HIGHJiIGHTS t^-^&^t*... -rf- -W^l REVOLUTl ^ r f3 S» ' *p ^ . V^^\N ^^-..^' ^ '^ ^^^:V\^- ;M^\'\<^ "^M^: ^< ^.•,# •%. ^ 9. ^^•%>^^^ ^^Mm''^%^^'' ^^Ma''^%^^^ ^^^£k''^\K^^ oQ\^i:,l:"/^. 4 >s e^ -i ■Q.^ ^ V ^ ^ ° " / -^ .^ ". -^AO^ \.^^ ^^cpA^ =,'=' ^ O.^^ ^ / ft fi s ,«5 ^ \f '-^°'-\*^ ^'Si''\t ^'^'^'^^^''^ ' HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION BY HILAIRE BELLOC AuTHOa OF "ROBKSPIEREE," "MaKIE Antoinette," etc. WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PAINTINGS AND PRINTS NEW YORK THE CENTURY CO. 1915 ^J^"' y-^^ Copyright, 1914, 1915, by The Century Co, Published, October, 1915 QGT 22 1915 ^CI.A414203 TABLE OF CONTENTS Pabt One PAGE The Royal Seance 3 Part Two Introduction . . . • 55 The Flight to Varennes 61 Part Three Introduction 113 The Storming of the Tuileeier 115 Part Four Introduction 161 Under the Mill of Valmy 163 Part Five Introduction 203 The Death of Louis XVI 205 Part Six Introduction 239 Lafayette and the Fall of the French Monarchy . . . 241 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS The Young Koyalist Frontispiece PAGE Louis XVI 4 Louis-Stanislas-Xavier de Bourbon, Comte de Provence, after- ward Louis XVIII 9 Charles Maurice de Talleyrand 15 Jean-Sylvain Bailly, President of the Commons in 1789 ... 22 The Commons taking the oath in the Tennis-Court at Versailles 28 Jacques Necker, Rector-General of Finances 33 The meeting of the National Assembly at Versailles, June, 1789 40 Emmanuel-Joseph Siey&s, Deputy from Paris to the Mational Assembly 45 Gabriel Honors Riquetti, Comte De Mirabeau 51 Allegory of the oath-taking in the Tennis-Court at Versailles . 58 "Vive le Roi ! Vive la Nation ! " 64 The National Assembly Petrified 69 The National Assembly Revivified 69 Madame Elisabeth 76 The end of the flight of the Royal Family at Varennes ... 81 Tlie Royal Family at Varennes, June 22, 1791 88 Drouet, the Postmaster at Varennes 93 The return to Paris 100 The arrival of the Royal Family in Paris, June 25, 1791 . . . 105 Enrolling volunteers in Paris on the Pont Neuf, before the statue of Henry IV 118 The Storming of the Tuileries 121 The assault of the Tuileries 128 A soldier of the National Guard 131 Grenadier of the Infantry of Ligne 131 Marie- Antoinette and her children 136 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE Louis XVI — The Forge in the Palace at Versailles 141 The Tuileries and its Garden in 1757 148 The struggle in the Halls of the Tuileries, August 10, 1792 . . 153 Ceremonial Costume of the Clergy, the Nobility and the Commons 160 Uniforms of the Army of French Emigrants 105 Goethe, who was with the German Army at Valmy . . . .171 Marshal Frangois-Christophe Keller mann, Duke of Valmy . .178 A Republican General .... 184 A Colonel of Infantry 184 Under the Mill at Valmy 189 General Charles-Frangois Dumouriez — In Command of the French at Valmy 195 Republican soldiers in the Revolution 202 Lamoignon de INIalesherbes, Counsel for the King at his Trial . 207 Proclamation of the Provisional Executive Council . . . .214 The last victims of the Terror 220 King Louis taking leave of his family in the tower of the Temple 223 A Mass Under the Terror 227 The death of King Louis XVI, January 21, 1793 233 Armand GastoU; Cardinal de Rohan 252 Caricature of a Royalist 257 Caricature of a Patriot 257 Cartoon of the Three Orders [The Clergy, Nobility and the Com- mons] in the National Assembly Forging the New Constitu- tion 204 A Popular Print at the time of tlie Revolution 209 Maximilien Robespierre 270 Georges Jacques Dan ton 281 Marie Jean Paul Roch Yves Gilbert Motier, Marquis de Lafa- yette 297 PART ONE THE ROYAL SEANCE LOUIS XVI From a photograph by Braiin, Clement & Co., New York, of the painting by Antoiue-Francois Callet, in Museum of Versailles HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION PART ONE THE ROYAL SEANCE UPON the crest of the steep and thickly wooded hills that rise from the left bank of the Seine below Paris, you may find a village the old stones of which, and something spacious in its whole arrangement, are consonant with its name. It is called "Marly of the King." There the great trees, the balustrade, and gates still standing recall the palace to which the French monarchy retired when leisure or fatigue or mourn- ing withdrew it from Versailles; for it was a place more domestic and far less burdened with state. To the gates of that great country house there came near ten o'clock, just after the hour when full darkness falls on a midsummer evening, a great 5 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION coach, driving from Versailles. It was the coach of the Archbishop of Paris, coming urgently to see the king, and the day was Friday, the nineteenth of June, 1789. They were in the full crisis that opened the Revolution. The tall windows of the palace were fully lit as the coach came up the drive. The night air was cold, for those June days were rainy and full of hurrying cloud. The Archbishop of Paris and liis colleague of Rouen, who was with him, were summoned by their titles into the room wliere Louis XVI sat discussing what should be done for the throne. Two days before, upon the Wednesday, the com- mons of the great Parliament — the Commons House in that great Parliament which had met again after a hundred years, and which now felt behind it the nation — had taken the first revolution- ary step and had usurped authority. The quarrel which had hampered all reform since this Parlia- ment of the States General had met six weeks before ; the refusal of the two privileged orders and particularly of the nobles to vote with the commons and to form with them one National Assembly ; the claim of the privileged orders and particularly of 6 THE ROYAL SEANCE the nobles to bar whatever the popular representa- tives might decide — all that had been destroyed in spirit by a new act of sovereignty. Using the title that was on all men's lips and call- ing themselves the "National Assembly" the com- mons had declared that the whole assembly was an indivisible body, and alone the organ of the nation. They had used with conscious purpose the solemn words, "Desires and decrees," which hitherto throughout all these centuries had never appeared above any seal or signature save that of a king. They had put body into this spiritual tiling by the enormous decision that no tax should be paid in the kingdom that had not their approval. This was the blow that had summoned the council round the king at Marly upon this Friday night. For now two anxious days doubtful issues and con- flicting policies had pulled Louis this way and that, whether to yield, whether to compromise, or whether to strike back. It was a fortnight since the sickly child who was heir to the throne had died, and this retirement of the royal family to Marly, consequent upon such 7 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION mourning, was confused by the numbness of that shock also. The king perhaps more than the queen had suffered in his powers and judgment; for Marie Antoinette, the most vigorous and lucid of those gathered in council at Marly, the least na- tional, and the least wide in judgment, was active at this moment for the full claims of the crown. With her at the king's side in the taking of this crucial decision stood other advisers. The king's two brothers, the elder and the younger, who, as Louis XVIII and Charles X, were to rule after the restoration, and who were now known under the titles of Provence and Artois, were in the palace together. Provence, the elder, very dull and heart- less, was the more solid; Artois, the younger, empty, poor in judgment, was the least unattrac- tive. They counted for their rank, and even Prov- ence for little else. Barentin was there, the keeper of the seals. He was a man of very clear decision, of straightforward speech and manner; a man with something sword- like about him. He thought and said that the king had only to move troops and settle matters at once. There also, lit by the candles of that night, was 8 LOUIS-STANISLAS-XAVIER DE BOURBOX, COMTE DE PROVENCE, AFTERWARD LOUIS XVIII From a photograph by Braun, Clement & Co., New York, of a painting by Jean-Martial Fredou, belonging to Marquis de Virieu, at the Chateau de Lantilly THE ROYAL SEANCE the vacuous, puffed face of Necker, the miUionaire. This man, famous through his wealth, which was ill acquired and enormous, an alien in religion as in blood, had become, by one of those ironies in which, the gods delight, the idol of the national movement. He was pitifully inferior to such an opportunity, empty of courage, empty of decision, and almost empty of comprehension. No idea informed him unless it was that of some vague financial liberalism (rather, say, moral anarchy) suitable to the crooked ways by which he himself had arrived. Those pro- truding eyes, that loose mouth, and that lethargic, self-satisfied expression were the idol that stood in the general mind for the giant things that were coming. Behind such brass was reddening the cre- ative fire of the nation. Such a doorkeeper did Fate choose to open the gates for the armies of Marceau and Napoleon. All his advice was for something "constitutional." In days better suited for such men as he Necker would have been a poli- tician, and a parliamentary politician at that. To these, then, thus assembled entered the arch- bishops with their news. The news was this: that before sunset, just before they had left Versailles, 11 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION the clergy had rallied to the commons. The bish- ops, indeed, all save four, had stood out for the privileged orders ; but the doubt in which all minds had been since the revolutionary step of forty-eight hours before was resolved. The clergy had broken rank with the nobles ; for that matter, many of the wealthier nobles were breaking rank, too. Deci- sion was most urgent; the moment was critical in the extreme, lest in a few hours the National As- sembly, already proclaimed, already half formed, should arise united and in full strength over against the crown. In not two hours after the arrival of the prelates the decision, nearly reached before they came, was finally taken by the king. He would follow Necker, and Necker was for a long, windy, compli- cated compromise. Necker was for a constitution, large, liberal, preventing the action of the popular life, preventing the yes and no of creative moods, leaving to the crown as much as would preserve its power to dissolve the States General and to sum- mon a new body less national — and, above all, less violent. There is an English word for this temper, the word "Whig." But that word is associated in 12 THE ROYAL SEANCE the English language with the triumph of wealth. Necker's muddy vision did not triumph. That decision was taken upon this Friday night, the nineteenth of June, 1789 — taken, I think, a little before midnight. Artois was off to bed, and Provence, too. The council was broken up. It was full midnight now when wheels were heard again upon the granite sets before the great doors, and the hot arrival of horses. The name an- nounced was that of Talleyrand, the Bishop of Autun, and the king, perhaps angrily, refused to see him. This man, with eyes like a ferret and an intelli- gence as keen as it was witty and narrow, a brad- awl of a mind, as invincible at intrigue as in vice, given up wholly to the search for personal advan- tage, had about him all that the plain piety of Louis XVI detested, and all that Louis XVI 's slow mind most feared. The king had made him Bishop of Autun against his every judgment, and only at the call of Talleyrand's fellow-clergymen, who loved their comrade's witty sallies against religion and his reputation of the brain. It was a reputation that had led Rome to consider the making of him a car- 13 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION dinal, and only Louis himself had prevented it. For Louis profoundly believed. It was Louis who had said in those days just before the Revolution, "I will give no man the see of Paris who denies his God." Such was Talleyrand, thirty-five years of age, destined to compass the ruin of the French church, to ordain to the schismatic body which attempted to replace it, to be picked out by Danton for his very vices as a good emissary to Pitt, to be one of the levers of Napoleon, to be the man that handed the crown to Louis XVIII at the restoration. Such was the man, full of policy and of evil, whom on that midnight Louis XVI refused to see. The king refused to see him with the more deter- mination that Talleyrand had asked for a secret audience. Talleyrand sent a servant to the king's younger brother, Artois, who knew him well, and Artois, who was in bed, asked him to come to the bedroom to speak to him, which he did; and there in that incongruous place, to the empty-headed man lying abed listening to him, Talleyrand, till well after midnight, set forth what should be done. He also came, he said, hot-foot from Versailles, a 14 CHARLES MAUPJCE DE TALLEYRAND THE ROYAL SEANCE witness, and he had twenty times the grip of any of these others, he said, to seize what had happened. He offered, as such men do, a bargain. He had prepared it, as such men will, for immediate accep- tance; "all thought out," as people say to-day of commercial "propositions." Let him form a min- istry. (He had actually brought in his carriage with him certain friends who would support him in it!) They would rapidly summon military force, dissolve the assembly at once, erect a new one that would be at the service of the crown. Artois dressed and went to see the king. But his brother gave him short shrift, and bade him tell Talleyrand to go. Then Talleyrand, with that look in his eyes, I think, that was noted so often when, later, he found himself thwarted in any one of his million plots and forced to creep round by some new way, went out to serve the Revolution. At the same time there was sent through the night to Versailles the royal order, to be proclaimed by heralds, that no meeting of the Parliament should take place until the Monday when, in the commons' hall, the king would declare his will to all the three houses, clergy, commons, and nobles 17 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION assembled; and that will, of course, was to be the muddled'Conipromise of Necker. These things done, they slept at last in Marly, and the very early dawn of the Saturday broke in a sky still troubled, rainy, and gray. Bailly, the president of the commons, sitting at Versailles, was a man such as are thrown to the surface in times of peace. He was honest and rich, a little paunchy, sober, and interested in astronomy. He was not without courage of the less vivid sort. He was fifty-three years of age. Bailly, the dignified spokesman of the commons in this awful crisis, was in his bed at Versailles, like everybody else except sentries, watchmen, and a few political intriguers, upon this very short sum- mer night of dull, rainy weather. They knocked at his door and woke him to bring him a note. It was a very curt note from the master of the ceremonies at the court. It told him that the great hall in which the commons met was not to be used by the commons that day, that Saturday; for it was to be decorated for the royal session of all the estates, to be held there upon the Monday, when the king 18 THE ROYAL SEANCE would address the States General together and tell them his will. It is not a weak spur to a man of such an age, especially if he is well to do, to have his dignity neglected and his sleep interrupted as well. Bailly had thought the commons worthy of more respect and of better notice. When, therefore, the mem- bers came, most of them under dripping umbrellas, to the door that should admit them to their great hall, Bailly was at their head as indignant as such a man could be. He found the door shut, a paper pinned upon it, whereon was written the royal order, and a sentry who told him and all his follow- ers that no one could come in save the workmen; for it would take all that day to prepare the hall for the royal meeting upon Monday. They let Bailly in to fetch his papers, no more. The commons went off under their umbrellas in the rain, a straggling procession of men, mostly middle class, in good black knee-breeches and coat, in dainty buckled shoes not meant for such weather, Bailly leading them; they made off, this dripping lot of them, and made history quickly and well. They found in an adjoining street an 19 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION empty tennis-court at their disposal, and there they met, organized a session, and took the oath, with one dissentient, that they would not disperse until they had achieved a new constitution for the French. The French do things themselves, a point in which they differ from the more practical nations. For instance, Macmahon, the soldier and president, used to brush his own coat every morning. Baren- tin, the keeper of the seals, followed all this busi- ness, but he followed it in person. From the win- dow of a house just across the narrow way he him- self overlooked through the clearstory of the tennis- court the swarm of the commons within, the public audience that thronged the galleries or climbed to the sills of the windows. He saw the eagerness and the resolve. He scribbled a rough note to be sent at once' to Marly — a note that has come to light only in the last few years, "II faut couper court." That is, "End things up at once, or it will be too late." The royal session and the king's declaration were postponed. They did not take place upon the Monday for which they were planned; they were 20 JEAN-SYLVAIN BAILLY, PRESIDENT VF THE COMMONS IN 178i> THE ROYAL SEANCE put forward to the Tuesday, the twenty-third of June. What passed during those two days men will debate according as they are biased upon one side or the other of this great quarrel. Necker would have it in his memoirs that he was overborne by Barentin and, as one may say, by the queen's party; that his original compromise was made a little stronger in favor of the crown. To this change, like the weak and false man he was, he would ascribe all the breakdown that followed. I do not believe him. I think he lied. We know how he made his fortune, and we know how to con- trast the whole being of a man like Necker with the whole being of a man like Barentin. Read Ba- rentin's notes on those same two days, and you will have little doubt that Necker lied. That he mud- dled things worse through the delay and through the increasing gravity of the menace to the throne is probable enough. That he showed any vision or determination or propounded any strict policy is not morally credible. The document which the king was to read was drawn up wholly in his own hand, and he was wholly responsible. Now turn to Versailles upon the morning of that 23 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION Tuesday, the twenty-third of June, 1789, the court having come in from Marly, and all being ready for the great occasion. Remember that in the interval the commons had met again ; the mass of the lower clergy had joined them, not by vote this time, but in person, and two archbishops and three bishops with them, and even from the nobles two men had come. It was therefore to be a set issue between the Na- tional Assembly now rapidly forming, that is, the commons triumphant, and the awful antique au- thority of the crown. If one had looked from the windows of the palace of Versailles upon that morning, still gray and rainy, still cold in weather, out toward the scene where so much was to be done, one would have caught beyond the great paved, semicircular place, beyond the gilded, high railings of the courtyard, in the central one of the three avenues, the broad road leading to Paris, the roof of a great barnlike building, a long parallelogram of stone and brick, with an oval skylight atop. There was but little to hide it, for the ground about was only begin- ning to be built over; young trees, just planted, 24) THE ROYAL SEANCE marked each side of the road upon which one end of this building abutted. Within this hall, un- gainly, and oddly apparent above the lower roofs about it and the unfinished lower buildings of the quarter, was to be acted a drama which deflected and, as some believe, destroyed the immemorial in- stitution of personal government in Europe, and launched those experiments by which the French people in arms proposed to change the face of Christendom. Under the rain and in the cold air of that morn- ing there was not much movement in Versailles. The great desert of hard paving-stones before the gilded railings of the palace yard was almost empty save of troops, and these, not yet arrived in very gi'eat numbers, seemed to be doing the work of a police rather than of an army. They were drawn up in lines that cut the Paris road and its ap- proaches, guarding on all sides this hall of the commons. The side streets which led past the back doors of that hall, the Street of St. Martin and the Street of the Works, had each their cordon of men. Small groups of soldiery, not patrolling, but watch- ing, were distributed here and there. 25 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION The eye caught in the ghstening, empty spaces of that wet, gray morning the red of the Swiss Guard and the blue and white of the mihtia. Be- yond these uniforms there was little else; no crowd was yet gathered. Nor was there as yet any pa- rade or any standing to arms. The ear could no more judge Versailles that morning than the eye. The rain was too soft for any noise, the early life of the town too dulled un- der such weather to send up any echo from the streets. But there could still be distinguished from that quarter of a mile away the occasional sound of hammering where the workmen within the hall were finishing the last of its decorations for the ceremony that was to take place that day. It was a little before nine o'clock in the morning. That large hall had its main entrance upon the new wide, bare Avenue de Paris, with its sprigs of trees. Years before it had been built to house the rackets and the tennis nets, perhaps the scenery of plays — all the material of the lesser pleasures of the court; for which reason it was still called the "Menus-Plaisirs," that is, the "Petty Leisures." It had stood for some forty years, and the things 26 THE ROYAL SEANCE to be warehoused had come in by its principal open- ing upon this great main road. By this main door you might have seen, under the rain, one after another entering as the morning wore on to ten o'clock. Some came on foot, most in the carriages of their equipage; but every indi- vidual, driven or walking, first halted at the line of armed men that barred the avenue, showed a card to prove that he was a deputy, cleric, or noble, and only then was let through. But though the public gathered slowly (in such weather!) the care- ful policing of the streets by these armed men was maintained, and the lines of red and blue still stood across the Avenue de Paris. They so came slowly up and in, the two privileged orders for one hour, six hundred in all. The hour drew to its close. Before the bugles up in the low, wooded heights to the south had sounded for the ten o'clock meal of the camp, be- fore the hour had struck from the clocks of the churches, files drew up to line the street on each side, and a guard stood before the porch. Much farther down the road, beyond a second line of soldiery which barred access from that far 29 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION side also, a small, but gathering, crowd of citizens showed far and small. Mixed with them and pass- ing through them were figures hurrying toward a narrow side street which ran to a back entrance of the Menus-Plaisirs — men in knee-breeches and short coats, all in blaclv, solemn. Those distant fig- ures in black thus mixing with the crowd and get- ting in by a back way were the commons, the men who had just claimed to be all France, to be sov- ereign. They had not been permitted to come in by the main door of their hall ; they were under or- ders to reach the place in this fashion by the meaner street behind it. Even that back door was shut against them. Of the four thousand soldiers all told who formed the ornament, the patrol, and the barriers of those streets, one guard was set at this closed back door forbidding entry. The six hundred commons, crowded and pushing under their dripping umbrel- las, began loud complaints, suggested protests, egged on their officials and in particular their presi- dent. He, Bailly, the middle-aged astronomer, full of rectitude, simple, and pompous, still called it an insult to be kept thus. But the guard had no 30 THE ROYAL SEANCE orders and would not open. Such citizens as had assembled in the street mixed now with the com- mons, supported their indignation. The rain still fell. It was not until nearly a full horn- had passed, until a commotion farther up toward the palace, and the shouted presenting of arms announced the arrival of the king that these six hundred, now at the limit of their restrained and profound exaspera- tion, were at last admitted to the ramshackle wooden corridor that was their only vestibule. They folded their umbrellas, shook the rain from their cloaks, and, hat under arm, filed through the inner way which led to the back of tlie hall. Thus did they meanly enter it last, humiliated and angry, they who would be the nation itself. The commons filed in two by two through the side door at the end of the great hall. They saw before them, under the great veiled, oval skylight of the place, the ranks of the clergy and of the nobles already assembled, rows deep, upon each side of the central gangway. They saw the throne, with its noble hangings roof high and spangled with lilies, upon the raised platform at the farther 31 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION end. They saw the whole place draped and painted and upholstered as it had been for the great cere- mony of the Parliament's opening seven weeks be- fore. It was eleven o'clock. Upon the king's right the queen, suffering some- what from that theatrical dignity which had been the bane of her carriage at the court, and had so offended the French sense of measure, courtesied deep, and would not be seated while the king still stood. Before the throne the ministry sat in rank ; but one chair was empty, and all men gazed at it. It was amazing that this chair should be empty, for it was the chair of the chief minister : it was Neck- er's chair. What was about to be done was Necker's doing. It was he who had written the words the king was to read. But that very morning he had grown afraid. He had ordered his carriage to take him with the rest; then, seeing how feeling had risen, persuaded partly by his women, partly by a native duplicity, that something was to be gained by a dramatic absence and a show of displeasure at what he knew would clash with opinion, he had at the last moment shirked and remained at home. He be- 32 == S ft = - '7 r ^p t 1 1 JACQUES XECKER, RECTOR-GEXERAL OF FINANCES THE ROYAL SEANCE trayed the king by that shu-king. He left it to be thought that he was not the author of his own words. Unhke most traitors, he reaped no reward. Whether rumors of what was to come had leaked out or not we cannot tell. Some of that great au- dience afterward said that they knew what was to- ward, and certainly among the two privileged or- ders there were a few who had heard the tenor of the speech. There were even one or two among the commons. But for the great bulk of those who waited curiously for the fruition of so dreadful a moment, the fruit of that moment was still un- known until the herald announced his cry, until the rustle of seating was over, and the king spoke. What he spoke in his simple, good-natured, rather thick voice was, for those who heard it, enor- mous. His first words raised the issue directly be- fore men had well realized the shock — the royal authority was advising a reversal of all that had been done in the six days: "I thought, gentlemen, that I had done all in my power for the good of my subjects. . . . The States General [not the National Assembly'] have been open now near two months, and they are not 35 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION yet agreed upon the preliminaries of their busi- ness. ... It is my duty, it is a duty which I owe to the common weal, and to my realm and to my- self, to end these divisions. ... I come to repress whatever has been attempted against the laws." He sat down, and every phrase in the five min- utes or so of the declaration drawn up for him had seemed to the commons and their partizans a chal- lenge. The king's face, if witnesses may be trusted, showed some surprise. There is an air in assem- blies which can be felt, though not defined, and the dense rows in black at the end of the hall were hostile. Barentin came up the steps of the throne and knelt, as custom demanded, then turned and said in a loud voice, "The king orders you to be cov; ered." Bailly put on his hat, sundry of his commons fol- lowed his example. The privileged orders for some reason made no such gesture. In the passions of the moment it was thought that they deliberatelj'^ insulted the third order, as though not caring for the privilege of remaining covered before the king, 36 THE ROYAL SEANCE if the commons were to share that i^rivilege. At any rate, Bailly nervously uncovered again, and those who had followed his example followed it once more. There was a little laughter, a little subdued challenging. They ceased as the articles of the king's main declaration — Necker's document — were read for him by his minister. There were twenty-five of them; each was short, and their delivery no great matter in time. But in effect they were capital. They maintained the separation of the three orders. They broke the unity of the National Assembly. They permitted common sessions, only upon questions conmion to all. Louis spoke again for a moment. Next were read the thirty-five articles Necker meant for a "liberal" constitution to the nation. Those who have attended the ritual of assemblies know how superficial and imperfect is the effect of such a preliminary single reading. Men strain their ears for this point and for that, but they do not grasp the details of what has been put before them. What reaches from the lips of the reader to / his audience is not, as in book-work, a precise and 37 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION complete plan; it is only a general effect. Those thirty-five articles, droned out in the official ac- cent, liberally as many of them were interpreted upon a further study, tolerably coordinated as they may have seemed to Necker and to those who drafted them in the clique of the council-chamber, meant for the commons a direct challenge. And the commons were right. The French Revolution was not permitted for politicians' work of this kind. Flame is not made for pap. Yet challenging as Necker's futilities were to the ardor of the time, it was not they that determined the gravity of that short hour. What determined it was the last and third speech of the king. Louis rose for the third time at the conclusion of this reading, and in brief sentences told them they had heard his will. He reminded them that they could do nothing without his specific approba- tion; he used the famous phrase that, if he were abandoned in his enterprise, "he would alone carry out the good of his peoples." His last sentence was this: "I order you, gentlemen, to separate at once, and to-morrow to come each of you to the place set 38 THE ROYAL SEANCE apart for your respective orders, there to resume your debates. To this effect I have ordered the grand master of ceremonies to prepare the places where you are to meet." During each brief interlude of the king's own speaking all had j)reserved a profound attention. During the reading of the articles there had been now and then a slight applause, especially from cer- tain of the nobles at the article in favor of the old feudal dues, and to that applause there had come isolated cries of "Silence!" from the commons. Nothing else had disturbed the ease, the dignity, and the rapidity of this one hour pregnant with war. One hour, for it was eleven when the king first entered; as he rose to dismiss them and leave the hall it was noon. When the king had passed behind the glorious, roof-high curtains of the throne, and so gone out, there was a noise of men moving. All the three hundred of the nobility rose and followed him. A great number of the clergy — most of that order — came after. The hall was left desolate in its center; most desolate where its great empty dais, splendid with the purple drapings and 41 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION the embroidered lilies of gold, and the empty throne dominated the floor below. The far end and the dark aisles behind the col- umns were still filled with the commons in a crowd. Some remained still seated, some few more had risen; all were keeping silent, and only a very few crept shamefacedly along the walls toward the doors. With the commons there now mixed such of the clergy as had dared to remain, and not a few of the public audience; of these last many lingered curiously, hanging on in the corners and sides of the place, watching for what was to come. One could not see from that hall any part of the life without. Its windows were high. Its prin- cipal light was from the glazed, oval skylight in the roof, covered and tempered by a veil of cloth. One could not hear the crowd which had gathered out- side in the broad avenue to see the king and his coaches go by, and which remained in great num- bers to attend the exit of the commons when these should leave. That inner place was isolated. But the seven or eight hundred men standing at bay therein could feel all about them the great mass of 42 THE ROYAL SEANCE soldiery upon the heights in the woods, the regi- ments marching in from the frontiers, the gather- ings of mob and of armed men against them down the valley in Paris, two hours away — all the ex- pectancy of arms. Workmen entered to remove the hangings and to dismantle the hall. Still the commons kept their places, as yet undecided; no general decision taken, none proposed, but yet the mass of them unmoving, and by their mere unmoving refusing the command of the crown. It was at this moment, before as yet the artisans had begun their business of ladders and hammer- ing, that there came out from the robing-room and from behind the cloths of the throne a figure with which the ceremony of the States General had al- ready rendered them familiar : it was young Dreux Breze, elegant, a trifle effeminate, little more than a boy. He carried his white wand of the master of ceremonies, as he had carried it when the session opened, and his person was, by the costume of his office, all gold and plumes and many diamonds. He performed his simple duty: he came up to Bailly, the president, and said: 43 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION "Sir, you heard the order of the king?" Bailly answered in silence, while men craned for- ward to hear : "Sir, the Assembly stands adjourned only by its own vote. I cannot disperse it until it has de- bated upon that adjournment." A pompous rig- marole enough, but thick with coming years. Said young Breze: "Am I to give that to the king as your reply?" And Bailly answered: "Yes." Then, turning to his colleagues, Bailly had be- gun to give his reasons to them, when he found striding up to his side, and facing Breze, the heavy vigor of Mirabeau. It was Mirabeau, so striding up, who in his powerful voice interposed. With no official right to mandate, he spoke most famous words, of which tradition has made a varied and doubtful legend, but which were in substance these : "Go tell those that sent you we are here by the will of the nation." He added either that force alone (of bayonets or what-not) could drive the commons out, or, as some say, that such force was powerless. EMANUEL JOSEPH SIEYES / A IVis,chez I'AuTEUR, Quay dca Augij{ljns N^/i aa .3' EMMANUEL-JOSEPH SIEYES, DEPUTY FROM PARIS TO THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY THE ROYAL SEANCE Even as he said it, Breze, having his answer from the official head of the commons, thus recalcitrant, moved away. The custom of the court was on him, and he moved out backward with his white wand. Of the men who saw that piece of ritual, some said within themselves that the thing was a sign, and that sovereignty had passed from the Bourbons. When he had gone there was silence again for a little while. It was broken by the workmen setting to their labor of dismantling the hall. Bailly or- dered them to cease, and they obeyed the order. The genius of the French people for decision and for manifold cooperation appeared again and again throughout the Revolution, in debate, in street fighting, upon the battle-field. Nowhere did it appear more clearly than at this origin of all the movement. Without traditional procedure, with no waiting on initiative from above, at this moment spontane- ous and collective action decided all. One voice, proposing an adjournment until to- morrow, was voted down at once. Next Sieyes, with his firm, accurate mouth, pronounced a graven phrase expressing the mind of all: "You are to- 47 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION day what you were yesterday." Immediately, upon the motion of Camus, a man too legal, but well able to define, the commons and such of the clergy as had remained with them voted unani- mously their contradiction to the throne. They voted that all that they had passed, and all that they had done, they still maintained. As the hands which had been raised everywhere to vote this motion fell again, the corner of French liistory was turned, and those curious to choose a precise point at which the outset of any matter may be set, should choose that moment of the fall of those hundreds of hands for the origin of modern Europe, its vast construction, its still imperiled ex- periment. One thing more remained to be done, though the general sense of those present did not at first grasp its necessity; the proposal and the carrying of it proceeded from the vivid sanity of Mirabeau. He it was who proposed that they should vote the in- violability of themselves, the deputies of the nation. To pass that decree meant that if the Assembly should win, it would have, for the punishment of any that had attempted to defeat it by force, the 48 THE ROYAL SEANCE awful weapon which a solemn declaration of inten- tion gives. But it also meant that if the commons were defeated, they had been guilty of treason, Bailly, perhaps from confusion, perhaps from timidity, himself hesitated, until Mirabeau, under- standing well what force it is that governs men, said: "If you do not pass this motion, sixty of us, and you the first, will be arrested this very night." A column of troops had already been formed out- side the doors, though the decision to act at once was, perhaps in fear of Paris, not acted on by the crown. Five hundred and twenty-seven men passed the decree, and of these thirty-four voted "No," four hundred and ninety-three, "Yes." Its operative words are significant: The National Assembly declares . . . that every individual corporation, tribunal, court or commis- sion, which may dare during or after the present session to pursue, seek out, arrest, or cause to be arrested ... a deputy upon the ground of any profession, advice, opinion, or speech made by him in the States General, no matter by whom such at- 49 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION tempts may be ordered, are guilty of treason and subject to capital punishment. This voted, there was no more to be done. The many men who had thus risked all looked at one another; Bailly declared the session at an end. They came out upon the crowds that still waited in the lifting weather outside, that cheered a little, and that wonderingly followed the dispersion of the deputies to their homes. The king and those who had left with him had lunched at the midday hour. They were past their coffee when the business of their antagonists was thus accomplished. The commons and the curious who had waited in the streets for their exit were late for luncheon that day. In a week, and two days more than a week, the battle was won. The clergy in a body had come in, the nobles in batch after batch, the National As- sembly was fully comjDosed at last, and Louis him- self, writing to the privileged orders — such as still refused — to bow to the commons, had accepted de- feat, and his sovereignty was never from that mo- ment full. 50 GABRIEL HONORE RIQUETTI, COMTE DE MIRABEAU PART TWO THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES I INTRODUCTION After the successful assertion by the commons of their new usurped powers over the crown, as described in our first paper, a second attempt at coercion, backed by the foreign mercenary troops in the service of the king, failed. The depots of arms at the Invalides and the Bastille in Paris were sacked by the populace, and the latter was taken by force upon the same day, July 14«, 1789. The first principles of the Revolution were laid in resolutions of the parliament at Versailles during the summer, notably the declaration known as that of the "Rights of Man" and the abolition of the feudal property of the nobility. Another popular rising in the capital in the month of October brought the court back to Paris, and the parlia- ment followed it. For eighteen months the tide of demo- cratic reform rose with greater and greater violence, and while the crown still remained the sole executive of the na- tion, possessed of all immediate control over the regular armed forces and the disbursement of public money, the personal peril of the royal family grew greater, and the term within which it seemed certain that the executive would lose its authority drew near. There stood between the monarchy — the one vital insti- tution of the French — and its ruin no real forces save the personality of Mirabeau and the regular troops. As 55 INTRODUCTION against the latter there had been raised and organized a considerable militia, duly armed by law and present in every village and town in the country ; while the mass of the regular troops had purposely been stationed at a dis- tance from Paris through the growing power of the par- liament. A foreign war was threatened through the desire of every ancient authority in Europe to repress the move- ment, and with the approaching threat of invasion, which could not but serve the king, the unpopularity, and there- fore the danger, of his family grew greater still. Mirabeau, who dominated the parliament by his person- ality even more than by his oratory and his prodigious in- dustry, had secretly entered into the service of the court in his determination to save the monarchy, in the fall of which he believed would be involved the breakdown of the country. He had drawn up a regular plan presupposing and inviting civil war. He would have the king leave Paris for some post such as Compiegne, not more than a day's posting away, and from that point appeal to the people and to the army to support him. All this work of Mirabeau was being done in the winter of 1790-91. Meanwhile the personal alarm of the queen, backed by her rare energy, preferred a complete flight with her hus- band and children, either to the frontier itself or beyond it, a total undoing of the Revolution if that flight were successful, and the return of the monarchy, backed not only by the army, but by the threat of foreign powers and of invasion. 56 ■A^Jrer^li«ltiiiwftiJWi«Ji mni jt.M..uit.S^ INTRODUCTION In this perhaps impracticable and too heroic scheme, utterly anti-national, her great ally was Fersen, a Swedish nobleman who had loved her with devotion from his first youth, and whom she, since her misfortunes began, liad come to love as devotedly in return. It seems certain that the overmastering ability of Mira- beau would have carried his plan and would probably have saved the French monarchy had he lived. But he died from overwork upon the second of April, 1791, and with him lacking, nothing could prevent the maturing of the queen's plan. A fortnight after Mirabeau's death the mob had pre- vented the king from leaving Paris, in a perfectly open manner, for a visit to one of his suburban palaces, and the great militia guard of the palace had not shown dis- cipline or loyalty. After that nothing remained but to fix a date for secret flight, and this date was ultimately fixed for the night of the twentieth of June. Fersen worked out all the plans in detail. He had the great traveling-coach, or berlin, specially built; the com- mander of the army upon the eastern frontier, Bouille, was warned and provided posts to receive the fugitives when they should have proceeded a little more than a hun- dred miles from Paris, and to conduct them in safety to Montmedy upon the extreme frontier; whence, when he should safely have reached it, the king was to issue his proclamation to the army and to the people. The travel- ing disguises for the royal family were prepared; three 59 INTRODUCTION gentlemen of their former guard were trusted to accom- pany the flight. A passport in the name of Mme. de KorfF, a Russian lady resident in Paris, was obtained, and the queen was to travel in that name with her two children, and her husband as a servant. 60 PART TWO THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES UPON the evening of Monday, the twentieth of June, 1791, a httle before nine o'clock, Axel de Fersen was leaning, with his chin in his hands, his elbows upon the parapet, looking over the bridge called the Pont Royal, which leads from the Tuileries to the southern bank of the Seine. He watched the dying light upon the river below, and waited with desperate impatience in liis heart, his body lounging in affected indolence. The sky above was cloudy. The day had been hot, but its last hours not sunlit. A freshness was now coming up from the Seine over the town, and the noises of life and movement that rise with the closing of the working hours in the capital filled the streets. He was dressed in the rough habit of a cabman, and the poor coach of which he had the driving stood in rank with others a little way from the gate of the palace. 61 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION As he so gazed, two men, one with a sunken, long- jawed face and small, peering eyes, the other frail, slight, and younger, both dressed in a faded yellow livery as of servants to some rich man of a time be- fore the Revolution had abolished liveries, came up to him. He knew already who they were. They were Moustier and Valory, two gentlemen of the king's disbanded guard who, in the disguise of serv- ants, had volunteered to serve Louis in his flight. Fersen gave them the instructions that they awaited, for one was to find and conduct the great coach he had had built and to keep it waiting for Fersen at the gates of the city ; the other was to act as outrider and to go before to prepare the relays. A third. Maiden, remained hidden in the apart- ments of the king. Night fell, an hour passed, and two women in the conduct of a man who hurried them across the bridge were put into a chaise that there awaited them and drove off. Fersen knew that mission also. These were the two waiting-women of the queen, going on ahead through the night to the sec- ond posting-station at Claye upon the eastern road. A little while later — it was eleven o'clock, or a little 62 WX •^» ' iMy\\ *<#*^«--, s.'"i3^^'i"^r*='f^- m •,^/M\\01 ' ' VIVE LE ROI ! VIVE LA NATION ! ' ' A Cartoon of 1789 THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES past — a woman came to him leading two children, two girls, it seemed, one old enough to walk alone, the other whom she held by the hand. It was JNIme. de Tourzel, the governess of the royal chil- dren. The elder girl was the princess royal. The young child, disg-uised as her sister, was the dau- phin, the httle heir to the throne. Many were go- ing in and out of the palace at that moment. This small group in somber clothing drew no one's eye in the half-light. The children were put into the cab, the woman followed, and Fersen, with the most cabman-like way in the world, climbed slowly up to his box and drove at a very quiet pace westward along the quay that flanks the Tuileries gardens. He came to the great open place which to-day is called the Place de la Concorde, where the half- finished bridge had only just lost its last work- man with the end of the day; he turned to the right across its paving and up the rue Royale until he came to the narrow rue St. Honore, where again he turned his shabby team to the right and drove as leisurely eastward. There is a place, now rebuilt out of all recogni- tion, the ways broadened, all the houses modern, 65 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION where a street still called by the name of "Ladder Street" (the rue de rEchelle) comes into the rue St. Honore. It is a very short street leading to- ward the palace. Between the Tuileries and those few yards of way there stood in those days a num- ber of great houses, the homes of certain nobles who had been about the court, and in the midst of their confused carved fronts was an archway that led to the royal stables, and by a narrow lane to the courtyard of the palace itself. In that Street of the Ladder Fersen halted, drawing his cab up toward the curb. The long detour over which he had purposely lingered had taken him nearly three quarters of an hour ; it was near twelve. He got down from the box, went to the carriage window, and said a word or tw^o, bid- ding the woman and the two children wait in patience. Then he paced up and down the rough paving as midnight deepened, sauntering in the fashion of cabmen that await a fare. Such light as there was between the high houses came from dim oil lamps slung from wall to wall and far apart. There was light also in the guard- room at the corner of the archwa}^ and there a 66 THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES militiaman stood sentry with fixed bayonet, for every issue from the palace was thus guarded. The street was full of people coming and going from that little town the Tuileries, and as the hour wore on, the great equipages of those who attended court passed in to take their masters up at the royal porch and passed out again on their way homeward. Fersen knew that the last ceremonies would not be over until very late, but that did not relieve his increasing anxiety. The darkness seemed to grow more profound as he waited. He watched with as little show as might be the throngs that passed back and forth through the archway ; he saw no figure of those he was awaiting until, M^hen it was quite dark — for though there was a moon, the cur- tain of clouds was thick — he saw, or thought he saw, seated upon a stone bench against one of the great houses a woman whose attitude even in that gloom he thought he knew. With the same leisurely pace of a man free from employment he sauntered past, noted the gray dress and broad, gray veiled hat under the dim light of the distant lamps, and the veil about the face, and coming closer still, knew that it was Madame Elizabeth, the king's sister. 67 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION He spoke in a whisper, without turning to her or stopping as he went slowly by. He made an im- perceptible movement of the head toward the cab, saying, "They wait for you." She did not move, and he feared for a moment that she might not have understood what he had said or recognized him, for he dared not linger. He paced back again toward his charge and again whispered the words as he passed, still looking down at the ground; and this time the woman rose, went to the cab, and entered it. The lights behind the shutters of the great houses had gone out, the distant noises in the palace hard by had ceased, the last of the equipages were rum- bling through the archwa}^, and still there was no sign of new-comers for him. It was long past mid- night, nearly one o'clock. Another of the cabmen in the rank spoke to him. He answered as best he could with the manner, accent, and slang of the trade. He oflFered this unwelcome friend a pinch of snuff from a rough box; then he went back as though to look to his horses, felt their legs, stood about them a little, and patted them. There was still, but very rarely, a belated servant 68 yy^T^ /Z.X^.Ti^.AL. L. I u:imJ. JUfHt/L't' THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY PETRIFIED. THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY REVIVIFIED Caricatures bj- Gillray THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES or so i^assing out from under the arch, and at last, when his fever of expectation was at the height, he distinguished two such, a man and a woman, com- ing toward him unhurriedly. As they came nearer, and the feeble ghmmer of the lamps showed them less confusedly, he marked the lumbering walk of the man. He wore a round soft hat, and a big overcoat against the freshness of the night air, and had the air of a familiar upper servant. At his side, with an upright gait and a certain poise of the head that Fersen knew, alas! for him, better than anything else on earth, went the woman. Fersen went forward, mastering his respect, and led them to the carriage; and then, without delay, but still careful to give no cause for remark by his haste, he drove northward over the loud granite sets of the streets. By what tortuous ways Fersen drove the king and his family one may hardly guess. They were puzzled to find him following many street turnings other than those that would lead them to the near- est gate of the city on the north and so to the great frontier road. But Fersen did what he did know- ingly. It was his business in this turn of the night 71 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION to make sure that the last point of his plan had been obeyed and that the great traveling-carriage had gone on before and was waiting for them out- side the limits of the city. He called at the stables and found one trusted servant of his to assure him that the thing had been sent and that all was ready. Then only did he turn toward the east and the north and make for the barrier at the end of the rue St. Martin, which was then the gate of Paris and the beginning of straggling houses and the open coun- try. /They did not reach that barrier till two o'clock, and already they breathed some faint air of morn- ing. No one challenged them. It was one cab like another, driving to the suburbs with some belated middle-class party that had dined in Paris that night. There were lights and music still in the house of the gate-keeper at the barrier, for there had been a wedding in his family that day, and they were feasting. After the glare of that light, Fer- sen looked in vain through the darkness for the berhn. Then, with some few minutes so lost, he saw the black hump at last drawn up well to the right and close to the bordering ditch. The 72 THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES guardsman, Moustier, and Balthazar, his own coachman, were sitting their horses immovable. They had waited thus immovable for some hours through the night. Very rapidly the travelers passed from the cab to the traveling-coach, and leaned back in the comfortable white velvet cushions of its upholstering. Fersen himself, sending back the cab I know not how, took his place upon the broad box of the berlin, and the four horses felt the traces and started. The journey had begun. Toward the northeast, to which the great road ran, there was already a hint of dawn, and great Paris just behind would not sleep long into the light. Therefore the horses, Fersen's own, with only a short stage before them, were urged to a vig- orous pace through the short, lonely suburb and still more lonely fields beyond, and Fersen's coach- man, who rode as postilion upon the leader, spared them little. It was near three o'clock when they reached the first posting-house at Bondy, three miles from the boundary of the city, and just outside the wall and railings of the park in that place. The guardsman Valory, who was outrider, had been there for an 73 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION hour; the six horses for the carriage were awaiting it, and the two horses which he and the third guards- man, Maiden, were to ride to the next stage. As they unharnessed Fersen's steaming beasts, Fersen himself, as coachman coming down from the box, waited a moment until the fresh team was in and the postilions mounted. Then he looked in at the window of the coach, and taking off his hat to the queen, he said, "Good-by, Madame de Korff," and under the growing light would no longer linger. He was off at once by the by-lane to the Brussels road beyond. He and those whom he had so worked to save were to meet at Montmedy. The postihons urged on their mounts, the short whips cracked, and they were gone. Fersen saw the great mass go swaying up the road, dark against the growing dawn, and went off lonely upon his separate flight to the north. As for the travelers, touched by that effect of morning which all feel, by the unnatural exhilara- tion of those strained hours of no sleep, and of a re- lease apparently begun, they broke into making plans for their disguise, reassuring themselves with every mile that passed and feeling the first sense of 74 MADAME ELISABETH From a photograph by Brann, Clement & Co., New York, of a painting by Mme. Vigee Lebrun, in the possession of Mme. la Marquise du Blaisdel THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES }-elief that they had known for two strained years. The sleepy little boy who was their fortune and the heir was set more comfortably back against the white cushions in his girl's clothes that he might rest. The five others, wakeful and eager, pretended to learn their roles. Mme. de Tom'zel was to be the mistress; the queen, the governess Rochet; the Princess Elizabeth, a companion; and the king a steward under the name of Durand. There was almost a spirit of comedy in the coach. The king talked of his new liberty and of riding, perhaps of the autumn hunting that he loved; and they con- versed also of the nature of their journey, where — and upon this perhaps they were more guarded — there might be peril, especially as they passed through the one considerable town of Chalons ; but also of how, not two hours beyond that place, at Somme-Vesle, a posting-house in the midst of Champagne, they would meet the first troop of their chain-mounted escorts thrust out from the army, and how with these they would henceforward be safe. They were late. They were already a full hour behind the time-table that men who understood the 77 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION essentials of order as the king had never understood them had laid down for their guidance. But the pace was brisk, the road was passing swiftly by, and the accident of such trifling unpunctuality so early in their adventure did not oppress them. There was no one with them accustomed to com- mand or to understand the all-importance of exacti- tude in any military affair. That little company, if we think of it, was an iso- lated thing and most imperfect for such a task: three women bred to a court and to the habits of leisure or of successive pleasures ; two children ; the unwilled, heavy king and husband, who never did or could decide, and whose judgment was slow to the point of disease. Beyond these were only the three guardsmen, almost servants. At Claye, the next relay, they found the queen's two waiting-women, who, abandoned for hours, had awaited them in their chaise, and were bewildered, wondering if they were lost. From Claye onward, the sun having now risen, though hidden behind the level roof of clouds, and the day fully begun, they passed through fields without villages, with scarcely a house, where the peasants in the eager work of the 78 THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES high summer were ah*eady abroad. The fourfold rank of great trees which dignified the road went by in monotonous procession. The quick change of horses at Meaux raised their hopes still higher, and as they opened their picnic-bags, bringing out bread and meat and wine to break their fast, they spoke in jests, increasingly secure. To Maiden riding by the carriage door, the queen beckoned, and offered wine and food, and she told him fa- miliarly of how the king had laughed roundly, say- ing that Lafayette, the master of the militia in Paris, and officially the guardian of the court, would be woundily puzzled that day. So much for that fresh early morning when all was well. The wide royal road, full of the Roman inheri- tance, breasts beyond Meaux a sharp, high, wooded hill, and the drag up that hill was long ; upon its far- ther side, on to the Marne again, goes a sharp pitch down which the shrieking brakes betrayed an equal delay. It was fully eight o'clock when they had come along the riverside to the lovely valley of the Sellot, winding between its wooded guardian hills to join the greater river. There two roads part, each leading equally to 79 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION Chalons and to the east; the main one still follows the Marne, but the second, somewhat shorter, cuts across the plateau to the south of the river, which few, even in the traveling of to-day, know, and which those who had planned the flight had chosen on account of its few towns and villages and less frequented inns. Yet it was precisely in this chosen stretch of thirty miles, by this less-fre- quented lower road to Chalons, that their evil was to come upon them. The hour's delay which one accident and another — the lateness of the moment in which the last of the court had left the palace, the slight time lost in peering for the berlin through the darkness at the gate, the long drag up and down the forest of Meaux — had burdened them with, was now per- haps more nearly grown to an hour and a half ; but not one of that little company could guess how much this meant, or how such errors breed of them- selves and add, how one strained and anxious man, watching during that Tuesday at the head of a little troop of horse in the lonely plains beyond Chalons, would be broken, and with him all their fortunes, by such incapacity. For save where it 80 THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES walked the hills, as heavy coaches must, the berlin went bravely enough, covering its eight miles an hour or more ; and the sense of speed made up with them for the realities of time and of coordinated distance wherein they were incompetent indeed. Nor was that error, that growing error in exacti- tude, all that they had to face. THE PURSUIT It was perhaps eight o'clock in Paris, at the most half an hour later, that the whole populace was alive to what had happened. The drimis were beat- ing, rallying the militia, the crowd was filling the square in front of the palace. At that moment when strong action in pursuit of the fugitives could not be long delayed, they were only just upon this upland road leaving the Marne ; they had a start of, say, forty-five miles, fifty at the most, before the first rider could surely mount and be galloping in pursuit. The carriage rolled on fairly with Valory, its outrider, on before, Maiden trotting at the door, and the chaise with the queen's two waiting- women in a cloud of dust behind. It rolled on eastward through that high, little-known land of 83 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION wide, hedgeless fields ; it was about ten o'clock when it came down into a sort of shallow cup lower than the plain, wherein lies that little place called "Old Houses" — Viels-Maisons. Very few men, I think, of those who travel or speak of their travels know the tiny group of roofs. It has not thirty families round its church, it meant to the travelers nothing but an insignificant posting-house and a relay; but it was there that their fate first touched them, for there a chance postilion, one called Picard, glanced at the faces, and knew them for the king and queen. Like so many upon that full and dreadful day, he yielded entirely to caution. The king was still the king. There was divided authority in France, and whether reward or punishment would follow any act no man could tell on such a day as this until it was known which of the two combatants, the crown or the parliament, would rule at last. So Picard said nothing; but he had seen. Others also were to prove discreet, but a little less discreet than he. The coach went on through the lonely land, past one small town, Montmirail, which later Napoleon's resistance was to render famous, and on again into 84! THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES the empty fields, still eastward. It grew to be noon, hot and ahnost stormy under the lowering sky. Louis the King, with his road-book spread upon his knee, followed with curiously detached in- terest the correspondence of the map with the dull landscape outside. As the carriage stopped at one posting-house after another, and as he would plunge his hand into his leather money-bag to give his guardsman the wages of the postilions, he was not content thus to show his face at the window, he would even stretch his legs a bit and get down from the carriage to pace to and fro while each fresh team was harnessing. "We are safe now," he said; and again, "There is no fear of our being recognized now." All the air of that little company had come to be one of se- curity, though one man had already marked them down, and already the galloping out in pursuit from the gates of Paris had begun. The governess and the royal children caught that air of security, and where a long hill put the horses at a walk, they got out and climbed it on foot. There was only one small incident of which to this day we cannot tell whether it was of any moment 85 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION or not. The little princess had noted it and had been disturbed. It was the presence of a traveler who for a time rode alone upon his horse behind them, walking when they walked, trotting when they trotted. It may have been no more than the coincidence that his way lay with theirs. Long be- fore Chalons he had turned off by a by-road and disappeared. There is, making a sort of western wall for the Champagne country, a very sharp and even range of hills running north and south. These are the escarpment of that plateau of which I have just spoken, and through which for many hours the coach had been traveling on. They end abruptly to the south, but just beyond the precipitous slope in which they terminate there stands across a nar- row, clean-cut valley one isolated hill called the Mont Aime; so that the gap is a sort of gate into the flat country below, which stretches eastward in a wide, rolling, chalky plain, the lower Cham- pagne, of which Chalons is the capital and center. Beyond that plain another low, sharp line of hills, the Forest of the Argonne, marks the very dis- tant horizon. 86 THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES Through this gate, which is a landmark for miles throughout the plain, passes the road; and half an hour beyond, or a little more, where the road crosses the small water of the Soude, three or four houses round one posting-house, by name Chaintrix, break the monotony of the fields. The travelers reached it just in the sultriest part of the day. They had not greatly added to their error in time ; they were not much, if at all, behind the hour and a half of debt against fate which they had already suffered to accumulate when fate touched them again, but this time with a stronger gesture than when, four hours before, the postboy at Viels-lNIaisons had looked askance and known them for what they were. Here lived one Lagny with certain married and unmarried daughters, and with him, by just one coincidence, his son-in-law from miles away, Vallet by name, who for that one day was there. That son-in-law had been to Paris the year before for the Revolutionary feast upon the Champ-de-Mars. He had there stared at the king, and when the ber- lin stopped at his father-in-law's door, and while yet the relay was waiting, he recognized his sover- 89 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION eign. Now it happened — so the doom of the king willed it — that all the small household, father and daughter and son-in-law, were Royalists of the old kind. They made obeisance openly; the king and the queen accepted that homage with delight, and at parting gave them gifts, which still remain in testimony to the truth of this tale. Vallet insisted upon driving them himself, — with what conse- quences we shall see, — and what was more, this spontaneous little scene of enthusiasm added by some few minutes again — perhaps a quarter, per- haps half an hour — to the delay. The royal chil- dren had gone in to rest a little from the heat and from their fatigue. When they came out and the coach started, the postmaster and his daughters openly acknowledged their hosts before the servants of the farm and the postboys around. Vallet himself rode upon the leaders — they whipped off before three — proud to be driving his king and filled with zeal. But his zeal was indis- creet. Twice he let the horses fall. Once his off wheel caught the parapet of a bridge. At least twice the traces broke, and time, now so heavily 90 THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES against them, turned still more heavily against them in the necessity of finding ropes and of mend- ing. There must have been one more hour lost somewhere in that stage of the road. When somewhat after four o'clock the fugitives clattered into Chalons, the whole matter was public knowledge. Whether Vallet had spoken, or whether the news shouted across the fields had been carried by some galloper, or in whatever other way it spread, many knew it while the two carriages were halted for the next relay in the town. The little knot that gathered round the carriage knew what they were gazing at; the bolder among them murmured thanks that the king had escaped his enemies. The postmaster of Chalons knew it, the mayor knew it, and many others whose names have not been preserved, but whose attitudes and words have. None would take upon himself any respon- sibility in the great quarrel, and only one obscure threat reached their ears. An unknown man did say in a low voice one thing which has been re- corded: at least we have it at second hand, but at good second hand, that the travelers heard during 91 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION a halt a passer-by cry to them that their plans had miscarried and that sooner or later they would be held. But this general recognition at Chalons dis- turbed them not at all. They were now not only secure in mind, as they had been for many hours, but also within touch of certain and physical se- curity. For at the very next relay, not two hours along the road, was not the first of those armed posts of escort waiting for them, to surround them, to form a rear-guard, which should forbid all pur- suit, to roll up further posts as the carriage still went eastward, and to form at last a whole body of cavalry, leading them on to the main army be- yond Varennes ? At that town, not fifty miles on, was the limit beyond which lay stationed in great numbers the army of Bouille, the general privy to the plot and ready to do all things for the king. Here, if we are to seize the last act of this dis- aster, we must have some pictm'c of the scene in which it was played. The lower Champagne, "The Champagne of the Dust," as the peasants call it, heaves in wide, low billows that barely disturb the vast sameness of its 92 'U^/^/r-f' . ^- y^ ^^y^r/t' ^r/c /^^'^^f^f^ir. y. .:....-. /:, ^.^^.,^'•. DKOUET, THE POSTMASTER AT VAKENNES THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES flat until the Argonne, its limit and its wall, is reached to the east. With the Ai'gonne are great trees again, and lively waters, and the recovery of rich land. That countryside of the "Champagne Pouil- leuse" is strange ; it has remained for centuries thus empty to the sky, land often too poor for the plow, everywhere hungry and half deserted. The slug- gish streams that make their way slowly through its shallow depressions are milk-white with the worthless chalky soil, and though now too regular plantations of stunted pines diversify it, planted in the hope of reclamation, it is of its nature a country without trees, as almost without men. Small, scat- tered villages hold its few people, and again and again one comes to patches as great as a rich 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 mili- tary roads. Here the French have made their chief modern ranges for the training of their gun- ners. Here Attila was broken in his great defeat, and you may see his enormous oval camp still stand- 95 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION ing, 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 re- turn until, after twenty -two years, the republic and Napoleon had transformed the world. Right across the sweep drives the great road from Chalons, twenty-five miles, till it strikes at 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 Chalons 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 berlin was passing through this stage. That hour and a half of debt to fate which the loy- alty of Lagny at Chaintrix had increased perhaps 96 THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES to two, the avoidable accidents under Vallet's post- ing had stretched to nearly three. Young Choiseul, the duke, had come in to Sonune-Vesle. He had his orders to expect some- what 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 trust- worthy 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 up the road, the postmaster, as though to make con- versation, strolled up to one man in subordinate command and said, "It seems that the king is to pass this way." He Vv^as answered neither yes nor no. 97 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION Peasants came in from the fields ; a little knot of men gathered; rmnors went about. In those days all the French had evil words for the foreign mer- cenaries 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 rumor of the truth, or at least the spreading of it, and any conflict between his little line of Ger- mans and the gathering peasantry about. And in one of those agonies that soldiers always feel, whether the command be great or small, when syn- chrony fails and when they are waiting hopelessly for something that never comes, torn as soldiers al- ways 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 98 THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES 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, 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 insure failure. He would ride away with his men across Ai'gonne and join the main body at Varennes. He would not further rouse the growing talk of the fields by swelling the contin- gents to the east with his own, and by showing more soldiers than need be along the road. He would cut across the plain and througli the woods. He rode away, and his men after him. As the horses drawing the berlin topped the slight rise which hides from that approach the post- ing-house of Somme-Vesle, and as the flat dip, with the steading and the long wall of the courtyard, appeared before the travelers, the king from the 101 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 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 hefore 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 travelers did not speak to one an- other; 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 west- ern clouds ; it shone u^^on tumbled, white fields, bare or with a meager harvest, and, upon its ridge to the left, on the mill which was to be lifted into such fame in fourteen months under the name of Valmy : they were crossing that battle-field. One more halt, one more relay under the faihng 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 102 THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES 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 thor- oughly what was toward. Gossip of it had been passing in the inns for hours. The post of hussars there waiting had angered men, but liad 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 har- nessing, looking ill-naturedly at the huge, yellow thing, with its heaped luggage and tarpaulin atop, and teUing his men in that hill country to spare the beasts. 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 103 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION truth far up the road hours before. And the trav- elers began their climb under the falling night up into Argonne. One more relay in the darkness at Clermont, where the road to Montmedy 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 boots and saddles, lit the flame. The militia were summoned by drummers throughout the streets, the German soldiers, muti- nous with hunger after their long wait and sup- ported in their mutiny by the town folk, failed to obey. The town council met, arrested, and exam- ined 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 de- tained." 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 104 THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES 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 Montmedy and of the turn-up 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, 107 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 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 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 sit- ting 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 drag- ging across it an empty wagon that lay by, and 108 THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES then strode up the main street of the place to find whether he had lost or won. He came uj)on the berlin 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 postilions. They would consent to go only a few yards farther, to cross the river. And there was Bouille's son and his men waiting for them. Drouet took the lead- er's reins and threw him back on his haunches. He had won the race. What followed was the anticlimax and the de- spair: 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 from Paris; the slow, dreadful return under the heat; and the restoration of the crown to the palace, which was henceforward its prison. 109 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 em- pire 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 ap- parent that matters would come to actual war, for many erroneously thought that the French Avould yield to the threat of foreign intervention. At the head of those who were guilty of this capital error was Marie Antoinette her- self, 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 re- sponsible 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 gov- ernments, meanwhile, grew more and more threatening, and Marie Antoinette kept up a secret correspondence with them. It became obvious as the spring of 1792 ap- 113 INTRODUCTION proached that if the foreign armies intervened, it would be not only to save the monarchy, but to crush the Revo- lution altogether. The queen betrayed French plans of war to the enemy. The emperor wrote a letter demanding certain things in his name that concerned French domestic politics alone. The result was that the French Revolu- tionary 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. Mean- while it was more and more publicly known that the court welcomed the war as a probable or perhaps certain deliver- ance 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 favor 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 mon- archy. 114 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. 115 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION This last day of their famous raid was hot and cloudless. The sight of the river alone was cool, past the stubble of the baked harvested field; and the great road stretched on dusty hour after hour and league after league. They had halted for the midday meal ; the after- noon 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 that 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 ahve with prepa- ration for the struggle; for the war had now run 116 THE STORMING OF THE TUILERIES 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 colors before them. Their cannon, now cleaned and burnished, followed in their train. In the center of Paris there stands, the most famous, perhaps, among the royal emblems of Eu- rope, a gi'eat 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 court- yards. 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 Tuile- ries turned away from the river at right angles. 119 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION For more than forty years the charred walls of that building, burned in the Commune, have disap- peared, 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 com- pleted 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. Honore, 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. 120 THE STORMING OF THE TUILERIES Behind the Tuileries to the west the gardens, which are now open to the town, and 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 Revo- lution. 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 ex- actly preserved amid the gold, the heavy hangings, and all the splendor of the Bourbons. So long as that center stood and governed, so long as it be- trayed (for it was certainly betraying) the nation in arms, that nation and the great experiment upon 123 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION which it had embarked were in peril or doomed. For from the Tuileries could go out not only open orders that presumed the defense of the frontiers and resistance to the coming invasion, but secret letters also, very contradictory of these; and one such had gone in those very days in menace of the French people. The queen's letter was an appeal for proclamation to be issued by the invaders, a manifesto threatening with military execution what- ever 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, swol- len 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 mer- cenaries, was available for its defense; it had can- non, and save against cannon the great building 124 THE STORMING OF THE TUILERIES was strong; it expected and received drafts of vol- unteers of its own that would support the king and could be armed; it possessed good reserves of am- munition; a minority, but a considerable minority, of the wealthier militia in the city, promised a rein- forcement. It would have a garrison of some six thousand men if an assault came. The very position of the palace strongly aided its defense. The garden behind was well pro- tected; 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, 125 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 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 mil- lion populace and over all the plain that holds Paris. Quarrels arose, indeed, violent enough, and blows were exchanged, especially where the volun- teer contingents from the provinces were feasted. Already by that end of July the news of what the invaders intended was abroad. Their proclama- tion, 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 pretense could be kept up no longer, and on that day the king com- municated to the congress in the riding-school, to 126 W''^ I "iAIh t- THE STORMING OF THE TUILERIES 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 fam- ily, all so acting were punishable by death, in par- ticular 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 every- thing 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 tem- per was discoverable throughout the city, very sig- nificant 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 increas- ing heat with orders upon each side, with the serving out of ball-cartridge, with the rations of powder for 129 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION the same, with the sending of directions where men should gather, and where defense 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 Brmiswick which heralded the inva- sion. 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 sev- enth, 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, 130 o Wi i ■^ ^^' ' 1 ^>" o Hpf ;,. >f ^.• c| H , J UXlFUliiiS OF THE AKMY UF FKEXCli FMiUKAXTS UNDER THE MILL OF VALMY harvest here and there, hedgeless, and ahnost fea- tureless, and looks directly eastward toward Ger- many 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 Germanics, 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 Revolu- tionary cause, justly doubting the temper of mere 167 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 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 des- perate a case worthy of defense, 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 in- vasion 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," were iike 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 168 UNDER THE MILL OF VALMY of which had now run in this 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 defense 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 know- ing that his position was turned. For though the Paris road was still held, the enemy was pouring 169 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION through the breach in the dike above, and the way to the capital was open for him round by that cir- cuitous 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 Sep- tember, 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 Ai-gonne 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 with 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 170 GOETHE, AVHO "WAS WITH THE GERMAN ARMY AT VALMY UNDER THE MILL OF VALMY 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 Ar- gonne, over against the French lines. The invad- ers could not leave those forces of Dumouriez's behind them upon their communications. It was their task, now that the Ai-gonne was forced, to clear away by capture or by dispersal the aiTny 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 communi- cations, 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 173 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION the abominable weather it had lately increased. Bread, which was almost their only ration (until they should come out into more favorable 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 Du- mouriez and his checker-work hotchpotch of volun- teers, of mercenaries, of old regulars, officered at random, and even some only half-officered, should be swept from the communications if the invasion was to proceed; and therefore without repose, and with the army 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 wliich 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 at- tempted 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 174^ UNDER THE MILL OF VALMY dawn broke uncertainly through a dense mist that covered all the swellings and 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 it. North- ward 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 fog. 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 the 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 veil 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 175 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION diary this commonplace, of awful meaning to a man who had had one such glimpse in such a fog in 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 opportunity. The fog closed again im- mediately. 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 176 l''.8Ll'??r01S C^SSRSS'JXJFallK JiCK](jXKll35^\IVN, J/' "//' /i;.yy, J>f^, r^',> Jia-rji/un MARSHAL FRANgOIS-CHRISTOPHE KELLERMANX, DUKE OF VALMY UNDER THE MILL OF VALMY clouds, so low that they covered the insignificant ridge of Ai-gonne and so low that the steeple of Sainte-Menehould, the Httle county town at the foot of the hills, disaj^peared 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 hne drawn up upon the one ridge saw as it looked east- ward 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. 179 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 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 dis- cipline — 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, were often groups grotesque, often ragged, and sometimes inter- spersed with dull, civilian clothes. A man, when he saw that sight, might have thought, perhaps, that he was watchmg a crowd stretched out for a spec- tacle 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, and forty 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 Prus- 180 UNDER THE MILL OF VALMY sian 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 certain Austrians could be discerned by peering up to the left and noting the furnishings of men upon certain points of higher ground. But the immediate business lay between those two lines, the one so strict, the other so loose, that faced each other upon each crest of that long, slow 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 there- fore of Europe, turned. Save in one place, where a few bushes and shallow, disused diggings for marl disturbed its even surface, it is for the most part plowland. At this date in the autumn, the twen- tieth 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 gi'ound of any other open field. No trickle of water runs through it even after rains. There is no appearance of 181 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 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 assault upon the French must be made after the advance had been properly prepared by artillery. And prepared it was. The Pinissian command- ers 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-gen- eral, holding that position to protect the rear of the French against attack, a man who had been through the whole American war, a certain Gen- eral Money, of whose strange fate I have written elsewhere, marveled at the continuity and sustain- ment of all that fire. Distant Argonne shook with 182 UNDER THE MILL OF VALMY it, and the ground carried the thuds mile upon mile. They felt it in Sainte-Menehould like the shock 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 missile 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 unex- 185 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION pected 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 "can- non fever" meant, were 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 over- borne by a crash and a thunder like no other. A lucky shot from the Prussian batteries fell into the midst of the French limbers, and in a sudden ex- plosion 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 center of the French line, the command- ers, 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 mer- cenaries still retained in the French service. But 186 UNDER THE MILL OF VALMY 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 neighbor, in the formation called echelon — the companies of the fa- mous Prussian line. They began their descent into the shallow valley — a slow descent, their boots clogged by pounds of the field mud; a perilous ad- vance, 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 descend to the 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. They halted often, they were often realined, but their slow progress was still working, ordered, and ex- actly maintained under that dramatic discipline which made in those days, as it does now, the appa- ratus, perhaps, of Prussian excellence and certainly 187 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION of Prussian prestige. They reached the level be- tween 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 gen- eral'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 forma- tion, and loudly responded with the cheers he had demanded ; the brigade that had broken was drawn up, put in reserve. The 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 mo- ment checked the rapidity of fire. The French guns, then, contmually alive, turned more and more from the Prussian batteries to the 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 to di- verge it to the left and to the right. You could see 188 UNDER THE MILL OF VALMY along the French line the handling of the muskets and the preparing to meet by infantry fire the Prus- sian 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 cannon- ade, — it was no true battle, — there happened the wholly unexpected, the almost miraculous and, in the ej^es 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 anx- iously 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 stand- ing, one would say, within touch of victory, suffer- ing with admirable obedience the steady loss under the French shot, and with admirable discipline clos- ing 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 191 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION less and less with every yard of their retirement from the French batteries, came nearly to their an- cient 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 re- turning of their foes the French continually cheered, and the guns seemed to put on more vigor, and it almost seemed as though the 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 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 192 UNDER THE MILL OF VALMY 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 hved in the circum- stances in which that issue was decided. I beheve, 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, and we have noth- ing to learn. 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 contem- poraries in modern history have said that Bruns- wick did not desire to press the action, but that his sympathy was with the Revolutionary forces. To talk like that is to misunderstand the whole psy- chology of soldiery; more, in such an action it is to misunderstand the whole psychology of men. Brunswick could not have recalled the charge with- out good cause on such a day and with such men about him as the King of Prussia, the emigrant 193 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 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 persist- ence 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 con- sonance. It certainly was not due to any doubt as to the moral ability of the men to continue the ordeal that they had suffered so admirably over six hundred yards of ground and over perhaps a quar- ter 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 com- panies 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 194< •:z ^/- // ( ^/ ////'/ v// /r- ;'/ /a// r/r. '//■/■ / '■■^O __' ^ f'//^// '/r/// / •//- ^ //// //vv GENERAL CH.VRLES-FRANQOIS DUMOURIEZ In Command of the French at Valmy UNDER THE MILL OF VALMY drowned state of the soil, that soil becomes virtually 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, fol- lowed 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. 197 PART FIVE THE DEATH OF LOUIS XVI ^isd^i^j • ■ _v^- '^'.. REPUBLICAN SOLDIERS IN THE KEVULUTIUN INTRODUCTION 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. Coin- cident with these successes, there came a period of high political excitement in Paris, and the rise of a sort of cru- sading spirit to spread the democratic principles through- out 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 con- siderable luxury, in the tower of the Temple, a medieval building in the northeastern 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 as to the legality of trying a former head of the state. The trial 203 INTRODUCTION was decreed exactly a month later. Louis was to plead at the bar of the Convention, — that is, the national con- gress, — 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 De- cember, and withdrew after the speeches for the defense had been made. His guilt was pronounced by the unani- mous vote of the Parliament, no one voting against, and only five abstaining. What followed I now describe. 204 PART FIVE THE DEATH OF LOUIS XVI THE long trial at the bar of the Parliament was over. The pleas had been heard, and old JMalesherbes, weighty and with 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 bj^ 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 16, 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, 205 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION if he chose, to add to his declaration the motives that had determined it. The three great chandehers 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 back- ground, were but ill distinguished. Upon the trib- une 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 by 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 ex- plain what he was about to do. He protested that if the penalty of death was odious to him, and if he had combated it consistently as a general prin- ciple of law, yet did he now support it for this exceptional case. "I remain compassionate for the oppressed. I know nothing of that humanity which is forever sacrificing whole peoples and pro- tecting tyrants. ... I vote for death." 206 LAMOIGNON DE MALESHERBES, COUNSEL FOR THE KING AT HIS TRIAL THE DEATH OF LOUIS XVI One after another the deputies for Paris, the ex- treme 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 de- claring loudly his responsibihty, his verdict, and his name, confirmed the whole by the 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 bed- side 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 ach- ing 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 209 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION weather history heard voice after voice, weak, strong, ashamed, defiant, pitiful, muffled, out- spoken, bass, treble, old, and young, repeating at regular intervals: "Death absolute"; "Death with respite"; "Banisliment" ; "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 ex- tinguished. Hardly a third of the list was done. All that short January day (Thursday, the seven- teenth of January) the dreadful thing proceeded until darkness fell again, until once more the chan- deliers 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 sleep- 210 THE DEATH OF LOUIS XVI less mass, within which some few had noted one by one the voices as they fell, and had already calcu- lated 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 wi'itten 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 per- haps ten o'clock, this silent process was interrupted, and the many that had fallen asleep, or were nod- ding 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 passion- ate, though short, debate began. The intervention of the King of Spain the Convention would not 211 HIGH LIGHTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION consider; upon the proposal that the king's advo- cates should be heard once more a debate was al- lowed. Many members joined it, though in brief periods. Robespierre, among others, spoke in- tensely. He demanded that sentence should be read out and given before there could be any con- sideration 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 compari- son 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 2ia PROCLAMATION Di U CONSEIL EXECUTIF P R O V I so I R E. EXTRAJT des Regiflres du Confeil, dii 20 Janvier 17^^, tan fecond de la Republique. Lf Ci.MKil eJ&uiif provifolrc dc-llWram fur ics mcfurc^ a prc-ndre pour Icxefiition du dt'Cret de U Conv.ntioi-. .ijtion.de. dc,% t j , .7. 1^ & 10 Janvier 179J. arrt'tc Ics difpofitions fuivanlcs; i.* L'czccutioi) dn (ugcmenr de Louis Cspet fe fal dcmain Ijndi 2i- i." Lc iieu de Icxccuii.:..! 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