roucher, against the insolent oration of the assassins of the generous Désilles. Collot d'Herbois, Robespierre, the Jacobins, the Cordeliers, and the very commune of Paris, clung to the idea of this triumph, which, according to them, would cover with opprobium the court and La Fayette. The feeble interposition of Pétion, who appeared as though he wished to moderate the scandal, served only to encourage it, for he of all men was most fitted to plunge the people into the last degree of excess. His affected virtue served only to cloak violence, and to cover with an hypocritical appearance of legality the outbreaks he dared not punish; and had a representative of anarchy been sought to be placed at the head of the commune of Paris, it could have found no fitter type than Pétion. His paternal reprimands to the people were but promises of impunity. The public force always arrived too late to punish; excuse was always to be found for sedition, amnesty for crime. The people felt that their magistrate was their accomplice and their slave, and yet whilst they despised they loved him.
XVII.
"This fête that is preparing for these soldiers," wrote Chénier, "is attributed to enthusiasm. For my part, I confess I do not perceive this enthusiasm. I see a few men who create a degree of agitation, but the rest are alarmed or indifferent. We are told that the national honour is interested in this reparation,—I can scarcely comprehend this; for, either the national guards of Metz, who put down the revolt of Nancy, are enemies of the public weal, or the soldiers of Châteauvieux are assassins: there is no medium. How, then, is the honour of Paris interested in fêting the murderers of our brothers? Other profound politicians say, this fête will humiliate those who have sought to fetter the nation. What! in order to humiliate, according to their judgment, a bad government, it is necessary to invent extravagances capable of destroying every species of government—recompense rebellion against the laws—crown foreign satellites for having shot French citizens in an émeute. It is said, that in every place where this procession passes, the statues will be veiled:—Ah! they will do well to veil the whole city, if this hideous orgy takes place; but it is not alone the statues of despots that should be veiled, but the face of every good citizen. It will be the duty of every youth in the kingdom, of every national guard in the kingdom to assume mourning on the day when the murder of their brothers confers a title of glory on foreign and seditious soldiers; it is the eyes of the army that should be veiled, that they may not behold the reward of insubordination and revolt; it is the National Assembly—the king—the administrators—the country—that should veil their faces, in order that they may not become complaisant or silent witnesses of the outrages offered to the authorities and the country. The book of the law must be covered, when those who have torn and stained its pages by musket-balls and sabre-cuts receive the civic honours. Citizens of Paris, honest yet weak men, there is not one of you who, when he interrogates his own heart, does not feel how much the country—how much he its child—are insulted by these outrages offered to the laws,—to those who execute them, and those who are for them. Do you not blush that a handful of turbulent men, who appear numerous because they are united and make a noise, should constrain you to do their pleasure, by telling you it is your own, and by amusing your puerile curiosity by unworthy spectacles? In a city that respected itself, such a fête would find before it silence and solitude, the streets and public places abandoned, the houses shut up, the windows deserted, and the flight and scorn of the passers-by would tell history what share honest and well-disposed men took in this scandalous and bacchanalian procession."
XVIII.
Collot d'Herbois insulted André Chénier and Roucher in his reply. Roucher replied by a letter full of sarcasm, in which he reminded Collot d'Herbois of his falls on the stage and his misadventures as an actor. "This personage of comic romance," said he, "who has leapt from the trestles of Punch to the tribune of the Jacobins, rushes at me, as though to strike me with the oar the Swiss have brought him from the galleys."
Placards for or against the fête covered the walls of the Palais Royal, and were alternately torn down by groups of young men or Jacobins.
Dupont de Nemours, the friend and master of Mirabeau, laid aside his philosophical calm, to address a letter on the same subject to Pétion, in which his conscience, as an honest man, braved the popularity of the tribune. "When the danger is imminent, it is the duty of all honest men to warn the magistrates of it. More particularly, when the magistrates themselves create it. You told a falsehood when you asserted that these soldiers had aided the Revolution on the 14th of July, and that they had refused to combat against the people of Paris. It is untrue that the Swiss refused to combat against the people of Paris, and it is true that they assassinated the national guards of Nancy. You have the audacity to term those men patriots who dare command the legislative body to send a deputation to the fête prepared for these rebels; these are the men whom you adopt as your friends; it is with them that you dine at la Rapée, so that the general of the national guard is obliged to gallop about for two hours to receive your orders before he can find you, and you seek in vain to conceal your embarrassment by high-flown phrases. You seek in vain to conceal this banquet given to assassins beneath the pretext of a banquet in honour of liberty. But these subterfuges are no longer available; the moment is urgent, and you will no longer deceive the sections, the army, or the eighty-three departments. Those who rule you, as they would a child, have agreed to surrender Paris to ten thousand pikes, to whom the bar of the Assembly will be thrown open the day the national guard is disarmed; the men destined to bear them arrive every day, and Paris receives an accession of twelve or fifteen hundred bandits every twenty-four hours, and beg, until the day of pillage arrives, which they await as ravens await their prey.—I have not told all;—generals are prepared for this hideous army. The friends of Jourdan, impatient to behold the man whom the amnesty had not delivered sufficiently soon, have broken open his prison at Avignon. Already, he has been received in triumph in several cities of the south, like the Swiss of the Châteauvieux, and will arrive at Paris to-morrow; Sunday he will be present at the fête with his companions—with the two Mainvielle—with Pegtavin;—with all those cold-blooded scoundrels who have killed in one night sixty-eight defenceless persons, and violated females before they murdered them. Catiline!—Cethegus!—march forward, the soldiers of Sylla are in the city, and the consul himself undertakes to disarm the Romans. The measure is full,—it overflows!"
Pétion strove miserably to justify himself in a letter in which his weakness and connivance revealed themselves beneath the multiplicity of excuses. At the same time Robespierre, mounting the tribune of the Jacobins, exclaimed, "You do not trace to their source the obstacles that oppose the expansion of the sentiments of the people. Against whom think you that you have to strive? against the aristocracy?—No. Against the court?—No. Against a general who has long entertained great designs against the people. It is not the national guard that views these preparations with alarm; it is the genius of La Fayette that conspires in the staff; it is the genius of La Fayette that conspires in the directory of the department; it is the genius of La Fayette that perverts the minds of so many good citizens in the capital who would but for him be with us.
"La Fayette is the most dangerous of the enemies of liberty, because he wears the mask of patriotism; it is he who, after having wrought all the evil in his power in the Constituent Assembly, has affected to withdraw to his estates, and then comes to strive for this post of mayor of Paris, not to obtain it, but to refuse it, in order to affect disinterestedness; it is he who has been appointed to the command of the French armies, in order to turn them against the Revolution. The national guards of Metz were as innocent as those of Paris, they can be nothing but patriots; it is La Fayette who, through the medium of Bouillé his relation and accomplice, has deceived them. How can we inscribe on the banners of this fête, Bouillé is alone guilty? Who sought to stifle the revolt at Nancy, and cover it with an impenetrable veil? Who demands crowns for the assassins of the soldiers of Châteauvieux? La Fayette. Who prevented me from speaking? La Fayette. Who are those who now dart such threatening glances at me? La Fayette and his accomplices." (Loud applause.)
XIX.
The preparations for this ceremony gave rise to a still more exciting drama at the National Assembly. At the opening of the sitting, a member demanded that the forty soldiers of Châteauvieux should be admitted to pay their respects to the legislative body. M. de Jaucourt opposed it: "If these soldiers," said he, "are only admitted to express their gratitude, I consent to their being admitted to the bar; but I demand that afterwards they be not allowed to remain during the debate." The speaker was interrupted by loud murmurs, and cries of à bas! à bas! from the tribunes. "An amnesty is neither a triumph nor a civic crown," continued he; "you cannot dishonour the names of the brave Désilles, or of those generous citizens who perished defending the laws against them; you cannot lacerate by this triumph the hearts of those among you who took part in the expedition of Nancy. Allow a soldier, who was ordered on this expedition with his regiment, to point out to you the effects this decision would have on the army. (The murmurs redouble.) The army will see in your conduct only an encouragement to insurrection; and these honours will lead the soldiers to believe that you look on these men, whom an amnesty has freed, not as men whose punishment was too severe, but as innocent victims." The tumult here became so great that M. de Jaucourt was forced to descend. But one of the members, who, it is evident to all, was almost overpowered by emotion, took his place. It was M. de Gouvion, a young officer, whose name was already gloriously inscribed in the early pages of the annals of our wars. He was clothed in deep black, and every feature of his face wore an expression of intense grief, which inspired the Assembly with involuntary interest, and the tumult was instantly changed into attention. His voice was tremulous and scarcely audible at first; it was evident that indignation as much as sorrow choked his utterance.
"Gentlemen," said he, "I had a brother, a good patriot, who, through the estimation in which he was held by his fellow citizens, had been successively elected commandant of the national guard, and member for the department. Ever ready to sacrifice himself for the revolution and the law, it was in the name of the revolution and the law that he was called upon to march to Nancy at the head of the brave national guards, and there he fell pierced by five bayonet-wounds, and by the hand of those who, ... I demand, if I am condemned to behold here the assassins of my brother." "Well, then, leave the chamber," cried a stern voice. The tribunes applauded this speech, more cruel and poignant than the thrust of a dagger. Indignation enabled M. de Gouvion to overcome his contempt. "Who is the dastard who himself in order to insult the grief of a brother?" cried he, glancing around to discover the speaker. "I will tell my name—'tis I," replied the deputy Choudieu, rising from his seat. Loud applause from the tribunes followed this insult of Choudieu's; it would seem as though this crowd had no longer any feeling, and that passion triumphed over nature. But M. de Gouvion was sustained by a sentiment stronger than popular fury—that of generous despair; he continued: "As a man, I applauded the clemency of the National Assembly when it burst the fetters of these unhappy soldiers who were misled." He was again interrupted, but continued: "the decrees of the Constituent Assembly, the orders of the king, the voice of their officers, the cries of their country, all were unavailing; without provocation on the part of the national guards of the two departments, they fired on Frenchmen, and my brother fell a victim to his obedience to the laws. No, I cannot remain silent, so long as the memory of the national guards is disgraced by the honours decreed to these men who murdered them."
Couthon, a young Jacobin, seated not far from Robespierre, from whose eyes he seemed to gain his secret inspirations, rose and replied to Gouvion, without insulting him. "Who is the slave of prejudices that would venture to dishonour men whom the law has absolved; who would not repress his personal grief in the interest and the triumph of liberty?" But Gouvion's voice touched that chord of justice and natural emotion that always vibrates beneath the insensibility of opinion. Twice did the Assembly, summoned by the president to vote for or against their admission to the debate, rise in an even number for and against this motion. And the secretaries, the judges of these decisions, hesitated to pronounce on which side the majority was; they at length, after two attempts, declared that the majority was in favour of the admission of the Swiss; but the minority protested, and the appel nominal was demanded. This pronounced a feeble majority that the Swiss should be admitted; and they instantly entered, amidst the applause of the tribunes, whilst the unfortunate Gouvion left the chamber by the opposite door, his forehead scarlet with indignation, and vowing never to set foot in that Assembly, where he was forced to behold and welcome the murderers of his brother. He instantly applied to the minister of war to join the army of the north, and fell there.
XX.
The soldiers were introduced, and Collot d'Herbois presented them to the admiring tribunes. The national guard of Versailles, who had followed them to the Assembly, defiled in the hall amidst the sound of drums, and cries of "Vive la Nation!" Groups of citizens and females of Paris, with tricoloured flags and pikes brandished over their heads, followed them; then the members of the popular societies of Paris presented to the president flags of honour given to the Swiss by the departments which these conquerors had just traversed. The men of the 14th of July, with Gouchon, the agitator of the faubourg St. Antoine, as their spokesman, announced that this faubourg had fabricated 10,000 pikes to defend their liberties and their country. This legitimate ovation, offered by the Girondists and Jacobins to undisciplined soldiers, authorised the people of Paris to decree to them the triumph of such an infamous proceeding (le triomphe du scandale).
It was no longer the people of liberty, but the people of anarchy; the day of the 15th of April combined all its emblems. Revolt armed against the laws, for instance, mutinous soldiers as conquerors; a colossal galley, an instrument of punishment and shame, crowned with flowers as an emblem; abandoned women and girls, collected from the lowest haunts of infamy, carrying and kissing the broken fetters of these galley-slaves; forty trophies, bearing the forty names of these Swiss; civic crowns on the names of these murderers of citizens; busts of Voltaire, Rousseau, Franklin, Sidney, the greatest philosophers and most virtuous patriots, mingled with the ignoble busts of these malefactors, and sullied by the contact; these soldiers themselves, astonished if not ashamed of their glory, advancing in the midst of a group of rebellious French-guard, in all the glorification of the forsaking of flags and want of discipline; the march closed by a car imitating in its form the prow of a galley, in this car the statue of Liberty armed in anticipation with the bludgeon of September, and wearing the bonnet rouge, an emblem borrowed from Phrygia by some, from the galleys by others; the book of the constitution carried processionally in this fête, as if to be present at the homage decreed to those who were armed against the laws; bands of male and female citizens, the pikes of the faubourg, the absence of the civic bayonets, fierce threats, theatrical music, demagogic hymns, derisive halts at the Bastille, the Hôtel-de-Ville, the Champ-de-Mars; at the altar of the country the vast and tumultuous rounds danced several times by chains of men and women round the triumphal galley, amidst the foul chorus of the air of the Carmagnole; embraces, more obscene than patriotic, between these women and the soldiers, who threw themselves into each others' arms; and in order to put the cope-stone on this debasement of the laws, Pétion the Maire of Paris, the magistrates of the people assisting personally at this fête, and sanctioning this insolent triumph over the laws by their weakness or their complicity. Such was this fête: an humiliating copy of the 14th of July, an infamous parody of an insurrection, which parodied a revolution!
France blushed; good citizens were alarmed; the national guard began to be afraid of pikes; the city to fear the faubourgs, and the army herein received the signal of the most entire disorganisation.
The indignation of the constitutional party burst forth in ironical strophes in a hymn of André Chénier, in which that young poet avenged the laws, and marked himself out for the scaffold.
"Salut divin triomphe! Entre dans nos murailles!
Rends nous ces soldats, illustrés
Par le sang de Désilles et par les funérailles
De nos citoyens massacrés!"[16]
BOOK XI.
I.
The echo of these triumphs of insubordination and murder was felt every where in the mutinous conduct of the troops, the disobedience of the national guard, and the risings of the populace; whilst at Paris they fêted the Swiss of Châteauvieux, the mob of Marseilles demanded with much violence that the Swiss regiment of Ernst should be expelled from the garrison at Aix, under pretext that they favoured the aristocracy, and that the security of Provence was thereby menaced. On the refusal of this regiment to quit the city, the Marseillaise marched upon Aix as the Parisians had marched upon Versailles in the days of October. They by violence compelled the national guard to accompany them, who had been destined to repress them; they surrounded the regiment of Ernst with cannon, made them lay down their arms, and shamefully drove them before sedition. The national guard, a force essentially revolutionary, because it participates, like the people, in the opinions, feelings, and passions, which, as a civic guard, it ought to repress, followed in every direction, from weakness or example, the fickle impressions of the mob. How could men, just leaving clubs, where they had been listening to, applauding, and frequently exciting sedition in patriotic discourses,—how could they, changing their feelings and part at the door of popular societies, take arms against the seditious? Thus they remained spectators, when they were not accomplices, of insurrections. The scarcity of colonial produce, the dearness of grain, the rigour of a hard winter, all contributed to disturb the people: the agitators turned all these misfortunes of the times into accusations and grounds of hatred against royalty.
II.
The government, powerless and disarmed, was rendered responsible for the severities of nature. Secret emissaries, armed bands, went amongst the towns and cities where markets were held, and there disseminated the most alarming reports, provoking the people to tax grain and flour, stigmatising the corn-dealers as monopolists—the perfidious charge of monopoly being a sure sentence of death. The fear of being accused of starving the people checked every speculation of business, and tended much more than actual want to the dearth of the markets. Nothing is so scarce as a commodity which is concealed. The corn-stores were crimes in the eyes of consumers of bread. The Maire of Etampes, Simoneau, an honest man, and an intrepid magistrate, was one victim sacrificed to the people's suspicions. Etampes was one of the great markets that supplied Paris. It was therefore necessary for it to preserve the liberty of commerce and the supply of flour. A mob, composed of men and women of the adjacent villages, assembling at the sound of the tocsin, marched upon the city one market-day, preceded by drums, armed with guns and pitchforks, in order to carry off the grain by force from the proprietors, divide it amongst themselves, and to exterminate, as they declared, the monopolists, amongst whom sinister voices mingled in low tones the name of Simoneau. The national guard disappeared, a detachment of one hundred men of the eighteenth regiment of cavalry were at Etampes, and the sole force at the Maire's disposal.
The officer answered for these soldiers as for himself. After long conversations with the seditious, to bring them back to reason and the law, Simoneau returned to the maison commune, ordered the red flag to be unfurled, proclaimed martial law, and then advanced upon the rebels, surrounded by the municipal body, and in the centre of the armed force; on reaching the square of the town, the crowd surrounded and cut off the detachment. The troopers left the Maire exposed—not one drew his sword in his defence. In vain did he summon them, in the name of the law, and by the weapons they wore, to render aid to the magistrate against assassins—in vain did he seize the bridle of one of the horsemen near him, crying, "Help, my friends."
Struck by blows of pitchforks and guns, at the moment when he appealed to the soldiery, he fell, shot, grasping in his hands the bridle of the cowardly trooper whom he was entreating: the fellow, in order to disengage himself, struck with the back of his sabre the arm of the Maire already dead, and left his body to the insults of the people. The miscreants, remaining in possession of the carcase, brutally mangled the palpitating limbs, and deliberated together as to cutting off the head. The leaders made their followers defile passing over the body of the Maire, and trampling in his blood. Then they went away beating their drums, and went to get drunk in the suburbs; and the taking away the grain, the apparent motive of the riot, was neglected in the moment of triumph. There was no pillage—either the blood made the people forget their hunger, or their hunger was but the pretext for assassination.
III.
At the moment when all was thus crumbling to pieces round the throne, a man, celebrated by the vast part attributed to him in the common ruin, sought to reconcile himself with the king: this was Louis-Philippe Joseph, Duc d'Orléans, first prince of the blood. I pause for this man, before whom history has hitherto paused, without being able to discover the real place which should be assigned to him amongst the passing events. An enigma to himself, he remains an enigma for posterity. Was the real solution of this enigma ambition or patriotism, weakness or conspiracy? Let facts reply.
Public opinion has its prejudices. Struck by the immensity of the work it accomplishes; giddy, as it were, by the rapidity of the movement which urges things on, it cannot believe that a series of natural causes, combined by Providence with the rise of certain ideas in the human mind, and aided by the coincidence of the times, can of itself produce such vast commotions. It seeks, then, the supernatural—the wonderful—fatality. It takes pleasure in imagining latent causes acting with mystery, and compelling with hidden hand men and events. It takes, in a word, every revolution for a conspiracy; and if it meets at starting, in the middle, or at the end of such crises some leading man, to whose interest these events may tend, it supposes itself the author, attributes to itself all the action of these revolutions, and all the scope of idea that accomplishes them; and, fortunate or unfortunate, innocent or guilty, claims for itself all the glory or demerit of the result. It renders its name divine, or its memory accursed. Such, for fifty years, was the destiny of the Duc d'Orleans.
IV.
It is a historic tradition amongst people from the highest antiquity, that the throne wears out royal races, and that whilst the reigning branches grow enervated by the possession of empire, younger branches become stronger and greater, by nourishing the ambition of becoming more powerful, and inspiring more closely to the people an air less corrupt than that which pervades courts. Thus, whilst primogeniture gives power to the elder, the people confer popularity on the juniors.
This singularity of a handsomer and more popular family than the reigning family, increasing near the throne, and having a dangerous rivalry with the throne in the mind of the nation, had always existed in the house of Orleans, since the time of Louis XIV. If this equivocal situation gave to the princes of this family some virtues, it gave them also corresponding vices. More intelligent and more ambitious than the king's sons, they were also more restless. The very restraint in which the policy of the reigning house kept them, condemned their idea or their courage to inaction, and forced them to misapply, in irregularities or indolence, the faculties with which nature had endowed them, and the immense fortune for which they had no other occupation: too great for citizens, too dangerous at the head of armies or in affairs, they had no place either amongst the people or at court; and thus they assumed it in opinion.
The Regent, a very superior man, long kept down by the inferiority of his part, had been the most brilliant example of all the virtues and all the vices of the blood of Orleans. Since the Regent, the princes endowed, like himself, with natural wit and courage, had felt the glory of great actions in their early youth. They had then again fallen back into obscurity, pleasures or devotion, by the jealousy of the reigning house. At the first show of brilliancy attached to their name, it had been darkened. Guilty by their very merit, their name urged them on to glory; and as soon as they proved themselves deserving, it was forbidden to them. These princes were destined to transmit with their family honours that impatience of a change of government which allows them to be men.
Louis-Philippe Joseph, Duc d'Orleans, was born at the precise epoch, when his rank, fortune, and character were to throw him into a current of new ideas, which his family passions called on him to favour, and into which, once drawn, it would be impossible for him to pause except at the throne or the scaffold. He was twenty when the first symptoms of the Revolution manifested themselves.
He was handsome, like all his race. Slender figure, firm step, smiling countenance, piercing glance, limbs made supple by all bodily exercises, with a heart disposed to love, and a splendid horseman, that great accomplishment of princes; a condescension void of familiarity, a ready eloquence, unquestionable courage, liberal to the arts, even to extravagance; those faults which are only due to the luxuries of the age, all marked him out as a popular favourite. He took every advantage of it; and, perhaps, his early intoxication with it somewhat affected his natural good sense. The love of the people appeared to him a means of avenging himself for the contempt in which the court neglected him. In his mind he braved the king of Versailles, feeling himself king of Paris.
He had married a princess of a race as beloved by the people; the only daughter of the Duc de Penthièvre. Lovely, amiable, and virtuous, she brought to her husband as dowry, with the vast fortune of the Duc de Penthièvre, that amount of consideration and public esteem which belonged to her house. The first political act of the Duc d'Orleans was a bold resistance to the wishes of the court, at the period of the exile of the parliaments. Exiled himself in his chateau of Villars-Cotterêts, the esteem and interest of the people followed him. The applauses of France sweetened the disgrace of the court. He believed that he comprehended the part of a great citizen in a free country; he desired to do so. He forgot too easily, in the atmosphere of adulation which surrounded him, that a man is not a great citizen only to please the people, but to defend—serve—and frequently to resist them.
Returned to Paris, he was desirous of joining the prestige of glory of arms to the civic crowns, with which his name was already decorated. He solicited of the court the dignity of grand-admiral of France, the survivorship of which belonged to him, after the Duc de Penthièvre, his father-in-law. He was refused. He embarked as a volunteer on board the fleet, commanded by the Comte d'Orvilliers, and was at the battle of Ouessant on the 17th of July, 1778. The results of this fight, when victory remained without conquest, in consequence of a false manœuvre, were imputed to the weakness of Duc d'Orleans, who wished to check the pursuit of the enemy. This dishonouring report, invented and disseminated by court hatred, soured the resentments of the young prince, but could not hide the brilliancy of his courage, which he displayed in caprices unworthy of his rank. At St. Cloud he sprang into the first balloon that carried aerial navigators into space. Calumny followed him even there, and a report was spread that he had burst the balloon with a thrust of his sword, in order to compel his companions to descend. Then arose between the court and himself a continual struggle of boldness on the one hand and slander on the other. The king treated him, however, with the indulgence which virtue testifies for youth's follies. The Comte d'Artois took him as the constant companion of his pleasures. The queen, who liked the Comte d'Artois, feared for him the contagion of the disorders and amours of the Duc d'Orleans. She hated equally in this young prince the favourite of the people of Paris and the corrupter of the Comte d'Artois. She made the king purchase the almost royal palace of St. Cloud, the favourite seat of the Duc d'Orleans. Infamous insinuations against him were incessantly transpiring from the half confidences of courtiers. He was accused of having induced courtezans to poison the blood of the Prince de Lamballe, his brother-in-law, and of having enervated him in debauches, in order that he might be the sole heir of the immense property of the house of Penthièvre. This crime was the pure invention of malice.
Thus persecuted by the animosity of the court, the Duc d'Orleans was more and more driven to retirement. In his frequent visits to England he formed a close intimacy with the Prince of Wales, heir to the throne, who took for his friends all the enemies of his father; playing with sedition, dishonoured by debts, of scandalous life, prolonging beyond the usual term those excesses of princes—horses, pleasure of the table, gaming, women; abetting the intrigues of Fox, Sheridan and Burke, and prefacing his advent to royal power by all the audacity of a refractory son and a factious citizen.
The Duc d'Orleans thus tasted of the joys of liberty in a London life. He brought back to France habits of insolence against the court, a taste for popular disturbances, contempt for his own rank, familiarity with the multitude, a citizen's life in a palace, and that simple style of dress, which by abandoning the uniform of the French nobility, and blending attire generally, soon destroyed all inequalities of costume amongst citizens.
Then given up entirely to the exclusive care of repairing his impaired fortune, the Duc d'Orleans constructed the Palais Royal. He changed the noble and spacious gardens of his palace into a market of luxury, devoted by day to traffic, and by night to play and debauchery—a complete sink of iniquities, built in the heart of the capital—a work of cupidity which antique manners never could forgive this prince; and which, being gradually adopted like the forum by the indolence of the Parisian population, was destined to become the cradle of the Revolution. This Revolution was striding onwards. The prince awaited it in supineness, as if liberty of the world had been but one more mistress.
His well-known hatred against the court had naturally drawn into his acquaintance all who desired a change. The Palais Royal was the elegant centre of a conspiracy with open doors, for the reform of government: the philosophy of the age there encountered politics and literature: it was the palace of opinion. Buffon came there constantly to pass the latter evenings of his life. Rousseau there received at a distance the only worship which his proud sensitiveness would accept even from princes. Franklin and the American republicans; Gibbon and the orators of the English opposition, Grimm and the German philosophers, Diderot, Siéyès, Sillery, Laclos, Suard, Florian, Raynal, La Harpe, and all the thinkers or writers who anticipated the new mind, met there with celebrated artists and savans. Voltaire himself, proscribed from Versailles by the human respect of a court, which admired his genius, had arrived thither on his last journey. The prince presented to him his children, one of whom reigns to-day over France. The dying philosopher blessed them, as he did those of Franklin, in the name of reason and liberty.
V.
If the prince himself had not a love of literature and a highly refined mind, he had sufficiently cultivated his mind to appreciate perfectly the pleasures of the understanding; but the revolutionary feeling instinctively counselled him to surround himself with all the strength that might one day serve liberty. Early tired of the beauty and virtue of the Duchesse d'Orleans, he had conceived for a lovely, witty, insinuating woman a sentiment which did not enchain the caprices of his heart, but which controlled his inconsistency and directed his mind. This woman, then seducing and since celebrated, was the Comtess de Sillery-Genlis, daughter of the Marquis Ducret de Saint Aubin, a gentleman of Charolais, without fortune. Her mother, who was still young and handsome, had brought her to Paris, to the house of M. de la Popelinière, a celebrated financier, whose old age she had taken captive. She educated her daughter for that doubtful destiny which awaits women on whom nature has lavished beauty and mind, and to whom society has refused their right position—adventuresses in society, sometimes raised, sometimes degraded.
The first masters formed this child by all the arts of mind and hand—her mother directed her to ambition. The second-rate position of this mother at the house of her opulent protector, formed the child to the plasticity and adulation which her mother's domestic condition required and illustrated. At sixteen years of age her precocious beauty and musical talent caused her to be already sought in the salons. Her mother produced her there in the dubious publicity between the theatre and the world. An artiste for some, she was, with others, a well educated girl; all were attracted by her: old men forgot their age. Buffon called her "ma fille." Her relationship with Madame de Montesson, widow of the Duc d'Orleans, gave her a footing in the house of the young prince. The Comte de Sillery-Genlis fell in love with her, and married her in spite of his family's opposition. Friend and confidant of the Duc d'Orleans, the Comte de Sillery obtained for his wife a place at the court of the Duchesse d'Orleans. Time and her ability did the rest.
The duke attached himself to her with the twofold power of admiration for her beauty and admiration of her superior understanding—the one empire confirmed the other. The complaints of the insulted duchess only made the duke more obstinate in his liking. He was governed, and desirous of having his feelings honoured, he announced it openly, merely seeking to colour it under the pretext of the education of his children. The Comtesse de Genlis followed at the same time the ambition of courts and the reputation of literature. She wrote with elegance those light works which amuse a woman's idle hours, whilst they lead their hearts astray into imaginary amours. Romances, which are to the west what opium is to the Orientals, waking day-dreams, had become necessities and events for the salons. Madame de Genlis wrote in a graceful style, and clothed her characters and ideas with a certain affectation of austerity which gave a becomingness to love: she moreover affected an universal acquaintance with the sciences, which made her sex disappear before the pretensions of her mind, and which recalled in her person those women of Italy who profess philosophy with a veil over their countenances.
The Duc d'Orleans, an innovator in every thing, believed he had found in a woman the Mentor for his sons. He nominated her governor of his children. The duchess, greatly annoyed, protested against this; the court laughed, and the people were amazed. Opinion, which yields to all who brave it, murmured, and then was silent. The future proved that the father was right: the pupils of this lady were not princes but men. She attracted to the Palais Royal all the dictators of public opinion. The first club in France was thus held in the very apartments of a prince of the blood. Literature, concealed from without these meetings as the madness of the first Brutus concealed his vengeance. The duke was not, perhaps, a conspirator, but henceforth there was an Orleans party. Siéyès, the mystic oracle of the Revolution, who seemed to carry it on his pensive front, and brood over it in silence; the Duc de Lauzun, passing from the confidence of Trianon to the consultations of the Palais Royal; Laclos, a young officer of artillery, author of an obscene romance, capable at need of elevating romantic intrigue to a political conspiracy; Sillery, soured against his order, at enmity with the court, an ambitious malcontent, awaiting nothing but what the future might bring forth; and others more obscure, but not less active, and serving as unknown guides for descending from the salons of a prince into the depths of the people: some the head, others the arms, of the duke's ambition, attended these meetings. Perhaps they might be ignorant of the aim, but they placed themselves on the declivity, and allowed Fortune to do as she pleased. Fortune was a revolution. The wonderful, that marvel of the masses, which is to the imagination what calculation is to reason, was not wanting to the Orleans party. Prophecies, those popular presentiments of destiny, domestic prodigies, admitted by the interested credulity of numerous clients of this house, announced the throne shortly to one of these princes. These rumours were rife amongst the people, from themselves, or the skilful insinuations of the partisans of the house of Orleans. In the convocation of States-General, the duke had not hesitated to pronounce in favour of the most popular reforms. The instructions which he had drawn up for the electors of his dominions were the work of the abbé Siéyès. The prince himself intrigued for the name and style of Citoyen. Elected deputy of the noblesse of Paris at Crespy and at Villars-Cotterêts, he selected Crespy, because the electors of this bailiwick were the more patriotic. At the procession of the States-General he left his own place vacant amongst the princes, and walked in the midst of the deputies. This abdication of his dignity near the throne to assume the dignity of a citizen, procured him the applauses of the nation.
VI.
Public favour towards him was such that had he been a Duc de Guise, and Louis XVI. a Henry III., the States-General would have finished, as did those of Blois, by an assassination or usurpation. Uniting with the tiers état, to obtain equality and the friendship of the nation against the nobility, he took the oath of the Tennis Court. He took his place behind Mirabeau, to disobey the king. Nominated president by the National Assembly, he refused this honour in order to remain a citizen. The day on which the dismissal of Necker betrayed the hostile projects of the court, and when the people of Paris named its leaders and defenders by acclamation, the name of the Duc d'Orleans was the first uttered. France took in the gardens of the palace the colours of his livery for a cockade. At the voice of Camille Desmoulins, who uttered the cry of alarm in the Palais Royal, the populace gathered, Legendre and Fréron led them; they placed the bust of the Duc d'Orleans beside that of Necker, covered them with black crape, and promenaded them, bareheaded themselves, in the presence of the silent citizens. Blood flowed; the dead body of one of the citizens who carried the busts, killed by the mob, serving as a standard to the people. The Duc d'Orleans was thus mixed up from his palace—his name and his image—with the first struggle and first murder of liberty. This was enough to make it believed that his hand moved all the threads of events. Whether from lack of boldness or ambition, he never assumed the appearance of the part which public opinion assigned to him. He did not then appear to push things beyond the conquest of a constitution for his country, and the character of a great patriot for himself. He respected or despised the throne. One or other of these feelings gave him importance in the eyes of history. All the world was of his party except himself.
Impartial men did honour to his moderation, the revolutionists imputed shame to his character. Mirabeau, who was seeking a pretender to personify the revolt, had had secret interviews with the Duc d'Orleans; had tested his ambition, to judge if it aspired to the throne. He had left him dissatisfied; he had even betrayed his dissatisfaction by angry phrases. Mirabeau required a conspirator; he had only found a patriot. What he despised in the Duc d'Orleans was not the meditation of a crime, but the refusal to be his accomplice. He had not anticipated such scruples; he revenged himself by terming this carelessness about the throne the cowardice of an ambitious man.
La Fayette instinctively hated in the Duc d'Orleans an influential rival. He accused the prince of fomenting troubles which he felt himself powerless to repress. It was asserted that the Duc d'Orleans and Mirabeau had been seen mingled with groups of men and women, and pointing to the château. Mirabeau defended himself by a smile of contempt. The Duc d'Orleans proved his innocence in a more serious manner. An assassination which should kill the king or queen would still leave the monarchy, the laws of the kingdom, and the princes inheritors of the throne. He could not mount to it except over the dead bodies of five persons placed by nature between himself and his ambition. These steps of crime could only have incurred the execrations of the nation, and must have even wearied the assassins themselves. Besides, he proved by numerous and undeniable witnesses that he had not gone to Versailles either on the 4th or 5th of October. Quitting Versailles on the 3rd, after the sitting of the National Assembly, he had returned to Paris. He had passed the day of the 4th in his palace and gardens at Mousseaux. On the 5th, he again was at Mousseaux; his cabriolet having broken down on the boulevard, he had gone on foot by the Champs Elysées. He had passed the day at Passy with his children and Madame de Genlis. He had supped at Mousseaux with some intimate friends, and slept again in Paris. It was not until the 6th, in the morning, that, informed of the events of the previous evening, he had gone to Versailles, and that his carriage had been stopped at the bridge of Sèvres, by the mob carrying the bleeding heads of the king's guard.[17] If this was not the conduct of a prince of the blood, who flies to the succour of his king and places himself at the foot of the throne, between the threatened sovereign and the people, neither was it that of an audacious usurper who tempts revolt by occasion, and at least presents to the people a completed crime.
The conduct of this prince was but that of one who looks to a contingent reversion: either that he would not receive the crown except by a fatality of events, and without thrusting forth his hand to fortune, or that he had more indifference than ambition for supreme power, or that he would not place his royalty as a check upon the way of liberty; that he sincerely desired a republic, and that the title of first citizen of a free nation appeared to him greater than that of king.
VII.
However, a short time after the days of the 5th and 6th October, La Fayette desired to break off the intimacy between the Duc d'Orleans and Mirabeau. He resolved at all risks to compel the prince to remove from the scene, and by an exercise of moral restraint or the fear of a state prosecution, to absent himself and go to London. He made the king and queen enter into his plans, by alarming them as to the prince's intrigues, and designating him as a competitor for the throne. La Fayette said one day to the queen, that this prince was the only man upon whom the suspicion of so lofty an ambition could fall. "Sir," replied the queen, with a look of incredulity, "is it necessary then to be a prince in order to pretend to the throne?" "At least, madam," replied the general, "I only know the Duc d'Orleans who aspires to it." La Fayette presumed too much on the prince's ambition.
VIII.
Mirabeau, discouraged at the hesitations and scruples of the Duc d'Orleans, and finding him above or below crime, cast him off like a despised accomplice of ambition, and tried to ally himself with La Fayette, who, possessed of the armed force, and who saw in Mirabeau the whole of the moral force, smiled at the idea of a duumvirate, which could assume to themselves empire. There were secret interviews at Paris and at Passy between these two rivals. La Fayette rejecting every idea of an usurpation profitable to the prince, declared to Mirabeau that he must renounce every conceived plot against the queen if he would come to an understanding with him. "Well, general," replied Mirabeau, "since you will have it so, let her live! A humbled queen may be fit for something, but a queen with her throat cut is only good as the subject of a bad tragedy!" This atrocious remark, which treated the bloodshed of a woman as a jest, was subsequently known by the queen, who however forgave Mirabeau, and did not allow it to interfere with her liaisons with the great orator. But the cold-blooded infamy must have found its way to her heart as an ominous warning of what she might fear hereafter.
La Fayette, sure of the consent of the king and queen, supported by the feelings of the national guard, who were growing weary of factions and the factious, ventured to assume quietly towards the prince the tone of a dictator, and to pronounce against him an arbitrary exile under the appearance of a mission freely accepted. He sent to request of the Duc d'Orleans a meeting at the Marquise de Coigny's, a noble intelligent lady attached to La Fayette, and in whose salon the Duc d'Orleans occasionally met him. After a conversation, heard by the walls alone, but the result of which showed its tenor, and which Mirabeau, to whom it was communicated, termed very imperious on the one side, and very resigned on the other, it was agreed that the Duc d'Orleans should forthwith set out for London. The friends of the prince induced him to change his resolution that same night, and he sent La Fayette a note to this effect. La Fayette requested another interview, in which he called upon him to keep his word, enjoined him to depart in twenty-four hours, and then conducted him to the king. There the prince accepted the feigned mission, and promised to leave nothing neglected to expose in England the plots of the conspirators of the kingdom. "You are more interested than any one," said La Fayette in the king's presence, "for no one is more compromised than yourself." Mirabeau, cognisant of this oppression of La Fayette and the court over the mind of the Duc d'Orleans, offered his services to the duke, and tempted him with the last offers of supreme power. The subject of his address to the Assembly was already prepared: he intended to denounce, as a conspiracy of despotism, this coup d'état against one citizen, in which the liberty of all citizens was attempted. "This violation of the inviolability of the representatives of the nation in the palpable exile of a prince of the blood; he was to point out La Fayette, making use of the royal hand to strike the rivals of his popularity, and to cover his own insolent dictatorship under the venerated sanction of the chief of the nation and the head of the family." Mirabeau had no doubt of the resentment of the Assembly against so odious an attempt, and promised the friends of the Duc d'Orleans one of those returns of opinion which raise a man to a higher elevation than that from which he has fallen. This language, backed by the entreaties of Laclos, Sillery, Lauzun, a second time shook the prince's resolution. He saw now disgrace in this voluntary exile, where at first he had only seen magnanimity. At the break of day he wrote that he declined the mission. La Fayette then sent for him to the minister for foreign affairs. There the prince, again overcome, wrote to the Assembly a letter, which destroyed beforehand all the denunciation of Mirabeau. "My enemies pretend," said the duke to La Fayette, "that you boast of having against me proofs of my share in the attempts of the 5th of October." "They are rather my enemies who say so," replied La Fayette: "if I had proofs against you I should already have arrested you. I have none, but I am seeking for them." The Duc d'Orleans went. Nine months had passed away since his return. The Constituent Assembly had left, without any other defence than anarchy, the constitution it had so lately voted. Disorder prevailed throughout the kingdom: the first acts of the Legislative Assembly announced the hesitation of a people which halts on a declivity, but is doomed to descend to the very bottom.
IX.
The Girondists, at the first step going a-head of the Barnaves and Lameths, showed a disposition to push France, all unprepared, into a republic. The Duc d'Orleans, whose long residence in England had allowed him to reflect at a distance from the attractions of events and factions, felt his Bourbon blood rise within him. He did not cease to be a patriot, but he understood that the safety of the country on the brink of a war was not in the destruction of the executive power. Unquestionably pity for the king and queen awakened in a heart in which hatred had not stifled every generous feeling. He felt himself too much avenged by the days of 5th and 6th October, by the humiliation of the king before the Assembly, by the daily insults of the populace under the windows of Marie Antoinette, and by the fearful nights of this family, whose palace was but a prison; and perhaps also he feared for himself the ingratitude of revolutions.
He had gone to England on compulsion, and had remained there under the idea, which was perfectly just, that his name might be used as a pretext for agitation in Paris. Laclos had gone to him in London from time to time to try again to tempt the exile's ambition, and make him ashamed of a deference for La Fayette, which France took to be cowardice. The prince's pride was roused at this, and he threatened to return; but the representations of M. de la Luzerne, minister of France in England, those of M. de Boinville, one of La Fayette's aides-de-camp, and his own reflections, had prevailed over the incitements of Laclos. Proof of this is found in a note of M. de la Luzerne's, found in an iron chest amongst the king's secret papers. "I attest," says M. de la Luzerne, "that I have presented to M. the Duc d'Orleans, M. de Boinville, aide-de-camp of M. de La Fayette, that M. de Boinville declared to the Duc d'Orleans that they were very uneasy as to the troubles which might at this moment be excited in Paris by malcontents, who would not scruple to make use of his name to disturb the capital, and perhaps the kingdom; and he was urged on these grounds to protract the time of his departure. The Duc d'Orleans, unwilling in any way to afford plea or pretext for any disturbance of public tranquillity, consented to delay his return."
X.
He at last left England, and on his return made several fruitless attempts to be again employed in the navy. Whilst his mind was thus wavering, he received the intelligence, through M. Bertrand de Molleville, that the king had nominated him to the rank of admiral. The Duc d'Orleans went to thank the minister, and added that, "He was rejoiced at the honour the king conferred on him, as it would give him an opportunity of communicating to the king his real sentiments, which had been odiously calumniated. I am very unfortunate," continued he; "my name has been involved in all the crimes imputed to me, and I have been deemed guilty, because I disdained to justify myself; but time will show whether my conduct belies my words."
The air of frankness and good faith, and the significant tone with which the Duc d'Orleans uttered these words, struck the minister, who until then had been greatly prejudiced against his innocence. He inquired if his royal highness would consent to repeat these expressions to the king, as they would rejoice his majesty, and he feared that they might lose some of their force if repeated by himself. The duke eagerly embraced the idea of seeing the king, if the king would receive him, and expressed his intention of presenting himself at the chateau the next day. The king, informed of this by his minister, awaited the prince, and had a long and private conference with him.
A confidential document, written with the prince's own hand, and drawn up in order to justify his memory in the eyes of his children and his friends, informs us of what passed at this interview. "The ultra-democrats," said the Duc d'Orleans, "deemed that I wished to make France a republic; the ambitious, that I wished, by my popularity, to force the king to resign the administration of the kingdom into my hands; lastly, the virtuous and patriotic had the illusion of their own virtue concerning me, for they deemed that I sacrificed myself entirely to the public good. The one party deemed me worse than I was; the others, better. I have merely followed my nature, and that impelled me, above all, to liberty. I fancied I saw her image in the parliaments, which at least possessed her tone and forms, and I embraced this phantom of representative freedom. Thrice did I sacrifice myself for those parliaments; twice from a conviction on my part; the third, not to belie what I had previously done. I had been in England; I had there seen true liberty, and I doubted not that the States-General, and France also, wished to obtain freedom. Scarcely had I foreseen that France would possess citizens, than I wished to be one of these citizens myself, and I made unhesitatingly the sacrifice of all the rank and privileges that separated me from the nation: they cost me nothing; I aspired to be a deputy—I was one. I sided with the tiers état, not from factious feeling, but from justice. In my opinion, it was impossible to prevent the completion of the Revolution, although some persons around the king thought otherwise. The troops were assembled, and surrounded the National Assembly. Paris imagined it was threatened, and rose en masse; the Gardes Françaises, who lived amongst the people, followed the stream, and the report was circulated that I had bribed this regiment with my gold. I will frankly declare my opinion: if the Gardes Françaises had acted differently, I should in that case have deemed they had been bought over; for their hostility against the people of Paris would have been unnatural. My bust was earned with that of M. Necker on the 14th of July. Why? because this minister, on whom every public hope reposed, was the idol of the nation, and because my name was amongst the list of those deputies of the Assembly, who, it was said, were to have been arrested by the troops summoned to Versailles. Amidst all these events, so favourable to a factious man, what was my behaviour? I withdrew from the eyes of the people: I did not flatter their excesses, but retired to my house at Mousseaux, where I passed the night; and the next morning I went, unattended, to the National Assembly at Versailles. At the fortunate moment when the king resolved to cast himself into the arms of the Assembly, I refused to form one of the deputation of members despatched to Paris to announce these tidings to the capital, for I feared lest some of the homages which the city owed to the king alone might be paid to me. And such was again my conduct on the days of October; I again absented myself, not to add fresh fuel to the excitement of the people; and I only reappeared when calm again prevailed. I was met at Sèvres by the bands of straggling assassins, who bore back the bleeding heads of the king's guards: these men stopped my carriage, and fired on the postilion. Thus I, who was the pretended leader of these men, narrowly escaped being their victim, and owed my safety to a body of the national guard, who escorted me to Versailles; and as I went to wait on the king I repressed the last murmurs of the people in the Cour des Ministres I signed the decree which declared the Assembly inseparable from the person of the king. It was at this time that M. de La Fayette called on me, and informed me of the king's desire that I should quit Paris, in order to afford no pretext for popular tumult. Convinced now, that the Revolution was accomplished, and only fearing the troubles with which attempts might be made to fetter its onward progress, I unhesitatingly obeyed, only demanding the consent of the National Assembly to my departure; this they granted, and I left Paris. The inhabitants of Boulogne, who had been worked upon by an intrigue which may be laid to my charge, but to which I was a stranger, since I would not yield to it, wished forcibly to detain me, and opposed my embarkation. I confess I was much touched, but I did not yield to this violent manifestation of public favour, and I myself persuaded them to return to their allegiance. Advantage has been taken of this voyage and my absence to impute to me, without refutation on my part, the most odious crimes. It was I who wished to force the king to fly with the Dauphin from Versailles,—but Versailles is not France; the king would have found his army and the nation when once he left this town, and the only result of my ambition would be civil war, and, a military dictatorship given to the king. But the Count de Provence was alive; he was the natural heir to the throne thus abandoned. He was popular; he had, like myself, joined the commons,—thus I should only have laboured for him. But the Count d'Artois was in safety in another country, his children were secure from my pretended murders, they were nearer the throne than myself. What a series of follies, absurdities, or useless crimes! The French nation, amidst the Revolution, have neither changed their character nor their sentiments. I fully believe that the Count d'Artois, whom I have myself loved, will prove this. I believe that by drawing nearer to a monarch whom he loves, and by whom he is loved, and to a people to whose love his brilliant qualities give him so great a right, he will, when these troubles have ceased, enjoy this portion of his inheritance, the love which the most sensible and affectionate of nations has vowed to the descendants of Henri IV."