X.
This young prince had been educated in complete solitude at the court of Louis XV. The atmosphere which had infected the age had not touched his heir. Whilst Louis XV. had changed his court into a place of ill-fame, his grandson, educated in a corner of the palace of Meudon by pious and enlightened masters, grew up in respect for his rank, in awe of the throne, and in a real love for the people whom he was one day to be called upon to govern. The soul of Fénélon seemed to have traversed two generations of kings in the palace where he had brought up the Duke of Burgundy, in order to inspire the education of his descendant. What was nearest the crowned vice upon the throne was perhaps the most pure of any thing in France. If the age had not been as dissolute as the king, it would have directed his love in that direction. He had reached that point of corruption in which purity appears ridiculous, and modesty was treated with contempt.
Married at twenty years of age to a daughter of Maria Theresa of Austria, the young prince had continued until his accession to the throne in his life of domestic retirement, study, and isolation. Europe was slumbering in a disgraceful peace. War, that exercise of princes, could not thus form him by contact with men and the custom of command. Fields of battle, which are the theatre of great actors of his stamp, had not brought him under the observation of his people. No prestige, except the circumstance of birth, clung to him. His sole popularity was derived from the disgust inspired by his grandfather. He occasionally had the esteem of his people, but never their favour. Upright and well-informed, he called to him sterling honesty and clear intelligence in the person of Turgot. But with the philosophic sentiment of the necessity of reforms, the prince had not the feeling of a reformer; he had neither the genius nor the boldness; nor had his ministers more than himself. They raised all questions without settling any, accumulated storms, without giving them any impulse, and the tempests were doomed to be eventually directed against themselves. From M. de Maurepas to M. Turgot, from M. Turgot to M. de Calonne, from M. de Calonne to M. Necker, from M. Necker to M. de Malesherbes, he floated from an honest man to an intriguant, from a philosopher to a banker, whilst the spirit of system and charlatanism ill supplied the spirit of government. God, who had given many men of notoriety during this reign, had refused it a statesman; all was promise and deception. The court clamoured, impatience seized on the nation, and violent convulsions followed. The Assembly of Notables, States General, National Assembly, had all burst in the hands of royalty; a revolution emanated from his good intentions more fierce and more irritable than if it had been the consequence of his vices. At the time when the king had this revolution before him in the National Assembly, he had not in his councils one man, not only capable of resisting but even of comprehending it. Men really strong prefer in such moments to be rather the popular ministers of the nation than the bucklers of the king.
XI.
M. de Montmorin was devoted to the king, but had no credit with the nation. The ministry had neither the initiative nor opposition; the initiative was in the hands of the Jacobins, and the executive power with the mob. The king, without an organ, without privilege, without force, had merely the odious responsibility of anarchy. He was the butt against which all parties directed the hate or rage of the people. He had the privilege of every accusation; whilst from the tribune Mirabeau, Barnave, Pétion, Lameth, and Robespierre, eloquently threatened the throne; infamous pamphlets, factious journals painted the king in the colours of a tyrant who was brutalised by wine, who lent himself to every caprice of an abandoned woman, and who conspired in the recesses of his palace with the enemies of the nation. In the sinister feeling of his coming fall, the stoical virtue of this prince sufficed for the calming of his conscience, but was not adequate to his resolutions. On leaving the council of his ministers, where he loyally accomplished the constitutional conditions of his character, he sought, sometimes in the friendship of his devoted servants, sometimes from the very persons of his enemies, admitted by stealth to his confidence, the most important inspirations. Counsels succeeded to counsels, and contradicted one another in the royal ear, as their results contradicted each other in their operations. His enemies suggested concessions, promising him a popularity, which escaped their hands just as they were about to ensure it to him. The court counselled the resistance which it had only in its dreams; the queen the courage she felt in her soul; intriguants, corruption, the timid, flight; and in turns, and almost at the same time, he tried all these expedients: not one was efficacious; the time for useful resolutions had passed,—the crisis was without remedy. It was necessary to choose between life and the throne. In endeavouring to preserve the two, it was written that he should lose both.
When we place ourselves in imagination in the position of Louis XVI., and ask what could have saved him? we reply disheartened—nothing. There are circumstances which enfold all a man's movements in such a snare, that, whatever direction he may take, he falls into the fatality of his faults or his virtues. This was the dilemma of Louis XVI. All the unpopularity of royalty in France, all the faults of preceding administrations, all the vices of kings, all the shame of courts, all the griefs of the people, were as it were accumulated on his head, and marked his innocent brow for the expiation of many ages. Epochs have their sacrifices as well as their religions. When they desire to recast an institution which no longer suits them, they pile upon the individual who personifies this institution all the odium and all the condemnation of the institution itself,—they make of this man a victim whom they sacrifice to the time. Louis XVI. was this innocent sacrifice, overwhelmed with all the iniquities of thrones, and destined to be immolated as a chastisement for royalty. Such was the king.
XII.
The queen seemed to be created by nature to contrast with the king, and to attract for ever the interest and pity of ages to one of those state dramas, which are incomplete unless the miseries and misfortunes of a woman mingle in them. Daughter of Maria Theresa, she had commenced her life in the storms of the Austrian monarchy. She was one of the children whom the Empress held by the hand when she presented herself as a supplicant before her faithful Hungarians, and the troops exclaimed, "We will die for our king, Maria Theresa." Her daughter, too, had the heart of a king. On her arrival in France, her beauty had dazzled the whole kingdom,—a beauty then in all its splendour. The two children whom she had given to the throne, far from impairing her good looks, added to the attractions of her person that character of maternal majesty which so well becomes the mother of a nation. The presentiment of her misfortunes, the recollection of the tragic scenes of Versailles, the uneasiness of each day somewhat diminished her youthful freshness. She was tall, slim, and graceful,—a real daughter of Tyrol. Her naturally majestic carriage in no way impaired the grace of her movements; her neck rising elegantly and distinctly from her shoulders gave expression to every attitude. The woman was perceptible beneath the queen, the tenderness of heart was not lost in the elevation of her destiny. Her light brown hair was long and silky, her forehead, high and rather projecting, was united to her temples by those fine curves which give so much delicacy and expression to that seat of thought or the soul in women; her eyes of that clear blue which recall the skies of the North or the waters of the Danube; an aquiline nose, with nostrils open and slightly projecting, where emotions palpitate and courage is evidenced; a large mouth, brilliant teeth, Austrian lips, that is, projecting and well defined; an oval countenance, animated, varying, impassioned, and the ensemble of these features replete with that expression impossible to describe which emanates from the look, the shades, the reflections of the face, which encompasses it with an iris like that of the warm and tinted vapour which bathes objects in full sunlight—the extreme loveliness which the ideal conveys, and which by giving it life increases its attraction. With all these charms, a soul yearning to attach itself, a heart easily moved, but yet earnest in desire to fix itself; a pensive and intelligent smile, with nothing of vacuity in it, nothing of preference or mere acquaintanceship in it, because it felt itself worthy of friendships. Such was Marie-Antoinette as a woman.
XIII.
It was enough to form the happiness of a man and the ornament of a court: to inspire a wavering monarch, and be the safeguard of a state under trying circumstances, something more is requisite. The genius of government is required, and the queen had it not. Nothing could have prepared her for the regulation of the disordered elements which were about her; misfortune had given her no time for reflection. Hailed with enthusiasm by a perverse court and an ardent nation, she must have believed in the eternity of such sentiments. She was lulled to sleep in the dissipations of the Trianon. She had heard the first threatenings of the tempest without believing in its dangers: she had trusted in the love she inspired, and which she felt in her own heart. The court had become exacting, the nation hostile. The instrument of the intrigues of the court on the heart of the king, she had at first favoured and then opposed all reforms which prevented or delayed the crises that arose. Her policy was but infatuation; her system but the perpetual abandonment of herself to every partisan who promised her the king's safety. The Comte D'Artois, a youthful prince, chivalrous in etiquette, had much influence with her. He relied greatly on the noblesse; made frequent references to his sword. He laughed at the crises: he disdained this war of words, caballed against ministers, and treated passing events with levity. The queen, intoxicated with the adulation of those around her, urged the king to recall the next day what he had conceded on the previous evening. Her hand was felt in all the transactions of the government: her apartments were the focus of a perpetual conspiracy against the government; the nation detected it, and ultimately detested her.
Her name became for the people the phantom of all counter-revolution. We are apt to calumniate what we fear. She was depicted under the features of a Messalina. The most infamous pamphlets were in circulation; the most scandalous anecdotes were credited. She may be accused of tenderness, but never of depravity. Lovely, young, and adored, if her heart did not remain insensible, her innermost feelings, innocent perhaps, never gave just ground for open scandal. History has its modesty, and we will not violate it.
XIV.
On the days of the 5th and 6th of October the queen perceived (too late) the enmity of the people; her heart must have been full of vengeance. Emigration commenced, and she viewed it favourably. All her friends were at Coblentz; she was believed to be in close connection with them, and this belief was true. Stories of an Austrian committee were busily spread amongst the people. The queen was accused of conspiring for the destruction of the nation, who at every moment demanded her head. A people in revolt must have some one to hate, and they handed over to her the queen. Her name was the theme of their songs of rage. One woman was the enemy of a whole nation, and her pride disdained to undeceive them. She inclosed herself in her resentment and her terror. Imprisoned in the palace of the Tuileries, she could not put her head out of window without provoking an outrage and hearing insult. Every noise in the city made her apprehensive of an insurrection. Her days were melancholy, her nights disturbed: she underwent hourly agony for two years, and that anguish was magnified in her heart by her love for her two children, and her disquietude for the king. Her court was forsaken; she saw none but the shadows of authority; the ministers forced on her by M. de La Fayette, before whom she was compelled to mask her countenance in smiles. Her apartments were watched by spies in the guise of servants. It was necessary to mislead them, in order to have interviews with the few friends who remained to her. Private staircases, dark corridors, were the means by which at night her secret counsellors obtained access to her. These meetings resembled conspiracies; she left them every time with a different train of ideas, which she communicated to the king, whose behaviour thus acquired the incoherence of a woman persecuted and distressed. Measures of resistance, bribing the Assembly, an entire surrender of the constitution, attempts by force, an assumption of royal dignity, repentance, weakness, terror, and flight,—all were discussed, planned, decided on, prepared and abandoned, on the same day. Women, so sublime in their devotion, are seldom capable of the continuous firmness of mind—the imperturbability requisite for a political plan. Their politics are in their heart, their passions trench so closely on their reason. Of all the virtues which a throne requires they have but courage; often heroes, they are never statesmen. The queen was another example of this: she did the king incredible mischief. With a mind infinitely superior, with more soul, more character than he, her superiority only served to inspire him with mischievous counsels. She was at once the charm of his misfortunes and the genius of his destruction; she conducted him step by step to the scaffold, but she ascended it with him.
XV.
The right side in the National Assembly consisted of men, the natural opponents of the movement, the nobility and higher clergy. All, however, were not of the same rank nor the same title. Seditions are found amongst the lower rank, revolutions in the higher. Seditions are but the angry workings of the people—revolutions are the ideas of the epoch. Ideas begin in the head of the nation. The French Revolution was a generous thought of the aristocracy. This thought fell into the hands of the people, who framed of it a weapon against the noblesse, the throne, and religion. The philosophy of the saloons became revolt in the streets: nevertheless all the great houses of the kingdom had given apostles to the first dogmata of the Revolution: the States General, the ancient theatre of the importance and triumphs of the higher nobility, had tempted the ambition of their heirs, and they had marched in the van of the reformers. Esprit de corps could not restrain them when the question of uniting with the Tiers Etat had been invoked. The Montmorencies, Noailles, La Rochefoucaulds, Clermont Tonnerres, Lally Tollendals, Virieux, d'Aiguillons, Lauzans, Montesquieus, Lameths, Mirabeaus, the Duc d'Orleans, first prince of the blood, the Count de Provence, brother of the king, king himself afterwards as Louis XVIII., had given an impulse to the boldest innovations. They had each borrowed their momentary popularity from principles easier to enunciate than restrain, and that popularity had nearly forsaken them all. So soon as these theorists of speculative revolution saw that they were carried away in the torrent, they attempted to ascend the stream from whose source they had started; some again surrounded the throne, others had emigrated after the days of the 5th and 6th of October. Others, more firm, remained in their places in the National Assembly; they fought without a hope, but still defended a fallen cause, gloriously resolute to maintain at least a monarchical power, and abandoning to the people, without a struggle, the spoils of the nobility and the church. Amongst these are Cazalès, the Abbé Maury, Malouet, and Clermont Tonnerre: they were the distinguished orators of this expiring party.
Clermont Tonnerre and Malouet were rather statesmen than orators; their cautious and reflective language weighed only on the reason; they sought for the mean between liberty and monarchy, and believed they had found it in the system of the Two Houses of English Legislature. The modérés of the two parties listened to them respectfully; like all half parties and half talents, they excited neither hatred nor anger; but events did not listen to them, but thrusting them aside, advanced towards results that were utterly absolute. Maury and Cazalès, less philosophic, were the two champions of the right side; different in character, their oratorical powers were much on a par. Maury represented the clergy, of which body he was a member; Cazalès, the noblesse, to whom he belonged. The one, Maury, early trained to struggles of polemical theology, had sharpened and polished in the pulpit the eloquence he was to bring into the tribune. Sprung from the lowest ranks of the people, he only belonged to the ancien régime by his garb, and defended religion and the monarchy as two texts, imposed upon him as themes for discourses. His conviction was the part he played; any other appointed character would have suited equally well; yet he sustained with unflinching courage and admirable consistency that which had been "set down for him."
Devoted from his youth to serious studies, endowed with abundant flow of words, striking and vivid in his language, his harangues were perfect treatises on the subjects he discussed. The only rival of Mirabeau, he needed but a cause more natural and more sterling to have become his equal: but sophistry could not deck abuses in colours more specious than those with which Maury invested the ancien régime.
Historical erudition and sacred learning supplied him with ample sources of argument. The boldness of his character and language inspired words which even avenge a defeat, and his fine countenance, his sonorous voice, his commanding gesture, the defiance and good temper with which he braved the tribunes, frequently drew down the applauses of his enemies. The people, who recognised his invincible strength, were amused at his impotent opposition. Maury was to them as one of those gladiators whom they like to see fight, although well knowing that they must perish in the strife. One thing was wanting to the Abbé Maury,—weight to his eloquence; neither his birth, his faith, nor his life inspired respect in those who listened. The actor was visible in the man, the advocate in the cause, the orator and his language were not identified. Strip the Abbé Maury of the habit of his order, and he might have changed sides without a struggle, and have taken his seat amongst the innovators. Such orators grace a party, they never save it.
XVI.
Cazalès was one of those men who are themselves ignorant of their own powers until the hour arrives when circumstances call forth their genius, and assign to them a duty. An obscure officer in the ranks of the army, chance, which cast him into the tribune, revealed the orator. He did not inquire which side he should defend; noble, the noblesse; royalist, the king; a subject, the throne. His position made his creed; he bore in the Assembly the character and qualities of his uniform. Language to him was only another sword, and in all the spirit of chivalry, he devoted it to the cause of Monarchy. Indolent and ill-educated, his natural good sense supplied the place of study. His monarchical faith was by no means fanaticism of the past: it admitted the modifications conceded by the king himself, and which were compatible with the inviolability of the throne and the working of the executive power. From Mirabeau to him the difference of the first principle was not wide apart, only one decried it as an aristocrat, and the other as a democrat. The one flung himself headlong into the midst of the people, the other attached himself to the steps of the throne. The characteristic of Cazalès' eloquence was that of a desperate cause. He protested more than he discussed, and opposed to the triumphs of violence on the côté gauche, his ironic defiance, his bursts of bitter indignation, which for the moment acquired admiration, but never led to victory. To him the noblesse owed that it fell with glory; the throne, with majesty: and his eloquence attained something that was heroic.
Behind these two men there was only a party, soured by ill-fortune, discouraged by its isolation from the nation, odious to the people, useless to the throne, feeding on vain illusions, and only preserving of its fallen power the resentment of injuries, and that insolence which was perpetually provoking fresh humiliations. The hopes of this party were entirely sustained by their reliance on the armed intervention of foreign powers. Louis XVI. was in their eyes a prisoner king, whom Europe would come and deliver from his thraldom. With them, patriotism and honour were at Coblentz. Overcome by numbers, without skilful leaders who understood how to gain immortal names by timely retreats; with no strength to contend against the spirit of the age and refusing to move with it, the côté droit could only call for vengeance, its political power was now confined to an imprecation.
The left side lost at one blow its leader and controller; in Mirabeau the national man had ceased to exist, and only the men of party remained, and they were Barnave and the two Lameths. These men humbled, rebuked, before the ascendency of Mirabeau, had attempted, long before his death, to balance the sovereignty of his genius by the exaggeration of their doctrines and harangues. Mirabeau was but the apostle—they would fain have been the faction-leaders of the time. Jealous of his influence, they would have crushed his talents beneath the superiority of their popularity. Mediocrity thinks to equal genius by outraging reason. A diminution of thirty or forty votes had taken place in the left side. This was the work of Barnave and the Lameths. The club of the friends of the constitution become the Jacobin Club, responded to them from without. The popular agitation excited by them was restrained by Mirabeau, who rallied against them the left, the centre, and the intelligent members of the right side. They conspired, they caballed, they fomented divisions in opinion all the more that they had not control in the Assembly.
Mirabeau was dead, and now the field was open to them. The Lameths—courtiers, educated by the kindness of the royal family, overwhelmed by the favours and pensions of the king, had the conspicuous defection of Mirabeau without having the excuse of his wrongs against the monarchy: this defection was one of their titles to popular favour. Clever men, they carried with them into the national cause the conduct of Courts in which they had been brought up: still their love of the Revolution was disinterested and sincere. Their eminent talents did not equal their ambition. Crushed by Mirabeau, they stirred up against him all those whom the shadow of that great man eclipsed in common with themselves. They sought for a rival to oppose to him, and found only men who envied him. Barnave presented himself, and they surrounded him, applauded him, intoxicated him with his self-importance. They persuaded him for a moment that phrases were politics, and that a rhetorician was a statesman.
Mirabeau was great enough not to fear, and just enough not to despise him. Barnave, a young barrister of Dauphiné, had made his début with much effect in the struggles between the parliament and the throne which had agitated his province, and displayed on small theatres the eloquence of men of the bar. Sent at thirty years of age to the States General, with Mounier his patron and master, he had soon quitted Mounier and the monarchical party, and made himself conspicuous amongst the democratic division. A word of sinister import which escaped not from his heart, but from his lips, weighed on his conscience with remorse. "Is then the blood that flows so pure?" he exclaimed at the first murder of the Revolution. This phrase had branded him on the brow with the mark of a ringleader of faction. Barnave was not this, or only as much so as was necessary for the success of his discourses; nothing in him was extreme but the orator: the man was by no means so, neither was he at all cruel. Studious, but without imagination; copious, but without warmth, his intellect was mediocre, his mind honest, his will variable, his heart in the right place. His talent, which they affected to compare with Mirabeau's, was nothing more than a power of skilfully rivetting public attention. His habit of pleading gave him, with its power of extempore speaking, an apparent superiority which vanished before reflection, Mirabeau's enemies had created him a pedestal on their hatred, and magnified his importance to make the comparison closer. When reduced to his actual stature, it was easy to recognise the distance that existed between the man of the nation, and the man of the bar.
Barnave had the misfortune to be the great man of a mediocre party, and the hero of an envious faction: he deserved a better destiny, which he subsequently acquired.
XVII.
Still deeper in the shade, and behind the chief of the National Assembly, a man almost unknown began to move, agitated by uneasy thoughts which seemed to forbid him to be silent and unmoved; he spoke on all occasions, and attacked all speakers indifferently, including Mirabeau himself. Driven from the tribune, he ascended it next day: overwhelmed with sarcasm, coughed down, disowned by all parties, lost amongst the eminent champions who fixed public attention, he was incessantly beaten, but never dispirited. It might have been said, that an inward and prophetic genius revealed to him the vanity of all talent, and the omnipotence of a firm will and unwearied patience, and that an inward voice said to him, "These men who despise thee are thine: all the changes of this Revolution which now will not deign to look upon thee, will eventually terminate in thee, for thou hast placed thyself in the way like the inevitable excess, in which all impulse ends."
This man was Robespierre.
There are abysses that we dare not sound, and characters we desire not to fathom, for fear of finding in them too great darkness, too much horror; but history, which has the unflinching eye of time, must not be chilled by these terrors, she must understand whilst she undertakes to recount. Maximilien Robespierre was born at Arras, of a poor family, honest and respectable; his father, who died in Germany, was of English origin. This may explain the shade of Puritanism in his character. The bishop of Arras had defrayed the cost of his education. Young Maximilien had distinguished himself on leaving college by a studious life, and austere manners. Literature and the bar shared his time. The philosophy of Jean Jacques Rousseau had made a profound impression on his understanding; the philosophy, falling upon an active imagination, had not remained a dead letter; it had become in him a leading principle, a faith, a fanaticism. In the strong mind of a sectarian, all conviction becomes a thing apart. Robespierre was the Luther of politics: and in obscurity he brooded over the confused thoughts of a renovation of the social world, and the religious world, as a dream which unavailingly beset his youth, when the Revolution came to offer him what destiny always offers to those who watch her progress, opportunity. He seized on it. He was named deputy of the third estate in the States General. Alone perhaps among all these men who opened at Versailles the first scene of this vast drama, he foresaw the termination; like the soul, whose seat in the human frame philosophers have not discovered, the thought of an entire people sometimes concentrates itself in the individual, the least known in the great mass. We should not despise any, for the finger of Destiny marks in the soul and not upon the brow. Robespierre had nothing: neither birth, nor genius nor exterior which should point him out to men's notice. There was nothing conspicuous about him; his limited talent had only shone at the bar or in provincial academies; a few verbal harangues filled with a tame and almost rustic philosophy, some bits of cold and affected poetry, had vainly displayed his name in the insignificance of the literary productions of the day: he was more than unknown, he was mediocre and contemned. His features presented nothing which could attract attention, when gazing round in a large assembly: there was no sign in visible characters of this power which was all within; he was the last word of the Revolution, but no one could read him.
Robespierre's figure was small, his limbs feeble and angular, his step irresolute, his attitudes affected, his gestures destitute of harmony or grace; his voice, rather shrill, aimed at oratorical inflexions, but only produced fatigue and monotony; his forehead was good, but small and extremely projecting above the temples, as if the mass and embarrassed movement of his thoughts had enlarged it by their efforts; his eyes, much covered by their lids and very sharp at the extremities, were deeply buried in the cavities of their orbits; they gave out a soft blue hue, but it was vague and unfixed, like a steel reflector on which a light glances; his nose straight and small was very wide at the nostrils, which were high and too expanded; his mouth was large, his lips thin and disagreeably contracted at each corner; his chin small and pointed, his complexion yellow and livid, like that of an invalid or a man worn out by vigils and meditations. The habitual expression of this visage was that of superficial serenity on a serious mind, and a smile wavering betwixt sarcasm and condescension. There was softness, but of a sinister character. The prevailing characteristic of this countenance was the prodigious and continual tension of brow, eyes, mouth, and all the facial muscles; in regarding him it was perceptible that the whole of his features, like the labour of his mind, converged incessantly on a single point with such power that there was no waste of will in his temperament, and he appeared to foresee all he desired to accomplish, as though he had already the reality before his eyes. Such then was the man destined to absorb in himself all those men, and make them his victims after he had used them as his instruments. He was of no party, but of all parties which in their turn served his ideal of the Revolution. In this his power consisted, for parties paused but he never did. He placed this ideal as an end to reach in every revolutionary movement, and advanced towards it with those who sought to attain it; then, this goal reached, he placed it still further off, and again marched forward with other men, continually advancing without ever deviating, ever pausing, ever retreating. The Revolution, decimated in its progress, must one day or other inevitably arrive at a last stage, and he desired it should end in himself. He was the entire incorporation of the Revolution,—principles, thoughts, passions, impulses. Thus incorporating himself wholly with it, he compelled it one day to incorporate itself in him—that day was a distant one.
XVIII.
Robespierre, who had often struggled against Mirabeau with Duport, the Lameths, and Barnave, began to separate himself from them as soon as they appeared to predominate in the Assembly. He formed, with Pétion and some others of small note, a small band of opposition, radically democratic, who encouraged the Jacobins without, and menaced Barnave and the Lameths whenever they ventured to pause. Pétion and Robespierre in the Assembly, Brissot and Danton at the Jacobin Club, formed the nucleus of the new party which was destined to accelerate the movement and speedily to convert it into convulsions and catastrophes.
Pétion was a popular Lafayette: popularity was his aim, and he acquired it earlier than Robespierre. A barrister without talent but upright, he had imbibed no more of philosophy than the Social Contract; young, good looking and a patriot, he was destined to become one of those complaisant idols of whom the people make what they please except a man; his credit in the streets and amongst the Jacobins gave him a certain amount of authority in the Assembly, where he was listened to as the significant echo of the will out of doors. Robespierre affected to respect him.
XIX.
The constitution was completed, the regal power was but a mere name, the king was but the executive of the orders of the national representation, his ministers only responsible hostages in the hands of the Assembly. The vices of this constitution were evident before it was entirely finished. Voted in the rage of parties, it was not a constitution, it was a vengeance of the people against the monarchy, the throne only existing as the substitute of a unique power which was every where instituted, but which no one yet dared to name. The people, parties, trembled lest on removing the throne they should behold an abyss in which the nation would be engulphed: it was thus tacitly agreed to respect its forms, though they daily despoiled and insulted the unfortunate monarch whom they kept chained to it.
Things were at that point where they have no possible termination except in a catastrophe. The army, without discipline, added but another element to the popular ferment: forsaken by its officers, who emigrated in masses, the subalterns seized upon democracy and propagated it in their ranks. Affiliated in every garrison with the Jacobin Club, they received from it their orders, and made of their troops soldiers of anarchy, accomplices of faction. The people to whom they had cast as a prey the feudal rights of the nobility and the tithes of the clergy, feared to have wrested from it what it held with disquietude, and saw in every direction plots which it anticipated by crimes. The sudden burst of liberty, for which it was not prepared, agitated without strengthening it: it evinced all the vices of enfranchised men without having got the virtues of the free man. The whole of France was but one vast sedition: anarchy swayed the state, and in order that it might be, as it were, self-governed, it had created its government in as many clubs as there were large municipalities in the kingdom. The dominant club was that of the Jacobins: this club was the centralisation of anarchy. So soon as a powerful and high passioned will moves a nation, their common impulse brings men together; individuality ceases, and the legal or illegal association organises the public prejudice. Popular societies thus have birth. At the first menaces of the court against the States General, certain Breton deputies had a meeting at Versailles, and formed a society to detect the plots of the court and assure the triumphs of liberty: its founders were Siéyès, Chapelier, Barnave, and Lameth. After the 5th and 6th of October, the Breton Club, transported to Paris in the train of the National Assembly, had there assumed the more forcible name of "Society of the Friends of the Constitution." It held its sittings in the old convent of the Jacobins Saint Honoré, not far from the Manège, where the National Assembly sat. The deputies, who had founded it at the beginning for themselves, now opened their doors to journalists, revolutionary writers, and finally to all citizens. The presentation by two of its members, and an open scrutiny as to the moral character of the person proposed, were the sole conditions of admission: the public was admitted to the sittings by inspectors, who examined the admission card. A set of rules, an office, a president, a corresponding committee, secretaries, an order of the day, a tribune, and orators, gave to these meetings all the forms of deliberative assemblies: they were assemblies of the people only without elections and responsibility; feeling alone gave them authority: instead of framing laws they formed opinion.
The sittings took place in the evening, so that the people should not be prevented from attending in consequence of their daily labour: the acts of the National Assembly, the events of the moment, the examination of social questions, frequently accusations against the king, ministers, the côté droit; were the texts of the debates. Of all the passions of the people, there hatred was the most flattered; they made it suspicious in order to subject it. Convinced that all was conspiring against it,—king, queen, court, ministers, authorities, foreign powers,—it threw itself headlong into the arms of its defenders. The most eloquent in its eyes was he who inspired it with most dread—it had a parching thirst for denunciations, and they were lavished on it with prodigal hand. It was thus that Barnave, the Lameths, then Danton, Marat, Brissot, Camille Desmoulins, Pétion, Robespierre, had acquired their authority over the people. These names had increased in reputation as the anger of the people grew hotter; they cherished their wrath in order to retain their greatness. The nightly sittings of the Jacobins and the Cordeliers frequently stifled the echo of the sittings of the National Assembly: the minority, beaten at the Manège, came to protest, accuse, threaten at the Jacobins.
Mirabeau himself, accused by Lameth on the subject of the law of emigration, came a few days before his death to listen face to face to the invectives of his denouncer, and had not disdained to justify himself. The clubs were the exterior strength, where the factious of the assembly gave the support of their names in order to intimidate the national representation. The national representation had only the laws; the club had the people, sedition, and even the army.
XX.
This expression of public opinion, thus organised into a permanent association at every point in the empire, gave an electric shock which nothing could resist. A motion made in Paris was echoed from club to club to the extremest provinces. The same spark lighted at once the same passion in millions of souls. All the societies corresponded with one another and with the mother society. The impulse was communicated and the response was felt every day. It was the government of factions enfolding in their nets the government of the law; but the law was mute and invisible, whilst faction was erect and eloquent. Let us imagine one of these sittings, at which the citizens, already agitated by the stormy air of the period, took their places at the close of day in one of those naves recently devoted to another worship. Some candles, brought by the affiliated, scarcely lighted up the gloomy place; naked walls, wooden benches, a tribune instead of an altar. Around this tribune some favoured orators pressed in order to speak. A crowd of citizens of all classes, of all costumes, rich, poor, soldiers, workpeople; women, to create excitement, enthusiasm, tenderness, tears whenever they enter; children, whom they raise in their arms as if to make them inspire, with their earliest breath, the feelings of an irritated people: a gloomy silence interrupted by shouts, applause, or hisses, just as the speaker is loved or hated: then inflammatory discourses shaking to the very centre by phrases of magical effect, the passions of this mob new to all the effects of eloquence. The enthusiasm real in some, feigned in others; stirring propositions, patriotic gifts, civic crowns, busts of leading republicans paraded round, symbols of superstition, and aristocracy burnt, songs loudly vociferated by demagogues in chorus at the opening of each sitting. What people, even in a time of tranquillity, could have resisted the pulsations of this fever, whose throbbings were daily renewed from the end of 1790 in every city in the kingdom? It was the rule of fanaticism preceding the reign of terror.
Thus was the Jacobin Club organised.
XXI.
The club of the Cordeliers, which is sometimes confounded with that of the Jacobins, even surpassed it in turbulence and demagogism. Marat and Danton ruled there.
The moderate constitutional party had also attempted its clubs, but passion is wanting to defensive societies; it is only the offensive that groups in factions; and thus the former expired of themselves until the establishment of the Club of Feuillants. The people drove away with a shower of stones the first meeting of the deputies, at M. De Clermont Tonnerres. Barnave reproached his colleagues in the tribune, and devoted them to public execration with the same voice which had raised and rallied the Friends of the Constitution. Liberty was as yet but a partial arm, which was unblushingly broken in the hands of an opponent.
What remained to the king thus pressed between an assembly, which had usurped all the executive functions, and those factious clubs, which usurped to themselves all the rights of representation? Placed without adequate strength between two rival powers, he was only there to receive the blows of each in the struggle, and to be cast as a daily sacrifice to popularity by the National Assembly; one power alone still maintained the shadow of the throne and exterior order, the national guard of Paris. But the national guard, which as a neutral force, whose only law was in public opinion, and was wavering itself between factions and the monarchy, might very well maintain safety in a public place, was unable to serve as a strong and independent support to political power. It was itself of the people; every serious intervention against the will of the people, appeared to it as sacrilege. It was a body of municipal police; it could never again be the army of the throne or the constitution; it was born of itself on the day after the 14th of July on the steps of the Hôtel de Ville, and it received no orders but from the municipality. The municipality had assigned M. de La Fayette as its head—nor could it have chosen better: an honest people, directed by its instinct, could not have selected a man who would represent it more faithfully.
XXII.
The marquis de La Fayette was a patrician, possessor of an immense fortune, and allied, through his wife, daughter of the Duc d'Ayen, with the greatest families of the court. Born at Chavaignac in Auvergne on the 6th of September, 1757, married at sixteen years of age, a precocious instinct of renown drove him in 1777 from his own country. It was at the period of the war of Independence in America; the name of Washington resounded throughout the two continents. A youth dreamed the same destiny for himself in the delights of the effeminate court of Louis XV.; that youth was La Fayette. He privately fitted out two vessels with arms and provisions, and arrived at Boston. Washington hailed him as he would have hailed the open succour of France. It was France without its flag. La Fayette and the young officers who followed him assured him of the secret wishes of a great people for the independence of the new world. The American general employed M. de La Fayette in this long war, the least of whose skirmishes assumed in traversing the seas the importance of a great battle. The American war, more remarkable for its results than its campaigns, was more fitted to form republicans than warriors. M. de La Fayette joined in it with heroism and devotion: he acquired the friendship of Washington. A French name was written by him on the baptismal register of a transatlantic nation. This name came back to France like the echo of liberty and glory. That popularity which seizes on all that is brilliant, was accorded to La Fayette on his return to his native land, and quite intoxicated the young hero. Opinion adopted him, the opera applauded him, actresses crowned him; the queen smiled upon him, the king created him a general; Franklin, made him a citizen, and national enthusiasm elevated him into its idol. This excess of public estimation decided his life. La Fayette found this popularity so sweet that he could not consent to lose it. Applause, however, is by no means glory, and subsequently he deserved that which he acquired. He gave to democracy that of which it was worthy, honesty.
On the 14th of July M. de La Fayette was ready for elevation on the shields of the bourgeoisie of Paris. A frondeur of the court, a revolutionist of high family, an aristocrat by birth, a democrat in principles, radiant with military renown acquired beyond seas, he united in his own person many qualities for rallying around him a civic militia, and for becoming the natural chief of an army of citizens. His American glory shone forth brilliantly in Paris. Distance increases every reputation—his was immense; it comprised and eclipsed all; Necker, Mirabeau, the Duc d'Orleans, the three most popular men in Paris,—all
Paled their ineffectual fires
before La Fayette, whose name was the nation's for three years. Supreme arbiter, he carried into the Assembly his authority as commandant of the national guard; his authority, as an influential member of the Assembly. Of these two conjoined titles be made a real dictatorship of opinion. As an orator he was but of slight consideration; his gentle style, though witty and keen, had nothing of that firm and electric manner which strikes the senses, makes the heart vibrate and communicates its vigour and effects to all who listen. Elegant as the language of a drawing room and overwhelmed in the mazes of diplomatic intrigues, he spoke of liberty in court phrases. The only parliamentary act of M. La Fayette was a proclamation of the rights of man, which was adopted by the National Assembly. This decalogue of free men, formed in the forests of America, contained more metaphysical phrases than sound policy. It applied as ill to an old society as the nudity of the savage to the complicated wants of civilised man: but it had the merit of placing man bare for the moment, and, by showing him what he was and what he was not, of setting him on the discovery of the real value of his duties and his rights. It was the cry of the revolt of nature against all tyrannies. This cry was destined to crumble into dust an old world used up in servitude, and to produce another new and breathing. It was to La Fayette's honour that he first proposed it.
The federation of 1790 was the apogee of M. de La Fayette: on that day he surpassed both king and assembly. The nation armed and reflective was there in person, and he commanded it; he could have done every thing and attempted nothing: the misfortune of that man was in his situation. A man of transition, his life passed between two ideas; if he had had but one he could have been master of the destinies of his country. The monarchy or the republic were alike in his hand; he had but to open it wide, he only half opened it, and it was only a semi-liberty that issued from it. In inspiring his country with a desire for a republic, he defended a constitution and a throne. His principles and his conduct were in opposition; he was honest, and yet seemed to betray; whilst he struggled with regret from duty to the monarchy, his heart was in the republic. Protector of the throne, he was at the same time its bugbear. One life can only be devoted to one cause. Monarchy and republicanism had the same esteem, the same wrongs in his mind, and he served for and against both. He died without having seen either of them triumphant, but he died virtuous and popular. He had, beside his private virtues, a public virtue, which will ever be a pardon to his faults, and immortality to his name; he had before all, more than all, and after all, the feeling, constancy, and moderation of the Revolution.
Such was the man and such the army on which reposed the executive power, the safety of Paris, the constitutional throne, and the life of the king.
XXIII.
Thus on the 1st of June, 1791, were parties situated, such the men and things in the midst of which the irresistible spirit of a vast social renovation advanced with occult and continuous impulse. What but contention, anarchy, crime, and death, could emanate from such elements! No party had the reason, no mind had the genius, no soul had the virtue, no arm had the energy, to control this chaos, and extract from it justice, truth, and strength. Things will only produce what they contain. Louis XVI. was upright and devoted to well doing, but he had not understood, from the very first symptoms of the Revolution, that there was only one part for the leader of a people, and that was to place himself in the van of the newly born idea, to forbear any struggle for the past, and thus to combine in his own person the twofold power of chief of the nation, and chief of a party. The character of moderation is only possible on the condition of having already acquired the unreserved confidence of the party whom it is desired to control. Henri IV. assumed this character, but it was after victory; had he attempted it before Ivry, he would have lost, not only the kingdom of France, but also of Navarre.
The court was venal, selfish, corrupt; it only defended in the king's person the sources of its vanities,—profitable exactions. The clergy, with Christian virtues, had no public virtues: a state within a state, its life was apart from the life of the nation, its ecclesiastical establishment seemed to be wholly independent of the monarchical establishment. It had only rallied round the monarchy, on the day it had beheld its own fortune compromised; and then it had appealed to the faith of the people, in order to preserve its wealth; but the people now only saw in the monks mendicants, and in the bishops extortioners. The nobility, effeminate by lengthened peace, emigrated in masses, abandoning their king to his besetting perils, and fully trusting in the prompt and decisive intervention of foreign powers. The third estate, jealous and envious, fiercely demanded their place and their rights amongst the privileged castes; its justice appeared hatred. The Assembly comprised in its bosom all these weaknesses, all this egotism, all these vices. Mirabeau was venal, Barnave jealous, Robespierre fanatic, the Jacobin Club blood-thirsty, the National Guard selfish, La Fayette a waverer, the government a nullity. No one desired the Revolution but for his own purpose, and according to his own scheme; and it must have been wrecked on these shoals a hundred times, if there were not in human crises something even stronger than the men who appear to guide them—the will of the event itself.
The Revolution in all its comprehensive bearings was not understood at that period by any one except, perchance, Robespierre and the thorough going democrats. The King viewed it only as a vast reform, the Duc d'Orleans as a great faction, Mirabeau but in its political point of view, La Fayette only in its constitutional aspect, the Jacobins as a vengeance, the mob as the abasing of the higher orders, the nation as a display of patriotism. None ventured as yet to contemplate its ultimate consummation.
All was thus blind, except the Revolution itself. The virtue of the Revolution was in the idea which forced these men on to accomplish it, and not in those who actually accomplished it; all its instruments were vitiated, corrupt, or personal; but the idea was pure, incorruptible, divine. The vices, passions, selfishness of men were inevitably doomed to produce in the coming crises those shocks, those violences, those perversities, and those crimes which are to human passions what consequences are to principles.
If each of the parties or men, mixed up from the first day with these great events had taken their virtue, instead of their impulses as the rule of their actions, all these disasters which eventually crushed them, would have been saved to them and to their country. If the king had been firm and sagacious, if the clergy had been free from a longing for things temporal, and if the aristocracy had been good; if the people had been moderate, if Mirabeau had been honest, if La Fayette had been decided, if Robespierre had been humane, the Revolution would have progressed, majestic and calm as a heavenly thought, through France, and thence through Europe; it would have been installed like a philosophy in facts, in laws, and in creeds. But it was otherwise decreed. The holiest most just and virtuous thought, when it passes through the medium of imperfect humanity, comes out in rags and in blood. Those very persons who conceived it, no longer recognise, disavow it. Yet it is not permitted, even to crime, to degrade the truth, that survives all, even its victims. The blood which sullies men does not stain its idea; and despite the selfishness which debases it, the infamies which trammel it, the crimes which pollute it, the blood-stained Revolution purifies itself, feels its own worth, triumphs, and will triumph.
BOOK II.
I.
The National Assembly, wearied with two years of existence, relaxed in its legislative movement: from the moment when it had nothing more to destroy, it really was at a loss what to do. The Jacobins took umbrage at it, its popularity was disappearing, the press inveighed against it, the clubs insulted it; the worn-out tool by which the people had acquired conquest, it felt the people were about to snap it asunder if it did not dissolve of its own accord. Its sittings were inanimate, and it was completing the constitution as a task inflicted on it, but at which it was discouraged before completion. It had no belief in the duration of that which it proclaimed imperishable. The lofty voices which had shaken France so long were now no more, or were silent from indifference. Maury, Cazalès, Clermont Tonnerre seemed careless of continuing a conflict in which honour was saved, and in which victory was henceforth impossible. From time to time, indeed, some burst of passion between parties interrupted the usual monotony of these theoretical discussions. Such was the struggle of the 10th of June between Cazalès and Robespierre with respect to the disbanding the officers of the army. "What is it," exclaimed Robespierre, "that the committees propose to us? to trust to the oaths, to the honour of officers, to defend a constitution which they detest! of what honour do they talk to us? What is that honour more than virtue and love of country? I take credit to myself for not believing in such honour."
Cazalès himself arose indignantly. "I could not listen tamely to such calumniating language," he exclaimed. At these words violent murmurs arose on the left, and cries (order! to the Abbaye! to the Abbaye!) burst forth from the ranks of the revolution: "What," said the royalist orator, "is it not enough to have restrained my indignation on hearing two thousand citizens thus accused, who in all moments of peril have presented an example of most heroic patience! I have listened to the previous speaker, because I am, and I assert it, a partisan of the most unlimited declaration of opinions; but it is beyond human endurance for me to conceal the contempt I feel for such diatribes. If you adopt the disbanding proposed you will no longer have an army, our frontiers will be delivered up to foreign invasion, and the interior to excesses and the pillage of an infuriated soldiery." These energetic words were the funeral oration of the old army, the project of the committee was adopted.
The discussion on the abolition of the punishment of death presented to Adrien Duport an opportunity to pronounce in favour of the abolition one of those orations which survive time, and which protest, in the name of reason and philosophy, against the blindness and atrocity of criminal legislation. He demonstrated with the most profound logic that society, by reserving to itself the right of homicide, justifies it to a certain extent in the murderer, and that the means most efficacious for preventing murder and making it infamous was to evince its own horror of the crime. Robespierre, who subsequently was fated to allow of unlimited immolation, demanded that society should be disarmed of the power of putting to death. If the prejudices of jurists had not prevailed over the wholesome doctrines of moral philosophy, who can say how much blood might not have been spared in France.
But these discussions confined to the interior of the Manège, occupied less public attention than the fierce controversies of the periodical press. Journalism, that universal and daily forum of the people's passions, had expanded with the progress of liberty. All ardent minds had eagerly embraced it, Mirabeau himself having set the example when he descended from the tribune. He wrote his letters to his constituents in the Courrier de Provence. Camille Desmoulins, a young man of great talent but weak reasoning powers, threw into his lucubrations for the press the feverish tumult of his thoughts. Brissot, Gorsas, Carra, Prudhomme, Fréron, Danton, Fauchet, Condorcet, edited democratic journals: they began by demanding the abolition of royalty, "the greatest scourge," said the Revolutions de Paris, "which has ever dishonoured the human species." Marat seemed to have concentrated in himself all the evil passions which ferment in a society in a state of decomposition: he constituted himself the permanent representative of popular hate. By pretending this, he kept it up, writing all the while with bitterness and ferocity. He became a cynic in order the more intimately to know the masses. He assumed the language of the lowest reprobates. Like the elder Brutus, he feigned idiocy, but it was not to save his country, it was to urge it to the uttermost bounds of madness, and then control it by its very insanity. All his pamphlets, echoes of the Jacobins and Cordeliers, daily excited the uneasiness, suspicions, and terrors of the people.
"Citizens," said he, "watch closely around this palace: the inviolable asylum of all plots against the nation, there a perverse queen lords it over an imbecile king and rears the cubs of tyranny. Lawless priests there consecrate the arms of insurrection against the people. They prepare the Saint Bartholomew of patriots. The genius of Austria is there, hidden in the committees over which Antoinette presides; they correspond with foreigners, and by concealed means forward to them the gold and arms of France, so that the tyrants who are assembling in arms on your frontier may find you famished and disarmed. The emigrants—d'Artois and Condé—there receive instructions of the coming vengeance of despotism. A guard of Swiss stipendiaries is not enough for the liberticide schemes of the Capets. Every night the good citizens who watch around this den see the ancient nobility entering stealthily and concealing arms beneath their clothes. Can knights of the poignard be any thing but the enrolled assassins of the people? What is La Fayette doing,—is he a dupe or an accomplice? Why does he leave free the avenues of the palace, which is only opened for vengeance or flight? Why do we leave the Revolution incomplete, and also leave in the hands of our crowned enemy, still in the midst of us, the time to overcome and destroy it? Do you not see that specie is disappearing and assignats are discredited? What means the assemblings on your frontier of emigrants and armed bodies, who are advancing to enclose you in a circle of iron? What are your ministers doing? Why is not the property of emigrants confiscated, their houses burnt, their heads set at a price? In whose hands are arms? In the hands of traitors. Who command your troops? traitors! Who hold the keys of your strong places? traitors, traitors, traitors, everywhere traitors; and in this palace of treason, the king of traitors! the inviolable traitor, the king! They tell you that he loves the constitution,—humbug! he comes to the Assembly,—humbug; the better he conceals his flight. Watch! watch! a great blow is preparing, is ready to burst; if you do not prevent it by a counter-blow more sudden, more terrible, the people and liberty are annihilated."
These declarations were not wholly void of foundation. The king, honest and good, did not conspire against his people, the queen did not think of selling to the House of Austria the crown of her husband and her son. If the constitution now completed had been able to restore order to the country and security to the throne, no sacrifice of power would have been felt by Louis XVI.: never did prince find more innate in his character the conditions of his moderation: that passive resignation, which is the character of constitutional sovereigns, was his virtue. He neither desired to reconquer nor to avenge himself. All he desired was, that his sincerity should be appreciated by the people, order re-established within and power without; that the Assembly, receding from the encroachments it had made on the executive power, should raise the constitution, correct its errors, and restore to royalty that power indispensable for the weal of the kingdom.
The queen herself, although of a mind more powerful and absolute, was convinced by necessity, and joined the king in his intentions; but the king, who had not two wills, had nevertheless two administrations, and two policies, one in France with his constitutional ministers, and another without with his brothers, and his agents with other powers. Baron de Breteuil, and M. de Calonne, rivals in intrigue, spake and diplomatised in his name. The king disowned them, sometimes with, and sometimes without, sincerity, in his official letters to ambassadors. This was not hypocrisy, it was weakness; a captive king, who speaks aloud to his jailers and in whispers to his friends, is excusable. These two languages not always agreeing, gave to Louis XVI. the appearance of disloyalty and treason: he did not betray, he hesitated.
His brothers, and especially the Comte d'Artois, did violence from without to his wishes, interpreting his silence according to their own desires. This young prince went from court to court to solicit in his brother's name the coalition of the monarchical powers against principles which already threatened every throne. Received graciously at Florence by the Emperor of Austria, Leopold, the queen's brother, he obtained a few days afterwards at Mantua the promise of a force of 35,000 men. The King of Prussia, and Spain, the King of Sardinia, Naples, and Switzerland, guaranteed equal forces. Louis XVI. sometimes entertained the hope of an European intervention as a means of intimidating the Assembly, and compelling it to a reconciliation with him; at other times he repulsed it as a crime. The state of his mind in this respect depended on the state of the kingdom; his understanding followed the flux and reflux of interior events. If a good decree, a cordial reconciliation with the Assembly, a return of popular applause came to console his sorrows, he resumed his hopes, and wrote to his agents to break up the hostile gatherings at Coblentz. If a new émeute disturbed the palace—if the Assembly degraded the royal power by some indignity or some outrage—he again began to despair of the Constitution, and to fortify himself against it. The incoherence of his thoughts was rather the fault of his situation than his own; but it compromised his cause equally within and without. Every thought which is not at unity destroys itself. The thought of the king, although right in the main, was too fluctuating not to vary with events, but those events had but one direction—the destruction of the monarchy.
II.
Nevertheless, in the midst of these vacillations of the royal will, it is impossible for history to misunderstand that from the month of November 1790 the king vaguely meditated a plan of escape from Paris in collusion with the emperor. Louis XVI. had obtained from this prince the promise of sending a body of troops on the French frontier at the moment when he should desire it; but had the king the intention of quitting the kingdom and returning at the head of a foreign force, or simply to assemble round his person a portion of his own army in some point of the frontier, and there to treat with the Assembly? This latter is the more probable hypothesis.
Louis XVI. had read much history, especially the history of England. Like all unfortunate men, he sought, in the misfortunes of dethroned princes, analogies with his own unhappy position. The portrait of Charles I., by Van Dyck, was constantly before his eyes in his closet in the Tuileries; his history continually open on his table. He had been struck by two circumstances; that James II. had lost his throne because he had left his kingdom, and that Charles I. had been beheaded for having made war against his parliament and his people. These reflections had inspired him with an instinctive repugnance against the idea of leaving France, or of casting himself into the arms of the army. In order to compel his decision one way or the other in favour of one of these two extreme parties, his freedom of mind was completely oppressed by the imminence of his present perils, and the dread which beset the château of the Tuileries night and day had penetrated the very soul of the king and queen.
The atrocious threats which assailed them whenever they showed themselves at the windows of their residence, the insults of the press, the vociferations of the Jacobins, the riots and murders which multiplied in the capital and the provinces, the violent obstacles which had been opposed to their departure from St. Cloud, and then the recollections of the daggers which had even pierced the queen's bed on the evening of the 5th to the 6th of October, made their life one continued scene of alarms. They began to comprehend that the insatiate Revolution was irritated even by the concessions they had made; that the blind fury of factions which had not paused before royalty surrounded by its guards, would not hesitate before the illusory inviolability decreed by a constitution; and that their lives, those of their children, and those of the royal family which remained, had no longer any assurance of safety but in flight.
Flight was therefore resolved upon, and was frequently discussed before the time when the king decided upon it. Mirabeau himself, bought by the court, had proposed it in his mysterious interviews with the queen. One of his plans presented to the king was, to escape from Paris, take refuge in the midst of a camp, or in a frontier town, and there treat with the baffled Assembly. Mirabeau remaining in Paris, and again possessing himself of the public mind, would lead matters, as he declared, to accommodation, and a voluntary restoration of the royal authority. Mirabeau had carried these hopes away with him into the tomb. The king himself, in his secret correspondence, testified his repugnance to intrusting his fate into the hands of the ringleader of the factions. Another cause of uneasiness troubled the king's mind, and gave the queen great anxiety; they were not ignorant that it was a question without, either at Coblentz or in the councils of Leopold and the King of Prussia, to declare the throne of France virtually vacant by default of the king's liberty, and to nominate as regent one of the emigrant princes, in order that he might call around him with a show of legality all his loyal subjects, and give to foreign troops an incontestible right of intervention. A throne even in fragments will not admit of participation.
An uneasy jealousy still prevailed in the midst of so many other alarms even in this palace, where sedition had already effected so many breaches. "M. le Comte d'Artois will then become a hero," said the queen ironically, who at one time was excessively fond of this young prince, but now hated him. The king, on his part, feared that moral forfeiture with which he was menaced, under pretence of delivering the monarchy. He knew not which to fear the most, his friends or his enemies. Flight only, to the centre of a faithful army, could remove him from both these perils; but flight was also a peril. If he succeeded, civil war might spring up, and the king had a horror of blood spilled in his defence; if it did not succeed, it would be imputed to him as a crime, and then who could say where the national fury would stop? Forfeiture, captivity, death, might be the consequence of the slightest accident, or least indiscretion. He was about to suspend by a slender thread his throne, his liberty, his life, and the lives a thousand times more dear to him—those of his wife, his two children, and his sister.
His tormenting reflections were long and terrible, lasting for eight months, during which time he had no confidants but the queen, Madame Elizabeth, a few faithful servants within the palace, and the Marquis de Bouillé without.
III.
The Marquis de Bouillé, cousin of M. de La Fayette, was of a character totally different to that of the hero of Paris. Severe and stern soldier, attached to the monarchy by principle, to the king by an almost religious devotion, his respect for his sovereign's orders had alone prevented him from emigrating; he was one of the few general officers popular amongst the soldiers who had remained faithful to their duty amidst the storms and tempests of the last two years, and who, without openly declaring for or against these innovations, had yet striven to preserve that force which outlives, and not unfrequently supplies, the deficiency of all others,—the force of discipline. He had served with great distinction in America, in the colonies in India, and the authority of his character and name had not as yet lost their influence over the soldiery; the heroic repression of the famous outbreak amongst the troops at Nancy in the preceding August had greatly contributed to strengthen this authority; and he alone of all the French generals had re-obtained the supreme command, and had crushed insubordination. The Assembly, alarmed in the midst of its triumphs by the seditions amongst the troops, had passed a vote of thanks to him as the saviour of his country. La Fayette, who commanded the citizens, feared only this rival who commanded regiments, he therefore watched and flattered M. de Bouillé. He constantly proposed to him a coalition of their forces, of which they would be the commanders-in-chief, and by thus acting in concert secure at once the revolution and the monarchy. M. de Bouillé, who doubted the loyalty of La Fayette, replied with a cold and sarcastic civility, that but ill concealed his suspicions. These two characters were incompatible,—the one was the representative of modern patriotism, the other of ancient honour: they could not harmonise.
The Marquis de Bouillé commanded the troops of Loraine, Alsace, Franche-Comté, and Champagne, and his government extended from Switzerland to the Sambre. He had no less than ninety battalions of foot, and a hundred and four squadrons of cavalry under his orders. Out of this number the general could only rely upon twenty battalions of German troops and a few cavalry regiments; the remainder were in favour of the Revolution: and the influence of the clubs had spread amongst them the spirit of insubordination and hatred for the king; the regiments obeyed the municipalities rather than their generals.