man’s estate that are left untilled and have lost almost all feature save the records of past wars. For here has been a great battle-field for ages. Across its flat one may still trace the lines of the Roman military roads. Here the French have made their chief modern ranges for the training of their gunners. Here Attila was broken in his great defeat, and you may see his enormous oval camp still standing, so large that it looks like the ruin of a town in the midst of the plain. Here also in the very next year that followed the flight of the king were to meet for the first time the armies of the Revolution and of Europe, and from these poor fields were to retreat the forces of the invasion, which did not return until, after twenty-two years, the republic and Napoleon had transformed the world. Here, yesterday, the fate of the world was decided once again in the Battle of the Marne.
Right across the sweep drives the great road from Châlons, twenty-five miles, till it strikes Sainte-Menehould, a country town at the foot of the Argonne. Only two relays break this long day’s stretch, Somme-Vesle and Orbeval, each an isolated farm and standing in one of those slightly depressed muddy-watered dips to which the road falls, and from which it as slightly rises again in its eastward progress across the plain. And there, at Somme-Vesle, at the Châlons end of the stretch, barely ten miles away, should be the first cavalry awaiting them, Choiseul’s troop.
It was in the hours between half-past four and six that the Berline was passing through this stage. That hour and a half of debt to fate which the loyalty of Lagny at Chaintrix had increased perhaps to two, the avoidable accidents under Vallet’s posting had stretched to nearly three.
Young Choiseul, the duke, had come in to Somme-Vesle. He had his orders to expect somewhat after noon at the earliest, at the latest by three, the carriage which held his master and the queen. His exact time-table said one, and at one that carriage had not yet reached Chaintrix! The officer was mounted, and his troop of forty also—forty German mercenaries esteemed more trustworthy in such a task than any troops of the nation. From one till two they still sat their horses, waiting in the road before the posting-house, with the width of the Champagne all about: a strange sight to see, so considerable an escort thus gathered, waiting for they would not say what! But here again, so oddly fast did the news travel, one man knew. As the afternoon wore on, and men sent riding up to the crest of the rise could see nothing coming down the road, the postmaster, as though to make conversation, strolled up to one man in subordinate command and said, “It seems that the king is to pass this way?” He was answered neither yes nor no.
Peasants came in from the fields; a little knot of men gathered; rumours went about. In those days all the French had evil words for the foreign mercenaries in the army. Some of the more ignorant of the field-workers began whispering that they were a press-gang, that they had come to seize men for the service. The better instructed were far more suspicious of something far more probable. Three o’clock passed, and there began to be some pressure upon the mounted men. A few were hustled; the gathering of peasants grew. Beyond all essentials was it essential, thus far from any support, to avoid a rumour of the truth, or at least the spreading of it; and for Choiseul to prevent any conflict between his little line of Germans and the gathering peasantry about. And in one of those agonies that soldiers always feel, whether the command be great or small, when synchrony fails and when they are waiting hopelessly for something that never comes, torn as soldiers always are in such delays between two necessities, Choiseul as the afternoon still drew on and the road for miles still showed quite empty, decided for the more immediate duty. A little longer, and his troop would have suffered assault, and the king, if after such inexplicable delay he did come at all, would come to find a country-side beginning to rise and his chances ruined.
But was the king coming? How often had not Choiseul been told of the perils, of the necessities, of the last moment of the repeated postponements! How well did he not know himself the chances of a postponement, he who had left Paris as a forerunner just before, and who had a good eye for the faults of the court! Hour after hour had passed; the king could not be coming, and to linger longer with his little German troop was in any case to ensure failure. He would ride away with his men across Argonne and join the main body at Varennes. He would not further rouse the growing talk of the fields by swelling the contingents to the east with his own, and by showing more soldiers than
need be along the road. He would cut across the plain and through the woods. He rode away, and his men after him.
As the horses drawing the Berline topped the slight rise which hides from that approach the posting-house of Somme-Vesle, and as the flat dip, with the steading and the long wall of the courtyard, appeared before the travellers, the king from the window, the guardsmen riding at the side, saw in one moment a sudden nothingness, which struck them as though the whole of their chances had turned. Lounging before the gate of the stables were the few hostlers and servants of the place. Of the soldiers in their blue and white, and of their mounts, not a sign. It was inexplicable, but it spoke loudly. And the emptiness of Champagne became in that unexpected shock far emptier than before. The travellers did not speak to one another; they did not even press the relay. For the first time that day a sense of dread was growing in them. They went on under the evening.
For it was now already evening. The reddening sun broke for a moment through a rift in the western clouds; it shone upon tumbled, white fields, bare or with a meagre harvest, and, upon its ridge to the left, on the mill which was to be lifted into such fame fourteen months later under the name of Valmy: they were crossing that battle-field.
One more halt, one more relay under the failing light, and the hoofs of the horses rang over the paving of Sainte-Menehould with the high woods of Argonne right before them. And as they came through the evening street, with all the people out to enjoy the new coolness of the air, that town more than any other they had yet passed knew thoroughly what was toward.
Gossip of it had been passing in the inns for hours. The post of hussars there waiting had angered men, but had been also too well explained, and their captain, as the coach waited for its horses, forgot the official secret and saluted when those within beckoned him to hear the news. Drouet, the son of the postmaster, himself now acting as postmaster of the place, sullenly ordered the harnessing, glancing ill-naturedly at the huge, yellow thing, with its heaped luggage, and tarpaulin atop, and telling his men in that hill country to spare their cattle. It was perhaps a close thing whether, amid the growing suspicion and anger of the place, one and then another and then a third passing the news, and all aflame against the foreign mercenaries set there for a guard, the coach would be allowed to start at all.
But the same fear and doubt of consequences held them here at Sainte-Menehould as it had held the much smaller number who had gradually heard the truth far up the road hours before. And the travellers began their climb unmolested under the falling night up into Argonne. One more relay in the darkness at Clermont, where the road to Montmédy branched off from that to Metz, and they were upon the last stage to Varennes and to safety.
But when they were gone, when they had thus been hardly allowed to go, the captain of the little troop of cavalry, sounding the boot and saddle, lit the flame. The militia were summoned by drummers throughout the streets, the German soldiers, mutinous with hunger after their long wait and supported in their mutiny by the town folk, failed to obey. The town council met, arrested, and examined the captain in command, and after one hour of increasing vehemence this decision was taken, which changed the story of France and of the world, “That the fugitives should be followed and detained.” And the two men chosen for this task of life or death—for should they fail, it was certainly death upon the return of the armies—were Drouet, the young postmaster, and Guillaume, both ex-cavalrymen and both men knowing, as they had need to know, the darkness of Argonne that night. Both were men of great courage.
The odds against them were heavy. Of eighteen miles their quarry had a start of seven. Further, they thought, as did all to whom the plan had not been given, that the king’s flight would be by the main Metz road. They knew nothing of his goal at Montmédy and of the turn-off toward Varennes which he would take at Clermont. They did not know that Varennes meant for him safety and for themselves immediate defeat.
They rode furiously up the road, and as they neared Clermont, nine miles on, having found in all those nine miles no sign of lights before them, in the pass where the great woods come close on each side and through which the road, the railway, and the stream run side by side to-day, Drouet heard voices in the darkness. He knew them for his own servants.
He learned in one breathless question and answer that the coach had turned off the Metz road after the relay down toward the north and Varennes. He had to decide in the thick darkness, and at once, between following by the highway and cutting through the woods. He had the soldier in him, and he decided. He would take the chance of the woods, though he had eleven miles to go, and only an hour to ride it in. If he did merit anything of fate, he would come in ahead of his prey; and if he failed, he failed.
He took the steep bank up into the trees with Guillaume, and though the two men knew the woods well, it was miraculous that they could thus gallop through a clouded night, through paths which I, who have followed them in full day, found tortuous and confused and often overgrown. He came down with his companion into Varennes town by the lane that leads from the forest above. It was asleep save for one light where men were sitting drinking. The hour was just on eleven. They could not tell whether they had won or lost in that great race. But Drouet, full of immediate decision, roused here a house and there another, blocked the bridge that led eastward to the farther part of the town and out toward the army by dragging across it an empty wagon that lay by, and then strode up the main street of the place to find whether he had lost or won.
He came upon the Berline suddenly under an arch that spanned the way from house to house, the big thing almost filling the arch, and its two round lamps, with their reflectors, shining like great eyes. He heard some altercation, and shrill above the other voices one woman’s urging the postillions. They would consent to go only a few yards farther, to cross the river. And there was Bouillé’s son and his men waiting for them. Drouet took the leader’s reins and threw him back on his haunches. He had won the race.
What followed was the anticlimax and the despair: the mayor, roused and hesitating; the hussars drifting in—Choiseul and the rest—now powerless before an immense armed mob that had gathered under the new day; the gallopers arrived at last from Paris; the slow, dreadful return under the heat; and the restoration of the crown to the palace, which was henceforeward its prison.
PART THREE
THE STORMING OF THE TUILERIES
INTRODUCTION
After the failure of the flight of the royal family, it was evident to all men of foresight that the European governments, and in particular the government of the empire at the head of which were the brother and afterward the nephew of Marie Antoinette, would attempt to restrain the Revolution by force of arms. It was not equally apparent that matters would come to actual war, for many erroneously thought that the French would yield to the threat of foreign intervention. At the head of those who were guilty of this capital error was Marie Antoinette herself, who wrote to her brother in the autumn of that same year, 1791, suggesting that he should gather a large armed force upon the frontiers, and declaring that it should act as a menace and a police. She was thus principally responsible for what followed.
The winter passed with a false situation both within France and without. There was a desperate attempt to keep the king nominally in power, though all real authority had left him since his flight. This attempt was resisted by the mass of opinion, but was supported by nearly all the politicians, even the most radical. The foreign governments, meanwhile, grew more and more threatening, and Marie Antoinette kept up a secret correspondence with them. It became obvious as the spring of 1792 approached that if the foreign armies intervened, it would be not only to save the monarchy, but to crush the Revolution altogether. The queen betrayed French plans of war to the enemy. The emperor wrote a letter demanding certain things to be done in his name that concerned French domestic politics alone. The result was that the French Revolutionary parliament made war in April, 1792. Prussia joined Austria in the coming campaign.
Luckily for France, the foreign preparations were very slow; the French forces were in a deplorable state, and the success of the foreign invaders hardly doubtful. Meanwhile it became more and more publicly known that the court welcomed the war as a probable or perhaps certain deliverance of the royal family by foreign arms. The Palace of the Tuileries in Paris was thus a sort of fortress wherein the executive,—that is, the king and the queen at his side,—still wholly in command of the French armies in theory, and largely in command of them in practice, could direct operations adverse to the national welfare.
The instinct of all the democratic leaders was in favour of taking the Tuileries by storm, as a foreign stronghold might be taken; but for this they had no forces save the militia, the regular forces near Paris being in the hands of the king. The turning of the scale was due to the arrival in Paris of armed bands from the provinces, chief among which were the companies from Marseilles. These, with the aid of the Parisian militia and the incompetence of the court, managed to storm the Tuileries upon the tenth of August, 1792, and thus put an end to the French monarchy.
PART THREE
THE STORMING OF THE TUILERIES
UPON Sunday, the twenty-ninth of July, 1792, in the late morning of that day, the broad road that flanks the River Seine above Paris was covered by a marching column of men. They were in number about five hundred. A few showed uniforms grotesque with dust and grease. The most part were in the clothes of their civil estate, a few workmen, many of the professions, not a few from the land. For the most part they went gaily enough, though without parade; but some were very weary, and a few halting pitiably, though all trudged on.
This column was that of “the men of Marseilles,” and their tatters and their fatigue were the usury of five hundred miles of blazing road. They had been one month so marching, and behind them they still dragged two cannon—dragged them by leather lanyards, taking turns.
This last day of their famous raid was hot and cloudless. The sight of the river alone was cool, beyond the stubble of the baked harvested fields; and the great road stretched on dusty hour after hour and league after league.
They had halted for the mid-day meal; the afternoon was already mellowing when they saw at last, far off in the north and west, the twin towers of the cathedral, the lifted dome of the university church upon the height to the left, the windmills upon Montmartre to the right, and between those low and distant hills the haze of Paris.
They formed somewhat before they reached the suburbs; they took some kind of rank, that their approach might be the more significant, and that they might hold their companies in the press of the poor from the eastern quarters who had come out in crowds to meet them under the sunset. They raised their famous song; they came in through the first houses to the noise of “La Marseillaise.”
Before them other contingents, less famous, had reached the city for the Revolutionary feast. These had found the whole town alive with preparation for the struggle; for the war had now run four months, or nearly four, and it was certain that the crown was betraying the people.
Upon the morrow this battalion from Marseilles came into the town through St. Anthony’s Gate, through the main way dense with people, past the last foundation ruins of the Bastille. Their drums beat. They carried their colours before them. Their cannon, now cleaned and burnished, followed in their train.
In the centre of Paris there stands, the most famous, perhaps, among the royal emblems of Europe, a great palace the construction of which is of every age, though its outward aspect is singularly united. It is the Louvre. This great place, more than a third of a mile in length, is in plan two courtyards. The larger of these, as large as a little town, and called the Carrousel, at the time of the Revolution was completed only upon one of its branches, and was closed toward the west by the mass of the Tuileries. Its one completed side was the southern one, that toward the river, called “the Long Gallery.” From the end of this the Tuileries turned away from the river at right angles. For more than forty years the charred walls of that building, burned in the Commune, have disappeared, and their place is taken now by an open garden. Only the two high, flanking pavilions which closed the north and the south of its long line still stand, each now forming one end of the completed great courtyard of the Louvre.
In 1792 the Tuileries had upon the Carrousel side, toward the palace of the Louvre, three smaller yards, walled and preserving its entrances from the public of the city. Beyond these again, and filling all the main Carrousel court of the Louvre, was a crowd of houses pierced by tortuous lanes, and in the midst of them a little chapel to St. Thomas of Canterbury. This mass of houses within the arms of the palace was, as it were, a little overflow of the town into the midst of the Louvre and its connected Tuileries. Through this built and crowded space traffic passed and repassed between the Rue St. Honoré, to the north of the Louvre, and the river, running along its southern side. For under the Long Gallery of the Louvre, the only completed side of the great Carrousel court, arches were pierced, giving access to the quays.
Behind the Tuileries to the west the gardens, which are now open to the town and form a part of it, were then private to the king. Overlooking
them from the north, the great oval of the royal riding-school looked with its tall, mournful windows, and therein, upon benches roughly provided for the passing circumstance, sat the congress of the Revolution. Therein were heard the declamations that hurried on the storm, and in these hot days, when the western casements of the palace stood open at morning, the court within could hear the distant noise of the debates.
That court, with the heavy, lethargic king in the midst of it, still governed in this end of July, 1792. He was still the executive; from him and from those rooms there still proceeded all orders to the armies, all communications with the powers of Europe. A great pomp still surrounded these last hours of the French monarchy. Its ceremonial was still exactly preserved amid the gold, the heavy hangings, and all the splendour of the Bourbons. So long as that centre stood and governed, so long as it betrayed (for it was certainly betraying) the nation in arms, that nation and the great experiment upon which it had embarked were in peril or doomed. For from the Tuileries could go out not only open orders that presumed the defence of the frontiers and resistance to the coming invasion, but secret letters also, very contradictory of these; and one such had gone out in those very days to the peril of the French people. The queen’s letter was an appeal for a proclamation to be issued by the invaders, a manifesto threatening with military execution whatever men or cities might either arrest the foreign armies or insult the shaken and tottering throne of her husband.
The Tuileries, then, thus standing in the midst of Paris, and of Paris armed in militia bodies, swollen with these Revolutionary volunteers from the provinces, was morally a sort of fortress, isolated and held, standing for the enemy in the very heart of the national capital. It must hold out till the invader came, or, if it fell, carry with it the crown.
The Tuileries was not only morally a fortress; it was in some measure an effective fortress as well. A regular force, the royal guard of Swiss mercenaries, was available for its defence; it had cannon, and save against cannon the great building was strong; it expected and received drafts of volunteers of its own that would support the king and could be armed; it possessed good reserves of ammunition. A minority, but a considerable minority, of the wealthier militia in the city, promised a reinforcement to the king. He would have a garrison of some six thousand men if an assault should come.
The very position of the palace strongly aided its defence. The garden behind was well protected; no street flanked it, as the Rue de Rivoli does to-day, but all along the north were houses, the narrow passages through which could easily be held. Upon the south it reposed upon the river, with only the quays between.
If the place was to be taken at all, it could be taken only from the east, the Louvre side; and not from there, it would seem, against any sustained musket-fire from the windows, still less against cannon stationed in the three walled inclosures that stood out before it toward the great courtyard of the Carrousel.
The sultry days with which that August opened were days of a curious hesitation. The invaders, massed under the Duke of Brunswick, beyond the German frontiers, were in column, marching up the Moselle Valley. They had not yet crossed those borders. The secret messages to the enemy, the negotiations between them and the treasonable crown, were still proceeding. The armed militia of Paris, or that majority of it which was ready to act for the Revolution and against the king, drilled, but did not yet move. There was a silence, as it were, or at the most a murmur, throughout the million populace and over all the plain that holds Paris. Quarrels arose, indeed, violent enough, and blows were exchanged, especially where the volunteer contingents from the provinces were feasted. Already by that end of July the news of what the invaders intended was abroad. Their proclamation, which the queen had inspired, was on all men’s lips. Copies of it, printed, had come in from the frontiers. It still suited the crown to pretend that it had not heard of that insult which it had itself drafted.
By the third of August the pretence could be kept up no longer, and on that day the king communicated to the congress in the riding-school, to the National Assembly, the amazing terms of the challenge. If the French would not undo all their Revolutionary work, if they met the invasion of the country by resistance, if they menaced the person of the court, and in particular the king and
his family, all so acting were punishable by death, in particular all public officers and magistrates that should so attempt to defend the cause of the nation. As for Paris, if it moved, Paris was to be destroyed.
There is a temper in the French by which everything is restrained in them until they act. It is a temper of rapid accumulation before the moment of decision. During the week that followed, this temper was discoverable throughout the city, very significant to certain captains of the people and in particular to Danton; very much misunderstood by foreigners who have left us their records, and by not a few of the court and of the wealthier quarters of the town.
As though each party to this coming and decisive grappling was instinctively aware of some known trysting-day, the week proceeded under its increasing heat with orders upon each side, with the serving out of ball-cartridge, with the rations of powder for the same, with the sending of directions where men should gather, and where defence should be posted. Neither side yet moved; neither side was strong enough to prevent the preparations of the other. There was violent thunder, but the air was not cleared. The oppression of the sky still grew heavier as the moment of crisis drew near.
I have said that it was upon the third of August that the king had admitted to the assembly the manifesto of Brunswick which heralded the invasion. That day was a Friday. Exactly seven days separated it from the crash. Upon Sunday, the fifth, when the last royal mass was said publicly in the chapel of the Tuileries, whispers and open words among the public in the galleries were the last expressions of civil and unarmed resistance that the court was to hear. By Tuesday, the seventh, every man who was to support the crown had received his orders. Upon Wednesday the Swiss Guards, in their barracks to the west of the town, had the command to march upon the morrow, and on Thursday, the ninth, at evening they came marching in, no man opposing them, while during that same evening all those of the wealthier militia, or of private gentry, or of old servitors, that would garrison the palace and defend the crown, passed in through its doors.
Before night the court heard the hammering and the sawing of the carpenters in the Long Gallery of the Louvre. They were making a gap
A SOLDIER OF THE NATIONAL GUARD GRENADIER OF THE INFANTRY Of LIGNÉ
At the Time of the French Revolution
To face p. 100
there in the flooring, lest the Tuileries should be turned from that end. With the fall of darkness they could also hear the rumbling wheels of cannon going to their posts and of waggons still distributing the arms and the munitions for the fight.
The night fell very dark and moonless, but open, in the stifling weather, to murky stars. From the higher windows of the Tuileries one could see in nearly all the houses around lights maintained at the windows of the citizens; for, that night, few slept. Amid so much terror and surmise, there was a grotesque suggestion of a city illuminated as for a gala-day.
Garrisoned within the palace there stood to arms squads of the volunteers along the first row of its eastern windows; the Swiss Guards were stationed with piled muskets in the three courts before it, and in the central hall up which the great marble stairway turned. The hours of the night went by. Midnight was passed, but nothing stirred.
It was a little before one o’clock in the morning of Friday, August 10th, when this general silence was shattered by one loud cannon-shot close at hand. For a moment it was thought that the popular forces were moving. It was not so. That cannon-shot was only a signal for the bells.
The bells began to ring in steeple after steeple, dome after dome, catching the call one from another athwart the dark town. First on the hill of the university; then by St. Anthony’s Gate, where was the thickest of the Revolutionary gatherings; then, nearer, by the town hall; then from St. Martin’s to the north; from the millennial rough tower of St. Germain to the south. For an hour or more the clamour of the bells filled Paris. But still there was no marching or any sound of arms, and from those high windows of the roof in the Tuileries, those attic windows where the watchers were, the streets lay empty below, under the dim oil-lamps that swung from cords across them and from the brighter light of the unsleeping houses.
From one of those same windows the queen, with certain of her women, watched through those hours of darkness. The stars began to pale, and along the uncertain east a band of dark cloud stood motionless in the sombre sky, like a distant coast revealed by the dawn. Behind it at last the vivid colour of a thunderous sunrise showed. The
MARIE-ANTOINETTE AND HER CHILDREN
From a photograph by Braun, Clément & Co., New York, of a painting by Mme. Vigée Lebrun, in Museum of Versailles
To face p. 103
violent red overspread all the arch above them, and so touched the roofs of Paris that it seemed as though a great fire had come at last with the wars and had caught all the city. Marie Antoinette called her sister-in-law, the Princess Elizabeth, to her side, and the two women watched this thing together. It was a little past four o’clock. The day broadened, and at last the sun rose blinding, and still the silence endured. The bells had long ceased, and the more careless of those within the Tuileries jested one with another, saying, “The tocsin did not yield this night; it has run dry.”
Before the sun had strength, and while yet the Tuileries cast a broad shadow westward over the garden terrace and toward the garden trees, while the streets were still quite empty, the queen unwisely bethought her that something might be done at this last moment to lend strength and dignity to the resistance of the palace. She would summon the king and bring the garrison out before him, so moving their loyalty and his too slow determination.
She went to find her husband. He had sunk into a torpor with the last hours of the night, and when she woke him from the place where he lay he started up dishevelled and confused. His clothes suffered through the wearing of so many hours; his very wig was disturbed and askew. His face was suffused. But he came down at her asking, and stood before the main western garden door, while what could be gathered of the six thousand were hurriedly summoned there into line to meet him and to be passed in review. Not all of them came,—not all of them by very many,—and the thing was so haphazard that unarmed pages slipped into the line and played the fool, with chance tongs and shovels to take the place of muskets when they saluted. The king, a figure not exciting loyalty on that breakfastless morning after that sleepless night, heavy in shoulder as in stomach, purple-coated, freckled and pale, walked up and down the motley line. It was an unhappy business, unworthy, undignified, the true product of an energetic woman’s misunderstanding of men. Just before the king turned to leave them, an old and devoted courtier went down on one rheumatic knee to offer his sword. There was a single laugh from somewhere. Louis turned and re-entered the palace.
By this time the Friday sun had risen high. It was between six and seven o’clock, and still the city did not move.
But there came to the queen—for it was she who was the soul of that defence—news full of omen. The regular government of the city, elective, popular, and resistant to the crown though it was, had not seemed strong enough for battle: it had fallen in the night, and in the town hall there were now in power men of some insurrectionary committee, the leaders of the revolt. The man chiefly responsible for the militia of the city, one who might have divided or checked its forces, by his authority, had left the palace in the night to meet the authorities of the city. When he reached the town hall he had found there not the authorities of the city, but this new insurrectionary body, and as he left the place the mob without had murdered him. It was certain now that the attack could not be restrained.
Before the eastern front of the palace, cutting the great courtyard of the Louvre and shutting off the houses in it from the Tuileries, ran a high wooden paling, stretching from one lodge gate to another. Between that paling and the Tuileries itself detachments of the guard were waiting with muskets loaded, and sections of cannon with matches lit, prepared to discharge at the first menace of attack.
It was about eight o’clock when the head of a street boy who had hoisted himself up precariously from the farther side appeared above that paling’s rim and disappeared again. Then one face, then another, as grotesquely, as impotently showed. Some stayed so long that it seemed as though their owners were standing upon the shoulders of companions. One or two of these larrikins threw stones. A guard levelled his musket, and all those faces popped down again. What a beginning for the catastrophe of a thousand years!
At an upper window of the palace Louis, the king, watched, looking eastward in his turn, and he and those about him heard a murmur coming from along the river quay—a murmur not loud, but wide-spread and deep and dull because there stood between it and the hearers the Long Gallery of the Louvre. It was the advance of the people, of their unformed vanguard, coming before the militia and the volunteers. In a moment that murmur turned to vivid, immediate, and neighbouring sound, like the roar of water which had
been heard approaching in a flume upon a mountain side and breaks suddenly outward from its issue over the washers: so the many thousands of the insurrectionary crowd burst through the arches under the Long Gallery, coming from the river quays into the Carrousel of the Louvre.
Every musket and every window was ready; all the fourteen guns of the palace were ready in rank before it. The great oaken gates of the palisade were burst asunder; the armed mob broke through swelling in; and at that moment the first order was given in the palace to fire.
Instantly the signal rolled along the line, and all the windows blazed with flame. Range in those days was very short, windage very great, and few fell; but the assault was checked, and as it halted, two guns of the Swiss roared out together, and the grape-shot swept down perhaps thirty men, opened a lane in the dark and shouting mass, and sent it pressing backward through the gates and the now opened rents in the palisade.
The Swiss, both those already before the palace and those coming out from within, formed by companies and charged. There were the shrieks and the trampling of a herd overcome by discipline,—the Swiss were perhaps a thousand all told,—and the whole place was cleared: the narrow and tortuous streets between the houses of the great Carrousel of the Louvre; and even, some say, the arches under the Long Gallery and the quays for some yards beyond.
It was not yet nine o’clock, and the palace seemed to be already saved.
There is no other town in Europe, and only two other peoples, the Irish and the Poles, of whom one could not say what many said in that moment of the town of Paris and of the French people, that their fate had been decided by this action of regulars against a mob. But Paris being Paris, and Gaul Gaul, and the French people having beyond any other the gift for rapid organization from below and for corporate discipline, no victory was yet won by the regulars.
Even as the noise of the broken mob retreating died away, another new noise, more formidable, more rhythmical, approached, and the watchers in the Tuileries heard it. It was not an army upon the march, but it was men determined and in some way ordered. It was the militia, it was the contingents from the provinces, and chief among them the volunteers from Marseilles, the five hundred with their guns.
The Swiss were back, ranged before the palace and in reserve in the central hall and by the great staircase. All the muskets were loaded again, though the affair was thought to be finished after that first brief and successful skirmish, when the sound of regular marching and the rumble of cannon-wheels were heard.
At his window, overlooking the still empty enclosures beneath him, stood Louis, heavy with insufficient sleep; by his side stood an official of the county, Roederer. The column of the popular attack came swinging through the arches which led from the river quay under the Long Gallery; their cannon were ready, and their muskets charged. This time it was war.
While each armed body facing the other held its fire, awaiting the advantage gained by such reserve,—for in those days of short range, to let a trained troop opposing one fire first was to have a heavy advantage in the returning fire at close quarters,—Westermann, an Alsatian, Danton’s friend, mounted upon a horse, rode out from the popular ranks to parley in their own tongue with these Swiss mercenaries, German in speech, like himself. One of these fired, I think,—at least, so the best story goes,—and immediately a rapidly increasing, alternative rattle of individual shots broke out from the line of the windows, above from the militia and the volunteers below; and unexpectedly, the ranks opening to let them through, the two cannon from Marseilles gave tongue against the cannon of the guards. This time there was no breaking, and the more trained firing of the militia and the provincial volunteers permitted of no further charge from the guards. But the reciprocal attack began to fill the space before the palace with fallen men, neither side yet proclaiming an advantage. The Swiss Guards still held the main door of the Tuileries; the fire from its long tiers of windows was still well nourished; the muskets in the hands of the half-trained populace were still regularly recharged, and held their own.
It was in this moment of doubt that Roederer, the politician who stood by the king at his eastern window, said to Louis that it was the duty of a monarch not to risk the state. “Look, Sire! A whole people are advancing! If the palace must fall, let it fall; but let the crown be saved.” Louis
looked dully out of that window, and thence he could see the Paris of the kings.
This place stretched back beyond the origins of religion into the roots of Rome; thirteen full hundred years of monarchy had sat therein. The huge pile of the Louvre, stretching out into the morning, was the story of Henry IV, of the Medicean woman before him, and of the Valois. The turrets upon the more distant island were the roofs of St. Louis. Eudes, the son of Robert, the founder of all the royal line, had beaten the barbarian off just where the slate pinnacles of the Châtelet pierced the sky half a mile away. Behind all these visible things were the ghosts of Clovis and of Charlemagne.
He turned to go. He went back through the palace to the western gardens, where the sound of the firing upon the eastern front was deadened by the mass of the palace between. His wife and his children were with him, and a few men of the guard. He crossed between the regular trees—his little boy, his heir, kicking the fallen leaves before him with his foot—and entering the riding-school, Louis took refuge with the parliament.
There stood that day upon the quays outside the southern end of the Tuileries a young man, a young man of twenty-three, a lieutenant of guns, Napoleon Bonaparte, on leave in Paris. He was alone. He had watched all that business curiously, a spectator. He had already some knowledge of what the soul is in men fighting. He has left his judgment upon record that had Louis not turned back that day “to save the monarchy,” the monarchy would have been saved. He believed, and his judgment of arms is not negligible, that if the king had shown himself even then in the open spaces before the palace and in danger, preferably upon a horse, that would have happened to the defence which would have saved it.
It was in the Long Gallery of the Louvre, where that arm of building joins the Tuileries, that the weak point of the defence had been discovered. The young men of the populace, eager and curious, had flowed up the stairways of the Long Gallery and had found the flooring cut and a gap between them and the entry to the Tuileries. That gap they had fought for, conquered, leaped, and bridged with planks; and just as the defence of the palace against the frontal attack was holding its last desperate own before the great main portal, just as the Swiss themselves were wondering how long the pressure they suffered could be resisted, the upper floor of the Tuileries was enfiladed: the first contingents from the Long Gallery were beginning to shoot down and through those open suites of rooms; the garrison was caught in flank and wavered.
Hervilly, an officer commanding the Swiss Guards, in that desperate moment received half a sheet of paper folded in four. The curious may peer at it to-day under glass in the Carnavalet in Paris. It was an order from the king to bid the guards cease fire and march out of the palace back to their barracks to the west of the town. That order had been sent from the place where Louis was in refuge, from the parliament in the riding-school. Hervilly read it. He put it in his pocket again. He still maintained the fire of the guards.
But it was too late. The Tuileries were pierced from the south: those that had found the entry by the Long Gallery called to others behind them; room after room was swept; hundred after hundred of the armed populace pressed through the gap, killing and cleaning out the garrison.
As the fire from the palace windows was thus quenched, the attack from the open against the outer front began to triumph; the main door was forced; the Swiss Guards were broken in the hall and upon the great marble staircase; their remnants were driven out backward through the western doors upon the Tuileries Gardens beyond.
There was no battle any more. The last shots died away as one hunted refugee after another, discharging his last desperate cartridge, was run down with the bayonet; and at last all that sound of men in arms ceased and gave place to the muffled tumult rolling in the rooms of the palace, a looting and a scuffling, a rumbling sound upon the many stairs.
There chimed, heard through this new lull, the strokes of ten o’clock from the dial upon the garden front and from the church of St. Roch, hard by. In those two hours since eight all had been accomplished.