Marie Antoinette

THE vanguard of the mob came pouring in.

They swarmed through the arches under the Long Gallery, and the main body of them still came swinging up to it along the river-side.

The sun, well up and brazen, touched the metal about them and sent dancing gleams from pikes and curved hooks bound to staves. Before that uneven crowd the long shadows of morning stood out sharply, thrown along the uneven paving of the narrow quays. They sang or jested; they jostled and could not order themselves. There were no soldiers among this first batch of the insurrection, nor even a body of the half-trained Militia, nor had they any guns. So they swarmed through the public archways under the Long Gallery, so they packed and surged in the square of the Carrousel. Before them were the walls of the central courtyard of the palace and a great gate shut against them.

Of the fourteen guns that the palace commanded, five faced them in this court, ready to fire should the crowd burst in. Three were advanced in the emptiness of the square; two, in support, were just outside the main door, whence the central staircase of the Tuileries swept up to the royal rooms. At that door the lads who had climbed the outer walls of the courtyard could also now see some few of the Guard drawn up in formation outside the palace door and already retiring; the rest were massed behind these in the hall: the solid body of Swiss who were the kernel of the defence.

These thousand mercenaries and more, immovable men, had in their attitude something at once of the grotesque and the terrible. Stiff and strict as lifeless things in their red and white, tight hose and muskets erect and firm, they were ready first for the volley, then for the charge, and every man (in that time, when ten rounds was thought a day’s provision) carried forty rounds upon him. The pale, unmoved faces of the mountaineers were here and there diversified by some livelier face, their rough-cut hair by the careful barbering of the wealthy, for there were gentry of the King’s who had borrowed uniforms of the Guard and had slipped in among them and now stood part of the silent rank.

The roaring of voices in the Carrousel beyond the walls of the courtyard increased continually; the outer noise of the sea of Paris rose with it every moment, and on the first floor, where the Royal Family and some few advisers sat, all this gathering crowd outside the courtyard walls was watched by those who were responsible for the unity of the nation in face of the advancing invasion, and for the person of what was still the King. Chief of those so responsible was Roederer. He stood there for that new public authority, the elected county-body which alone had legal power; he considered only the necessary survival of the King. Already, at dawn, he had advised that the King should leave the defence to others; now, hours later, as the mob and its noise swelled and swelled, he insisted once more. It was but a personal act whose value in the military thing that followed only those present could judge, nay, only those who knew, as only contemporaries can know them, the personal forces at work. There was no capitulation here.... But in the judgment of the greatest master of war, Louis leaving the defence by those few yards determined the issue; for it was Napoleon, himself perhaps a witness, who said that if the King had then been seen on horseback before the palace, his troops would have had the better of the fight. But the King did what he thought was necessary for the moment of peril, and guarded his family. He said, “Let us go.” As he passed through the corridors of the palace down to the main doors upon the garden side, he said to those who heard him, “We shall be back soon.” He believed it and they also. None saw in this precaution an element of defeat, and yet that sort of shadow which doom throws before itself as it advances vaguely oppressed the palace.

The King, the Queen, and their children, Madame de Lamballe and Madame de Tourzel, the governess, the handful of Ministers and friends, had nothing to do with the military scheme of the defence. Louis had thought it prudent, and his advisers also, that those few steps should be taken between the palace and the Parliament House that lay beyond the palace garden, and as they went along the broad garden way between the formal trees, few thought, if any thought, that those ten minutes in the privacy of their grounds were final. Later, all called it the beginning or the presage of defeat.

The King walked solidly on in front by himself, murmuring from time to time that the leaves had begun to fall very early that year. The Dauphin, holding the Queen’s hand, trotted by her side and amused himself by pushing away with his feet those same dead leaves, until, the sickly little chap growing weary, a Grenadier of the Royal Militia, which formed their escort, lifted the Prince in his arms against his blue coat. The Queen’s face, mottled red and white in the violence she did herself by that retreat, was now disfigured by tears, and the crowd beyond the palisades of the garden, seeing royalty thus taking refuge, broke through a gate and made a hubbub round the Parliament door. But a couple of dozen members made a way through them and met the Royal party, assuring them of an asylum within. With some little pushing, complaints and speechifying they got them into safety, and the King so took his place beside the Speaker in that great oval of the riding-school in the early but hot and sunlit morning, the Queen and the children behind him upon the Bench of the Ministers; and there the Grenadier gently put down the child.

Vergniaud was in the Chair, and, when the King had spoken his few words to the Parliament, it was Vergniaud who assured him of the protection of the laws. But there was a prejudice too strong in volume, of too recent a date, and too lively in character, to permit of the open presence of royalty at their debates. Royalty must, at least in appearance, withdraw, and Louis and his wife and the children and some few of their attendants consented to enter a little box where the shorthand reporters of a certain Journal had usually their place. It overlooked the hundreds of the Assembly from a little above their level, and was so placed at the south-eastern corner of the great ellipse that the sun, creeping round, was bound to beat upon it through the high-arched southern windows as the day wore on. The grating was removed, they were attempting some repose in that strict lodgment, when the sudden sound which all so tensely awaited broke out beyond the garden trees. The firing had begun. It was a little after nine.

Cabined as they were within the little box, whose outer wall gave upon the gardens of the palace, they could hear, trembling through the stone and noisy through the open windows, on that hot August morning the rattle of the musketry of the defence. The Marseillais had come up in their turn; they had come into the courtyard. They had parleyed with the Swiss. The gentry at the broad windows of the first floor, each group twelve front three deep, had opened fire to stop that parleying. But of what so passed the Parliament and the little party in the reporters’ box knew nothing. They heard but one discharge of cannon, booming dull, and after that a silence. The debate in the hall of the Parliament ceased. It was the moment when the Swiss had rallied and when the defenders of the palace had swept the populace from the Carrousel, and had so thought to have ended the day. There were many in that hall who thought it ended also: mobs are often thus defeated in a few moments. The silence lasted.

Two more discharges of cannon might have been—and were perhaps thought to be in the anxious house and by the much more anxious group that strained their ears in the reporters’ box—the last volley against a flying crowd. It was not so: those cannon were the two pieces of Marseilles leading a return of the mob, and thenceforward, with every moment for a quarter of an hour, for twenty minutes, the fusillade and the roar of approaching thousands swelled like the calculated swell of an orchestra. The Queen heard, where she sat in the corner of the tiny lodge, the whistle of grape, the thud of solid shot against the walls, the crash of glass, and all that increasing roar which told her that the populace had returned like a tide, flooding the courts of the palace and invading its very doors. For some very few moments they heard that struggle maintained.

Then it was that Roederer, rightly or wrongly, a lawyer, not a soldier, determined that the day was lost. In the spirit which had made him, in his capacity as a high official of the Local Government, twice advise the King to retire, and the second time succeed in that advice, in that same spirit he now advised a capitulation. Perhaps he hoped by such a compromise (could it arrive in time) to save the Monarchy. More probably he deemed the Monarchy secure, and thought only by this capitulation to save the House in which the Parliament sat and in which the Crown had taken refuge from direct assault by the mob. At any rate there was written, and presumably in the King’s presence, the hurried word or two which ordered the Guard to cease firing, and that scrap of paper Louis signed.^[29] It was the last act of the French Monarchy.

This order was conveyed to the upright and soldierly D’Hervilly: it filled him with contempt and anger. He took the paper, pocketed it, forced his way round with difficulty to the further side of the Tuileries, saw that the defence, though now beaten back to the very doors, was still maintained, and, so far from communicating the King’s command, determined, as many a soldier before has done in such a fix, to disobey. He continued to direct the battle.

Though the populace had rushed the doors and in part the river wing of the palace, a furious hand-to-hand fight still raged. The staircase was not yet carried; that wing of the populace which had leapt the gap in the flooring and had boarded the Pavilion de Flore from the Long Gallery had not yet fought its way into the Tuileries. The great body of the insurgents was still massed outside in the square; a steady fire was still maintained upon them from the windows of the palace. It was not until the rooms were at last flooded by the advancing mob and the staircase was held that D’Hervilly faltered. He was turned. The assault had begun to verge upon a massacre. Of one half-company of the popular Militia, all but five had been hit at one door alone in the upper rooms. Before the main door, within a few yards of it, 400 men—if we may trust those who most desired to hide the full numbers—400 men at least lay heaped. Within, the mob was taking its revenge and the sacking had begun before D’Hervilly showed that scrap of paper to the Guard. This second command also the Swiss obeyed, as they had obeyed the first command to die.

They fell back out of the palace in order, this remnant of a high discipline; they passed down the main broad avenue of the gardens steadily: the covering volleys of their retreat came very sharp and clear just outside the windows of the Parliament. Those within heard their steady tramp, until at last that tramp turned to a scuffle; there were crunchings upon the gravel, confused scrambles upon the lawns, choked cries and fugitive running; they had broken by the round pond.

Far off along the river-side one could still hear a rhythm and a tramp of men. It was the marching of the Marseillese with their prisoners: for they had made prisoners and disdained to massacre. They had saved somewhat more than a company of the Guard and bore them escort. The fight was done.

It was just after ten o’clock. In those two hours, or little more, of doubt, in that one hour of combat, there had perished many thousands of men and the tradition of nine hundred years.

The day passed without wind or air, a day of increasing clamour. The conquering populace entered by deputations, and with the rhetoric of the poor and of their leaders before the bar of the manège. They demanded and obtained the suspension of Louis “till the National Convention should be called.” They brought spoils religiously to that bar, “lest they should be thought thieves.” They harangued and they declaimed—by the mouth of leaders.

Far off in the chapel of the palace a young man at the organ played the “Dies Iræ” for his whim. Those who had so lately been the masters of the palace sat huddled in the box of the Logotachygraphe.

If the modern reader would have some conception of it, this “loge” of the shorthand reporter, let him think, if he is rich, of a box at the opera, or, if he is poor, of a cabin upon a steamer: such was its size.

Louis XVI. and one or two of his armed gentlemen, the Queen, the little children and their governess, sat packed hour after hour in that little den; through the torn grating of it they could see the vast oval of the riding-school, its sweep of benches under the candle-light. It was a huge pit, from whence in a confusion of speech and clamour rose the smoke of their fate.

The summer night had been so tedious and so burning that in their ten-foot square of a hutch the refugees had hardly endured it. The little child had fallen into a stupid sleep upon his mother’s knees, and a sweat unnatural to childhood so bathed his exhausted face that the Queen would not let it remain. She turned for a handkerchief to a gentleman of theirs: he gave her his—but there was the blood of a wound upon it.

Midnight had passed, and they still sat thus packed and buried; before them still rose the sonorous cries of the invading mob, the interjections of the Parliament, the rhetoric of the last speeches. The hundreds of lights still flamed in the double chandeliers of the enormous hall; the roof and the planks of the half-empty benches around the arena still sent back echoes.

It was two in the morning before the doors could open on them, and with the sweep of cooler air came the roar of the populace still on guard after all these eighteen hours. The crowd pressed against the railings as a strong escort hurried the King and Queen across a little corner of the gardens to the deserted monastery next door. There were large candles thrust into the barrels of chance muskets: the night was calm and they could burn. By that faint and smoky light, which but just caught the faces of the crowd beyond, they hurried into the door of the Feuillants.

For many months no one had trodden the corridor of the place; the bricks of the flooring beneath their feet lay unevenly. The blank and whitewashed walls, cracked and neglected, were pierced by four such similar little doors as monasteries use for an entrance to their cells, and in those four bare cells the Parliament had hurriedly provided what furniture the old house afforded.

The Dauphin had awakened for a moment in the fresh air, and had smiled; he had said, so that those near could hear him: “I am to sleep in mamma’s room to-night!” His mother had promised it him as a reward during the dreadful day; he slept when the doors closed on them, and his sister slept too. The Queen was too angry for repose.

She saw the monk’s bed of the cell, little and hard; she saw the mouldy green paper on the wall; she stamped for one last futile time into the King’s presence beyond the partition to cry that things should surely have turned differently.

“The Marseillese should have been driven back!”

Louis had never failed to meet her anger when it rose by a stolid truth. “Who was to drive them back?” he said.

Then she, who had not understood the armed nature of the struggle, but only her own fierce desire, turned back and threw herself upon the narrow bed of her refuge.

The day already glimmered. One could see the trees of what had been but yesterday her royal garden, and one could see the palace beyond through the dirty windows of the little room. The sun rose and showed her her misery more clearly. She could not sleep. It was not till the light in the east had risen above the many roofs of the Tuileries and had already thrown a slit of bright shining aslant into the room, that there fell upon her less a slumber than an unhappy trance of exhaustion.

There was silence while she slept. The mob had gone home exhausted. The carts, which had worked all night round the palace and in the gardens picking up the wounded and the dead, lumbered no more, and their crunching upon the gravel of the alleys had ceased. No wheels rattled in the Rue St. Honoré as yet, and the few that still maintained the sitting in the Parliament were attended by no more in the Tribunes than a few sleepy beings watching to the end. Outside in the still air all that could be heard was the early piping of birds.

For that little space Marie Antoinette lay broken but forgetful of the dreadful day.

Her sister-in-law, in whom self-sacrifice was permanent, watched her pitifully so lying for one hour and another. Then she woke the children and dressed them for the new day, silently, so as to spare their mother’s sleep, but that sleep did not endure. The Queen raised herself unrefreshed, and, when she saw the children, remembered their promise and their fall and said: “It will all end with us!...”

With the morning some succour began to arrive from their own class, who pitied them, especially from foreigners. Lady Gower’s little son, younger than the Dauphin, was yet of the same measure. The child could therefore wear the change that was sent him from the English Embassy. The King was supplied by a captain of his Swiss, a man as corpulent as himself. The Queen could get linen at least from the Duchesse de Gramont. Her watch and purse were stolen, left behind or lost, but there was plenty of money; one of her women had no less than twenty pounds upon her: there was no need to look further.

At ten an escort brought that broken family back to the reporter’s box. And so daily the long fatigue was endured and the mean lodging of the night. All the Saturday, all the Sunday, the debates continued in their presence. They saw, they half-understood the quarrel between the city, which had determined to be master of their persons, and the Parliament, which refused to forgo its sovereignty. They heard the decree passed that overthrew the statues of the kings throughout Paris. They heard that the palace of the Luxemburg was to be their sumptuous prison; then the long argument against that building, the perpetual demand of the city for their custody; the suggestion of this place and that: the Archbishop’s palace—at last the Temple.

They saw the deputation of the city, with the Mayor at its head, insisting; they heard the Parliament give way, and knew by Sunday evening that Paris would hold them hostages.

On the morrow—a fatal 13th—their Court was removed from them: a few friends only were allowed to remain. Under the wan light of evening two great carriages—still royal, but their drivers’ livery gone and a dull grey replacing it—stood before the door of the Feuillants. The act of imprisonment had begun.

The heavy coaches rolled along the paving. The scene was that of a crowd freed from labour at such an hour, thousands on either side, and a dense escort pushing its armed column through. The sunset and the long twilight were full of halts and summonses; Pétion, with his head thrust through the window, was insisting on a way for Authority: there was a noise of men struggling, sometimes to see, sometimes to save their feet, snatches of songs, cries.

The distance was not quite a mile and a half. For over two hours the coaches pushed and fought their passage up to the Place Vendôme, where the statue of Louis XIV. lay fallen: past the wide boulevards whose width did nothing to disperse the crowd: down at last along the narrow lane of the Temple, till they came to the great pillars of the porch.

All this while the Queen sat silent. Her husband and she and her royal children were still given honour—sat on the front seat of the great carriage; but the ladies who yet followed the Court, the governess of the Children of France, were indignant that Authority should have passed to the officials, and that these should sit wearing their hats of office before France-in-Person. So also when the Royal Family walked across the courtyard to the steps of what had once been Artois’ Palace of the Temple, the deputation of the Commune there present to receive them kept their heads covered and insisted upon their new authority, calling Louis “Sir,” not “Sire,” and preserving in his sight that austere carriage which he had thought the peculiar appanage of kings.

They went up the great staircase, lit splendidly as for a feast, lit as it had been for Artois in the days she so well remembered: the doors shut as upon guests assembled. They followed their warders down a short, walled way through the open night, and saw before them at last, with lamps in every old crocket of the corners, and every window ablaze, the enormous mass of the Tower.

To the north of the square keep which was the main outline of the Tower, a second building, an afterthought of the latter Middle Ages, had been added. It leant up against its larger neighbour, forming a kind of pent-house; its four storeys were far lower than those of the stronghold—the rooms into which each storey was partitioned were necessarily smaller and less convenient than those which they were to occupy later in the main tower: it was nevertheless necessary to lodge them here for the first few weeks, because this annex alone was furnished. It had been the residence of the Archivist in charge; its main room had been his drawing-room; the whole was ready for an immediate occupation.

To these Princesses and their train there was a portentous novelty in such a place. The King, a man, and one fond of hunting in all weathers, self-centred, negligent of his person, careless of any luxury save that of the table, saw nothing sharp in these surroundings: indeed, his sex, especially when it is leisured, can take what it finds in a campaign or accident with no great shock. But the women, who had in every moment of their lives been moulded by magnificence and ease, could not understand the place at all. Varennes had been a hurly-burly; the wretched three days just ended at the Feuillants a violent interlude; for the rest their pains and terrors of the past three years had been played upon a gorgeous scene. They had slept for a thousand nights of peril in very soft and bulging beds whose frames were thick with gilding, beds whose canopies were splendidly high and curtained like thrones. They had been surrounded for a thousand days of peril by silent servants trained and dressed in gorgeous livery for their work. They had looked out on great ordered gardens, and had walked over the shining floors of the palace. That was their protection: a habit of grand circumstance and continuous exalted experience against which the occasional horror and the strain of their lives could make no impression.

To-night, in the unaccustomed stillness of the Temple enclosure, they sat silent in the knowledge that these low roofs and common walls must be a kind of home for them. All was at first insupportable; the King’s sister, sleeping on a ground-floor, in a room which once the cooks of the house inhabited: next to her through the wall, the Guard-Room; the Queen, the royal children and their governess, cooped up in a couple of small bedrooms fifteen feet square or less, preparing their own beds and the Dauphin’s, were in a new, worse world. The poor Princesse de Lamballe, with her own great virtue of fidelity surviving all her inanities, put a truckle bed for herself in the dark little passage between the two rooms and slept there, as a dog sleeps at the door of its mistress. Nor did even this society endure. A week had not passed when the officers came by night to read a new decree, and to separate the Duchesse de Tourzel and the Princesse de Lamballe from their masters, saying: “There must be no one here but Capetians.” Then the complete isolation of their lives, a new habit, of settled hours and monotonous exactitude, began.

This life reflected as in a quiet mirror the chaos of the enormous struggle which was being fought out beyond the walls of the Temple. They were prisoners and yet unrestricted; confined by public authority and yet permitted the refinements of their rank. Surrounded by guardians, but by guardians none of whom as yet insulted them, many of whom were secretly their friends, some few their devoted servants, traitors to the State in the crisis of a great war but traitors through devotion to a national tradition.

Twenty courses at a meal were not thought too many; a dozen servants, paid fantastic salaries, did not suffice them; their expenditure, if not the half million voted, was yet at the rate of many thousands a year; the doctor and the drawing master may visit them, and the Duchesse de Gramont may send them books. Their wine, though the King alone drank it, was of the best, commonly champagne (at that time not the fashionable wine of the rich, but rather the ritual of feast days); they had good furniture at their demand, an ample library of many hundred volumes; and in general such comfort as such a situation could afford. But a violent contrast marked their lives, the contrast between this luxury and the anarchy of manners around them. Their guards, often gentlemen, were now courteous, now obsequious, now offensive, according as chance sent men of varying politics or character by turn to be on duty at the Tower.

The alternate fears and expectations of the Revolution, the doubtful chances of the frontier battles, the unsettled quarrel of the political parties among the conquerors—all these permit the inconsistencies of that moment upon the part of the Commune and the Parliament. They permit within the Tower that mixture of the prison and the home whereby an increasing severity of rule and an increasing vexation did not forbid the costly furniture, the very complete library, the exquisite cooking which make up the curious contrast of their lives.

The order of their day was simple and unchangeable. The King would rise at six, shave, dress, and read till nine. The Queen and the Dauphin were up by eight, at which hour the servants and the guard came into the rooms. At nine they breakfasted. During the morning great care was taken by Louis himself with the lessons of the boy. The Queen and her sister-in-law dressed for the day. They walked in the large gardens where the mob from far off could watch them from behind the railings of the Square; dined at two o’clock, played cards. The King would sleep in the afternoon, would sup again at nine, and read till midnight.

A week after the Princesse de Lamballe and the Duchesse de Tourzel had left them, before the end of August, the first of the indignities offered to the person of the Monarch came to him thus: they took away his sword. It was but an ornament, yet in all that long line of ancestry no other had had his sword unclasped. And this man, who could never have used a true sword, let alone that toy, felt the loss like a wound. Much at the same time, that is before the end of August, entered three new people into the prison—Tison and his wife, new gaolers who had to act as spies upon them; and Cléry, who was to act as the valet of Louis, who was devoted to him, and who has left us what is certainly the clearest and probably the most accurate account of the prison life of the family.

In those same days they heard whispered to them by one of the guards, Hue, the first news they had had upon the matter that never left their thoughts. The invasion was successful. Brunswick was well on his way—it was impossible that he should be opposed.

For yet another week no incident disturbed the common run of their quiet; the physical impressions which build up most of life were neighbouring and small; the daily noise of hammering in the great tower next door where their permanent apartments were preparing; the daily reading, the daily games of backgammon, and, daily, the sumptuous meals; the modest dresses, changed (as is the custom of the gentry) for the evening; the daily intercourse with such two Commissioners from the City Council as happened to be on guard. From their windows they could see the rapid demolition of the small huddled buildings round the Tower, and Palloy’s great encircling wall rising between them and liberty on every side.

But beyond these exterior things their minds dwelt continually upon the matter which had held all their thoughts for a year. They remembered, in their isolation, the frontier, the Argonne (which is a wall), and beyond it the bare plains of the East: moving densely over these the convoys, the guns, and the packed columns of the invasion. They had failed to hold their Parisian fortress till the advent of that slow machine, but they could still hope serenely: they had known regulars since their childhood: they saw in the advance of Brunswick something inevitable; they were certain of his success, and they waited.

How truly the history of the Revolution is the history of war can never sufficiently be stamped upon the mind of the student. The Terror when it came was, as I shall call it, nothing but martial law established during a reign: the steps by which the fury of the time advanced towards it corresponded exactly to the fortune of the French armies.

Upon the 2nd of September, as the prisoners walked in the garden, they heard a roar throughout the city. The populace beyond the railings threw stones: they were hurried back into their prison. For a moment before dusk they saw the wild and fanatical face of Mathieu, once a monk, who shouted at them: “The Émigrés have taken Verdun, but if we perish you shall perish with us.” In the increasing hubbub all around, the little Dauphin cried and was disturbed; and all night the Queen could not sleep. She could not sleep as the noise rose and roared throughout Paris.... It had almost come. The armies were almost here, and once again the dice were being shaken for the murder of the prisoners, or for their deliverance.

It was on that day, and pricked by the spur of such news, that Marat’s frenzied committee gathered a band, and began the massacre of those caught in the public prisons—all those suspect of complicity with the invasion and of the desire to help the foreigner in destroying the new liberties of the nation. Among these hundreds, roped in suddenly upon suspicion from among the rich or the reactionary of the older world, was the foolish, tender and loyal woman who had determined to share the fortunes of the Queen—the Princesse de Lamballe. When they had taken her a fortnight before from the side of her friend she had but been thrust into another prison to await these days.

The 3rd of September broke upon the captives, a dull uneasy morning in which the clamour of distant disturbance still occasionally reached them from the centre of the city southward, then came nearer.

They were told that on that day there would be no walk in the garden. They sat therefore all the morning in their rooms. They dined as was their custom; their dinner was over, it was not quite three o’clock, and the King and the guard for the day stood together at one of the great tunnel-like windows of the first floor, for the windows were not yet blinded as they later were. The guard by his side was one Danjou, a young man of thirty-two, very eager upon the new world which he believed to be then arising; full of a vision of freedom, a good sculptor—for that was his business—intense in action, he was, above all, brave. Energy bubbled out of him, and he had, what goes with energy, a clear head and rapid decision. The King and this man stood together exchanging that kind of easy conversation which Louis had by this time learnt to hold with men of every rank. They were watching the workmen pull down the houses near by, and the rising of the wall which was built to enclose the gardens of the Temple. Now and then, as a great beam fell with its great clouds of dust, the honest and slow King would laugh and say: “There goes another!” Their conversation was on this level when they heard an increasing noise outside the gates. To the Royal Family it meant but one more mob rolling by. Danjou, who was a free man fresh from outside and knew better, was silent and anxious: he was aware that the massacres had begun.

At first it was a set of drunken songs far off, and then a clamour in the streets. At last, quite close, separate cries and loud demands, and hammering at the gates; and next a nasty crowd burst in. They were not very numerous, but they were drunk and mad with blood; and they dragged with them the body of the only woman killed during all those horrors, a corpse stripped, perhaps mutilated, and separate from it a head with powder on the hair. This head, thrust upon a pike, some of the foremost raised before the window; and Louis, slow of vision though he was, recognised it for the Princesse de Lamballe’s. His wife was at the table behind him. The window was high, deep and distant. Louis cried suddenly, “Prevent the Queen...!” But, whether she had seen or had not seen that dreadful thing, the Queen had fainted.

Without, Danjou, acting as promptly as a soldier, was standing on the steps, giving the mob all the words that came to him of flattery, rhetoric, or menace; and getting them at last to scramble down from the heaps of broken brick and rubble they occupied, and to go, taking their trophy with them. Within, her sister and her husband attended the Queen.

She was quite broken down. The night fell, but again she could not sleep. She passed the dark hours sobbing with pain, until yet another day had dawned upon her. And still a long way off in Paris the massacres continued. Still, through the first week of September and the second, advanced the army of the invaders which was to save them as it came victorious; or at the worst it came at least to destroy their enemies and the city which had dared to imprison them.

News did not reach the prisoners save at such intervals, or in such broken whispers, or by such doubtful signs that they could make little of it: but whether they knew much of that news or little, the army was irresistibly advancing: the French troops which were to oppose it were increasingly falling in value: the passes of Argonne were forced—all but one. Dumouriez was turned; and by the 20th of September Prussia and Austria were present, armed, four days’ march from the gates; and there was no force at all between them and Paris. That same day the Parliament in Paris met the menace by declaring the Republic.

Upon the morrow the most extreme of the extremists, Hébert, the cleanly and insane, looked in to mock them coldly; while outside the booming voice of Lubin proclaimed in a most distinct proclamation, phrase by phrase, that the French Monarchy was no more. The King went on reading, the Queen went on sewing; for such was the occupation of either as they heard those words. The slow hours of the equinox passed without news or disturbance in the city; but meanwhile, out where the armies were, a prodigious and as yet unexplained thing had happened. Austria and Prussia and the Emigrants had failed. The strong cities which they had easily taken, the passes of Argonne which they had almost as easily forced, the contemptuous and just strategy by which they had marched round the worthless forces of the National Defence and now stood between it and Paris—all these by some miracle of war had availed them nothing: and in a muddy dip before the windmill of Valmy the whole campaign had failed.

I wish I had the space here to digress into some account of that inexplicable day. I know the place, and I have well comprehended the conditions of soil and of gunnery under which the Prussian charge failed even before its onset. Nor could any study more engross, nor any examination prove more conclusive, than an analysis of the few hours in which this accident of European history was decided upon the ground which, centuries before, had seen Gaul, and therefore Europe, saved from Attila. But neither the limits nor the nature of my subject permit me; and it must be enough to say that on the 21st of September at Valmy, a few yards from the road whereby the King had fled to Varennes, by the failure of one charge the invasion failed. In a few days the retreat of the army that was to rescue or to avenge the King and the Queen had begun; and from that moment the nature of their imprisonment changed.

Upon the 29th of September pens, ink and paper were taken away from the prisoners, and on the evening of the same day there once more entered the cleanly and insane Hébert, who read to them the order that Louis XVI should be separated from his family and imprisoned in another set of rooms in the Tower.

Those relations which had been at first ridiculous, later tolerated, and though affectionate not deep, between the Queen and her husband, her dislike of his advances towards the Liberal movement, her angry amazement at his patriotism in the early days of the revolt,—all these which are too often read into her last emotions in his regard, must be in part forgotten when we consider how they all lived together behind those thick walls. Every human soul that left the group was something lost to them for ever. Of the two that had last left them, the head of one, shown murdered, had been seen at the window. And moreover, this order to separate the King meant almost certainly some form of approaching disaster. The children also were a bond. For they knew nothing of whatever early phantasies, whatever recent disagreements there had been between the wife and the husband, and they must now have their father hidden from them.

He was taken away. Upon the next day, the 30th, as once before during their imprisonment, the Queen refused to eat and sat silent. To that silence there succeeded a fit of violent anger in which she screamed at the guards. It was when Cléry came to get some books for his master.

It is reported that Simon, one of the Municipals who was later to be the gaoler of her child, said as he saw the distress of the women, that it nearly moved him to tears, and that turning to the Queen he told her that she had had no tears when the palace fought the people upon the 10th of August. It is said that the Queen answered: “You do not understand.” And when he added: “You should be glad at least that the traitors are caught,”—by which phrase he meant the popular vengeance and the massacres in the prisons, the repulsion of the invasion and the rest of it—the Queen would not answer a word.

Upon the 1st of November, the day before her thirty-seventh birthday, she saw again a visitor to her prison, a dark face which it appalled her to see: it was a face stamped with all the association of Varennes. It was the face of Drouet.

He spoke to her as a deputy from the Municipality (to which he now belonged), to ask whether she had anything to complain of. She resolutely maintained her sullen silence; she turned her face away and treated him as though he were not there, and he on his part threw his arms up in a gesture of resignation, then bowed to her and went out.

The royal people had colds in November and waited through a shivering month what could not but be the approach of some very evil thing. Upon the 6th, one of those scraps of news—positive news and ill—which reached them like patches of clear light in the midst of murky fears and rumours, was granted to the prisoners. The Committee of Parliament had reported upon Louis’ case: an indictment was framed; he would certainly be tried.

To such an advance of misfortune the Queen could only oppose the fixed hope that in some way or other the regular armies of the Old World must break through. They had been checked at Valmy, nay, they had retreated. But surely they could not but return, and brush aside at last the raw and formless rags of the French volunteers. They could not but. The old regulated armies, the peace of mind, the brilliant uniforms, the vast prestige of German arms, the leadership of gentlemen—sanity, cleanliness, and the approval of educated men—these must at last destroy those mere composite mobs, half regulars, half forced levies; sodden, mutinous, ill-fed, ill-clothed, officered as best might be, untutored and untutorable, which her gaolers had flung together in a sort of delirium, hotch-potch, to make a confused covering against the governing classes of Europe who were advancing in defence of all the decencies of this world.

As the Royal Family so hoped against hope, that ill-conditioned crowd—old soldiers relaxed in discipline, young enthusiasts who drank, sickly and grumbling volunteers, veterans hoping for revenge against the harsh experience of years (a dangerous type), company-officers of a week’s standing (put side by side with others of twenty years), captains in boyhood and lieutenants at forty—this welter was jumbled all together under the anxious eye of Dumouriez, along a valley of the frontier, on the muddy banks of the river called Hate—La Haine.

I know the place: low banks that rise in the distance into hills are overlooked far up stream and down by the fantastic belfry of Mons and its huge church dominating the plain. Dumouriez, deeply doubting his rabble but knowing the temper of his own people, poured the young men and the old across the line of the river, leading them with the Marseillaise. Among the villages of the assaulted line Jemappes has given its name to the charge. By the evening of that same day, the 6th of November, the Austrian force was destroyed, a third of its men lay upon the field or had deserted, the rest were beating off in a pressed retreat, eastward and away. The rabble should have failed and had succeeded.

I have said that for Valmy no explanation has as yet been given. For Jemappes there are many explanations: that the Austrians had attempted to hold too long a strategic line and were outnumbered at the chief tactical point of the battle: that their excellent cavalry (the French in this arm were deplorable) had not been allowed to hold their left long enough: that one passage of the river was accidental and could not have been foreseen (a bad commentary on any action!). But the true cause of that temporary yet decisive achievement was to be found in two forms of energy: rapidity in marching and in the handling of guns—but such criticisms do not concern this book.^[30]

Of this victory, coincident with the beginning of the King’s agony, Marie Antoinette for days could know nothing, and even when the rumour reached her it was but the victorious shouting in the streets and a name or two whispered by a servant that gave her a passing impression that her champions had suffered a further check—no more. Yet before that tide should flow back and finally swamp the French packed in Leipsig, twenty years must pass, and not till then should the Kings and the Lords at last see Paris from a hill.