glory of such characters as Lafayette’s lies in this, that though their intellects may not have had the strength to grasp transcendental things or to perceive the complexity of the material with which a politician must deal, yet an unswerving determination to do what their conscience dictates is discoverable throughout their lives. No greater thing can be said of any man; and it is not upon the moral side, but rather upon the reasonable, that such characters fail. Those who affirm the fate of the soul to depend upon right action within its lights will be secure of such men’s salvation.
While the popular forces were gathered in Paris for that assault on the palace which proved so successful, the Prussian and Austrian army of invasion, under the command of the Duke of Brunswick, was marching against the French by the valley of the Moselle. It was accompanied by many of the French nobles who had emigrated, and who desired by any methods, even those of foreign invasion, the destruction of the Revolutionary movement. We have seen how Lafayette had the supreme opportunity of meeting that invasion and had refused it. The frontier was not crossed until some days after the palace had fallen, and after Lafayette had abandoned his army. The invasion was immediately successful. The frontier fortress of Verdun fell. The French forces were largely composed of unreliable volunteers. The regulars themselves had been badly demoralized, and the French army under General Dumouriez, whose task it now was to stop the invasion, lay upon the line of the Argonne, not a week’s march from Paris, with very little hope of defending that forest-ridge successfully. But by one of the strangest accidents in history, under this army when Dumouriez, had been successfully turned by the invaders and was in its most desperate plight, an action fought near the village of Valmy changed the whole story of Europe. The result of this action, which was in a tactical sense indecisive, and in which the opposing forces never came to close quarters, was that the invading army was checked in its career, was ultimately bound to retire, and the Revolution was granted just the time it required to raise and discipline new forces for the meeting of further invasions which were bound to follow. This action at Valmy, which, despite its indecisive tactical quality, was one of capital importance in the history of the world, was fought almost coincidently with the declaration of the Republic. On this same ground—a cannon-shot to the North—France and Germany to-day[A] stand opposed.
[A] Feb. 25th, 1916.
THERE is a country-side in western Europe upon which the fate of the world has twice been decided, the first time when Attila and his Asiatics were here broken by the forces of the Roman Empire; the second when the French Revolution was saved in the action I am about to describe; a third decision is in the balance as I write.
This country-side is known to the French, within whose territory it lies, as the Champagne Pouilleuse. The Romans, from its capital, called it the Catalaunian Fields; for its capital is the town of Châlons upon the Marne.
The plain is of a peculiar nature, difficult to be seized by those who have not known it, but, once perceived, a thing not easily forgotten, so distinctive is it and so much apart from all that bounds it. In formation the soil is chalky, but not of that chalk which bears the green swards of Sussex or Normandy; not of that chalk over which the trout streams of the Vexin or Hampshire run so clear. It is a chalk kneaded, as it were, with clayey thickness, so that it bears only stunted trees or none, is sterile to the plough; and the waters which run sluggishly in the shallow dips of it are turbid, like milk and water mixed, and all their fords are muddy and difficult to pass. Those who drink of these waters and who live by them are few. It is an inhospitable land.
For the shape of it, it is of an odd, rolling, confused sort, which, in describing it, I have often compared, and shall here compare again, to the slightly lifted waves of a sea, rounded, and heaving indiscriminately, where currents meet near the land a day after a gale. You will find no direction or set of up and down in these billows. Standing upon the summit of any one, others are seen around you as low, as smooth, as untenanted as that one from which you gaze, and between you and them lie broad and slight depressions a mile or two across, and hardly deep enough to hide the sparse villages of those plains. Such is the Champagne Pouilleuse.
If a man stands upon any one of these slight
rolls of hungry land, ploughed desperately for insufficient harvest here and there, hedgeless, and almost featureless, and looks directly eastward towards Germany and the roads by which invasions come, he will perceive, running black and distinct all along the horizon, a low ridge, even enough in outline. If the weather is clear, he may perceive it to be wooded. It stands no more than three hundred feet above the average level of the plain, but it bounds it absolutely. This ridge is the range of hills that, with its forest, is called “the Argonne.”
This ridge barring the main approach to Paris along the roads from the east, traversed in one steep pass by the main road which leads to Paris from the Germanies, Dumouriez held with his insufficient and patchwork forces, calling on Kellermann to bring up at all speed reinforcements from the south, and knowing well in his heart that even with those reinforcements he had not the quality of men who in the shock that was coming could withstand the famous discipline of the Prussians and the training of their Austrian allies. For Dumouriez, precise in temper, a soldier of the old strict armies, and one in very doubtful allegiance to the Revolutionary cause, justly doubting the temper of mere volunteers, and misjudging what the future might make even of such undisciplined men, thought, if anything, too little of the material, bad as it was, which he had to his hand.
If the reader should wonder why a low ridge of this kind could prove an obstacle to the advance of armies, and should be thought even in so desperate a case worthy of defence, the explanation is this: armies depend for their very lives, and equally for their offensive power, upon a train of vehicles and guns. They are tied to roads. And such a feature as the Argonne, low though it be, dense with wood and undergrowth, and built of deep, damp clay, was almost as effectual a barrier to invasion as might be an equally broad arm of water. The few roads across it, cut through the woods and hardened, in particular the great Paris road from Germany which crossed it at the point called “les Islettes,” are like bridges or causeways over such an arm of water, and as necessary for the passage of any army as are bridges over water. To hold these passes, if it were possible, was all Dumouriez’s plan. For Verdun had fallen in the first days of this month of September (1792), more than half of which had now run in that week when Dumouriez lay along the hillside with his men, every pass guarded, and awaiting the shock.
That shock came in the form of direct assaults upon the roads across the hills, attempts to carry them with the high hand. These assaults at first failed. An enemy attempting thus to break some link in a chain of defence will make for the weakest. If Prussia and Austria were to cross the Argonne, it must be by that one of the four roads where the resistance was weakest. The direct road, the great Paris road, which was the southernmost of the four passages, they would not first attempt. They managed in their second effort to break the line at that point called “The Cross in the Woods,” a day’s march to the north. They lost but few men in this success. They gained their gate; Dumouriez’s line was pierced. Hurriedly in the night he withdrew all those of his men who, lying to the north, would have been isolated had they waited for the dawn, and he fell back down the hills, standing now with his back to Germany, his face to Paris, and knowing that his position was turned. For though the Paris road was still held, the enemy was pouring round through the breach in the dyke above, and the way to the capital was open for the enemy round by that northern road.
All the weather of those few days had been drenching rain. The clay of the hills was sodden, the autumn leaves drifting upon it throughout the forest; the bare, rolling plains and the chalk were sodden with it, too. It was the nineteenth of September, and Kellermann, just in time by a few hours, but with reinforcements that could hardly save his country, had effected his junction with his chief. So Dumouriez, with Kellermann now linked on to him to his left and to the south, stood with his back to the Argonne and his face to Paris, waiting for inevitable catastrophe, while round by his right hand the enemy poured through into the open plain.
There was present with those invading columns a man supremely gifted in the power both to observe and to express, a young man destined soon to bear one of the greatest of names. This was Goethe. For Goethe was with the German armies, and we have from him some account of what he saw. We can see through his eyes the bare, dull landscape, with low, misty clouds hurrying above
it, now hiding all things in rain, now in an interval of drier weather showing a steaming reek coming up from the drenched fields; and between those two flats of gray earth and gray sky the dark bodies of troops moving like ordered herds westward from the Argonne and the woods, on over the rolling of the open land.
By this night of the nineteenth of September they had taken their full march and were drawn up with their backs to Paris, their faces to the Argonne, over against the French lines. The invaders could not leave those forces of Dumouriez’s behind them upon their communications. It was their task, now that the Argonne was forced, to clear away by capture or by dispersal the army that was still in existence, though doubtful, or, rather, only too certain of its fate.
Now, this long way round by the northern gate in the hills, this lengthening of tortuous communications, and the persistent rain of those days, made it imperative that the decision should be taken promptly. Dysentery had been present in the Prussian and Austrian forces for some time. In the abominable weather it had lately increased. Bread, which was almost their only ration (until they should come out into more favourable lands a day’s march ahead upon the road to Paris), came up but tardily and clumsily by the long round of the muddy road. It was imperative that Dumouriez and his checker-work hotchpotch of volunteers, of foreign mercenaries, of old regulars, an army officered at random, and even some units only half-officered, should be swept from the communications if the invasion was to proceed; and therefore without repose, and with the invading force as it found itself after fighting through the Argonne and making the long march afterward, was to attack at once, with the first light of the next day, the twentieth. That day was to be decisive in the business of the modern world. For, by coincidences upon which men still debate, but which I think can be explained, and which I shall now present, the invaders failed in their easy task. Dumouriez’s troops were left intact after the attempted action, and the armed reduction of the Revolution was postponed so long that it became at last impossible.
After all those days of cold and deadly rain the dawn broke uncertainly through a dense mist that covered all the swellings of the tumbled land. The extreme right of the invaders’ line, the Prussian regiments with their king, reaching southward as far as the Paris road, was in the thick of that fog. Northward it lay somewhat more loosely and thinly where the Austrians formed the left extremity. But everywhere it was too dense for any observation. Such scouting as was attempted groped painfully yard by yard in that confusion, and there was at first no wind at all, nor any lifting of the mist.
It was some two hours after sunrise before the first break in this veil appeared, and that but a slight one. We have the relation from the pen of a man who saw it. He was out with a small patrol of cavalry, feeling and groping thus beyond the Paris road to discover what the French might be doing under the cover of such white nothingness, when a momentary air raised the curtain for fifty yards or so, and he found himself point-blank against a battery of four guns, the French gunners standing idly by. Their position was such that, had the day been clear, they would have enfiladed the whole Prussian line. The young man set down in his diary this commonplace, of awful meaning to a man who had had one such glimpse in such a fog on such a morning:
“Upon what threads of chance do not the fates of empires depend!”
But this extreme battery of the French knew nothing of their opportunity. The fog closed again immediately. The vague, mounted figures that the gunners had seen were swallowed up at once, and the effect of that strange encounter was to make the officer in command of the guns withdraw them, fearing that in his feeling through the mist on to that little height he had pushed his pieces too far. The Prussian patrol heard, though they now could not see even so few yards away, the hoofs of the horses sogging up with the limber, the clanking of the hooked guns, and the retirement across the moist stubble. They heard the swish of the wheels and occasional commands fainter and fainter, and then nothing.
As the morning advanced, however, the wind which had carried the rain of all those days—a wind from the south and east—began to blow again, and drove the mist before it into very low, scurrying clouds, so low that they covered the insignificant ridge of Argonne and so low that the steeple of Sainte-Menehould, the little county town at the foot of the hills, disappeared into them. But those low clouds left the rolls of land in the plain itself free from their mist, and at last the armies could see each other; and this is what the Prussian line drawn up upon the one ridge saw as it looked eastward to the other.
There was more than half a mile, but less than a mile, of very shallow, concave dip separating this swell, or crest, upon which the King of Prussia and his staff had drawn up their regiments and another similar swell, or crest, opposite where was the French left, the troops of Kellermann.
This opposing crest beyond the very shallow and perfectly bare valley bore, standing in the midst of the French line, a windmill—a windmill famous now in the legends and songs of the French army, an object that has grown symbolic, and that you will find in all the legends and pictures of the battle. It was the Mill of Valmy. Indeed, Valmy village was close by, but hidden by the crest, for it lay upon the farther slope.
The French line thus strung on each side of the mill upon the crest presented a contrast indeed to the strict rod-like files of the Prussian infantry that watched them from over the depression. Their loose order, their confusion, their lack of officers, their heterogeneous composition, their doubtful discipline—all these in the soul of that army were externally expressed by something straggling and unsure. The very uniforms, so far as one could discern them at such a distance, formed groups grotesque, often ragged, and sometimes interspersed with dull, civilian clothes. A man, when he saw that sight, might have thought, perhaps, that he was watching a crowd stretched out for a spectacle rather than soldiers. But in one arm, by which the French have often conquered, and to which the greatest of their captains was later strongly attached,—I mean the guns,—something stricter prevailed; forty pieces were drawn up on the cusp of the crescent near the mill.
For a mile or two, in various groups, northward of this position that Kellermann had taken up, lay the French right under Dumouriez, and opposite him in turn were the Austrians. From the Prussian ridge, which I take for my point of view (since it was there, or rather in sight of it, that the issue was determined) uncertain portions of Dumouriez’s command and bodies of Austrians could be just discerned in the cloud. But the immediate business lay between those two lines, the one so
strict, the other so loose, that faced each other from either crest of that long, shallow trough under Valmy Mill.
The ground separating these two lines, the slight fall from the one, the level at the bottom, the slight rise to the other, demands particular notice. It was, as the reader will soon see, the whole matter upon which the fate of this cannonade, and therefore of Europe, turned. Save in one place, where a few bushes and superficial, disused diggings for marl disturbed its even surface, it is for the most part ploughland. At this date in the autumn, the twentieth of September, it is covered with stubble, and the short, stiff straws, cut close to the soil by the sickle, make it seem like the ground of any other open field. No trickle of water runs through it even after rains. There is no appearance of swamp or marsh. One is not warned by rushes or other water growths of any difference between this field and any other field. So it dips and rises again for its half or three quarters of a mile of breadth and for its mile or so of length, almost everywhere under crop, and now under autumn stubble, save here and there where balks of measly grass have been left that show between their insufficient blades the dirty gray-white of that half-chalky soil.
It was across such land, such to the eye at least, that the Prussian assault upon the French must be made after the advance had been properly prepared by artillery.
And prepared it was. The Prussian commanders let loose so furious a cannonade as had not been heard by any living soldier of that day. Miles away in the pass of les Islettes, an Englishman, who by strange adventure was the brigadier-general, holding that position to protect the rear of the French against attack, a man who had been through the whole American war (a certain General Money, of whose strange fate I have written elsewhere) marvelled at the continuity and sustainment of all that fire. Distant Argonne shook with it, and the ground carried the thuds mile upon mile. They felt it in Sainte-Menehould like the shocks of falling timber.
But the range was long for the field-pieces of those days, and one’s target at a thousand yards very uncertain. Many a missle flew over the heads of the motley French line, many fell short, and buried themselves in the wet bank of the slope before it. The losses so inflicted by hour after hour of sustained battery-work were not great, nor did that loose line upon each side of the mill seem to fluctuate or waver, nor were the King of Prussia and his staff, or Brunswick, commanding all, over-certain when the apt time for the critical charge and the advance of their infantry would come.
For to the Prussian guns the French gunners replied with a fire almost equally maintained and upon the whole of greater precision. They could not dominate the enemy’s fire; they were, indeed, inferior to it, but they did not allow themselves to be dominated by it. It was the remark of all those who watched that field upon either side that the French forces in this one respect of the guns had powerfully surprised the invaders by their unexpected efficiency. So the cannonade went on until men the least used to battle, the young recruits of Prussia, the young poet Goethe himself, looking (and noting curiously and a little sickly what “cannon fever” meant), were grown used to the roar and the blows of sound, and had come to make it a sort of background for their mind.
It was at an hour that will never be precisely known,—so difficult is it to determine by evidence the phases even of a single action, but probably early in the afternoon, between one and two o’clock,—that all this tornado of sound was hugely overborne by a crash and a thunder like no other. A lucky shot from the Prussian batteries had fallen into the midst of the French limbers, and in a sudden explosion great masses of ammunition blew wheels, cases, horses, and men up in a sheaf of flame and in plumes of smoke close by Valmy Mill. There, in the very centre of the French line, the commanders, now watching eagerly through their glasses from the Prussian ridge, saw the beginning of a breakdown: a whole brigade was stampeding. It was, by a curious irony, a brigade of German mercenaries still retained in the French service. But as they broke, others also wavered; the line was in desperate confusion, and might at any moment lose such formation as it had.
This was the opportunity for the charge, and Brunswick sent forward one—slightly advanced, in front of and to the right of its neighbour, in the formation called “echelon”—the companies of the famous Prussian line. They began their descent into the shallow valley—a slow descent,
their boots clogged by pounds of the field mud; a perilous advance, with their own guns firing over their heads across the valley, but an advance which, when it should be complete, the half-mile crossed, and the opposing slope taken at the charge, would decide the main business of the invasion, and would end the resistance of the Revolutionary armies. Against them as they went forward was now directed some part of the French artillery fire, such part as could be spared from the Prussian guns above. The Prussian companies halted often, they were often realigned, but their slow progress was still working, ordered, and exactly maintained under that dramatic discipline which made in those days, as it does now, the apparatus, perhaps, of Prussian excellence and certainly of Prussian prestige. They reached the level between the two lines; they touched the first rise of the opposing slope.
Meanwhile Kellermann, upon his horse, when the French line had wavered upon the great explosion, rode suddenly along it, and with his feathered general’s hat high upon the point of his sword, waving it, called loudly for cheers—cheers for the nation, which was the Revolutionary cry. The young men, emboldened, recovered some sort of formation, and loudly responded with the cheers he had demanded; the brigade that had broken was drawn up, put in reserve. The French guns during that critical five minutes had behaved as though they had been veterans, nor had their fire diminished, nor had a gunner moved save just in that central point where the destruction of so much ammunition for a moment checked the rapidity of fire.
The French guns, then, continually alive, turned more and more from the distant Prussian batteries to the nearer infantry advancing against them up the slope. The Prussian guns, as their men came nearer to the French, had nearly to cease their fire or at least to diverge it to the left and to the right. You could see along the French line the handling of the muskets and the preparing to meet by infantry fire the Prussian charge when it should come within its fifty or eighty yards.
But to that distance it never came. For at this last phase of the battle, or, rather, of the cannonade,—it was no true battle,—there happened the wholly unexpected, the almost miraculous and, in the eyes of many historians, the inexplicable thing. The Prussian companies in all their length, now within four hundred yards of the French line, thinned a little by French cannon fire, but quite unmoved and morally prepared for the advance, halted. Their progress, resumed, watched anxiously by their commanders upon the height behind, grew slower and slower, was made in jerks, checked in a yard or two, finally stood still. There standing, one would say, within touch of victory, suffering with admirable obedience the steady loss under the French shot, and with admirable discipline closing its ranks, this Prussian infantry was seen at last to fall back, to turn, and to retire. As slowly as they had come, in the same order, with the same absence of looseness anywhere, the files, suffering less and less with every yard of their retirement from the French batteries, came nearly to their ancient stations, were drawn up just below the crest from which they had started somewhat over half an hour before. Valmy became again a cannonade and only a cannonade; but at the sight of this returning of their foes the French continually cheered, and the guns seemed to put on more vigour, and it almost seemed as though the very numbers of the defenders grew.
The afternoon wore on, the cannonade slackened toward evening, and it was one fitful shot and then another, and then none at last, and when darkness fell the two lines stood where they had stood in the morning. But the assault had failed.
What had happened? Why had not the Prussian charge proceeded?
Now, to that question, which has produced many and strange, false, fantastic answers, I think a true answer can be provided, and I shall attempt to provide it upon the authority of an observation made very closely and with the unique intention of understanding this unique affair in the history of arms. For when I went to make myself acquainted with Valmy field it was in the same season, in the same weather, after the same rains, in the same mists, and I believe that I have as much as any man lived in the circumstances under which that issue was decided. I believe, having myself gone over that depression from the Prussian ridge toward the French, in just that weather and after just those rains, that the advance was stopped by nothing more mysterious than marshy soil.
History is empty of evidence here, and we have nothing to learn from it. Upon the French side the retirement seemed inexplicable, and upon the Prussian the shame and failure of it seemed to have tied every man’s tongue; yet I believe it to be due to nothing more romantic than mud. Certain of our contemporaries in modern history have said that Brunswick did not desire to press the action, because that his sympathy was with the Revolutionary forces. To talk like that is to misunderstand the whole psychology of soldiery; more—in such an action it is to misunderstand the whole psychology of men. Brunswick could not have recalled the charge without good cause on such a day and with such men about him as the King of Prussia, the emigrant princes and the commanders; but the thing is, on the face of it, absurd. A wiser guess, but made erroneously, ascribes the retirement to the persistence and effect of the French artillery-fire as the Prussian charge approached. This must certainly be rejected, for we know that the advance was steady, and the retirement too, and what is more, we know how comparatively small were the losses. It was not due to an officer losing his head, for the whole line retired without breaking and in consonance. It certainly was not due to any doubt as to the moral ability of the men to continue the ordeal that had suffered so admirably over six hundred yards of ground and over perhaps a quarter of an hour of time.
Those who will do as I did, and visit Valmy in the autumn, and after the rains, and walk by no path or any picking of one’s way, but straight across the stubble, as the soldiers of those deployed companies had to do, will, I am sure, decide as I here decide. For they will come to a belt not upon the bottom level, but at the beginning of the opposing slope, where, under the deceitful similarity of the unchanged stubble, and with nothing to mark the drowned state of the soil, that soil becomes almost impassable, certainly impassable to men under fire. The French had before them, though they did not know it, a true obstacle, the unwitting attempt to cross which as though it were no obstacle lost the Prussians the battle, and with the battle lost the kings and the aristocracies of Europe their throw against the French democracy.
Night fell, still misty, but unbroken by the sound of arms or of marching. With the next day, when the invaders counted their losses these, not
over-heavy, they were appalled to find made far graver by a great increase of dysentery, which such a night in the open after such a day had produced. At the end of a week they fell back eastward again, followed and hampered by the French cavalry, and when they passed the boundaries of what was now the Republic, a blank-shot fired from the walls of Longwy closed this great episode in the story of the Gauls.
After the Battle of Valmy, the French armies, with the beginning of autumn, obtained quite unexpected and, as they were to prove, ephemeral successes. Dumouriez, a man of vast military ability, continued to command. The Republican armies poured over the Low Countries. Coincident with these successes, there came a period of high political excitement in Paris, and the rise of a sort of crusading enthusiasm, to spread the democratic principles throughout Europe and to transform society. It is to this more than to any other cause that we must ascribe the trial and execution of the king. There was, indeed, from the point of view of statesmanship alone, some excuse for the trial and fate of Louis. So long as he lived, he was necessarily a rallying-point round which all the counter-revolution would gather. The royal family having been kept in strict imprisonment, but not without some state and considerable luxury, in the Tower of the Temple (a mediæval building in the north-eastern part of Paris), it was at first uncertain what would be done with them. The first steps in the affair took the form of an examination of the papers found in the palace and of a report on Louis’s conduct. The accusations against the fallen king were formulated on the third of November. There were debates in the Revolutionary Congress as to the legality of trying a former head of the state. The trial was decreed exactly a month later. Louis was to plead at the bar of the Convention,—that is, the national congress,—which had met just before Valmy, and which had voted the Republic. Long before his trial began, he was already separated from the rest of his family, who were given rooms above his own in the Temple. The indictment was framed by a committee, which reported on the tenth of December; on the eleventh Louis appeared at the bar of the Convention. He had three advocates, the chief being the old and highly respected legist Malesherbes. The king appeared for the second time on the twenty-sixth of December, and withdrew after the speeches for the defence had been made. His guilt was pronounced by the unanimous vote of the Parliament, no one voting against, and only five abstaining. What followed I now describe.
THE long trial at the bar of the Parliament was over. The pleas had been heard, and old Malesherbes, weighty and with the dignity at once of ancient law, of contempt for fate, and of complete self-control, had done all that could be done for the king. The verdict had been given. Louis was found guilty by all of betraying the nation. He had called in the enemy. There remained to be decided by a further vote what his penalty should be.
It was the evening of Wednesday, January 16th, 1793. The deputies of the nation were to vote, each publicly and by name, an enormous roll-call of hundreds of men; each was to come up the steps to the tribune, to face the vast audience that stretched from left to right of the riding-school, and to pronounce clearly his decision. Each was free, if he chose, to add to his declaration the motives that had determined it.
The three great chandeliers that hung from the roof of the place were lit, affording a mellow, but insufficient, light in which the faces of the great throng, small dots of white on the black background, were but ill-distinguished. Upon the tribune itself a brighter light was turned.
The sun had long set; the evening meal was over; at eight o’clock the interminable procession began. They came on one by one, arranged in groups according to their constituencies. They went up in turn the steps of the tribune from the right, voted in open voice, descended by the left. Among the first was Robespierre, because he was of those that sat for the capital. He made a speech (too long) to explain what he was about to do. He protested that if the penalty of death was odious to him, and if he had combatted it consistently as a general principle of law, yet did he now support if for this exceptional case. “I remain compassionate for the oppressed. I know nothing of that humanity which is for ever sacrificing whole peoples and protecting tyrants.... I vote for death.”
One after another the deputies for Paris, the extreme men, the men of the Mountain, mounted those few steps, faced the great silent body of their colleagues, while those who had just voted before them were quietly seeking their places again, and those who were about to vote stood lined up before the steps upon the farther side, and one after the other gave his voice for death. Each after so declaring loudly his responsibility, his verdict, and his name, confirmed the whole by signing of a roll.
The voice of Danton was heard, the harsh, but deep and strong, voice that was already the first in the country. He had sat all that day by the bedside of his wife, who was to die. He had but just come back from the frontiers and from the army. His huge body was broken with fatigue; his soul was heavy with grief; his powerful brain was aching from a lack of sleep. “I am no politician,” he shouted; “I vote for death.”
So all night long the dreadful litany proceeded. Men left the hall to take an hour or two of sleep, a snatch of food; yet the hall seemed always full despite the coming and going of single figures, and through the long, cold darkness of that misty weather history heard voice after voice, weak, strong, ashamed, defiant, pitiful, muffled, outspoken, bass, treble, old, and young, repeating at irregular intervals: “Death absolute”; “Death with respite”; “Banishment”; “Imprisonment.” And history saw, after each such speech or cry (for many spoke as well before they declared the doom), an isolated man, high upon the tribune, beneath the candles, bending over the register and signing to what he had determined and proclaimed.
The dull dawn of winter broke through a leaden sky. No eastern window received it. The tall, gaunt casements of the southern wall overlooking the Tuileries Gardens grew gradually into lighter oblongs of gray. The candles paled and were extinguished. Hardly a third of the list was done. All that short January day (Thursday, the seventeenth of January) the dreadful thing proceeded until darkness fell again, until once more the chandeliers were lit. Once more it was night, and they were still voting, still declaring.
At last, when more than twenty-four hours had passed, the business was over. No one was left to come forward to the tribune; and this great sleepless mass, within which some few had noted one by one the voices as they fell, and had already calculated the issue, waited for the counting of the votes and for the recounting. Not only by word of
mouth, nor only by the signing of the register, had the precision of so awful an event been secured, but one by one the votes had been written down, folded, and sealed. The clerks of the Parliament opened each packet and arranged the sentences in rows, according to their tenor: for death absolute, for imprisonment, for delay. So one hour went past, and then another; but in the third, when it was perhaps ten o’clock, at night this silent process was interrupted, and the many that had fallen asleep, or were nodding half asleep after such a vigil, looked up surprised to hear that two letters had reached the assembly, one from some agent of the Bourbon king in Spain to demand a respite; the other from the advocates of the king, who demanded to be heard once more before the chair should announce the result of the voting.
All was interrupted; an immediate and passionate, though short, debate began. The intervention of the King of Spain the Convention would not consider; upon the proposal that the king’s advocates should be heard once more a debate was allowed. Many members joined it, though in brief periods. Robespierre among others, spoke intensely. He demanded that sentence should be read out and given before there could be any consideration of appeal. That opinion (not through him) prevailed, and the opening and arranging of the votes continued. A ceaseless little crackling of tearing papers, the whispered comments of men in groups, now and then some cry from the public in the galleries, broke the silence.
It was not far from midnight when a further movement among the clerks at the table, a comparison of sums, and heads bent together, scrutinizing the additions, prefaced the last scene of this act. The paper, with the figures written on it, was handed up to the chairman. That chairman was Vergniaud; perhaps the noblest, certainly the most eloquent, of the Girondins. He rose in his place above them, holding that paper before him, and read out in the grave and even voice which had often moved their debates:
“It is with profound sadness that I declare the penalty incurred by Louis Capet to be, by the vote of the majority of this assembly, that of death.”
Of seven hundred and twenty-one men who had voted, three hundred and ninety-seven had demanded the scaffold, a majority of seventy-three.
It was in complete silence that this memorable sentence fell. That silence was continued for some moments unbroken. The advocates of the king were now permitted to enter, for sentence had been formally delivered, and old Malesherbes, short, strong in figure for all his years, and now so far oblivious of his dignity and name as to be weeping, put forward his last plea. Sentence of death could not be given, by all the traditions of their law, unless two-thirds of the bench (for the French will have no single judges) concurred. And again, the prisoner had not had all those guarantees which a prisoner should have. And again, since it was as the head of the whole nation that he had acted, and since it was by the whole nation that he was conceived to be judged, then let the whole nation speak. He demanded an appeal to the French people.
For a third time Robespierre spoke. He spoke with more emotion than his peculiar academic style commonly permitted. Though he was in no way representative as yet of public feeling, though he was still a lesser man among those hundreds, for the third time his opinion coincided with that which was to prevail. He implored the assembly not to reopen the whole issue of civil war by putting this grave matter upon which they had fixedly decided to a general vote of millions. Not for the first time did this unalterable man betray for a moment his own unalterable creed. Later he was himself to perish in punishment divine of such deviations from the conscience of equality and of citizenship.
Guadet—Guadet, the Girondin—spoke for the king in the legal matter. Merlin, a jurisconsult of some weight, replied. It was not true, he said, that by the traditions of the common law a majority of two-thirds was required to confirm so grave a sentence in any tribunal. Upon points of fact, he urged, a majority not of two-thirds, but more,—of ten out of twelve judges or assessors should determine,—but for the penalty a bare majority—three votes out of five given from the bench—had always been held sufficient. The appeal of Louis was rejected, and the Convention rose after a continued session of thirty-six hours.
There remained the question of respite. It was debated upon the next day, Friday, the 18th of January. It was with a singular difficulty that this second debate proceeded. Men left their places time and again during the course of the day; there was such confusion that no vote could be taken; and all the Saturday the thing hung in the balance right on into the small hours—the dark and cold small hours of the January night. It was three o’clock upon the Sunday morning before the final vote appeared. Six hundred and ninety men decided it, and a majority of seventy was found for immediate death.
That Sunday, Louis, in the prison of the Temple, in the great square tower where he and his wife and his children and his sister had now for many months been held captive, suffered his passion.
It is singular, instructive, a lesson in history, to note what the man’s temper was during this prodigious time. The curious may examine (displayed under glass in the archives for all to see) the note which he wrote out with his own hand in his prison. It proves in its handwriting and in its composition, in its very erasures, a momentous calm. If courage in the presence of death be a chief index to character, admire so complete a courage present in a man whose lack of judgment, torpor, grave lethargies, whose imbecilities even, had helped to bring him where he was. Louis, but for his death, might pass to history among the negligible figures of her roll; but see how he died!
The note, written finely in even lines, asks for a delay of three days “to permit me to appear before the presence of God.” It asks further for the right to have his own confessor and for the guaranteeing of that confessor (the Abbé Edgeworth, of course) from all anxiety. He asks to see his family, and he recommends to the goodwill of the nation all those who were attached to his person.
Here and there he changes a word, scratching out the original expression deliberately, rewriting the substituted expression in a hand as firm as the rest. It is curious to note that he twice expunges the term “the National Convention.” He was making his address to the Convention, and yet he would not use its title.
The night came early upon that Sunday, for the unbroken, drizzling sky still stretched above Paris, and there was no sunset. Moreover, the insufficient windows of the mediæval tower, sunk in their thick walls, were partly boarded to prevent communication with friends outside. After some