Marie Antoinette

THAT night the prisoners in the Tower did not sleep, saving the little Dauphin: he slept soundly; and it is said of his mother that, watching him, she murmured that he was of the age at which his brother had died, at Meudon, and that those of her family who died earliest were the most blessed. In the last silences of the January night, till past two in the morning, the woman Tison, who was in part their gaoleress and in part a spy upon them, heard them talking still, and when she came to them Madame Elizabeth said: “For God’s sake leave us.”

Cléry, the dead master’s valet, was taken away, still noting as he went the new look in the Queen’s eyes. And in this same week there came the mourning clothes which they had asked of the authorities and which had been granted them. The Princess Royal fell ill. The Queen would no longer walk in the garden now, and the child, lacking exercise—and with bad blood—suffered. Her legs swelled badly. The authorities allowed the man who had been the family doctor of the children in the old days to come and visit them now. Brunier was his name, and in the old days Marie Antoinette had affected to ridicule his middle-class energy: she thought he lacked respect to the clay of which she and her children were made. She was glad enough to see him now, and he was devoted. He was allowed to call in a surgeon and to bring in linen. Nor was he their only communication with the external world, for though the sound and the news of it did not reach them, yet they were not as modern prisoners are, denied companionship. Upon the pretext or with the real excuse that the mourning clothes did not fit, a dressmaker whom they had known was allowed in; and in general, as will be seen in a moment, there were methods of communication between them and those who desired to know every moment of their captivity and every accident of their fate. From the close of January onwards into the summer, five months, it is possible to establish no precise chronology of their actions, but it is possible to decide the general tenour of their lives: save in one particular, which is that we cannot determine to-day what exactly were the relations between the Queen and those who would rescue her or who could give her news of the outer world—especially Fersen.

We have of course several accounts furnished by eye-witnesses, notably the account of Turgy, who was their sole servant in their prison; but these accounts, and that account especially, are tinged with the very obvious atmosphere of the Restoration. Quite poor people, writing on the suggestion of a powerful government at a time when every laudatory or illuminating detail upon the imprisonment of the Royal Family had its high money value, must, however honest, be somewhat suspect. For the most honest man or woman the conditions of the Restoration were such that there would be an inevitable tendency to exaggeration; and we have no evidence available of the exact characters of the witnesses. Still the witnesses are witnesses, and though an elaborate code of signals (which some of them pretend) probably did not exist, yet we know both from Fersen himself and from the way in which affairs were conducted on either side, that not a little communication was established between the widowed Queen and the Royalists outside. To more than that general statement no historian can commit himself, unless he be one of those belated university types who will trust a printed or a written document beyond their own common sense.

It must be remembered that during the first two months after the death of the King, that is, during all February and March 1793, the exalted and the noble minds of the Gironde were still at the head of that executive power which is in France (since the French have no aristocracy) the whole of government. Nay, they remained technically the heads of the Executive until the end of May 1793, though their power was touched by the establishment of the Revolutionary Tribunal on the proposal of the Radicals in March, and undermined by the establishment of the Committee of Public Safety on the proposal of Danton in early April.

The Girondins and the Municipality of Paris were at odds. The Municipality itself was not homogeneous. The guarding of the Queen, which was the business of the Municipality, was not uniform. The Municipality had to choose many men to relieve each other in relays; and of these, two, Toulan and Lepitre, tended, at least after a little experience of their prisoners, to show them sympathy. One of their officers, Michonis, did more and would have saved her.

From time to time a newspaper would be smuggled in to these Princesses; it is said that music played from a window whence they could hear it, conveyed signals, and at any rate it is certain that Fersen had some news of them.

Now Fersen at this moment, in early February that is, bad as his judgment of French affairs was, appreciated their situation in a phrase. He called the Queen “a hostage,” and this describes very accurately the meaning of her captivity.

I repeat, no one can understand the Revolution who does not treat it as a military thing, and no one can understand military affairs who imagines them to be an anarchy. Of necessity a brain directs them, for if in military affairs a plan be lacking, the weakest opposing plan can always conquer. It was not cruelty nor love of vengeance that dominated the position of the prisoners. They were an asset.

But though their value was recognised and their imprisonment was part of a diplomatic arrangement, yet there were different policies regarding them. The Radicals, the Mountain, were at once the most enthusiastic and the most practical of the Revolutionary groups. They were not in power, they had not a permanent majority in the Parliament though they had Paris behind them, but they saw clearly that France was in to win: they saw clearly (first Danton, then in succession to him Carnot) that every general action lost, every fortress in a chain surrendered, was the approach not of some neutral or balancing arrangement, but of a full, complete and ruthless reaction in Europe without and in France within. It had come to winning all or losing all. The nobler Girondin blood that still controlled the Republic knew too little of the vices of men to follow that calculation. The Girondins still believed that in some mystic way a steady adherence to the Republican ideal—the volunteer soldier as against the conscript, the citizen controlling the soldier, the locality governing itself—man absolute—was a thing so high that no human circumstance could wound it. They thought it bound to survive through some force inherent in justice.

Within three weeks of the execution of Louis all Europe was banded against the Republic, and one may say, morally, all the Christian world, for even the distant and ill-informed Colonials of Philadelphia and Virginia had recoiled nervously at the news of a King’s execution. The pressure of that general war against the Republic was to give, by what fools call the logic of events, a most powerful aid to the practical and savage determination of the Mountain: it was to squeeze to death the idealism of the Girondins.

While yet these last were in power there were plots for the escape of the prisoners, plots which failed; and their treatment, even in minor details (as the allowing them to take their own form of exercise and the leaving of them as much as possible alone) was easy. Little objects left by the King were conveyed to the Queen from the upper room, and Jarjayes, a friend, saw that they reached the King’s brothers. Had the impossible attempt of the Girondins performed the miracle which they who had called on this miraculous war demanded, had the patchy volunteer forces of the French found it possible to conquer in those early months of ’93, the treatment of the prisoners would have gone from better to better; their release by negotiation would soon have arrived, if not by negotiation then from mere mercy. This same Jarjayes, who had been Marshal of the camp and was husband to one of the Queen’s women, found things so easy that he could weave a definite plot for the escape of the Royal Prisoners. Why it failed we do not know, though of course the Royalist evidence we have ascribes it to a special virtue in the Queen, who refused to be separated from her children. In the first week of March the first plan failed, on account of a violent reaction towards severity on the part of the authorities following the first military reverses in the Netherlands. The second plan is better attested, and there is here a sufficient concurrence of witnesses to make us believe that some hesitation of the Queen’s did cause its final failure. She would have had to flee alone, and it is on the whole just to decide that she refused; for we have it on the authority of a fairly honest man that the Princess Royal had some memory of this incident of her childhood and had spoken to him on it, while Chauveau-Lagarde (who was later the Queen’s counsel during her trial) has left a copy of a note of hers saying that she would not fly alone without her children. Of other supposed communications between her and Jarjayes we have only his copy of her writing.^[31] At any rate, with the last days of March all this early phase of the Queen’s widowed captivity comes to an end. Dumouriez and the French armies lost the great and decisive action of Neerwinden upon the 18th of the month, and in the last week of it, though the Committee of Public Safety was not yet formed to establish martial law throughout the Republic and to save the State, yet new rigours began.

The woman Tison and her husband—half the gaolers, half the spies of the family, as I have said—were not permitted to leave the Tower of the Temple. Pencils were forbidden. Upon the 25th of March a chimney fire was a pretext for the appearance of Chaumette coming from the Commune of Paris. He returned the next day with the Mayor Pache, and with Santerre, the man of the fall of the Bastille, the rich leader of the popular militia; in those same hours Dumouriez at the head of the defeated French Army was receiving the general of the Austrian forces and negotiating treason. He was about to join hands with the enemy and to propose a march on Paris. The first demand for the Queen’s trial was made—by Robespierre: a week and Dumouriez’ treason was accomplished: the chief general of the Republic had despaired of France and had gone over to the Austrian camp with the design of marching on Paris and at least restoring order; his army had refused to follow him, but the shock was enormous. Paris won; the Girondins lost. The Committee of Public Safety was established.

The Terror was born; and the Revolution, acting under martial law, went forward to loose everything at once or to survive by despotism and by arms.

Thence onward Marie Antoinette’s imprisonment becomes another matter. On the 20th of April there came into her prison men whose tone and manner would never have been allowed before: the chief of the “Madmen,” as the populace called them, the intense Republicans who would believe anything of a Bourbon, Hébert, came into the prison. He came at night. By coincidence or by design her terrors for the future were to be terrors of the night. It was near eleven when his dandy, meagre figure and thin, pointed face appeared to terrify her, and for five hours the whole place was searched and ransacked. Her little son, already ailing, she had to lift from his bed while they felt the mattress and the very walls to see what might be hidden. They took from Madame Elizabeth her stick of sealing-wax, her pencil—which had no lead to it—and they took with them a little scapular of the Sacred Heart and a prayer for France—but the France for which the Princesses had this written prayer was not the nation.

On the 23rd they came again and found nothing but an old hat of the King’s, which his sister kept as a sort of relic and had put under her bed. It was taken for granted (and justly) that communication had been established between the prisoners and the Kings outside. A denunciation of Lepitre, Toulan and the rest, failed, but Toulan and Lepitre were struck off the list of guards.

With the end of May the populace, supported and permitted by the new Committee of Public Safety, conquered the lingering Moderate majority, and the Committee of Public Safety was left without rivals; it began from that moment to direct the war with the leonine courage and ferocity, the new and transcendent intelligence, the ruthless French lucidity which ultimately at Wattignies saved the State.

Upon the victory of Paris and the Mountain, the destruction of the Moderates, the establishment of martial law, the despotism of the Committee of Public Safety, came the last phase of the Queen’s imprisonment—and with it, by a most evil coincidence or portent, the growing illness of the little heir, her son. Sharp pains in his side, convulsions, the doctor sent for in the early part of May, and again towards its end, and again in June, things going from bad to worse with him.

To these prisoners, shut away from men, the movement of that world was unknown. They only knew that something was surging all round the thick, obliterating, impenetrable walls of their Tower.^[32] On the day when the populace conquered the Girondins, all they knew was that they were not allowed even upon the roof, from which, upon most days for some hour or so, they might take the air and look down upon the slates of revolutionary Paris far below; and during June when the new power of the Committee and of martial law, of the Terror, of the determination of the Revolution, of the city, was fixing itself firmly in the saddle, they knew nothing of what was passing, save perhaps from a growing insolence in their guards.

In that same month yet another plot for their escape failed. It depended upon two men; the one a certain Batz, on whom our information is most confused and our evidence most doubtful, as indeed his own character and his own memories were doubtful and confused (he was a sort of enthusiast who had already attempted many impossible things); the other, a character quite clearly comprehended, one Michonis. Batz was a kind of baron; Michonis was, like Toulan and Lepitre, of the Municipality and had regular authority. He will be seen again in the last plot to save the Queen. Of whatever nature was this uncertain attempt, it also failed. Shortly after the woman Tison diversified their lives by going mad with great suddenness and suffering a fit. She was removed; and the incident is only of note because certain pamphleteers have called it a judgment of God. Yet her wage was small.

Upon the day after that unusual accident, the growing suspicion of the popular party against what was left of Moderate administration in Government broke out in a furious denunciation of actual and supposed conspiracies. It was feared that the great mass of suspects now gathered into the prisons possessed some engine for revolt. An extreme policy in diplomacy and in arms, as in internal government, finally prevailed, and with the 1st of July this ardent severity took the form of a decree, passed in the now enfeebled and captured Parliament, that the Dauphin—the greatest asset of all—should be separated from his mother and put, though in the same building, under a different guard.

It is not to be imagined that so large a transformation of policy between the execution of the King and the decree for the separation of the Dauphin had, in any part of it, a mainspring other than the war. I have said that the steps of the spring, the destruction of the Gironde by the Mountain, the capture by Paris of the Parliament were but the effects of the collapse of the Volunteer rush at Neerwinden, the treason of Dumouriez and the new—and necessary—martial law that henceforward bound the Republic. All the last rigours of the imprisonment depended upon the same catastrophe.

The enemy that had been checked at Valmy, and had been attacked in the winter but half-prepared, the enemy that had suffered the French gallop to overwhelm the Netherlands and to occupy Mayence—was returning. The Republicans were out of Belgium, the armies of the Kings were flooding back upon the Rhine. The Rhine and Alsace depended upon two things—Mayence, and, behind it, shielding Alsace, the lines of Weissembourg that stretched from the river to the mountains. Mayence was to fall, the lines of Weissembourg were to be pierced. As for the Belgic frontier, there a line of fortresses could check for a moment the advance of the Allies—for the French fortify: they are in this the heirs of Rome; and whenever they suffer defeat the theory of fortification is belittled; in the resurrections of their military power the spade goes forward, borne upon the shoulders of Gaul.

In this July of 1793 the Belgic frontier only perilously held. The sieges were at hand and the fall of the frontier strongholds was at hand. These once conquered, it was proposed by Austria, Prussia, and England to dismember the territory of the Republic. To all this I will return.

It was upon the 1st of July, with the enemy advancing, that it was proposed to take the Dauphin from the Queen.

Upon the evening of the 3rd the order was executed.

It was but just dark when the guard challenged a patrol at the gate of the Tower; the patrol was the escort of six Municipals who had come from the authorities of the city to take the person of the child.

The women within the prison had had no warning. The same Fate which had been kind to them in making a silence all around their lives during these dreadful months and in hiding from them the dangers that rose around was cruel to them now, leaving them unprepared for this sudden and tearing wound. There was a candle in the room and by its light the little girl, the Princess Royal, read out aloud—from a book of Prayers, it is said—to her aunt and her mother, the Queen. These two women sewed as they listened; they were mending the clothes of the children. The little boy slept in his bed in the same room: his mother had hung a shawl to hide the light from his eyes. Save for his regular breathing there was no sound to interrupt the high, monotonous voice of the little girl as she read on, when suddenly her elders heard upon the floors below the advent of new authorities and of a message. The steps of six men came louder up the stone stairs, the doors opened as though to a military command, and the Princesses saw, crowding in the corner of the small room, a group whose presence they did not understand, though among them the Queen recognised Michonis. The reading stopped, the women turned round but did not rise, the child stirred in his sleep. One of that group spoke first before the Queen could question them. “We have come,” he said, “by order of the House, to tell you that the separation of Capet’s son from his mother has been voted.”

Then the Queen rose. Never until now had she abandoned before any but her husband, or perhaps in the very intimacy of the Council, the restraint which she believed her rank to demand. The violence of her blood had been apparent in many a petulant and many an undignified gesture; she had raised her voice against many a deputation; she had sneered more than once against women of a poorer kind; she had thrown at La Fayette the keys which he demanded on their return to the palace after the flight to Varennes; but she had never yet lost command of herself. Upon this terrible night, for the only time in her life, she did completely lose all her self-command. Something confused her like a madness, and all the intensity of her spirit came out nakedly in defence of the child.

She stood up by the little bed; all her complexity of pride and all her training in intrigue deserted her; she cried out; she took refuge in such weapons as the women of the poor, whom no law protects, use to defend their sanctities. Her voice rang, became shrill and shrieked in the little room, violent and rising; she threatened death; next moment she implored. Her little daughter and her sister-in-law caught her methods. They joined in the imprecations and in the prayers. The child was awakened by the noise, by the shuffling of so many awkward and heavy feet in the doorway, by the passionate outcries around him; he awoke and gazed; then when he saw his mother he clung to her, and she kissed him repeatedly and held him as though he were again part of herself and as though none could take him from her without taking her life also, and all the while her prayers and execrations showered upon the armed men as they stood hesitating apart and waiting.

How long this scene continued we cannot tell; it may have been the best part of an hour.^[33] At last some one of the deputation found decision and cried, “Why will you make this scene? No one wants to kill your son! Let him go freely; we could take him—if you force us to that!”

She lifted the little boy up and dressed him, his eyes still dazed with sleep. She lingered over him with conventional benedictions, repeated and prolonged. Her hands could not let him go. Fearing some further violence, a member of the deputation muttered a suggestion for the guard; but the Queen’s active passion was exhausted, she would be violent no more. She herself, perhaps, loosened his little hands from her dress and said, “Come, you must obey....” Then they took him away; the great door was shut upon him. The women within, trembling beside the cot, could still hear the child pleading with a lessening voice in the distance until another door clanged below and the rest of the night was silent.

God has made a law whereby women are moved by strength and by weakness, but in different ways: by strength as a necessity for their protection, so that they demand it in men and in things and yet perpetually rebel against it; and by weakness as an opportunity for the exercise of all their nature, so that suffering (if it is sudden) or disaster calls out in women all of themselves: and this is especially true of mothers and sons.

That child, that boy, had seemed at first so rosy and so well in the old days at Versailles; his health had so contrasted with the sickly advance of Death upon his elder brother; he had been the hope of the throne. Then there had come upon him the curse of the men of his family; he had grown weaker and more weak; he had had nervous fits of rage, a nervous fear of noise unnatural to his age. Some had thought him deficient; all had noted with anxiety or with malice his increasing weakness during the period of the Royal Family’s imprisonment. Fits had seized him. But a few weeks before he had had convulsions; and all June, during the illness of which I have spoken, fears for him had already arisen: it was a rapid tragedy of childhood that was soon to end in death.^[34] His mother’s devotion—having him now only for its object in the isolation of those stone walls—had become the whole of her being. That he had grown so dull, so failing, so more than common sickly, so odd, did but heighten in some way the mystic feeling in her. He was the King.... She was observed to pay him a certain reverence, and she served him at table (as spies thought at least) with the gravity of a ceremonial. All this at one abominable stroke she lost.

She would watch him—oh, unhappy woman!—through chinks and chance places when the little chap was taken out to get the air, with gaolers, upon the roof for some few minutes of the day. He, of course, easily and at once forgot. He soon learnt to repeat the phrases he heard around him, laughed when his guardians laughed, and even asked, as he heard them ask, “whether the women still lived?” He played at ball a little with his gaolers; but he weakened still and he decayed. That child was the head of an authority older than Islam, and the heir to a family name older than the Sagas, and in his little drooping body were all the rights of the Capetians.

The Queen saw him, I say, for a few moments—now upon one day, now upon another—by chance, as he took the air with his gaolers. She had nothing more to lose—and her soul was broken.

Those who were to destroy the new society of the French, to rescue or to avenge the Queen, were now once more at hand and now almost arrived.

Their way to Paris lay open but for two last perilous and endangered defences; to the right the lines of Weissembourg, to the left Maubeuge.

There are two avenues of approach westward into the heart of Gaul and two only. The great marches of the French eastward, which are the recurrent flood-tides of European history, pour up by every channel, cross the Alps at every pass, utilise the narrow gate of Belfort, the narrower gate of the Rhone, the gorge of the Meuse, the Cerdagne, the Somport, Roncesvalles. But in the ebb, when the outer peoples of Europe attempt invasion, two large ways alone satisfy that necessity at once for concentration and for a wide front which is essential to any attack upon a people permanently warlike.^[35] These two ways pass, the one between the Vosges and the Ardennes, the other between the Ardennes and the sea. By the first of these have come hosts from Attila’s to those of 1870; by the second, hosts from the little war-band of Clovis to the Allies of 1815. Both avenues were involved in this balancing moment of ’93: the first, the passage by Lorraine, was still blocked by the defence of Mayence and the lines of Weissembourg;^[36] the second, the passage by the Low Countries, was all but won. Of the string of fortresses defending that passage, Maubeuge was now almost the last, would soon be the very last, to stand.

It was not upon Mayence and the lines of Weissembourg (though these to soldiers seemed of equal importance), it was upon the bare plains of the north that Paris strained its eyes in these perilous hot days—the long flat frontier of Hainault and of Flanders—and it is here that the reader must look for his background to the last agony of the Queen.

The line of defence, stretched like a chain across that long flat frontier, was breaking down, had almost disappeared. Point after point upon the line had gone; it held now by one point remaining, and the ruin of that was imminent: the Republicans were attentive, in a fever for the final crash, when the last pin-point upon which the defence was stretched should give way and the weight of the invaders should pour unresisted upon Paris. When that march began there would be nothing for those who had challenged the world but “to cover their faces and to die.”

Of what character is that north-eastern frontier of France and what in military terms was the nature of the blow which was about to fall?

It is a frontier drawn irregularly due south-east for a hundred miles, from the sea to the difficult highlands of Ardennes and the waste Fagne Land. As it runs thus irregularly, it cuts arbitrarily through a belt of population which is one in creed, speech, and tradition: there is therefore no moral obstacle present to the crossing of it, and to this moral facility of passage is added the material facility that no evident gates or narrows constrain an invading army to particular entries. From the dead flat of the sea-coast the country rises slowly into little easy hills and slopes of some confusion, but not till that frontier reaches and abuts against the Ardennes does any obstacle mark it. It is traversed by a score of main roads suitable for a parallel advance, all excellent in surface and in bridges and other artifice; it is thickly set with towns and villages to afford repose and supply. Lastly, it is the nearest point of attack to Paris. Once forced, ten days’ rapid marching from that frontier brings the invader to the capital, and there is nothing between.

Such advantages—which, it is said, tempt unstable brains in Berlin to-day—have rendered this line, whenever some powerful enemy held its further side, of supreme defensive importance to the French. Until the formation of the Belgian State it had been for centuries—from the battle of Bouvines at least—the front of national defence; here the tradition of the seventeenth century and the genius of Vauban and his successors had established a network of strongholds, which formed the barrier now so nearly destroyed in this summer of ’93.

These fortresses ran along that frontier closely interdependent, every one a support to its neighbours, forming a narrowing wedge of strongholds, from where Dunkirk upon the sea was supported by Gravelines to where the whole system came to a point in the last fortress and camp of Maubeuge, close up against the impassable Ardennes.

Maubeuge was the pivot of that door. Upon Maubeuge the last effort of the invaders would be made. The rolling up of the defending line of strongholds would proceed until Maubeuge alone should be left to menace the advance of the invasion. Maubeuge once fallen, all the Revolution also fell.

So much has been written to explain the failure of the Allies and the ultimate triumph of France in that struggle, that this prime truth—the all-importance of Maubeuge—clear enough to the people of the time, has grown obscured.^[37] The long debates of the Allies, the policy of the Cabinet in London, the diversion upon Dunkirk, all these and many other matters are given a weight far beyond their due in the military problem of ’93. The road from the base of the Allies to their objective in Paris lay right through the quadrilateral of fortresses, Mons, Condé, Valenciennes, Maubeuge. Mons was theirs; Condé, Valenciennes and Maubeuge blocked their advance at its outset. A deflection to the left was rendered impossible by the Ardennes. A deflection to the right, possible enough, added, for every degree of such deflection, an added peril to the communication of the advance, laying the flank of the communications open to attack from whatever French garrison might have been left uncaptured. All these garrisons must be accounted for before Coburg could march on Paris. Mons, as I have said, was in Austrian hands and in Austrian territory; Condé, nay, Valenciennes, might fall successively to the invader; but so long as Maubeuge remained untaken the march upon Paris was blocked.

There were not wanting at that moment critics who demanded an immediate march on the capital, especially as the summer waxed, as the peril of the Queen increased, and as the immobility of the Allies gave time for the martial law of the Terror to do its work, and to raise its swarms of recruits from all the country-sides: these critics were in error; Coburg at the head of the Austrian army was right. Poor as was the quality of the French troops opposed to him, and anarchic as was their constantly changing command, to have left a place of refuge whither they could concentrate and whence they could operate in a body upon his lengthening communications, as he pressed on to Paris through hostile country, would have been mad cavalry work, not generalship. Maubeuge with its entrenched camp, Maubeuge open to continual reinforcement from all the French country that lay south and west of it, was essential to his final advance. That Maubeuge stood untaken transformed the war, and, in spite of every disturbing factor in the complex problem, it should be a fixed datum in history that the resistance of Maubeuge and the consequent charge at Wattignies decided ’93 as surely as the German artillery at St. Privat decided 1870. Maubeuge was the hinge of all the campaign.

Coburg, as the summer heightened, set out to pocket one by one the supports of that last position: he easily succeeded.

In Paris a vague sense of doom filled all the leaders, but a fever of violent struggle as well.... The Queen in her prison saw once again (and shuddered at it) the dark face of Drouet and heard his threatening voice.

All France had risen. There was civil war in the west and in the north. A Norman woman had murdered Marat. Mayence was strictly held all round about with the men of Marseilles raging within; and as for the Barrier of Fortresses to the north, Coburg now held them in the hollow of his hand.

A fortnight after the Dauphin had been taken from the Queen, the fortress of Condé fell; it had fallen from lack of food. The Council of Maubeuge heard that news. Valenciennes would come next along the line—then, they! They wrote to the Committee of Public Safety a letter, which may still be read in the archives of the town, demanding provisions. None came.

It is difficult to conceive the welter of the time: distracted orders flying here and there along the hundred miles of cordon that stretched from Ardennes to the channel: orders contradictory, unobeyed, or, if obeyed, fatal. Commands shifted and reshifted; civilians from the Parliament carrying the power of life and death and muddling half they did; levies caught up at random, bewildered, surrendering, deserting; recruits too numerous for the army to digest; a lack of all things. No provisions entered Maubeuge.

July dragged on, and Maubeuge could hear down the west wind the ceaseless booming of the guns round Valenciennes. Upon July 26th, Dubay, the Representative on mission for the Parliament, sent to and established in Maubeuge, heard an unusual silence. As the day drew on a dread rose in him. The guns round Valenciennes no longer boomed. Only rare shots from this point and from that were heard: perhaps it was the weather deceived him. But all next day the same damnable silence hung over the west. On the 30th he wrote to the Parliament: “We hear no firing from Valenciennes—but we are confident they cannot have surrendered.” They had surrendered.

So Valenciennes was gone!... Condé was gone.... Maubeuge alone remained, with the little outpost of Le Quesnoy to delay a moment its necessary investment and sure doom.

The officer in command of Maubeuge awaited his orders. They came from Paris in two days. Their rhetoric was of a different kind from that in which Ministers who are gentlemen of breeding address the General Officers of their own society to-day. The Committee of Public Safety had written thus: “Valenciennes has fallen: you answer on your head for Maubeuge.”

Far off in Germany, where that other second avenue of invasion was in dispute, the French in Mayence had surrendered.

So July ended, and immediately, upon the 1st of August, the defiant decree was thrown at Europe that the Queen herself should be tried. So closely did that decision mix with the military moment that it was almost a military thing, and at half-past two on the morning of the 2nd the order reached her: she in turn was to go down the way so many had begun to tread.

She showed no movement of the body or of the mind. Night had already brought her too many terrors. The two women were awakened. The decree of the Convention which ordered the transference of the Queen to the Conciergerie for her trial was read. She answered not a word, but dressed herself and made a little package of her clothes; she embraced her daughter gently, and bade her regard Madame Elizabeth as her second mother; then stood for a moment or two in the arms of that sister-in-law who answered her in whispers. She turned to go and did not look backward, but as she went out to get into the carriage which was to carry her across the City, she struck her head violently against the low lintel of the door. They asked her if she was hurt, and she answered in the first and only words that she addressed to her captors that nothing more on earth could give her pain. The carriage travelled rapidly through the deserted streets of the night, the clattering of the mounted guard on either side of it. It was her one brief glimpse of the world between a prison and a prison.

As the Queen drove through the night, silent as it was, there reached her those noises of a City which never cease, and which to prisoners in transition (to our gagged prison victims to-day as they cross London from one Hell to another) are a sort of gaiety or at least a whiff of other men’s living. These noises were the more alive and the more perpetual in this horrid August dark of ’93 because a last agony was now risen high upon the Revolution; the news had been of defeats, of cities fallen, of Valenciennes itself surrendered: so that the next news might be the last. All night long men sat up in the wine-shops quarrelling on it; even as her gaolers drove her by, she saw lights in dirty ground-floor windows and she heard from time to time snatches of marching songs. It was the invasion.