THERE existed in France at that moment one force which, in alliance with the Government, could have preserved the continuity of institutions, among other institutions of the Throne. That force resided in the personality of Mirabeau.

Had he survived and so succeeded—for his failure was only possible with death—the French nation might indeed have preserved all its forms and would then have lost its principle and power. It might have been transformed into something of lower vigour than itself, it might have grown to forget action, and the nineteenth century, which was to see our civilisation ploughed by the armies and sowed by the ideas of Napoleon—so that it became a century enormous with French energy and has left us to-day under a necessity still to persevere—might have been a time of easy reaction: an Europe without Germany, without Italy: an Europe having in its midst the vast lethargic body of the French Monarchy and dominated wholly by the mercantile activity of England.

This, I say, might, or rather would, have been the fate of the Revolution, and therefore of the world, with what further consequences we cannot tell, had Mirabeau, once in alliance with the Court, survived; for wherever in history the continuity of form has been preferred to a spirit of renascence, such lethargy and such decline have succeeded. But though an effect of this kind would have resulted for Christendom in general, for the Queen and for her family the success of Mirabeau would have been salvation. The air and the tradition of the palace would have survived; she would have grown old beside her husband in a State lessened but preserving many of the externals of power; her later years wise, resigned, and probably magnificent. As it was, the alliance between Mirabeau and the Court was made—but before the first year of its effect had run, Mirabeau was dead: he dead, the slope of change led Marie Antoinette, with rapid and direct insistence, to flight, to imprisonment, and to the scaffold.

It is but very rarely that so much can be laid to the action of one brain in history. What were the characters in Mirabeau’s position that made it true of him in this spring of 1790? They were these: that he had through certain qualities in him become accepted as the organ of a popular movement; that, by other qualities more profoundly rooted in him, he was determined upon order; and, finally, that an early maturity of judgment—already hardened before his fortieth year—strong passions often satisfied and their resulting fruit of deadness, much bitter humiliation, the dreadful annealing of poverty working upon known and vast capacity, had rendered him quite careless of those imaginary future things the vision of which alone can support men in the work of creation. He was now a man walking backwards, observing things known, judging men, testing their actions and motives as one would test natural and invariable forces, using the whole either to achieve some end which had already been achieved elsewhere—which was in existence somewhere and had reality—or to preserve things still standing around him, things whose nature he knew. He would have preserved all and he would have degraded his land. This most national of Frenchmen would have closed to France her avenue of growth. He was “practical”: and the chief quality of his people, which is the power most suddenly to evoke a corporate will, he did not comprehend. It was a mystery, and therefore he ignored it. Of things hidden he could divine nothing at all. The Faith, for example, being then driven underground, he utterly despised.

His command of spoken speech, sonorous, incisive, revealing, dominating by turns; his rapid concentration of phrase, his arrangement and possession (through others) of innumerable details, were points that made him the chief of a Parliament: his courage and advancing presence—for he was a sort of lion—peculiarly suited him to the Gauls, and his love of men, which was enormous, forbade the growth of those feminine enmities which are the only perils of our vulgar politicians to-day, and which sprouted from debate even in the high temper of the Revolution, as they must sprout wherever talking and not fighting is the game.

His travel, his wide reading, his communication throughout Europe and in the greatest houses with numerous close, varied and admiring friends, gave him that poise and that contempt for vision which made his leadership, when once he led, secure.

With all this went the passion to administrate, to do, which months of speeches and of opposition to the executive had but swollen. In April his opportunity came.

It was the Queen who made this capital move.

For many months indeed he would have come in secret to the aid of the Court. From the very meeting of the States-General the year before, Mirabeau had known that his place was with Government rather than in the tribune. His past of passion forbade him executive power. Necker, with quite another past—a nasty financial past—had dared to insult him in the early days of the Parliament. All the summer he had begged La Marck, his friend, to speak for him to the Queen, to the Throne. La Marck, who was very close to the Queen and was a companion since Trianon, had spoken, but Mirabeau was still a voice only, and, to women, an unpleasant one. In October he had directly attacked the Queen—she held him responsible for the two dreadful days and the insults of the drag back to Paris. The decrees in November which preserved the Assembly from decay by forbidding its members to accept office had closed the Ministry to him: in December he had tried to work a secret executive power through Monsieur, and Marie Antoinette’s distrust of Monsieur had again foiled him. La Marck had given up hope of helping his friend, the decrees and the debates of the Assembly shook the Throne with increasing violence, the King was counselless, when, after some long debate within herself, of which, in the nature of the thing, we can have no hint or record, the Queen, in the days when the preparation for her child’s sacrament was her chief affair, and a fortnight or so before that communion, determined to unite the brain of Mirabeau to the Crown.

She easily persuaded Louis. Before or after that persuasion she spoke to Mercy, and Mercy wrote to that ancestral Belgic land whither La Marck, certain that nothing could be done in Paris, and desiring to check the effects of the revolt in the Austrian Netherlands upon his estates, had betaken him three months before. La Marck at once returned; he crossed the frontier, and in his private house, up along the Faubourg St. Honoré, Mirabeau and Mercy met upon an April evening. All was most secretly done, so that none, not the populace, nor the Parliament, nor the courtiers—nor even Necker—should know. These two very separate abilities, Mercy and Mirabeau, recognised each other: for some days yet the latter, and the greater, the storm-tossed one, doubted; he still spoke of “an embassy” for his reward—he stooped to beg favour again of La Fayette. At last he was convinced of the Court’s sincerity, and on the 10th of May he wrote for the King—that is, for the Government (there was no other)—that first admirable Letter of Advice, which remains the chief monument of his genius. In one year he had proceeded from being an Evil Reputation to be a Speechifier, from a Speechifier to a something inspiring dread: now he was secretly in power; in half power; his was one of the hands on the tiller. To himself that year had been but a year of debt and makeshift; his principal relief at this vast change was a relief of the purse.

Mirabeau wanted money. He was a gentleman and his honour wanted it. In his appetite for it he did all a gentleman would do, sacrificing that self-respect which men not gentlemen would not part with to save their lives. He approached enemies and friends indifferently. La Fayette, whose militia power offended him and whose nullity drove him wild, La Fayette whom he had attacked and publicly jeered at, he quietly tapped for £2000 and railed when that cautious Saviour of Two Worlds sent less than half the sum. He had the gentleman’s morbid shame of old debts and the gentleman’s carelessness in contracting new. He was of the sort that kill themselves rather than finally default, and yet who take the road that makes defaulting sure. To such a man, now rising on the Revolutionary wave, entertaining, ordering secretarial work on every side, playing the part of a public god, the offer of the Court was new life. Yet here again some apology must be offered to the modern reader for the pettiness of the sum which sufficed in those days to purchase so much power upon such an occasion. For the salvation of the Monarchy Mirabeau was to receive, upon the payment of his debts, not half the income we give to a politician who has climbed on to the Front Bench: when he had accomplished his task he was to receive, upon retirement, a sum that would just purchase such a pension as we accord for life to a nephew or a son-in-law fatigued by two years of the Board of Trade. He accepted the terms: but for him and for those like him a wage, however shameful or secret, is but an opportunity for intense and individual action. He was the more himself and the less a servant when he had wages to spend. He designed his campaign at once: to see the Queen upon whose energy alone he relied and in whom—though he had never kissed her hand or spoken to her face to face—he divined a corresponding courage; and next, through her, while maintaining his demagogic power, to crush the growth of anarchy by the welding of an army; and at last to restore the Monarchy by a civil war. For order was, he imagined, the chief affair, and anarchy was all that great brain could discover in the early ferment of the time.

He was a man very capable of being a lover: he was an artist who ardently desired an instrument: he trusted his capacity with women, and he far over-priced the power in action though not the vigour of the Queen. She upon her side dreaded the meeting and delayed it, though Mercy himself and the new Archbishop of Toulouse, now her confessor, urged it.

Upon the 4th of June the Court had left Paris for St. Cloud to spend, within an hour of the capital and within sight of it, the months of summer. That memorable anniversary of her son’s death isolated and saddened the woman upon whom was thus thrown a responsibility too great for her judgment. All the month she hesitated, while the notes from Mirabeau in his new capacity as Counsellor of the Court, coming in continually more insistent, more authoritative, and more wide, made the meeting a necessity. At last, upon the 29th, she decided. A room was chosen, “such that none could know;” he was to come upon Friday, July 3, to the little back-door of the garden towards the park: there was a further delay—he was put off to the morrow. He slept at his sister’s house at Auteuil, and early on the Saturday morning, taking his sister’s son with him for sole companion, disguised, he drove to the little garden-door. Everything was silent about him in the summer morning as he drove from Auteuil to St. Cloud, that nephew of his riding as his postillion, and no one by. A certain suspicion weighed upon him. He remembered the delays, the secrecy; he remembered that no friend loved him as much as each loved or hated the Crown. Before he put his hand to the latch he gave the boy a note and said: “If I am not returned within three-quarters of an hour, give this to the Captain of the Militia,” and, having said this, he went alone into the garden.

In France and throughout his world the event of those days was the Federation. In ten days all the delegates would meet upon the Champ de Mars for the anniversary of the Bastille: the change in men was to be confirmed in a vast meeting of friendship: the King was to swear and a world quite renewed was to arise. Even in London the blaze of the triumph had struck the street, and the common shows were preparing pictures and models of the feast. Upon this all Europe was turned as the delegates came swarming daily into the simmering July of Paris and as the altar rose upon the great open field by the river. For him, and now for history also, a greater, what might, had Mirabeau lived, have been a more enduring scene, was the secret morning meeting so prepared.

The Queen awaited him in a room apart, the King at her side. She awaited with some hesitation the fierce step and the bold eye, the strong pitted face of “the Monster,” but her rank and a long apprenticeship to reception had taught her to receive. He came in and saw this woman whom he had so much desired to see, he spoke with her for half-an-hour, and as he left her he kissed her hand. Two things remained with him: the moderation, the over-moderation of the King, but in her a sort of regal determination which was half an illusion of his own, but which most powerfully filled his spirit and which left him enfeoffed to the cause he had so long chosen to serve. He came out to his nephew, where the carriage waited, radiant, all his energy renewed. He had perhaps a clear conception of the Queen in action supporting him, determining the King, eagerly accepting his wisdom and his plans. In that he gave her far too great a place; but great men impute greatness, and Mirabeau was too great for women.

The show of the Federation passed, gloriously; the life of the nation rose to passion and broke bounds. In the matter of the army, by which alone Authority could live, Mirabeau saw its strength dissolved. The melting of society had destroyed that discipline, the hardest, the most necessary and the least explicable bond among men: the frontier mutinied for arrears of pay, and with the first days of August it was evident that neither for defence nor for the re-establishment of law would the army be available. The army, that one solid weapon of the Monarchy, was now cracked all down the blade. The Army of the East, long, as I have said, the chief resource of the executive, was affected like the rest of the service. There Bouillé, a trained and careful man, wealthy, noble, of course, Whiggish in politics, and of middle age, held the command and saw from one day to another in all the garrisons of his command the method of soldiers failing. One mutiny followed another; regimental chests were seized for arrears of pay; the non-commissioned officers were no longer with the cadre in spirit; officers of the lower grades had been insulted, of the higher reluctantly and more reluctantly obeyed.

It was at this moment that Mirabeau saw fit to give that grave advice for which posterity has judged him so hardly and which yet betrays the decision of his soul. He determined upon civil war.

Many things might have saved him and the nation from such a policy: notably La Fayette, a plaster head of the Militia might have been made a reserve force behind the failing regulars; and it has been pretended that La Fayette and Mirabeau were now quite separate, and the wealthy young fellow useless to his elder the Statesman, because La Fayette, in opposing Mirabeau’s presidency of the Assembly for the Federation, had offended the vanity from which great orators suffer. The cause is insufficient. Mirabeau had lost all hope that La Fayette could act. He passed him by. What as a fact did prevent the immediate prosecution of Mirabeau’s policy was the insufficiency of the Queen, and this it was that saved the country and the memory of her adviser from a course that would certainly have preserved the Throne.

Contrasted against the surroundings of her family and her Court, even of her immediate enemies, her decision had shone: contrasted against Mirabeau’s will it was pale. She preferred, she even attempted to foist upon him, that project of foreign intervention which, three years later, killed her; and his famous words in his Advice of August 13 seemed to her rhetoric or worse. Its style was “extraordinary”: he was “mad.” “Four enemies are at the charge,” he had written, “the taxes, repudiation, the army, and winter”—she could not bear the style: but he was right. The harvest was in—it was not sufficient; a new and vast increase of assignats was voted—Mirabeau himself most urgently advising it—and on all this, at the end of August, came Nancy.

The chief and the last foundation of force for the King were the Swiss regiments. Those of the Guard in the last supreme moment of the Monarchy all but saved it. At Nancy in that August of 1790 three regiments were quartered, two French, one Swiss, that called “Château Vieux.” They mutinied, mainly for pay; after scenes which do not concern this book, they were broken—upon the last day of the month, with a loss to the still disciplined troops opposing them of forty officers and ten times that number of men. The gravity of that day was of a kind we also know, when, in some crisis (with us such crisis has been for generations foreign, not domestic) a much graver thing, a much louder noise, brings to a pitch emotion ready for violence and suddenly presents as a reality what all had desired or feared. Of such are the first shots of a war, the first news of a fatal illness. The French mutineers were disbanded. The opinion of the moment would have tolerated no course more severe: but—and this was the wedge that struck into the heart of the time and clove men asunder—the Swiss were made such an example of old things as the whole Revolution had come to sweep away. True, their own rich officers were the judges of the Swiss; what was done did not then lie and does not lie to-day on the conscience of the French people; but when of these foreign peasants, driven by poverty to a foreign service and maddened to mutiny by the fraudulent retaining of their pay, one-half were made the subjects of a public horror, the country gasped. The town of Nancy, a town of great beauty, the flower of Lorraine, had fought with and had supported the mutineers. It suffered the sight of half of the whole Swiss regiment marched out for punishment, half sent to barracks and then reserved for some obscurer fate. Of those so publicly destroyed, two-thirds were for the galleys, near a third were hanged on high gallows before all, to turn the stomachs of the new Citizens for a free state; one was broken on a wheel with clubs, his bones crushed to satisfy the privileged in a social order already infamous, his blood spattered on the pavement of a town which had befriended him. It was an anomaly of hell fallen in the midst of the new hopes and within six weeks of that clamour of goodwill upon the Champ de Mars when all such nightmares were to have been buried for ever.

The Assembly voted its thanks for the restoration of order: the vote was moved by Mirabeau. Bouillé commanded an army now silent, and the thing was done. But the minority of wealthy men that had thus dared applaud the executions at Nancy was now cut off from fellowship with the nation, and the civil war which Mirabeau desired was come in spirit—for the Government, the only possible executive, the Crown, was with that minority.

Necker, lost in public opinion, defeated in finance, thoroughly terrified at the sound of arms, was off across the frontier for ever to Geneva, his Bible and his money-bags. For a few months Mirabeau’s strength was to remain increasing, the one central thing—but secretly his power of action was marred, for, while the Court listened and heard him, it did not move. He would have seen the Queen—she would not see him. Already his complicity was guessed by a few—it had been denounced frenziedly amid parliamentary jeers and laughter by one young man, since dead: but the rumour had terrified the palace. Mirabeau, still taking the palace’s pay, still pouring in upon it Advices which he desired to be commands—(and yet still refused so much as a Royal audience)—grew continually upon the Parliament.

As his power over the Assembly increased, his fret against the hesitation of the Court increased with it; it increased to desperation, and that desperation was the more exasperated because a man of his temper could not grasp—in the absence of personal interviews—what it was that held back the Crown. Yet to a man of another temper the explanation would have been easy. There was a conflict, not only of mediocrity with genius, not only of two wills—the one accustomed to an inert command, the other avid to exercise a vigorous one—but a conflict also of ends to be attained; for that which Mirabeau desired—and which he thought the King and Queen to desire—was a national thing, whereas what the King and Queen now desired was a personal thing. He all the while was considering the Monarchy, an institution necessary to his country: they thought more and more daily of their individual selves: their habits, their wounded right, their children—their religion.

In nothing did the friction of that new machine, the alliance between Mirabeau and the Court, show more than in this matter of religion. To Mirabeau, as to every vigorous spirit of that generation, the Faith was inconceivable. How far, by an effort of fancy, he could picture minds that held it one cannot tell, but one may be certain that he could not but associate such minds with ineptitude. Now the business of 1790, unknown to the men who most mixed in that business, was Religion. France had of herself transformed herself in eighteen months. The Roman conceptions had returned, the municipalities governed, the whole people were moving in a stream together, equality had re-arisen to the surface of things; war, if war came, would be a national thing—the life in each had determined to be based upon a general will. At this overwhelming change the Parliament had assisted; it was their function to express its main features in new laws, and, as to details, to thresh them out in debate and make them fit the new scheme: among these details was the definition of the Clergy’s status. The Catholic Church was present—for the peasants at least—and it must thus still be recognised, its powers must be defined, the terms of its recognition must be formulated. These cultivated men of the Parliament—and I include the bishops—had no conception of Resurrection. The Church was an old thing, passive, woven into the lower stuff of the State; it would not again be what a dim tradition affirmed it once to have been. Let it die down quietly in its villages and go. As for the Institution of it, the higher-salaried places—its use in Government—why, that was to be Gallican.

Just before the Federation in July the Civil Constitution of the Clergy had passed the House. Just before Nancy the King had assented, and it was law.

To the men who spoke and legislated, it was a just and straightforward law; to us who know a future they could not know, it is a monstrous absurdity. Priests and bishops “elected”—not by enthusiasm or by clamour or by a populace ardent, but by paper votes—as we elect our dunderheads to Westminster! Unity, the prime test of life, secured by no more than a letter to Rome announcing election and courteously admitting communion! Every diocese and parish a new creation, created without any consultation of Peter and his Authority! Yet such was the sleep of the Faith a century ago that this incredible instrument provoked discussion only; and such protests as came were not protests of laughter or even of anger, but protests of argument—with after-thoughts of money. But the King and the Queen believed.

Had she not suffered, this void of the century in matters of the soul might have left Marie Antoinette indifferent. She had been indifferent to that prig-brother of hers when he played the philosopher at Vienna and the fool in the Netherlands. The populace, who guard the seeds of religion, were unknown to her as to the King and to the Parliament. But she had so suffered that she had concentrated upon the Creed: her husband had always held it simply—he was a simple man. Now, when he signed the Civil Constitution, and she knew of that act, it was proof that they had done with the national ferment, that their concern was to get away, to return, and to reconquer; that henceforward no public act of theirs, no acceptation of any Reform, had in it or was meant to have the least validity in conscience. She especially was quite cut off henceforward from the crown she had worn—it was no longer a symbol of her State for her; and if she had continued to wear it, as Mirabeau desired, after a reconquest achieved through civil war, she would have worn it contentedly over defeated subjects rather than over a nation.

All this Mirabeau saw as little as he saw the passion of the village priests, the anger of the women in the country-sides. The resistance (which immediately began) he thought purely political. Priests that would not take the oath were Partisans of the old tyranny and breakdown; the Pope, who was preparing his definite refusal, was a subtle Italian whom he, Mirabeau, must meet by a Gallic brutality. To the King Mirabeau secretly represented the Civil Constitution and the gathering revolt against it as an excellent lever for recruiting the provinces and raising that civil war of the Government against anarchy which was his whole policy; but to the Assembly (and here it was most of himself that appeared) he spoke against the Church’s refusal to accept with a violence that astounded, and at times provoked to rebuke, his most extreme admirers. All his spirit during that autumn and early winter of 1790-91 is one of diatribe and fury against the intangible foe he himself had raised.

On the 26th of November he forced the Assembly to vote the prosecution of priests who refused the oath; on the 4th of January he accused the hierarchy of their old game—“too well known in our history”—of playing for an “ultramontane” authority; ten days later, on the 14th, he broke all bounds: swore that the priests cared little if religion died (and much he cared for it!) so that their power was saved. The priests present left the hall. He continued with greater violence, and all the Assembly protested. On the proposition of Camus (himself next-door to a Huguenot) it was moved and carried that Mirabeau be no longer heard. When, a bare week after all this, a Letter of Advice reached the King from Mirabeau headed, “On the Way to make use of the Civil Constitution,” how should the King not be bewildered?

The King read it; he found a stupefying series of counsels. How could so simple a man as he understand the contradiction between Mirabeau’s public speeches and secret executive advice? “No time” (he read in Mirabeau’s private communication to the Crown)—“No time could be more favourable for uniting all the malcontents, the most dangerous ones, and raising his royal popularity to the detriment of the Assembly;” he was to provoke resistance secretly, to refuse executive aid: to throw the odium of the Civil Constitution and of the priests’ resistance to it on the Assembly. What could a man of Louis’ kind make of all this? Had Marie Antoinette been a she-Mirabeau, as Mirabeau half-believed her to be, she might have followed the plan. Contrariwise, she was a Christian mother, much too untaught and too devout by now to use religion for political intrigue. To emphasise their bewilderment, this Husband and Wife find that their late Confessor—whom they had indignantly rejected for his schism—had taken the oath at the pressing of Mirabeau himself.... It is not to be wondered at that Mirabeau’s advice hung fire.

There were other glaring contrasts between his public and his private view: there was Mirabeau’s high playing of the demagogue rôle. He must roar with the Jacobins: that organisation, the “radical thousand” of Paris, and a hundred and fifty societies at its back throughout France, already directed the storm from the October of ’90. He mixed with it, flattered it, became its powerful spokesman in the Assembly, was its President by the end of November; and while he so marked and emphasised with his voice and will almost every one of the succeeding steps that led towards a pure democracy, he marvelled that the Court would not accept his secret counsel and believe his support of the Crown to be his true motive of action all the while. It was indeed his main motive; but men of his stature also require applause, and the double part he filled was acted too brilliantly upon its public side for his private statesmanship—to which all his intellect and much of his heart was really devoted—to obtain full weight at the palace. He was permanently mistrusted, and he met that mistrust by chance phrases of contempt or insult which he may or may not have intended to be repeated to the woman and the office which he desired both to guide and to save.

In one thing, however, his influence still weighed: in that one thing it would have sufficed, had he lived, to save the Queen. I mean in the plan, still debated and still postponed, for the abandonment of Paris by the Crown.

I have said that the main misunderstanding between the Queen and Mirabeau lay in this, that for him a national, for her a domestic, end was now in view. For months he had urged a public withdrawal from the capital, a public appeal to the armed forces, a withdrawal to some near and loyal town, a town with a palace and tradesmen dependent on it—to Compiègne, for instance, a long day’s ride^[18] away; thereafter an appeal to the provinces and, if the extremists and Paris would fight, then a civil war and a reconquest of power. He had talked of the Queen on horseback with her son; he resurrected Maria Theresa and imagined bold things. The Queen desired for her husband, herself, and her children merely safety: but she would not leave the King.

Once that summer the Queen and her children had driven out from St. Cloud towards the western woods that overhang the Seine; the King and his gentlemen had ridden westward also in the wooded plain below. Many in either retinue had thought the moment come, but each party returned at evening.

Returned to Paris in the autumn, the rising flood of public feeling made a public appeal and a public withdrawal more difficult with every succeeding month, and month after month it was postponed.

The foreigner, of whom the French had hardly thought during the first months of their enthusiasm, now re-arose before them; many were already anxious for the frontier, and already the irritant of German menace, which was to lead at last from Valmy to Wattignies and from Wattignies to Jena, had begun to chafe the military appetites of Paris. Were war to break out with the spring of the next year—nay, were it only in the air—the escape of the King from Paris would be more difficult than ever.

It was at the close of October,^[19] before the Court had left St. Cloud for Paris, that the plan for leaving Paris first took definite shape and that Louis sent Parniers with a message to Bouillé at Metz.

Mirabeau had pointed to Bouillé as the only general to defend that march; not because Bouillé was on the frontier, but because Bouillé had got his army in hand again, was very capable, did not intrigue. But Bouillé, in Mirabeau’s design, was to come westward and to receive the King at Compiègne. The General himself accepted such a plan and urged it. The King still preferred a flight to the very frontier, Besançon for choice, and it is impossible—when his reluctance to leave at all is considered, his whole character, his wife’s counsel, and her previous attitude in the letters and appeals of that summer—to doubt that the Queen had moulded that decision. It was not a firm choice. Bouillé’s son, coming at Christmas to Paris to sound people and things, found La Fayette of very dubious loyalty, and he doubted the aid of the Militia. He saw Fersen (the young fellow took for granted that Fersen was the Queen’s lover); he saw him in Fersen’s own house in the Faubourg St. Honoré. They discussed the rottenness of the army, the unlikeliness of immediate foreign aid. It was decided to postpone the thing for three months.

And meanwhile the Queen heard debated before her the alternatives of a flight to the frontier and of a domestic rising nearer Paris in defence of the Crown. She was by all her bent—and was increasingly to be—in favour of foreign support; but Mirabeau’s counsel was something to her. At the end of February it prevailed, and La Marck came to Bouillé at Metz with the news that Mirabeau’s plan should be considered. Bouillé agreed. There was to be no suggestion of flight: the Court’s choice of the frontier was to be abandoned. Compiègne should be the goal of a short and determined march. The soldier rejoiced, as did Mirabeau, that a final decision had been made, that no near presence of foreign aid was expected, and that the idea of a flight to the frontier was given up. March, perhaps the close of it, was to see the thing done, and so with the spring was to be issued the challenge to civil war: then and then only, if necessary, might there follow a retirement upon a fortress.

The thing was dangerous and more dangerous. Mesdames, the King’s aunts, had left their country house at great pains for Italy: the populace had all but detained them. La Fayette, a month later, had disarmed certain gentlemen of the palace and had insisted that his Militia alone mount guard. It was certain, as March crept on, that the decision must soon be taken, and that the double power of Mirabeau over Court and Parliament could alone force the exit from Paris to a well-chosen town, and so decide the issue of a Restoration of the Monarchy now so grievously imperilled. Mirabeau still grew in power, still spoke in his loudest tones, still watched, and drove all his team of political dupes and Royal clients, still remained strongly double. Swearing to one that he had all ready for the end of Monarchy if the King should fly; writing continually (and more sincerely) to another his plans in aid of such a flight; asking for yet more money (on the 2nd of March); urging a further double-dealing with the Assembly in a secret and verbal message to the King (on the 13th); betraying the Jacobins, his Jacobins, in a private letter (on the 21st). Doing all this with his intrigue fully formed, and the royal family already sheltered under the wing of that intrigue, Fate entered.

It was on the 24th of March that Mirabeau wrote his last letter to La Marck. His friend had mining rights in the kingdom: the new mining laws were down for debate that week. He promised to speak, and on the morning of the 27th he called on La Marck upon his way to the manège; he was faint and compelled to rest awhile upon a couch there, but he rallied and went on to the Parliament. It was Sunday. The streets were full of people: he was recognised, followed, and cheered.

Upon that 27th of March he spoke more than once: his ill-ease was not apparent. On the 28th he was struck. But even so lying in his bed, for the next three days, in spite of an increasing agony, he made of his moments of respite occasions for set words, usually well chosen, pagan, proud, memorable, and a trifle affected. A crowd in the street without kept guard and silence. A crowd was about his bed continually. Talleyrand, reconciled, came; La Marck, who loved him, came repeatedly—and a hundred others. He spoke, and they spoke, of Death, as a matter for converse, often for jest. La Marck quizzed him: “Oh, you connoisseur of great death-beds!” Talleyrand told him that he came, “like the populace, to hear.” A man who loved him said well, “that he acted death as a great actor upon a national stage.” Astounding courage, and more astounding silence upon the thing he had never cared for or believed: all the greatness and all the void of the eighteenth century was here. He admitted God, however, and rallied his good doctor, a materialist—as then were all, and still are most, experts in viscera: the days were sun-lit, and the sun reminded him of God. So for four days; upon the fifth day, the 2nd of April, at half-past eight in the morning, those watching his last and silent agony saw that he was dead.

Many modern historians have said that the death of Mirabeau affected but little the plans that had been made for flight.

It is an error. The death of Mirabeau changed all, and it was one more of those hammer-blows of Fate exactly coincident with the sequence of the Queen’s weird.

It is true that the flight was already long arranged. It is true that its very details were planned for the most part long before Mirabeau died. Nevertheless had Mirabeau lived the whole thing would have had a different issue; and for this reason, that Mirabeau dominated all that world—not only the world of the Court but also the world of Parliament, and, in some indirect way, the world of Opinion as well—by Will. Any action that the Court had taken with Mirabeau alive and active would have been bent to Mirabeau’s plan, and even if the flight had been, not (as he counselled) to Compiègne, but to Montmédy and the frontier, Mirabeau would have forced at once its success and a consequent civil war. He would have permitted no departure without being privy to it; he would have sworn, shouted, cajoled and persuaded doubly upon either side—for Mirabeau was a soldierly man; he had a plan and could use men by ordering. He could use them for the achievement of a fixed end, which was now the salvation of the Monarchy; for he believed the Monarchy to be the skeleton and framework of France—this creative light of the Revolution around him seemed to him a mere mist and dazzle. Great as he was, I repeat it, the Revolution seemed to him to be drifting towards an Anarchy. He was like a landsman who may be brave and domineering but who shudders when he first comes across the temper of the sea.

But what might have happened is but hypothesis. For Mirabeau died; and Mirabeau once dead it was necessarily certain that the Court, left to itself, should attempt to preserve not Monarchy but merely the Court. Mirabeau living, that determination of theirs to save their bodies would have done no harm, and the eagerness of the Queen to get away to the neighbourhood of friends would have been used as human intelligence uses the instinct of animals. Mirabeau dead, that force ran ever along its own blind line, attempting merely to save the persons of the King and Queen and their children. Attempting so small a thing it happened to fail: but on the failure or success of that attempt the largest things depended.

It was, as we have seen, upon Saturday the 2nd of April that Mirabeau died, and had said in dying that there went with him the last shreds of the Monarchy.

The Sunday following his death was that upon which the Schismatic Priests said their first Masses in every parish of the city.

I have not space to reiterate in this volume the vast issue involved. I have sufficiently emphasised and shall further emphasise the profound truth that every Civil Revolution is theological at bottom, because, at bottom, it must be based upon a divergence of philosophy: a divergence between the philosophies of the old order and the new. A chance test of philosophy thrown at random into the Revolutionary movement had separated men suddenly and was rifting the State asunder; for a fortnight Paris raged upon the Nationalisation of the Church.

I will not detain the reader. There was here one of those double duties where the wisest get most bewildered and the most sincere go the furthest astray. Let the reader remember (difficult as it is to do so in the religious atmosphere of our time) that with the educated of that day Religion was dead—with the populace of Paris even more dead. The thing was a mere emblem. Its last little flickering light (which we have since seen to grow to so great a flame) was not comprehended, save as a political institution, by the great bulk of the Parliament, by the professions, by the workers; the very beggars in the street despised the Faith, and the shrines were empty. You were a priest or one of the very few Mass-goers? Then you were suspected of supporting the old forms of civil polity! After the Civil Constitution of the Clergy you deliberately refused to take a reasonable oath to the Constitution and the new-born Liberty of Men? Then you were a traitor, and a silly traitor at that. Let it be remembered that at this moment Religion had no warriors. All the vast rally of the nineteenth century was undreamt of. The bishops were place-hunters full of evil living;^[20] the Creed an empty historic formula: a convention like the conventions of “party” in England to-day. The reader must see this, in spite of all the nineteenth century may have taught him to the contrary, or he will never see the Revolution.

In such a crisis two factors, quite uncomprehended, stood like rocks—they were but small minorities: so are rocks small accidents in the general sea. The one was that little group of people who still practised the united Catholic Faith—and it just so happened that of these the King was one, his sister another, and—from the beginning in her light, easy way, latterly with increasing depth—his wife a third; the other factor was the mass of the humbler Clergy. They felt as by an instinct the note of unity; they refused to subscribe: to all, or nearly all, the bishops it was—for the most part—a matter of rank and policy to resist the Bill; to the two-thirds of the country Clergy to resist the Law was loyalty to our Lord.

What the King felt in that quarrel we all know. Marie Antoinette, in spite of her devotion, was never able to neglect the human, the purely temporal, the vulgarly political aspect of the quarrel. Her husband, sincerely sympathetic though he was with the French temper, thought mainly of the Divine interests in the matter; though he thought slowly and badly, that was his thought. The populace, the politicians—all the world—saw nothing whatsoever in the Catholic resistance but a dodge devised by privilege to put a spoke in the wheel of the Revolution. And Paris especially, having for so long abandoned religion, raged round the refusal of the priests.

It is pitiful to read how small a rally the Faith could make! One chapel in all Paris was hired for the true Mass to be said therein, and handfuls here and there put forward a timid claim to approach the only altar which Rome acknowledged. I say it for the third or for the fourth time, to-day we cannot understand these things, for the Resurrection of the Catholic Church stands between us and them; but to this Paris on that Lenten Sunday, the 3rd of April 1791, the presence of the Schismatic Clergy, each in his parish, was a plain challenge launched against the Crown, and it was nothing more: the attachment of the Court to the Roman Unity seemed to Paris a mere political intrigue, odious and unnational and stinking of treason. For a fortnight the Parisian anger raged, and the 17th of April was Palm Sunday.

It has become a rule for those who are in communion with the Catholic Church that they should receive the Sacraments at least once a year, and that at Easter or thereabouts; a rule defined, if I am not mistaken, during the struggle with the Lutheran—that latest of the great heresies. This rule the King had satisfied, and on that Palm Sunday had taken Communion in his Chapel from a priest who had not sworn the Civic Oath. All the customary talk of some religious necessity by which he was in conscience compelled to leave Paris is balderdash. The attempt he made the next day, the Monday, to leave the city in order to spend the Easter days in the suburban palace of St. Cloud was purely political. Religion had no part therein. It cannot be determined to-day—unless indeed further evidence should come before us—how much the mere desire to prove a liberty of action on the part of the Court, how much a sort of challenge sure to be defeated, how much a hope that escape would be easier from a suburban point, entered into this plan; but it is quite certain that the Body of the Lord and His Resurrection had nothing whatsoever to do with it. And when upon Monday of Holy Week, the 18th of April, a little before noon, the royal family got into their carriage to drive, as was their constitutional right, to the neighbouring palace those few miles away where the populace could not surround them, a crowd, organised as were these crowds of the Revolution, held them all around. The scene has been repeated too often to be repeated here; one character marks it—it is one of profound importance—for the first time armed and disciplined force was wholly upon the side of the Revolution.

The Militia which La Fayette had formed were with the people, and the common will of that great mob was present also in the men who bore arms. It had not been so in any of the movements antecedent to this, unless we admit the sharp national anger of the loose and almost civilian “French Guards” against the hired German Cavalry in July 1789. Hitherto there had been a distinction between the people at large and that portion of the people which was armed and disciplined, a distinction which now broke down because to the French temper on this Monday of Holy Week 1791 the issue was too grave for such distinctions. The national King must be kept in Paris; the people would not let him leave, much as a man will not let his money go out of his sight or out of his control.

Let it be noted that here, as is invariably the case throughout the history of the French people, the general mass had easily learned a secret thing: All the bamboozlement had failed—as it is failing to-day in spite of the financial press of Paris, the Secret Societies, and every other instrument of fraud. The vast crowd which hustled round the King’s carriage knew and freely repeated his project of invasion which had now been so carefully and, as it was thought, so secretly plotted for six months.

The French people are accustomed to, and have, as it were, an appetite for, duels in the dark where one of the two combatants must die. There was determination upon the one side—without proof—that the King desired to fly and must be restrained. There was determination upon the other—accompanied by frequent denial—that the King should escape to the French frontier and should be free.

Not the next day, but the day after, Wednesday in Holy Week, the Queen, the Queen herself pulled the trigger. All that blind force of desire for the mere personal safety of her family, which Mirabeau would have controlled, but which in her unguided hands was an unreasoning torrent, impelled her action. She wrote to Mercy that her very life was in danger and that the business must be done with next month at the latest. She mentioned the place of flight, Montmédy.

Eight weeks followed, during which every effort of the royal family was directed to the achievement of a mere flight.

The limits of these pages do not permit me the many details which could make of that early summer a long book of intrigue. When the thing had failed each had his excuses, and Bouillé would have it that with a docile obedience on the part of the Court he could have saved the Court. It may be argued that if the King had gone by way of Rheims he would have escaped. It may be argued that the delay of twenty-four hours (which certainly did take place) made such and such a difference. All these arguments fall to the ground when it is considered that the King did escape from Paris, escaped easily along the road to the frontier, was safe and trebly safe until, as will be seen, two accidents, wholly incalculable and each a clear part of Fate, broke that immemorial Crown of the French Monarchy. The first (as will be seen) was the error—if it was an error—made by young Choiseul on the Chalons road—a mere mechanical one; the second—much more miraculous—was the ride of Drouet, galloping in a dark night under a covered moon wildly through the very difficult ridgeway of Argonne, and even that miracle only just came off by fifteen minutes. It was not delay, whether of twenty-four hours or of a fortnight, which brought them back to Paris. It was that other force for which we have no name, but which one may call if one likes Necessity or Something Written.