Marie Antoinette

ON the 23rd of September the Regiment of Flanders marched into Versailles.

To seize all that follows two things must be clearly fixed: first, that the Queen was now separate from all the life around her; secondly, that the accidents of the next fortnight determined all that remained of her life.

The Revolution, now organised, possessed of regular authorities and of a clear theory, was in action, moving with the rapidity of some French campaign towards clean victory, or, upon an error or a check, defeat—a defeat absolute, as are ever the failures of high adventure.

The Queen has been called the chief opponent of that Revolutionary idea and of those new Revolutionary authorities: it is an error so to regard her; she did not meet their advance in so comprehensive a fashion. She saw nothing but a meaningless storm whirling about her; she cared for nothing in the great issue but the preservation during the tempest, and the full restoration at the end of it, of all that was to have been her little son’s; she feared as her only enemy a violent and beastly thing, the mob, in whose activity she recognised all that had so long bewildered her in the French people; but while she feared it she also despised it as a thing less than human, incapable of plan, able to hurt but certain at last to be tamed. The march of Paris upon Versailles which was now at hand, with its flaming brutality, its anarchy of thousands and of blood, confirmed in her for ever her wholly insufficient judgment. From those days until she died her only appeal was to the foreigner, her only strategy the choice of manner and of time for using an actual or a potential invasion.

It may next be asked why the Regiment of Flanders marching in led to such abrupt and to such enormous consequences? It was accompanied by a section of guns only, and though its ready ammunition was high for a mere change of garrison in those days,^[11] it was but one unit more where, three months before, division after division had been massed round Paris and throughout Versailles.

The answer to the question is to be found in the temper of those who watched that entry. It took place in the afternoon with imposing parade; the grenadiers of Flanders filed up the Paris road between the ranks of the Body-Guard—a new regiment of the Guard which was still stranger and somewhat hostile to the temper of the crowd. Again, Flanders was a quasi-foreign regiment, comparable to those which the Crown had drafted in before the rising of Paris destroyed the plan of a civil war and had since, on a deliberate pledge, withdrawn. Again the reinforcement coincided with that long verbal struggle upon the acceptation by Louis of the Decrees (of the Rights of Man and the abolition of Feudal Dues)—a verbal struggle apparently futile, but in essence symbolic of the Veto of the Crown. To this it must be added that Paris, in which, in spite of harvest, a partial famine reigned, was again roused for adventure; that now for weeks the opposition of the King to the Decrees of the Assembly had exasperated the leaders of opinion—those innumerable writers and those orators who could now voice, inflame, and even guide an insurrection; finally, it must be remembered that there remained but one solid and highly disciplined body intact throughout the insurrections of that summer, the desertions and the siding of the troops with the populace—this was the Army of the East that lay along the frontier under the command of Bouillé. It was of no great size—some 25,000 men—but it was largely foreign (Swiss and German) in composition, was excellently led, well drilled, already political in the united spirit of its command. Thither it was feared and hoped the King would fly: a regiment or two to flank his evasion and to escort it would be sufficient: this was the meaning of the Regiment of Flanders.

All this, however, would not alone have provoked an uprising: the departure of the King actually attempted might have done so, but we now know, and most then believed, that though the Queen urged flight, Louis would not consider it. The true cause of the catastrophe; the disturbance, which ruined the unstable equilibrium of political forces that October, was a manifest exaltation or crisis of emotion observable in the officers of the newly arrived regiment, still stronger in the Guards, pervading the whole Court, and nowhere centred more fiercely than in the heart of the Queen. It was as though the tramp of that one column of relief, added to so much restrained and impatient emotion, coming after the silent angers of that long summer, coinciding with a critical intensity of indignation and of loyalty within the palace, was just the final sound that broke down prudence. All the commissioned, many of the rank, betrayed the new glow of loyalty in chance phrases and in jests; chance swords were drawn and shown, chance menaces or chance snatches of loyal songs in taverns led on to the act which clothed all this rising spirit with form, and stood out as a definite challenge to Paris and to the Assembly.

It was customary (and still is) for the officers resident in a French garrison to entertain the officers of a newly-come regiment. The Guards had never done so yet. They were all of the gentry, the general custom of the army affected them little, for in all ranks, the gentlemen of the Guard were in theory, to some extent in reality, equal in blood. Nevertheless their officers chose, for the purposes of a political demonstration, the pretext of a custom hitherto thought unworthy of their corps. The Guard had fixed upon Thursday, the 1st of October, to show this civility to Flanders. In the atmosphere of these days the occasion could not but become a very different matter from such a dinner as the mess of even the premier corps—so acting for the first time—could offer to a provincial body of the line.

In the expenses determined,^[12] and the place chosen, it was evident that all the Court was moving: the great theatre of the palace, unused for so long and reserved for the greatest and most official ceremonies, was made ready, lavishly; the tables were set upon its stages, the lights, the decorations were the King’s; and when the officers of Flanders, all, perhaps (save their Colonel), unready for so much splendour, found themselves in the Salle d’Hercule—the guests of the palace rather than of the Guards—it was apparent that some large affair was before them: they were led to the theatre and the banquet began.

It was just three o’clock: down in the town the Assembly was voting the last clauses of the Constitution. In the courtyards of the palace the private soldiers of Flanders had gathered, buzzing at the gates—later, and for a purpose, some few were admitted, but that was not until some hours had passed: they pressed curiously, now and then making way for some belated member of the band, which, with that of the Guards, was to play at the banquet.

The tables were set in a horse-shoe, and two hundred and ten places were laid: more than the two messes were concerned! Eighty seats were for the Guards—for all that could be found connected with the Guards—and the Guards were there in full; double their usual number were in Versailles: there were others, strange guests and chosen volunteers. There were others, men whose presence proved a certain plan, officers of the local national militia, the new armed force of the Revolution, but officers picked carefully for their weakness or their secret disapproval of the national movement. So they sat down and began to eat and drink; there were provided two bottles a man.^[13]

Outside the great empty theatre the autumn evening closed; within, by the thousand lights of it, the ladies of the Court, coming, as the banquet rose higher, into the boxes to applaud, saw one by one the white cockades of the Guards transferred to their guests. The national colours were regulation for Flanders; they were the essential mark of the new national Militia—yet, first one guest then another, eagerly or reluctantly, weakly or defiantly, took on the white cockade of the old Monarchy which the Guards still legally wore. The women folded paper cockades and threw them down ... at last all seated there were under the emblem; some say that black cockades for the Queen were also shown. They drank to the King, the Queen, the Heir; the noise of laughter and of enthusiasm grew, the toasts and the cheers were exchanged from the boxes to the stage; the floor of the theatre filled with new-comers—speech and the exhilaration of companionship gained on them and rose. Some there in wine felt now again, like a memory in the blood, the old and passionate French love of the kings. Some, who had come to Versailles secretly determined for the Crown, now at last gave full rein and let the soul gallop to its end. All were on fire with that Gallic ardour for adventure against great odds, and in all that Gallic passion for comradeship was aflame. Some few of the rank and file were admitted ... the heavy men of Flanders ... they also drank. The Queen (the meat being now gone, the fruits served) was seen, whether come by reluctance or willing, in her box.... They cried her name and swords were drawn. They clamoured for her to come down from where she sat there radiant, hearing at last the voices and the mood upon which (so little did she understand of war) she imagined and had imagined her victory to depend.

She came down and passed slowly before them and their delirium, smiling highly, holding in her arms her little son; and the King, less certain of the issue, heavy, splashed with the mud of his hunting, went with her as she proceeded. They passed. The height of their fever was upon these soldiers; one leant over to the band and suggested, “Pleasant it is to be....” The band consulted; they were not sure of the tune. “Well, then, play ‘O Richard! O my King!’” That everybody knew, any one could sing it; it was a tune of the day—and with the music madness took them. They poured out into the cold night air of the marble court, singing, cheering, all armed—defiant of the new world. The whole life of the palace and its thousands, invigorated, mixed with music and re-heightened the strain. Sundry bugles were blown as though for a charge. The noise of that clamour rang through the town, the populace without the gate was gathering, the Militia armed; and the crowd thus alarmed in the far night could see, beyond the palace railings under the brilliant windows of the front, a herd of men still cheering madly, the gleam of swords raised, and one dark figure climbing to the King’s window to seize and kiss his hand; and against the lights within, the shadows of the family approving.

The colonel of the Versailles Militia went to the palace and returned: the crowd dispersed, the cheering of the revellers died away. Next day was sober; yet even all next day the exaltation, though now sober, grew. The national uniform of the Militia was insulted and challenged in Versailles, turned out of the palace. The Queen, ineffably ignorant, gave colours to a deputation of that Militia, and begged them, with a smile, to believe that yesterday had pleased her greatly—she had seen certain of their officers at the feast—and so little was enough to deceive her! There was another milder meeting (for the men), a mere exchange of glasses, and all Saturday, the 3rd of October, the armament of the Crown, such as it was—some thousands—stood ready and did not forget the valour and the ardent loyalty which their chiefs had lit with such memorable cheers and songs.

But another noise and another life began beyond that fringe of woods which eastward veiled Paris. The million of that place were in a hum: messages came from them and to them. Marat had explored the new force in Versailles, the Presses in Paris were raining pamphlets—something confused and enormous, a vision of their national King abandoning them, a nightmare of treason; all this mixed with hunger oppressed the mind of the million. I say “mixed with hunger,” for though there was by this time plenty of grain there was little flour, and in the lack of bread violent angers had risen: some thought the Assembly (their talisman), the very nation itself, to be again in peril from the soldiers. So all Sunday, October 4, the hive of Paris droned in its narrow streets and gathered; upon Monday, for the second time that year, it swarmed.

To the west and to the south of Paris there runs a ring of clean high land against the sky, and it is clothed with forest; one part of it, still charming and in places abandoned, is called the Forest of Meudon, and many who read this have walked through it and have seen at the end of some one of its long rides the great city below.

In the morning of Monday, the 5th of October 1789, the far corner of these woods near Chatillon rang with shots, and down one alley or another would come from time to time the soft and heavy beat of horses at a canter, as grooms and servants moved with the guns. The King was shooting. A south-west wind blew through the trees with no great violence; some rain had fallen and more threatened from the shredded, low, grey clouds above. Of all the company in those alleys and between those high trees, on which the leaves, though withering, still hung, the King alone was undisturbed. His pleasure in horsemanship and his seven miles’ ride from the palace, his delight in the morning air, and his keen attention to the sole occupation that called out his lethargic energy, forbade him to consider other things; but all his suite were wondering, each in his degree, what might be happening in the plain below them, or in Paris, or in the town of Versailles which they had left—for it was known that Paris was moving.

All morning long they shot in those woods until, when it was already perhaps past noon and rain had again begun to fall, a sound of different riding came furiously up the main alley which follows the ridge and springs from the high road. It was the riding of a man who rides on a fresh horse and changes post, and is a courier. His name was Cubieres, and he was a gentleman of the Court flying with news, straight in the long French stirrup, with a set face, and his mount belly to ground. He took one turning, then another, came thundering up to the King and drew rein.

The King, as this messenger reached him, was noting his bag in a little book. The message of Cubieres was that Paris had marched upon Versailles, that the great avenue road was black with tattered women and with men, seething and turning, and demanding food and blood. He brought no rumours, and he could tell the King nothing of the Queen. The King mounted. All mounted and rode at speed. They turned their mounts westerly again, and rode at speed toward Versailles. And as they rode two feelings dully contended in the mind of Louis: the first was anxiety for his wife; the second annoyance at the sudden interruption of his business; and later, as the bulk of the palace appeared far off through the trees, he was filled with that irritant wonder as to what he should do, what his action should be: the trouble of decision which cursed him whenever he and action came face to face. The wind had fallen, and now the rain poured steadily and drenched them all.

Consider that grey morning in the town also—I mean in the town of Versailles—and how under that same covered sky and those same low shreds of flying cloud the empty streets of Versailles were arming.

Upon the broad deserted avenue before the gates of the National Assembly there were no passers-by; the drip from the brown leaves of the trees, the patter from the eaves of the stately houses, and the gurgling of water in the gutters enforced the silence. Now and then an official or a member in black knee-breeches and thin buckled shoes, delicately stepping from stone to stone, would hurriedly cross over the paving, cloaked and covered by an ample umbrella, as was the habit of those heroes when it rained; but for the rest the streets were empty, the setts shining with wet under the imperfect autumn light. Far off, beside the railing and before the wrought-iron gates of the palace, the troops were beginning to form, for it was already known that the bridge of Sèvres had been left unguarded and that the mob was pouring up the Paris road. The troops came marching from one barrack and another in the various quarters of the town, converging upon this central place, and some, the Swiss, were issuing from the outlets of the palace itself, and some, the Mounted Guard, were filing out of the half-moon of the royal stables, where now the Sappers and the 22nd of Artillery may be found. They formed and formed under the weather. The Body-Guard upon their great horses, deeply mantled and groomed as for parade, lined all the front; behind them the Swiss on foot filled the square of the courtyard; Ragged Flanders, the Ragged Regiment of Flanders, famous in song for its rags as for its amours and its drums,^[14] stood by companies before them all in the wide public place, where all the roads of Versailles converge and make an approach to the Court and form an open centre for the royal city.

The formation was accomplished, food was served, arms piled. They stood there in rank alone, with no civilians to watch or mock them under the rain, and behind them the great house they were guarding stood empty of Monarchy. And before them the wide avenue from Paris, the Avenue which was the artery of opinion, of energy, and all the national being at that moment, stood empty also, and it rained and rained. The great body of troops, red, yellow and blue in bands, were the only tenants of the scene.

Within the Assembly a debate not over-full of purpose had alternately dragged and raged: it had been known almost from the opening of the sitting that Paris would move. Those premonitions which have led the less scholarly or the more fanatical of historians to see in the Revolution a perpetual pre-arrangement and cabal, those warning things in the air which you find at every stage of the great turmoil (rumours flew before the King all the way to Varennes, and the victory upon the right wing at Wattignies was known in Paris an hour before the final charge), those inexplicable things had come, and immediately upon their heels had come direct news from one messenger after another: how the wine merchants’ shops had been sacked, how the bridge of Sèvres was passed, how the rabble were now but five miles off and breasting the hill. That futility, which the Revolutionary Assemblies suffered less perhaps than other Parliaments, but which is inherent in all discussion, condemned this engine of the new Democracy to discuss on such a day nothing of greater moment than the order of that day, and the order of that day was the King’s letter: for the King had written that he would “accede” to the Decrees (of Rights of Man and to the extinction of the Feudal Dues) but that he would not “sanction” them. And on the verbal discussion between the word “accede” and the word “sanction” legal tomfoolery was fated to batten, while up in the woods of Meudon the King who had written that letter was still shooting peacefully and innocent of guile, and while so many thousands, desperately hungry, were marching up the road, having black Maillard—as who should say murder—for their Captain, and dragging behind them a section of their guns.

From such futility and from such tomfoolery the debate was just saved by the strength of personality alone. Mounier, in the Speaker’s chair, lent energy to them all, though of a despairing kind; and when some one had said to him, “All Paris is marching upon us,” and had foreseen the invasion of the palace and perhaps the ruin of the Crown, he had answered, according to one version, “The better for the Republic,” according to another version, “The sooner shall we have the Republic here.”

At the back of the great oblong colonnaded hall, trim Robespierre, fresh from “The Sign of the Fox” and from his farmer companions, was, in that vibrating and carrying little voice of his, laying down decisions. There should be no compromise; if they compromised now, the Revolution was lost. But he was careful to be strictly in order—he was always careful of that—and the thing on which he advised “no compromise” was not the mob, but the letter of the King.

A larger man touched nearer to the life, though it was but an interjection; for Mirabeau, ever vividly grasping facts and things, had hinted at the Queen: that mob was marching on the Queen. He had said that he would sign if, in whatever might follow, “The King alone should be held inviolate.” And there is one witness who affirms that he added in a whisper, which those on the benches about him clearly heard, that he meant specifically to exclude from amnesty and from protection the woman against whom so many and such varied hatreds had now converged, and who stood to a million men for innumerable varied reasons a legendary enemy, but one in her flesh and blood to be hated—the negation of all the hope of the moment and of French honour and of the national will.

This woman, upon whom already lay the weight of so much discontent and terror, sat that morning for the last time in Trianon, where the rain was beating against Gabriel’s graceful, tall windows and streaming down the panes. Some ill-ease compelled her, though the place was protected, remote and silent, and though the weather was so drear, to wander in her gardens and to cross the paths between the showers. In the early afternoon she was in the Grotto, and it was there that the news came to her, for a messenger found her also as that other one had found her husband. He bade her come at once to the palace, and told her that the mob had filled the town.

She came; it was still the middle afternoon, and such light as the day afforded was still full, when she saw from the windows of the ante-chamber, looking over the full length of the courtyard, beyond the line of soldiers, that eddying volume of the populace and heard the noise of their mingled cries. It was the first time in her life that she had seen the people menacing. She listened to the distant roaring for a long time in silence, with her women about her, until the noise of horse-hoofs clattered upon the flags below, and she knew that Louis had returned. He came, booted and splashed, up the great stairs; there members of his Ministry and his advisers were ready. Marie Antoinette entered with them into the Council Room, and as the door was shut behind her there was shut out, though barely for an hour, the instant noise of that peril.

This is the way in which Paris came to Versailles and began its usurpation of the Crown.

There is a tall window in Versailles in the corner of the Council Room whence one can see the Courts opening outwards before the palace and so beyond to the wide Place d’Armes. Through that window, streaming with rain under the declining light of the pouring October day, could be seen the tumult.

All the wide enclosure before the palace was guarded and bare. Over its wet stones came and went only hurried messengers—orderlies from the armed forces or servants from the Court. Holding the long 300 yards of gilded railing was the double rank of the Guards, mounted, swords drawn; next, the Dragoons, a clear and detached line of cavalry; in front of these, in triple rank, the Regiment of Flanders.

Three armed bodies thus guarded the sweep of the railings and the approach to the palace in parallel order, and beyond them, right into the depths of the landscape, stretched a vast and confused mob filling up the three great avenues and crowding half the Place d’Armes; in that mob many of the armed Militia of Versailles, met at first in formation but now mingled with the populace, could be distinguished. At such a distance no distinct voices could be heard, but a roaring sound or murmur like the noise of a beach rose from the multitude and outweighed the furious patter of the rain on the glass: at rare intervals a shot was fired, wantonly, but no news of bloodshed came. From time to time a patrol of the Guard could be seen, towering on chargers high above the populace, forcing its way through; swords also sometimes striking could be distinguished. This uncertain and menacing sight, blurred in the rain, was all that the Queen could distinguish.

Within the King’s room was a deputation of women, and Mounier, the President of the Assembly, had been received; council upon council was held, that the Queen at least should retire to some neighbouring town, that the King should fly—but nothing was determined, and to that reiterated policy of flight so often suggested since July, now so pressing, the King murmured as he paced back and forth, “A King in flight!...” It is said that the horses were ordered; but with every moment the plan became more difficult. Darkness fell upon a sky still stormy; the troops still held their lines, but the noises seemed nearer and more menacing. It was imagined better to withdraw the Guard at least, as the pressure upon them increased.

That order may be criticised, but it may also be defended. La Fayette was marching on Versailles from Paris with a considerable force of partly trained Militia. The Guards, round whom the legend of the supper had grown, and whose white cockades were an insult to the national colours, exasperated the populace beyond bearing, and were, it was thought, the main cause of the pressure to which the troops were subjected. Wisely or foolishly, the Guard was withdrawn; the line regiments alone were left to contain the mob.

It was eight o’clock, and for two hours further a futile deliberation proceeded in the royal rooms. In those hours first one messenger then another convinced the King of a thing inconceivable in those days—personal danger to himself and especially to the Queen. At ten o’clock he signed the Decrees, the refusal of which were thought to be the political cause of the tumult. At midnight could be heard at last the regular marching of drilled men: La Fayette had arrived with 20,000 from Paris—not soldiers, if you will, men of but three months’ training, but in uniform, capable of formation and well armed—the Militia of Paris.

So profound was the mental distance between the surroundings of the King and the leaders of the reform that not a few at Court feared this relieving force, thinking that such a man as La Fayette might be tempted to capture the Monarchy with it and to betray it to the mob! They understood him little. He showed that night some statesmanship, great activity, and an admirable devotion to duty: it was his judgment that failed. He judged falsely of what the crowd were capable; he underestimated his countrymen, and he judged falsely of what his Militia could do; he over-estimated uniform and an imperfect drill. He urged that the regular troops, the pressure upon whom after all these hours was now almost intolerable, should be withdrawn; he further urged that he should be permitted with his Militia and with some few of the Guard to police the open spaces and to protect the palace.

His advice—the advice of the only man with a large armed force behind him—was accepted. By two o’clock there was silence and, as it was thought, security. Men slept as they could in such shelter as they might find or in the open. Far off there was the glare of a fire, where, in the midst of the crowd, a wounded horse had been killed and was roasting for food. The hubbub within the palace had died down; nothing was heard but the rhythmic clank of a sentry, or, as the hours passed, the challenge of a relief. The Queen also slept.

What followed has been told a thousand times. Her great bedroom looked east and south; it was the chief room in her wing, which, just beyond the central Court, corresponded to the King’s upon the northern side. From that room to the Council Chamber and to the King’s private apartments there were three ways: the way by the main gallery of mirrors which her household took upon Sunday mornings and on all sorts of grand occasions to join the King for High Mass; a second shorter way through little rooms at the back, which were her own private cabinets; and, thirdly, a secret passage worked now in the thickness of a wall, now in the space between two floors, and leading directly from the King’s room to her own.

All that afternoon and evening the new strength of her character had conspicuously appeared. Her friends, her enemies remarked it equally. There was something almost serene in her during these first experiences of peril; but they were to grow far more severe. Her children she had sent into the King’s wing. She was assured of peace at least until morning, and she slept.^[15]

Further along than the tall chapel whose roof so dominates Versailles, towards what is now the limit of the Hotel of the Reservoirs, in the Court which is called that of the Opera House, one of the great iron gates which gave entry into the palace grounds stood open on that gusty night of rain. A single sentinel, chosen from the Militia, stood before it. By this gate not a few of the crowd found their way into the palace gardens, and, coming to the southern wing, vaguely knew, though the interior of the place was doubtful to them, that they stood beneath the windows of the Queen.

Marie Antoinette had slept perhaps three hours when she awoke to hear cries and curses against her name, and staring in the bewildered moment which succeeds the oblivion of sleep she saw that it was dawn. Then next she heard somewhere, confused, far off, in the centre of the building, a noise of thousands and their cries. Her maid threw a petticoat upon her and a mantle, and delayed her a perilous moment that she might have stockings on as she fled. She made for the private rooms that would take her to the King’s wing, when, as the noise of the invading mob grew louder and their leaders (missing her door) poured on clamouring to find and to kill her, one of her Guards half-opened the door of her room and cried, “Save the Queen!” The butt of a musket felled him: the Queen was already saved.

The violence of those who thus poured past her door found no victim. She had run through her little library and boudoir, knocked at the door of the Œil de Bœuf and had it hurriedly opened to her; she had knocked and knocked and some one had opened the door fearfully and shut it again when she had passed through. She saw the Œil de Bœuf barricaded. A handful of the Guard went desperately piling up chairs, sofas and foot-stools against the outer doors, while she slipped through to the King’s room. He meanwhile, as the assault on the palace had awakened him also, had run along the secret passage to her room, and, seeing it empty, had come back to find her in his own.

The eruption of the mob had been as rapid as the bursting of a storm. The immediate forming of the La Fayette’s Militia Guard and its victory proved almost as rapid. The first shot had been fired at six, probably by one of the Guards at the central door: within an hour the Militia had cleared the rabble out, even the tenacious pillagers were dislodged, and the populace stood, thrust outside the doors and massed in the narrow marble Court beneath the King’s windows, in part discomfited but much more angry, and with a policy gradually shaping in the common mouth: a policy expressed in cries that “they would see the King,” that “the King was their King,” that “they must bring back the King to Paris.”

The morning had broken clear and fine and quite calm after the rain of yesterday and the wind of the night; its light increased with the advancing hours: the energy of the mob remained—and in the midst of it a long-bearded man, half mad, an artist’s model, was hacking off the heads of the two Guards who had been killed when the palace was rushed.

The Queen looked down upon the flood of the people from the windows of her husband’s room. Her sister-in-law was at her shoulder, her little daughter close to her left side, and in front of her, standing upon a chair, the Dauphin was playing with his sister’s hair and complaining that he was hungry: and all the while the mob shouted for the King.

The King showed himself. They would see the Queen too: and La Fayette, still their adviser and still trusted in a bewildered way as a sort of saviour, told her it was imperative that she should come. She went, therefore, to the great central room of all that house, the room which had been the state bedroom of Louis XIV., and stepped out upon the balcony of its central window, holding her children by the hand. The mob roared that they would have no children there. She waved them back into the room, and stood for some moments surveying the anger of the unhappy thousands packed beneath, with the new and serene day rising in the eastern heaven behind them. Her hands were on the rail of the balcony. She hardly moved. There were weapons raised in the tumbling crowd: one man aimed at her and then lowered his musket. La Fayette came forward, took her right hand, knelt and kissed it, and the little scene was over.

How could she have known until that moment that there were such things?

It was certain more and more as the day grew to noon that the Court must obey and that the populace had morally conquered. In a little inner room the King and Queen sat together, and together they decided (or, the King deciding, she could not but decide in the same necessity) that they would return to Paris. She turned to her husband and said: “Promise me at least this: that when next such an occasion shall come, you will fly while yet there is time.” Louis, to whom the idea of flight was hateful, let his eyes fill with tears, but did not answer.

Louis’ decision to return was a wise decision. The popular demand was not to constrain but to possess their King. It was not until later that the changing mood of Paris and its success seemed to make of that moment of October the beginning of the King’s captivity; with some little difference in persons and in wills, this yielding to what all the national sentiment demanded might even yet have made of the Crown once more an active national emblem and of the person of the King a leader.

It was half-past one when the carriages with difficulty came to the palace. It was two before the march to Paris began.

The road from Versailles to Paris falls and falls down a long easy valley which the woods still clothe on either side of the very broad and royal highway: the woods rose in that autumn afternoon dense and unbroken for many miles. Two things contrasted powerfully one against the other: the howling turbulence of the crowd, the stillness of nature all around. It was as though some sort of astonishment had struck the trees and the pure sky, or as though these were spectators standing apart and watching what tempests can arise in the mind of man.

The season was late; the foliage was but just turning; the gorgeous leaves hung tremulous in that still air: none fell. The masses of colour in the thickets of Viroflay were tapestried and immovable; and all this silence of the world was soft as well. The air had about it that tender, half-ironical caress which it possesses on perfect autumn days in the Parisis, and the sky was of that misty but contented blue which they know very well who have wandered in that valley upon such days. Cleaving through such beatitude, a long line of shrieking and of clamouring, of laughter and of curses, of the shrill complaints of women, of the moans of pain and of fatigue, mixed with the sudden wanton discharge of muskets, went, for mile after mile; the populace were drawing back their King to Paris.

It is not seven miles from the palace to the river—not another four to what were then the barriers of the city. They took for these eleven miles all but seven hours. The coaches crawled and pushed through the swarm of the angry poor. The Queen, her husband and her children, Monsieur, Madame Elizabeth, the governess of the royal children—all sat together in one great coach rumbling along in the midst of insult and of intolerable noise. From where she sat, facing the horses near the window, the Queen could see far off at the head of that interminable column two pikes slanting in the air. The heads of the Guards who had saved her were upon them.^[16] She could see here and there, close under those trophies, glints of yellow, where certain of the Foot Guards were marched like prisoners along, with the blue of the national Militia flanking and escorting them on either side; and, mixed in the crowd, the Mounted Guardsmen were there, prisoners also, with the Mounted Militia holding them. Of all that followed after she could see nothing; but she could hear. There was the rumbling of the wheels of the two cannon, the great sixty waggons loaded with flour, and she could hear the cries that cursed her own name. The afternoon wore on. The sun lay low over the palace they had left. It was dusk by the time they reached the river; it was dark before they came to the barriers of the town.

There, by the same gate of entry which the first of the Bourbons had traversed two hundred years before, the Monarchy re-entered that capital which, for precisely a century, it had, with a fatal lack of national instinct, abandoned. Bailly, the Mayor, met them under torches in the darkness and presented the keys of the city. The Royal Family must needs go on, late as it was and they lacking food, to the Hotel de Ville, that the crowds of the city might see them. It was not until ten o’clock that the unhappy household, the little children broken by such hours and so much fasting, found themselves at last under the roof of the Tuileries.

The Tuileries were a barracks.

The huge empty line of buildings, which, had they been thus abandoned to-day, would have been made a Sunday show, had in that age been put to no use; they had become in the absence of the Court but a warren of large deserted rooms. Furniture was wanting; there was dust and negligence everywhere; the discomfort, the indignity, the friction were but increased by the hasty swarms of workmen who had been turned on in a few hours to fit the place for human living. No more exact emblem of the divorce between the Crown and Paris could be found than the inner ruin of that royal town-house, nor could any deeper lesson have been conveyed—had the last of the Bourbons but heeded it—than the reproach of those rooms.

As for Paris—Paris believed it had recovered the King. The month and more that followed was filled with a series of receptions and of plaudits. The Bar, the University, the Treasury, last of all the Academy—all the great bodies of the State were received in audience and joined in a general welcome. Parliament was at work again before the end of the month, first in the Archbishop’s palace upon the Island, later in the great oval manège or riding-school which lay along the north of the palace gardens. It was there that all the drama of the Revolution was to be played.^[17]

That drama began to work, as the winter of 1789 advanced, with a new, a more organised, and, as it were, a more fatal rapidity; and as the volume of the reform grew and its momentum also rose, the Queen sank back further and further into the recesses of her religion.

Her energy was not diminished. Those few months of silence did but restore her power to act with speed and even with violence in the succeeding year, but for the moment, like a sort of foil to the speed of the current around her, she steadfastly regarded the only things that remain to the doomed or the destitute.

The communion of her daughter chiefly concerned her then. To this it was that she looked forward in the coming spring, and this (insignificant as the matter may seem to those who know little of such minds) was the fixed interest of that winter for the Queen.

Her letters during those months betray that momentary isolation. She inclined once more, after the tumults and defeats, to a not very worthy contempt for the slow, insufficient, and absolutely just mind of her husband. There are phrases of violence like the sudden small flames of banked fires in those letters of hers in that season; but her reserve remains absolute. She boasts that she “had seen death from near by.” But “she will keep to her plan and not meddle.” “My business is to see the King at ease.” Then again, later, in Lent she sneers: “One at my side is prepared to take things in a modest way.” She follows with a phrase that is reminiscent of the audacity she so recently showed and was again so soon to show: “I shall not let the power of the Throne go at so cheap a rate.” This letter, which, read to-day after so many years, breathes the too jagged vigour of the woman, has about it an awful character; for she wrote it to a man who, even as she wrote it, was lying dead—her brother and her mainstay, the Emperor. The desire to return to the arena is still in her: she writes once, wistfully, “I must get hold of the leaders.” There are other letters, passionate, womanish letters to her woman friends. To Madame de Polignac, out in exile at Parma, letter after letter. In these, as in all the rest, you read her interval of seclusion from the fight. That interval was one of five months.

She in those five months, from the Day of the Dead in November 1789 to the very early Easter of 1790, was like an athlete who, in the midst of some furious game, stands apart for a moment recovering his breath and relaxing his muscles while the struggle grows more active, separate from him, but acted before his eyes. Soon he will re-enter the press with a renewed vigour. And so did she when after that sad winter she combined with Mirabeau, and the driving force in those two minds tried to work in a yoke together. But for the rest, I say, religion chiefly held her. Her isolation was not so much a plan (as she pretended) as a physical and necessary thing. She was exhausted. She had done with the body for a moment; she was concerned with the soul.

If one could portray graphically the accidents of that tragic life, if a mould could be taken of her great hopes and her great sufferings, if a cast in relief could be made of her passion, you would find, I think, in such a map of her existence two high peaks of exalted suffering and vision: the death of her son—so small in history, so great to her—would be the first; and the second would be those hours in October when she, to whom all such things had been mere words, was for the first time in her wealthy life threatened with cold air against her body, the vulgar in her bedroom, and death; when she first saw a weapon levelled at her and first came in physical contact with violence, a thing that all save the wealthy and their parasites daily know. These were the two strong, new, and terrible days which had bitten into her experience. These were and remained her isolated memories. The rest, her future evils, came by a more gradual slope: her very death was to her less enormous. Her dumbness during these winter months of ’89 and the working inwards of her life was a reaction of repose after the shock of October.

By the vast mass of the Louvre there is a church dedicated to that Saint Germanus who preached against Pelagius in Britain, and who, as an old man, had laid his hand upon the head of the young Saint Geneviève, the goose-girl, near Mount Valerian and had foreseen her glory. This church has much history. From its tower rang the call to arms which roused the populace of Paris against the wealthy oppressors of the Huguenot faction and maddened the poor to take their revenge in the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. It was and is the parish church of the palace. Here, before Lent was over (upon Wednesday in Holy Week), the little girl, her daughter, knelt at her first Communion. The Queen stood in the darkness of the nave, dressed without ornament, her fine head serious, her commanding eyes at once tender and secure.

I cannot write of her or hear of her without remembering her thus; and that last power of hers, a power made of abrupt vivacity tamed at last by misfortune into dignity and strength, here, I think, begins. Such a power was not henceforward the permanent quality of her soul—far from it, but it appeared and reappeared. It was strong more than once for a moment in the last hours before she died; and how well one sees why such as had perceived in her the seeds of this force of the spirit, even when she was distraught and played the fool in youth, now, when it had blossomed, worshipped her! Upon this last mood her legend is built and survives. She had a regal head.

She stood in the nave unnoticed in her black dress without ornament, and saw the little girl go up in white and veiled to the altar-rails. There was no one there. Never since Constantine had the Faith been lower in France; but the Faith is a thing for the individual mind and not for majorities.

They went back homewards. They gave alms.

Meanwhile, though this was her true life for those months, one must speak of what went on without: the rising of the Revolutionary song and the noises at her feet. For out of this swelling energy and increasing peril was to grow her experiment of an alliance with the virile brain of Mirabeau.

There stands, side by side with the activity of mortal life, a silent thing commonly unseen and, even if seen, despised. It has no name, unless its name be religion: its form is the ritual of the altar; its philosophy is despised under the title of Theology. This thing and its influence should least of all appear in the controversies of a high civilisation. With an irony that every historian of whatever period must have noted a hundred times, this thing and its influence perpetually intervene, when most society is rational and when most it is bent upon positive things; and now at the moment when the transformation of society towards such better things seemed so easy and the way so plain, now in late ’89, before any threat had come from the King or any danger of dissolution from within, this thing, this influence, entered unnoticed by a side-door; it was weak and almost dumb. It and it alone halted and still halts all the Revolutionary work, for it should have been recognised and it was not. It demanded its place and no place was given it. There is a divine pride about it and, as it were, a divine necessity of vengeance. Religion, if it be slighted, if it be misunderstood, will implacably destroy.

It was the Queen’s Birthday, the Day of the Dead, November 2, 1789, one of those fatal and recurrent dates to which her history is pinned, which saw the sowing of that seed and the little entry of what was to become the major and perhaps the unending feud of our modern democracies.

The clergy of the French Church were then national to a degree hitherto unknown in the history of the Church in any of her provinces. The national movement swept them all. The Episcopacy represented, in some few of the greatest sees, the Revolutionary enthusiasms, in the mass of bishops the resistance to the Revolution which was exactly parallel to the attitude of the lay nobility. The parish clergy reflected with exact fidelity the homogeneous will of the nation. It was a priest who furnished the notes of the Revolutionary movement in the capital of Normandy. Later it was a priest who wrote the last (and the only literary) stanza of the Marseillaise. Even the religious, or what was left of them (for monastic life had never fallen to a lower state or one more dead since first St. Martin had brought it into Gaul), met the movement in a precisely similar fashion, suspected it in proportion to their privilege or their wealth, welcomed it in proportion to their knowledge of the people and their mixing with them. It was the poor remnant of the Dominicans of Paris that received and housed and gave its name to the headquarters of pure democracy, the Jacobins.

The clergy, then, were but the nation. The long campaign against the Faith, which had so long been the business of the Huguenot, the Deist, the Atheist, and the Jew, had indeed brought the Faith very near to death, and, as has so often been insisted in the course of these pages, it is difficult for a modern man to conceive how tiny was the little flickering flame of Catholicism in the generation before the Revolution, for he is used to it to-day as a great combative advancing thing against which every effort of its enemies’ energies must be actively and constantly used. The clergy as a body of men were national and willing to aid the nation; the Faith, which should have been their peculiar business, had almost gone—therefore it was that to put to national uses what seemed the grossly exaggerated endowments of religion seemed a national policy in that embarrassed time. Therefore it was that the endowments so attacked could ill defend themselves, for the philosophy of their defence, which lay in their religion, was forgotten. Obviously necessary and patriotic as the policy seemed, it awoke that influence of which I speak, which does not reside in men and which is greater than men, which only acts through men, but is not of them; and Religion—seemingly all but dead—rose at once when it felt upon it the gesture of the civil power.

It was, I have said, the 2nd of November, the Queen’s Birthday, the Day of the Dead, that the vote was taken upon the confiscation of religious endowments. The light was failing as that vote began. The candelabra of the great riding-school were lit, and it was full darkness before the vote was ended, for five-sixths of all possible votes were cast and nearly one thousand men voted each to the call of his name upon a roll. When the figures were read, a majority of 222 had decided the thing, and, in deciding it, had determined the dual fortunes of Europe thenceforward to our own time. The Revolution, a thing inconceivable apart from the French inheritance of Catholic Dogma, had raised an issue against the Catholic Church. For three weeks had the matter been debated; the days of October had launched it, and while yet the Parliament was in Versailles a bishop—one later to be famous under his own name of Talleyrand—had moved in favour of that Act.

It was a simple plan, and to see how immediate and necessary it seemed we have but to read the figures of the clerical funds and of their iniquitous distribution; yet it failed altogether and had for its effect only one effect much larger than any one dreamt—the creation of enmity in the only Thing that could endure, indefinitely opposed to the Revolution, mobile, vigorous, and with a life as long or longer than its own.

The figures were these: In a nation of 25 millions now raising, by a grinding and most unpopular taxation, less than 18,000,000 in the year, and of that paying quite one-half as interest upon a hopeless and increasing debt, was present a body of men, 40,000 in number, whose revenues had always been considered as the retribution of a particular function now universally disregarded; and these revenues would almost suffice to pay the amount which would save the nation from bankruptcy. The property from which these revenues were derived was sufficient to cancel the debt and to set the nation free upon a new course of readjusted taxation, an increased and unencumbered activity and, as it seemed to all at that moment, to save the State. Talleyrand himself in his clear and chiselled speech put the matter with the precision of a soldier. The reform would wipe out all encumbrances, permit the destruction of the old and hateful taxes, notably the salt tax, suppress the purchase of public offices, and meanwhile permit the nation in its new course to pay without grievous burden regular salaries to the clergy as civil servants according to their rank, which salaries would abolish the gross inequalities which had arisen in the economic development of fifteen centuries. No ordained priest would have less than what was in those days regarded as a sufficient maintenance. The monstrous revenues of certain sees, which were of no service to Religion or to the State, would disappear.

The plan was simple, it seemed most rational, and, as I have said, it was voted—from it was to proceed directly within two months the creation of those Government notes upon the security of Church lands, whose very name is for us to-day a summary of the disaster—the Assignats: the Assignats, which have become a cant term for worthless paper. Before Christmas that ominous word was to appear. Before spring the false step of dissolving the moribund religious orders was to be taken. Before summer the plan to establish a national Church controlled by the State was to be formulated; within a year that simple plan of disendowment had bred schism and the fixed resistance of the King, later it engendered Vendée, Normandy, all the Civil Wars, and—with a rending that has all but destroyed Europe—a separation between the two chief appetites native to mankind, the hunger for justice in the State, and that other hunger for God, who is the end of the soul. The wound is not yet healed.

Such was the principal act passing during those months of the winter and spring under the eyes of the Queen in her retirement and silence; accompanying that act was much more. The first of the plots had broken out, the first of those recurrent and similar plots for saving the person of the King; the first of the victims, Favras, had been hanged; the first hint, therefore, of a distinction between the King as head of the nation and the King as a person to be preserved had appeared. It was to grow until it threw into the whirlpool of the Revolution the flight to Varennes.

Just before the end of February, the force upon which Marie Antoinette now most relied—her brother Joseph—died. Leopold, a character of no such readiness or maturity, succeeded him, and the Queen, reading his letter upon the 27th, knew that she had come to that turn of human life after which, even for the most blest, everything is loss without replacement, until we stand alone at the tomb. Even for the most blest: for her the turn had come just as she and all of hers must sail into the darkness of a great storm.

I have said that it was on the last day of March, Spy Wednesday, that she had stood obscure in her plain black, blotted against the darkness of the nave and watching the Communion of her child. Upon the next day, Holy Thursday of 1790, was published, by order of the Revolutionary Parliament, that official paper called “The Red Book,” which suddenly heralded to all the public all that her Court had been, which gave body and form to all those hitherto vague rumours and legends of extravagance and folly which had been the chief weapons of her enemies. It was as though a malarial, impalpable influence weakening her had suddenly distilled into a palpable and definite material poison. It was as though some weapon of mist, which though formidable was undecided, had become suddenly a weapon of steel. The publication of that list of pensions, of doles, of bribes effected in her fortunes a change like the change in the life of some man whose reputation has hitherto suffered from hints and innuendoes, and who suddenly finds himself with the whole thing published in the papers upon the witness and record of a Court of Law.

Let a modern reader imagine what that publication was by so stretching his fancy as to conceive the delivery to general knowledge in this country of what is done in payment and receipt by our big money-changers, our newspapers, our politicians, and let him imagine (by another stretch of fancy) a public opinion in this country already alive to the existence of that corruption and already angry against it: then he will see what a date in the chances of the Queen’s life was this Holy Thursday!

The business now before herself and such as were statesmen around her was no longer to make triumphant, but rather to save the Monarchy.