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-The Project Gutenberg eBook of The French Revolution, by Thomas Carlyle
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
-most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
-of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
-www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
-will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
-using this eBook.
-
-Title: The French Revolution
-
-Author: Thomas Carlyle
-
-Release Date: March 30, 1998 [eBook #1301]
-[Most recently updated: September 26, 2020]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: UTF-8
-
-Produced by: Sue Asscher and David Widger
-
-*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FRENCH REVOLUTION ***
-
-cover
-
-
-
-
-THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
-
- A HISTORY
-
-by THOMAS CARLYLE
-
-
-
-
-Contents
-
- THE FRENCH REVOLUTION A HISTORY
-VOLUME I. THE BASTILLE
-BOOK 1.I. DEATH OF LOUIS XV.
-Chapter 1.1.I. Louis the Well-Beloved.
-Chapter 1.1.II. Realised Ideals.
-Chapter 1.1.III. Viaticum.
-Chapter 1.1.IV. Louis the Unforgotten.
-
-BOOK 1.II. THE PAPER AGE
-Chapter 1.2.I. Astræa Redux.
-Chapter 1.2.II. Petition in Hieroglyphs.
-Chapter 1.2.III. Questionable.
-Chapter 1.2.IV. Maurepas.
-Chapter 1.2.V. Astræa Redux without Cash.
-Chapter 1.2.VI. Windbags.
-Chapter 1.2.VII. Contrat Social.
-Chapter 1.2.VIII. Printed Paper.
-
-BOOK 1.III. THE PARLEMENT OF PARIS
-Chapter 1.3.I. Dishonoured Bills.
-Chapter 1.3.II. Controller Calonne.
-Chapter 1.3.III. The Notables.
-Chapter 1.3.IV. Loménie’s Edicts.
-Chapter 1.3.V. Loménie’s Thunderbolts.
-Chapter 1.3.VI. Loménie’s Plots.
-Chapter 1.3.VII. Internecine.
-Chapter 1.3.VIII. Loménie’s Death-throes.
-Chapter 1.3.IX. Burial with Bonfire.
-
-BOOK 1.IV. STATES-GENERAL
-Chapter 1.4.I. The Notables Again.
-Chapter 1.4.II. The Election.
-Chapter 1.4.III. Grown Electric.
-Chapter 1.4.IV. The Procession.
-
-BOOK 1.V. THE THIRD ESTATE
-Chapter 1.5.I. Inertia.
-Chapter 1.5.II. Mercury de Brézé.
-Chapter 1.5.III. Broglie the War-God.
-Chapter 1.5.IV. To Arms!
-Chapter 1.5.V. Give us Arms.
-Chapter 1.5.VI. Storm and Victory.
-Chapter 1.5.VII. Not a Revolt.
-Chapter 1.5.VIII. Conquering your King.
-Chapter 1.5.IX. The Lanterne.
-
-BOOK VI. CONSOLIDATION
-Chapter 1.6.I. Make the Constitution.
-Chapter 1.6.II. The Constituent Assembly.
-Chapter 1.6.III. The General Overturn.
-Chapter 1.6.IV. In Queue.
-Chapter 1.6.V. The Fourth Estate.
-
-BOOK VII. THE INSURRECTION OF WOMEN
-Chapter 1.7.I. Patrollotism.
-Chapter 1.7.II. O Richard, O my King.
-Chapter 1.7.III. Black Cockades.
-Chapter 1.7.IV. The Menads.
-Chapter 1.7.V. Usher Maillard.
-Chapter 1.7.VI. To Versailles.
-Chapter 1.7.VII. At Versailles.
-Chapter 1.7.VIII. The Equal Diet.
-Chapter 1.7.IX. Lafayette.
-Chapter 1.7.X. The Grand Entries.
-Chapter 1.7.XI. From Versailles.
-
-VOLUME II. THE CONSTITUTION
-BOOK 2.I. THE FEAST OF PIKES
-Chapter 2.1.I. In the Tuileries.
-Chapter 2.1.II. In the Salle de Manége.
-Chapter 2.1.III. The Muster.
-Chapter 2.1.IV. Journalism.
-Chapter 2.1.V. Clubbism.
-Chapter 2.1.VI. Je le jure.
-Chapter 2.1.VII. Prodigies.
-Chapter 2.1.VIII. Solemn League and Covenant.
-Chapter 2.1.IX. Symbolic.
-Chapter 2.1.X. Mankind.
-Chapter 2.1.XI. As in the Age of Gold.
-Chapter 2.1.XII. Sound and Smoke.
-
-BOOK 2.II. NANCI
-Chapter 2.2.I. Bouillé.
-Chapter 2.2.II. Arrears and Aristocrats.
-Chapter 2.2.III. Bouillé at Metz.
-Chapter 2.2.IV. Arrears at Nanci.
-Chapter 2.2.V. Inspector Malseigne.
-Chapter 2.2.VI. Bouillé at Nanci.
-
-BOOK 2.III. THE TUILERIES
-Chapter 2.3.I. Epimenides.
-Chapter 2.3.II. The Wakeful.
-Chapter 2.3.III. Sword in Hand.
-Chapter 2.3.IV. To fly or not to fly.
-Chapter 2.3.V. The Day of Poniards.
-Chapter 2.3.VI. Mirabeau.
-Chapter 2.3.VII. Death of Mirabeau.
-
-BOOK 2.IV. VARENNES
-Chapter 2.4.I. Easter at Saint-Cloud.
-Chapter 2.4.II. Easter at Paris.
-Chapter 2.4.III. Count Fersen.
-Chapter 2.4.IV. Attitude.
-Chapter 2.4.V. The New Berline.
-Chapter 2.4.VI. Old-Dragoon Drouet.
-Chapter 2.4.VII. The Night of Spurs.
-Chapter 2.4.VIII. The Return.
-Chapter 2.4.IX. Sharp Shot.
-
-BOOK 2.V. PARLIAMENT FIRST
-Chapter 2.5.I. Grande Acceptation.
-Chapter 2.5.II. The Book of the Law.
-Chapter 2.5.III. Avignon.
-Chapter 2.5.IV. No Sugar.
-Chapter 2.5.V. Kings and Emigrants.
-Chapter 2.5.VI. Brigands and Jalès.
-Chapter 2.5.VII. Constitution will not march.
-Chapter 2.5.VIII. The Jacobins.
-Chapter 2.5.IX. Minister Roland.
-Chapter 2.5.X. Pétion-National-Pique.
-Chapter 2.5.XI. The Hereditary Representative.
-Chapter 2.5.XII. Procession of the Black Breeches.
-
-BOOK 2.VI. THE MARSEILLESE
-Chapter 2.6.I. Executive that does not act.
-Chapter 2.6.II. Let us march.
-Chapter 2.6.III. Some Consolation to Mankind.
-Chapter 2.6.IV. Subterranean.
-Chapter 2.6.V. At Dinner.
-Chapter 2.6.VI. The Steeples at Midnight.
-Chapter 2.6.VII. The Swiss.
-Chapter 2.6.VIII. Constitution burst in Pieces.
-
-VOLUME III. THE GUILLOTINE
-BOOK 3.I. SEPTEMBER
-Chapter 3.1.I. The Improvised Commune.
-Chapter 3.1.II. Danton.
-Chapter 3.1.III. Dumouriez.
-Chapter 3.1.IV. September in Paris.
-Chapter 3.1.V. A Trilogy.
-Chapter 3.1.VI. The Circular.
-Chapter 3.1.VII. September in Argonne.
-Chapter 3.1.VIII. Exeunt.
-
-BOOK 3.II. REGICIDE
-Chapter 3.2.I. The Deliberative.
-Chapter 3.2.II. The Executive.
-Chapter 3.2.III. Discrowned.
-Chapter 3.2.IV. The Loser Pays.
-Chapter 3.2.V. Stretching of Formulas.
-Chapter 3.2.VI. At the Bar.
-Chapter 3.2.VII. The Three Votings.
-Chapter 3.2.VIII. Place de la Révolution.
-
-BOOK 3.III. THE GIRONDINS
-Chapter 3.3.I. Cause and Effect.
-Chapter 3.3.II. Culottic and Sansculottic.
-Chapter 3.3.III. Growing Shrill.
-Chapter 3.3.IV. Fatherland in Danger.
-Chapter 3.3.V. Sansculottism Accoutred.
-Chapter 3.3.VI. The Traitor.
-Chapter 3.3.VII. In Fight.
-Chapter 3.3.VIII. In Death-Grips.
-Chapter 3.3.IX. Extinct.
-
-BOOK 3.IV. TERROR
-Chapter 3.4.I. Charlotte Corday.
-Chapter 3.4.II. In Civil War.
-Chapter 3.4.III. Retreat of the Eleven.
-Chapter 3.4.IV. O Nature.
-Chapter 3.4.V. Sword of Sharpness.
-Chapter 3.4.VI. Risen against Tyrants.
-Chapter 3.4.VII. Marie-Antoinette.
-Chapter 3.4.VIII. The Twenty-two.
-
-BOOK 3.V. TERROR THE ORDER OF THE DAY
-Chapter 3.5.I. Rushing down.
-Chapter 3.5.II. Death.
-Chapter 3.5.III. Destruction.
-Chapter 3.5.IV. Carmagnole complete.
-Chapter 3.5.V. Like a Thunder-Cloud.
-Chapter 3.5.VI. Do thy Duty.
-Chapter 3.5.VII. Flame-Picture.
-
-BOOK 3.VI. THERMIDOR
-Chapter 3.6.I. The Gods are athirst.
-Chapter 3.6.II. Danton, No Weakness.
-Chapter 3.6.III. The Tumbrils.
-Chapter 3.6.IV. Mumbo-Jumbo.
-Chapter 3.6.V. The Prisons.
-Chapter 3.6.VI. To Finish the Terror.
-Chapter 3.6.VII. Go Down to.
-
-BOOK 3.VII. VENDÉMIAIRE
-Chapter 3.7.I. Decadent.
-Chapter 3.7.II. La Cabarus.
-Chapter 3.7.III. Quiberon.
-Chapter 3.7.IV. Lion not Dead.
-Chapter 3.7.V. Lion Sprawling its Last.
-Chapter 3.7.VI. Grilled Herrings.
-Chapter 3.7.VII. The Whiff of Grapeshot.
-Chapter 3.7.VIII. Finis.
-
- INDEX.
- FOOTNOTES.
-
-
-
-
-THE FRENCH REVOLUTION A HISTORY
-by
-THOMAS CARLYLE
-
-
- VOLUME I.—THE BASTILLE
-
-Diesem Ambos vergleich’ ich das Land, den Hammer dem Herscher;
- Und dem Volke das Blech, das in der Mitte sich krümmt.
-Wehe dem armen Blech, wenn nur willkürliche Schläge
- Ungewiss treffen, und nie fertig der Kessel erscheint!
-
- GOETHE
-
-
- BOOK 1.I.
- DEATH OF LOUIS XV.
-
-
- Chapter 1.1.I.
- Louis the Well-Beloved.
-
- President Hénault, remarking on royal Surnames of Honour how
- difficult it often is to ascertain not only why, but even when,
- they were conferred, takes occasion in his sleek official way, to
- make a philosophical reflection. “The Surname of _Bien-aimé_
- (Well-beloved),” says he, “which Louis XV. bears, will not leave
- posterity in the same doubt. This Prince, in the year 1744, while
- hastening from one end of his kingdom to the other, and
- suspending his conquests in Flanders that he might fly to the
- assistance of Alsace, was arrested at Metz by a malady which
- threatened to cut short his days. At the news of this, Paris, all
- in terror, seemed a city taken by storm: the churches resounded
- with supplications and groans; the prayers of priests and people
- were every moment interrupted by their sobs: and it was from an
- interest so dear and tender that this Surname of _Bien-aimé_
- fashioned itself—a title higher still than all the rest which
- this great Prince has earned.”[1]
-
- So stands it written; in lasting memorial of that year 1744.
- Thirty other years have come and gone; and “this great Prince”
- again lies sick; but in how altered circumstances now! Churches
- resound not with excessive groanings; Paris is stoically calm:
- sobs interrupt no prayers, for indeed none are offered; except
- Priests’ Litanies, read or chanted at fixed money-rate per hour,
- which are not liable to interruption. The shepherd of the people
- has been carried home from Little Trianon, heavy of heart, and
- been put to bed in his own Château of Versailles: the flock knows
- it, and heeds it not. At most, in the immeasurable tide of French
- Speech (which ceases not day after day, and only ebbs towards the
- short hours of night), may this of the royal sickness emerge from
- time to time as an article of news. Bets are doubtless depending;
- nay, some people “express themselves loudly in the streets.”[2]
- But for the rest, on green field and steepled city, the May sun
- shines out, the May evening fades; and men ply their useful or
- useless business as if no Louis lay in danger.
-
- Dame Dubarry, indeed, might pray, if she had a talent for it;
- Duke d’Aiguillon too, Maupeou and the Parlement Maupeou: these,
- as they sit in their high places, with France harnessed under
- their feet, know well on what basis they continue there. Look to
- it, D’Aiguillon; sharply as thou didst, from the Mill of St.
- Cast, on Quiberon and the invading English; thou, “covered if not
- with glory yet with meal!” Fortune was ever accounted inconstant:
- and each dog has but his day.
-
- Forlorn enough languished Duke d’Aiguillon, some years ago;
- covered, as we said, with meal; nay with worse. For La Chalotais,
- the Breton Parlementeer, accused him not only of poltroonery and
- tyranny, but even of _concussion_ (official plunder of money);
- which accusations it was easier to get “quashed” by backstairs
- Influences than to get answered: neither could the thoughts, or
- even the tongues, of men be tied. Thus, under disastrous eclipse,
- had this grand-nephew of the great Richelieu to glide about;
- unworshipped by the world; resolute Choiseul, the abrupt proud
- man, disdaining him, or even forgetting him. Little prospect but
- to glide into Gascony, to rebuild Châteaus there,[3] and die
- inglorious killing game! However, in the year 1770, a certain
- young soldier, Dumouriez by name, returning from Corsica, could
- see “with sorrow, at Compiègne, the old King of France, on foot,
- with doffed hat, in sight of his army, at the side of a
- magnificent phaeton, doing homage to the—Dubarry.”[4]
-
- Much lay therein! Thereby, for one thing, could D’Aiguillon
- postpone the rebuilding of his Château, and rebuild his fortunes
- first. For stout Choiseul would discern in the Dubarry nothing
- but a wonderfully dizened Scarlet-woman; and go on his way as if
- she were not. Intolerable: the source of sighs, tears, of
- pettings and pouting; which would not end till “France” (La
- France, as she named her royal valet) finally mustered heart to
- see Choiseul; and with that “quivering in the chin (_tremblement
- du menton_)” natural in such case,[5] faltered out a dismissal:
- dismissal of his last substantial man, but pacification of his
- scarlet-woman. Thus D’Aiguillon rose again, and culminated. And
- with him there rose Maupeou, the banisher of Parlements; who
- plants you a refractory President “at Croe in Combrailles on the
- top of steep rocks, inaccessible except by litters,” there to
- consider himself. Likewise there rose Abbé Terray, dissolute
- Financier, paying eightpence in the shilling,—so that wits
- exclaim in some press at the playhouse, ‘Where is Abbé Terray,
- that he might reduce us to two-thirds!’ And so have these
- individuals (verily by black-art) built them a Domdaniel, or
- enchanted Dubarrydom; call it an Armida-Palace, where they dwell
- pleasantly; Chancellor Maupeou “playing blind-man’s-buff” with
- the scarlet Enchantress; or gallantly presenting her with dwarf
- Negroes;—and a Most Christian King has unspeakable peace within
- doors, whatever he may have without. “My Chancellor is a
- scoundrel; but I cannot do without him.”[6]
-
- Beautiful Armida-Palace, where the inmates live enchanted lives;
- lapped in soft music of adulation; waited on by the splendours of
- the world;—which nevertheless hangs wondrously as by a single
- hair. Should the Most Christian King die; or even get seriously
- afraid of dying! For, alas, had not the fair haughty Châteauroux
- to fly, with wet cheeks and flaming heart, from that Fever-scene
- at Metz; driven forth by sour shavelings? She hardly returned,
- when fever and shavelings were both swept into the background.
- Pompadour too, when Damiens wounded Royalty “slightly, under the
- fifth rib,” and our drive to Trianon went off futile, in shrieks
- and madly shaken torches,—had to pack, and be in readiness: yet
- did not go, the wound not proving poisoned. For his Majesty has
- religious faith; believes, at least in a Devil. And now a third
- peril; and who knows what may be in it! For the Doctors look
- grave; ask privily, If his Majesty had not the small-pox long
- ago?—and doubt it may have been a false kind. Yes, Maupeou,
- pucker those sinister brows of thine, and peer out on it with thy
- malign rat-eyes: it is a questionable case. Sure only that man is
- mortal; that with the life of one mortal snaps irrevocably the
- wonderfulest talisman, and all Dubarrydom rushes off, with
- tumult, into infinite Space; and ye, as subterranean Apparitions
- are wont, vanish utterly,—leaving only a smell of sulphur!
-
- These, and what holds of these may pray,—to Beelzebub, or whoever
- will hear them. But from the rest of France there comes, as was
- said, no prayer; or one of an _opposite_ character, “expressed
- openly in the streets.” Château or Hôtel, were an enlightened
- Philosophism scrutinises many things, is not given to prayer:
- neither are Rossbach victories, Terray Finances, nor, say only
- “sixty thousand _Lettres de Cachet_” (which is Maupeou’s share),
- persuasives towards that. O Hénault! Prayers? From a France
- smitten (by black-art) with plague after plague, and lying now in
- shame and pain, with a Harlot’s foot on its neck, what prayer can
- come? Those lank scarecrows, that prowl hunger-stricken through
- all highways and byways of French Existence, will they pray? The
- dull millions that, in the workshop or furrowfield, grind
- fore-done at the wheel of Labour, like haltered gin-horses, if
- blind so much the quieter? Or they that in the Bicêtre Hospital,
- “eight to a bed,” lie waiting their manumission? Dim are those
- heads of theirs, dull stagnant those hearts: to them the great
- Sovereign is known mainly as the great Regrater of Bread. If they
- hear of his sickness, they will answer with a dull _Tant pis pour
- lui;_ or with the question, Will he die?
-
- Yes, will he die? that is now, for all France, the grand
- question, and hope; whereby alone the King’s sickness has still
- some interest.
-
-
- Chapter 1.1.II.
- Realised Ideals.
-
- Such a changed France have we; and a changed Louis. Changed,
- truly; and further than thou yet seest!—To the eye of History
- many things, in that sick-room of Louis, are now visible, which
- to the Courtiers there present were invisible. For indeed it is
- well said, “in every object there is inexhaustible meaning; the
- eye sees in it what the eye brings means of seeing.” To Newton
- and to Newton’s Dog Diamond, what a different pair of Universes;
- while the painting on the optical retina of both was, most
- likely, the same! Let the Reader here, in this sick-room of
- Louis, endeavour to look with the mind too.
-
- Time was when men could (so to speak) of a given man, by
- nourishing and decorating him with fit appliances, to the due
- pitch, _make_ themselves a King, almost as the Bees do; and what
- was still more to the purpose, loyally obey him when made. The
- man so nourished and decorated, thenceforth named royal, does
- verily bear rule; and is said, and even thought, to be, for
- example, “prosecuting conquests in Flanders,” when he lets
- himself like luggage be carried thither: and no light luggage;
- covering miles of road. For he has his unblushing Châteauroux,
- with her band-boxes and rouge-pots, at his side; so that, at
- every new station, a wooden gallery must be run up between their
- lodgings. He has not only his _Maison-Bouche_, and _Valetaille_
- without end, but his very Troop of Players, with their pasteboard
- coulisses, thunder-barrels, their kettles, fiddles,
- stage-wardrobes, portable larders (and chaffering and quarrelling
- enough); all mounted in wagons, tumbrils, second-hand
- chaises,—sufficient not to conquer Flanders, but the patience of
- the world. With such a flood of loud jingling appurtenances does
- he lumber along, prosecuting his conquests in Flanders; wonderful
- to behold. So nevertheless it was and had been: to some solitary
- thinker it might seem strange; but even to him inevitable, not
- unnatural.
-
- For ours is a most fictile world; and man is the most fingent
- plastic of creatures. A world not fixable; not fathomable! An
- unfathomable Somewhat, which is _Not we;_ which we can work with,
- and live amidst,—and model, miraculously in our miraculous Being,
- and name World.—But if the very Rocks and Rivers (as Metaphysic
- teaches) are, in strict language, _made_ by those outward Senses
- of ours, how much more, by the Inward Sense, are all Phenomena of
- the spiritual kind: Dignities, Authorities, Holies, Unholies!
- Which inward sense, moreover is not permanent like the outward
- ones, but forever growing and changing. Does not the Black
- African take of Sticks and Old Clothes (say, exported
- Monmouth-Street cast-clothes) what will suffice, and of these,
- cunningly combining them, fabricate for himself an Eidolon (Idol,
- or _Thing Seen_), and name it _Mumbo-Jumbo;_ which he can
- thenceforth pray to, with upturned awestruck eye, not without
- hope? The white European mocks; but ought rather to consider; and
- see whether he, at home, could not do the like a little more
- wisely.
-
- So it _was_, we say, in those conquests of Flanders, thirty years
- ago: but so it no longer is. Alas, much more lies sick than poor
- Louis: not the French King only, but the French Kingship; this
- too, after long rough tear and wear, is breaking down. The world
- is all so changed; so much that seemed vigorous has sunk
- decrepit, so much that was not is beginning to be!—Borne over the
- Atlantic, to the closing ear of Louis, King by the Grace of God,
- what sounds are these; muffled ominous, new in our centuries?
- Boston Harbour is black with unexpected Tea: behold a
- Pennsylvanian Congress gather; and ere long, on Bunker Hill,
- DEMOCRACY announcing, in rifle-volleys death-winged, under her
- Star Banner, to the tune of Yankee-doodle-doo, that she is born,
- and, whirlwind-like, will envelope the whole world!
-
- Sovereigns die and Sovereignties: how all dies, and is for a Time
- only; is a “Time-phantasm, yet reckons itself real!” The
- Merovingian Kings, slowly wending on their bullock-carts through
- the streets of Paris, with their long hair flowing, have all
- wended slowly on,—into Eternity. Charlemagne sleeps at Salzburg,
- with truncheon grounded; only Fable expecting that he will
- awaken. Charles the Hammer, Pepin Bow-legged, where now is their
- eye of menace, their voice of command? Rollo and his shaggy
- Northmen cover not the Seine with ships; but have sailed off on a
- longer voyage. The hair of Towhead (_Tête d’étoupes_) now needs
- no combing; Iron-cutter (_Taillefer_) cannot cut a cobweb; shrill
- Fredegonda, shrill Brunhilda have had out their hot life-scold,
- and lie silent, their hot life-frenzy cooled. Neither from that
- black Tower de Nesle descends now darkling the doomed gallant, in
- his sack, to the Seine waters; plunging into Night: for Dame de
- Nesle now cares not for this world’s gallantry, heeds not this
- world’s scandal; Dame de Nesle is herself gone into Night. They
- are all gone; sunk,—down, down, with the tumult they made; and
- the rolling and the trampling of ever new generations passes over
- them, and they hear it not any more forever.
-
- And yet withal has there not been realised somewhat? Consider (to
- go no further) these strong Stone-edifices, and what they hold!
- Mud-Town of the Borderers (_Lutetia Parisiorum_ or _Barisiorum_)
- has paved itself, has spread over all the Seine Islands, and far
- and wide on each bank, and become City of Paris, sometimes
- boasting to be “Athens of Europe,” and even “Capital of the
- Universe.” Stone towers frown aloft; long-lasting, grim with a
- thousand years. Cathedrals are there, and a Creed (or memory of a
- Creed) in them; Palaces, and a State and Law. Thou seest the
- Smoke-vapour; _un_extinguished Breath as of a thing living.
- Labour’s thousand hammers ring on her anvils: also a more
- miraculous Labour works noiselessly, not with the Hand but with
- the Thought. How have cunning workmen in all crafts, with their
- cunning head and right-hand, tamed the Four Elements to be their
- ministers; yoking the winds to their Sea-chariot, making the very
- Stars their Nautical Timepiece;—and written and collected a
- _Bibliothèque du Roi;_ among whose Books is the Hebrew Book! A
- wondrous race of creatures: _these_ have been realised, and what
- of Skill is in these: call not the Past Time, with all its
- confused wretchednesses, a lost one.
-
- Observe, however, that of man’s whole terrestrial possessions and
- attainments, unspeakably the noblest are his Symbols, divine or
- divine-seeming; under which he marches and fights, with
- victorious assurance, in this life-battle: what we can call his
- Realised Ideals. Of which realised ideals, omitting the rest,
- consider only these two: his Church, or spiritual Guidance; his
- Kingship, or temporal one. The Church: what a word was there;
- richer than Golconda and the treasures of the world! In the heart
- of the remotest mountains rises the little Kirk; the Dead all
- slumbering round it, under their white memorial-stones, “in hope
- of a happy resurrection:”—dull wert thou, O Reader, if never in
- any hour (say of moaning midnight, when such Kirk hung spectral
- in the sky, and Being was as if swallowed up of Darkness) it
- spoke to thee—things unspeakable, that went into thy soul’s soul.
- Strong was he that had a Church, what we can call a Church: he
- stood thereby, though “in the centre of Immensities, in the
- conflux of Eternities,” yet manlike towards God and man; the
- vague shoreless Universe had become for him a firm city, and
- dwelling which he knew. Such virtue was in Belief; in these
- words, well spoken: _I believe_. Well might men prize their
- _Credo_, and raise stateliest Temples for it, and reverend
- Hierarchies, and give it the tithe of their substance; it was
- worth living for and dying for.
-
- Neither was that an inconsiderable moment when wild armed men
- first raised their Strongest aloft on the buckler-throne, and
- with clanging armour and hearts, said solemnly: Be thou our
- Acknowledged Strongest! In such Acknowledged Strongest (well
- named King, _Kön-ning,_ Can-ning, or Man that was Able) what a
- Symbol shone now for them,—significant with the destinies of the
- world! A Symbol of true Guidance in return for loving Obedience;
- properly, if he knew it, the prime want of man. A Symbol which
- might be called sacred; for is there not, in reverence for what
- is better than we, an indestructible sacredness? On which ground,
- too, it was well said there lay in the Acknowledged Strongest a
- divine right; as surely there might in the Strongest, whether
- Acknowledged or not,—considering _who_ it was that made him
- strong. And so, in the midst of confusions and unutterable
- incongruities (as all growth is confused), did this of Royalty,
- with Loyalty environing it, spring up; and grow mysteriously,
- subduing and assimilating (for a principle of Life was in it);
- till it also had grown world-great, and was among the main Facts
- of our modern existence. Such a Fact, that Louis XIV., for
- example, could answer the expostulatory Magistrate with his
- ‘_L’Etat c’est moi_ (The State? I am the State);’ and be replied
- to by silence and abashed looks. So far had accident and
- forethought; had your Louis Elevenths, with the leaden Virgin in
- their hatband, and torture-wheels and conical _oubliettes_
- (man-eating!) under their feet; your Henri Fourths, with their
- prophesied social millennium, “when every peasant should have his
- fowl in the pot;” and on the whole, the fertility of this most
- fertile Existence (named of Good and Evil),—brought it, in the
- matter of the Kingship. Wondrous! Concerning which may we not
- again say, that in the huge mass of Evil, as it rolls and swells,
- there is ever some Good working imprisoned; working towards
- deliverance and triumph?
-
- How such Ideals do realise themselves; and grow, wondrously, from
- amid the incongruous ever-fluctuating chaos of the Actual: this
- is what World-History, if it teach any thing, has to teach us,
- How they grow; and, after long stormy growth, bloom out mature,
- supreme; then quickly (for the blossom is brief) fall into decay;
- sorrowfully dwindle; and crumble down, or rush down, noisily or
- noiselessly disappearing. The blossom is so brief; as of some
- centennial Cactus-flower, which after a century of waiting shines
- out for hours! Thus from the day when rough Clovis, in the Champ
- de Mars, in sight of his whole army, had to cleave retributively
- the head of that rough Frank, with sudden battleaxe, and the
- fierce words, ‘It was thus thou clavest the vase’ (St. Remi’s and
- mine) ‘at Soissons,’ forward to Louis the Grand and his _L’Etat
- c’est moi_, we count some twelve hundred years: and now this the
- very next Louis is dying, and so much dying with him!—Nay, thus
- too, if Catholicism, with and against Feudalism (but _not_
- against Nature and her bounty), gave us English a Shakspeare and
- Era of Shakspeare, and so produced a blossom of Catholicism—it
- was not till Catholicism itself, so far as Law could abolish it,
- had been abolished here.
-
- But of those decadent ages in which no Ideal either grows or
- blossoms? When Belief and Loyalty have passed away, and only the
- cant and false echo of them remains; and all Solemnity has become
- Pageantry; and the Creed of persons in authority has become one
- of two things: an Imbecility or a Macchiavelism? Alas, of these
- ages World-History can take no notice; they have to become
- compressed more and more, and finally suppressed in the Annals of
- Mankind; blotted out as spurious,—which indeed they are. Hapless
- ages: wherein, if ever in any, it is an unhappiness to be born.
- To be born, and to learn only, by every tradition and example,
- that God’s Universe is Belial’s and a Lie; and “the Supreme
- Quack” the hierarch of men! In which mournfulest faith,
- nevertheless, do we not see whole generations (two, and sometimes
- even three successively) live, what they call living; and
- vanish,—without chance of reappearance?
-
- In such a decadent age, or one fast verging that way, had our
- poor Louis been born. Grant also that if the French Kingship had
- not, by course of Nature, long to live, he of all men was the man
- to accelerate Nature. The Blossom of French Royalty, cactus-like,
- has accordingly made an astonishing progress. In those Metz days,
- it was still standing with all its petals, though bedimmed by
- Orleans Regents and _Roué_ Ministers and Cardinals; but now, in
- 1774, we behold it bald, and the virtue nigh gone out of it.
-
- Disastrous indeed does it look with those same “realised ideals,”
- one and all! The Church, which in its palmy season, seven hundred
- years ago, could make an Emperor wait barefoot, in penance-shift;
- three days, in the snow, has for centuries seen itself decaying;
- reduced even to forget old purposes and enmities, and join
- interest with the Kingship: on this younger strength it would
- fain stay its decrepitude; and these two will henceforth stand
- and fall together. Alas, the Sorbonne still sits there, in its
- old mansion; but mumbles only jargon of dotage, and no longer
- leads the consciences of men: not the Sorbonne; it is
- _Encyclopédies, Philosophie_, and who knows what nameless
- innumerable multitude of ready Writers, profane Singers,
- Romancers, Players, Disputators, and Pamphleteers, that now form
- the Spiritual Guidance of the world. The world’s Practical
- Guidance too is lost, or has glided into the same miscellaneous
- hands. Who is it that the King (_Able-man_, named also _Roi,
- Rex,_ or Director) now guides? His own huntsmen and prickers:
- when there is to be no hunt, it is well said, “_Le Roi ne fera
- rien_ (Today his Majesty will do _nothing_).”[7] He lives and
- lingers there, because he is living there, and none has yet laid
- hands on him.
-
- The nobles, in like manner, have nearly ceased either to guide or
- misguide; and are now, as their master is, little more than
- ornamental figures. It is long since they have done with
- butchering one another or their king: the Workers, protected,
- encouraged by Majesty, have ages ago built walled towns, and
- there ply their crafts; will permit no Robber Baron to “live by
- the saddle,” but maintain a gallows to prevent it. Ever since
- that period of the _Fronde_, the Noble has changed his fighting
- sword into a court rapier, and now loyally attends his king as
- ministering satellite; divides the spoil, not now by violence and
- murder, but by soliciting and finesse. These men call themselves
- supports of the throne, singular gilt-pasteboard _caryatides_ in
- that singular edifice! For the rest, their privileges every way
- are now much curtailed. That law authorizing a Seigneur, as he
- returned from hunting, to kill not more than two Serfs, and
- refresh his feet in their warm blood and bowels, has fallen into
- perfect desuetude,—and even into incredibility; for if Deputy
- Lapoule can believe in it, and call for the abrogation of it, so
- cannot we.[8] No Charolois, for these last fifty years, though
- never so fond of shooting, has been in use to bring down slaters
- and plumbers, and see them roll from their roofs;[9] but contents
- himself with partridges and grouse. Close-viewed, their industry
- and function is that of dressing gracefully and eating
- sumptuously. As for their debauchery and depravity, it is perhaps
- unexampled since the era of Tiberius and Commodus. Nevertheless,
- one has still partly a feeling with the lady Maréchale: ‘Depend
- upon it, Sir, God thinks twice before damning a man of that
- quality.’[10] These people, of old, surely had virtues, uses; or
- they could not have been there. Nay, one virtue they are still
- required to have (for mortal man cannot live without a
- conscience): the virtue of perfect readiness to fight duels.
-
- Such are the shepherds of the people: and now how fares it with
- the flock? With the flock, as is inevitable, it fares ill, and
- ever worse. They are not tended, they are only regularly shorn.
- They are sent for, to do statute-labour, to pay statute-taxes; to
- fatten battle-fields (named “Bed of honour”) with their bodies,
- in quarrels which are not theirs; their hand and toil is in every
- possession of man; but for themselves they have little or no
- possession. Untaught, uncomforted, unfed; to pine dully in thick
- obscuration, in squalid destitution and obstruction: this is the
- lot of the millions; _peuple taillable et corvéable à merci et
- miséricorde_. In Brittany they once rose in revolt at the first
- introduction of Pendulum Clocks; thinking it had something to do
- with the _Gabelle_. Paris requires to be cleared out periodically
- by the Police; and the horde of hunger-stricken vagabonds to be
- sent wandering again over space—for a time. “During one such
- periodical clearance,” says Lacretelle, “in May, 1750, the Police
- had presumed withal to carry off some reputable people’s
- children, in the hope of extorting ransoms for them. The mothers
- fill the public places with cries of despair; crowds gather, get
- excited: so many women in destraction run about exaggerating the
- alarm: an absurd and horrid fable arises among the people; it is
- said that the doctors have ordered a Great Person to take baths
- of young human blood for the restoration of his own, all spoiled
- by debaucheries. Some of the rioters,” adds Lacretelle, quite
- coolly, “were hanged on the following days:” the Police went
- on.[11] O ye poor naked wretches! and this, then, is your
- inarticulate cry to Heaven, as of a dumb tortured animal, crying
- from uttermost depths of pain and debasement? Do these azure
- skies, like a dead crystalline vault, only reverberate the echo
- of it on you? Respond to it only by “hanging on the following
- days?”—Not so: not forever! Ye are heard in Heaven. And the
- answer too will come,—in a horror of great darkness, and shakings
- of the world, and a cup of trembling which all the nations shall
- drink.
-
- Remark, meanwhile, how from amid the wrecks and dust of this
- universal Decay new Powers are fashioning themselves, adapted to
- the new time and its destinies. Besides the old Noblesse,
- originally of Fighters, there is a new recognised Noblesse of
- Lawyers; whose gala-day and proud battle-day even now is. An
- unrecognised Noblesse of Commerce; powerful enough, with money in
- its pocket. Lastly, powerfulest of all, least recognised of all,
- a Noblesse of Literature; without steel on their thigh, without
- gold in their purse, but with the “grand thaumaturgic faculty of
- Thought” in their head. French Philosophism has arisen; in which
- little word how much do we include! Here, indeed, lies properly
- the cardinal symptom of the whole wide-spread malady. Faith is
- gone out; Scepticism is come in. Evil abounds and accumulates: no
- man has Faith to withstand it, to amend it, to begin by amending
- himself; it must even go on accumulating. While hollow langour
- and vacuity is the lot of the Upper, and want and stagnation of
- the Lower, and universal misery is very certain, what other thing
- is certain? That a Lie cannot be believed! Philosophism knows
- only this: her other belief is mainly that, in spiritual
- supersensual matters no Belief is possible. Unhappy! Nay, as yet
- the Contradiction of a Lie is some kind of Belief; but the Lie
- with its Contradiction once swept away, what will remain? The
- five unsatiated Senses will remain, the sixth insatiable Sense
- (of vanity); the whole _dæmonic_ nature of man will
- remain,—hurled forth to rage blindly without rule or rein; savage
- itself, yet with all the tools and weapons of civilisation; a
- spectacle new in History.
-
- In such a France, as in a Powder-tower, where fire unquenched and
- now unquenchable is smoking and smouldering all round, has Louis
- XV. lain down to die. With Pompadourism and Dubarryism, his
- Fleur-de-lis has been shamefully struck down in all lands and on
- all seas; Poverty invades even the Royal Exchequer, and
- Tax-farming can squeeze out no more; there is a quarrel of
- twenty-five years’ standing with the Parlement; everywhere Want,
- Dishonesty, Unbelief, and hotbrained Sciolists for
- state-physicians: it is a portentous hour.
-
- Such things can the eye of History see in this sick-room of King
- Louis, which were invisible to the Courtiers there. It is twenty
- years, gone Christmas-day, since Lord Chesterfield, summing up
- what he had noted of this same France, wrote, and sent off by
- post, the following words, that have become memorable: “In short,
- all the symptoms which I have ever met with in History, previous
- to great Changes and Revolutions in government, now exist and
- daily increase in France.”[12]
-
-
- Chapter 1.1.III.
- Viaticum.
-
- For the present, however, the grand question with the Governors
- of France is: Shall extreme unction, or other ghostly viaticum
- (to Louis, not to France), be administered?
-
- It is a deep question. For, if administered, if so much as spoken
- of, must not, on the very threshold of the business, Witch
- Dubarry vanish; hardly to return should Louis even recover? With
- her vanishes Duke d’Aiguillon and Company, and all their
- Armida-Palace, as was said; Chaos swallows the whole again, and
- there is left nothing but a smell of brimstone. But then, on the
- other hand, what will the Dauphinists and Choiseulists say? Nay
- what may the royal martyr himself say, should he happen to get
- deadly worse, without getting delirious? For the present, he
- still kisses the Dubarry hand; so we, from the ante-room, can
- note: but afterwards? Doctors’ bulletins may run as they are
- ordered, but it is “confluent small-pox,”—of which, as is
- whispered too, the Gatekeeper’s once so buxom Daughter lies ill:
- and Louis XV. is not a man to be trifled with in his viaticum.
- Was he not wont to catechise his very girls in the
- _Parc-aux-cerfs_, and pray with and for them, that they might
- preserve their—orthodoxy?[13] A strange fact, not an unexampled
- one; for there is no animal so strange as man.
-
- For the moment, indeed, it were all well, could Archbishop
- Beaumont but be prevailed upon—to wink with one eye! Alas,
- Beaumont would himself so fain do it: for, singular to tell, the
- Church too, and whole posthumous hope of Jesuitism, now hangs by
- the apron of this same unmentionable woman. But then “the force
- of public opinion”? Rigorous Christophe de Beaumont, who has
- spent his life in persecuting hysterical Jansenists and
- incredulous Non-confessors; or even their dead bodies, if no
- better might be,—how shall he now open Heaven’s gate, and give
- Absolution with the _corpus delicti_ still under his nose? Our
- Grand-Almoner Roche-Aymon, for his part, will not higgle with a
- royal sinner about turning of the key: but there are other
- Churchmen; there is a King’s Confessor, foolish Abbé Moudon; and
- Fanaticism and Decency are not yet extinct. On the whole, what is
- to be done? The doors can be well watched; the Medical Bulletin
- adjusted; and much, as usual, be hoped for from time and chance.
-
- The doors are well watched, no improper figure can enter. Indeed,
- few wish to enter; for the putrid infection reaches even to the
- _Œil-de-Bœuf;_ so that “more than fifty fall sick, and ten die.”
- Mesdames the Princesses alone wait at the loathsome sick-bed;
- impelled by filial piety. The three Princesses, _Graille, Chiffe,
- Coche_ (Rag, Snip, Pig, as he was wont to name them), are
- assiduous there; when all have fled. The fourth Princess _Loque_
- (Dud), as we guess, is already in the Nunnery, and can only give
- her orisons. Poor _Graille_ and Sisterhood, they have never known
- a Father: such is the hard bargain Grandeur must make. Scarcely
- at the _Débotter_ (when Royalty took off its boots) could they
- snatch up their “enormous hoops, gird the long train round their
- waists, huddle on their black cloaks of taffeta up to the very
- chin;” and so, in fit appearance of full dress, “every evening at
- six,” walk majestically in; receive their royal kiss on the brow;
- and then walk majestically out again, to embroidery,
- small-scandal, prayers, and vacancy. If Majesty came some
- morning, with coffee of its own making, and swallowed it with
- them hastily while the dogs were uncoupling for the hunt, it was
- received as a grace of Heaven.[14] Poor withered ancient women!
- in the wild tossings that yet await your fragile existence,
- before it be crushed and broken; as ye fly through hostile
- countries, over tempestuous seas, are almost taken by the Turks;
- and wholly, in the Sansculottic Earthquake, know not your right
- hand from your left, be this always an assured place in your
- remembrance: for the act was good and loving! To us also it is a
- little sunny spot, in that dismal howling waste, where we hardly
- find another.
-
- Meanwhile, what shall an impartial prudent Courtier do? In these
- delicate circumstances, while not only death or life, but even
- sacrament or no sacrament, is a question, the skilfulest may
- falter. Few are so happy as the Duke d’Orléans and the Prince de
- Condé; who can themselves, with volatile salts, attend the King’s
- ante-chamber; and, at the same time, send their brave sons (Duke
- de Chartres, _Egalité_ that is to be; Duke de Bourbon, one day
- Condé too, and famous among Dotards) to wait upon the Dauphin.
- With another few, it is a resolution taken; _jacta est alea_. Old
- Richelieu,—when Beaumont, driven by public opinion, is at last
- for entering the sick-room,—will twitch him by the rochet, into a
- recess; and there, with his old dissipated mastiff-face, and the
- oiliest vehemence, be seen pleading (and even, as we judge by
- Beaumont’s change of colour, prevailing) “that the King be not
- killed by a proposition in Divinity.” Duke de Fronsac, son of
- Richelieu, can follow his father: when the Curé of Versailles
- whimpers something about sacraments, he will threaten to “throw
- him out of the window if he mention such a thing.”
-
- Happy these, we may say; but to the rest that hover between two
- opinions, is it not trying? He who would understand to what a
- pass Catholicism, and much else, had now got; and how the symbols
- of the Holiest have become gambling-dice of the Basest,—must read
- the narrative of those things by Besenval, and Soulavie, and the
- other Court Newsmen of the time. He will see the Versailles
- Galaxy all scattered asunder, grouped into new ever-shifting
- Constellations. There are nods and sagacious glances;
- go-betweens, silk dowagers mysteriously gliding, with smiles for
- this constellation, sighs for that: there is tremor, of hope or
- desperation, in several hearts. There is the pale grinning Shadow
- of Death, ceremoniously ushered along by another grinning Shadow,
- of Etiquette: at intervals the growl of Chapel Organs, like
- prayer by machinery; proclaiming, as in a kind of horrid diabolic
- horse-laughter, _Vanity of vanities, all is Vanity!_
-
-
- Chapter 1.1.IV.
- Louis the Unforgotten.
-
- Poor Louis! With these it is a hollow phantasmagory, where like
- mimes they mope and mowl, and utter false sounds for hire; but
- with thee it is frightful earnest.
-
- Frightful to all men is Death; from of old named King of Terrors.
- Our little compact home of an Existence, where we dwelt
- complaining, yet as in a home, is passing, in dark agonies, into
- an Unknown of Separation, Foreignness, unconditioned Possibility.
- The Heathen Emperor asks of his soul: Into what places art thou
- now departing? The Catholic King must answer: To the Judgment-bar
- of the Most High God! Yes, it is a summing-up of Life; a final
- settling, and giving-in the “account of the deeds done in the
- body:” they are done now; and lie there unalterable, and do bear
- their fruits, long as Eternity shall last.
-
- Louis XV. had always the kingliest abhorrence of Death. Unlike
- that praying Duke of Orleans, _Egalité’s_ grandfather,—for indeed
- several of them had a touch of madness,—who honesty believed that
- there was no Death! He, if the Court Newsmen can be believed,
- started up once on a time, glowing with sulphurous contempt and
- indignation on his poor Secretary, who had stumbled on the words,
- _feu roi d’Espagne_ (the late King of Spain): ‘_Feu roi,
- Monsieur?_’—‘_Monseigneur_,’ hastily answered the trembling but
- adroit man of business, ‘_c’est une titre qu’ils prennent_ (’tis
- a title they take).’[15] Louis, we say, was not so happy; but he
- did what he could. He would not suffer Death to be spoken of;
- avoided the sight of churchyards, funereal monuments, and
- whatsoever could bring it to mind. It is the resource of the
- Ostrich; who, hard hunted, sticks his foolish head in the ground,
- and would fain forget that his foolish unseeing body is not
- unseen too. Or sometimes, with a spasmodic antagonism,
- significant of the same thing, and of more, he _would_ go; or
- stopping his court carriages, would send into churchyards, and
- ask “how many new graves there were today,” though it gave his
- poor Pompadour the disagreeablest qualms. We can figure the
- thought of Louis that day, when, all royally caparisoned for
- hunting, he met, at some sudden turning in the Wood of Senart, a
- ragged Peasant with a coffin: ‘For whom?’—It was for a poor
- brother slave, whom Majesty had sometimes noticed slaving in
- those quarters. ‘What did he die of?’—‘Of hunger:’—the King gave
- his steed the spur.[16]
-
- But figure his thought, when Death is now clutching at his own
- heart-strings, unlooked for, inexorable! Yes, poor Louis, Death
- has found thee. No palace walls or life-guards, gorgeous
- tapestries or gilt buckram of stiffest ceremonial could keep him
- out; but he is here, here at thy very life-breath, and will
- extinguish it. Thou, whose whole existence hitherto was a chimera
- and scenic show, at length becomest a reality: sumptuous
- Versailles bursts asunder, like a dream, into void Immensity;
- Time is done, and all the scaffolding of Time falls wrecked with
- hideous clangour round thy soul: the pale Kingdoms yawn open;
- there must thou enter, naked, all unking’d, and await what is
- appointed thee! Unhappy man, there as thou turnest, in dull
- agony, on thy bed of weariness, what a thought is thine!
- Purgatory and Hell-fire, now all-too possible, in the prospect;
- in the retrospect,—alas, what thing didst thou do that were not
- better undone; what mortal didst thou generously help; what
- sorrow hadst thou mercy on? Do the “five hundred thousand”
- ghosts, who sank shamefully on so many battle-fields from
- Rossbach to Quebec, that thy Harlot might take revenge for an
- epigram,—crowd round thee in this hour? Thy foul Harem; the
- curses of mothers, the tears and infamy of daughters? Miserable
- man! thou “hast done evil as thou couldst:” thy whole existence
- seems one hideous abortion and mistake of Nature; the use and
- meaning of thee not yet known. Wert thou a fabulous Griffin,
- _devouring_ the works of men; daily dragging virgins to thy
- cave;—clad also in scales that no spear would pierce: no spear
- but Death’s? A Griffin not fabulous but real! Frightful, O Louis,
- seem these moments for thee.—We will pry no further into the
- horrors of a sinner’s death-bed.
-
- And yet let no meanest man lay flattering unction to his soul.
- Louis was a Ruler; but art not thou also one? His wide France,
- look at it from the Fixed Stars (themselves not yet Infinitude),
- is no wider than thy narrow brickfield, where thou too didst
- faithfully, or didst unfaithfully. Man, “Symbol of Eternity
- imprisoned into Time!” it is not thy works, which are all mortal,
- infinitely little, and the greatest no greater than the least,
- but only the Spirit thou workest in, that can have worth or
- continuance.
-
- But reflect, in any case, what a life-problem this of poor Louis,
- when he rose as _Bien-Aimé_ from that Metz sick-bed, really was!
- What son of Adam could have swayed such incoherences into
- coherence? Could he? Blindest Fortune alone has cast _him_ on the
- top of it: he swims there; can as little sway it as the drift-log
- sways the wind-tossed moon-stirred Atlantic. ‘What have I done to
- be so loved?’ he said then. He may say now: What have I done to
- be so hated? Thou hast done nothing, poor Louis! Thy fault is
- properly even this, that thou didst _nothing_. What could poor
- Louis do? Abdicate, and wash his hands of it,—in favour of the
- first that would accept! Other clear wisdom there was none for
- him. As it was, he stood gazing dubiously, the absurdest mortal
- extant (a very Solecism Incarnate), into the absurdest confused
- world;—wherein at lost nothing seemed so certain as that he, the
- incarnate Solecism, had five senses; that were Flying Tables
- (_Tables Volantes_, which vanish through the floor, to come back
- reloaded). and a _Parc-aux-cerfs_.
-
- Whereby at least we have again this historical curiosity: a human
- being in an original position; swimming passively, as on some
- boundless “Mother of Dead Dogs,” towards issues which he partly
- saw. For Louis had withal a kind of insight in him. So, when a
- new Minister of Marine, or what else it might be, came announcing
- his new era, the Scarlet-woman would hear from the lips of
- Majesty at supper: ‘Yes, he spread out his ware like another;
- promised the beautifulest things in the world; not a thing of
- which will come: he does not know this region; he will see.’ Or
- again: ‘’Tis the twentieth time I hear all that; France will
- never get a Navy, I believe.’ How touching also was this: ‘If _I_
- were Lieutenant of Police, I would prohibit those Paris
- cabriolets.’[17]
-
- Doomed mortal;—for is it not a doom to be Solecism incarnate! A
- new _Roi Fainéant_, King Donothing; but with the strangest new
- _Mayor of the Palace:_ no bow-legged Pepin now for _Mayor_, but
- that same cloud-capt, fire-breathing Spectre of DEMOCRACY;
- incalculable, which is enveloping the world!—Was Louis no
- wickeder than this or the other private Donothing and Eatall;
- such as we often enough see, under the name of Man, and even Man
- of Pleasure, cumbering God’s diligent Creation, for a time? Say,
- wretcheder! His Life-solecism was seen and felt of a whole
- scandalised world; him endless Oblivion cannot engulf, and
- swallow to endless depths,—not yet for a generation or two.
-
- However, be this as it will, we remark, not without interest,
- that “on the evening of the 4th,” Dame Dubarry issues from the
- sick-room, with perceptible “trouble in her visage.” It is the
- fourth evening of May, year of Grace 1774. Such a whispering in
- the Œil-de-Bœuf! Is he dying then? What can be said is, that
- Dubarry seems making up her packages; she sails weeping through
- her gilt boudoirs, as if taking leave. D’Aiguilon and Company are
- near their last card; nevertheless they will not yet throw up the
- game. But as for the sacramental controversy, it is as good as
- settled without being mentioned; Louis can send for his Abbé
- Moudon in the course of next night, be confessed by him, some say
- for the space of “seventeen minutes,” and demand the sacraments
- of his own accord.
-
- Nay, already, in the afternoon, behold is not this your Sorceress
- Dubarry with the handkerchief at her eyes, mounting D’Aiguillon’s
- chariot; rolling off in his Duchess’s consolatory arms? She is
- gone; and her place knows her no more. Vanish, false Sorceress;
- into Space! Needless to hover at neighbouring Ruel; for thy day
- is done. Shut are the royal palace-gates for evermore; hardly in
- coming years shalt thou, under cloud of night, descend once, in
- black domino, like a black night-bird, and disturb the fair
- Antoinette’s music-party in the Park: all Birds of Paradise
- flying from thee, and musical windpipes growing mute.[18] Thou
- unclean, yet unmalignant, not unpitiable thing! What a course was
- thine: from that first trucklebed (in Joan of Arc’s country)
- where thy mother bore thee, with tears, to an unnamed father:
- forward, through lowest subterranean depths, and over highest
- sunlit heights, of Harlotdom and Rascaldom—to the guillotine-axe,
- which shears away thy vainly whimpering head! Rest there
- uncursed; only buried and abolished: what else befitted thee?
-
- Louis, meanwhile, is in considerable impatience for his
- sacraments; sends more than once to the window, to see whether
- they are not coming. Be of comfort, Louis, what comfort thou
- canst: they are under way, those sacraments. Towards six in the
- morning, they arrive. Cardinal Grand-Almoner Roche-Aymon is here,
- in pontificals, with his pyxes and his tools; he approaches the
- royal pillow; elevates his wafer; mutters or seems to mutter
- somewhat;—and so (as the Abbé Georgel, in words that stick to
- one, expresses it) has Louis “made the _amende honorable_ to
- God;” so does your Jesuit construe it.—‘_Wa, Wa_,’ as the wild
- Clotaire groaned out, when life was departing, ‘what great God is
- this that pulls down the strength of the strongest kings!’[19]
-
- The _amende honorable_, what “legal apology” you will, to
- God:—but not, if D’Aiguillon can help it, to man. Dubarry still
- hovers in his mansion at Ruel; and while there is life, there is
- hope. Grand-Almoner Roche-Aymon, accordingly (for he seems to be
- in the secret), has no sooner seen his pyxes and gear repacked,
- then he is stepping majestically forth again, as if the work were
- done! But King’s Confessor Abbé Moudon starts forward; with
- anxious acidulent face, twitches him by the sleeve; whispers in
- his ear. Whereupon the poor Cardinal must turn round; and declare
- audibly; ‘That his Majesty repents of any subjects of scandal he
- may have given (_a pu donner_); and purposes, by the strength of
- Heaven assisting him, to avoid the like—for the future!’ Words
- listened to by Richelieu with mastiff-face, growing blacker;
- answered to, aloud, “with an epithet,”—which Besenval will not
- repeat. Old Richelieu, conqueror of Minorca, companion of
- Flying-Table orgies, perforator of bedroom walls,[20] is thy day
- also done?
-
- Alas, the Chapel organs may keep going; the Shrine of Sainte
- Genevieve be let down, and pulled up again,—without effect. In
- the evening the whole Court, with Dauphin and Dauphiness, assist
- at the Chapel: priests are hoarse with chanting their “Prayers of
- Forty Hours;” and the heaving bellows blow. Almost frightful! For
- the very heaven blackens; battering rain-torrents dash, with
- thunder; almost drowning the organ’s voice: and electric
- fire-flashes make the very flambeaux on the altar pale. So that
- the most, as we are told, retired, when it was over, with hurried
- steps, “in a state of meditation (_recueillement_),” and said
- little or nothing.[21]
-
- So it has lasted for the better half of a fortnight; the Dubarry
- gone almost a week. Besenval says, all the world was getting
- impatient _que cela finît;_ that poor Louis would have done with
- it. It is now the 10th of May 1774. He will soon have done now.
-
- This tenth May day falls into the loathsome sick-bed; but dull,
- unnoticed there: for they that look out of the windows are quite
- darkened; the cistern-wheel moves discordant on its axis; Life,
- like a spent steed, is panting towards the goal. In their remote
- apartments, Dauphin and Dauphiness stand road-ready; all grooms
- and equerries booted and spurred: waiting for some signal to
- escape the house of pestilence.[22] And, hark! across the
- Œil-de-Bœuf, what sound is that; sound “terrible and absolutely
- like thunder”? It is the rush of the whole Court, rushing as in
- wager, to salute the new Sovereigns: Hail to your Majesties! The
- Dauphin and Dauphiness are King and Queen! Over-powered with many
- emotions, they two fall on their knees together, and, with
- streaming tears, exclaim, ‘O God, guide us, protect us; we are
- too young to reign!’—Too young indeed.
-
- Thus, in any case, “with a sound absolutely like thunder,” has
- the Horologe of Time struck, and an old Era passed away. The
- Louis that was, lies forsaken, a mass of abhorred clay; abandoned
- “to some poor persons, and priests of the _Chapelle
- Ardente_,”—who make haste to put him “in two lead coffins,
- pouring in abundant spirits of wine.” The new Louis with his
- Court is rolling towards Choisy, through the summer afternoon:
- the royal tears still flow; but a word mispronounced by
- Monseigneur d’Artois sets them all laughing, and they weep no
- more. Light mortals, how ye walk your light life-minuet, over
- bottomless abysses, divided from you by a film!
-
- For the rest, the proper authorities felt that no Funeral could
- be too unceremonious. Besenval himself thinks it was
- unceremonious enough. Two carriages containing two noblemen of
- the usher species, and a Versailles clerical person; some score
- of mounted pages, some fifty palfreniers; these, with torches,
- but not so much as in black, start from Versailles on the second
- evening with their leaden bier. At a high trot they start; and
- keep up that pace. For the jibes (_brocards_) of those Parisians,
- who stand planted in two rows, all the way to St. Denis, and
- “give vent to their pleasantry, the characteristic of the
- nation,” do not tempt one to slacken. Towards midnight the vaults
- of St. Denis receive their own; unwept by any eye of all these;
- if not by poor _Loque_ his neglected Daughter’s, whose Nunnery is
- hard by.
-
- Him they crush down, and huddle under-ground, in this impatient
- way; him and his era of sin and tyranny and shame; for behold a
- New Era is come; the future all the brighter that the past was
- base.
-
-
- BOOK 1.II.
- THE PAPER AGE
-
-
- Chapter 1.2.I.
- Astræa Redux.
-
- A paradoxical philosopher, carrying to the uttermost length that
- aphorism of Montesquieu’s, “Happy the people whose annals are
- tiresome,” has said, “Happy the people whose annals are vacant.”
- In which saying, mad as it looks, may there not still be found
- some grain of reason? For truly, as it has been written, “Silence
- is divine,” and of Heaven; so in all earthly things too there is
- a silence which is better than any speech. Consider it well, the
- Event, the thing which can be spoken of and recorded, is it not,
- in all cases, some disruption, some solution of continuity? Were
- it even a glad Event, it involves change, involves loss (of
- active Force); and so far, either in the past or in the present,
- is an irregularity, a disease. Stillest perseverance were our
- blessedness; not dislocation and alteration,—could they be
- avoided.
-
- The oak grows silently, in the forest, a thousand years; only in
- the thousandth year, when the woodman arrives with his axe, is
- there heard an echoing through the solitudes; and the oak
- announces itself when, with a far-sounding crash, it _falls_. How
- silent too was the planting of the acorn; scattered from the lap
- of some wandering wind! Nay, when our oak flowered, or put on its
- leaves (its glad Events), what shout of proclamation could there
- be? Hardly from the most observant a word of recognition. These
- things _befell_ not, they were slowly _done;_ not in an hour, but
- through the flight of days: what was to be said of it? This hour
- seemed altogether as the last was, as the next would be.
-
- It is thus everywhere that foolish Rumour babbles not of what was
- done, but of what was misdone or undone; and foolish History
- (ever, more or less, the written epitomised synopsis of Rumour)
- knows so little that were not as well unknown. Attila Invasions,
- Walter-the-Penniless Crusades, Sicilian Vespers, Thirty-Years
- Wars: mere sin and misery; not work, but hindrance of work! For
- the Earth, all this while, was yearly green and yellow with her
- kind harvests; the hand of the craftsman, the mind of the thinker
- rested not: and so, after all, and in spite of all, we have this
- so glorious high-domed blossoming World; concerning which, poor
- History may well ask, with wonder, Whence _it_ came? She knows so
- little of it, knows so much of what obstructed it, what would
- have rendered it impossible. Such, nevertheless, by necessity or
- foolish choice, is her rule and practice; whereby that paradox,
- “Happy the people whose annals are vacant,” is not without its
- true side.
-
- And yet, what seems more pertinent to note here, there is a
- stillness, not of unobstructed growth, but of passive inertness,
- and symptom of imminent downfall. As victory is silent, so is
- defeat. Of the opposing forces the weaker has resigned itself;
- the stronger marches on, noiseless now, but rapid, inevitable:
- the fall and overturn will not be noiseless. How all grows, and
- has its period, even as the herbs of the fields, be it annual,
- centennial, millennial! All grows and dies, each by its own
- wondrous laws, in wondrous fashion of its own; spiritual things
- most wondrously of all. Inscrutable, to the wisest, are these
- latter; not to be prophesied of, or understood. If when the oak
- stands proudliest flourishing to the eye, you know that its heart
- is sound, it is not so with the man; how much less with the
- Society, with the Nation of men! Of such it may be affirmed even
- that the superficial aspect, that the inward feeling of full
- health, is generally ominous. For indeed it is of apoplexy, so to
- speak, and a plethoric lazy habit of body, that Churches,
- Kingships, Social Institutions, oftenest die. Sad, when such
- Institution plethorically says to itself, Take thy ease, thou
- hast goods laid up;—like the fool of the Gospel, to whom it was
- answered, Fool, _this night_ thy life shall be required of thee!
-
- Is it the healthy peace, or the ominous unhealthy, that rests on
- France, for these next Ten Years? Over which the Historian can
- pass lightly, without call to linger: for as yet events are not,
- much less performances. Time of sunniest stillness;—shall we call
- it, what all men thought it, the new Age of Gold? Call it at
- least, of Paper; which in many ways is the succedaneum of Gold.
- Bank-paper, wherewith you can still buy when there is no gold
- left; Book-paper, splendent with Theories, Philosophies,
- Sensibilities,—beautiful art, not only of revealing Thought, but
- also of so beautifully hiding from us the want of Thought! Paper
- is made from the _rags_ of things that did once exist; there are
- endless excellences in Paper.—What wisest Philosophe, in this
- halcyon uneventful period, could prophesy that there was
- approaching, big with darkness and confusion, the event of
- events? Hope ushers in a Revolution,—as earthquakes are preceded
- by bright weather. On the Fifth of May, fifteen years hence, old
- Louis will not be sending for the Sacraments; but a new Louis,
- his grandson, with the whole pomp of astonished intoxicated
- France, will be opening the States-General.
-
- Dubarrydom and its D’Aiguillons are gone forever. There is a
- young, still docile, well-intentioned King; a young, beautiful
- and bountiful, well-intentioned Queen; and with them all France,
- as it were, become young. Maupeou and his Parlement have to
- vanish into thick night; respectable Magistrates, not indifferent
- to the Nation, were it only for having been opponents of the
- Court, can descend unchained from their “steep rocks at Croe in
- Combrailles” and elsewhere, and return singing praises: the old
- Parlement of Paris resumes its functions. Instead of a profligate
- bankrupt Abbé Terray, we have now, for Controller-General, a
- virtuous philosophic Turgot, with a whole Reformed France in his
- head. By whom whatsoever is wrong, in Finance or otherwise, will
- be righted,—as far as possible. Is it not as if Wisdom herself
- were henceforth to have seat and voice in the Council of Kings?
- Turgot has taken office with the noblest plainness of speech to
- that effect; been listened to with the noblest royal
- trustfulness.[23] It is true, as King Louis objects, ‘They say he
- never goes to mass;’ but liberal France likes him little worse
- for that; liberal France answers, ‘The Abbé Terray always went.’
- Philosophism sees, for the first time, a Philosophe (or even a
- Philosopher) in office: she in all things will applausively
- second him; neither will light old Maurepas obstruct, if he can
- easily help it.
-
- Then how “sweet” are the manners; vice “losing all its
- deformity;” becoming _decent_ (as established things, making
- regulations for themselves, do); becoming almost a kind of
- “sweet” virtue! Intelligence so abounds; irradiated by wit and
- the art of conversation. Philosophism sits joyful in her
- glittering saloons, the dinner-guest of Opulence grown ingenuous,
- the very nobles proud to sit by her; and preaches, lifted up over
- all Bastilles, a coming millennium. From far Ferney, Patriarch
- Voltaire gives sign: veterans Diderot, D’Alembert have lived to
- see this day; these with their younger Marmontels, Morellets,
- Chamforts, Raynals, make glad the spicy board of rich ministering
- Dowager, of philosophic Farmer-General. O nights and suppers of
- the gods! Of a truth, the long-demonstrated will now be done:
- “the Age of Revolutions approaches” (as Jean Jacques wrote), but
- then of happy blessed ones. Man awakens from his long
- somnambulism; chases the Phantasms that beleagured and bewitched
- him. Behold the new morning glittering down the eastern steeps;
- fly, false Phantasms, from its shafts of light; let the Absurd
- fly utterly forsaking this lower Earth for ever. It is Truth and
- _Astræa Redux_ that (in the shape of Philosophism) henceforth
- reign. For what imaginable purpose was man made, if not to be
- “happy”? By victorious Analysis, and Progress of the Species,
- happiness enough now awaits him. Kings can become philosophers;
- or else philosophers Kings. Let but Society be once rightly
- constituted,—by victorious Analysis. The stomach that is empty
- shall be filled; the throat that is dry shall be wetted with
- wine. Labour itself shall be all one as rest; not grievous, but
- joyous. Wheatfields, one would think, cannot come to grow
- untilled; no man made clayey, or made weary thereby;—unless
- indeed machinery will do it? Gratuitous Tailors and Restaurateurs
- may start up, at fit intervals, one as yet sees not how. But if
- each will, according to rule of Benevolence, have a care for all,
- then surely—no one will be uncared for. Nay, who knows but, by
- sufficiently victorious Analysis, “human life may be indefinitely
- lengthened,” and men get rid of Death, as they have already done
- of the Devil? We shall then be happy in spite of Death and the
- Devil.—So preaches magniloquent Philosophism her _Redeunt
- Saturnia regna._
-
- The prophetic song of Paris and its Philosophes is audible enough
- in the Versailles Œil-de-Bœuf; and the Œil-de-Bœuf, intent
- chiefly on nearer blessedness, can answer, at worst, with a
- polite ‘Why not?’ Good old cheery Maurepas is too joyful a Prime
- Minister to dash the world’s joy. Sufficient for the day be its
- own evil. Cheery old man, he cuts his jokes, and hovers careless
- along; his cloak well adjusted to the wind, if so be he may
- please all persons. The simple young King, whom a Maurepas cannot
- think of troubling with business, has retired into the interior
- apartments; taciturn, irresolute; though with a sharpness of
- temper at times: he, at length, determines on a little smithwork;
- and so, in apprenticeship with a Sieur Gamain (whom one day he
- shall have little cause to bless), is learning to make locks.[24]
- It appears further, he understood Geography; and could read
- English. Unhappy young King, his childlike trust in that foolish
- old Maurepas deserved another return. But friend and foe, destiny
- and himself have combined to do him hurt.
-
- Meanwhile the fair young Queen, in her halls of state, walks like
- a goddess of Beauty, the cynosure of all eyes; as yet mingles not
- with affairs; heeds not the future; least of all, dreads it.
- Weber and Campan[25] have pictured her, there within the royal
- tapestries, in bright boudoirs, baths, peignoirs, and the Grand
- and Little Toilette; with a whole brilliant world waiting
- obsequious on her glance: fair young daughter of Time, what
- things has Time in store for thee! Like Earth’s brightest
- Appearance, she moves gracefully, environed with the grandeur of
- Earth: a reality, and yet a magic vision; for, behold, shall not
- utter Darkness swallow it! The soft young heart adopts orphans,
- portions meritorious maids, delights to succour the poor,—such
- poor as come picturesquely in her way; and sets the fashion of
- doing it; for as was said, Benevolence has now begun reigning. In
- her Duchess de Polignac, in Princess de Lamballe, she enjoys
- something almost like friendship; now too, after seven long
- years, she has a child, and soon even a Dauphin, of her own; can
- reckon herself, as Queens go, happy in a husband.
-
- Events? The Grand events are but charitable Feasts of Morals
- (_Fêtes des mœurs_), with their Prizes and Speeches; Poissarde
- Processions to the Dauphin’s cradle; above all, Flirtations,
- their rise, progress, decline and fall. There are Snow-statues
- raised by the poor in hard winter to a Queen who has given them
- fuel. There are masquerades, theatricals; beautifyings of little
- Trianon, purchase and repair of St. Cloud; journeyings from the
- summer Court-Elysium to the winter one. There are poutings and
- grudgings from the Sardinian Sisters-in-law (for the Princes too
- are wedded); little jealousies, which Court-Etiquette can
- moderate. Wholly the lightest-hearted frivolous foam of
- Existence; yet an artfully refined foam; pleasant were it not so
- costly, like that which mantles on the wine of Champagne!
-
- Monsieur, the King’s elder Brother, has set up for a kind of wit;
- and leans towards the Philosophe side. Monseigneur d’Artois pulls
- the mask from a fair impertinent; fights a duel in
- consequence,—almost drawing blood.[26] He has breeches of a kind
- new in this world;—a fabulous kind; “four tall lackeys,” says
- Mercier, as if he had seen it, “hold him up in the air, that he
- may fall into the garment without vestige of wrinkle; from which
- rigorous encasement the same four, in the same way, and with more
- effort, must deliver him at night.”[27] This last is he who now,
- as a gray time-worn man, sits desolate at Grätz;[28] having
- winded up his destiny with the Three Days. In such sort are poor
- mortals swept and shovelled to and fro.
-
-
- Chapter 1.2.II.
- Petition in Hieroglyphs.
-
- With the working people, again it is not so well. Unlucky! For
- there are twenty to twenty-five millions of them. Whom, however,
- we lump together into a kind of dim compendious unity, monstrous
- but dim, far off, as the _canaille;_ or, more humanely, as “the
- masses.” Masses, indeed: and yet, singular to say, if, with an
- effort of imagination, thou follow them, over broad France, into
- their clay hovels, into their garrets and hutches, the masses
- consist all of units. Every unit of whom has his own heart and
- sorrows; stands covered there with his own skin, and if you prick
- him he will bleed. O purple Sovereignty, Holiness, Reverence;
- thou, for example, Cardinal Grand-Almoner, with thy plush
- covering of honour, who hast thy hands strengthened with
- dignities and moneys, and art set on thy world watch-tower
- solemnly, in sight of God, for such ends,—what a thought: that
- every unit of these masses is a miraculous Man, even as thyself
- art; struggling, with vision, or with blindness, for _his_
- infinite Kingdom (this life which he has got, once only, in the
- middle of Eternities); with a spark of the Divinity, what thou
- callest an immortal soul, in him!
-
- Dreary, languid do these struggle in their obscure remoteness;
- their hearth cheerless, their diet thin. For them, in this world,
- rises no Era of Hope; hardly now in the other,—if it be not hope
- in the gloomy rest of Death, for their faith too is failing.
- Untaught, uncomforted, unfed! A dumb generation; their voice only
- an inarticulate cry: spokesman, in the King’s Council, in the
- world’s forum, they have none that finds credence. At rare
- intervals (as now, in 1775), they will fling down their hoes and
- hammers; and, to the astonishment of thinking mankind,[29] flock
- hither and thither, dangerous, aimless; get the length even of
- Versailles. Turgot is altering the Corn-trade, abrogating the
- absurdest Corn-laws; there is dearth, real, or were it even
- “factitious;” an indubitable scarcity of bread. And so, on the
- second day of May 1775, these waste multitudes do here, at
- Versailles Château, in wide-spread wretchedness, in sallow faces,
- squalor, winged raggedness, present, as in legible hieroglyphic
- writing, their Petition of Grievances. The Château gates have to
- be shut; but the King will appear on the balcony, and speak to
- them. They have seen the King’s face; their Petition of
- Grievances has been, if not read, looked at. For answer, two of
- them are hanged, on a “new gallows forty feet high;” and the rest
- driven back to their dens,—for a time.
-
- Clearly a difficult “point” for Government, that of dealing with
- these masses;—if indeed it be not rather the sole point and
- problem of Government, and all other points mere accidental
- crotchets, superficialities, and beatings of the wind! For let
- Charter-Chests, Use and Wont, Law common and special say what
- they will, the masses count to so many millions of units; made,
- to all appearance, by God,—whose Earth this is declared to be.
- Besides, the people are not without ferocity; they have sinews
- and indignation. Do but look what holiday old Marquis Mirabeau,
- the crabbed old friend of Men, looked on, in these same years,
- from his lodging, at the Baths of Mont d’Or: “The savages
- descending in torrents from the mountains; our people ordered not
- to go out. The Curate in surplice and stole; Justice in its
- peruke; Marechausee sabre in hand, guarding the place, till the
- bagpipes can begin. The dance interrupted, in a quarter of an
- hour, by battle; the cries, the squealings of children, of infirm
- persons, and other assistants, tarring them on, as the rabble
- does when dogs fight: frightful men, or rather frightful wild
- animals, clad in jupes of coarse woollen, with large girdles of
- leather studded with copper nails; of gigantic stature,
- heightened by high wooden-clogs (_sabots_); rising on tiptoe to
- see the fight; tramping time to it; rubbing their sides with
- their elbows: their faces haggard (_figures hâves_), and covered
- with their long greasy hair; the upper part of the visage waxing
- pale, the lower distorting itself into the attempt at a cruel
- laugh and a sort of ferocious impatience. And these people pay
- the _taille!_ And you want further to take their salt from them!
- And you know not what it is you are stripping barer, or as you
- call it, governing; what by the spurt of your pen, in its cold
- dastard indifference, you will fancy you can starve always with
- impunity; always till the catastrophe come!—Ah Madame, such
- Government by Blindman’s-buff, stumbling along too far, will end
- in the General Overturn (_culbute générale_).”[30]
-
- Undoubtedly a dark feature this in an Age of Gold,—Age, at least,
- of Paper and Hope! Meanwhile, trouble us not with thy prophecies,
- O croaking Friend of Men: ’tis long that we have heard such; and
- still the old world keeps wagging, in its old way.
-
-
- Chapter 1.2.III.
- Questionable.
-
- Or is this same Age of Hope itself but a simulacrum; as Hope too
- often is? Cloud-vapour with rainbows painted on it, beautiful to
- see, to sail towards,—which hovers over Niagara Falls? In that
- case, victorious Analysis will have enough to do.
-
- Alas, yes! a whole world to remake, if she could see it; work for
- another than she! For all is wrong, and gone out of joint; the
- inward spiritual, and the outward economical; head or heart,
- there is no soundness in it. As indeed, evils of all sorts are
- more or less of kin, and do usually go together: especially it is
- an old truth, that wherever huge physical evil is, there, as the
- parent and origin of it, has moral evil to a proportionate extent
- been. Before those five-and-twenty labouring Millions, for
- instance, could get that haggardness of face, which old Mirabeau
- now looks on, in a Nation calling itself Christian, and calling
- man the brother of man,—what unspeakable, nigh infinite
- Dishonesty (of _seeming_ and not _being_) in all manner of
- Rulers, and appointed Watchers, spiritual and temporal, must
- there not, through long ages, have gone on accumulating! It will
- accumulate: moreover, it will reach a head; for the first of all
- Gospels is this, that a Lie cannot endure for ever.
-
- In fact, if we pierce through that rosepink vapour of
- Sentimentalism, Philanthropy, and Feasts of Morals, there lies
- behind it one of the sorriest spectacles. You might ask, What
- bonds that ever held a human society happily together, or held it
- together at all, are in force here? It is an unbelieving people;
- which has suppositions, hypotheses, and froth-systems of
- victorious Analysis; and for _belief_ this mainly, that Pleasure
- is pleasant. Hunger they have for all sweet things; and the law
- of Hunger; but what other law? Within them, or over them,
- properly none!
-
- Their King has become a King Popinjay; with his Maurepas
- Government, gyrating as the weather-cock does, blown about by
- every wind. Above them they see no God; or they even do not look
- above, except with astronomical glasses. The Church indeed still
- is; but in the most submissive state; quite tamed by
- Philosophism; in a singularly short time; for the hour was come.
- Some twenty years ago, your Archbishop Beaumont would not even
- let the poor Jansenists get buried: your Loménie Brienne (a
- rising man, whom we shall meet with yet) could, in the name of
- the Clergy, insist on having the Anti-protestant laws, which
- condemn to death for preaching, “put in execution.”[31] And,
- alas, now not so much as Baron Holbach’s Atheism can be
- burnt,—except as pipe-matches by the private speculative
- individual. Our Church stands haltered, dumb, like a dumb ox;
- lowing only for provender (of tithes); content if it can have
- that; or, dumbly, dully expecting its further doom. And the
- Twenty Millions of “haggard faces;” and, as finger-post and
- guidance to them in their dark struggle, “a gallows forty feet
- high”! Certainly a singular Golden Age; with its Feasts of
- Morals, its “sweet manners,” its sweet institutions
- (_institutions douces_); betokening nothing but peace among
- men!—Peace? O Philosophe-Sentimentalism, what hast thou to do
- with peace, when thy mother’s name is Jezebel? Foul Product of
- still fouler Corruption, thou with the corruption art doomed!
-
- Meanwhile it is singular how long the rotten will hold together,
- provided you do not handle it roughly. For whole generations it
- continues standing, “with a ghastly affectation of life,” after
- all life and truth has fled out of it; so loth are men to quit
- their old ways; and, conquering indolence and inertia, venture on
- new. Great truly is the Actual; is the Thing that has rescued
- itself from bottomless deeps of theory and possibility, and
- stands there as a definite indisputable Fact, whereby men do work
- and live, or once did so. Widely shall men cleave to that, while
- it will endure; and quit it with regret, when it gives way under
- them. Rash enthusiast of Change, beware! Hast thou well
- considered all that Habit does in this life of ours; how all
- Knowledge and all Practice hang wondrous over infinite abysses of
- the Unknown, Impracticable; and our whole being is an infinite
- abyss, _overarched_ by Habit, as by a thin Earth-rind,
- laboriously built together?
-
- But if “every man,” as it has been written, “holds confined
- within him a _mad_-man,” what must every Society do;—Society,
- which in its commonest state is called “the standing miracle of
- this world”! “Without such Earth-rind of Habit,” continues our
- author, “call it System of Habits, in a word, _fixed ways_ of
- acting and of believing,—Society would not exist at all. With
- such it exists, better or worse. Herein too, in this its System
- of Habits, acquired, retained how you will, lies the true
- Law-Code and Constitution of a Society; the only Code, though an
- unwritten one which it can in nowise _dis_obey. The thing we call
- written Code, Constitution, Form of Government, and the like,
- what is it but some miniature image, and solemnly expressed
- summary of this unwritten Code? _Is_,—or rather alas, is _not;_
- but only should be, and always tends to be! In which latter
- discrepancy lies struggle without end.” And now, we add in the
- same dialect, let but, by ill chance, in such ever-enduring
- struggle,—your “thin Earth-rind” be once _broken!_ The fountains
- of the great deep boil forth; fire-fountains, enveloping,
- engulfing. Your “Earth-rind” is shattered, swallowed up; instead
- of a green flowery world, there is a waste wild-weltering
- chaos:—which has again, with tumult and struggle, to _make_
- itself into a world.
-
- On the other hand, be this conceded: Where thou findest a Lie
- that is oppressing thee, extinguish it. Lies exist there only to
- be extinguished; they wait and cry earnestly for extinction.
- Think well, meanwhile, in what spirit thou wilt do it: not with
- hatred, with headlong selfish violence; but in clearness of
- heart, with holy zeal, gently, almost with pity. Thou wouldst not
- _replace_ such extinct Lie by a new Lie, which a new Injustice of
- thy own were; the parent of still other Lies? Whereby the latter
- end of that business were worse than the beginning.
-
- So, however, in this world of ours, which has both an
- indestructible hope in the Future, and an indestructible tendency
- to persevere as in the Past, must Innovation and Conservation
- wage their perpetual conflict, as they may and can. Wherein the
- “dæmonic element,” that lurks in all human things, _may_
- doubtless, some once in the thousand years—get vent! But indeed
- may we not regret that such conflict,—which, after all, is but
- like that classical one of “hate-filled Amazons with heroic
- Youths,” and will end in _embraces_,—should usually be so
- spasmodic? For Conservation, strengthened by that mightiest
- quality in us, our indolence, sits for long ages, not victorious
- only, which she should be; but tyrannical, incommunicative. She
- holds her adversary as if annihilated; such adversary lying, all
- the while, like some buried Enceladus; who, to gain the smallest
- freedom, must stir a whole Trinacria with it Ætnas.
-
- Wherefore, on the whole, we will honour a Paper Age too; an Era
- of hope! For in this same frightful process of Enceladus Revolt;
- when the task, on which no mortal would willingly enter, has
- become imperative, inevitable,—is it not even a kindness of
- Nature that she lures us forward by cheerful promises, fallacious
- or not; and a whole generation plunges into the Erebus Blackness,
- lighted on by an Era of Hope? It has been well said: “Man is
- based on Hope; he has properly no other possession but Hope; this
- habitation of his is named the Place of Hope.”
-
-
- Chapter 1.2.IV.
- Maurepas.
-
- But now, among French hopes, is not that of old M. de Maurepas
- one of the best-grounded; who hopes that he, by dexterity, shall
- contrive to continue Minister? Nimble old man, who for all
- emergencies has his light jest; and ever in the worst confusion
- will emerge, cork-like, unsunk! Small care to him is
- Perfectibility, Progress of the Species, and _Astræa Redux:_ good
- only, that a man of light wit, verging towards fourscore, can in
- the seat of authority feel himself important among men. Shall we
- call him, as haughty Châteauroux was wont of old, “_M. Faquinet_
- (Diminutive of Scoundrel)”? In courtier dialect, he is now named
- “the Nestor of France;” such governing Nestor as France has.
-
- At bottom, nevertheless, it might puzzle one to say where the
- Government of France, in these days, specially is. In that
- Château of Versailles, we have Nestor, King, Queen, ministers and
- clerks, with paper-bundles tied in tape: but the Government? For
- Government is a thing that _governs_, that guides; and if need
- be, compels. Visible in France there is not such a thing.
- Invisible, inorganic, on the other hand, there is: in Philosophe
- saloons, in Œil-de-Bœuf galleries; in the tongue of the babbler,
- in the pen of the pamphleteer. Her Majesty appearing at the Opera
- is applauded; she returns all radiant with joy. Anon the
- applauses wax fainter, or threaten to cease; she is heavy of
- heart, the light of her face has fled. Is Sovereignty some poor
- Montgolfier; which, blown into by the popular wind, grows great
- and mounts; or sinks flaccid, if the wind be withdrawn? France
- was long a “Despotism tempered by Epigrams;” and now, it would
- seem, the Epigrams have get the upper hand.
-
- Happy were a young “Louis the Desired” to make France happy; if
- it did not prove too troublesome, and he only knew the way. But
- there is endless discrepancy round him; so many claims and
- clamours; a mere confusion of tongues. Not reconcilable by man;
- not manageable, suppressible, save by some strongest and wisest
- men;—which only a lightly-jesting lightly-gyrating M. de Maurepas
- can so much as subsist amidst. Philosophism claims her new Era,
- meaning thereby innumerable things. And claims it in no faint
- voice; for France at large, hitherto mute, is now beginning to
- speak also; and speaks in that same sense. A huge, many-toned
- sound; distant, yet not unimpressive. On the other hand, the
- Œil-de-Bœuf, which, as nearest, one can hear best, claims with
- shrill vehemence that the Monarchy be as heretofore a Horn of
- Plenty; wherefrom loyal courtiers may draw,—to the just support
- of the throne. Let Liberalism and a New Era, if such is the wish,
- be introduced; only no curtailment of the royal moneys? Which
- latter condition, alas, is precisely the impossible one.
-
- Philosophism, as we saw, has got her Turgot made
- Controller-General; and there shall be endless reformation.
- Unhappily this Turgot could continue only twenty months. With a
- miraculous _Fortunatus’ Purse_ in his Treasury, it might have
- lasted longer; with such Purse indeed, every French
- Controller-General, that would prosper in these days, ought first
- to provide himself. But here again may we not remark the bounty
- of Nature in regard to Hope? Man after man advances confident to
- the Augean Stable, as if _he_ could clean it; expends his little
- fraction of an ability on it, with such cheerfulness; does, in so
- far as he was honest, accomplish something. Turgot has faculties;
- honesty, insight, heroic volition; but the Fortunatus’ Purse he
- has not. Sanguine Controller-General! a whole pacific French
- Revolution may stand schemed in the head of the thinker; but who
- shall pay the unspeakable “indemnities” that will be needed?
- Alas, far from that: on the very threshold of the business, he
- proposes that the Clergy, the Noblesse, the very Parlements be
- subjected to taxes! One shriek of indignation and astonishment
- reverberates through all the Château galleries; M. de Maurepas
- has to gyrate: the poor King, who had written few weeks ago, “_Il
- n’y a que vous et moi qui aimions le peuple_ (There is none but
- you and I that has the people’s interest at heart),” must write
- now a dismissal;[32] and let the French Revolution accomplish
- itself, pacifically or not, as it can.
-
- Hope, then, is deferred? Deferred; not destroyed, or abated. Is
- not this, for example, our Patriarch Voltaire, after long years
- of absence, revisiting Paris? With face shrivelled to nothing;
- with “huge peruke _à la Louis Quatorze_, which leaves only two
- eyes ‘visible’ glittering like carbuncles,” the old man is
- here.[33] What an outburst! Sneering Paris has suddenly grown
- reverent; devotional with Hero-worship. Nobles have disguised
- themselves as tavern-waiters to obtain sight of him: the
- loveliest of France would lay their hair beneath his feet. “His
- chariot is the nucleus of a comet; whose train fills whole
- streets:” they crown him in the theatre, with immortal vivats;
- “finally stifle him under roses,”—for old Richelieu recommended
- opium in such state of the nerves, and the excessive Patriarch
- took too much. Her Majesty herself had some thought of sending
- for him; but was dissuaded. Let Majesty consider it,
- nevertheless. The purport of this man’s existence has been to
- wither up and annihilate all whereon Majesty and Worship for the
- present rests: and is it _so_ that the world recognises him? With
- Apotheosis; as its Prophet and Speaker, who has spoken wisely the
- thing it longed to say? Add only, that the body of this same
- rose-stifled, beatified-Patriarch cannot get buried except by
- stealth. It is wholly a notable business; and France, without
- doubt, is _big_ (what the Germans call “Of good Hope”): we shall
- wish her a happy birth-hour, and blessed fruit.
-
- Beaumarchais too has now winded-up his Law-Pleadings
- (_Mémoires_);[34] not without result, to himself and to the
- world. Caron Beaumarchais (or de Beaumarchais, for he got
- ennobled) had been born poor, but aspiring, esurient; with
- talents, audacity, adroitness; above all, with the talent for
- intrigue: a lean, but also a tough, indomitable man. Fortune and
- dexterity brought him to the harpsichord of Mesdames, our good
- Princesses _Loque, Graille_ and Sisterhood. Still better, Paris
- Duvernier, the Court-Banker, honoured him with some confidence;
- to the length even of transactions in cash. Which confidence,
- however, Duvernier’s Heir, a person of quality, would not
- continue. Quite otherwise; there springs a Lawsuit from it:
- wherein tough Beaumarchais, losing both money and repute, is, in
- the opinion of Judge-Reporter Goezman, of the Parlement Maupeou,
- of a whole indifferent acquiescing world, miserably beaten. In
- all men’s opinions, only not in his own! Inspired by the
- indignation, which makes, if not verses, satirical law-papers,
- the withered Music-master, with a desperate heroism, takes up his
- lost cause in spite of the world; fights for it, against
- Reporters, Parlements and Principalities, with light banter, with
- clear logic; adroitly, with an inexhaustible toughness and
- resource, like the skilfullest fencer; on whom, so skilful is he,
- the whole world now looks. Three long years it lasts; with
- wavering fortune. In fine, after labours comparable to the Twelve
- of Hercules, our unconquerable Caron triumphs; regains his
- Lawsuit and Lawsuits; strips Reporter Goezman of the judicial
- ermine; covering him with a perpetual garment of obloquy
- instead:—and in regard to the Parlement Maupeou (which he has
- helped to extinguish), to Parlements of all kinds, and to French
- Justice generally, gives rise to endless reflections in the minds
- of men. Thus has Beaumarchais, like a lean French Hercules,
- ventured down, driven by destiny, into the Nether Kingdoms; and
- victoriously tamed hell-dogs there. He also is henceforth among
- the notabilities of his generation.
-
-
- Chapter 1.2.V.
- Astræa Redux without Cash.
-
- Observe, however, beyond the Atlantic, has not the new day verily
- dawned! Democracy, as we said, is born; storm-girt, is struggling
- for life and victory. A sympathetic France rejoices over the
- Rights of Man; in all saloons, it is said, What a spectacle! Now
- too behold our Deane, our Franklin, American Plenipotentiaries,
- here in position soliciting;[35] the sons of the Saxon Puritans,
- with their Old-Saxon temper, Old-Hebrew culture, sleek Silas,
- sleek Benjamin, here on such errand, among the light children of
- Heathenism, Monarchy, Sentimentalism, and the Scarlet-woman. A
- spectacle indeed; over which saloons may cackle joyous; though
- Kaiser Joseph, questioned on it, gave this answer, most
- unexpected from a Philosophe: ‘Madame, the trade I live by is
- that of royalist (_Mon métier à moi c’est d’être royaliste_).’
-
- So thinks light Maurepas too; but the wind of Philosophism and
- force of public opinion will blow him round. Best wishes,
- meanwhile, are sent; clandestine privateers armed. Paul Jones
- shall equip his _Bon Homme Richard:_ weapons, military stores can
- be smuggled over (if the English do not seize them); wherein,
- once more Beaumarchais, dimly as the Giant Smuggler becomes
- visible,—filling his own lank pocket withal. But surely, in any
- case, France should have a Navy. For which great object were not
- now the time: now when that proud Termagant of the Seas has her
- hands full? It is true, an impoverished Treasury cannot build
- ships; but the hint once given (which Beaumarchais says he gave),
- this and the other loyal Seaport, Chamber of Commerce, will build
- and offer them. Goodly vessels bound into the waters; a _Ville de
- Paris_, Leviathan of ships.
-
- And now when gratuitous three-deckers dance there at anchor, with
- streamers flying; and eleutheromaniac Philosophedom grows ever
- more clamorous, what can a Maurepas do—but gyrate? Squadrons
- cross the ocean: Gages, Lees, rough Yankee Generals, “with
- woollen night-caps under their hats,” present arms to the
- far-glancing Chivalry of France; and new-born Democracy sees, not
- without amazement, “Despotism tempered by Epigrams” fight at her
- side. So, however, it is. King’s forces and heroic volunteers;
- Rochambeaus, Bouillés, Lameths, Lafayettes, have drawn their
- swords in this sacred quarrel of mankind;—shall draw them again
- elsewhere, in the strangest way.
-
- Off Ushant some naval thunder is heard. In the course of which
- did our young Prince, Duke de Chartres, “hide in the hold;” or
- did he materially, by _active_ heroism, contribute to the
- victory? Alas, by a second edition, we learn that there was no
- victory; or that English Keppel had it.[36] Our poor young Prince
- gets his Opera plaudits changed into mocking tehees; and cannot
- become Grand-Admiral,—the source to him of woes which one may
- call endless.
-
- Woe also for _Ville de Paris_, the Leviathan of ships! English
- Rodney has clutched it, and led it home, with the rest; so
- successful was his new “manœuvre of breaking the enemy’s
- line.”[37] It seems as if, according to Louis XV., “France were
- never to have a Navy.” Brave Suffren must return from Hyder Ally
- and the Indian Waters; with small result; yet with great glory
- for “six” _non-defeats;_—which indeed, with such seconding as he
- had, one may reckon heroic. Let the old sea-hero rest now,
- honoured of France, in his native Cevennes mountains; send smoke,
- not of gunpowder, but mere culinary smoke, through the old
- chimneys of the Castle of Jalès,—which one day, in other hands,
- shall have other fame. Brave Lapérouse shall by and by lift
- anchor, on philanthropic Voyage of Discovery; for the King knows
- Geography.[38] But, alas, this also will not prosper: the brave
- Navigator goes, and returns not; the Seekers search far seas for
- him in vain. He has vanished trackless into blue Immensity; and
- only some mournful mysterious shadow of him hovers long in all
- heads and hearts.
-
- Neither, while the War yet lasts, will Gibraltar surrender. Not
- though Crillon, Nassau-Siegen, with the ablest projectors extant,
- are there; and Prince Condé and Prince d’Artois have hastened to
- help. Wondrous leather-roofed Floating-batteries, set afloat by
- French-Spanish _Pacte de Famille_, give gallant summons: to
- which, nevertheless, Gibraltar answers Plutonically, with mere
- torrents of redhot iron,—as if stone Calpe had become a throat of
- the Pit; and utters such a Doom’s-blast of a No, as all men must
- credit.[39]
-
- And so, with this loud explosion, the noise of War has ceased; an
- Age of Benevolence may hope, for ever. Our noble volunteers of
- Freedom have returned, to be her missionaries. Lafayette, as the
- matchless of his time, glitters in the Versailles Œil-de-Beouf;
- has his Bust set up in the Paris Hôtel-de-Ville. Democracy stands
- inexpugnable, immeasurable, in her New World; has even a foot
- lifted towards the Old;—and our French Finances, little
- strengthened by such work, are in no healthy way.
-
- What to do with the Finance? This indeed is the great question: a
- small but most black weather-symptom, which no radiance of
- universal hope can cover. We saw Turgot cast forth from the
- Controllership, with shrieks,—for want of a Fortunatus’ Purse. As
- little could M. de Clugny manage the duty; or indeed do anything,
- but consume his wages; attain “a place in History,” where as an
- ineffectual shadow thou beholdest him still lingering;—and let
- the duty manage itself. Did Genevese Necker _possess_ such a
- Purse, then? He possessed banker’s skill, banker’s honesty;
- _credit_ of all kinds, for he had written Academic Prize Essays,
- struggled for India Companies, given dinners to Philosophes, and
- “realised a fortune in twenty years.” He possessed, further, a
- taciturnity and solemnity; of depth, or else of dulness. How
- singular for Celadon Gibbon, false swain as he had proved; whose
- father, keeping most probably his own gig, “would not hear of
- such a union,”—to find now his forsaken Demoiselle Curchod
- sitting in the high places of the world, as Minister’s Madame,
- and “Necker not jealous!”[40]
-
- A new young Demoiselle, one day to be famed as a Madame and De
- Staël, was romping about the knees of the Decline and Fall: the
- lady Necker founds Hospitals; gives solemn Philosophe
- dinner-parties, to cheer her exhausted Controller-General.
- Strange things have happened: by clamour of Philosophism,
- management of Marquis de Pezay, and Poverty constraining even
- Kings. And so Necker, Atlas-like, sustains the burden of the
- Finances, for five years long?[41] Without wages, for he refused
- such; cheered only by Public Opinion, and the ministering of his
- noble Wife. With many thoughts in him, it is hoped;—which,
- however, he is shy of uttering. His _Compte Rendu_, published by
- the royal permission, fresh sign of a New Era, shows
- wonders;—which what but the genius of some Atlas-Necker can
- prevent from becoming portents? In Necker’s head too there is a
- whole pacific French Revolution, of its kind; and in that
- taciturn dull depth, or deep dulness, ambition enough.
-
- Meanwhile, alas, his Fotunatus’ Purse turns out to be little
- other than the old “_vectigal_ of Parsimony.” Nay, he too has to
- produce his scheme of taxing: Clergy, Noblesse to be taxed;
- Provincial Assemblies, and the rest,—like a mere Turgot! The
- expiring M. de Maurepas must gyrate one other time. Let Necker
- also depart; not unlamented.
-
- Great in a private station, Necker looks on from the distance;
- abiding his time. “Eighty thousand copies” of his new Book, which
- he calls _Administration des Finances_, will be sold in few days.
- He is gone; but shall return, and that more than once, borne by a
- whole shouting Nation. Singular Controller-General of the
- Finances; once Clerk in Thelusson’s Bank!
-
-
- Chapter 1.2.VI.
- Windbags.
-
- So marches the world, in this its Paper Age, or Era of Hope. Not
- without obstructions, war-explosions; which, however, heard from
- such distance, are little other than a cheerful marching-music.
- If indeed that dark living chaos of Ignorance and Hunger,
- five-and-twenty million strong, under your feet,—were to begin
- playing!
-
- For the present, however, consider Longchamp; now when Lent is
- ending, and the glory of Paris and France has gone forth, as in
- annual wont. Not to assist at _Tenebris_ Masses, but to sun
- itself and show itself, and salute the Young Spring.[42]
- Manifold, bright-tinted, glittering with gold; all through the
- Bois de Boulogne, in longdrawn variegated rows;—like longdrawn
- living flower-borders, tulips, dahlias, lilies of the valley; all
- in their moving flower-pots (of new-gilt carriages): pleasure of
- the eye, and pride of life! So rolls and dances the Procession:
- steady, of firm assurance, as if it rolled on adamant and the
- foundations of the world; not on mere heraldic parchment,—under
- which smoulders a lake of fire. Dance on, ye foolish ones; ye
- sought not wisdom, neither have ye found it. Ye and your fathers
- have sown the wind, ye shall reap the whirlwind. Was it not, from
- of old, written: _The wages of sin is death?_
-
- But at Longchamp, as elsewhere, we remark for one thing, that
- dame and cavalier are waited on each by a kind of human familiar,
- named _jokei._ Little elf, or imp; though young, already
- withered; with its withered air of premature vice, of
- knowingness, of completed elf-hood: useful in various
- emergencies. The name _jokei_ (jockey) comes from the English; as
- the thing also fancies that it does. Our Anglomania, in fact , is
- grown considerable; prophetic of much. If France is to be free,
- why shall she not, now when mad war is hushed, love neighbouring
- Freedom? Cultivated men, your Dukes de Liancourt, de la
- Rochefoucault admire the English Constitution, the English
- National Character; would import what of it they can.
-
- Of what is lighter, especially if it be light as wind, how much
- easier the freightage! Non-Admiral Duke de Chartres (not yet
- d’Orléans or Egalité) flies to and fro across the Strait;
- importing English Fashions; this he, as hand-and-glove with an
- English Prince of Wales, is surely qualified to do. Carriages and
- saddles; top-boots and _rédingotes_, as we call riding-coats. Nay
- the very mode of riding: for now no man on a level with his age
- but will trot _à l’Anglaise_, rising in the stirrups; scornful of
- the old sitfast method, in which, according to Shakspeare,
- “butter and eggs” go to market. Also, he can urge the fervid
- wheels, this brave Chartres of ours; no whip in Paris is rasher
- and surer than the unprofessional one of Monseigneur.
-
- Elf _jokeis_, we have seen; but see now real Yorkshire jockeys,
- and what they ride on, and train: English racers for French
- Races. These likewise we owe first (under the Providence of the
- Devil) to Monseigneur. Prince d’Artois also has his stud of
- racers. Prince d’Artois has withal the strangest horseleech: a
- moonstruck, much-enduring individual, of Neuchâtel in
- Switzerland,—named _Jean Paul Marat_. A problematic Chevalier
- d’Eon, now in petticoats, now in breeches, is no less problematic
- in London than in Paris; and causes bets and lawsuits. Beautiful
- days of international communion! Swindlery and Blackguardism have
- stretched hands across the Channel, and saluted mutually: on the
- racecourse of Vincennes or Sablons, behold in English
- curricle-and-four, wafted glorious among the principalities and
- rascalities, an English Dr. Dodd,[43]—for whom also the too early
- gallows gapes.
-
- Duke de Chartres was a young Prince of great promise, as young
- Princes often are; which promise unfortunately has belied itself.
- With the huge Orléans Property, with Duke de Penthievre for
- Father-in-law (and now the young Brother-in-law Lamballe killed
- by excesses),—he will one day be the richest man in France.
- Meanwhile, “his hair is all falling out, his blood is quite
- spoiled,”—by early transcendentalism of debauchery. Carbuncles
- stud his face; dark studs on a ground of burnished copper. A most
- signal failure, this young Prince! The stuff prematurely burnt
- out of him: little left but foul smoke and ashes of expiring
- sensualities: what might have been Thought, Insight, and even
- Conduct, gone now, or fast going,—to confused darkness, broken by
- bewildering dazzlements; to obstreperous crotchets; to activities
- which you may call semi-delirious, or even semi-galvanic! Paris
- affects to laugh at his charioteering; but he heeds not such
- laughter.
-
- On the other hand, what a day, not of laughter, was that, when he
- threatened, for lucre’s sake, to lay sacrilegious hand on the
- Palais-Royal Garden![44] The flower-parterres shall be riven up;
- the Chestnut Avenues shall fall: time-honoured boscages, under
- which the Opera Hamadryads were wont to wander, not inexorable to
- men. Paris moans aloud. Philidor, from his Café de la Regence,
- shall no longer look on greenness; the loungers and losels of the
- world, where now shall they haunt? In vain is moaning. The axe
- glitters; the sacred groves fall crashing,—for indeed Monseigneur
- was short of money: the Opera Hamadryads fly with shrieks. Shriek
- not, ye Opera Hamadryads; or not as those that have no comfort.
- He will surround your Garden with new edifices and piazzas:
- though narrowed, it shall be replanted; dizened with hydraulic
- jets, cannon which the sun fires at noon; things bodily, things
- spiritual, such as man has not imagined;—and in the Palais-Royal
- shall again, and more than ever, be the _Sorcerer’s Sabbath_ and
- _Satan-at-Home_ of our Planet.
-
- What will not mortals attempt? From remote Annonay in the
- Vivarais, the Brothers Montgolfier send up their paper-dome,
- filled with the smoke of burnt wool.[45] The Vivarais provincial
- assembly is to be prorogued this same day: Vivarais
- Assembly-members applaud, and the shouts of congregated men. Will
- victorious Analysis scale the very Heavens, then?
-
- Paris hears with eager wonder; Paris shall ere long see. From
- Reveilion’s Paper-warehouse there, in the Rue St. Antoine (a
- noted Warehouse),—the new Montgolfier air-ship launches itself.
- Ducks and poultry are borne skyward: but now shall men be
- borne.[46] Nay, Chemist Charles thinks of hydrogen and glazed
- silk. Chemist Charles will himself ascend, from the Tuileries
- Garden; Montgolfier solemnly cutting the cord. By Heaven, he also
- mounts, he and another? Ten times ten thousand hearts go
- palpitating; all tongues are mute with wonder and fear; till a
- shout, like the voice of seas, rolls after him, on his wild way.
- He soars, he dwindles upwards; has become a mere gleaming
- circlet,—like some Turgotine snuff-box, what we call “_Turgotine
- Platitude;_” like some new daylight Moon! Finally he descends;
- welcomed by the universe. Duchess Polignac, with a party, is in
- the Bois de Boulogne, waiting; though it is drizzly winter; the
- 1st of December 1783. The whole chivalry of France, Duke de
- Chartres foremost, gallops to receive him.[47]
-
- Beautiful invention; mounting heavenward, so beautifully,—so
- unguidably! Emblem of much, and of our Age of Hope itself; which
- shall mount, specifically-light, majestically in this same
- manner; and hover,—tumbling whither Fate will. Well if it do not,
- Pilatre-like, explode; and demount all the more tragically!—So,
- riding on windbags, will men scale the Empyrean.
-
- Or observe Herr Doctor Mesmer, in his spacious Magnetic Halls.
- Long-stoled he walks; reverend, glancing upwards, as in rapt
- commerce; an Antique Egyptian Hierophant in this new age. Soft
- music flits; breaking fitfully the sacred stillness. Round their
- Magnetic Mystery, which to the eye is mere tubs with water,—sit
- breathless, rod in hand, the circles of Beauty and Fashion, each
- circle a living circular _Passion-Flower:_ expecting the magnetic
- afflatus, and new-manufactured Heaven-on-Earth. O women, O men,
- great is your infidel-faith! A Parlementary Duport, a Bergasse,
- D’Espréménil we notice there; Chemist Berthollet too,—on the part
- of Monseigneur de Chartres.
-
- Had not the Academy of Sciences, with its Baillys, Franklins,
- Lavoisiers, interfered! But it did interfere. (Lacretelle, 18me
- Siecle, iii.258.) Mesmer may pocket his hard money, and withdraw.
- Let him walk silent by the shore of the Bodensee, by the ancient
- town of Constance; meditating on much. For so, under the
- strangest new vesture, the old great truth (since no vesture can
- hide it) begins again to be revealed: That man is what we call a
- miraculous creature, with miraculous power over men; and, on the
- whole, with such a Life in him, and such a World round him, as
- victorious Analysis, with her Physiologies, Nervous-systems,
- Physic and Metaphysic, will never completely _name_, to say
- nothing of explaining. Wherein also the Quack shall, in all ages,
- come in for his share.[48]
-
-
- Chapter 1.2.VII.
- Contrat Social.
-
- In such succession of singular prismatic tints, flush after flush
- suffusing our horizon, does the Era of Hope dawn on towards
- fulfilment. Questionable! As indeed, with an Era of Hope that
- rests on mere universal Benevolence, victorious Analysis, Vice
- cured of its deformity; and, in the long run, on Twenty-five dark
- savage Millions, looking up, in hunger and weariness, to that
- _Ecce-signum_ of theirs “forty feet high,”—how could it but be
- questionable?
-
- Through all time, if we read aright, sin was, is, will be, the
- parent of misery. This land calls itself most Christian, and has
- crosses and cathedrals; but its High-priest is some Roche-Aymon,
- some Necklace-Cardinal Louis de Rohan. The voice of the poor,
- through long years, ascends inarticulate, in _Jacqueries_,
- meal-mobs; low-whimpering of infinite moan: unheeded of the
- Earth; not unheeded of Heaven. Always moreover where the Millions
- are wretched, there are the Thousands straitened, unhappy; only
- the Units can flourish; or say rather, be ruined the last.
- Industry, all noosed and haltered, as if it too were some beast
- of chase for the mighty hunters of this world to bait, and cut
- slices from,—cries passionately to these its well-paid guides and
- watchers, not, _Guide me;_ but, _Laissez faire,_ Leave me alone
- of _your_ guidance! What market has Industry in this France? For
- two things there may be market and demand: for the coarser kind
- of field-fruits, since the Millions will live: for the fine kinds
- of luxury and spicery,—of multiform taste, from opera-melodies
- down to racers and courtesans; since the Units will be amused. It
- is at bottom but a mad state of things.
-
- To mend and remake all which we have, indeed, victorious
- Analysis. Honour to victorious Analysis; nevertheless, out of the
- Workshop and Laboratory, what thing was victorious Analysis yet
- known to make? Detection of incoherences, mainly; destruction of
- the incoherent. From of old, Doubt was but half a magician; she
- evokes the spectres which she cannot quell. We shall have
- “endless vortices of froth-logic;” whereon first words, and then
- things, are whirled and swallowed. Remark, accordingly, as
- acknowledged grounds of Hope, at bottom mere precursors of
- Despair, this perpetual theorising about Man, the Mind of Man,
- Philosophy of Government, Progress of the Species and such-like;
- the main thinking furniture of every head. Time, and so many
- Montesquieus, Mablys, spokesmen of Time, have discovered
- innumerable things: and now has not Jean Jacques promulgated his
- new Evangel of a _Contrat Social;_ explaining the whole mystery
- of Government, and how it is _contracted_ and bargained for,—to
- universal satisfaction? Theories of Government! Such have been,
- and will be; in ages of decadence. Acknowledge them in their
- degree; as processes of Nature, who does nothing in vain; as
- steps in her great process. Meanwhile, what theory is so certain
- as this, That all theories, were they never so earnest, painfully
- elaborated, are, and, by the very conditions of them, must be
- incomplete, questionable, and even false? Thou shalt know that
- this Universe is, what it professes to be, an _infinite_ one.
- Attempt not to swallow _it_, for thy logical digestion; be
- thankful, if skilfully planting down this and the other fixed
- pillar in the chaos, thou prevent its swallowing _thee_. That a
- new young generation has exchanged the Sceptic Creed, _What shall
- I believe?_ for passionate Faith in this Gospel according to Jean
- Jacques is a further step in the business; and betokens much.
-
- Blessed also is Hope; and always from the beginning there was
- some Millennium prophesied; Millennium of Holiness; but (what is
- notable) never till this new Era, any Millennium of mere Ease and
- plentiful Supply. In such prophesied Lubberland, of Happiness,
- Benevolence, and Vice cured of its deformity, trust not, my
- friends! Man is not what one calls a happy animal; his appetite
- for sweet victual is so enormous. How, in this wild Universe,
- which storms in on him, infinite, vague-menacing, shall poor man
- find, say not happiness, but existence, and footing to stand on,
- if it be not by girding himself together for continual endeavour
- and endurance? Woe, if in his heart there dwelt no devout Faith;
- if the word Duty had lost its meaning for him! For as to this of
- Sentimentalism, so useful for weeping with over romances and on
- pathetic occasions, it otherwise verily will avail nothing; nay
- less. The healthy heart that said to itself, “How healthy am I!”
- was already fallen into the fatalest sort of disease. Is not
- Sentimentalism twin-sister to Cant, if not one and the same with
- it? Is not Cant the _materia prima_ of the Devil; from which all
- falsehoods, imbecilities, abominations body themselves; from
- which no true thing _can_ come? For Cant is itself properly a
- double-distilled Lie; the second-power of a Lie.
-
- And now if a whole Nation fall into that? In such case, I answer,
- infallibly they will return out of it! For life is no
- cunningly-devised deception or self-deception: it is a great
- truth that thou art alive, that thou hast desires, necessities;
- neither can these subsist and satisfy themselves on delusions,
- but on fact. To fact, depend on it, we shall come back: to such
- fact, blessed or cursed, as we have wisdom for. The lowest, least
- blessed fact one knows of, on which necessitous mortals have ever
- based themselves, seems to be the primitive one of Cannibalism:
- That _I_ can devour _Thee_. What if such Primitive Fact were
- precisely the one we had (with our improved methods) to revert
- to, and begin anew from!
-
-
- Chapter 1.2.VIII.
- Printed Paper.
-
- In such a practical France, let the theory of Perfectibility say
- what it will, discontents cannot be wanting: your promised
- Reformation is so indispensable; yet it comes not; who will begin
- it—with himself? Discontent with what is around us, still more
- with what is above us, goes on increasing; seeking ever new
- vents.
-
- Of Street Ballads, of Epigrams that from of old tempered
- Despotism, we need not speak. Nor of Manuscript Newspapers
- (_Nouvelles à la main_) do we speak. Bachaumont and his
- journeymen and followers may close those “thirty volumes of
- scurrilous eaves-dropping,” and quit that trade; for at length if
- not liberty of the Press, there is license. Pamphlets can be
- surreptititiously vended and read in Paris, did they even bear to
- be “Printed at Pekin.” We have a _Courrier de l’Europe_ in those
- years, regularly published at London; by a De Morande, whom the
- guillotine has not yet devoured. There too an unruly Linguet,
- still unguillotined, when his own country has become too hot for
- him, and his brother Advocates have cast him out, can emit his
- hoarse wailings, and _Bastille Dévoilée_ (Bastille unveiled).
- Loquacious Abbé Raynal, at length, has his wish; sees the
- _Histoire Philosophique,_ with its “lubricity,” unveracity, loose
- loud eleutheromaniac rant (contributed, they say, by
- Philosophedom at large, though in the Abbé’s name, and to his
- glory), burnt by the common hangman;—and sets out on his travels
- as a martyr. It was the edition of 1781; perhaps the last notable
- book that had such fire-beatitude,—the hangman discovering now
- that it did not serve.
-
- Again, in Courts of Law, with their money-quarrels,
- divorce-cases, wheresoever a glimpse into the household existence
- can be had, what indications! The Parlements of Besancon and Aix
- ring, audible to all France, with the amours and destinies of a
- young Mirabeau. He, under the nurture of a “Friend of Men,” has,
- in State Prisons, in marching Regiments, Dutch Authors” garrets,
- and quite other scenes, “been for twenty years learning to resist
- despotism:” despotism of men, and alas also of gods. How, beneath
- this rose-coloured veil of Universal Benevolence and _Astræa
- Redux_, is the sanctuary of Home so often a dreary void, or a
- dark contentious Hell-on-Earth! The old Friend of Men has his own
- divorce case too; and at times, “his whole family but one” under
- lock and key: he writes much about reforming and enfranchising
- the world; and for his own private behoof he has needed sixty
- _Lettres-de-Cachet_. A man of insight too, with resolution, even
- with manful principle: but in such an element, inward and
- outward; which he could not rule, but only madden. Edacity,
- rapacity;—quite contrary to the finer sensibilities of the heart!
- Fools, that expect your verdant Millennium, and nothing but Love
- and Abundance, brooks running wine, winds whispering music,—with
- the whole ground and basis of your existence champed into a mud
- of Sensuality; which, daily growing deeper, will soon have no
- bottom but the Abyss!
-
- Or consider that unutterable business of the Diamond Necklace.
- Red-hatted Cardinal Louis de Rohan; Sicilian jail-bird Balsamo
- Cagliostro; milliner Dame de Lamotte, “with a face of some
- piquancy:” the highest Church Dignitaries waltzing, in Walpurgis
- Dance, with quack-prophets, pickpurses and public women;—a whole
- Satan’s Invisible World displayed; working there continually
- under the daylight visible one; the smoke of its torment going up
- for ever! The Throne has been brought into scandalous collision
- with the Treadmill. Astonished Europe rings with the mystery for
- ten months; sees only lie unfold itself from lie; corruption
- among the lofty and the low, gulosity, credulity, imbecility,
- strength nowhere but in the hunger. Weep, fair Queen, thy first
- tears of unmixed wretchedness! Thy fair name has been tarnished
- by foul breath; irremediably while life lasts. No more shalt thou
- be loved and pitied by living hearts, till a new generation has
- been born, and thy own heart lies cold, cured of all its
- sorrows.—The Epigrams henceforth become, not sharp and bitter;
- but cruel, atrocious, unmentionable. On that 31st of May, 1786, a
- miserable Cardinal Grand-Almoner Rohan, on issuing from his
- Bastille, is escorted by hurrahing crowds: unloved he, and worthy
- of no love; but important since the Court and Queen are his
- enemies.[49]
-
- How is our bright Era of Hope dimmed: and the whole sky growing
- bleak with signs of hurricane and earthquake! It is a doomed
- world: gone all “obedience that made men free;” fast going the
- obedience that made men slaves,—at least to one another. Slaves
- only of their own lusts they now are, and will be. Slaves of sin;
- inevitably also of sorrow. Behold the mouldering mass of
- Sensuality and Falsehood; round which plays foolishly, itself a
- corrupt phosphorescence, some glimmer of Sentimentalism;—and over
- all, rising, as Ark of _their_ Covenant, the grim Patibulary Fork
- “forty feet high;” which also is now nigh rotted. Add only that
- the French Nation distinguishes itself among Nations by the
- characteristic of Excitability; with the good, but also with the
- perilous evil, which belongs to that. Rebellion, explosion, of
- unknown extent is to be calculated on. There are, as Chesterfield
- wrote, “all the symptoms I have ever met with in History!”
-
- Shall we say, then: Wo to Philosophism, that it destroyed
- Religion, what it called “extinguishing the abomination (_écraser
- l’infâme_)”? Wo rather to those that made the Holy an
- abomination, and extinguishable; wo at all men that live in such
- a time of world-abomination and world-destruction! Nay, answer
- the Courtiers, it was Turgot, it was Necker, with their mad
- innovating; it was the Queen’s want of etiquette; it was he, it
- was she, it was that. Friends! it was every scoundrel that had
- lived, and quack-like pretended to be doing, and been only eating
- and _mis_doing, in all provinces of life, as Shoeblack or as
- Sovereign Lord, each in his degree, from the time of Charlemagne
- and earlier. All this (for be sure no falsehood perishes, but is
- as seed sown out to grow) has been storing itself for thousands
- of years; and now the account-day has come. And rude will the
- settlement be: of wrath laid up against the day of wrath. O my
- Brother, be not thou a Quack! Die rather, if thou wilt take
- counsel; ’tis but dying once, and thou art quit of it for ever.
- Cursed is that trade; and bears curses, thou knowest not how,
- long ages after thou art departed, and the wages thou hadst are
- all consumed; nay, as the ancient wise have written,—through
- Eternity itself, and is verily marked in the Doom-Book of a God!
-
- Hope deferred maketh the heart sick. And yet, as we said, Hope is
- but deferred; not abolished, not abolishable. It is very notable,
- and touching, how this same Hope does still light onwards the
- French Nation through all its wild destinies. For we shall still
- find Hope shining, be it for fond invitation, be it for anger and
- menace; as a mild heavenly light it shone; as a red conflagration
- it shines: burning sulphurous blue, through darkest regions of
- Terror, it still shines; and goes sent out at all, since
- Desperation itself is a kind of Hope. Thus is our Era still to be
- named of Hope, though in the saddest sense,—when there is nothing
- left but Hope.
-
- But if any one would know summarily what a Pandora’s Box lies
- there for the opening, he may see it in what by its nature is the
- symptom of all symptoms, the surviving Literature of the Period.
- Abbé Raynal, with his lubricity and loud loose rant, has spoken
- _his_ word; and already the fast-hastening generation responds to
- another. Glance at Beaumarchais’ _Mariage de Figaro;_ which now
- (in 1784), after difficulty enough, has issued on the stage; and
- “runs its hundred nights,” to the admiration of all men. By what
- virtue or internal vigour it so ran, the reader of our day will
- rather wonder:—and indeed will know so much the better that it
- flattered some pruriency of the time; that it spoke what all were
- feeling, and longing to speak. Small substance in that _Figaro:_
- thin wiredrawn intrigues, thin wiredrawn sentiments and sarcasms;
- a thing lean, barren; yet which winds and whisks itself, as
- through a wholly mad universe, adroitly, with a high-sniffing
- air: wherein each, as was hinted, which is the grand secret, may
- see some image of himself, and of his own state and ways. So it
- runs its hundred nights, and all France runs with it; laughing
- applause. If the soliloquising Barber ask: ‘What has your
- Lordship done to earn all this?’ and can only answer: ‘You took
- the trouble to be born (_Vous vous êtes donné la peine de
- naître_),’ all men must laugh: and a gay horse-racing Anglomaniac
- Noblesse loudest of all. For how can small books have a great
- danger in them? asks the Sieur Caron; and fancies his thin
- epigram may be a kind of reason. Conqueror of a golden fleece, by
- giant smuggling; tamer of hell-dogs, in the Parlement Maupeou;
- and finally crowned Orpheus in the _Théâtre Français_,
- Beaumarchais has now culminated, and unites the attributes of
- several demigods. We shall meet him once again, in the course of
- his decline.
-
- Still more significant are two Books produced on the eve of the
- ever-memorable Explosion itself, and read eagerly by all the
- world: Saint-Pierre’s _Paul et Virginie_, and Louvet’s _Chevalier
- de Faublas_. Noteworthy Books; which may be considered as the
- last speech of old Feudal France. In the first there rises
- melodiously, as it were, the wail of a moribund world: everywhere
- wholesome Nature in unequal conflict with diseased perfidious
- Art; cannot escape from it in the lowest hut, in the remotest
- island of the sea. Ruin and death must strike down the loved one;
- and, what is most significant of all, death even here not by
- necessity, but by etiquette. What a world of prurient corruption
- lies visible in that super-sublime of modesty! Yet, on the whole,
- our good Saint-Pierre is musical, poetical though most morbid: we
- will call his Book the swan-song of old dying France.
-
- Louvet’s again, let no man account musical. Truly, if this
- wretched _Faublas_ is a death-speech, it is one under the
- gallows, and by a felon that does not repent. Wretched _cloaca_
- of a Book; without depth even as a cloaca! What “picture of
- French society” is here? Picture properly of nothing, if not of
- the mind that gave it out as some sort of picture. Yet symptom of
- much; above all, of the world that could nourish itself thereon.
-
-
- BOOK 1.III.
- THE PARLEMENT OF PARIS
-
-
- Chapter 1.3.I.
- Dishonoured Bills.
-
- While the unspeakable confusion is everywhere weltering within,
- and through so many cracks in the surface sulphur-smoke is
- issuing, the question arises: Through what crevice will the main
- Explosion carry itself? Through which of the old craters or
- chimneys; or must it, at once, form a new crater for itself? In
- every Society are such chimneys, are Institutions serving as
- such: even Constantinople is not without its safety-valves; there
- too Discontent can vent itself,—in material fire; by the number
- of nocturnal conflagrations, or of hanged bakers, the Reigning
- Power can read the signs of the times, and change course
- according to these.
-
- We may say that this French Explosion will doubtless first try
- all the old Institutions of escape; for by each of these there
- is, or at least there used to be, some communication with the
- interior deep; they are national Institutions in virtue of that.
- Had they even become personal Institutions, and what we can call
- choked up from their original uses, there nevertheless must the
- impediment be weaker than elsewhere. Through which of them then?
- An observer might have guessed: Through the Law Parlements; above
- all, through the Parlement of Paris.
-
- Men, though never so thickly clad in dignities, sit not
- inaccessible to the influences of their time; especially men
- whose life is business; who at all turns, were it even from
- behind judgment-seats, have come in contact with the actual
- workings of the world. The Counsellor of Parlement, the President
- himself, who has bought his place with hard money that he might
- be looked up to by his fellow-creatures, how shall he, in all
- Philosophe-soirées, and saloons of elegant culture, become
- notable as a Friend of Darkness? Among the Paris Long-robes there
- may be more than one patriotic Malesherbes, whose rule is
- conscience and the public good; there are clearly more than one
- hotheaded D’Espréménil, to whose confused thought any loud
- reputation of the Brutus sort may seem glorious. The
- Lepelletiers, Lamoignons have titles and wealth; yet, at Court,
- are only styled “Noblesse of the Robe.” There are Duports of deep
- scheme; Fréteaus, Sabatiers, of incontinent tongue: all nursed
- more or less on the milk of the _Contrat Social_. Nay, for the
- whole Body, is not this patriotic opposition also a fighting for
- oneself? Awake, Parlement of Paris, renew thy long warfare! Was
- not the Parlement Maupeou abolished with ignominy? Not now hast
- thou to dread a Louis XIV., with the crack of his whip, and his
- Olympian looks; not now a Richelieu and Bastilles: no, the whole
- Nation is behind thee. Thou too (O heavens!) mayest become a
- Political Power; and with the shakings of thy horse-hair wig
- shake principalities and dynasties, like a very Jove with his
- ambrosial curls!
-
- Light old M. de Maurepas, since the end of 1781, has been fixed
- in the frost of death: ‘Never more,’ said the good Louis, ‘shall
- I hear his step overhead;’ his light jestings and gyratings are
- at an end. No more can the importunate reality be hidden by
- pleasant wit, and today’s evil be deftly rolled over upon
- tomorrow. The morrow itself has arrived; and now nothing but a
- solid phlegmatic M. de Vergennes sits there, in dull matter of
- fact, like some dull punctual Clerk (which he originally was);
- admits what cannot be denied, let the remedy come whence it will.
- In him is no remedy; only clerklike “despatch of business”
- according to routine. The poor King, grown older yet hardly more
- experienced, must himself, with such no-faculty as he has, begin
- governing; wherein also his Queen will give help. Bright Queen,
- with her quick clear glances and impulses; clear, and even noble;
- but all too superficial, vehement-shallow, for that work! To
- govern France were such a problem; and now it has grown well-nigh
- too hard to govern even the Œil-de-Bœuf. For if a distressed
- People has its cry, so likewise, and more audibly, has a bereaved
- Court. To the Œil-de-Bœuf it remains inconceivable how, in a
- France of such resources, the Horn of Plenty should run dry: did
- it not _use_ to flow? Nevertheless Necker, with his revenue of
- parsimony, has “suppressed above six hundred places,” before the
- Courtiers could oust him; parsimonious finance-pedant as he was.
- Again, a military pedant, Saint-Germain, with his Prussian
- manœuvres; with his Prussian notions, as if merit and not
- coat-of-arms should be the rule of promotion, has disaffected
- military men; the Mousquetaires, with much else are suppressed:
- for he too was one of your suppressors; and unsettling and
- oversetting, did mere mischief—to the Œil-de-Bœuf. Complaints
- abound; scarcity, anxiety: it is a changed Œil-de-Bœuf. Besenval
- says, already in these years (1781) there was such a melancholy
- (such a _tristesse_) about Court, compared with former days, as
- made it quite dispiriting to look upon.
-
- No wonder that the Œil-de-Bœuf feels melancholy, when you are
- suppressing its places! Not a place can be suppressed, but some
- purse is the lighter for it; and more than one heart the heavier;
- for did it not employ the working-classes too,—manufacturers,
- male and female, of laces, essences; of Pleasure generally,
- whosoever could manufacture Pleasure? Miserable economies; never
- felt over Twenty-five Millions! So, however, it goes on: and is
- not yet ended. Few years more and the Wolf-hounds shall fall
- suppressed, the Bear-hounds, the Falconry; places shall fall,
- thick as autumnal leaves. Duke de Polignac demonstrates, to the
- complete silencing of ministerial logic, that his place cannot be
- abolished; then gallantly, turning to the Queen, surrenders it,
- since her Majesty so wishes. Less chivalrous was Duke de Coigny,
- and yet not luckier: ‘We got into a real quarrel, Coigny and I,’
- said King Louis; ‘but if he had even struck me, I could not have
- blamed him.’[50] In regard to such matters there can be but one
- opinion. Baron Besenval, with that frankness of speech which
- stamps the independent man, plainly assures her Majesty that it
- is frightful (_affreux_); ‘you go to bed, and are not sure but
- you shall rise impoverished on the morrow: one might as well be
- in Turkey.’ It is indeed a dog’s life.
-
- How singular this perpetual distress of the royal treasury! And
- yet it is a thing not more incredible than undeniable. A thing
- mournfully true: the stumbling-block on which all Ministers
- successively stumble, and fall. Be it “want of fiscal genius,” or
- some far other want, there is the palpablest discrepancy between
- Revenue and Expenditure; a _Deficit_ of the Revenue: you must
- “choke (_combler_) the Deficit,” or else it will swallow you!
- This is the stern problem; hopeless seemingly as squaring of the
- circle. Controller Joly de Fleury, who succeeded Necker, could do
- nothing with it; nothing but propose loans, which were tardily
- filled up; impose new taxes, unproductive of money, productive of
- clamour and discontent. As little could Controller d’Ormesson do,
- or even less; for if Joly maintained himself beyond year and day,
- d’Ormesson reckons only by months: till “the King purchased
- Rambouillet without consulting him,” which he took as a hint to
- withdraw. And so, towards the end of 1783, matters threaten to
- come to still-stand. Vain seems human ingenuity. In vain has our
- newly-devised “Council of Finances” struggled, our Intendants of
- Finance, Controller-General of Finances: there are unhappily no
- Finances to control. Fatal paralysis invades the social movement;
- clouds, of blindness or of blackness, envelop us: are we breaking
- down, then, into the black horrors of NATIONAL BANKRUPTCY?
-
- Great is Bankruptcy: the great bottomless gulf into which all
- Falsehoods, public and private, do sink, disappearing; whither,
- from the first origin of them, they were all doomed. For Nature
- is true and not a lie. No lie you can speak or act but it will
- come, after longer or shorter circulation, like a Bill drawn on
- Nature’s Reality, and be presented there for payment,—with the
- answer, _No effects_. Pity only that it often had so long a
- circulation: that the original forger were so seldom he who bore
- the final smart of it! Lies, and the burden of evil they bring,
- are passed on; shifted from back to back, and from rank to rank;
- and so land ultimately on the dumb lowest rank, who with spade
- and mattock, with sore heart and empty wallet, daily come in
- _contact_ with reality, and can pass the cheat no further.
-
- Observe nevertheless how, by a just compensating law, if the lie
- with its burden (in this confused whirlpool of Society) sinks and
- is shifted ever downwards, then in return the distress of it
- rises ever upwards and upwards. Whereby, after the long pining
- and demi-starvation of those Twenty Millions, a Duke de Coigny
- and his Majesty come also to have their “real quarrel.” Such is
- the law of just Nature; bringing, though at long intervals, and
- were it only by Bankruptcy, matters round again to the mark.
-
- But with a Fortunatus’ Purse in his pocket, through what length
- of time might not almost any Falsehood last! Your Society, your
- Household, practical or spiritual Arrangement, is untrue, unjust,
- offensive to the eye of God and man. Nevertheless its hearth is
- warm, its larder well replenished: the innumerable Swiss of
- Heaven, with a kind of Natural loyalty, gather round it; will
- prove, by pamphleteering, musketeering, that it is a truth; or if
- not an unmixed (unearthly, impossible) Truth, then better, a
- wholesomely attempered one, (as wind is to the shorn lamb), and
- works well. Changed outlook, however, when purse and larder grow
- empty! Was your Arrangement so true, so accordant to Nature’s
- ways, then how, in the name of wonder, has Nature, with her
- infinite bounty, come to leave it famishing there? To all men, to
- all women and all children, it is now indutiable that your
- Arrangement was _false_. Honour to Bankruptcy; ever righteous on
- the great scale, though in detail it is so cruel! Under all
- Falsehoods it works, unweariedly mining. No Falsehood, did it
- rise heaven-high and cover the world, but Bankruptcy, one day,
- will sweep it down, and make us free of it.
-
-
- Chapter 1.3.II.
- Controller Calonne.
-
- Under such circumstances of _tristesse_, obstruction and sick
- langour, when to an exasperated Court it seems as if fiscal
- genius had departed from among men, what apparition could be
- welcomer than that of M. de Calonne? Calonne, a man of
- indisputable genius; even fiscal genius, more or less; of
- experience both in managing Finance and Parlements, for he has
- been Intendant at Metz, at Lille; King’s Procureur at Douai. A
- man of weight, connected with the moneyed classes; of unstained
- name,—if it were not some peccadillo (of showing a Client’s
- Letter) in that old D’Aiguillon-Lachalotais business, as good as
- forgotten now. He has kinsmen of heavy purse, felt on the Stock
- Exchange. Our Foulons, Berthiers intrigue for him:—old Foulon,
- who has now nothing to do but intrigue; who is known and even
- seen to be what they call a scoundrel; but of unmeasured wealth;
- who, from Commissariat-clerk which he once was, may hope, some
- think, if the game go right, to be Minister himself one day.
-
- Such propping and backing has M. de Calonne; and then
- intrinsically such qualities! Hope radiates from his face;
- persuasion hangs on his tongue. For all straits he has present
- remedy, and will make the world roll on wheels before him. On the
- 3d of November 1783, the Œil-de-Bœuf rejoices in its new
- Controller-General. Calonne also shall have trial; Calonne also,
- in his way, as Turgot and Necker had done in theirs, shall
- forward the consummation; suffuse, with one other flush of
- brilliancy, our now too leaden-coloured Era of Hope, and wind it
- up—into fulfilment.
-
- Great, in any case, is the felicity of the Œil-de-Bœuf.
- Stinginess has fled from these royal abodes: suppression ceases;
- your Besenval may go peaceably to sleep, sure that he shall awake
- unplundered. Smiling Plenty, as if conjured by some enchanter,
- has returned; scatters contentment from her new-flowing horn. And
- mark what suavity of manners! A bland smile distinguishes our
- Controller: to all men he listens with an air of interest, nay of
- anticipation; makes their own wish clear to themselves, and
- grants it; or at least, grants conditional promise of it. ‘I fear
- this is a matter of difficulty,’ said her Majesty.—‘Madame,’
- answered the Controller, ‘if it is but difficult, it is done, if
- it is impossible, it shall be done (_se fera_).’ A man of such
- “facility” withal. To observe him in the pleasure-vortex of
- society, which none partakes of with more gusto, you might ask,
- When does he work? And yet his work, as we see, is never
- behindhand; above all, the fruit of his work: ready-money. Truly
- a man of incredible facility; facile action, facile elocution,
- facile thought: how, in mild suasion, philosophic depth sparkles
- up from him, as mere wit and lambent sprightliness; and in her
- Majesty’s Soirees, with the weight of a world lying on him, he is
- the delight of men and women! By what magic does he accomplish
- miracles? By the only true magic, that of genius. Men name him
- “_the_ Minister;” as indeed, when was there another such? Crooked
- things are become straight by him, rough places plain; and over
- the Œil-de-Bœuf there rests an unspeakable sunshine.
-
- Nay, in seriousness, let no man say that Calonne had not genius:
- genius for Persuading; before all things, for Borrowing. With the
- skilfulest judicious appliances of underhand money, he keeps the
- Stock-Exchanges flourishing; so that Loan after Loan is filled up
- as soon as opened. “Calculators likely to know”[51] have
- calculated that he spent, in extraordinaries, “at the rate of one
- million daily;” which indeed is some fifty thousand pounds
- sterling: but did he not procure something with it; namely peace
- and prosperity, for the time being? Philosophedom grumbles and
- croaks; buys, as we said, 80,000 copies of Necker’s new Book: but
- Nonpareil Calonne, in her Majesty’s Apartment, with the
- glittering retinue of Dukes, Duchesses, and mere happy admiring
- faces, can let Necker and Philosophedom croak.
-
- The misery is, such a time cannot last! Squandering, and Payment
- by Loan is no way to choke a Deficit. Neither is oil the
- substance for quenching conflagrations;—but, only for assuaging
- them, _not_ permanently! To the Nonpareil himself, who wanted not
- insight, it is clear at intervals, and dimly certain at all
- times, that his trade is by nature temporary, growing daily more
- difficult; that changes incalculable lie at no great distance.
- Apart from financial Deficit, the world is wholly in such a
- new-fangled humour; all things working loose from their old
- fastenings, towards new issues and combinations. There is not a
- dwarf _jokei_, a cropt Brutus’-head, or Anglomaniac horseman
- rising on his stirrups, that does not betoken change. But what
- then? The day, in any case, passes pleasantly; for the morrow, if
- the morrow come, there shall be counsel too. Once mounted (by
- munificence, suasion, magic of genius) high enough in favour with
- the Œil-de-Bœuf, with the King, Queen, Stock-Exchange, and so far
- as possible with all men, a Nonpareil Controller may hope to go
- careering through the Inevitable, in some unimagined way, as
- handsomely as another.
-
- At all events, for these three miraculous years, it has been
- expedient heaped on expedient; till now, with such cumulation and
- height, the pile topples perilous. And here has this
- world’s-wonder of a Diamond Necklace brought it at last to the
- clear verge of tumbling. Genius in that direction can no more:
- mounted high enough, or not mounted, we must fare forth. Hardly
- is poor Rohan, the Necklace-Cardinal, safely bestowed in the
- Auvergne Mountains, Dame de Lamotte (unsafely) in the
- Salpêtrière, and that mournful business hushed up, when our
- sanguine Controller once more astonishes the world. An expedient,
- unheard of for these hundred and sixty years, has been
- propounded; and, by dint of suasion (for his light audacity, his
- hope and eloquence are matchless) has been got
- adopted,—_Convocation of the Notables._
-
- Let notable persons, the actual or virtual rulers of their
- districts, be summoned from all sides of France: let a true tale,
- of his Majesty’s patriotic purposes and wretched pecuniary
- impossibilities, be suasively told them; and then the question
- put: What are we to do? Surely to adopt healing measures; such as
- the magic of genius will unfold; such as, once sanctioned by
- Notables, all Parlements and all men must, with more or less
- reluctance, submit to.
-
-
- Chapter 1.3.III.
- The Notables.
-
- Here, then is verily a sign and wonder; visible to the whole
- world; bodeful of much. The Œil-de-Bœuf dolorously grumbles; were
- we not well as we stood,—quenching conflagrations by oil?
- Constitutional Philosophedom starts with joyful surprise; stares
- eagerly what the result will be. The public creditor, the public
- debtor, the whole thinking and thoughtless public have their
- several surprises, joyful and sorrowful. Count Mirabeau, who has
- got his matrimonial and other Lawsuits huddled up, better or
- worse; and works now in the dimmest element at Berlin; compiling
- _Prussian Monarchies_, Pamphlets _On Cagliostro;_ writing, with
- pay, but not with honourable recognition, innumerable Despatches
- for his Government,—scents or descries richer quarry from afar.
- He, like an eagle or vulture, or mixture of both, preens his
- wings for flight homewards.[52]
-
- M. de Calonne has stretched out an Aaron’s Rod over France;
- miraculous; and is summoning quite unexpected things. Audacity
- and hope alternate in him with misgivings; though the
- sanguine-valiant side carries it. Anon he writes to an intimate
- friend, ‘_Je me fais pitié à moi-même_ (I am an object of pity to
- myself);’ anon, invites some dedicating Poet or Poetaster to sing
- “this Assembly of the Notables and the Revolution that is
- preparing.”[53] Preparing indeed; and a matter to be sung,—only
- not till we have _seen_ it, and what the issue of it is. In deep
- obscure unrest, all things have so long gone rocking and swaying:
- will M. de Calonne, with this his alchemy of the Notables, fasten
- all together again, and get new revenues? Or wrench all asunder;
- so that it go no longer rocking and swaying, but clashing and
- colliding?
-
- Be this as it may, in the bleak short days, we behold men of
- weight and influence threading the great vortex of French
- Locomotion, each on his several line, from all sides of France
- towards the Château of Versailles: summoned thither _de par le
- roi_. There, on the 22d day of February 1787, they have met, and
- got installed: Notables to the number of a Hundred and
- Thirty-seven, as we count them name by name:[54] add Seven
- Princes of the Blood, it makes the round Gross of Notables. Men
- of the sword, men of the robe; Peers, dignified Clergy,
- Parlementary Presidents: divided into Seven Boards (_Bureaux_);
- under our Seven Princes of the Blood, Monsieur, D’Artois,
- Penthievre, and the rest; among whom let not our new Duke
- d’Orléans (for, since 1785, he is Chartres no longer) be
- forgotten. Never yet made Admiral, and now turning the corner of
- his fortieth year, with spoiled blood and prospects; half-weary
- of a world which is more than half-weary of him, Monseigneur’s
- future is most questionable. Not in illumination and insight, not
- even in conflagration; but, as was said, “in dull smoke and ashes
- of outburnt sensualities,” does he live and digest. Sumptuosity
- and sordidness; revenge, life-weariness, ambition, darkness,
- putrescence; and, say, in sterling money, three hundred thousand
- a year,—were this poor Prince once to burst loose from his
- Court-moorings, to what regions, with what phenomena, might he
- not sail and drift! Happily as yet he “affects to hunt daily;”
- sits there, since he must sit, presiding that Bureau of his, with
- dull moon-visage, dull glassy eyes, as if it were a mere tedium
- to him.
-
- We observe finally, that Count Mirabeau has actually arrived. He
- descends from Berlin, on the scene of action; glares into it with
- flashing sun-glance; discerns that it will do nothing for him. He
- had hoped these Notables might need a Secretary. They do need
- one; but have fixed on Dupont de Nemours; a man of smaller fame,
- but then of better;—who indeed, as his friends often hear,
- labours under this complaint, surely not a universal one, of
- having “five kings to correspond with.”[55] The pen of a Mirabeau
- cannot become an official one; nevertheless it remains a pen. In
- defect of Secretaryship, he sets to denouncing Stock-brokerage
- (_Dénonciation de l’Agiotage_); testifying, as his wont is, by
- loud bruit, that he is present and busy;—till, warned by friend
- Talleyrand, and even by Calonne himself underhand, that “a
- seventeenth _Lettre-de-Cachet_ may be launched against him,” he
- timefully flits over the marches.
-
- And now, in stately royal apartments, as Pictures of that time
- still represent them, our hundred and forty-four Notables sit
- organised; ready to hear and consider. Controller Calonne is
- dreadfully behindhand with his speeches, his preparatives;
- however, the man’s “facility of work” is known to us. For
- freshness of style, lucidity, ingenuity, largeness of view, that
- opening Harangue of his was unsurpassable:—had not the
- subject-matter been so appalling. A Deficit, concerning which
- accounts vary, and the Controller’s own account is not
- unquestioned; but which all accounts agree in representing as
- “enormous.” This is the epitome of our Controller’s difficulties:
- and then his means? Mere Turgotism; for thither, it seems, we
- must come at last: Provincial Assemblies; new Taxation; nay,
- strangest of all, new Land-tax, what he calls _Subvention
- Territoriale_, from which neither Privileged nor Unprivileged,
- Noblemen, Clergy, nor Parlementeers, shall be exempt!
-
- Foolish enough! These Privileged Classes have been used to tax;
- levying toll, tribute and custom, at all hands, while a penny was
- left: but to be themselves taxed? Of such Privileged persons,
- meanwhile, do these Notables, all but the merest fraction,
- consist. Headlong Calonne had given no heed to the “composition,”
- or judicious packing of them; but chosen such Notables as were
- really notable; trusting for the issue to off-hand ingenuity,
- good fortune, and eloquence that never yet failed. Headlong
- Controller-General! Eloquence can do much, but not all. Orpheus,
- with eloquence grown rhythmic, musical (what we call Poetry),
- drew iron tears from the cheek of Pluto: but by what witchery of
- rhyme or prose wilt thou from the pocket of Plutus draw gold?
-
- Accordingly, the storm that now rose and began to whistle round
- Calonne, first in these Seven Bureaus, and then on the outside of
- them, awakened by them, spreading wider and wider over all
- France, threatens to become unappeasable. A Deficit so enormous!
- Mismanagement, profusion is too clear. Peculation itself is
- hinted at; nay, Lafayette and others go so far as to speak it
- out, with attempts at proof. The blame of his Deficit our brave
- Calonne, as was natural, had endeavoured to shift from himself on
- his predecessors; not excepting even Necker. But now Necker
- vehemently denies; whereupon an “angry Correspondence,” which
- also finds its way into print.
-
- In the Œil-de-Bœuf, and her Majesty’s private Apartments, an
- eloquent Controller, with his ‘Madame, if it is but difficult,’
- had been persuasive: but, alas, the cause is now carried
- elsewhither. Behold him, one of these sad days, in Monsieur’s
- Bureau; to which all the other Bureaus have sent deputies. He is
- standing at bay: alone; exposed to an incessant fire of
- questions, interpellations, objurgations, from those “hundred and
- thirty-seven” pieces of logic-ordnance,—what we may well call
- _bouches à feu_, fire-mouths literally! Never, according to
- Besenval, or hardly ever, had such display of intellect,
- dexterity, coolness, suasive eloquence, been made by man. To the
- raging play of so many fire-mouths he opposes nothing angrier
- than light-beams, self-possession and fatherly smiles. With the
- imperturbablest bland clearness, he, for five hours long, keeps
- answering the incessant volley of fiery captious questions,
- reproachful interpellations; in words prompt as lightning, quiet
- as light. Nay, the cross-fire too: such side questions and
- incidental interpellations as, in the heat of the main-battle, he
- (having only one tongue) could not get answered; these also he
- takes up at the first slake; answers even these.[56] Could
- blandest suasive eloquence have saved France, she were saved.
-
- Heavy-laden Controller! In the Seven Bureaus seems nothing but
- hindrance: in Monsieur’s Bureau, a Loménie de Brienne, Archbishop
- of Toulouse, with an eye himself to the Controllership, stirs up
- the Clergy; there are meetings, underground intrigues. Neither
- from without anywhere comes sign of help or hope. For the Nation
- (where Mirabeau is now, with stentor-lungs, “denouncing Agio”)
- the Controller has hitherto done nothing, or less. For
- Philosophedom he has done as good as nothing,—sent out some
- scientific Lapérouse, or the like: and is he not in “angry
- correspondence” with its Necker? The very Œil-de-Bœuf looks
- questionable; a falling Controller has no friends. Solid M. de
- Vergennes, who with his phlegmatic judicious punctuality might
- have kept down many things, died the very week before these
- sorrowful Notables met. And now a Seal-keeper, _Garde-des-Sceaux_
- Miroménil is thought to be playing the traitor: spinning plots
- for Loménie-Brienne! Queen’s-Reader Abbé de Vermond, unloved
- individual, was Brienne’s creature, the work of his hands from
- the first: it may be feared the backstairs passage is open,
- ground getting mined under our feet. Treacherous Garde-des-Sceaux
- Miroménil, at least, should be dismissed; Lamoignon, the eloquent
- Notable, a stanch man, with connections, and even ideas,
- Parlement-President yet intent on reforming Parlements, were not
- he the right Keeper? So, for one, thinks busy Besenval; and, at
- dinner-table, rounds the same into the Controller’s ear,—who
- always, in the intervals of landlord-duties, listens to him as
- with charmed look, but answers nothing positive.[57]
-
- Alas, what to answer? The force of private intrigue, and then
- also the force of public opinion, grows so dangerous, confused!
- Philosophedom sneers aloud, as if its Necker already triumphed.
- The gaping populace gapes over Wood-cuts or Copper-cuts; where,
- for example, a Rustic is represented convoking the poultry of his
- barnyard, with this opening address: ‘Dear animals, I have
- assembled you to advise me what sauce I shall dress you with;’ to
- which a Cock responding, ‘We don’t want to be eaten,’ is checked
- by ‘You wander from the point (_Vous vous écartez de la
- question_).’[58] Laughter and logic; ballad-singer, pamphleteer;
- epigram and caricature: what wind of public opinion is this,—as
- if the Cave of the Winds were bursting loose! At nightfall,
- President Lamoignon steals over to the Controller’s; finds him
- “walking with large strides in his chamber, like one out of
- himself.”[59] With rapid confused speech the Controller begs M.
- de Lamoignon to give him “an advice.” Lamoignon candidly answers
- that, except in regard to his own anticipated Keepership, unless
- that would prove remedial, he really cannot take upon him to
- advise.
-
- “On the Monday after Easter,” the 9th of April 1787, a date one
- rejoices to verify, for nothing can excel the indolent falsehood
- of these _Histoires and Mémoires_,—“On the Monday after Easter,
- as I, Besenval, was riding towards Romainville to the Maréchal de
- Segur’s, I met a friend on the Boulevards, who told me that M. de
- Calonne was out. A little further on came M. the Duke d’Orléans,
- dashing towards me, head to the wind” (trotting _à l’Anglaise_),
- “and confirmed the news.”[60] It is true news. Treacherous
- Garde-des-Sceaux Miroménil is gone, and Lamoignon is appointed in
- his room: but appointed for his own profit only, not for the
- Controller’s: “next day” the Controller also has had to move. A
- little longer he may linger near; be seen among the money
- changers, and even “working in the Controller’s office,” where
- much lies unfinished: but neither will that hold. Too strong
- blows and beats this tempest of public opinion, of private
- intrigue, as from the Cave of all the Winds; and blows him
- (higher Authority giving sign) out of Paris and France,—over the
- horizon, into Invisibility, or outer Darkness.
-
- Such destiny the magic of genius could not forever avert.
- Ungrateful Œil-de-Bœuf! did he not miraculously rain gold manna
- on you; so that, as a Courtier said, ‘All the world held out its
- hand, and I held out my hat,’—for a time? Himself is poor;
- penniless, had not a “Financier’s widow in Lorraine” offered him,
- though he was turned of fifty, her hand and the rich purse it
- held. Dim henceforth shall be his activity, though unwearied:
- Letters to the King, Appeals, Prognostications; Pamphlets (from
- London), written with the old suasive facility; which however do
- not persuade. Luckily his widow’s purse fails not. Once, in a
- year or two, some shadow of him shall be seen hovering on the
- Northern Border, seeking election as National Deputy; but be
- sternly beckoned away. Dimmer then, far-borne over utmost
- European lands, in uncertain twilight of diplomacy, he shall
- hover, intriguing for “Exiled Princes,” and have adventures; be
- overset into the Rhine stream and half-drowned, nevertheless save
- his papers dry. Unwearied, but in vain! In France he works
- miracles no more; shall hardly return thither to find a grave.
- Farewell, thou facile sanguine Controller-General, with thy light
- rash hand, thy suasive mouth of gold: worse men there have been,
- and better; but to thee also was allotted a task,—of raising the
- wind, and the winds; and thou hast done it.
-
- But now, while Ex-Controller Calonne flies storm-driven over the
- horizon, in this singular way, what has become of the
- Controllership? It hangs vacant, one may say; extinct, like the
- Moon in her vacant interlunar cave. Two preliminary shadows, poor
- M. Fourqueux, poor M. Villedeuil, do hold in quick succession
- some simulacrum of it,[61]—as the new Moon will sometimes shine
- out with a dim preliminary old one in her arms. Be patient, ye
- Notables! An actual new Controller is certain, and even ready;
- were the indispensable manœuvres but gone through. Long-headed
- Lamoignon, with Home Secretary Bréteuil, and Foreign Secretary
- Montmorin have exchanged looks; let these three once meet and
- speak. Who is it that is strong in the Queen’s favour, and the
- Abbé de Vermond’s? That is a man of great capacity? Or at least
- that has struggled, these fifty years, to have it thought great;
- now, in the Clergy’s name, demanding to have Protestant
- death-penalties “put in execution;” no flaunting it in the
- Œil-de-Bœuf, as the gayest man-pleaser and woman-pleaser;
- gleaning even a good word from Philosophedom and your Voltaires
- and D’Alemberts? With a party ready-made for him in the
- Notables?—Loménie de Brienne, Archbishop of Toulouse! answer all
- the three, with the clearest instantaneous concord; and rush off
- to propose him to the King; “in such haste,” says Besenval, “that
- M. de Lamoignon had to borrow a _simarre_,” seemingly some kind
- of cloth apparatus necessary for that.[62]
-
- Loménie-Brienne, who had all his life “felt a kind of
- predestination for the highest offices,” has now therefore
- obtained them. He presides over the Finances; he shall have the
- title of Prime Minister itself, and the effort of his long life
- be realised. Unhappy only that it took such talent and industry
- to _gain_ the place; that to _qualify_ for it hardly any talent
- or industry was left disposable! Looking now into his inner man,
- what qualification he may have, Loménie beholds, not without
- astonishment, next to nothing but vacuity and possibility.
- Principles or methods, acquirement outward or inward (for his
- very body is wasted, by hard tear and wear) he finds none; not so
- much as a plan, even an unwise one. Lucky, in these
- circumstances, that Calonne has had a plan! Calonne’s plan was
- gathered from Turgot’s and Necker’s by compilation; shall become
- Loménie’s by adoption. Not in vain has Loménie studied the
- working of the British Constitution; for he professes to have
- some Anglomania, of a sort. Why, in that free country, does one
- Minister, driven out by Parliament, vanish from his King’s
- presence, and another enter, borne in by Parliament?[63] Surely
- not for mere change (which is ever wasteful); but that all men
- may have share of what is going; and so the strife of Freedom
- indefinitely prolong itself, and no harm be done.
-
- The Notables, mollified by Easter festivities, by the sacrifice
- of Calonne, are not in the worst humour. Already his Majesty,
- while the “interlunar shadows” were in office, had held session
- of Notables; and from his throne delivered promissory
- conciliatory eloquence: “The Queen stood waiting at a window,
- till his carriage came back; and Monsieur from afar clapped hands
- to her,” in sign that all was well.[64] It has had the best
- effect; if such do but last. Leading Notables meanwhile can be
- “caressed;” Brienne’s new gloss, Lamoignon’s long head will
- profit somewhat; conciliatory eloquence shall not be wanting. On
- the whole, however, is it not undeniable that this of ousting
- Calonne and adopting the plans of Calonne, is a measure which, to
- produce its best effect, should be looked at from a certain
- distance, cursorily; not dwelt on with minute near scrutiny. In a
- word, that no service the Notables could now do were so obliging
- as, in some handsome manner, to—take themselves away! Their “Six
- Propositions” about Provisional Assemblies, suppression of
- _Corvées_ and suchlike, can be accepted without criticism. The
- _Subvention_ on Land-tax, and much else, one must glide hastily
- over; safe nowhere but in flourishes of conciliatory eloquence.
- Till at length, on this 25th of May, year 1787, in solemn final
- session, there bursts forth what we can call an explosion of
- eloquence; King, Loménie, Lamoignon and retinue taking up the
- successive strain; in harrangues to the number of ten, besides
- his Majesty’s, which last the livelong day;—whereby, as in a kind
- of choral anthem, or bravura peal, of thanks, praises, promises,
- the Notables are, so to speak, organed out, and dismissed to
- their respective places of abode. They had sat, and talked, some
- nine weeks: they were the first Notables since Richelieu’s, in
- the year 1626.
-
- By some Historians, sitting much at their ease, in the safe
- distance, Loménie has been blamed for this dismissal of his
- Notables: nevertheless it was clearly time. There are things, as
- we said, which should not be dwelt on with minute close scrutiny:
- over hot coals you cannot glide too fast. In these Seven Bureaus,
- where no work could be done, unless talk were work, the
- questionablest matters were coming up. Lafayette, for example, in
- Monseigneur d’Artois’ Bureau, took upon him to set forth more
- than one deprecatory oration about _Lettres-de-Cachet_, Liberty
- of the Subject, _Agio_, and suchlike; which Monseigneur
- endeavouring to repress, was answered that a Notable being
- summoned to speak his opinion must speak it.[65]
-
- Thus too his Grace the Archbishop of Aix perorating once, with a
- plaintive pulpit tone, in these words? ‘Tithe, that free-will
- offering of the piety of Christians’—‘Tithe,’ interrupted Duke la
- Rochefoucault, with the cold business-manner he has learned from
- the English, ‘that free-will offering of the piety of Christians;
- on which there are now forty-thousand lawsuits in this
- realm.’[66] Nay, Lafayette, bound to speak his opinion, went the
- length, one day, of proposing to convoke a “National Assembly.”
- ‘You demand States-General?’ asked Monseigneur with an air of
- minatory surprise.—‘Yes, Monseigneur; and even better than
- that.’—‘Write it,’ said Monseigneur to the Clerks.[67]—Written
- accordingly it is; and what is more, will be acted by and by.
-
-
- Chapter 1.3.IV.
- Loménie’s Edicts.
-
- Thus, then, have the Notables returned home; carrying to all
- quarters of France, such notions of deficit, decrepitude,
- distraction; and that States-General will cure it, or will not
- cure it but kill it. Each Notable, we may fancy, is as a funeral
- torch; disclosing hideous abysses, better left hid! The
- unquietest humour possesses all men; ferments, seeks issue, in
- pamphleteering, caricaturing, projecting, declaiming; vain
- jangling of thought, word and deed.
-
- It is Spiritual Bankruptcy, long tolerated; verging now towards
- Economical Bankruptcy, and become intolerable. For from the
- lowest dumb rank, the inevitable misery, as was predicted, has
- spread upwards. In every man is some obscure feeling that his
- position, oppressive or else oppressed, is a false one: all men,
- in one or the other acrid dialect, as assaulters or as defenders,
- must give vent to the unrest that is in them. Of such stuff
- national well-being, and the glory of rulers, is not made. O
- Loménie, what a wild-heaving, waste-looking, hungry and angry
- world hast thou, after lifelong effort, got promoted to take
- charge of!
-
- Loménie’s first Edicts are mere soothing ones: creation of
- Provincial Assemblies, “for apportioning the imposts,” when we
- get any; suppression of _Corvées_ or statute-labour; alleviation
- of _Gabelle_. Soothing measures, recommended by the Notables;
- long clamoured for by all liberal men. Oil cast on the waters has
- been known to produce a good effect. Before venturing with great
- essential measures, Loménie will see this singular “swell of the
- public mind” abate somewhat.
-
- Most proper, surely. But what if it were not a swell of the
- abating kind? There are swells that come of upper tempest and
- wind-gust. But again there are swells that come of subterranean
- pent wind, some say; and even of inward decomposition, of decay
- that has become self-combustion:—as when, according to
- Neptuno-Plutonic Geology, the World is all decayed down into due
- attritus of this sort; and shall now be _exploded_, and new-made!
- These latter abate not by oil.—The fool says in his heart, How
- shall not tomorrow be as yesterday; as all days,—which were once
- tomorrows? The wise man, looking on this France, moral,
- intellectual, economical, sees, “in short, all the symptoms he
- has ever met with in history,”—unabatable by soothing Edicts.
-
- Meanwhile, abate or not, cash must be had; and for that quite
- another sort of Edicts, namely “bursal” or fiscal ones. How easy
- were fiscal Edicts, did you know for certain that the Parlement
- of Paris would what they call “register” them! Such right of
- registering, properly of mere _writing down_, the Parlement has
- got by old wont; and, though but a Law-Court, can remonstrate,
- and higgle considerably about the same. Hence many quarrels;
- desperate Maupeou devices, and victory and defeat;—a quarrel now
- near forty years long. Hence fiscal Edicts, which otherwise were
- easy enough, become such problems. For example, is there not
- Calonne’s _Subvention Territoriale_, universal, unexempting
- Land-tax; the sheet-anchor of Finance? Or, to show, so far as
- possible, that one is not without original finance talent,
- Loménie himself can devise an _Edit du Timbre_ or
- Stamp-tax,—borrowed also, it is true; but then from America: may
- it prove luckier in France than there!
-
- France has her resources: nevertheless, it cannot be denied, the
- aspect of that Parlement is questionable. Already among the
- Notables, in that final symphony of dismissal, the Paris
- President had an ominous tone. Adrien Duport, quitting magnetic
- sleep, in this agitation of the world, threatens to rouse himself
- into preternatural wakefulness. Shallower but also louder, there
- is magnetic D’Espréménil, with his tropical heat (he was born at
- Madras); with his dusky confused violence; holding of
- Illumination, Animal Magnetism, Public Opinion, Adam Weisshaupt,
- Harmodius and Aristogiton, and all manner of confused violent
- things: of whom can come no good. The very Peerage is infected
- with the leaven. Our Peers have, in too many cases, laid aside
- their frogs, laces, bagwigs; and go about in English costume, or
- ride rising in their stirrups,—in the most headlong manner;
- nothing but insubordination, eleutheromania, confused unlimited
- opposition in their heads. Questionable: not to be ventured upon,
- if we had a Fortunatus’ Purse! But Loménie has waited all June,
- casting on the waters what oil he had; and now, betide as it may,
- the two Finance Edicts must out. On the 6th of July, he forwards
- his proposed Stamp-tax and Land-tax to the Parlement of Paris;
- and, as if putting his own leg foremost, not his borrowed
- Calonne’s-leg, places the Stamp-tax first in order.
-
- Alas, the Parlement will _not_ register: the Parlement demands
- instead a “state of the expenditure,” a “state of the
- contemplated reductions;” “states” enough; which his Majesty must
- decline to furnish! Discussions arise; patriotic eloquence: the
- Peers are summoned. Does the Nemean Lion begin to bristle? Here
- surely is a duel, which France and the Universe may look upon:
- with prayers; at lowest, with curiosity and bets. Paris stirs
- with new animation. The outer courts of the Palais de Justice
- roll with unusual crowds, coming and going; their huge outer hum
- mingles with the clang of patriotic eloquence within, and gives
- vigour to it. Poor Loménie gazes from the distance, little
- comforted; has his invisible emissaries flying to and fro,
- assiduous, without result.
-
- So pass the sultry dog-days, in the most electric manner; and the
- whole month of July. And still, in the Sanctuary of Justice,
- sounds nothing but Harmodius-Aristogiton eloquence, environed
- with the hum of crowding Paris; and no registering accomplished,
- and no “states” furnished. ‘States?’ said a lively Parlementeer:
- ‘Messieurs, the states that should be furnished us, in my opinion
- are the STATES-GENERAL.’ On which timely joke there follow
- cachinnatory buzzes of approval. What a word to be spoken in the
- Palais de Justice! Old D’Ormesson (the Ex-Controller’s uncle)
- shakes his judicious head; far enough from laughing. But the
- outer courts, and Paris and France, catch the glad sound, and
- repeat it; shall repeat it, and re-echo and reverberate it, till
- it grow a deafening peal. Clearly enough here is no registering
- to be thought of.
-
- The pious Proverb says, “There are remedies for all things but
- death.” When a Parlement refuses registering, the remedy, by long
- practice, has become familiar to the simplest: a Bed of Justice.
- One complete month this Parlement has spent in mere idle
- jargoning, and sound and fury; the _Timbre_ Edict not registered,
- or like to be; the _Subvention_ not yet so much as spoken of. On
- the 6th of August let the whole refractory Body roll out, in
- wheeled vehicles, as far as the King’s Château of Versailles;
- there shall the King, holding his Bed of Justice, _order_ them,
- by his own royal lips, to register. They may remonstrate, in an
- under tone; but they must obey, lest a worse unknown thing befall
- them.
-
- It is done: the Parlement has rolled out, on royal summons; has
- heard the express royal order to register. Whereupon it has
- rolled back again, amid the hushed expectancy of men. And now,
- behold, on the morrow, this Parlement, seated once more in its
- own Palais, with “crowds inundating the outer courts,” not only
- does not register, but (O portent!) declares all that was done on
- the prior day to be _null_, and the Bed of Justice as good as a
- futility! In the history of France here verily is a new feature.
- Nay better still, our heroic Parlement, getting suddenly
- enlightened on several things, declares that, for its part, it is
- incompetent to register Tax-edicts at all,—having done it by
- mistake, during these late centuries; that for such act one
- authority only is competent: the assembled Three Estates of the
- Realm!
-
- To such length can the universal spirit of a Nation penetrate the
- most isolated Body-corporate: say rather, with such weapons,
- homicidal and suicidal, in exasperated political duel, will
- Bodies-corporate fight! But, in any case, is not this the real
- death-grapple of war and internecine duel, Greek meeting Greek;
- whereon men, had they even no interest in it, might look with
- interest unspeakable? Crowds, as was said, inundate the outer
- courts: inundation of young eleutheromaniac Noblemen in English
- costume, uttering audacious speeches; of Procureurs,
- Basoche-Clerks, who are idle in these days: of Loungers,
- Newsmongers and other nondescript classes,—rolls tumultuous
- there. “From three to four thousand persons,” waiting eagerly to
- hear the _Arrêtés_ (Resolutions) you arrive at within; applauding
- with bravos, with the clapping of from six to eight thousand
- hands! Sweet also is the meed of patriotic eloquence, when your
- D’Espréménil, your Fréteau, or Sabatier, issuing from his
- Demosthenic Olympus, the thunder being hushed for the day, is
- welcomed, in the outer courts, with a shout from four thousand
- throats; is borne home shoulder-high “with benedictions,” and
- strikes the stars with his sublime head.
-
-
- Chapter 1.3.V.
- Loménie’s Thunderbolts.
-
- Arise, Loménie-Brienne: here is no case for “Letters of Jussion;”
- for faltering or compromise. Thou seest the whole loose _fluent_
- population of Paris (whatsoever is not solid, and fixed to work)
- inundating these outer courts, like a loud destructive deluge;
- the very Basoche of Lawyers’ Clerks talks sedition. The lower
- classes, in this duel of Authority with Authority, Greek
- throttling Greek, have ceased to respect the City-Watch:
- Police-satellites are marked on the back with chalk (the M
- signifies _mouchard_, spy); they are hustled, hunted like _feræ
- naturæ_. Subordinate rural Tribunals send messengers of
- congratulation, of adherence. Their Fountain of Justice is
- becoming a Fountain of Revolt. The Provincial Parlements look on,
- with intent eye, with breathless wishes, while their elder sister
- of Paris does battle: the whole Twelve are of one blood and
- temper; the victory of one is that of all.
-
- Ever worse it grows: on the 10th of August, there is “_Plainte_”
- emitted touching the “prodigalities of Calonne,” and permission
- to “proceed” against him. No registering, but instead of it,
- denouncing: of dilapidation, peculation; and ever the burden of
- the song, States-General! Have the royal armories no thunderbolt,
- that thou couldst, O Loménie, with red right-hand, launch it
- among these Demosthenic theatrical thunder-barrels, mere resin
- and noise for most part;—and shatter, and smite them silent? On
- the night of the 14th of August, Loménie launches his
- thunderbolt, or handful of them. Letters named of the Seal (_de
- Cachet_), as many as needful, some sixscore and odd, are
- delivered overnight. And so, next day betimes, the whole
- Parlement, once more set on wheels, is rolling incessantly
- towards Troyes in Champagne; “escorted,” says History, “with the
- blessings of all people;” the very innkeepers and postillions
- looking gratuitously reverent.[68] This is the 15th of August
- 1787.
-
- What will not people bless; in their extreme need? Seldom had the
- Parlement of Paris deserved much blessing, or received much. An
- isolated Body-corporate, which, out of old confusions (while the
- Sceptre of the Sword was confusedly struggling to become a
- Sceptre of the Pen), had got itself together, better and worse,
- as Bodies-corporate do, to satisfy some dim desire of the world,
- and many clear desires of individuals; and so had grown, in the
- course of centuries, on concession, on acquirement and
- usurpation, to be what we see it: a prosperous social Anomaly,
- deciding Lawsuits, sanctioning or rejecting Laws; and withal
- disposing of its places and offices by sale for ready
- money,—which method sleek President Hénault, after meditation,
- will demonstrate to be the indifferent-best.[69]
-
- In such a Body, existing by purchase for ready-money, there could
- not be excess of public spirit; there might well be excess of
- eagerness to divide the public spoil. Men in helmets have divided
- that, with swords; men in wigs, with quill and inkhorn, do divide
- it: and even more hatefully these latter, if more peaceably; for
- the wig-method is at once irresistibler and baser. By long
- experience, says Besenval, it has been found useless to sue a
- Parlementeer at law; no Officer of Justice will serve a writ on
- one; his wig and gown are his Vulcan’s-panoply, his enchanted
- cloak-of-darkness.
-
- The Parlement of Paris may count itself an unloved body; mean,
- not magnanimous, on the political side. Were the King weak,
- always (as now) has his Parlement barked, cur-like at his heels;
- with what popular cry there might be. Were he strong, it barked
- before his face; hunting for him as his alert beagle. An unjust
- Body; where foul influences have more than once worked shameful
- perversion of judgment. Does not, in these very days, the blood
- of murdered Lally cry aloud for vengeance? Baited, circumvented,
- driven mad like the snared lion, Valour had to sink extinguished
- under vindictive Chicane. Behold him, that hapless Lally, his
- wild dark soul looking through his wild dark face; trailed on the
- ignominious death-hurdle; the voice of his despair choked by a
- wooden gag! The wild fire-soul that has known only peril and
- toil; and, for threescore years, has buffeted against Fate’s
- obstruction and men’s perfidy, like genius and courage amid
- poltroonery, dishonesty and commonplace; faithfully enduring and
- endeavouring,—O Parlement of Paris, dost thou reward it with a
- gibbet and a gag?[70] The dying Lally bequeathed his memory to
- his boy; a young Lally has arisen, demanding redress in the name
- of God and man. The Parlement of Paris does its utmost to defend
- the indefensible, abominable; nay, what is singular,
- dusky-glowing Aristogiton d’Espréménil is the man chosen to be
- its spokesman in that.
-
- Such Social Anomaly is it that France now blesses. An unclean
- Social Anomaly; but in duel against another worse! The exiled
- Parlement is felt to have “covered itself with glory.” There are
- quarrels in which even Satan, bringing help, were not unwelcome;
- even Satan, fighting stiffly, might cover himself with glory,—of
- a temporary sort.
-
- But what a stir in the outer courts of the Palais, when Paris
- finds its Parlement trundled off to Troyes in Champagne; and
- nothing left but a few mute Keepers of records; the Demosthenic
- thunder become extinct, the martyrs of liberty clean gone!
- Confused wail and menace rises from the four thousand throats of
- Procureurs, Basoche-Clerks, Nondescripts, and Anglomaniac
- Noblesse; ever new idlers crowd to see and hear; Rascality, with
- increasing numbers and vigour, hunts _mouchards_. Loud whirlpool
- rolls through these spaces; the rest of the City, fixed to its
- work, cannot yet go rolling. Audacious placards are legible, in
- and about the Palais, the speeches are as good as seditious.
- Surely the temper of Paris is much changed. On the third day of
- this business (18th of August), Monsieur and Monseigneur
- d’Artois, coming in state-carriages, according to use and wont,
- to have these late obnoxious _Arrêtés_ and protests “expunged”
- from the Records, are received in the most marked manner.
- Monsieur, who is thought to be in opposition, is met with vivats
- and strewed flowers; Monseigneur, on the other hand, with
- silence; with murmurs, which rise to hisses and groans; nay, an
- irreverent Rascality presses towards him in floods, with such
- hissing vehemence, that the Captain of the Guards has to give
- order, ‘_Haut les armes_ (Handle arms)!’—at which thunder-word,
- indeed, and the flash of the clear iron, the Rascal-flood
- recoils, through all avenues, fast enough.[71] New features
- these. Indeed, as good M. de Malesherbes pertinently remarks, ‘it
- is a quite new kind of contest this with the Parlement:’ no
- transitory sputter, as from collision of hard bodies; but more
- like ‘the first sparks of what, if not quenched, may become a
- great conflagration.’[72]
-
- This good Malesherbes sees himself now again in the King’s
- Council, after an absence of ten years: Loménie would profit if
- not by the faculties of the man, yet by the name he has. As for
- the man’s opinion, it is not listened to;—wherefore he will soon
- withdraw, a second time; back to his books and his trees. In such
- King’s Council what can a good man profit? Turgot tries it not a
- second time: Turgot has quitted France and this Earth, some years
- ago; and now cares for none of these things. Singular enough:
- Turgot, this same Loménie, and the Abbé Morellet were once a trio
- of young friends; fellow-scholars in the Sorbonne. Forty new
- years have carried them severally thus far.
-
- Meanwhile the Parlement sits daily at Troyes, calling cases; and
- daily adjourns, no Procureur making his appearance to plead.
- Troyes is as hospitable as could be looked for: nevertheless one
- has comparatively a dull life. No crowds now to carry you,
- shoulder-high, to the immortal gods; scarcely a Patriot or two
- will drive out so far, and bid you be of firm courage. You are in
- furnished lodgings, far from home and domestic comfort: little to
- do, but wander over the unlovely Champagne fields; seeing the
- grapes ripen; taking counsel about the thousand-times consulted:
- a prey to tedium; in danger even that Paris may forget you.
- Messengers come and go: pacific Loménie is not slack in
- negotiating, promising; D’Ormesson and the prudent elder Members
- see no good in strife.
-
- After a dull month, the Parlement, yielding and retaining, makes
- truce, as all Parlements must. The Stamp-tax is withdrawn: the
- _Subvention_ Land-tax is also withdrawn; but, in its stead, there
- is granted, what they call a “Prorogation of the Second
- Twentieth,”—itself a kind of Land-tax, but not so oppressive to
- the Influential classes; which lies mainly on the Dumb class.
- Moreover, secret promises exist (on the part of the Elders), that
- finances may be raised by Loan. Of the ugly word States-General
- there shall be no mention.
-
- And so, on the 20th of September, our exiled Parlement returns:
- D’Espréménil said, “it went out covered with glory, but had come
- back covered with mud (_de boue_).” Not so, Aristogiton; or if
- so, thou surely art the man to clean it.
-
-
- Chapter 1.3.VI.
- Loménie’s Plots.
-
- Was ever unfortunate Chief Minister so bested as Loménie-Brienne?
- The reins of the State fairly in his hand these six months; and
- not the smallest motive-power (of Finance) to stir from the spot
- with, this way or that! He flourishes his whip, but advances not.
- Instead of ready-money, there is nothing but rebellious debating
- and recalcitrating.
-
- Far is the public mind from having calmed; it goes chafing and
- fuming ever worse: and in the royal coffers, with such yearly
- Deficit running on, there is hardly the colour of coin. Ominous
- prognostics! Malesherbes, seeing an exhausted, exasperated France
- grow hotter and hotter, talks of “conflagration:” Mirabeau,
- without talk, has, as we perceive, descended on Paris again,
- close on the rear of the Parlement,[73]—not to quit his native
- soil any more.
-
- Over the Frontiers, behold Holland invaded by Prussia;[74] the
- French party oppressed, England and the Stadtholder triumphing:
- to the sorrow of War-Secretary Montmorin and all men. But without
- money, sinews of war, as of work, and of existence itself, what
- can a Chief Minister do? Taxes profit little: this of the Second
- Twentieth falls not due till next year; and will then, with its
- “strict valuation,” produce more controversy than cash. Taxes on
- the Privileged Classes cannot be got registered; are intolerable
- to our supporters themselves: taxes on the Unprivileged yield
- nothing,—as from a thing drained dry more cannot be drawn. Hope
- is nowhere, if not in the old refuge of Loans.
-
- To Loménie, aided by the long head of Lamoignon, deeply pondering
- this sea of troubles, the thought suggested itself: Why not have
- a Successive Loan (_Emprunt Successif_), or Loan that went on
- lending, year after year, as much as needful; say, till 1792? The
- trouble of registering such Loan were the same: we had then
- breathing time; money to work with, at least to subsist on. Edict
- of a Successive Loan must be proposed. To conciliate the
- Philosophes, let a liberal Edict walk in front of it, for
- emancipation of Protestants; let a liberal Promise guard the rear
- of it, that when our Loan ends, in that final 1792, the
- States-General shall be convoked.
-
- Such liberal Edict of Protestant Emancipation, the time having
- come for it, shall cost a Loménie as little as the
- “Death-penalties to be put in execution” did. As for the liberal
- Promise, of States-General, it can be fulfilled or not: the
- fulfilment is five good years off; in five years much intervenes.
- But the registering? Ah, truly, there is the difficulty!—However,
- we have that promise of the Elders, given secretly at Troyes.
- Judicious gratuities, cajoleries, underground intrigues, with old
- Foulon, named “_Ame damnée_, Familiar-demon, of the Parlement,”
- may perhaps do the rest. At worst and lowest, the Royal Authority
- has resources,—which ought it not to put forth? If it cannot
- realise money, the Royal Authority is as good as dead; dead of
- that surest and miserablest death, inanition. Risk and win;
- without risk all is already lost! For the rest, as in enterprises
- of pith, a touch of stratagem often proves furthersome, his
- Majesty announces _a Royal Hunt_, for the 19th of November next;
- and all whom it concerns are joyfully getting their gear ready.
-
- Royal Hunt indeed; but of two-legged unfeathered game! At eleven
- in the morning of that Royal-Hunt day, 19th of November 1787,
- unexpected blare of trumpetting, tumult of charioteering and
- cavalcading disturbs the Seat of Justice: his Majesty is come,
- with Garde-des-Sceaux Lamoignon, and Peers and retinue, to hold
- Royal Session and have Edicts registered. What a change, since
- Louis XIV. entered here, in boots; and, whip in hand, ordered his
- registering to be done,—with an Olympian look which none durst
- gainsay; and did, without stratagem, in such unceremonious
- fashion, hunt as well as register![75] For Louis XVI., on this
- day, the Registering will be enough; if indeed he and the day
- suffice for it.
-
- Meanwhile, with fit ceremonial words, the purpose of the royal
- breast is signified:—Two Edicts, for Protestant Emancipation, for
- Successive Loan: of both which Edicts our trusty Garde-des-Sceaux
- Lamoignon will explain the purport; on both which a trusty
- Parlement is requested to deliver its opinion, each member having
- free privilege of speech. And so, Lamoignon too having perorated
- not amiss, and wound up with that Promise of States-General,—the
- Sphere-music of Parlementary eloquence begins. Explosive,
- responsive, sphere answering sphere, it waxes louder and louder.
- The Peers sit attentive; of diverse sentiment: unfriendly to
- States-General; unfriendly to Despotism, which cannot reward
- merit, and is suppressing places. But what agitates his Highness
- d’Orléans? The rubicund moon-head goes wagging; darker beams the
- copper visage, like unscoured copper; in the glazed eye is
- disquietude; he rolls uneasy in his seat, as if he meant
- something. Amid unutterable satiety, has sudden new appetite, for
- new forbidden fruit, been vouchsafed him? Disgust and edacity;
- laziness that cannot rest; futile ambition, revenge,
- non-admiralship:—O, within that carbuncled skin what a confusion
- of confusions sits bottled!
-
- “Eight Couriers,” in course of the day, gallop from Versailles,
- where Loménie waits palpitating; and gallop back again, not with
- the best news. In the outer Courts of the Palais, huge buzz of
- expectation reigns; it is whispered the Chief Minister has lost
- six votes overnight. And from within, resounds nothing but
- forensic eloquence, pathetic and even indignant; heartrending
- appeals to the royal clemency, that his Majesty would please to
- summon States-General forthwith, and be the Saviour of
- France:—wherein dusky-glowing D’Espréménil, but still more
- Sabatier de Cabre, and Fréteau, since named _Commère_ Fréteau
- (Goody Fréteau), are among the loudest. For six mortal hours it
- lasts, in this manner; the infinite hubbub unslackened.
-
- And so now, when brown dusk is falling through the windows, and
- no end visible, his Majesty, on hint of Garde-des-Sceaux,
- Lamoignon, opens his royal lips once more to say, in brief That
- he must have his Loan-Edict registered.—Momentary deep
- pause!—See! Monseigneur d’Orléans rises; with moon-visage turned
- towards the royal platform, he asks, with a delicate graciosity
- of manner covering unutterable things: ‘Whether it is a Bed of
- Justice, then; or a Royal Session?’ Fire flashes on him from the
- throne and neighbourhood: surly answer that ‘it is a Session.’ In
- that case, Monseigneur will crave leave to remark that Edicts
- cannot be registered by _order_ in a Session; and indeed to
- enter, against such registry, his individual humble Protest.
- ‘_Vous êtes bien le maître_ (You will do your pleasure)’, answers
- the King; and thereupon, in high state, marches out, escorted by
- his Court-retinue; D’Orléans himself, as in duty bound, escorting
- him, but only to the gate. Which duty done, D’Orléans returns in
- from the gate; redacts his Protest, in the face of an applauding
- Parlement, an applauding France; and so—has _cut_ his
- Court-moorings, shall we say? And will now sail and drift, fast
- enough, towards Chaos?
-
- Thou foolish D’Orléans; Equality that art to be! Is Royalty grown
- a mere wooden Scarecrow; whereon thou, pert scald-headed crow,
- mayest alight at pleasure, and peck? Not yet wholly.
-
- Next day, a Lettre-de-Cachet sends D’Orléans to bethink himself
- in his Château of Villers-Cotterets, where, alas, is no Paris
- with its joyous necessaries of life; no fascinating indispensable
- Madame de Buffon,—light wife of a great Naturalist much too old
- for her. Monseigneur, it is said, does nothing but walk
- distractedly, at Villers-Cotterets; cursing his stars. Versailles
- itself shall hear penitent wail from him, so hard is his doom. By
- a second, simultaneous Lettre-de-Cachet, Goody Fréteau is hurled
- into the Stronghold of Ham, amid the Norman marshes; by a third,
- Sabatier de Cabre into Mont St. Michel, amid the Norman
- quicksands. As for the Parlement, it must, on summons, travel out
- to Versailles, with its Register-Book under its arm, to have the
- Protest _biffé_ (expunged); not without admonition, and even
- rebuke. A stroke of authority which, one might have hoped, would
- quiet matters.
-
- Unhappily, no; it is a mere taste of the whip to rearing
- coursers, which makes them rear worse! When a team of Twenty-five
- Millions begins rearing, what is Loménie’s whip? The Parlement
- will nowise acquiesce meekly; and set to register the Protestant
- Edict, and do its other work, in salutary fear of these three
- Lettres-de-Cachet. Far from that, it begins questioning
- Lettres-de-Cachet generally, their legality, endurability; emits
- dolorous objurgation, petition on petition to have its three
- Martyrs delivered; cannot, till that be complied with, so much as
- think of examining the Protestant Edict, but puts it off always
- “till this day week.”[76]
-
- In which objurgatory strain Paris and France joins it, or rather
- has preceded it; making fearful chorus. And now also the other
- Parlements, at length opening their mouths, begin to join; some
- of them, as at Grenoble and at Rennes, with portentous
- emphasis,—threatening, by way of reprisal, to interdict the very
- Tax-gatherer.[77] ‘In all former contests,’ as Malesherbes
- remarks, ‘it was the Parlement that excited the Public; but here
- it is the Public that excites the Parlement.’
-
-
- Chapter 1.3.VII.
- Internecine.
-
- What a France, through these winter months of the year 1787! The
- very Œil-de-Bœuf is doleful, uncertain; with a general feeling
- among the Suppressed, that it were better to be in Turkey. The
- Wolf-hounds are suppressed, the Bear-hounds, Duke de Coigny, Duke
- de Polignac: in the Trianon little-heaven, her Majesty, one
- evening, takes Besenval’s arm; asks his candid opinion. The
- intrepid Besenval,—having, as he hopes, nothing of the sycophant
- in _him_,—plainly signifies that, with a Parlement in rebellion,
- and an Œil-de-Bœuf in suppression, the King’s Crown is in
- danger;—whereupon, singular to say, her Majesty, as if hurt,
- changed the subject, _et ne me parla plus de rien!_[78]
-
- To whom, indeed, can this poor Queen speak? In need of wise
- counsel, if ever mortal was; yet beset here only by the hubbub of
- chaos! Her dwelling-place is so bright to the eye, and confusion
- and black care darkens it all. Sorrows of the Sovereign, sorrows
- of the woman, think-coming sorrows environ her more and more.
- Lamotte, the Necklace-Countess, has in these late months escaped,
- perhaps been suffered to escape, from the Salpêtrière. Vain was
- the hope that Paris might thereby forget her; and this
- ever-widening-lie, and heap of lies, subside. The Lamotte, with a
- V (for _Voleuse_, Thief) branded on both shoulders, has got to
- England; and will therefrom emit lie on lie; defiling the highest
- queenly name: mere distracted lies;[79] which, in its present
- humour, France will greedily believe.
-
- For the rest, it is too clear our Successive Loan is not filling.
- As indeed, in such circumstances, a Loan registered by expunging
- of Protests was not the likeliest to fill. Denunciation of
- _Lettres-de-Cachet_, of Despotism generally, abates not: the
- Twelve Parlements are busy; the Twelve hundred Placarders,
- Balladsingers, Pamphleteers. Paris is what, in figurative speech,
- they call “flooded with pamphlets (_regorge de brochures_);”
- flooded and eddying again. Hot deluge,—from so many Patriot
- ready-writers, all at the _fervid_ or boiling point; each
- ready-writer, now in the hour of eruption, going like an Iceland
- Geyser! Against which what can a judicious friend Morellet do; a
- Rivarol, an unruly Linguet (well paid for it),—spouting _cold!_
-
- Now also, at length, does come discussion of the Protestant
- Edict: but only for new embroilment; in pamphlet and
- counter-pamphlet, increasing the madness of men. Not even
- Orthodoxy, bedrid as she seemed, but will have a hand in this
- confusion. She, once again in the shape of Abbé Lenfant, “whom
- Prelates drive to visit and congratulate,”—raises audible sound
- from her pulpit-drum.[80] Or mark how D’Espréménil, who has his
- own confused way in all things, produces at the right moment in
- Parlementary harangue, a pocket Crucifix, with the apostrophe:
- ‘Will ye crucify him afresh?’ _Him_, O D’Espréménil, without
- scruple;—considering what poor stuff, of ivory and filigree, _he_
- is made of!
-
- To all which add only that poor Brienne has fallen sick; so hard
- was the tear and wear of his sinful youth, so violent, incessant
- is this agitation of his foolish old age. Baited, bayed at
- through so many throats, his Grace, growing consumptive,
- inflammatory (with _humeur de dartre_), lies reduced to milk
- diet; in exasperation, almost in desperation; with “repose,”
- precisely the impossible recipe, prescribed as the
- indispensable.[81]
-
- On the whole, what can a poor Government do, but once more recoil
- ineffectual? The King’s Treasury is running towards the lees; and
- Paris “eddies with a flood of pamphlets.” At all rates, let the
- _latter_ subside a little! D’Orléans gets back to Raincy, which
- is nearer Paris and the fair frail Buffon; finally to Paris
- itself: neither are Fréteau and Sabatier banished forever. The
- Protestant Edict is registered; to the joy of Boissy d’Anglas and
- good Malesherbes: Successive Loan, all protests expunged or else
- withdrawn, remains open,—the rather as few or none come to fill
- it. States-General, for which the Parlement has clamoured, and
- now the whole Nation clamours, will follow “in five years,”—if
- indeed not sooner. O Parlement of Paris, what a clamour was that!
- ‘Messieurs,’ said old d’Ormesson, ‘you will get States-General,
- and you will repent it.’ Like the Horse in the Fable, who, to be
- avenged of his enemy, applied to the Man. The Man mounted; did
- swift execution on the enemy; but, unhappily, would not dismount!
- Instead of five years, let three years pass, and this clamorous
- Parlement shall have both seen its enemy hurled prostrate, and
- been itself ridden to foundering (say rather, jugulated for hide
- and shoes), and lie dead in the ditch.
-
- Under such omens, however, we have reached the spring of 1788. By
- no path can the King’s Government find passage for itself, but is
- everywhere shamefully flung back. Beleaguered by Twelve
- rebellious Parlements, which are grown to be the organs of an
- angry Nation, it can advance nowhither; can accomplish nothing,
- obtain nothing, not so much as money to subsist on; but must sit
- there, seemingly, to be eaten up of Deficit.
-
- The measure of the Iniquity, then, of the Falsehood which has
- been gathering through long centuries, is nearly full? At least,
- that of the misery is! For the hovels of the Twenty-five
- Millions, the misery, permeating upwards and forwards, as its law
- is, has got so far,—to the very Œil-de-Bœuf of Versailles. Man’s
- hand, in this blind pain, is set against man: not only the low
- against the higher, but the higher against each other; Provincial
- Noblesse is bitter against Court Noblesse; Robe against Sword;
- Rochet against Pen. But against the King’s Government who is not
- bitter? Not even Besenval, in these days. To it all men and
- bodies of men are become as enemies; it is the centre whereon
- infinite contentions unite and clash. What new universal
- vertiginous movement is this; of Institution, social
- Arrangements, individual Minds, which once worked cooperative;
- now rolling and grinding in distracted collision? Inevitable: it
- is the breaking-up of a World-Solecism, worn out at last, down
- even to bankruptcy of money! And so this poor Versailles Court,
- as the chief or central Solecism, finds all the other Solecisms
- arrayed against it. Most natural! For your human Solecism, be it
- Person or Combination of Persons, is ever, by law of Nature,
- uneasy; if verging towards bankruptcy, it is even miserable:—and
- when would the meanest Solecism consent to blame or amend
- _itself_, while there remained another to amend?
-
- These threatening signs do not terrify Loménie, much less teach
- him. Loménie, though of light nature, is not without courage, of
- a sort. Nay, have we not read of lightest creatures, trained
- Canary-birds, that could fly cheerfully with lighted matches, and
- fire cannon; fire whole powder-magazines? To sit and die of
- deficit is no part of Loménie’s plan. The evil is considerable;
- but can he not remove it, can he not attack it? At lowest, he can
- attack the _symptom_ of it: these rebellious Parlements he can
- attack, and perhaps remove. Much is dim to Loménie, but two
- things are clear: that such Parlementary duel with Royalty is
- growing perilous, nay internecine; above all, that money must be
- had. Take thought, brave Loménie; thou Garde-des-Sceaux
- Lamoignon, who hast ideas! So often defeated, balked cruelly when
- the golden fruit seemed within clutch, rally for one other
- struggle. To tame the Parlement, to fill the King’s coffers:
- these are now life-and-death questions.
-
- Parlements have been tamed, more than once. Set to perch “on the
- peaks of rocks in accessible except by litters,” a Parlement
- grows reasonable. O Maupeou, thou bold man, had we left thy work
- where it was!—But apart from exile, or other violent methods, is
- there not one method, whereby all things are tamed, even lions?
- The method of hunger! What if the Parlement’s supplies were cut
- off; namely its Lawsuits!
-
- Minor Courts, for the trying of innumerable minor causes, might
- be instituted: these we could call _Grand Bailliages_. Whereon
- the Parlement, shortened of its prey, would look with yellow
- despair; but the Public, fond of cheap justice, with favour and
- hope. Then for Finance, for registering of Edicts, why not, from
- our own Œil-de-Bœuf Dignitaries, our Princes, Dukes, Marshals,
- make a thing we could call _Plenary Court_; and there, so to
- speak, do our registering ourselves? St. Louis had his Plenary
- Court, of Great Barons;[82] most useful to him: our Great Barons
- are still here (at least the Name of them is still here); our
- necessity is greater than his.
-
- Such is the Loménie-Lamoignon device; welcome to the King’s
- Council, as a light-beam in great darkness. The device seems
- feasible, it is eminently needful: be it once well executed,
- great deliverance is wrought. Silent, then, and steady; now or
- never!—the World shall see one other Historical Scene; and so
- singular a man as Loménie de Brienne still the Stage-manager
- there.
-
- Behold, accordingly, a Home-Secretary Bréteuil “beautifying
- Paris,” in the peaceablest manner, in this hopeful spring weather
- of 1788; the old hovels and hutches disappearing from our
- Bridges: as if for the State too there were halcyon weather, and
- nothing to do but beautify. Parlement seems to sit acknowledged
- victor. Brienne says nothing of Finance; or even says, and
- prints, that it is all well. How is this; such halcyon quiet;
- though the Successive Loan did not fill? In a victorious
- Parlement, Counsellor Goeslard de Monsabert even denounces that
- “levying of the Second Twentieth on strict valuation;” and gets
- decree that the valuation shall not be strict,—not on the
- privileged classes. Nevertheless Brienne endures it, launches no
- Lettre-de-Cachet against it. How is this?
-
- Smiling is such vernal weather; but treacherous, sudden! For one
- thing, we hear it whispered, “the Intendants of Provinces have
- all got order to be at their posts on a certain day.” Still more
- singular, what incessant Printing is this that goes on at the
- King’s Château, under lock and key? Sentries occupy all gates and
- windows; the Printers come not out; they sleep in their
- workrooms; their very food is handed in to them![83] A victorious
- Parlement smells new danger. D’Espréménil has ordered horses to
- Versailles; prowls round that guarded Printing-Office; prying,
- snuffing, if so be the sagacity and ingenuity of man may
- penetrate it.
-
- To a shower of gold most things are penetrable. D’Espréménil
- descends on the lap of a Printer’s Danae, in the shape of “five
- hundred louis d’or:” the Danae’s Husband smuggles a ball of clay
- to her; which she delivers to the golden Counsellor of Parlement.
- Kneaded within it, their stick printed proof-sheets;—by Heaven!
- the royal Edict of that same self-registering _Plenary Court;_ of
- those _Grand Bailliages_ that shall cut short our Lawsuits! It is
- to be promulgated over all France on one and the same day.
-
- This, then, is what the Intendants were bid wait for at their
- posts: this is what the Court sat hatching, as its accursed
- cockatrice-egg; and would not stir, though provoked, till the
- brood were out! Hie with it, D’Espréménil, home to Paris; convoke
- instantaneous Sessions; let the Parlement, and the Earth, and the
- Heavens know it.
-
-
- Chapter 1.3.VIII.
- Loménie’s Death-throes.
-
- On the morrow, which is the 3rd of May, 1788, an astonished
- Parlement sits convoked; listens speechless to the speech of
- D’Espréménil, unfolding the infinite misdeed. Deed of treachery;
- of unhallowed darkness, such as Despotism loves! Denounce it, O
- Parlement of Paris; awaken France and the Universe; roll what
- thunder-barrels of forensic eloquence thou hast: with thee too it
- is verily Now or never!
-
- The Parlement is not wanting, at such juncture. In the hour of
- his extreme jeopardy, the lion first incites himself by roaring,
- by lashing his sides. So here the Parlement of Paris. On the
- motion of D’Espréménil, a most patriotic Oath, of the One-and-all
- sort, is sworn, with united throat;—an excellent new-idea, which,
- in these coming years, shall not remain unimitated. Next comes
- indomitable Declaration, almost of the rights of man, at least of
- the rights of Parlement; Invocation to the friends of French
- Freedom, in this and in subsequent time. All which, or the
- essence of all which, is brought to paper; in a tone wherein
- something of plaintiveness blends with, and tempers, heroic
- valour. And thus, having sounded the storm-bell,—which Paris
- hears, which all France will hear; and hurled such defiance in
- the teeth of Loménie and Despotism, the Parlement retires as from
- a tolerable first day’s work.
-
- But how Loménie felt to see his cockatrice-egg (so essential to
- the salvation of France) broken in this premature manner, let
- readers fancy! Indignant he clutches at his thunderbolts (_de
- Cachet_, of the Seal); and launches two of them: a bolt for
- D’Espréménil; a bolt for that busy Goeslard, whose service in the
- Second Twentieth and “strict valuation” is not forgotten. Such
- bolts clutched promptly overnight, and launched with the early
- new morning, shall strike agitated Paris if not into
- requiescence, yet into wholesome astonishment.
-
- Ministerial thunderbolts may be launched; but if they do not
- _hit?_ D’Espréménil and Goeslard, warned, both of them, as is
- thought, by the singing of some friendly bird, elude the Loménie
- Tipstaves; escape disguised through skywindows, over roofs, to
- their own Palais de Justice: the thunderbolts have _missed_.
- Paris (for the buzz flies abroad) is struck into astonishment
- _not_ wholesome. The two martyrs of Liberty doff their disguises;
- don their long gowns; behold, in the space of an hour, by aid of
- ushers and swift runners, the Parlement, with its Counsellors,
- Presidents, even Peers, sits anew assembled. The assembled
- Parlement declares that these its two martyrs cannot be given up,
- to any sublunary authority; moreover that the “session is
- permanent,” admitting of no adjournment, till pursuit of them has
- been relinquished.
-
- And so, with forensic eloquence, denunciation and protest, with
- couriers going and returning, the Parlement, in this state of
- continual explosion that shall cease neither night nor day, waits
- the issue. Awakened Paris once more inundates those outer courts;
- boils, in floods wilder than ever, through all avenues. Dissonant
- hubbub there is; jargon as of Babel, in the hour when they were
- first smitten (as here) with mutual unintelligibilty, and the
- people had not yet dispersed!
-
- Paris City goes through its diurnal epochs, of working and
- slumbering; and now, for the second time, most European and
- African mortals are asleep. But here, in this Whirlpool of Words,
- sleep falls not; the Night spreads her coverlid of Darkness over
- it in vain. Within is the sound of mere martyr invincibility;
- tempered with the due tone of plaintiveness. Without is the
- infinite expectant hum,—growing drowsier a little. So has it
- lasted for six-and-thirty hours.
-
- But hark, through the dead of midnight, what tramp is this? Tramp
- as of armed men, foot and horse; Gardes Françaises, Gardes
- Suisses: marching hither; in silent regularity; in the flare of
- torchlight! There are Sappers, too, with axes and crowbars:
- apparently, if the doors open not, they will be forced!—It is
- Captain D’Agoust, missioned from Versailles. D’Agoust, a man of
- known firmness;—who once forced Prince Condé himself, by mere
- incessant looking at him, to give satisfaction and fight;[84] he
- now, with axes and torches is advancing on the very sanctuary of
- Justice. Sacrilegious; yet what help? The man is a soldier; looks
- merely at his orders; impassive, moves forward like an inanimate
- engine.
-
- The doors open on summons, there need no axes; door after door.
- And now the innermost door opens; discloses the long-gowned
- Senators of France: a hundred and sixty-seven by tale, seventeen
- of them Peers; sitting there, majestic, “in permanent session.”
- Were not the men military, and of cast-iron, this sight, this
- silence reechoing the clank of his own boots, might stagger him!
- For the hundred and sixty-seven receive him in perfect silence;
- which some liken to that of the Roman Senate overfallen by
- Brennus; some to that of a nest of coiners surprised by officers
- of the Police.[85] _Messieurs_, said D’Agoust, _De par le Roi!_
- Express order has charged D’Agoust with the sad duty of arresting
- two individuals: M. Duval d’Espréménil and M. Goeslard de
- Monsabert. Which respectable individuals, as he has not the
- honour of knowing them, are hereby invited, in the King’s name,
- to surrender themselves.—Profound silence! Buzz, which grows a
- murmur: ‘We are all D’Espréménils!’ ventures a voice; which other
- voices repeat. The President inquires, Whether he will employ
- violence? Captain D’Agoust, honoured with his Majesty’s
- commission, has to execute his Majesty’s order; would so gladly
- do it without violence, will in any case do it; grants an august
- Senate space to deliberate which method _they_ prefer. And
- thereupon D’Agoust, with grave military courtesy, has withdrawn
- for the moment.
-
- What boots it, august Senators? All avenues are closed with fixed
- bayonets. Your Courier gallops to Versailles, through the dewy
- Night; but also gallops back again, with tidings that the order
- is authentic, that it is irrevocable. The outer courts simmer
- with idle population; but D’Agoust’s grenadier-ranks stand there
- as immovable floodgates: there will be no revolting to deliver
- you. ‘Messieurs!’ thus spoke D’Espréménil, ‘when the victorious
- Gauls entered Rome, which they had carried by assault, the Roman
- Senators, clothed in their purple, sat there, in their curule
- chairs, with a proud and tranquil countenance, awaiting slavery
- or death. Such too is the lofty spectacle, which you, in this
- hour, offer to the universe (_à l’univers_), after having
- generously’—with much more of the like, as can still be read.[86]
-
- In vain, O D’Espréménil! Here is this cast-iron Captain D’Agoust,
- with his cast-iron military air, come back. Despotism,
- constraint, destruction sit waving in his plumes. D’Espréménil
- must fall silent; heroically give himself up, lest worst befall.
- Him Goeslard heroically imitates. With spoken and speechless
- emotion, they fling themselves into the arms of their
- Parlementary brethren, for a last embrace: and so amid plaudits
- and plaints, from a hundred and sixty-five throats; amid wavings,
- sobbings, a whole forest-sigh of Parlementary pathos,—they are
- led through winding passages, to the rear-gate; where, in the
- gray of the morning, two Coaches with _Exempts_ stand waiting.
- There must the victims mount; bayonets menacing behind.
- D’Espréménil’s stern question to the populace, “Whether they have
- courage?” is answered by silence. They mount, and roll; and
- neither the rising of the May sun (it is the 6th morning), nor
- its setting shall lighten their heart: but they fare forward
- continually; D’Espréménil towards the utmost Isles of Sainte
- Marguerite, or Hieres (supposed by some, if that is any comfort,
- to be Calypso’s Island); Goeslard towards the land-fortress of
- Pierre-en-Cize, extant then, near the City of Lyons.
-
- Captain D’Agoust may now therefore look forward to Majorship, to
- Commandantship of the Tuilleries;[87]—and withal vanish from
- History; where nevertheless he has been fated to do a notable
- thing. For not only are D’Espréménil and Goeslard safe whirling
- southward, but the Parlement itself has straightway to march out:
- to that also his inexorable order reaches. Gathering up their
- long skirts, they file out, the whole Hundred and Sixty-five of
- them, through two rows of unsympathetic grenadiers: a spectacle
- to gods and men. The people revolt not; they only wonder and
- grumble: also, we remark, these unsympathetic grenadiers are
- _Gardes Françaises_,—who, one day, will sympathise! In a word,
- the Palais de Justice is swept clear, the doors of it are locked;
- and D’Agoust returns to Versailles with the key in his
- pocket,—having, as was said, merited preferment.
-
- As for this Parlement of Paris, now turned out to the street, we
- will without reluctance leave it there. The Beds of Justice it
- had to undergo, in the coming fortnight, at Versailles, in
- registering, or rather refusing to register, those new-hatched
- Edicts; and how it assembled in taverns and tap-rooms there, for
- the purpose of Protesting,[88] or hovered disconsolate, with
- outspread skirts, not knowing where to assemble; and was reduced
- to lodge Protest “with a Notary;” and in the end, to sit still
- (in a state of forced “vacation”), and do nothing; all this,
- natural now, as the burying of the dead after battle, shall not
- concern us. The Parlement of Paris has as good as performed its
- part; doing and misdoing, so far, but hardly further, could it
- stir the world.
-
- Loménie has removed the evil then? Not at all: not so much as the
- symptom of the evil; scarcely the _twelfth_ part of the symptom,
- and exasperated the other eleven! The Intendants of Provinces,
- the Military Commandants are at their posts, on the appointed 8th
- of May: but in no Parlement, if not in the single one of Douai,
- can these new Edicts get registered. Not peaceable signing with
- ink; but browbeating, bloodshedding, appeal to primary club-law!
- Against these Bailliages, against this Plenary Court, exasperated
- Themis everywhere shows face of battle; the Provincial Noblesse
- are of her party, and whoever hates Loménie and the evil time;
- with her attorneys and Tipstaves, she enlists and operates down
- even to the populace. At Rennes in Brittany, where the historical
- Bertrand de Moleville is Intendant, it has passed from fatal
- continual duelling, between the military and gentry, to
- street-fighting; to stone-volleys and musket-shot: and still the
- Edicts remained unregistered. The afflicted Bretons send
- remonstrance to Loménie, by a Deputation of Twelve; whom,
- however, Loménie, having heard them, shuts up in the Bastille. A
- second larger deputation he meets, by his scouts, on the road,
- and persuades or frightens back. But now a third largest
- Deputation is indignantly sent by _many_ roads: refused audience
- on arriving, it meets to take council; invites Lafayette and all
- Patriot Bretons in Paris to assist; agitates itself; becomes the
- _Breton Club_, first germ of—the _Jacobins’ Society._[89]
-
- So many as eight Parlements get exiled:[90] others might need
- that remedy, but it is one not always easy of appliance. At
- Grenoble, for instance, where a Mounier, a Barnave have not been
- idle, the Parlement had due order (by _Lettres-de-Cachet_) to
- depart, and exile itself: but on the morrow, instead of coaches
- getting yoked, the alarm-bell bursts forth, ominous; and peals
- and booms all day: crowds of mountaineers rush down, with axes,
- even with firelocks,—whom (most ominous of all!) the soldiery
- shows no eagerness to deal with. “Axe over head,” the poor
- General has to sign capitulation; to engage that the
- _Lettres-de-Cachet_ shall remain unexecuted, and a beloved
- Parlement stay where it is. Besancon, Dijon, Rouen, Bourdeaux,
- are not what they should be! At Pau in Bearn, where the old
- Commandant had failed, the new one (a Grammont, native to them)
- is met by a Procession of townsmen with the Cradle of Henri
- Quatre, the Palladium of their Town; is conjured as he venerates
- this old Tortoise-shell, in which the great Henri was rocked, not
- to trample on Bearnese liberty; is informed, withal, that his
- Majesty’s cannon are all safe—in the keeping of his Majesty’s
- faithful Burghers of Pau, and do now lie pointed on the walls
- there; ready for action![91]
-
- At this rate, your Grand Bailliages are like to have a stormy
- infancy. As for the Plenary Court, it has literally expired in
- the birth. The very Courtiers looked shy at it; old Marshal
- Broglie declined the honour of sitting therein. Assaulted by a
- universal storm of mingled ridicule and execration,[92] this poor
- Plenary Court met once, and never any second time. Distracted
- country! Contention hisses up, with forked hydra-tongues,
- wheresoever poor Loménie sets his foot. “Let a Commandant, a
- Commissioner of the King,” says Weber, “enter one of these
- Parlements to have an Edict registered, the whole Tribunal will
- disappear, and leave the Commandant alone with the Clerk and
- First President. The Edict registered and the Commandant gone,
- the whole Tribunal hastens back, to declare such registration
- null. The highways are covered with _Grand Deputations_ of
- Parlements, proceeding to Versailles, to have their registers
- expunged by the King’s hand; or returning home, to cover a new
- page with a new resolution still more audacious.”[93]
-
- Such is the France of this year 1788. Not now a Golden or Paper
- Age of Hope; with its horse-racings, balloon-flyings, and finer
- sensibilities of the heart: ah, gone is that; its golden
- effulgence paled, bedarkened in _this_ singular manner,—brewing
- towards preternatural weather! For, as in that wreck-storm of
- _Paul et Virginie_ and Saint-Pierre,—“One huge motionless cloud”
- (say, of Sorrow and Indignation) “girdles our whole horizon;
- streams up, hairy, copper-edged, over a sky of the colour of
- lead.” Motionless itself; but “small clouds” (as exiled
- Parlements and suchlike), “parting from it, fly over the zenith,
- with the velocity of birds:”—till at last, with one loud howl,
- the whole Four Winds be dashed together, and all the world
- exclaim, There is the tornado! _Tout le monde s’écria, Voilà
- l’ouragan!_
-
- For the rest, in such circumstances, the Successive Loan, very
- naturally, remains unfilled; neither, indeed, can that impost of
- the Second Twentieth, at least not on “strict valuation,” be
- levied to good purpose: “Lenders,” says Weber, in his hysterical
- vehement manner, “are afraid of ruin; tax-gatherers of hanging.”
- The very Clergy turn away their face: convoked in Extraordinary
- Assembly, they afford no gratuitous gift (_don gratuit_),—if it
- be not that of advice; here too instead of cash is clamour for
- States-General.[94]
-
- O Loménie-Brienne, with thy poor flimsy mind all bewildered, and
- now “three actual cauteries” on thy worn-out body; who art like
- to die of inflamation, provocation, milk-diet, _dartres vives_
- and _maladie_—(best untranslated);[95] and presidest over a
- France with innumerable _actual cauteries_, which also is dying
- of inflammation and the rest! Was it wise to quit the bosky
- verdures of Brienne, and thy new ashlar Château there, and what
- it held, for _this?_ Soft were those shades and lawns; sweet the
- hymns of Poetasters, the blandishments of high-rouged Graces:[96]
- and always this and the other Philosophe Morellet (nothing
- deeming himself or thee a questionable Sham-Priest) could be so
- happy in making happy:—and also (hadst thou known it), in the
- Military School hard by there sat, studying mathematics, a
- dusky-complexioned taciturn Boy, under the name of: NAPOLEON
- BONAPARTE!—With fifty years of effort, and one final dead-lift
- struggle, thou hast made an exchange! Thou hast got thy robe of
- office,—as Hercules had his Nessus’-shirt.
-
- On the 13th of July of this 1788, there fell, on the very edge of
- harvest, the most frightful hailstorm; scattering into wild waste
- the Fruits of the Year; which had otherwise suffered grievously
- by drought. For sixty leagues round Paris especially, the ruin
- was almost total.[97] To so many other evils, then, there is to
- be added, that of dearth, perhaps of famine.
-
- Some days before this hailstorm, on the 5th of July; and still
- more decisively some days after it, on the 8th of August,—Loménie
- announces that the States-General are actually to meet in the
- following month of May. Till after which period, this of the
- Plenary Court, and the rest, shall remain _postponed_. Further,
- as in Loménie there is no plan of forming or holding these most
- desirable States-General, “thinkers are invited” to furnish him
- with one,—through the medium of discussion by the public press!
-
- What could a poor Minister do? There are still ten months of
- respite reserved: a sinking pilot will fling out all things, his
- very biscuit-bags, lead, log, compass and quadrant, before
- flinging out _himself_. It is on this principle, of sinking, and
- the incipient delirium of despair, that we explain likewise the
- almost miraculous “invitation to thinkers.” Invitation to Chaos
- to be so kind as build, out of its tumultuous drift-wood, an Ark
- of Escape for him! In these cases, not invitation but command has
- usually proved serviceable.—The Queen stood, that evening,
- pensive, in a window, with her face turned towards the Garden.
- The _Chef de Gobelet_ had followed her with an obsequious cup of
- coffee; and then retired till it were sipped. Her Majesty
- beckoned Dame Campan to approach: ‘_Grand Dieu!_’ murmured she,
- with the cup in her hand, ‘what a piece of news will be made
- public today! The King grants States-General.’ Then raising her
- eyes to Heaven (if Campan were not mistaken), she added: ‘’Tis a
- first beat of the drum, of ill-omen for France. This Noblesse
- will ruin us.’[98]
-
- During all that hatching of the Plenary Court, while Lamoignon
- looked so mysterious, Besenval had kept asking him one question:
- Whether they had cash? To which as Lamoignon always answered (on
- the faith of Loménie) that the cash was safe, judicious Besenval
- rejoined that then all was safe. Nevertheless, the melancholy
- fact is, that the royal coffers are almost getting literally void
- of coin. Indeed, apart from all other things this “invitation to
- thinkers,” and the great change now at hand are enough to “arrest
- the circulation of capital,” and forward only that of pamphlets.
- A few thousand gold louis are now all of money or money’s worth
- that remains in the King’s Treasury. With another movement as of
- desperation, Loménie invites Necker to come and be Controller of
- Finances! Necker has other work in view than controlling Finances
- for Loménie: with a dry refusal he stands taciturn; awaiting his
- time.
-
- What shall a desperate Prime Minister do? He has grasped at the
- strongbox of the King’s Theatre: some Lottery had been set on
- foot for those sufferers by the hailstorm; in his extreme
- necessity, Loménie lays hands even on this.[99] To make provision
- for the passing day, on any terms, will soon be impossible.—On
- the 16th of August, poor Weber heard, at Paris and Versailles,
- hawkers, “with a hoarse stifled tone of voice (_voix étouffée,
- sourde_)” drawling and snuffling, through the streets, an _Edict
- concerning Payments_ (such was the soft title Rivarol had
- contrived for it): all payments at the Royal Treasury shall be
- made henceforth, three-fifths in Cash, and the remaining
- two-fifths—in Paper bearing interest! Poor Weber almost swooned
- at the sound of these cracked voices, with their bodeful
- raven-note; and will never forget the effect it had on him.[100]
-
- But the effect on Paris, on the world generally? From the dens of
- Stock-brokerage, from the heights of Political Economy, of
- Neckerism and Philosophism; from all articulate and inarticulate
- throats, rise hootings and howlings, such as ear had not yet
- heard. Sedition itself may be imminent! Monseigneur d’Artois,
- moved by Duchess Polignac, feels called to wait upon her Majesty;
- and explain frankly what crisis matters stand in. “The Queen
- wept;” Brienne himself wept;—for it is now visible and palpable
- that he must go.
-
- Remains only that the Court, to whom his manners and garrulities
- were always agreeable, shall make his fall soft. The grasping old
- man has already got his Archbishopship of Toulouse exchanged for
- the richer one of Sens: and now, in this hour of pity, he shall
- have the Coadjutorship for his nephew (hardly yet of due age); a
- Dameship of the Palace for his niece; a Regiment for her husband;
- for himself a red Cardinal’s-hat, a _Coupe de Bois_ (cutting from
- the royal forests), and on the whole “from five to six hundred
- thousand livres of revenue:”[101] finally, his Brother, the Comte
- de Brienne, shall still continue War-minister. Buckled-round with
- such bolsters and huge featherbeds of Promotion, let him now fall
- as soft as he can!
-
- And so Loménie departs: rich if Court-titles and Money-bonds can
- enrich him; but if these cannot, perhaps the poorest of all
- extant men. “Hissed at by the people of Versailles,” he drives
- forth to Jardi; southward to Brienne,—for recovery of health.
- Then to Nice, to Italy; but shall return; shall glide to and fro,
- tremulous, faint-twinkling, fallen on awful times: till the
- Guillotine—snuff out his weak existence? Alas, worse: for it is
- _blown_ out, or choked out, foully, pitiably, on the way to the
- Guillotine! In his Palace of Sens, rude Jacobin Bailiffs made him
- drink with them from his own wine-cellars, feast with them from
- his own larder; and on the morrow morning, the miserable old man
- lies dead. This is the end of Prime Minister, Cardinal Archbishop
- Loménie de Brienne. Flimsier mortal was seldom fated to do as
- weighty a mischief; to have a life as despicable-envied, an exit
- as frightful. _Fired_, as the phrase is, with ambition: blown,
- like a kindled rag, the sport of winds, not this way, not that
- way, but of all ways, straight towards _such_ a
- powder-mine,—which he kindled! Let us pity the hapless Loménie;
- and forgive him; and, as soon as possible, forget him.
-
-
- Chapter 1.3.IX.
- Burial with Bonfire.
-
- Besenval, during these extraordinary operations, of Payment
- two-fifths in Paper, and change of Prime Minister, had been out
- on a tour through his District of Command; and indeed, for the
- last months, peacefully drinking the waters of Contrexeville.
- Returning now, in the end of August, towards Moulins, and
- “knowing nothing,” he arrives one evening at Langres; finds the
- whole Town in a state of uproar (_grande rumeur_). Doubtless some
- sedition; a thing too common in these days! He alights
- nevertheless; inquires of a “man tolerably dressed,” what the
- matter is?—‘How?’ answers the man, ‘you have not heard the news?
- The Archbishop is thrown out, and M. Necker is recalled; and all
- is going to go well!’[102]
-
- Such _rumeur_ and vociferous acclaim has risen round M. Necker,
- ever from “that day when he issued from the Queen’s Apartments,”
- a nominated Minister. It was on the 24th of August: “the
- galleries of the Château, the courts, the streets of Versailles;
- in few hours, the Capital; and, as the news flew, all France,
- resounded with the cry of _Vive le Roi! Vive M. Necker!_[103] In
- Paris indeed it unfortunately got the length of turbulence.”
- Petards, rockets go off, in the Place Dauphine, more than enough.
- A “wicker Figure (_Mannequin d’osier_),” in Archbishop’s stole,
- made emblematically, three-fifths of it satin, two-fifths of it
- paper, is promenaded, not in silence, to the popular
- judgment-bar; is doomed; shriven by a mock Abbé de Vermond; then
- solemnly consumed by fire, at the foot of Henri’s Statue on the
- Pont Neuf;—with such petarding and huzzaing that Chevalier Dubois
- and his City-watch see good finally to make a charge (more or
- less ineffectual); and there wanted not burning of sentry-boxes,
- forcing of guard-houses, and also “dead bodies thrown into the
- Seine over-night,” to avoid new effervescence.[104]
-
- Parlements therefore shall return from exile: Plenary Court,
- Payment two-fifths in Paper have vanished; gone off in smoke, at
- the foot of Henri’s Statue. States-General (with a Political
- Millennium) are now certain; nay, it shall be announced, in our
- fond haste, for January next: and all, as the Langres man said,
- is “going to go.”
-
- To the prophetic glance of Besenval, one other thing is too
- apparent: that Friend Lamoignon cannot keep his Keepership.
- Neither he nor War-minister Comte de Brienne! Already old Foulon,
- with an eye to be war-minister himself, is making underground
- movements. This is that same Foulon named _âme damnée du
- Parlement;_ a man grown gray in treachery, in griping,
- projecting, intriguing and iniquity: who once when it was
- objected, to some finance-scheme of his, ‘What will the people
- do?’—made answer, in the fire of discussion, ‘The people may eat
- grass:’ hasty words, which fly abroad irrevocable,—and will send
- back tidings!
-
- Foulon, to the relief of the world, fails on this occasion; and
- will always fail. Nevertheless it steads not M. de Lamoignon. It
- steads not the doomed man that he have interviews with the King;
- and be “seen to return _radieux_,” emitting _rays_. Lamoignon is
- the hated of Parlements: Comte de Brienne is Brother to the
- Cardinal Archbishop. The 24th of August has been; and the 14th
- September is not yet, when they two, as their great Principal had
- done, descend,—made to fall _soft_, like him.
-
- And now, as if the last burden had been rolled from its heart,
- and assurance were at length perfect, Paris bursts forth anew
- into extreme jubilee. The Basoche rejoices aloud, that the foe of
- Parlements is fallen; Nobility, Gentry, Commonalty have rejoiced;
- and rejoice. Nay now, with new emphasis, Rascality itself,
- starting suddenly from its dim depths, will arise and do it,—for
- down even thither the new Political Evangel, in some rude version
- or other, has penetrated. It is Monday, the 14th of September
- 1788: Rascality assembles anew, in great force, in the Place
- Dauphine; lets off petards, fires blunderbusses, to an incredible
- extent, without interval, for eighteen hours. There is again a
- wicker Figure, “_Mannequin_ of osier:” the centre of endless
- howlings. Also Necker’s Portrait snatched, or purchased, from
- some Printshop, is borne processionally, aloft on a perch, with
- huzzas;—an example to be remembered.
-
- But chiefly on the Pont Neuf, where the Great Henri, in bronze,
- rides sublime; there do the crowds gather. All passengers must
- stop, till they have bowed to the People’s King, and said
- audibly: _Vive Henri Quatre; au diable Lamoignon!_ No carriage
- but must stop; not even that of his Highness d’Orléans. Your
- coach-doors are opened: Monsieur will please to put forth his
- head and bow; or even, if refractory, to alight altogether, and
- kneel: from Madame a wave of her plumes, a smile of her fair
- face, there where she sits, shall suffice;—and surely a coin or
- two (to buy _fusées_) were not unreasonable from the Upper
- Classes, friends of Liberty? In this manner it proceeds for days;
- in such rude horse-play,—not without kicks. The City-watch can do
- nothing; hardly save its own skin: for the last twelve-month, as
- we have sometimes seen, it has been a kind of pastime to _hunt_
- the Watch. Besenval indeed is at hand with soldiers; but they
- have orders to avoid firing, and are not prompt to stir.
-
- On Monday morning the explosion of petards began: and now it is
- near midnight of Wednesday; and the “wicker _Mannequin_” is to be
- buried,—apparently in the Antique fashion. Long rows of torches,
- following it, move towards the Hôtel Lamoignon; but “a servant of
- mine” (Besenval’s) has run to give warning, and there are
- soldiers come. Gloomy Lamoignon is not to die by conflagration,
- or this night; not yet for a year, and then by gunshot (suicidal
- or accidental is unknown).[105] Foiled Rascality burns its
- “Mannikin of osier,” under his windows; “tears up the
- sentry-box,” and rolls off: to try Brienne; to try Dubois Captain
- of the Watch. Now, however, all is bestirring itself; Gardes
- Françaises, Invalides, Horse-patrol: the Torch Procession is met
- with sharp shot, with the thrusting of bayonets, the slashing of
- sabres. Even Dubois makes a charge, with that Cavalry of his, and
- the cruelest charge of all: “there are a great many killed and
- wounded.” Not without clangour, complaint; subsequent criminal
- trials, and official persons dying of heartbreak![106] So,
- however, with steel-besom, Rascality is brushed back into its dim
- depths, and the streets are swept clear.
-
- Not for a century and half had Rascality ventured to step forth
- in this fashion; not for so long, showed its huge rude lineaments
- in the light of day. A Wonder and new Thing: as yet gamboling
- merely, in awkward Brobdingnag sport, not without quaintness;
- hardly in anger: yet in its huge half-vacant laugh lurks a shade
- of grimness,—which could unfold itself!
-
- However, the thinkers invited by Loménie are now far on with
- their pamphlets: States-General, on one plan or another, will
- infallibly meet; if not in January, as was once hoped, yet at
- latest in May. Old Duke de Richelieu, moribund in these autumn
- days, opens his eyes once more, murmuring, ‘What would Louis
- Fourteenth’ (whom he remembers) ‘have said!’—then closes them
- again, forever, before the evil time.
-
-
- BOOK 1.IV.
- STATES-GENERAL
-
-
- Chapter 1.4.I.
- The Notables Again.
-
- The universal prayer, therefore, is to be fulfilled! Always in
- days of national perplexity, when wrong abounded and help was
- not, this remedy of States-General was called for; by a
- Malesherbes, nay by a Fénelon;[107] even Parlements calling for
- it were “escorted with blessings.” And now behold it is
- vouchsafed us; States-General shall verily be!
-
- To say, let States-General be, was easy; to say in what manner
- they shall be, is not so easy. Since the year of 1614, there have
- no States-General met in France, all trace of them has vanished
- from the living habits of men. Their structure, powers, methods
- of procedure, which were never in any measure fixed, have now
- become wholly a vague possibility. Clay which the potter may
- shape, this way or that:—say rather, the twenty-five millions of
- potters; for so many have now, more or less, a vote in it! How to
- shape the States-General? There is a problem. Each
- Body-corporate, each privileged, each organised Class has secret
- hopes of its own in that matter; and also secret misgivings of
- its own,—for, behold, this monstrous twenty-million Class,
- hitherto the dumb sheep which these others had to agree about the
- manner of shearing, is now also arising with hopes! It has ceased
- or is ceasing to be dumb; it speaks through Pamphlets, or at
- least brays and growls behind them, in unison,—increasing
- wonderfully their volume of sound.
-
- As for the Parlement of Paris, it has at once declared for the
- “old form of 1614.” Which form had this advantage, that the
- _Tiers Etat_, Third Estate, or Commons, figured there as a show
- mainly: whereby the Noblesse and Clergy had but to avoid quarrel
- between themselves, and decide unobstructed what _they_ thought
- best. Such was the clearly declared opinion of the Paris
- Parlement. But, being met by a storm of mere hooting and howling
- from all men, such opinion was blown straightway to the winds;
- and the popularity of the Parlement along with it,—never to
- return. The Parlements part, we said above, was as good as
- played. Concerning which, however, there is this further to be
- noted: the proximity of dates. It was on the 22nd of September
- that the Parlement returned from “vacation” or “exile in its
- estates;” to be reinstalled amid boundless jubilee from all
- Paris. Precisely next day it was, that this same Parlement came
- to its “clearly declared opinion:” and then on the morrow after
- that, you behold it “covered with outrages”; its outer court, one
- vast sibilation, and the glory departed from it for
- evermore.[108] A popularity of twenty-four hours was, in those
- times, no uncommon allowance.
-
- On the other hand, how superfluous was that invitation of
- Loménie’s: the invitation to thinkers! Thinkers and unthinkers,
- by the million, are spontaneously at their post, doing what is in
- them. Clubs labour: _Societe Publicole;_ Breton Club; Enraged
- Club, _Club des Enrages_. Likewise Dinner-parties in the Palais
- Royal; your Mirabeaus, Talleyrands dining there, in company with
- Chamforts, Morellets, with Duponts and hot Parlementeers, not
- without object! For a certain _Necker_ean Lion’s-provider, whom
- one could name, assembles them there;[109]—or even their own
- private determination to have dinner does it. And then as to
- Pamphlets—in figurative language; “it is a sheer snowing of
- pamphlets; like to snow up the Government thoroughfares!” Now is
- the time for Friends of Freedom; sane, and even insane.
-
- Count, or self-styled Count, d’Aintrigues, “the young
- Languedocian gentleman,” with perhaps Chamfort the Cynic to help
- him, rises into furor almost Pythic; highest, where many are
- high.[110] Foolish young Languedocian gentleman; who himself so
- soon, “emigrating among the foremost,” must fly indignant over
- the marches, with the _Contrat Social_ in his pocket,—towards
- outer darkness, thankless intriguings, _ignis-fatuus_ hoverings,
- and death by the stiletto! Abbé Sieyes has left Chartres
- Cathedral, and canonry and book-shelves there; has let his
- tonsure grow, and come to Paris with a secular head, of the most
- irrefragable sort, to ask three questions, and answer them: _What
- is the Third Estate? All.—What has it hitherto been in our form
- of government? Nothing.—What does it want? To become Something._
-
- D’Orléans,—for be sure he, on his way to Chaos, is in the thick
- of this,—promulgates his _Deliberations;_[111] fathered by him,
- written by Laclos of the _Liaisons Dangereuses._ The result of
- which comes out simply: “The Third Estate is the Nation.” On the
- other hand, Monseigneur d’Artois, with other Princes of the
- Blood, publishes, in solemn _Memorial_ to the King, that if such
- things be listened to, Privilege, Nobility, Monarchy, Church,
- State and Strongbox are in danger.[112] In danger truly: and yet
- if you do not listen, are they out of danger? It is the voice of
- all France, this sound that rises. Immeasurable, manifold; as the
- sound of outbreaking waters: wise were he who knew what to do in
- it,—if not to fly to the mountains, and hide himself?
-
- How an ideal, all-seeing Versailles Government, sitting there on
- such principles, in such an environment, would have determined to
- demean itself at this new juncture, may even yet be a question.
- Such a Government would have felt too well that its long task was
- now drawing to a close; that, under the guise of these
- States-General, at length inevitable, a new omnipotent Unknown of
- Democracy was coming into being; in presence of which no
- Versailles Government either could or should, except in a
- provisory character, continue extant. To enact which provisory
- character, so unspeakably important, might its whole faculties
- but have sufficed; and so a peaceable, gradual, well-conducted
- Abdication and _Domine-dimittas_ have been the issue!
-
- This for our ideal, all-seeing Versailles Government. But for the
- actual irrational Versailles Government? Alas, that is a
- Government existing there only for its own behoof: without right,
- except possession; and now also without might. It foresees
- nothing, sees nothing; has not so much as a purpose, but has only
- purposes,—and the instinct whereby all that exists will struggle
- to keep existing. Wholly a vortex; in which vain counsels,
- hallucinations, falsehoods, intrigues, and imbecilities whirl;
- like withered rubbish in the meeting of winds! The Œil-de-Bœuf
- has its irrational hopes, if also its fears. Since hitherto all
- States-General have done as good as nothing, why should these do
- more? The Commons, indeed, look dangerous; but on the whole is
- not revolt, unknown now for five generations, an impossibility?
- The Three Estates can, by management, be set against each other;
- the Third will, as heretofore, join with the King; will, out of
- mere spite and self-interest, be eager to tax and vex the other
- two. The other two are thus delivered bound into our hands, that
- we may fleece them likewise. Whereupon, money being got, and the
- Three Estates all in quarrel, dismiss them, and let the future go
- as it can! As good Archbishop Loménie was wont to say: ‘There are
- so many accidents; and it needs but one to save us.’—How many to
- destroy us?
-
- Poor Necker in the midst of such an anarchy does what is possible
- for him. He looks into it with obstinately hopeful face; lauds
- the known rectitude of the kingly mind; listens indulgent-like to
- the known perverseness of the queenly and courtly;—emits if any
- proclamation or regulation, one favouring the _Tiers Etat;_ but
- settling nothing; hovering afar off rather, and advising all
- things to settle themselves. The grand questions, for the
- present, have got reduced to two: the Double Representation, and
- the Vote by Head. Shall the Commons have a “double
- representation,” that is to say, have as many members as the
- Noblesse and Clergy united? Shall the States-General, when once
- assembled, vote and deliberate, in one body, or in three separate
- bodies; “vote by head, or vote by class,”—_ordre_ as they call
- it? These are the moot-points now filling all France with jargon,
- logic and eleutheromania. To terminate which, Necker bethinks
- him, Might not a second Convocation of the Notables be fittest?
- Such second Convocation is resolved on.
-
- On the 6th of November of this year 1788, these Notables
- accordingly have reassembled; after an interval of some eighteen
- months. They are Calonne’s old Notables, the same Hundred and
- Forty-four,—to show one’s impartiality; likewise to save time.
- They sit there once again, in their Seven Bureaus, in the hard
- winter weather: it is the hardest winter seen since 1709;
- thermometer below zero of Fahrenheit, Seine River frozen
- over.[113] Cold, scarcity and eleutheromaniac clamour: a changed
- world since these Notables were “organed out,” in May gone a
- year! They shall see now whether, under their Seven Princes of
- the Blood, in their Seven Bureaus, they can settle the
- moot-points.
-
- To the surprise of Patriotism, these Notables, once so patriotic,
- seem to incline the wrong way; towards the anti-patriotic side.
- They stagger at the Double Representation, at the Vote by Head:
- there is not affirmative decision; there is mere debating, and
- that not with the best aspects. For, indeed, were not these
- Notables themselves mostly of the Privileged Classes? They
- clamoured once; now they have their misgivings; make their
- dolorous representations. Let them vanish, ineffectual; and
- return no more! They vanish after a month’s session, on this 12th
- of December, year 1788: the _last_ terrestrial Notables, not to
- reappear any other time, in the History of the World.
-
- And so, the clamour still continuing, and the Pamphlets; and
- nothing but patriotic Addresses, louder and louder, pouting in on
- us from all corners of France,—Necker himself some fortnight
- after, before the year is yet done, has to present his
- _Report_,[114] recommending at his own risk that same Double
- Representation; nay almost enjoining it, so loud is the jargon
- and eleutheromania. What dubitating, what circumambulating! These
- whole six noisy months (for it began with Brienne in July,) has
- not _Report_ followed _Report_, and one Proclamation flown in the
- teeth of the other?[115]
-
- However, that first moot-point, as we see, is now settled. As for
- the second, that of voting by Head or by Order, it unfortunately
- is still left hanging. It hangs there, we may say, between the
- Privileged Orders and the Unprivileged; as a ready-made
- battle-prize, and necessity of war, from the very first: which
- battle-prize whosoever seizes it—may thenceforth bear as
- battle-flag, with the best omens!
-
- But so, at least, by Royal Edict of the 24th of January,[116]
- does it finally, to impatient expectant France, become not only
- indubitable that National Deputies _are_ to meet, but possible
- (so far and hardly farther has the royal Regulation gone) to
- begin electing them.
-
-
- Chapter 1.4.II.
- The Election.
-
- Up, then, and be doing! The royal signal-word flies through
- France, as through vast forests the rushing of a mighty wind. At
- Parish Churches, in Townhalls, and every House of Convocation; by
- Bailliages, by Seneschalsies, in whatsoever form men convene;
- there, with confusion enough, are Primary Assemblies forming. To
- elect your Electors; such is the form prescribed: then to draw up
- your “Writ of Plaints and Grievances (_Cahier de plaintes et
- doléances_),” of which latter there is no lack.
-
- With such virtue works this Royal January Edict; as it rolls
- rapidly, in its leathern mails, along these frostbound highways,
- towards all the four winds. Like some _fiat_, or magic
- spell-word;—which such things do resemble! For always, as it
- sounds out “at the market-cross,” accompanied with trumpet-blast;
- presided by Bailli, Seneschal, or other minor Functionary, with
- beef-eaters; or, in country churches is droned forth after
- sermon, “_au prône des messes paroissales;_” and is registered,
- posted and let fly over all the world,—you behold how this
- multitudinous French People, so long simmering and buzzing in
- eager expectancy, begins heaping and shaping itself into organic
- groups. Which organic groups, again, hold smaller organic
- grouplets: the inarticulate buzzing becomes articulate speaking
- and acting. By Primary Assembly, and then by Secondary; by
- “successive elections,” and infinite elaboration and scrutiny,
- according to prescribed process—shall the genuine “Plaints and
- Grievances” be at length got to paper; shall the fit National
- Representative be at length laid hold of.
-
- How the whole People shakes itself, as if it had one life; and,
- in thousand-voiced rumour, announces that it is awake, suddenly
- out of long death-sleep, and will thenceforth sleep no more! The
- long looked-for has come at last; wondrous news, of Victory,
- Deliverance, Enfranchisement, sounds magical through every heart.
- To the proud strong man it has come; whose strong hands shall no
- more be gyved; to whom boundless unconquered continents lie
- disclosed. The weary day-drudge has heard of it; the beggar with
- his crusts moistened in tears. What! To us also has hope reached;
- down even to us? Hunger and hardship are not to be eternal? The
- bread we extorted from the rugged glebe, and, with the toil of
- our sinews, reaped and ground, and kneaded into loaves, was not
- wholly for another, then; but we also shall eat of it, and be
- filled? Glorious news (answer the prudent elders), but all-too
- unlikely!—Thus, at any rate, may the lower people, who pay no
- money-taxes and have no right to vote,[117] assiduously crowd
- round those that do; and most Halls of Assembly, within doors and
- without, seem animated enough.
-
- Paris, alone of Towns, is to have Representatives; the number of
- them twenty. Paris is divided into Sixty Districts; each of which
- (assembled in some church, or the like) is choosing two Electors.
- Official deputations pass from District to District, for all is
- inexperience as yet, and there is endless consulting. The streets
- swarm strangely with busy crowds, pacific yet restless and
- loquacious; at intervals, is seen the gleam of military muskets;
- especially about the Palais, where Parlement, once more on duty,
- sits querulous, almost tremulous.
-
- Busy is the French world! In those great days, what poorest
- speculative craftsman but will leave his workshop; if not to
- vote, yet to assist in voting? On all highways is a rustling and
- bustling. Over the wide surface of France, ever and anon, through
- the spring months, as the Sower casts his corn abroad upon the
- furrows, sounds of congregating and dispersing; of crowds in
- deliberation, acclamation, voting by ballot and by voice,—rise
- discrepant towards the ear of Heaven. To which political
- phenomena add this economical one, that Trade is stagnant, and
- also Bread getting dear; for before the rigorous winter there
- was, as we said, a rigorous summer, with drought, and on the 13th
- of July with destructive hail. What a fearful day! all cried
- while that tempest fell. Alas, the next anniversary of it will be
- a worse.[118] Under such aspects is France electing National
- Representatives.
-
- The incidents and specialties of these Elections belong not to
- Universal, but to Local or Parish History: for which reason let
- not the new troubles of Grenoble or Besancon; the bloodshed on
- the streets of Rennes, and consequent march thither of the Breton
- “Young Men” with Manifesto by their “Mothers, Sisters and
- Sweethearts;”[119] nor suchlike, detain us here. It is the same
- sad history everywhere; with superficial variations. A reinstated
- Parlement (as at Besancon), which stands astonished at this
- Behemoth of a States-General it had itself evoked, starts
- forward, with more or less audacity, to fix a thorn in its nose;
- and, alas, is instantaneously struck down, and hurled quite
- out,—for the new popular force can use not only arguments but
- brickbats! Or else, and perhaps combined with this, it is an
- order of Noblesse (as in Brittany), which will beforehand tie up
- the Third Estate, that it harm not the old privileges. In which
- act of tying up, never so skilfully set about, there is likewise
- no possibility of prospering; but the Behemoth-Briareus snaps
- your cords like green rushes. Tie up? Alas, Messieurs! And then,
- as for your chivalry rapiers, valour and wager-of-battle, think
- one moment, how can that answer? The plebeian heart too has red
- life in it, which changes not to paleness at glance even of you;
- and “the six hundred Breton gentlemen assembled in arms, for
- seventy-two hours, in the Cordeliers’ Cloister, at Rennes,”—have
- to come out again, _wiser_ than they entered. For the Nantes
- Youth, the Angers Youth, all Brittany was astir; “mothers,
- sisters and sweethearts” shrieking after them, _March!_ The
- Breton Noblesse must even let the mad world have its way.[120]
-
- In other Provinces, the Noblesse, with equal goodwill, finds it
- better to stick to Protests, to well-redacted “_Cahiers_ of
- grievances,” and satirical writings and speeches. Such is
- partially their course in Provence; whither indeed Gabriel Honoré
- Riquetti Comte de Mirabeau has rushed down from Paris, to speak a
- word in season. In Provence, the Privileged, backed by their Aix
- Parlement, discover that such novelties, enjoined though they be
- by Royal Edict, tend to National detriment; and what is still
- more indisputable, “to impair the dignity of the Noblesse.”
- Whereupon Mirabeau protesting aloud, this same Noblesse, amid
- huge tumult within doors and without, flatly determines to expel
- him from their Assembly. No other method, not even that of
- successive duels, would answer with him, the obstreperous
- fierce-glaring man. Expelled he accordingly is.
-
- “In all countries, in all times,” exclaims he departing, “the
- Aristocrats have implacably pursued every friend of the People;
- and with tenfold implacability, if such a one were himself born
- of the Aristocracy. It was thus that the last of the Gracchi
- perished, by the hands of the Patricians. But he, being struck
- with the mortal stab, flung dust towards heaven, and called on
- the Avenging Deities; and from this dust there was born
- Marius,—Marius not so illustrious for exterminating the Cimbri,
- as for overturning in Rome the tyranny of the Nobles.”[121]
- Casting up _which_ new curious handful of dust (through the
- Printing-press), to breed what it can and may, Mirabeau stalks
- forth into the Third Estate.
-
- That he now, to ingratiate himself with this Third Estate,
- “opened a cloth-shop in Marseilles,” and for moments became a
- furnishing tailor, or even the fable that he did so, is to us
- always among the pleasant memorabilities of this era. Stranger
- Clothier never wielded the ell-wand, and rent webs for men, or
- fractional parts of men. The _Fils Adoptif_ is indignant at such
- disparaging fable,[122]—which nevertheless was widely believed in
- those days.[123] But indeed, if Achilles, in the heroic ages,
- killed mutton, why should not Mirabeau, in the unheroic ones,
- measure broadcloth?
-
- More authentic are his triumph-progresses through that disturbed
- district, with mob jubilee, flaming torches, “windows hired for
- two louis,” and voluntary guard of a hundred men. He is Deputy
- Elect, both of Aix and of Marseilles; but will prefer Aix. He has
- opened his far-sounding voice, the depths of his far-sounding
- soul; he can quell (such virtue is in a spoken word) the
- pride-tumults of the rich, the hunger-tumults of the poor; and
- wild multitudes move under him, as under the moon do billows of
- the sea: he has become a world compeller, and ruler over men.
-
- One other incident and specialty we note; with how different an
- interest! It is of the Parlement of Paris; which starts forward,
- like the others (only with less audacity, seeing better how it
- lay), to nose-ring that Behemoth of a States-General. Worthy
- Doctor Guillotin, respectable practitioner in Paris, has drawn up
- his little “Plan of a _Cahier of doléances_;”—as had he not,
- having the wish and gift, the clearest liberty to do? He is
- getting the people to sign it; whereupon the surly Parlement
- summons him to give an account of himself. He goes; but with all
- Paris at his heels; which floods the outer courts, and copiously
- signs the _Cahier_ even there, while the Doctor is giving account
- of himself within! The Parlement cannot too soon dismiss
- Guillotin, with compliments; to be borne home shoulder-high.[124]
- This respectable Guillotin we hope to behold once more, and
- perhaps only once; the Parlement not even once, but let it be
- engulphed unseen by us.
-
- Meanwhile such things, cheering as they are, tend little to cheer
- the national creditor, or indeed the creditor of any kind. In the
- midst of universal portentous doubt, what certainty can seem so
- certain as money in the purse, and the wisdom of keeping it
- there? Trading Speculation, Commerce of all kinds, has as far as
- possible come to a dead pause; and the hand of the industrious
- lies idle in his bosom. Frightful enough, when now the rigour of
- seasons has also done its part, and to scarcity of work is added
- scarcity of food! In the opening spring, there come rumours of
- forestalment, there come King’s Edicts, Petitions of bakers
- against millers; and at length, in the month of April—troops of
- ragged Lackalls, and fierce cries of starvation! These are the
- thrice-famed _Brigands:_ an actual existing quotity of persons:
- who, long reflected and reverberated through so many millions of
- heads, as in concave multiplying mirrors, become a whole Brigand
- World; and, like a kind of Supernatural Machinery wondrously move
- the Epos of the Revolution. The Brigands are here: the Brigands
- are there; the Brigands are coming! Not otherwise sounded the
- clang of Phoebus Apollo’s silver bow, scattering pestilence and
- pale terror; for this clang too was of the imagination;
- preternatural; and it too walked in formless immeasurability,
- _having made itself like to the Night_ (νυκτὶ ἐοικώς.)!
-
- But remark at least, for the first time, the singular empire of
- Suspicion, in those lands, in those days. If poor famishing men
- shall, prior to death, gather in groups and crowds, as the poor
- fieldfares and plovers do in bitter weather, were it but that
- they may chirp mournfully together, and misery look in the eyes
- of misery; if famishing men (what famishing fieldfares cannot do)
- should discover, once congregated, that they need not die while
- food is in the land, since they are many, and with empty wallets
- have right hands: in all this, what need were there of
- Preternatural Machinery? To most people none; but not to French
- people, in a time of Revolution. These Brigands (as Turgot’s also
- were, fourteen years ago) have all been set on; enlisted, though
- without tuck of drum,—by Aristocrats, by Democrats, by D’Orléans,
- D’Artois, and enemies of the public weal. Nay Historians, to this
- day, will prove it by one argument: these Brigands pretending to
- have no victual, nevertheless contrive to drink, nay, have been
- seen drunk.[125] An unexampled fact! But on the whole, may we not
- predict that a people, with such a width of Credulity and of
- Incredulity (the proper union of which makes Suspicion, and
- indeed unreason generally), will see Shapes enough of Immortals
- fighting in its battle-ranks, and never want for Epical
- Machinery?
-
- Be this as it may, the Brigands are clearly got to Paris, in
- considerable multitudes:[126] with sallow faces, lank hair (the
- true enthusiast complexion), with sooty rags; and also with large
- clubs, which they smite angrily against the pavement! These
- mingle in the Election tumult; would fain sign Guillotin’s
- _Cahier_, or any _Cahier_ or Petition whatsoever, could they but
- write. Their enthusiast complexion, the smiting of their sticks
- bodes little good to any one; least of all to rich
- master-manufacturers of the Suburb Saint-Antoine, with whose
- workmen they consort.
-
-
- Chapter 1.4.III.
- Grown Electric.
-
- But now also National Deputies from all ends of France are in
- Paris, with their commissions, what they call pouvoirs, or
- powers, in their pockets; inquiring, consulting; looking out for
- lodgings at Versailles. The States-General shall open there, if
- not on the First, then surely on the Fourth of May, in grand
- procession and gala. The _Salle des Menus_ is all
- new-carpentered, bedizened for them; their very costume has been
- fixed; a grand controversy which there was, as to “slouch-hats or
- slouched-hats,” for the Commons Deputies, has got as good as
- adjusted. Ever new strangers arrive; loungers, miscellaneous
- persons, officers on furlough,—as the worthy Captain Dampmartin,
- whom we hope to be acquainted with: these also, from all regions,
- have repaired hither, to see what is toward. Our Paris
- Committees, of the Sixty Districts, are busier than ever; it is
- now too clear, the Paris Elections will be late.
-
- On Monday, the 27th of April, Astronomer Bailly notices that the
- Sieur Réveillon is not at his post. The Sieur Réveillon,
- “extensive Paper Manufacturer of the Rue St. Antoine;” he,
- commonly so punctual, is absent from the Electoral Committee;—and
- even will never reappear there. In those “immense Magazines of
- velvet paper” has aught befallen? Alas, yes! Alas, it is no
- Montgolfier rising there today; but Drudgery, Rascality and the
- Suburb that is rising! Was the Sieur Réveillon, himself once a
- journeyman, heard to say that “a journeyman might live handsomely
- on fifteen _sous_ a-day?” Some sevenpence halfpenny: ’tis a
- slender sum! Or was he only thought, and believed, to be heard
- saying it? By this long chafing and friction it would appear the
- National temper has got _electric_.
-
- Down in those dark dens, in those dark heads and hungry hearts,
- who knows in what strange figure the new Political Evangel may
- have shaped itself; what miraculous “Communion of Drudges” may be
- getting formed! Enough: grim individuals, soon waxing to grim
- multitudes, and other multitudes crowding to see, beset that
- Paper-Warehouse; demonstrate, in loud ungrammatical language
- (addressed to the passions too), the insufficiency of sevenpence
- halfpenny a-day. The City-watch cannot dissipate them; broils
- arise and bellowings; Réveillon, at his wits’ end, entreats the
- Populace, entreats the authorities. Besenval, now in active
- command, Commandant of Paris, does, towards evening, to
- Réveillon’s earnest prayer, send some thirty Gardes Françaises.
- These clear the street, happily without firing; and take post
- there for the night in hope that it may be all over.[127]
-
- Not so: on the morrow it is far worse. Saint-Antoine has arisen
- anew, grimmer than ever;—reinforced by the unknown Tatterdemalion
- Figures, with their enthusiast complexion and large sticks. The
- City, through all streets, is flowing thitherward to see: “two
- cartloads of paving-stones, that happened to pass that way” have
- been seized as a visible godsend. Another detachment of Gardes
- Françaises must be sent; Besenval and the Colonel taking earnest
- counsel. Then still another; they hardly, with bayonets and
- menace of bullets, penetrate to the spot. What a sight! A street
- choked up, with lumber, tumult and the endless press of men. A
- Paper-Warehouse eviscerated by axe and fire: mad din of Revolt;
- musket-volleys responded to by yells, by miscellaneous missiles;
- by tiles raining from roof and window,—tiles, execrations and
- slain men!
-
- The Gardes Françaises like it not, but have to persevere. All day
- it continues, slackening and rallying; the sun is sinking, and
- Saint-Antoine has not yielded. The City flies hither and thither:
- alas, the sound of that musket-volleying booms into the far
- dining-rooms of the Chaussée d’Antin; alters the tone of the
- dinner-gossip there. Captain Dampmartin leaves his wine; goes out
- with a friend or two, to see the fighting. Unwashed men growl on
- him, with murmurs of ‘_À bas les Aristocrates_ (Down with the
- Aristocrats);’ and insult the cross of St. Louis? They elbow him,
- and hustle him; but do not pick his pocket;—as indeed at
- Réveillon’s too there was not the slightest stealing.[128]
-
- At fall of night, as the thing will not end, Besenval takes his
- resolution: orders out the _Gardes Suisses_ with two pieces of
- artillery. The Swiss Guards shall proceed thither; summon that
- rabble to depart, in the King’s name. If disobeyed, they shall
- load their artillery with grape-shot, visibly to the general eye;
- shall again summon; if again disobeyed, fire,—and keep firing
- “till the last man” be in this manner blasted off, and the street
- clear. With which spirited resolution, as might have been hoped,
- the business is got ended. At sight of the lit matches, of the
- foreign red-coated Switzers, Saint-Antoine dissipates; hastily,
- in the shades of dusk. There is an encumbered street; there are
- “from four to five hundred” dead men. Unfortunate Réveillon has
- found shelter in the Bastille; does therefrom, safe behind stone
- bulwarks, issue, plaint, protestation, explanation, for the next
- month. Bold Besenval has thanks from all the respectable Parisian
- classes; but finds no special notice taken of him at
- Versailles,—a thing the man of true worth is used to.[129]
-
- But how it originated, this fierce electric sputter and
- explosion? From D’Orléans! cries the Court-party: he, with his
- gold, enlisted these Brigands,—surely in some surprising manner,
- without sound of drum: he raked them in hither, from all corners;
- to ferment and take fire; evil is his good. From the Court! cries
- enlightened Patriotism: it is the cursed gold and wiles of
- Aristocrats that enlisted them; set them upon ruining an innocent
- Sieur Réveillon; to frighten the faint, and disgust men with the
- career of Freedom.
-
- Besenval, with reluctance, concludes that it came from “the
- English, our natural enemies.” Or, alas, might not one rather
- attribute it to Diana in the shape of Hunger? To some twin
- _Dioscuri_, OPPRESSION and REVENGE; so often seen in the battles
- of men? Poor Lackalls, all betoiled, besoiled, encrusted into dim
- defacement; into whom nevertheless the breath of the Almighty has
- breathed a living soul! To them it is clear only that
- eleutheromaniac Philosophism has yet baked no bread; that
- Patrioti Committee-men will level down to their own level, and no
- lower. Brigands, or whatever they might be, it was bitter earnest
- with them. They bury their dead with the title of _Défenseurs de
- la Patrie_, Martyrs of the good Cause.
-
- Or shall we say: Insurrection has now served its Apprenticeship;
- and this was its proof-stroke, and no inconclusive one? Its next
- will be a master-stroke; announcing indisputable Mastership to a
- whole astonished world. Let that rock-fortress, Tyranny’s
- stronghold, which they name _Bastille_, or _Building_, as if
- there were no other building,—look to its guns!
-
- But, in such wise, with primary and secondary Assemblies, and
- _Cahiers_ of Grievances; with motions, congregations of all
- kinds; with much thunder of froth-eloquence, and at last with
- thunder of platoon-musquetry,—does agitated France accomplish its
- Elections. With confused winnowing and sifting, in this rather
- tumultuous manner, it has now (all except some remnants of Paris)
- sifted out the true wheat-grains of National Deputies, Twelve
- Hundred and Fourteen in number; and will forthwith open its
- States-General.
-
-
- Chapter 1.4.IV.
- The Procession.
-
- On the first Saturday of May, it is gala at Versailles; and
- Monday, fourth of the month, is to be a still greater day. The
- Deputies have mostly got thither, and sought out lodgings; and
- are now successively, in long well-ushered files, kissing the
- hand of Majesty in the Château. Supreme Usher de Brézé does not
- give the highest satisfaction: we cannot but observe that in
- ushering Noblesse or Clergy into the anointed Presence, he
- liberally opens _both_ his folding-doors; and on the other hand,
- for members of the Third Estate opens only one! However, there is
- room to enter; Majesty has smiles for all.
-
- The good Louis welcomes his Honourable Members, with smiles of
- hope. He has prepared for them the Hall of _Menus_, the largest
- near him; and often surveyed the workmen as they went on. A
- spacious Hall: with raised platform for Throne, Court and
- Blood-royal; space for six hundred Commons Deputies in front; for
- half as many Clergy on this hand, and half as many Noblesse on
- that. It has lofty galleries; wherefrom dames of honour,
- splendent in _gaze d’or;_ foreign Diplomacies, and other
- gilt-edged white-frilled individuals to the number of two
- thousand,—may sit and look. Broad passages flow through it; and,
- outside the inner wall, all round it. There are committee-rooms,
- guard-rooms, robing-rooms: really a noble Hall; where upholstery,
- aided by the subject fine-arts, has done its best; and crimson
- tasseled cloths, and emblematic _fleurs-de-lys_ are not wanting.
-
- The Hall is ready: the very costume, as we said, has been
- settled; and the Commons are not to wear that hated slouch-hat
- (_chapeau clabaud_), but one not quite so slouched (_chapeau
- rabattu_). As for their manner of _working_, when all dressed:
- for their “voting by head or by order” and the rest,—this, which
- it were perhaps still time to settle, and in few hours will be no
- longer time, remains unsettled; hangs dubious in the breast of
- Twelve Hundred men.
-
- But now finally the Sun, on Monday the 4th of May, has
- risen;—unconcerned, as if it were no special day. And yet, as his
- first rays could strike music from the Memnon’s Statue on the
- Nile, what tones were these, so thrilling, tremulous of
- preparation and foreboding, which he awoke in every bosom at
- Versailles! Huge Paris, in all conceivable and inconceivable
- vehicles, is pouring itself forth; from each Town and Village
- come subsidiary rills; Versailles is a very sea of men. But above
- all, from the Church of St. Louis to the Church of Notre-Dame:
- one vast suspended-billow of Life,—with _spray_ scattered even to
- the chimney-pots! For on chimney-tops too, as over the roofs, and
- up thitherwards on every lamp-iron, sign-post, breakneck coign of
- vantage, sits patriotic Courage; and every window bursts with
- patriotic Beauty: for the Deputies are gathering at St. Louis
- Church; to march in procession to Notre-Dame, and hear sermon.
-
- Yes, friends, ye may sit and look: boldly or in thought, all
- France, and all Europe, may sit and look; for it is a day like
- few others. Oh, one might weep like Xerxes:—So many serried rows
- sit perched there; like winged creatures, alighted out of Heaven:
- all these, and so many more that follow them, shall have wholly
- fled aloft again, vanishing into the blue Deep; and the memory of
- this day still be fresh. It is the baptism-day of Democracy; sick
- Time has given it birth, the numbered months being run. The
- extreme-unction day of Feudalism! A superannuated System of
- Society, decrepit with toils (for has it not done much; produced
- you, and what ye have and know!)—and with thefts and brawls,
- named glorious-victories; and with profligacies, sensualities,
- and on the whole with dotage and senility,—is now to die: and so,
- with death-throes and birth-throes, a new one is to be born. What
- a work, O Earth and Heavens, what a work! Battles and bloodshed,
- September Massacres, Bridges of Lodi, retreats of Moscow,
- Waterloos, Peterloos, Tenpound Franchises, Tarbarrels and
- Guillotines;—and from this present date, if one might prophesy,
- some two centuries of it still to fight! Two centuries; hardly
- less; before Democracy go through its due, most baleful, stages
- of _Quack_ocracy; and a pestilential World be burnt up, and have
- begun to grow green and young again.
-
- Rejoice nevertheless, ye Versailles multitudes; to you, from whom
- all this is hid, and glorious end of it is visible. This day,
- sentence of death is pronounced on Shams; judgment of
- resuscitation, were it but far off, is pronounced on Realities.
- This day it is declared aloud, as with a Doom-trumpet, that a
- _Lie is unbelievable_. Believe that, stand by that, if more there
- be not; and let what thing or things soever will follow it
- follow. “Ye can no other; God be your help!” So spake a greater
- than any of you; opening _his_ Chapter of World-History.
-
- Behold, however! The doors of St. Louis Church flung wide; and
- the Procession of Processions advancing towards Notre-Dame!
- Shouts rend the air; one shout, at which Grecian birds might drop
- dead. It is indeed a stately, solemn sight. The Elected of
- France, and then the Court of France; they are marshalled and
- march there, all in prescribed place and costume. Our Commons “in
- plain black mantle and white cravat;” Noblesse, in gold-worked,
- bright-dyed cloaks of velvet, resplendent, rustling with laces,
- waving with plumes; the Clergy in rochet, alb, or other best
- _pontificalibus:_ lastly comes the King himself, and King’s
- Household, also in their brightest blaze of pomp,—their brightest
- and final one. Some Fourteen Hundred Men blown together from all
- winds, on the deepest errand.
-
- Yes, in that silent marching mass there lies Futurity enough. No
- symbolic Ark, like the old Hebrews, do these men bear: yet with
- them too is a Covenant; they too preside at a new Era in the
- History of Men. The whole Future is there, and Destiny
- dim-brooding over it; in the hearts and unshaped thoughts of
- these men, it lies illegible, inevitable. Singular to think:
- _they_ have it in them; yet not they, not mortal, only the Eye
- above can read it,—as it shall unfold itself, in fire and
- thunder, of siege, and field-artillery; in the rustling of
- battle-banners, the tramp of hosts, in the glow of burning
- cities, the shriek of strangled nations! Such things lie hidden,
- safe-wrapt in this Fourth day of May;—say rather, had lain in
- some other unknown day, of which this latter is the public fruit
- and outcome. As indeed what wonders lie in every Day,—had we the
- sight, as happily we have not, to decipher it: for is not every
- meanest Day “the conflux of two Eternities!”
-
- Meanwhile, suppose we too, good Reader, should, as now without
- miracle Muse Clio enables us—take _our_ station also on some
- coign of vantage; and glance momentarily over this Procession,
- and this Life-sea; with far other eyes than the rest do, namely
- with prophetic? We can mount, and stand there, without fear of
- falling.
-
- As for the Life-sea, or onlooking unnumbered Multitude, it is
- unfortunately all-too dim. Yet as we gaze fixedly, do not
- nameless Figures not a few, which shall not always be nameless,
- disclose themselves; visible or presumable there! Young Baroness
- de Staël—she evidently looks from a window; among older
- honourable women.[130] Her father is Minister, and one of the
- gala personages; to his own eyes the chief one. Young spiritual
- Amazon, thy rest is not there; nor thy loved Father’s: “as
- Malebranche saw all things in God, so M. Necker sees all things
- in Necker,”—a theorem that will not hold.
-
- But where is the brown-locked, light-behaved, fire-hearted
- Demoiselle Théroigne? Brown eloquent Beauty; who, with thy winged
- words and glances, shalt thrill rough bosoms, whole steel
- battalions, and persuade an Austrian Kaiser,—pike and helm lie
- provided for thee in due season; and, alas, also strait-waistcoat
- and long lodging in the Salpêtrière! Better hadst thou staid in
- native Luxemburg, and been the mother of some brave man’s
- children: but it was not thy task, it was not thy lot.
-
- Of the rougher sex how, without tongue, or hundred tongues, of
- iron, enumerate the notabilities! Has not Marquis Valadi hastily
- quitted his quaker broadbrim; his Pythagorean Greek in Wapping,
- and the city of Glasgow?[131] De Morande from his _Courrier de
- l’Europe;_ Linguet from his _Annales_, they looked eager through
- the London fog, and became Ex-Editors,—that they might feed the
- guillotine, and have their due. Does Louvet (of _Faublas_) stand
- a-tiptoe? And Brissot, hight De Warville, friend of the Blacks?
- He, with Marquis Condorcet, and Clavière the Genevese “have
- created the _Moniteur_ Newspaper,” or are about creating it. Able
- Editors must give account of such a day.
-
- Or seest thou with any distinctness, low down probably, not in
- places of honour, a Stanislas Maillard, riding-tipstaff
- (_huissier à cheval_) of the Châtelet; one of the shiftiest of
- men? A Captain Hulin of Geneva, Captain Elie of the Queen’s
- Regiment; both with an air of half-pay? Jourdan, with
- tile-coloured whiskers, not yet with tile-beard; an unjust dealer
- in mules? He shall be, in a few months, Jourdan the Headsman, and
- have other work.
-
- Surely also, in some place not of honour, stands or sprawls up
- querulous, that he too, though short, may see,—one squalidest
- bleared mortal, redolent of soot and horse-drugs: Jean Paul Marat
- of Neuchâtel! O Marat, Renovator of Human Science, Lecturer on
- Optics; O thou remarkablest Horseleech, once in D’Artois’
- Stables,—as thy bleared soul looks forth, through thy bleared,
- dull-acrid, wo-stricken face, what sees it in all this? Any
- faintest light of hope; like dayspring after Nova-Zembla night?
- Or is it but _blue_ sulphur-light, and spectres; woe, suspicion,
- revenge without end?
-
- Of Draper Lecointre, how he shut his cloth-shop hard by, and
- stepped forth, one need hardly speak. Nor of Santerre, the
- sonorous Brewer from the Faubourg St. Antoine. Two other Figures,
- and only two, we signalise there. The huge, brawny, Figure;
- through whose black brows, and rude flattened face (_figure
- ecrasée_), there looks a waste energy as of Hercules not yet
- furibund,—he is an esurient, unprovided Advocate; Danton by name:
- him mark. Then that other, his slight-built comrade and
- craft-brother; he with the long curling locks; with the face of
- dingy blackguardism, wondrously irradiated with genius, as if a
- naphtha-lamp burnt within it: that Figure is Camille Desmoulins.
- A fellow of infinite shrewdness, wit, nay humour; one of the
- sprightliest clearest souls in all these millions. Thou poor
- Camille, say of thee what they may, it were but falsehood to
- pretend one did not almost love thee, thou headlong
- lightly-sparkling man! But the brawny, not yet furibund Figure,
- we say, is Jacques Danton; a name that shall be “tolerably known
- in the Revolution.” He is President of the electoral Cordeliers
- District at Paris, or about to be it; and shall open his lungs of
- brass.
-
- We dwell no longer on the mixed shouting Multitude: for now,
- behold, the Commons Deputies are at hand!
-
- Which of these Six Hundred individuals, in plain white cravat,
- that have come up to regenerate France, might one guess would
- become their _king?_ For a king or leader they, as all bodies of
- men, must have: be their work what it may, there is one man there
- who, by character, faculty, position, is fittest of all to do it;
- that man, as future not yet elected king, walks there among the
- rest. He with the thick black locks, will it be? With the _hure_,
- as himself calls it, or black _boar’s-head_, fit to be “shaken”
- as a senatorial portent? Through whose shaggy beetle-brows, and
- rough-hewn, seamed, carbuncled face, there look natural ugliness,
- small-pox, incontinence, bankruptcy,—and burning fire of genius;
- like comet-fire glaring fuliginous through murkiest confusions?
- It is _Gabriel Honoré Riquetti de Mirabeau_, the world-compeller;
- man-ruling Deputy of Aix! According to the Baroness de Staël, he
- steps proudly along, though looked at askance here, and shakes
- his black _chevelure_, or lion’s-mane; as if prophetic of great
- deeds.
-
- Yes, Reader, that is the Type-Frenchman of this epoch; as
- Voltaire was of the last. He is French in his aspirations,
- acquisitions, in his virtues, in his vices; perhaps more French
- than any other man;—and intrinsically such a mass of manhood too.
- Mark him well. The National Assembly were all different without
- that one; nay, he might say with the old Despot: ‘The National
- Assembly? I am that.’
-
- Of a southern climate, of wild southern blood: for the Riquettis,
- or Arighettis, had to fly from Florence and the Guelfs, long
- centuries ago, and settled in Provence; where from generation to
- generation they have ever approved themselves a peculiar kindred:
- irascible, indomitable, sharp-cutting, true, like the steel they
- wore; of an intensity and activity that sometimes verged towards
- madness, yet did not reach it. One ancient Riquetti, in mad
- fulfilment of a mad vow, chains two Mountains together; and the
- chain, with its “iron star of five rays,” is still to be seen.
- May not a modern Riquetti unchain so much, and set it
- drifting,—which also shall be seen?
-
- Destiny has work for that swart burly-headed Mirabeau; Destiny
- has watched over him, prepared him from afar. Did not his
- Grandfather, stout _Col-d’Argent_ (Silver-Stock, so they named
- him), shattered and slashed by seven-and-twenty wounds in one
- fell day lie sunk together on the Bridge at Casano; while Prince
- Eugene’s cavalry galloped and regalloped over him,—only the
- flying sergeant had thrown a camp-kettle over that loved head;
- and Vendôme, dropping his spyglass, moaned out, “Mirabeau is
- _dead_, then!” Nevertheless he was not dead: he awoke to breathe,
- and miraculous surgery;—for Gabriel was yet to be. With his
- silver _stock_ he kept his scarred head erect, through long
- years; and wedded; and produced tough Marquis Victor, the _Friend
- of Men_. Whereby at last in the appointed year 1749, this
- long-expected rough-hewn Gabriel Honoré did likewise see the
- light: roughest lion’s-whelp ever littered of that rough breed.
- How the old lion (for our old Marquis too was lion-like, most
- unconquerable, kingly-genial, most perverse) gazed wonderingly on
- his offspring; and determined to train him as no lion had yet
- been! It is in vain, O Marquis! This cub, though thou slay him
- and flay him, will not learn to draw in dogcart of Political
- Economy, and be a _Friend of Men;_ he will not be Thou, must and
- will be Himself, another than Thou. Divorce lawsuits, “whole
- family save one in prison, and three-score _Lettres-de-Cachet_”
- for thy own sole use, do but astonish the world.
-
- Our Luckless Gabriel, sinned against and sinning, has been in the
- Isle of Rhe, and heard the Atlantic from his tower; in the Castle
- of If, and heard the Mediterranean at Marseilles. He has been in
- the Fortress of Joux; and forty-two months, with hardly clothing
- to his back, in the Dungeon of Vincennes;—all by
- _Lettre-de-Cachet_, from his lion father. He has been in
- Pontarlier Jails (self-constituted prisoner); was noticed fording
- estuaries of the sea (at low water), in flight from the face of
- men. He has pleaded before Aix Parlements (to get back his wife);
- the public gathering on roofs, to see since they could not hear:
- ‘the clatter-teeth (_claque-dents_)!’ snarles singular old
- Mirabeau; discerning in such admired forensic eloquence nothing
- but two clattering jaw-bones, and a head vacant, sonorous, of the
- drum species.
-
- But as for Gabriel Honoré, in these strange wayfarings, what has
- he not seen and tried! From drill-sergeants, to prime-ministers,
- to foreign and domestic booksellers, all manner of men he has
- seen. All manner of men he has gained; for at bottom it is a
- social, loving heart, that wild unconquerable one:—more
- especially all manner of women. From the Archer’s Daughter at
- Saintes to that fair young Sophie Madame Monnier, whom he could
- not but “steal,” and be beheaded for—in effigy! For indeed hardly
- since the Arabian Prophet lay dead to Ali’s admiration, was there
- seen such a Love-hero, with the strength of thirty men. In War,
- again, he has helped to conquer Corsica; fought duels, irregular
- brawls; horsewhipped calumnious barons. In Literature, he has
- written on _Despotism_, on _Lettres-de-Cachet;_ Erotics
- Sapphic-Werterean, Obscenities, Profanities; Books on the
- _Prussian Monarchy_, on _Cagliostro_, on _Calonne_, on _the Water
- Companies of Paris:_—each book comparable, we will say, to a
- bituminous alarum-fire; huge, smoky, sudden! The firepan, the
- kindling, the bitumen were his own; but the lumber, of rags, old
- wood and nameless combustible rubbish (for all is fuel to him),
- was gathered from huckster, and ass-panniers, of every
- description under heaven. Whereby, indeed, hucksters enough have
- been heard to exclaim: Out upon it, the fire is _mine!_
-
- Nay, consider it more generally, seldom had man such a talent for
- borrowing. The idea, the faculty of another man he can make his;
- the man himself he can make his. ‘All reflex and echo (_tout de
- reflet et de réverbère_)!’ snarls old Mirabeau, who can see, but
- will not. Crabbed old Friend of Men! it is his sociality, his
- aggregative nature; and will now be the quality of all for him.
- In that forty-years “struggle against despotism,” he has gained
- the glorious faculty of _self-help_, and yet not lost the
- glorious natural gift of _fellowship_, of being helped. Rare
- union! This man can live self-sufficing—yet lives also in the
- life of other men; can make men love him, work with him: a born
- king of men!
-
- But consider further how, as the old Marquis still snarls, he has
- ‘made away with (_humé_, swallowed) all _Formulas;_’—a fact
- which, if we meditate it, will in these days mean much. This is
- no man of system, then; he is only a man of instincts and
- insights. A man nevertheless who will glare fiercely on any
- object; and see through it, and conquer it: for he has intellect,
- he has will, force beyond other men. A man not with
- _logic-spectacles;_ but with an _eye!_ Unhappily without
- Decalogue, moral Code or Theorem of any fixed sort; yet not
- without a strong living Soul in him, and Sincerity there: a
- Reality, not an Artificiality, not a Sham! And so he, having
- struggled “forty years against despotism,” and “made away with
- all formulas,” shall now become the spokesman of a Nation bent to
- do the same. For is it not precisely the struggle of France also
- to cast off despotism; to make away with _her_ old
- formulas,—having found them naught, worn out, far from the
- reality? She will make away with _such_ formulas;—and even go
- _bare_, if need be, till she have found new ones.
-
- Towards such work, in such manner, marches he, this singular
- Riquetti Mirabeau. In fiery rough figure, with black Samson-locks
- under the slouch-hat, he steps along there. A fiery fuliginous
- mass, which could not be choked and smothered, but would fill all
- France with smoke. And now it has got _air;_ it will burn its
- whole substance, its whole smoke-atmosphere too, and fill all
- France with flame. Strange lot! Forty years of that smouldering,
- with foul fire-damp and vapour enough, then victory over
- that;—and like a burning mountain he blazes heaven-high; and, for
- twenty-three resplendent months, pours out, in flame and molten
- fire-torrents, all that is in him, the Pharos and Wonder-sign of
- an amazed Europe;—and then lies hollow, cold forever! Pass on,
- thou questionable Gabriel Honoré, the greatest of them all: in
- the whole National Deputies, in the whole Nation, there is none
- like and none second to thee.
-
- But now if Mirabeau is the greatest, who of these Six Hundred may
- be the meanest? Shall we say, that anxious, slight,
- ineffectual-looking man, under thirty, in spectacles; his eyes
- (were the glasses off) troubled, careful; with upturned face,
- snuffing dimly the uncertain future-time; complexion of a
- multiplex atrabiliar colour, the final shade of which may be the
- pale sea-green.[132] That greenish-coloured (_verdâtre_)
- individual is an Advocate of Arras; his name is _Maximilien
- Robespierre_. The son of an Advocate; his father founded
- mason-lodges under Charles Edward, the English Prince or
- Pretender. Maximilien the first-born was thriftily educated; he
- had brisk Camille Desmoulins for schoolmate in the College of
- Louis le Grand, at Paris. But he begged our famed
- Necklace-Cardinal, Rohan, the patron, to let him depart thence,
- and resign in favour of a younger brother. The strict-minded Max
- departed; home to paternal Arras; and even had a Law-case there
- and pleaded, not unsuccessfully, “in favour of the first Franklin
- thunder-rod.” With a strict painful mind, an understanding small
- but clear and ready, he grew in favour with official persons, who
- could foresee in him an excellent man of business, happily quite
- free from genius. The Bishop, therefore, taking counsel, appoints
- him Judge of his diocese; and he faithfully does justice to the
- people: till behold, one day, a culprit comes whose crime merits
- hanging; and the strict-minded Max must abdicate, for his
- conscience will not permit the dooming of any son of Adam to die.
- A strict-minded, strait-laced man! A man unfit for Revolutions?
- Whose small soul, transparent wholesome-looking as small ale,
- could by no chance ferment into virulent _alegar_,—the mother of
- ever new alegar; till all France were grown acetous virulent? We
- shall see.
-
- Between which two extremes of grandest and meanest, so many grand
- and mean roll on, towards their several destinies, in that
- Procession! There is _Cazalès_, the learned young soldier; who
- shall become the eloquent orator of Royalism, and earn the shadow
- of a name. Experienced _Mounier_, experienced _Malouet;_ whose
- Presidential Parlementary experience the stream of things shall
- soon leave stranded. A Pétion has left his gown and briefs at
- Chartres for a stormier sort of pleading; has not forgotten his
- violin, being fond of music. His hair is grizzled, though he is
- still young: convictions, beliefs, placid-unalterable are in that
- man; not hindmost of them, belief in himself. A
- Protestant-clerical _Rabaut-St.-Etienne_, a slender young
- eloquent and vehement _Barnave_, will help to regenerate France.
- There are so many of them young. Till thirty the Spartans did not
- suffer a man to marry: but how many men here under thirty; coming
- to produce not one sufficient citizen, but a nation and a world
- of such! The old to heal up rents; the young to remove
- rubbish:—which latter, is it not, indeed, the task here?
-
- Dim, formless from this distance, yet authentically there, thou
- noticest the Deputies from Nantes? To us mere clothes-screens,
- with slouch-hat and cloak, but bearing in their pocket a _Cahier_
- of _doléances_ with this singular clause, and more such in it:
- “That the master wigmakers of Nantes be not troubled with new
- gild-brethren, the actually existing number of ninety-two being
- more than sufficient!”[133] The Rennes people have elected Farmer
- _Gérard_, “a man of natural sense and rectitude, without any
- learning.” He walks there, with solid step; unique, “in his
- rustic farmer-clothes;” which he will wear always; careless of
- short-cloaks and costumes. The name Gérard, or “_Père Gérard_,
- Father Gérard,” as they please to call him, will fly far; borne
- about in endless banter; in Royalist satires, in Republican
- didactic Almanacks.[134] As for the man Gerard, being asked once,
- what he did, after trial of it, candidly think of this
- Parlementary work,—‘I think,’ answered he, ‘that there are a good
- many scoundrels among us.’ so walks Father Gérard; solid in his
- thick shoes, whithersoever bound.
-
- And worthy _Doctor Guillotin_, whom we hoped to behold one other
- time? If not here, the Doctor should be here, and we see him with
- the eye of prophecy: for indeed the Parisian Deputies are all a
- little late. Singular Guillotin, respectable practitioner: doomed
- by a satiric destiny to the strangest immortal glory that ever
- kept obscure mortal from his resting-place, the bosom of
- oblivion! Guillotin can improve the ventilation of the Hall; in
- all cases of medical police and _hygiène_ be a present aid: but,
- greater far, he can produce his “Report on the Penal Code;” and
- reveal therein a cunningly devised Beheading Machine, which shall
- become famous and world-famous. This is the product of
- Guillotin’s endeavours, gained not without meditation and
- reading; which product popular gratitude or levity christens by a
- feminine derivative name, as if it were his daughter: _La
- Guillotine!_ ‘With my machine, Messieurs, I whisk off your head
- (_vous fais sauter la tête_) in a twinkling, and you have no
- pain;’—whereat they all laugh.[135] Unfortunate Doctor! For
- two-and-twenty years he, unguillotined, shall hear nothing but
- guillotine, see nothing but guillotine; then dying, shall through
- long centuries wander, as it were, a disconsolate ghost, on the
- wrong side of Styx and Lethe; his name like to outlive Cæsar’s.
-
- See _Bailly_, likewise of Paris, time-honoured Historian of
- Astronomy Ancient and Modern. Poor Bailly, how thy serenely
- beautiful Philosophising, with its soft moonshiny clearness and
- thinness, ends in foul thick confusion—of Presidency, Mayorship,
- diplomatic Officiality, rabid Triviality, and the throat of
- everlasting Darkness! Far was it to descend from the heavenly
- Galaxy to the _Drapeau Rouge:_ beside that fatal dung-heap, on
- that last hell-day, thou must “tremble,” though only with cold,
- “_de froid_.” Speculation is not practice: to be weak is not so
- miserable; but to be weaker than our task. Wo the day when they
- mounted thee, a peaceable pedestrian, on that wild Hippogriff of
- a Democracy; which, spurning the firm earth, nay lashing at the
- very _stars_, no yet known Astolpho could have ridden!
-
- In the Commons Deputies there are Merchants, Artists, Men of
- Letters; three hundred and seventy-four Lawyers;[136] and at
- least one Clergyman: the _Abbé Sieyes_. Him also Paris sends,
- among its twenty. Behold him, the light thin man; cold, but
- elastic, wiry; instinct with the pride of Logic; passionless, or
- with but one passion, that of self-conceit. If indeed that can be
- called a passion, which, in its independent concentrated
- greatness, seems to have soared into transcendentalism; and to
- sit there with a kind of godlike indifference, and look down on
- passion! He is the man, and wisdom shall die with him. This is
- the Sieyes who shall be System-builder, Constitution-builder
- General; and build Constitutions (as many as wanted)
- skyhigh,—which shall all unfortunately fall before he get the
- scaffolding away. ‘_La Politique_,’ said he to Dumont, ‘Polity is
- a science I think I have completed (_achevée_).’[137] What
- things, O Sieyes, with thy clear assiduous eyes, art thou to see!
- But were it not curious to know how Sieyes, now in these days
- (for he is said to be still alive)[138] looks out on all that
- Constitution masonry, through the rheumy soberness of extreme
- age? Might we hope, still with the old irrefragable
- transcendentalism? The victorious cause pleased the gods, the
- vanquished one pleased Sieyes (_victa Catoni_).
-
- Thus, however, amid skyrending vivats, and blessings from every
- heart, has the Procession of the Commons Deputies rolled by.
-
- Next follow the Noblesse, and next the Clergy; concerning both of
- whom it might be asked, What they specially have come for?
- Specially, little as they dream of it, to answer this question,
- put in a voice of thunder: What are you doing in God’s fair Earth
- and Task-garden; where whosoever is not working is begging or
- stealing? Wo, wo to themselves and to all, if they can only
- answer: Collecting tithes, Preserving game!—Remark, meanwhile,
- how _D’Orléans_ affects to step before his own Order, and mingle
- with the Commons. For him are _vivats:_ few for the rest, though
- all wave in plumed “hats of a feudal cut,” and have sword on
- thigh; though among them is _D’Antraigues_, the young
- Languedocian gentleman,—and indeed many a Peer more or less
- noteworthy.
-
- There are _Liancourt_, and _La Rochefoucault;_ the liberal
- Anglomaniac Dukes. There is a filially pious _Lally;_ a couple of
- liberal _Lameths_. Above all, there is a _Lafayette;_ whose name
- shall be Cromwell-Grandison, and fill the world. Many a “formula”
- has this Lafayette too made away with; yet not _all_ formulas. He
- sticks by the Washington-formula; and by that he will stick;—and
- hang by it, as by sure bower-anchor hangs and swings the tight
- war-ship, which, after all changes of wildest weather and water,
- is found still hanging. Happy for him; be it glorious or not!
- Alone of all Frenchmen he has a theory of the world, and right
- mind to conform thereto; he can become a hero and perfect
- character, were it but the hero of one idea. Note further our old
- Parlementary friend, _Crispin-Catiline d’Espréménil_. He is
- returned from the Mediterranean Islands, a redhot royalist,
- repentant to the finger-ends;—unsettled-looking; whose light,
- dusky-glowing at best, now flickers foul in the socket; whom the
- National Assembly will by and by, to save time, “regard as in a
- state of distraction.” Note lastly that globular _Younger_
- Mirabeau; indignant that his elder Brother is among the Commons:
- it is _Viscomte_ Mirabeau; named oftener Mirabeau _Tonneau_
- (Barrel Mirabeau), on account of his rotundity, and the
- quantities of strong liquor he contains.
-
- There then walks our French Noblesse. All in the old pomp of
- chivalry: and yet, alas, how changed from the old position;
- drifted far down from their native latitude, like Arctic icebergs
- got into the Equatorial sea, and fast thawing there! Once these
- Chivalry _Duces_ (Dukes, as they are still named) did actually
- _lead_ the world,—were it only towards battle-spoil, where lay
- the world’s best wages then: moreover, being the ablest Leaders
- going, they had their lion’s share, those _Duces;_ which none
- could grudge them. But now, when so many Looms, improved
- Ploughshares, Steam-Engines and Bills of Exchange have been
- invented; and, for battle-brawling itself, men hire
- Drill-Sergeants at eighteen-pence a-day,—what mean these
- goldmantled Chivalry Figures, walking there “in black-velvet
- cloaks,” in high-plumed “hats of a feudal cut”? Reeds shaken in
- the wind!
-
- The Clergy have got up; with _Cahiers_ for abolishing
- pluralities, enforcing residence of bishops, better payment of
- tithes.[139] The Dignitaries, we can observe, walk stately, apart
- from the numerous Undignified,—who indeed are properly little
- other than Commons disguised in Curate-frocks. Here, however,
- though by strange ways, shall the Precept be fulfilled, and they
- that are greatest (much to their astonishment) become least. For
- one example, out of many, mark that plausible _Grégoire:_ one day
- Curé Grégoire shall be a Bishop, when the now stately are
- wandering distracted, as Bishops _in partibus_. With other
- thought, mark also the _Abbé Maury:_ his broad bold face; mouth
- accurately primmed; full eyes, that ray out intelligence,
- falsehood,—the sort of sophistry which is astonished you should
- find it sophistical. Skilfulest vamper-up of old rotten leather,
- to make it look like new; always a rising man; he used to tell
- Mercier, ‘You will see; I shall be in the Academy before
- you.’[140] Likely indeed, thou skilfullest Maury; nay thou shalt
- have a Cardinal’s Hat, and plush and glory; but alas, also, in
- the longrun—mere oblivion, like the rest of us; and six feet of
- earth! What boots it, vamping rotten leather on these terms?
- Glorious in comparison is the livelihood thy good old Father
- earns, by making shoes,—one may hope, in a sufficient manner.
- Maury does not want for audacity. He shall wear pistols, by and
- by; and at death-cries of ‘_La Lanterne_, The Lamp-iron;’ answer
- coolly, ‘Friends, will you see better there?’
-
- But yonder, halting lamely along, thou noticest next _Bishop
- Talleyrand-Perigord_, his Reverence of Autun. A sardonic grimness
- lies in that irreverent Reverence of Autun. He will do and suffer
- strange things; and will _become_ surely one of the strangest
- things ever seen, or like to be seen. A man living in falsehood,
- and on falsehood; yet not what you can call a false man: there is
- the specialty! It will be an enigma for future ages, one may
- hope: hitherto such a product of Nature and Art was possible only
- for this age of ours,—Age of Paper, and of the Burning of Paper.
- Consider Bishop Talleyrand and Marquis Lafayette as the topmost
- of their two kinds; and say once more, looking at what they did
- and what they were, _O Tempus ferax rerum!_
-
- On the whole, however, has not this unfortunate Clergy also
- drifted in the Time-stream, far from its native latitude? An
- anomalous mass of men; of whom the whole world has already a dim
- understanding that it can understand nothing. They were once a
- Priesthood, interpreters of Wisdom, revealers of the Holy that is
- in Man: a true _Clerus_ (or Inheritance of God on Earth): but
- now?—They pass silently, with such _Cahiers_ as they have been
- able to redact; and none cries, God bless them.
-
- King Louis with his Court brings up the rear: he cheerful, in
- this day of hope, is saluted with plaudits; still more Necker his
- Minister. Not so the Queen; on whom hope shines not steadily any
- more. Ill-fated Queen! Her hair is already gray with many cares
- and crosses; her first-born son is dying in these weeks: black
- falsehood has ineffaceably soiled her name; ineffaceably while
- this generation lasts. Instead of _Vive la Reine_, voices insult
- her with _Vive d’Orléans_. Of her queenly beauty little remains
- except its stateliness; not now gracious, but haughty, rigid,
- silently enduring. With a most mixed feeling, wherein joy has no
- part, she resigns herself to a day she hoped never to have seen.
- Poor Marie Antoinette; with thy quick noble instincts; vehement
- glancings, vision all-too fitful narrow for the work thou hast to
- do! O there are tears in store for thee; bitterest wailings, soft
- womanly meltings, though thou hast the heart of an imperial
- Theresa’s Daughter. Thou doomed one, shut thy eyes on the
- future!—
-
- And so, in stately Procession, have passed the Elected of France.
- Some towards honour and quick fire-consummation; most towards
- dishonour; not a few towards massacre, confusion, emigration,
- desperation: all towards Eternity!—So many heterogeneities cast
- together into the fermenting-vat; there, with incalculable
- action, counteraction, elective affinities, explosive
- developments, to work out healing for a sick moribund System of
- Society! Probably the strangest Body of Men, if we consider well,
- that ever met together on our Planet on such an errand. So
- thousandfold complex a Society, ready to burst-up from its
- infinite depths; and these men, its rulers and healers, without
- life-rule for themselves,—other life-rule than a Gospel according
- to Jean Jacques! To the wisest of them, what we must call the
- wisest, man is properly an Accident under the sky. Man is without
- Duty round him; except it be “to make the Constitution.” He is
- without Heaven above him, or Hell beneath him; he has no God in
- the world.
-
- What further or better belief can be said to exist in these
- Twelve Hundred? Belief in high-plumed hats of a feudal cut; in
- heraldic scutcheons; in the divine right of Kings, in the divine
- right of Game-destroyers. Belief, or what is still worse, canting
- half-belief; or worst of all, mere Macchiavellic
- pretence-of-belief,—in consecrated dough-wafers, and the godhood
- of a poor old Italian Man! Nevertheless in that immeasurable
- Confusion and Corruption, which struggles there so blindly to
- become less confused and corrupt, there is, as we said, this one
- salient point of a New Life discernible: the deep fixed
- Determination to have done with Shams. A determination, which,
- consciously or unconsciously, is _fixed;_ which waxes ever more
- fixed, into very madness and fixed-idea; which in such embodiment
- as lies provided there, shall now unfold itself rapidly:
- monstrous, stupendous, unspeakable; new for long thousands of
- years!—How has the Heaven’s _light_, oftentimes in this Earth, to
- clothe itself in thunder and electric murkiness; and descend as
- molten _lightning_, blasting, if purifying! Nay is it not rather
- the very murkiness, and atmospheric suffocation, that _brings_
- the lightning and the light? The new Evangel, as the old had
- been, was it to be born in the Destruction of a World?
-
- But how the Deputies assisted at High Mass, and heard sermon, and
- applauded the preacher, church as it was, when he preached
- politics; how, next day, with sustained pomp, they are, for the
- first time, installed in their _Salles des Menus_ (Hall no longer
- of _Amusements_), and become a States-General,—readers can fancy
- for themselves. The King from his _estrade_, gorgeous as Solomon
- in all his glory, runs his eye over that majestic Hall;
- many-plumed, many-glancing; bright-tinted as rainbow, in the
- galleries and near side spaces, where Beauty sits raining bright
- influence. Satisfaction, as of one that after long voyaging had
- got to port, plays over his broad simple face: the innocent King!
- He rises and speaks, with sonorous tone, a conceivable speech.
- With which, still more with the succeeding one-hour and two-hour
- speeches of Garde-des-Sceaux and M. Necker, full of nothing but
- patriotism, hope, faith, and deficiency of the revenue,—no reader
- of these pages shall be tried.
-
- We remark only that, as his Majesty, on finishing the speech, put
- on his plumed hat, and the Noblesse according to custom imitated
- him, our Tiers-Etat Deputies did mostly, not without a shade of
- fierceness, in like manner clap-on, and even crush on their
- slouched hats; and stand there awaiting the issue.[141] Thick
- buzz among them, between majority and minority of _Couvrezvous,
- Décrouvrez-vous_ (Hats off, Hats on)! To which his Majesty puts
- end, by taking _off_ his own royal hat again.
-
- The session terminates without further accident or omen than
- this; with which, significantly enough, France has opened her
- States-General.
-
-
- BOOK 1.V.
- THE THIRD ESTATE
-
-
- Chapter 1.5.I.
- Inertia.
-
- That exasperated France, in this same National Assembly of hers,
- has got something, nay something great, momentous, indispensable,
- cannot be doubted; yet still the question were: Specially _what?_
- A question hard to solve, even for calm onlookers at this
- distance; wholly insoluble to actors in the middle of it. The
- States-General, created and conflated by the passionate effort of
- the whole nation, is there as a thing high and lifted up. Hope,
- jubilating, cries aloud that it will prove a miraculous Brazen
- Serpent in the Wilderness; whereon whosoever looks, with faith
- and obedience, shall be healed of all woes and serpent-bites.
-
- We may answer, it will at least prove a symbolic Banner; round
- which the exasperating complaining Twenty-Five Millions,
- otherwise isolated and without power, may rally, and work—what it
- is in them to work. If battle must be the work, as one cannot
- help expecting, then shall it be a battle-banner (say, an Italian
- Gonfalon, in its old Republican _Carroccio_); and shall tower up,
- car-borne, shining in the wind: and with iron tongue peal forth
- many a signal. A thing of prime necessity; which whether in the
- van or in the centre, whether leading or led and driven, must do
- the fighting multitude incalculable services. For a season, while
- it floats in the very front, nay as it were stands solitary
- there, waiting whether force will gather round it, this same
- National _Carroccio_, and the signal-peals it rings, are a main
- object with us.
-
- The omen of the “slouch-hats clapt on” shows the Commons Deputies
- to have made up their minds on one thing: that neither Noblesse
- nor Clergy shall have precedence of them; hardly even Majesty
- itself. To such length has the _Contrat Social_, and force of
- public opinion, carried us. For what is Majesty but the Delegate
- of the Nation; delegated, and bargained with (even rather
- tightly),—in some very singular posture of affairs, which Jean
- Jacques has not fixed the date of?
-
- Coming therefore into their Hall, on the morrow, an inorganic
- mass of Six Hundred individuals, these Commons Deputies perceive,
- without terror, that they have it all to themselves. Their Hall
- is also the Grand or general Hall for all the Three Orders. But
- the Noblesse and Clergy, it would seem, have retired to their two
- separate Apartments, or Halls; and are there “verifying their
- powers,” not in a conjoint but in a separate capacity. They are
- to constitute two separate, perhaps separately-voting Orders,
- then? It is as if both Noblesse and Clergy had silently taken for
- granted that they already were such! Two Orders against one; and
- so the Third Order to be left in a perpetual minority?
-
- Much may remain unfixed; but the negative of that is a thing
- fixed: in the Slouch-hatted heads, in the French Nation’s head.
- Double representation, and all else hitherto gained, were
- otherwise futile, null. Doubtless, the “powers must be
- verified;”—doubtless, the Commission, the electoral Documents of
- your Deputy must be inspected by his brother Deputies, and found
- valid: it is the preliminary of all. Neither is this question, of
- doing it separately or doing it conjointly, a vital one: but if
- it lead to such? It must be resisted; wise was that maxim, Resist
- the beginnings! Nay were resistance unadvisable, even dangerous,
- yet surely pause is very natural: pause, with Twenty-five
- Millions behind you, may become resistance enough.—The inorganic
- mass of Commons Deputies will restrict itself to a “system of
- inertia,” and for the present remain inorganic.
-
- Such method, recommendable alike to sagacity and to timidity, do
- the Commons Deputies adopt; and, not without adroitness, and with
- ever more tenacity, they persist in it, day after day, week after
- week. For six weeks their history is of the kind named barren;
- which indeed, as Philosophy knows, is often the fruitfulest of
- all. These were their still creation-days; wherein they sat
- incubating! In fact, what they did was to do nothing, in a
- judicious manner. Daily the inorganic body reassembles; regrets
- that they cannot get organisation, “verification of powers in
- common, and begin regenerating France. Headlong motions may be
- made, but let such be repressed; inertia alone is at once
- unpunishable and unconquerable.
-
- Cunning must be met by cunning; proud pretension by inertia, by a
- low tone of patriotic sorrow; low, but incurable, unalterable.
- Wise as serpents; harmless as doves: what a spectacle for France!
- Six Hundred inorganic individuals, essential for its regeneration
- and salvation, sit there, on their elliptic benches, longing
- passionately towards life; in painful durance; like souls waiting
- to be born. Speeches are spoken; eloquent; audible within doors
- and without. Mind agitates itself against mind; the Nation looks
- on with ever deeper interest. Thus do the Commons Deputies sit
- incubating.
-
- There are private conclaves, supper-parties, consultations;
- Breton Club, Club of Viroflay; germs of many Clubs. Wholly an
- element of confused noise, dimness, angry heat;—wherein, however,
- the Eros-egg, kept at the fit temperature, may hover safe,
- unbroken till it be hatched. In your Mouniers, Malouets,
- Lechapeliers in science sufficient for that; fervour in your
- Barnaves, Rabauts. At times shall come an inspiration from royal
- Mirabeau: he is nowise yet recognised as royal; nay he was
- “groaned at,” when his name was first mentioned: but he is
- struggling towards recognition.
-
- In the course of the week, the Commons having called their Eldest
- to the chair, and furnished him with young stronger-lunged
- assistants,—can speak articulately; and, in audible lamentable
- words, declare, as we said, that they are an inorganic body,
- longing to become organic. Letters arrive; but an inorganic body
- cannot open letters; they lie on the table unopened. The Eldest
- may at most procure for himself some kind of List or Muster-roll,
- to take the votes by, and wait what will betide. Noblesse and
- Clergy are all elsewhere: however, an eager public crowds all
- galleries and vacancies; which is some comfort. With effort, it
- is determined, not that a Deputation shall be sent,—for how can
- an inorganic body send deputations?—but that certain individual
- Commons Members shall, in an accidental way, stroll into the
- Clergy Chamber, and then into the Noblesse one; and mention
- there, as a thing they have happened to observe, that the Commons
- seem to be sitting waiting for them, in order to verify their
- powers. That is the wiser method!
-
- The Clergy, among whom are such a multitude of Undignified, of
- mere Commons in Curates’ frocks, depute instant respectful answer
- that they are, and will now more than ever be, in deepest study
- as to that very matter. Contrariwise the Noblesse, in cavalier
- attitude, reply, after four days, that they, for their part, are
- all verified and constituted; which, they had trusted, the
- Commons also were; such _separate_ verification being clearly the
- proper constitutional wisdom-of-ancestors method;—as they the
- Noblesse will have much pleasure in demonstrating by a Commission
- of their number, if the Commons will meet them, Commission
- against Commission! Directly in the rear of which comes a
- deputation of Clergy, reiterating, in their insidious
- conciliatory way, the same proposal. Here, then, is a complexity:
- what will wise Commons say to this?
-
- Warily, inertly, the wise Commons, considering that they are, if
- not a French Third Estate, at least an Aggregate of individuals
- pretending to some title of that kind, determine, after talking
- on it five days, to name such a Commission,—though, as it were,
- with proviso not to be convinced: a sixth day is taken up in
- naming it; a seventh and an eighth day in getting the forms of
- meeting, place, hour and the like, settled: so that it is not
- till the evening of the 23rd of May that Noblesse Commission
- first meets Commons Commission, Clergy acting as Conciliators;
- and begins the impossible task of convincing it. One other
- meeting, on the 25th, will suffice: the Commons are
- inconvincible, the Noblesse and Clergy irrefragably convincing;
- the Commissions retire; each Order persisting in its first
- pretensions.[142]
-
- Thus have three weeks passed. For three weeks, the Third-Estate
- Carroccio, with far-seen Gonfalon, has stood stockstill, flouting
- the wind; waiting what force would gather round it.
-
- Fancy can conceive the feeling of the Court; and how counsel met
- counsel, the loud-sounding inanity whirled in that distracted
- vortex, where wisdom could not dwell. Your cunningly devised
- Taxing-Machine has been got together; set up with incredible
- labour; and stands there, its three pieces in contact; its two
- fly-wheels of Noblesse and Clergy, its huge working-wheel of
- Tiers-Etat. The two fly-wheels whirl in the softest manner; but,
- prodigious to look upon, the huge working-wheel hangs motionless,
- refuses to stir! The cunningest engineers are at fault. How
- _will_ it work, when it does begin? Fearfully, my Friends; and to
- many purposes; but to gather taxes, or grind court-meal, one may
- apprehend, never. Could we but have continued gathering taxes _by
- hand!_ Messeigneurs d’Artois, Conti, Condé (named Court
- Triumvirate), they of the anti-democratic _Mémoire au Roi_, has
- not their foreboding proved true? They may wave reproachfully
- their high heads; they may beat their poor brains; but the
- cunningest engineers can do nothing. Necker himself, were he even
- listened to, begins to look blue. The only thing one sees
- advisable is to bring up soldiers. New regiments, two, and a
- battalion of a third, have already reached Paris; others shall
- get in march. Good were it, in all circumstances, to have troops
- within reach; good that the command were in sure hands. Let
- Broglie be appointed; old Marshal Duke de Broglie; veteran
- disciplinarian, of a firm drill-sergeant morality, such as may be
- depended on.
-
- For, alas, neither are the Clergy, or the very Noblesse what they
- should be; and might be, when so menaced from without: entire,
- undivided within. The Noblesse, indeed, have their Catiline or
- Crispin D’Espréménil, dusky-glowing, all in renegade heat; their
- boisterous Barrel-Mirabeau; but also they have their Lafayettes,
- Liancourts, Lameths; above all, their D’Orléans, now cut forever
- from his Court-moorings, and musing drowsily of high and highest
- sea-prizes (for is not he too a son of Henri Quatre, and partial
- potential Heir-Apparent?)—on his voyage towards Chaos. From the
- Clergy again, so numerous are the Curés, actual deserters have
- run over: two small parties; in the second party Curé Gregoire.
- Nay there is talk of a whole Hundred and Forty-nine of them about
- to desert in mass, and only restrained by an Archbishop of Paris.
- It seems a losing game.
-
- But judge if France, if Paris sat idle, all this while! Addresses
- from far and near flow in: for our Commons have now grown organic
- enough to open letters. Or indeed to cavil at them! Thus poor
- Marquis de Brézé, Supreme Usher, Master of Ceremonies, or
- whatever his title was, writing about this time on some
- ceremonial matter, sees no harm in winding up with a “Monsieur,
- yours with sincere attachment.”—‘To whom does it address itself,
- this sincere attachment?’ inquires Mirabeau. ‘To the Dean of the
- Tiers-Etat.’—‘There is no man in France entitled to write that,’
- rejoins he; whereat the Galleries and the World will not be kept
- from applauding.[143] Poor De Brézé! These Commons have a still
- older grudge at him; nor has he yet done with them.
-
- In another way, Mirabeau has had to protest against the quick
- suppression of his Newspaper, _Journal of the
- States-General;_—and to continue it under a new name. In which
- act of valour, the Paris Electors, still busy redacting their
- _Cahier_, could not but support him, by Address to his Majesty:
- they claim utmost “provisory freedom of the press;” they have
- spoken even about demolishing the Bastille, and erecting a Bronze
- Patriot King on the site!—These are the rich Burghers: but now
- consider how it went, for example, with such loose miscellany,
- now all grown eleutheromaniac, of Loungers, Prowlers, social
- Nondescripts (and the distilled Rascality of our Planet), as
- whirls forever in the Palais Royal;—or what low infinite groan,
- first changing into a growl, comes from Saint-Antoine, and the
- Twenty-five Millions in danger of starvation!
-
- There is the indisputablest scarcity of corn;—be it
- Aristocrat-plot, D’Orléans-plot, of this year; or drought and
- hail of last year: in city and province, the poor man looks
- desolately towards a nameless lot. And this States-General, that
- could make us an age of gold, is forced to stand motionless;
- cannot get its powers verified! All industry necessarily
- languishes, if it be not that of making motions.
-
- In the Palais Royal there has been erected, apparently by
- subscription, a kind of Wooden Tent (_en planches de
- bois_);[144]—most convenient; where select Patriotism can now
- redact resolutions, deliver harangues, with comfort, let the
- weather but as it will. Lively is that Satan-at-Home! On his
- table, on his chair, in every _café_, stands a patriotic orator;
- a crowd round him within; a crowd listening from without,
- open-mouthed, through open door and window; with “thunders of
- applause for every sentiment of more than common hardiness.” In
- Monsieur Dessein’s Pamphlet-shop, close by, you cannot without
- strong elbowing get to the counter: every hour produces its
- pamphlet, or litter of pamphlets; “there were thirteen today,
- sixteen yesterday, nine-two last week.”[145] Think of Tyranny and
- Scarcity; Fervid-eloquence, Rumour, Pamphleteering; _Societé
- Publicole_, Breton Club, Enraged Club;—and whether every
- tap-room, coffee-room, social reunion, accidental street-group,
- over wide France, was not an Enraged Club!
-
- To all which the Commons Deputies can only listen with a sublime
- inertia of sorrow; reduced to busy themselves “with their
- internal police.” Surer position no Deputies ever occupied; if
- they keep it with skill. Let not the temperature rise too high;
- break not the Eros-egg till it be hatched, till it break itself!
- An eager public crowds all Galleries and vacancies! “cannot be
- restrained from applauding.” The two Privileged Orders, the
- Noblesse all verified and constituted, may look on with what face
- they will; not without a secret tremor of heart. The Clergy,
- always acting the part of conciliators, make a clutch at the
- Galleries, and the popularity there; and miss it. Deputation of
- them arrives, with dolorous message about the “dearth of grains,”
- and the necessity there is of casting aside vain formalities, and
- deliberating on this. An insidious proposal; which, however, the
- Commons (moved thereto by seagreen Robespierre) dexterously
- accept as a sort of hint, or even pledge, that the Clergy will
- forthwith come over to them, constitute the States-General, and
- so cheapen grains![146]—Finally, on the 27th day of May,
- Mirabeau, judging the time now nearly come, proposes that “the
- inertia cease;” that, leaving the Noblesse to their own stiff
- ways, the Clergy be summoned, “in the name of the God of Peace,”
- to join the Commons, and begin.[147] To which summons if they
- turn a deaf ear,—we shall see! Are not one Hundred and Forty-nine
- of them ready to desert?
-
- O Triumvirate of Princes, new Garde-des-Sceaux Barentin, thou
- Home-Secretary Bréteuil, Duchess Polignac, and Queen eager to
- listen,—what is now to be done? This Third Estate will get in
- motion, with the force of all France in it; Clergy-machinery with
- Noblesse-machinery, which were to serve as beautiful
- counter-balances and drags, will be shamefully dragged after
- it,—and take fire along with it. What is to be done? The
- Œil-de-Bœuf waxes more confused than ever. Whisper and
- counter-whisper; a very tempest of whispers! Leading men from all
- the Three Orders are nightly spirited thither; conjurors many of
- them; but can they conjure this? Necker himself were now welcome,
- could he interfere to purpose.
-
- Let Necker interfere, then; and in the King’s name! Happily that
- incendiary “God-of-Peace” message is not yet _answered_. The
- Three Orders shall again have conferences; under this Patriot
- Minister of theirs, somewhat may be healed, clouted up;—we
- meanwhile getting forward Swiss Regiments, and a “hundred pieces
- of field-artillery.” This is what the Œil-de-Bœuf, for its part,
- resolves on.
-
- But as for Necker—Alas, poor Necker, thy obstinate Third Estate
- has one first-last word, _verification in common_, as the pledge
- of voting and deliberating in common! Half-way proposals, from
- such a tried friend, they answer with a stare. The tardy
- conferences speedily break up; the Third Estate, now ready and
- resolute, the whole world backing it, returns to its Hall of the
- Three Orders; and Necker to the Œil-de-Bœuf, with the character
- of a disconjured conjuror there—fit only for dismissal.[148]
-
- And so the Commons Deputies are at last on their own strength
- getting under way? Instead of Chairman, or Dean, they have now
- got a President: Astronomer Bailly. Under way, with a vengeance!
- With endless vociferous and temperate eloquence, borne on
- Newspaper wings to all lands, they have now, on this 17th day of
- June, determined that their name is not _Third Estate_,
- but—_National Assembly!_ They, then, are the Nation? Triumvirate
- of Princes, Queen, refractory Noblesse and Clergy, what, then,
- are _you?_ A most deep question;—scarcely answerable in living
- political dialects.
-
- All regardless of which, our new National Assembly proceeds to
- appoint a “committee of subsistences;” dear to France, though it
- can find little or no grain. Next, as if our National Assembly
- stood quite firm on its legs,—to appoint “four other standing
- committees;” then to settle the security of the National Debt;
- then that of the Annual Taxation: all within eight-and-forty
- hours. At such rate of velocity it is going: the conjurors of the
- Œil-de-Bœuf may well ask themselves, Whither?
-
-
- Chapter 1.5.II.
- Mercury de Brézé.
-
- Now surely were the time for a “god from the machine;” there is a
- _nodus_ worthy of one. The only question is, Which god? Shall it
- be Mars de Broglie, with his hundred pieces of cannon?—Not yet,
- answers prudence; so soft, irresolute is King Louis. Let it be
- Messenger _Mercury_, our Supreme Usher de Brézé.
-
- On the morrow, which is the 20th of June, these Hundred and
- Forty-nine false Curates, no longer restrainable by his Grace of
- Paris, will desert in a body: let De Brézé intervene, and
- produce—closed doors! Not only shall there be Royal Session, in
- that Salle des Menus; but no meeting, nor working (except by
- carpenters), till then. Your Third Estate, self-styled “National
- Assembly,” shall suddenly see itself extruded from its Hall, by
- carpenters, in this dexterous way; and reduced to do nothing, not
- even to meet, or articulately lament,—till Majesty, with _Séance
- Royale_ and new miracles, be ready! In this manner shall De
- Brézé, as Mercury _ex machinâ_, intervene; and, if the
- Œil-de-Bœuf mistake not, work deliverance from the _nodus_.
-
- Of poor De Brézé we can remark that he has yet prospered in none
- of his dealings with these Commons. Five weeks ago, when they
- kissed the hand of Majesty, the mode he took got nothing but
- censure; and then his “sincere attachment,” how was it scornfully
- whiffed aside! Before supper, this night, he writes to President
- Bailly, a new Letter, to be delivered shortly after dawn
- tomorrow, in the King’s name. Which Letter, however, Bailly in
- the pride of office, will merely crush together into his pocket,
- like a bill he does not mean to pay.
-
- Accordingly on Saturday morning the 20th of June, shrill-sounding
- heralds proclaim through the streets of Versailles, that there is
- to be a _Séance Royale_ next Monday; and no meeting of the
- States-General till then. And yet, we observe, President Bailly
- in sound of this, and with De Brézé’s Letter in his pocket, is
- proceeding, with National Assembly at his heels, to the
- accustomed Salles des Menus; as if De Brézé and heralds were mere
- wind. It is shut, this Salle; occupied by Gardes Françaises.
- ‘Where is your Captain?’ The Captain shows his royal order:
- workmen, he is grieved to say, are all busy setting up the
- platform for his Majesty’s _Séance;_ most unfortunately, no
- admission; admission, at furthest, for President and Secretaries
- to bring away papers, which the joiners might destroy!—President
- Bailly enters with Secretaries; and returns bearing papers: alas,
- within doors, instead of patriotic eloquence, there is now no
- noise but hammering, sawing, and operative screeching and
- rumbling! A profanation without parallel.
-
- The Deputies stand grouped on the Paris Road, on this umbrageous
- _Avenue de Versailles;_ complaining aloud of the indignity done
- them. Courtiers, it is supposed, look from their windows, and
- giggle. The morning is none of the comfortablest: raw; it is even
- drizzling a little.[149] But all travellers pause; patriot
- gallery-men, miscellaneous spectators increase the groups. Wild
- counsels alternate. Some desperate Deputies propose to go and
- hold session on the great outer Staircase at Marly, under the
- King’s windows; for his Majesty, it seems, has driven over
- thither. Others talk of making the Château Forecourt, what they
- call _Place d’Armes_, a Runnymede and new _Champ de Mai_ of free
- Frenchmen: nay of awakening, to sounds of indignant Patriotism,
- the echoes of the Œil-de-boeuf itself.—Notice is given that
- President Bailly, aided by judicious Guillotin and others, has
- found place in the Tennis-Court of the Rue St. François. Thither,
- in long-drawn files, hoarse-jingling, like cranes on wing, the
- Commons Deputies angrily wend.
-
- Strange sight was this in the Rue St. François, Vieux Versailles!
- A naked Tennis-Court, as the pictures of that time still give it:
- four walls; naked, except aloft some poor wooden penthouse, or
- roofed spectators’-gallery, hanging round them:—on the floor not
- now an idle teeheeing, a snapping of balls and rackets; but the
- bellowing din of an indignant National Representation,
- scandalously exiled hither! However, a cloud of witnesses looks
- down on them, from wooden penthouse, from wall-top, from
- adjoining roof and chimney; rolls towards them from all quarters,
- with passionate spoken blessings. Some table can be procured to
- write on; some chair, if not to sit on, then to stand on. The
- Secretaries undo their tapes; Bailly has constituted the
- Assembly.
-
- Experienced Mounier, not wholly new to such things, in
- Parlementary revolts, which he has seen or heard of, thinks that
- it were well, in these lamentable threatening circumstances, to
- unite themselves by an Oath.—Universal acclamation, as from
- smouldering bosoms getting vent! The Oath is redacted; pronounced
- aloud by President Bailly,—and indeed in such a sonorous tone,
- that the cloud of witnesses, even outdoors, hear it, and bellow
- response to it. Six hundred right-hands rise with President
- Bailly’s, to take God above to witness that they will not
- separate for man below, but will meet in all places, under all
- circumstances, wheresoever two or three can get together, till
- they have made the Constitution. Made the Constitution, Friends!
- That is a long task. Six hundred hands, meanwhile, will sign as
- they have sworn: six hundred save one; one Loyalist Abdiel, still
- visible by this sole light-point, and nameable, poor “M. Martin
- d’Auch, from Castelnaudary, in Languedoc.” Him they permit to
- sign or signify refusal; they even save him from the cloud of
- witnesses, by declaring “his head deranged.” At four o’clock, the
- signatures are all appended; new meeting is fixed for Monday
- morning, earlier than the hour of the Royal Session; that our
- Hundred and Forty-nine Clerical deserters be not balked: we shall
- meet “at the Recollets Church or elsewhere,” in hope that our
- Hundred and Forty-nine will join us;—and now it is time to go to
- dinner.
-
- This, then, is the Session of the Tennis-Court, famed _Séance du
- Jeu de Paume;_ the fame of which has gone forth to all lands.
- This is Mercurius de Brézé’s appearance as _Deus ex machinâ;_
- this is the fruit it brings! The giggle of Courtiers in the
- Versailles Avenue has already died into gaunt silence. Did the
- distracted Court, with Gardes-des-Sceaux Barentin, Triumvirate
- and Company, imagine that they could scatter six hundred National
- Deputies, big with a National Constitution, like as much barndoor
- poultry, big with next to nothing,—by the white or black rod of a
- Supreme Usher? Barndoor poultry fly cackling: but National
- Deputies turn round, lion-faced; and, with uplifted right-hand,
- swear an Oath that makes the four corners of France tremble.
-
- President Bailly has covered himself with honour; which shall
- become rewards. The National Assembly is now doubly and trebly
- the Nation’s Assembly; not militant, martyred only, but
- triumphant; insulted, and which could not _be_ insulted. Paris
- disembogues itself once more, to witness, “with grim looks,” the
- _Séance Royale:_[150] which, by a new felicity, is postponed till
- Tuesday. The Hundred and Forty-nine, and even with Bishops among
- them, all in processional mass, have had free leisure to march
- off, and solemnly join the Commons sitting waiting in their
- Church. The Commons welcomed them with shouts, with embracings,
- nay with tears;[151] for it is growing a life-and-death matter
- now.
-
- As for the _Séance_ itself, the Carpenters seem to have
- accomplished their platform; but all else remains unaccomplished.
- Futile, we may say fatal, was the whole matter. King Louis
- enters, through seas of people, all grim-silent, angry with many
- things,—for it is a bitter rain too. Enters, to a Third Estate,
- likewise grim-silent; which has been wetted waiting under mean
- porches, at back-doors, while Court and Privileged were entering
- by the front. King and Garde-des-Sceaux (there is no Necker
- visible) make known, not without longwindedness, the
- determinations of the royal breast. The Three Orders _shall_ vote
- separately. On the other hand, France may look for considerable
- constitutional blessings; as specified in these Five-and-thirty
- Articles,[152] which Garde-des-Sceaux is waxing hoarse with
- reading. Which Five-and-Thirty Articles, adds his Majesty again
- rising, if the Three Orders most unfortunately cannot agree
- together to effect them, I myself will effect: ‘_seul je ferai le
- bien de mes peuples_,’—which being interpreted may signify, You,
- contentious Deputies of the States-General, have probably not
- long to be here! But, in fine, all shall now withdraw for this
- day; and meet again, each Order in its separate place, tomorrow
- morning, for despatch of business. _This_ is the determination of
- the royal breast: pithy and clear. And herewith King, retinue,
- Noblesse, majority of Clergy file out, as if the whole matter
- were satisfactorily completed.
-
- These file out; through grim-silent seas of people. Only the
- Commons Deputies file not out; but stand there in gloomy silence,
- uncertain what they shall do. One man of them is certain; one man
- of them discerns and dares! It is now that King Mirabeau starts
- to the Tribune, and lifts up his lion-voice. Verily a word in
- season; for, in such scenes, the moment is the mother of ages!
- Had not Gabriel Honoré been there,—one can well fancy, how the
- Commons Deputies, affrighted at the perils which now yawned dim
- all round them, and waxing ever paler in each other’s paleness,
- might very naturally, one after one, have _glided off;_ and the
- whole course of European History have been different!
-
- But he is there. List to the _brool_ of that royal forest-voice;
- sorrowful, low; fast swelling to a roar! Eyes kindle at the
- glance of his eye:—National Deputies were missioned by a Nation;
- they have sworn an Oath; they—but lo! while the lion’s voice
- roars loudest, what Apparition is this? Apparition of Mercurius
- de Brézé, muttering somewhat!—‘Speak out,’ cry
- several.—‘Messieurs,’ shrills De Brézé, repeating himself, ‘You
- have heard the King’s orders!’—Mirabeau glares on him with
- fire-flashing face; shakes the black lion’s mane: ‘Yes, Monsieur,
- we have heard what the King was advised to say: and you who
- cannot be the interpreter of his orders to the States-General;
- you, who have neither place nor right of speech here; _you_ are
- not the man to remind us of it. Go, Monsieur, tell these who sent
- you that we are here by the will of the People, and that nothing
- shall send us hence but the force of bayonets!’[153] And poor De
- Brézé shivers forth from the National Assembly;—and also (if it
- be not in one faintest glimmer, months later) finally from the
- page of History!—
-
- Hapless De Brézé; doomed to survive long ages, in men’s memory,
- in this faint way, with tremulent white rod! He was true to
- Etiquette, which was his Faith here below; a martyr to respect of
- persons. Short woollen cloaks could not kiss Majesty’s hand as
- long velvet ones did. Nay lately, when the poor little Dauphin
- lay dead, and some ceremonial Visitation came, was he not
- punctual to announce it even to the Dauphin’s _dead body:_
- ‘Monseigneur, a Deputation of the States-General!’[154] _Sunt
- lachrymæ rerum._
-
- But what does the Œil-de-Bœuf, now when De Brézé shivers back
- thither? _Despatch_ that same force of bayonets? Not so: the seas
- of people still hang multitudinous, intent on what is passing;
- nay rush and roll, loud-billowing, into the Courts of the Château
- itself; for a report has risen that Necker is to be dismissed.
- Worst of all, the Gardes Françaises seem indisposed to act: “two
- Companies of them _do not fire_ when ordered!”[155] Necker, for
- not being at the _Séance_, shall be shouted for, carried home in
- triumph; and must not be dismissed. His Grace of Paris, on the
- other hand, has to fly with broken coach-panels, and owe his life
- to furious driving. The _Gardes-du-Corps_ (Body-Guards), which
- you were drawing out, had better be drawn in again.[156] There is
- no sending of bayonets to be thought of.
-
- Instead of soldiers, the Œil-de-Bœuf sends—carpenters, to take
- down the platform. Ineffectual shift! In few instants, the very
- carpenters cease wrenching and knocking at their platform; stand
- on it, hammer in hand, and listen open-mouthed.[157] The Third
- Estate is decreeing that it is, was, and will be, nothing but a
- National Assembly; and now, moreover, an inviolable one, all
- members of it inviolable: “infamous, traitorous, towards the
- Nation, and guilty of capital crime, is any person,
- body-corporate, tribunal, court or commission that now or
- henceforth, during the present session or after it, shall dare to
- pursue, interrogate, arrest, or cause to be arrested, detain or
- cause to be detained, any,” &c. &c. “_on whose part soever_ the
- same be commanded.”[158] Which done, one can wind up with this
- comfortable reflection from Abbé Sieyes: ‘Messieurs, you are
- today what you were yesterday.’
-
- Courtiers may shriek; but it is, and remains, even so. Their
- well-charged explosion has exploded _through the touch-hole;_
- covering themselves with scorches, confusion, and unseemly soot!
- Poor Triumvirate, poor Queen; and above all, poor Queen’s
- Husband, who means well, had he any fixed meaning! Folly is that
- wisdom which is wise only behindhand. Few months ago these
- Thirty-five Concessions had filled France with a rejoicing, which
- might have lasted for several years. Now it is unavailing, the
- very mention of it slighted; Majesty’s express orders set at
- nought.
-
- All France is in a roar; a sea of persons, estimated at “ten
- thousand,” whirls “all this day in the Palais Royal.”[159] The
- remaining Clergy, and likewise some Forty-eight Noblesse,
- D’Orléans among them, have now forthwith gone over to the
- victorious Commons; by whom, as is natural, they are received
- “with acclamation.”
-
- The Third Estate triumphs; Versailles Town shouting round it; ten
- thousand whirling all day in the Palais Royal; and all France
- standing a-tiptoe, not unlike whirling! Let the Œil-de-Bœuf look
- to it. As for King Louis, he will swallow his injuries; will
- temporise, keep silence; will at all costs have present peace. It
- was Tuesday the 23d of June, when he spoke that peremptory royal
- mandate; and the week is not done till he has written to the
- remaining obstinate Noblesse, that they also must oblige him, and
- give in. D’Espréménil rages his last; Barrel Mirabeau “breaks his
- sword,” making a vow,—which he might as well have kept. The
- “Triple Family” is now therefore complete; the third erring
- brother, the Noblesse, having joined it;—erring but pardonable;
- soothed, so far as possible, by sweet eloquence from President
- Bailly.
-
- So triumphs the Third Estate; and States-General are become
- National Assembly; and all France may sing _Te Deum_. By wise
- inertia, and wise cessation of inertia, great victory has been
- gained. It is the last night of June: all night you meet nothing
- on the streets of Versailles but “men running with torches” with
- shouts of jubilation. From the 2nd of May when they kissed the
- hand of Majesty, to this 30th of June when men run with torches,
- we count seven weeks complete. For seven weeks the National
- Carroccio has stood far-seen, ringing many a signal; and, so much
- having now gathered round it, may hope to stand.
-
-
- Chapter 1.5.III.
- Broglie the War-God.
-
- The Court feels indignant that it is conquered; but what then?
- Another time it will do better. Mercury descended in vain; now
- has the time come for Mars.—The gods of the Œil-de-Bœuf have
- withdrawn into the darkness of their cloudy Ida; and sit there,
- shaping and forging what may be needful, be it “billets of a new
- National Bank,” munitions of war, or things forever inscrutable
- to men.
-
- Accordingly, what means this “apparatus of troops”? The National
- Assembly can get no furtherance for its Committee of
- Subsistences; can hear only that, at Paris, the Bakers’ shops are
- besieged; that, in the Provinces, people are living on
- “meal-husks and boiled grass.” But on all highways there hover
- dust-clouds, with the march of regiments, with the trailing of
- cannon: foreign Pandours, of fierce aspect; Salis-Samade,
- Esterhazy, Royal-Allemand; so many of them foreign, to the number
- of thirty thousand,—which fear can magnify to fifty: all wending
- towards Paris and Versailles! Already, on the heights of
- Montmartre, is a digging and delving; too like a scarping and
- trenching. The effluence of Paris is arrested Versailles-ward by
- a barrier of cannon at Sèvres Bridge. From the Queen’s Mews,
- cannon stand pointed on the National Assembly Hall itself. The
- National Assembly has its very slumbers broken by the tramp of
- soldiery, swarming and defiling, endless, or seemingly endless,
- all round those spaces, at dead of night, “without drum-music,
- without audible word of command.”[160] What means it?
-
- Shall eight, or even shall twelve Deputies, our Mirabeaus,
- Barnaves at the head of them, be whirled suddenly to the Castle
- of Ham; the rest ignominiously dispersed to the winds? No
- National Assembly can make the Constitution with cannon levelled
- on it from the Queen’s Mews! What means this reticence of the
- Œil-de-Bœuf, broken only by nods and shrugs? In the mystery of
- that cloudy Ida, what is it that they forge and shape?—Such
- questions must distracted Patriotism keep asking, and receive no
- answer but an echo.
-
- Enough of themselves! But now, above all, while the hungry
- food-year, which runs from August to August, is getting older;
- becoming more and more a famine-year? With “meal-husks and boiled
- grass,” Brigands may actually collect; and, in crowds, at farm
- and mansion, howl angrily, _Food! Food!_ It is in vain to send
- soldiers against them: at sight of soldiers they disperse, they
- vanish as under ground; then directly reassemble elsewhere for
- new tumult and plunder. Frightful enough to look upon; but what
- to _hear_ of, reverberated through Twenty-five Millions of
- suspicious minds! Brigands and Broglie, open Conflagration,
- preternatural Rumour are driving mad most hearts in France. What
- will the issue of these things be?
-
- At Marseilles, many weeks ago, the Townsmen have taken arms; for
- “suppressing of Brigands,” and other purposes: the military
- commandant may make of it what he will. Elsewhere, everywhere,
- could not the like be done? Dubious, on the distracted Patriot
- imagination, wavers, as a last deliverance, some foreshadow of a
- _National Guard_. But conceive, above all, the Wooden Tent in the
- Palais Royal! A universal hubbub there, as of dissolving worlds:
- their loudest bellows the mad, mad-making voice of Rumour; their
- sharpest gazes Suspicion into the pale dim World-Whirlpool;
- discerning shapes and phantasms; imminent bloodthirsty Regiments
- camped on the Champ-de-Mars; dispersed National Assembly; redhot
- cannon-balls (to burn Paris);—the mad War-god and Bellona’s
- sounding thongs. To the calmest man it is becoming too plain that
- battle is inevitable.
-
- Inevitable, silently nod Messeigneurs and Broglie: Inevitable and
- brief! Your National Assembly, stopped short in its
- Constitutional labours, may fatigue the royal ear with addresses
- and remonstrances: those cannon of ours stand duly levelled;
- those troops are here. The King’s Declaration, with its
- Thirty-five too generous Articles, was spoken, was not listened
- to; but remains yet unrevoked: he himself shall effect it, _seul
- il fera!_
-
- As for Broglie, he has his headquarters at Versailles, all as in
- a seat of war: clerks writing; significant staff-officers,
- inclined to taciturnity; plumed aides-de-camp, scouts, orderlies
- flying or hovering. He himself looks forth, important,
- impenetrable; listens to Besenval Commandant of Paris, and his
- warning and earnest counsels (for he has come out repeatedly on
- purpose), with a silent smile.[161] The Parisians resist?
- scornfully cry Messeigneurs. As a meal-mob may! They have sat
- quiet, these five generations, submitting to all. Their Mercier
- declared, in these very years, that a Parisian revolt was
- henceforth “impossible.”[162] Stand by the royal Declaration, of
- the Twenty-third of June. The Nobles of France, valorous,
- chivalrous as of old, will rally round us with one heart;—and as
- for this which you call Third Estate, and which we call
- _canaille_ of unwashed Sansculottes, of Patelins, Scribblers,
- factious Spouters,—brave Broglie, “with a whiff of grapeshot
- (_salve de canons_),” if need be, will give quick account of it.
- Thus reason they: on their cloudy Ida; hidden from men,—men also
- hidden from them.
-
- Good is grapeshot, Messeigneurs, on one condition: that the
- shooter also were made of metal! But unfortunately he is made of
- flesh; under his buffs and bandoleers your hired shooter has
- instincts, feelings, even a kind of thought. It is his kindred,
- bone of his bone, this same _canaille_ that shall be whiffed; he
- has brothers in it, a father and mother,—living on meal-husks and
- boiled grass. His very doxy, not yet “dead i’ the spital,” drives
- him into military heterodoxy; declares that if he shed Patriot
- blood, he shall be accursed among men. The soldier, who has seen
- his pay stolen by rapacious Foulons, his blood wasted by
- Soubises, Pompadours, and the gates of promotion shut inexorably
- on him if he were not born noble,—is himself not without griefs
- against you. Your cause is not the soldier’s cause; but, as would
- seem, your own only, and no other god’s nor man’s.
-
- For example, the world may have heard how, at Bethune lately,
- when there rose some “riot about grains,” of which sort there are
- so many, and the soldiers stood drawn out, and the word “Fire!
- was given,—not a trigger stirred; only the butts of all muskets
- rattled angrily against the ground; and the soldiers stood
- glooming, with a mixed expression of countenance;—till clutched
- “each under the arm of a patriot householder,” they were all
- hurried off, in this manner, to be treated and caressed, and have
- their pay increased by subscription![163]
-
- Neither have the Gardes Françaises, the best regiment of the
- line, shown any promptitude for street-firing lately. They
- returned grumbling from Réveillon’s; and have not burnt a single
- cartridge since; nay, as we saw, not even when bid. A dangerous
- humour dwells in these Gardes. Notable men too, in their way!
- Valadi the Pythagorean was, at one time, an officer of theirs.
- Nay, in the ranks, under the three-cornered felt and cockade,
- what hard heads may there not be, and reflections going
- on,—unknown to the public! One head of the hardest we do now
- discern there: on the shoulders of a certain Sergeant Hoche.
- Lazare Hoche, that is the name of him; he used to be about the
- Versailles Royal Stables, nephew of a poor herbwoman; a handy
- lad; exceedingly addicted to reading. He is now Sergeant Hoche,
- and can rise no farther: he lays out his pay in rushlights, and
- cheap editions of books.[164]
-
- On the whole, the best seems to be: Consign these Gardes
- Françaises to their Barracks. So Besenval thinks, and orders.
- Consigned to their barracks, the Gardes Françaises do but form a
- “Secret Association,” an Engagement not to act against the
- National Assembly. Debauched by Valadi the Pythagorean; debauched
- by money and women! cry Besenval and innumerable others.
- Debauched by what you will, or in need of no debauching, behold
- them, long files of them, their consignment broken, arrive,
- headed by their Sergeants, on the 26th day of June, at the Palais
- Royal! Welcomed with vivats, with presents, and a pledge of
- patriot liquor; embracing and embraced; declaring in words that
- the cause of France is their cause! Next day and the following
- days the like. What is singular too, except this patriot humour,
- and breaking of their consignment, they behave otherwise with
- “the most rigorous accuracy.”[165]
-
- They are growing questionable, these Gardes! Eleven ring-leaders
- of them are put in the Abbaye Prison. It boots not in the least.
- The imprisoned Eleven have only, “by the hand of an individual,”
- to drop, towards nightfall, a line in the Café de Foy; where
- Patriotism harangues loudest on its table. “Two hundred young
- persons, soon waxing to four thousand,” with fit crowbars, roll
- towards the Abbaye; smite asunder the needful doors; and bear out
- their Eleven, with other military victims:—to supper in the
- Palais Royal Garden; to board, and lodging “in campbeds, in the
- _Théâtre des Variétés;_” other national _Prytaneum_ as yet not
- being in readiness. Most deliberate! Nay so punctual were these
- young persons, that finding one military victim to have been
- imprisoned for real civil crime, they returned him to his cell,
- with protest.
-
- Why new military force was not called out? New military force was
- called out. New military force did arrive, full gallop, with
- drawn sabre: but the people gently “laid hold of their bridles;”
- the dragoons sheathed their swords; lifted their caps by way of
- salute, and sat like mere statues of dragoons,—except indeed that
- a drop of liquor being brought them, they “drank to the King and
- Nation with the greatest cordiality.”[166]
-
- And now, ask in return, why Messeigneurs and Broglie the great
- god of war, on seeing these things, did not pause, and take some
- other course, any other course? Unhappily, as we said, they could
- see nothing. Pride, which goes before a fall; wrath, if not
- reasonable, yet pardonable, most natural, had hardened their
- hearts and heated their heads; so, with imbecility and violence
- (ill-matched pair), they rush to seek their hour. All Regiments
- are not Gardes Françaises, or debauched by Valadi the
- Pythagorean: let fresh undebauched Regiments come up; let
- Royal-Allemand, Salais-Samade, Swiss Château-Vieux come up,—which
- can fight, but can hardly speak except in German gutturals; let
- soldiers march, and highways thunder with artillery-waggons:
- Majesty has a new Royal Session to hold,—and miracles to work
- there! The whiff of grapeshot can, if needful, become a blast and
- tempest.
-
- In which circumstances, before the redhot balls begin raining,
- may not the Hundred-and-twenty Paris Electors, though their
- _Cahier_ is long since finished, see good to meet again daily, as
- an “Electoral Club”? They meet first “in a Tavern;”—where “the
- largest wedding-party” cheerfully give place to them.[167] But
- latterly they meet in the _Hôtel-de-Ville_, in the Townhall
- itself. Flesselles, Provost of Merchants, with his Four Echevins
- (_Scabins_, Assessors), could not prevent it; such was the force
- of public opinion. He, with his Echevins, and the Six-and-Twenty
- Town-Councillors, all appointed from Above, may well sit silent
- there, in their long gowns; and consider, with awed eye, what
- prelude this is of convulsion coming from Below, and how
- themselves shall fare in that!
-
-
- Chapter 1.5.IV.
- To Arms!
-
- So hangs it, dubious, fateful, in the sultry days of July. It is
- the passionate printed _advice_ of M. Marat, to abstain, of all
- things, from violence.[168] Nevertheless the hungry poor are
- already burning Town Barriers, where Tribute on eatables is
- levied; getting clamorous for food.
-
- The twelfth July morning is Sunday; the streets are all placarded
- with an enormous-sized _De par le Roi_, “inviting peaceable
- citizens to remain within doors,” to feel no alarm, to gather in
- no crowd. Why so? What mean these “placards of enormous size”?
- Above all, what means this clatter of military; dragoons,
- hussars, rattling in from all points of the compass towards the
- Place Louis Quinze; with a staid gravity of face, though saluted
- with mere nicknames, hootings and even missiles?[169] Besenval is
- with them. Swiss Guards of his are already in the Champs Elysées,
- with four pieces of artillery.
-
- Have the destroyers descended on us, then? From the Bridge of
- Sèvres to utmost Vincennes, from Saint-Denis to the
- Champ-de-Mars, we are begirt! Alarm, of the vague unknown, is in
- every heart. The Palais Royal has become a place of awestruck
- interjections, silent shakings of the head: one can fancy with
- what dolorous sound the noon-tide cannon (which the Sun fires at
- the crossing of his meridian) went off there; bodeful, like an
- inarticulate voice of doom.[170] Are these troops verily come out
- “against Brigands”? Where are the Brigands? What mystery is in
- the wind?—Hark! a human voice reporting articulately the
- Job’s-news: _Necker, People’s Minister, Saviour of France, is
- dismissed_. Impossible; incredible! Treasonous to the public
- peace! Such a voice ought to be choked in the
- water-works;[171]—had not the news-bringer quickly fled.
- Nevertheless, friends, make of it what you will, the news is
- true. Necker is gone. Necker hies northward incessantly, in
- obedient secrecy, since yesternight. We have a new Ministry:
- Broglie the War-god; Aristocrat Bréteuil; Foulon who said the
- people might eat grass!
-
- Rumour, therefore, shall arise; in the Palais Royal, and in broad
- France. Paleness sits on every face; confused tremor and
- fremescence; waxing into thunder-peals, of Fury stirred on by
- Fear.
-
- But see Camille Desmoulins, from the Café de Foy, rushing out,
- sibylline in face; his hair streaming, in each hand a pistol! He
- springs to a table: the Police satellites are eyeing him; alive
- they shall not take him, not they alive him alive. This time he
- speaks without stammering:—Friends, shall we die like hunted
- hares? Like sheep hounded into their pinfold; bleating for mercy,
- where is no mercy, but only a whetted knife? The hour is come;
- the supreme hour of Frenchman and Man; when Oppressors are to try
- conclusions with Oppressed; and the word is, swift Death, or
- Deliverance forever. Let such hour be _well_-come! Us, meseems,
- one cry only befits: To Arms! Let universal Paris, universal
- France, as with the throat of the whirlwind, sound only: To
- arms!—‘To arms!’ yell responsive the innumerable voices: like one
- great voice, as of a Demon yelling from the air: for all faces
- wax fire-eyed, all hearts burn up into madness. In such, or
- fitter words,[172] does Camille evoke the Elemental Powers, in
- this great moment.—Friends, continues Camille, some rallying
- sign! Cockades; green ones;—the colour of hope!—As with the
- flight of locusts, these green tree leaves; green ribands from
- the neighbouring shops; all green things are snatched, and made
- cockades of. Camille descends from his table, “stifled with
- embraces, wetted with tears;” has a bit of green riband handed
- him; sticks it in his hat. And now to Curtius’ Image-shop there;
- to the Boulevards; to the four winds; and rest not till France be
- on fire!
-
- France, so long shaken and wind-parched, is probably at the right
- inflammable point.—As for poor Curtius, who, one grieves to
- think, might be but imperfectly paid,—he cannot make two words
- about his Images. The Wax-bust of Necker, the Wax-bust of
- D’Orléans, helpers of France: these, covered with crape, as in
- funeral procession, or after the manner of suppliants appealing
- to Heaven, to Earth, and Tartarus itself, a mixed multitude bears
- off. For a sign! As indeed man, with his singular imaginative
- faculties, can do little or nothing without signs: thus Turks
- look to their Prophet’s banner; also Osier _Mannikins_ have been
- burnt, and Necker’s Portrait has erewhile figured, aloft on its
- perch.
-
- In this manner march they, a mixed, continually increasing
- multitude; armed with axes, staves and miscellanea; grim,
- many-sounding, through the streets. Be all Theatres shut; let all
- dancing, on planked floor, or on the natural greensward, cease!
- Instead of a Christian Sabbath, and feast of _guinguette_
- tabernacles, it shall be a Sorcerer’s Sabbath; and Paris, gone
- rabid, dance,—with the Fiend for piper!
-
- However, Besenval, with horse and foot, is in the Place Louis
- Quinze. Mortals promenading homewards, in the fall of the day,
- saunter by, from Chaillot or Passy, from flirtation and a little
- thin wine; with sadder step than usual. Will the Bust-Procession
- pass that way! Behold it; behold also Prince Lambesc dash forth
- on it, with his Royal-Allemands! Shots fall, and sabre-strokes;
- Busts are hewn asunder; and, alas, also heads of men. A sabred
- Procession has nothing for it but to _explode_, along what
- streets, alleys, Tuileries Avenues it finds; and disappear. One
- unarmed man lies hewed down; a Garde Française by his uniform:
- bear him (or bear even the report of him) dead and gory to his
- Barracks;—where he has comrades still alive!
-
- But why not now, victorious Lambesc, charge through that
- Tuileries Garden itself, where the fugitives are vanishing? Not
- show the Sunday promenaders too, how steel glitters, besprent
- with blood; that it be told of, and men’s ears tingle?—Tingle,
- alas, they did; but the wrong way. Victorious Lambesc, in this
- his second or Tuileries charge, succeeds but in overturning (call
- it not slashing, for he struck with the flat of his sword) one
- man, a poor old schoolmaster, most pacifically tottering there;
- and is driven out, by barricade of chairs, by flights of “bottles
- and glasses,” by execrations in bass voice and treble. Most
- delicate is the mob-queller’s vocation; wherein Too-much may be
- as bad as Not-enough. For each of these bass voices, and more
- each treble voice, borne to all points of the City, rings now
- nothing but distracted indignation; will ring all another. The
- cry, _To arms!_ roars tenfold; steeples with their metal
- storm-voice boom out, as the sun sinks; armorer’s shops are
- broken open, plundered; the streets are a living foam-sea, chafed
- by all the winds.
-
- Such issue came of Lambesc’s charge on the Tuileries Garden: no
- striking of salutary terror into Chaillot promenaders; a striking
- into broad wakefulness of Frenzy and the three Furies,—which
- otherwise were not asleep! For they lie always, those
- subterranean Eumenides (fabulous and yet so true), in the dullest
- existence of man;—and can dance, brandishing their dusky torches,
- shaking their serpent-hair. Lambesc with Royal-Allemand may ride
- to his barracks, with curses for his marching-music; then ride
- back again, like one troubled in mind: vengeful Gardes
- Françaises, _sacre_ing, with knit brows, start out on him, from
- their barracks in the Chaussé d’Antin; pour a volley into him
- (killing and wounding); which he must not answer, but ride
- on.[173]
-
- Counsel dwells not under the plumed hat. If the Eumenides awaken,
- and Broglie has given no orders, what can a Besenval do? When the
- Gardes Françaises, with Palais-Royal volunteers, roll down,
- greedy of more vengeance, to the Place Louis Quinze itself, they
- find neither Besenval, Lambesc, Royal-Allemand, nor any soldier
- now there. Gone is military order. On the far Eastern Boulevard,
- of Saint-Antoine, the Chasseurs Normandie arrive, dusty, thirsty,
- after a hard day’s ride; but can find no billet-master, see no
- course in this City of confusions; cannot get to Besenval, cannot
- so much as discover where he is: Normandie must even bivouac
- there, in its dust and thirst,—unless some patriot will treat it
- to a cup of liquor, with advices.
-
- Raging multitudes surround the Hôtel-de-Ville, crying: Arms!
- Orders! The Six-and-twenty Town-Councillors, with their long
- gowns, have ducked under (into the raging chaos);—shall never
- emerge more. Besenval is painfully wriggling himself out, to the
- Champ-de-Mars; he must sit there “in the cruelest uncertainty:”
- courier after courier may dash off for Versailles; but will bring
- back no answer, can hardly bring himself back. For the roads are
- all blocked with batteries and pickets, with floods of carriages
- arrested for examination: such was Broglie’s one sole order; the
- Œil-de-Bœuf, hearing in the distance such mad din, which sounded
- almost like invasion, will before all things keep its own head
- whole. A new Ministry, with, as it were, but one foot in the
- stirrup, cannot take leaps. Mad Paris is abandoned altogether to
- itself.
-
- What a Paris, when the darkness fell! A European metropolitan
- City hurled suddenly forth from its old combinations and
- arrangements; to crash tumultuously together, seeking new. Use
- and wont will now no longer direct any man; each man, with what
- of originality he has, must begin thinking; or following those
- that think. Seven hundred thousand individuals, on the sudden,
- find all their old paths, old ways of acting and deciding, vanish
- from under their feet. And so there go they, with clangour and
- terror, they know not as yet whether running, swimming or
- flying,—headlong into the New Era. With clangour and terror: from
- above, Broglie the war-god impends, preternatural, with his
- redhot cannon-balls; and from below, a preternatural
- Brigand-world menaces with dirk and firebrand: madness rules the
- hour.
-
- Happily, in place of the submerged Twenty-six, the Electoral Club
- is gathering; has declared itself a “Provisional Municipality.”
- On the morrow it will get Provost Flesselles, with an Echevin or
- two, to give help in many things. For the present it decrees one
- most essential thing: that forthwith a “Parisian Militia” shall
- be enrolled. Depart, ye heads of Districts, to labour in this
- great work; while we here, in Permanent Committee, sit alert. Let
- fencible men, each party in its own range of streets, keep watch
- and ward, all night. Let Paris court a little fever-sleep;
- confused by such fever-dreams, of “violent motions at the Palais
- Royal;”—or from time to time start awake, and look out,
- palpitating, in its nightcap, at the clash of discordant
- mutually-unintelligible Patrols; on the gleam of distant
- Barriers, going up all-too ruddy towards the vault of Night.[174]
-
-
- Chapter 1.5.V.
- Give us Arms.
-
- On Monday the huge City has awoke, not to its week-day industry:
- to what a different one! The working man has become a fighting
- man; has one want only: that of arms. The industry of all crafts
- has paused;—except it be the smith’s, fiercely hammering pikes;
- and, in a faint degree, the kitchener’s, cooking off-hand
- victuals; for _bouche va toujours_. Women too are sewing
- cockades;—not now of green, which being D’Artois colour, the
- Hôtel-de-Ville has had to interfere in it; but of _red_ and
- _blue_, our old Paris colours: these, once based on a ground of
- constitutional _white_, are the famed TRICOLOR,—which (if
- Prophecy err not) “will go round the world.”
-
- All shops, unless it be the Bakers’ and Vintners’, are shut:
- Paris is in the streets;—rushing, foaming like some Venice
- wine-glass into which you had dropped poison. The tocsin, by
- order, is pealing madly from all steeples. Arms, ye Elector
- Municipals; thou Flesselles with thy Echevins, give us arms!
- Flesselles gives what he can: fallacious, perhaps insidious
- promises of arms from Charleville; order to seek arms here, order
- to seek them there. The new Municipals give what they can; some
- three hundred and sixty indifferent firelocks, the equipment of
- the City-Watch: “a man in wooden shoes, and without coat,
- directly clutches one of them, and mounts guard.” Also as hinted,
- an order to all Smiths to make pikes with their whole soul.
-
- Heads of Districts are in fervent consultation; subordinate
- Patriotism roams distracted, ravenous for arms. Hitherto at the
- Hôtel-de-Ville was only such modicum of indifferent firelocks as
- we have seen. At the so-called Arsenal, there lies nothing but
- rust, rubbish and saltpetre,—overlooked too by the guns of the
- Bastille. His Majesty’s Repository, what they call
- _Garde-Meuble_, is forced and ransacked: tapestries enough, and
- gauderies; but of serviceable fighting-gear small stock! Two
- silver-mounted cannons there are; an ancient gift from his
- Majesty of Siam to Louis Fourteenth: gilt sword of the Good
- Henri; antique Chivalry arms and armour. These, and such as
- these, a necessitous Patriotism snatches greedily, for want of
- better. The Siamese cannons go trundling, on an errand they were
- not meant for. Among the indifferent firelocks are seen
- tourney-lances; the princely helm and hauberk glittering amid
- ill-hatted heads,—as in a time when all times and their
- possessions are suddenly sent jumbling!
-
- At the _Maison de Saint-Lazare_, Lazar-House once, now a
- Correction-House with Priests, there was no trace of arms; but,
- on the other hand, corn, plainly to a culpable extent. Out with
- it, to market; in this scarcity of grains!—Heavens, will
- “fifty-two carts,” in long row, hardly carry it to the _Halle aux
- Bleds?_ Well, truly, ye reverend Fathers, was your pantry filled;
- fat are your larders; over-generous your wine-bins, ye plotting
- exasperators of the Poor; traitorous forestallers of bread!
-
- Vain is protesting, entreaty on bare knees: the House of
- Saint-Lazarus has that in it which comes not out by protesting.
- Behold, how, from every window, it _vomits:_ mere torrents of
- furniture, of bellowing and hurlyburly;—the cellars also leaking
- wine. Till, as was natural, smoke rose,—kindled, some say, by the
- desperate Saint-Lazaristes themselves, desperate of other
- riddance; and the Establishment vanished from this world in
- flame. Remark nevertheless that “a thief” (set on or not by
- Aristocrats), being detected there, is “instantly hanged.”
-
- Look also at the Châtelet Prison. The Debtors’ Prison of La Force
- is broken from without; and they that sat in bondage to
- Aristocrats go free: hearing of which the Felons at the Châtelet
- do likewise “dig up their pavements,” and stand on the offensive;
- with the best prospects,—had not Patriotism, passing that way,
- “fired a volley” into the Felon world; and crushed it down again
- under hatches. Patriotism consorts not with thieving and felony:
- surely also Punishment, this day, hitches (if she still hitch)
- after Crime, with frightful shoes-of-swiftness! “Some score or
- two” of wretched persons, found prostrate with drink in the
- cellars of that Saint-Lazare, are indignantly haled to prison;
- the Jailor has no room; whereupon, other place of security not
- suggesting itself, it is written, “_on les pendit_, they hanged
- them.”[175] Brief is the word; not without significance, be it
- true or untrue!
-
- In such circumstances, the Aristocrat, the unpatriotic rich man
- is packing-up for departure. But he shall not get departed. A
- wooden-shod force has seized all Barriers, burnt or not: all that
- enters, all that seeks to issue, is stopped there, and dragged to
- the Hôtel-de-Ville: coaches, tumbrils, plate, furniture, “many
- meal-sacks,” in time even “flocks and herds” encumber the Place
- de Grève.[176]
-
- And so it roars, and rages, and brays; drums beating, steeples
- pealing; criers rushing with hand-bells: ‘Oyez, oyez. All men to
- their Districts to be enrolled!’ The Districts have met in
- gardens, open squares; are getting marshalled into volunteer
- troops. No redhot ball has yet fallen from Besenval’s Camp; on
- the contrary, Deserters with their arms are continually dropping
- in: nay now, joy of joys, at two in the afternoon, the Gardes
- Françaises, being ordered to Saint-Denis, and flatly declining,
- have come over in a body! It is a fact worth many. Three thousand
- six hundred of the best fighting men, with complete accoutrement;
- with cannoneers even, and cannon! Their officers are left
- standing alone; could not so much as succeed in “spiking the
- guns.” The very Swiss, it may now be hoped, Château-Vieux and the
- others, will have doubts about fighting.
-
- Our Parisian Militia,—which some think it were better to name
- National Guard,—is prospering as heart could wish. It promised to
- be forty-eight thousand; but will in few hours double and
- quadruple that number: invincible, if we had only arms!
-
- But see, the promised Charleville Boxes, marked _Artillerie!_
- Here, then, are arms enough?—Conceive the blank face of
- Patriotism, when it found them filled with rags, foul linen,
- candle-ends, and bits of wood! Provost of the Merchants, how is
- this? Neither at the Chartreux Convent, whither we were sent with
- signed order, is there or ever was there any weapon of war. Nay
- here, in this Seine Boat, safe under tarpaulings (had not the
- nose of Patriotism been of the finest), are “five thousand-weight
- of gunpowder;” not coming _in_, but surreptitiously going out!
- What meanest thou, Flesselles? ’Tis a ticklish game, that of
- “amusing” us. Cat plays with captive mouse: but mouse with
- enraged cat, with enraged National Tiger?
-
- Meanwhile, the faster, O ye black-aproned Smiths, smite; with
- strong arm and willing heart. This man and that, all stroke from
- head to heel, shall thunder alternating, and ply the great
- forge-hammer, till stithy reel and ring again; while ever and
- anon, overhead, booms the alarm-cannon,—for the City has now got
- gunpowder. Pikes are fabricated; fifty thousand of them, in
- six-and-thirty hours: judge whether the Black-aproned have been
- idle. Dig trenches, unpave the streets, ye others, assiduous, man
- and maid; cram the earth in barrel-barricades, at each of them a
- volunteer sentry; pile the whinstones in window-sills and upper
- rooms. Have scalding pitch, at least boiling water ready, ye weak
- old women, to pour it and dash it on Royal-Allemand, with your
- old skinny arms: your shrill curses along with it will not be
- wanting!—Patrols of the newborn National Guard, bearing torches,
- scour the streets, all that night; which otherwise are vacant,
- yet illuminated in every window by order. Strange-looking; like
- some naphtha-lighted City of the Dead, with here and there a
- flight of perturbed Ghosts.
-
- O poor mortals, how ye make this Earth bitter for each other;
- this fearful and wonderful Life fearful and horrible; and Satan
- has his place in all hearts! Such agonies and ragings and
- wailings ye have, and have had, in all times:—to be buried all,
- in so deep silence; and the salt sea is not swoln with your
- tears.
-
- Great meanwhile is the moment, when tidings of Freedom reach us;
- when the long-enthralled soul, from amid its chains and squalid
- stagnancy, arises, were it still only in blindness and
- bewilderment, and swears by Him that made it, that it will be
- _free!_ Free? Understand that well, it is the deep commandment,
- dimmer or clearer, of our whole being, to be _free_. Freedom is
- the one purport, wisely aimed at, or unwisely, of all man’s
- struggles, toilings and sufferings, in this Earth. Yes, supreme
- is such a moment (if thou have known it): first vision as of a
- flame-girt Sinai, in this our waste Pilgrimage,—which thenceforth
- wants not its pillar of cloud by day, and pillar of fire by
- night! Something it is even,—nay, something considerable, when
- the chains have grown _corrosive_, poisonous, to be free “from
- oppression by our fellow-man.” Forward, ye maddened sons of
- France; be it towards this destiny or towards that! Around you is
- but starvation, falsehood, corruption and the clam of death.
- Where ye are is no abiding.
-
- Imagination may, imperfectly, figure how Commandant Besenval, in
- the Champ-de-Mars, has worn out these sorrowful hours
- Insurrection all round; his men melting away! From Versailles, to
- the most pressing messages, comes no answer; or once only some
- vague word of answer which is worse than none. A Council of
- Officers can decide merely that there is no decision: Colonels
- inform him, “weeping,” that they do not think their men will
- fight. Cruel uncertainty is here: war-god Broglie sits yonder,
- inaccessible in his Olympus; does not descend terror-clad, does
- not produce his whiff of grapeshot; sends no orders.
-
- Truly, in the Château of Versailles all seems mystery: in the
- Town of Versailles, were we there, all is rumour, alarm and
- indignation. An august National Assembly sits, to appearance,
- menaced with death; endeavouring to defy death. It has resolved
- “that Necker carries with him the regrets of the Nation.” It has
- sent solemn Deputation over to the Château, with entreaty to have
- these troops withdrawn. In vain: his Majesty, with a singular
- composure, invites us to be busy rather with our own duty, making
- the Constitution! Foreign Pandours, and suchlike, go pricking and
- prancing, with a swashbuckler air; with an eye too probably to
- the _Salle des Menus_,—were it not for the “grim-looking
- countenances” that crowd all avenues there.[177] Be firm, ye
- National Senators; the cynosure of a firm, grim-looking people!
-
- The august National Senators determine that there shall, at
- least, be Permanent Session till this thing end. Wherein,
- however, consider that worthy Lafranc de Pompignan, our new
- President, whom we have named Bailly’s successor, is an old man,
- wearied with many things. He is the Brother of that Pompignan who
- meditated lamentably on the Book of _Lamentations:_
-
- Saves-voux pourquoi Jérémie
- Se lamentait toute sa vie?
- C’est qu’il prévoyait
- Que Pompignan le traduirait!
-
-
- Poor Bishop Pompignan withdraws; having got Lafayette for helper
- or substitute: this latter, as nocturnal Vice-President, with a
- thin house in disconsolate humour, sits sleepless, with lights
- unsnuffed;—waiting what the hours will bring.
-
- So at Versailles. But at Paris, agitated Besenval, before
- retiring for the night, has stept over to old M. de Sombreuil, of
- the _Hôtel des Invalides_ hard by. M. de Sombreuil has, what is a
- great secret, some eight-and-twenty thousand stand of muskets
- deposited in his cellars there; but no trust in the temper of his
- Invalides. This day, for example, he sent twenty of the fellows
- down to unscrew those muskets; lest Sedition might snatch at
- them; but scarcely, in six hours, had the twenty unscrewed twenty
- gun-locks, or dogsheads (_chiens_) of locks,—each Invalide his
- dogshead! If ordered to fire, they would, he imagines, turn their
- cannon against himself.
-
- Unfortunate old military gentlemen, it is your hour, not of
- glory! Old Marquis de Launay too, of the Bastille, has pulled up
- his drawbridges long since, “and retired into his interior;” with
- sentries walking on his battlements, under the midnight sky,
- aloft over the glare of illuminated Paris;—whom a National
- Patrol, passing that way, takes the liberty of firing at; “seven
- shots towards twelve at night,” which do not take effect.[178]
- This was the 13th day of July, 1789; a worse day, many said, than
- the last 13th was, when only hail fell out of Heaven, not madness
- rose out of Tophet, ruining worse than crops!
-
- In these same days, as Chronology will teach us, hot old Marquis
- Mirabeau lies stricken down, at Argenteuil,—_not_ within sound of
- these alarm-guns; for _he_ properly is not there, and only the
- body of him now lies, deaf and cold forever. It was on Saturday
- night that he, drawing his last life-breaths, gave up the ghost
- there;—leaving a world, which would never go to his mind, now
- broken out, seemingly, into deliration and the _culbute
- générale_. What is it to him, departing elsewhither, on his long
- journey? The old Château Mirabeau stands silent, far off, on its
- scarped rock, in that “gorge of two windy valleys;” the
- pale-fading spectre now of a Château: this huge World-riot, and
- France, and the World itself, fades also, like a shadow on the
- great still mirror-sea; and all shall be as God wills.
-
- Young Mirabeau, sad of heart, for he loved this crabbed brave old
- Father, sad of heart, and occupied with sad cares,—is withdrawn
- from Public History. The great crisis transacts itself without
- him.[179]
-
-
- Chapter 1.5.VI.
- Storm and Victory.
-
- But, to the living and the struggling, a new, Fourteenth morning
- dawns. Under all roofs of this distracted City, is the nodus of a
- drama, not untragical, crowding towards solution. The bustlings
- and preparings, the tremors and menaces; the tears that fell from
- old eyes! This day, my sons, ye shall quit you like men. By the
- memory of your fathers’ wrongs, by the hope of your children’s
- rights! Tyranny impends in red wrath: help for you is none if not
- in your own right hands. This day ye must do or die.
-
- From earliest light, a sleepless Permanent Committee has heard
- the old cry, now waxing almost frantic, mutinous: Arms! Arms!
- Provost Flesselles, or what traitors there are among you, may
- think of those Charleville Boxes. A hundred-and-fifty thousand of
- us; and but the third man furnished with so much as a pike! Arms
- are the one thing needful: with arms we are an unconquerable
- man-defying National Guard; without arms, a rabble to be whiffed
- with grapeshot.
-
- Happily the word has arisen, for no secret can be kept,—that
- there lie muskets at the _Hôtel des Invalides_. Thither will we:
- King’s Procureur M. Ethys de Corny, and whatsoever of authority a
- Permanent Committee can lend, shall go with us. Besenval’s Camp
- is there; perhaps he will not fire on us; if he kill us we shall
- but die.
-
- Alas, poor Besenval, with his troops melting away in that manner,
- has not the smallest humour to fire! At five o’clock this
- morning, as he lay dreaming, oblivious in the _Ecole Militaire_,
- a “figure” stood suddenly at his bedside: “with face rather
- handsome; eyes inflamed, speech rapid and curt, air audacious:”
- such a figure drew Priam’s curtains! The message and monition of
- the figure was, that resistance would be hopeless; that if blood
- flowed, wo to him who shed it. Thus spoke the figure; and
- vanished. “Withal there was a kind of eloquence that struck one.”
- Besenval admits that he should have arrested him, but did
- not.[180] Who this figure, with inflamed eyes, with speech rapid
- and curt, might be? Besenval knows but mentions not. Camille
- Desmoulins? Pythagorean Marquis Valadi, inflamed with “violent
- motions all night at the Palais Royal?” Fame names him, “Young M.
- Meillar”;[181] Then shuts her lips about him for ever.
-
- In any case, behold about nine in the morning, our National
- Volunteers rolling in long wide flood, south-westward to the
- _Hôtel des Invalides;_ in search of the one thing needful. King’s
- procureur M. Ethys de Corny and officials are there; the Curé of
- Saint-Etienne du Mont marches unpacific, at the head of his
- militant Parish; the Clerks of the Bazoche in red coats we see
- marching, now Volunteers of the Bazoche; the Volunteers of the
- Palais Royal:—National Volunteers, numerable by tens of
- thousands; of one heart and mind. The King’s muskets are the
- Nation’s; think, old M. de Sombreuil, how, in this extremity,
- thou wilt refuse them! Old M. de Sombreuil would fain hold
- parley, send Couriers; but it skills not: the walls are scaled,
- no Invalide firing a shot; the gates must be flung open.
- Patriotism rushes in, tumultuous, from grundsel up to ridge-tile,
- through all rooms and passages; rummaging distractedly for arms.
- What cellar, or what cranny can escape it? The arms are found;
- all safe there; lying packed in straw,—apparently with a view to
- being burnt! More ravenous than famishing lions over dead prey,
- the multitude, with clangour and vociferation, pounces on them;
- struggling, dashing, clutching:—to the jamming-up, to the
- pressure, fracture and probable extinction, of the weaker
- Patriot.[182] And so, with such protracted crash of deafening,
- most discordant Orchestra-music, the Scene is changed: and
- eight-and-twenty thousand sufficient firelocks are on the
- shoulders of so many National Guards, lifted thereby out of
- darkness into fiery light.
-
- Let Besenval look at the glitter of these muskets, as they flash
- by! Gardes Françaises, it is said, have cannon levelled on him;
- ready to open, if need were, from the other side of the
- River.[183] Motionless sits he; “astonished,” one may flatter
- oneself, “at the proud bearing (_fière contenance_) of the
- Parisians.”—And now, to the Bastille, ye intrepid Parisians!
- There grapeshot still threatens; thither all men’s thoughts and
- steps are now tending.
-
- Old de Launay, as we hinted, withdrew “into his interior” soon
- after midnight of Sunday. He remains there ever since, hampered,
- as all military gentlemen now are, in the saddest conflict of
- uncertainties. The Hôtel-de-Ville “invites” him to admit National
- Soldiers, which is a soft name for surrendering. On the other
- hand, His Majesty’s orders were precise. His garrison is but
- eighty-two old Invalides, reinforced by thirty-two young Swiss;
- his walls indeed are nine feet thick, he has cannon and powder;
- but, alas, only one day’s provision of victuals. The city too is
- French, the poor garrison mostly French. Rigorous old de Launay,
- think what thou wilt do!
-
- All morning, since nine, there has been a cry everywhere: To the
- Bastille! Repeated “deputations of citizens” have been here,
- passionate for arms; whom de Launay has got dismissed by soft
- speeches through portholes. Towards noon, Elector Thuriot de la
- Rosiere gains admittance; finds de Launay indisposed for
- surrender; nay disposed for blowing up the place rather. Thuriot
- mounts with him to the battlements: heaps of paving-stones, old
- iron and missiles lie piled; cannon all duly levelled; in every
- embrasure a cannon,—only drawn back a little! But outwards
- behold, O Thuriot, how the multitude flows on, welling through
- every street; tocsin furiously pealing, all drums beating the
- _générale:_ the Suburb Saint-Antoine rolling hitherward wholly,
- as one man! Such vision (spectral yet real) thou, O Thuriot, as
- from thy Mount of Vision, beholdest in this moment: prophetic of
- what other Phantasmagories, and loud-gibbering Spectral
- Realities, which, thou yet beholdest not, but shalt! ‘_Que voulez
- vous?_’ said de Launay, turning pale at the sight, with an air of
- reproach, almost of menace. ‘Monsieur,’ said Thuriot, rising into
- the moral-sublime, ‘What mean _you?_ Consider if I could not
- precipitate _both_ of us from this height,’—say only a hundred
- feet, exclusive of the walled ditch! Whereupon de Launay fell
- silent. Thuriot shews himself from some pinnacle, to comfort the
- multitude becoming suspicious, fremescent: then descends; departs
- with protest; with warning addressed also to the Invalides,—on
- whom, however, it produces but a mixed indistinct impression. The
- old heads are none of the clearest; besides, it is said, de
- Launay has been profuse of beverages (_prodigua des buissons_).
- They think, they will not fire,—if not fired on, if they can help
- it; but must, on the whole, be ruled considerably by
- circumstances.
-
- Wo to thee, de Launay, in such an hour, if thou canst not, taking
- some one firm decision, _rule_ circumstances! Soft speeches will
- not serve; hard grape-shot is questionable; but hovering between
- the two is _un_questionable. Ever wilder swells the tide of men;
- their infinite hum waxing ever louder, into imprecations, perhaps
- into crackle of stray musketry,—which latter, on walls nine feet
- thick, cannot do execution. The Outer Drawbridge has been lowered
- for Thuriot; new _deputation of citizens_ (it is the third, and
- noisiest of all) penetrates that way into the Outer Court: soft
- speeches producing no clearance of these, de Launay gives fire;
- pulls up his Drawbridge. A slight sputter;—which has _kindled_
- the too combustible chaos; made it a roaring fire-chaos! Bursts
- forth insurrection, at sight of its own blood (for there were
- deaths by that sputter of fire), into endless rolling explosion
- of musketry, distraction, execration;—and overhead, from the
- Fortress, let one great gun, with its grape-shot, go booming, to
- shew what we _could_ do. The Bastille is besieged!
-
- On, then, all Frenchmen that have hearts in their bodies! Roar
- with all your throats, of cartilage and metal, ye Sons of
- Liberty; stir spasmodically whatsoever of utmost faculty is in
- you, soul, body or spirit; for it is the hour! Smite, thou Louis
- Tournay, cartwright of the Marais, old-soldier of the Regiment
- Dauphine; smite at that Outer Drawbridge chain, though the fiery
- hail whistles round thee! Never, over nave or felloe, did thy axe
- strike such a stroke. Down with it, man; down with it to Orcus:
- let the whole accursed Edifice sink thither, and Tyranny be
- swallowed up for ever! Mounted, some say on the roof of the
- guard-room, some “on bayonets stuck into joints of the wall,”
- Louis Tournay smites, brave Aubin Bonnemere (also an old soldier)
- seconding him: the chain yields, breaks; the huge Drawbridge
- slams down, thundering (_avec fracas_). Glorious: and yet, alas,
- it is still but the outworks. The Eight grim Towers, with their
- Invalides’ musketry, their paving stones and cannon-mouths, still
- soar aloft intact;—Ditch yawning impassable, stone-faced; the
- inner Drawbridge with its _back_ towards us: the Bastille is
- still to take!
-
- To describe this Siege of the Bastille (thought to be one of the
- most important in history) perhaps transcends the talent of
- mortals. Could one but, after infinite reading, get to understand
- so much as the plan of the building! But there is open Esplanade,
- at the end of the Rue Saint-Antoine; there are such Forecourts,
- _Cour Avancé, Cour de l’Orme_, arched Gateway (where Louis
- Tournay now fights); then new drawbridges, dormant-bridges,
- rampart-bastions, and the grim Eight Towers: a labyrinthic Mass,
- high-frowning there, of all ages from twenty years to four
- hundred and twenty;—beleaguered, in this its last hour, as we
- said, by mere Chaos come again! Ordnance of all calibres; throats
- of all capacities; men of all plans, every man his own engineer:
- seldom since the war of Pygmies and Cranes was there seen so
- anomalous a thing. Half-pay Elie is home for a suit of
- regimentals; no one would heed him in coloured clothes: half-pay
- Hulin is haranguing Gardes Françaises in the Place de Grève.
- Frantic Patriots pick up the grape-shots; bear them, still hot
- (or seemingly so), to the Hôtel-de-Ville:—Paris, you perceive, is
- to be burnt! Flesselles is “pale to the very lips” for the roar
- of the multitude grows deep. Paris wholly has got to the acme of
- its frenzy; whirled, all ways, by panic madness. At every
- street-barricade, there whirls simmering, a minor
- whirlpool,—strengthening the barricade, since God knows what is
- coming; and all minor whirlpools play distractedly into that
- grand Fire-Mahlstrom which is lashing round the Bastille.
-
- And so it lashes and it roars. Cholat the wine-merchant has
- become an impromptu cannoneer. See Georget, of the Marine
- Service, fresh from Brest, ply the King of Siam’s cannon.
- Singular (if we were not used to the like): Georget lay, last
- night, taking his ease at his inn; the King of Siam’s cannon also
- lay, knowing nothing of _him_, for a hundred years. Yet now, at
- the right instant, they have got together, and discourse eloquent
- music. For, hearing what was toward, Georget sprang from the
- Brest Diligence, and ran. Gardes Françaises also will be here,
- with real artillery: were not the walls so thick!—Upwards from
- the Esplanade, horizontally from all neighbouring roofs and
- windows, flashes one irregular deluge of musketry,—without
- effect. The Invalides lie flat, firing comparatively at their
- ease from behind stone; hardly through portholes, shew the tip of
- a nose. We fall, shot; and make no impression!
-
- Let conflagration rage; of whatsoever is combustible! Guard-rooms
- are burnt, Invalides mess-rooms. A distracted “Peruke-maker with
- two fiery torches” is for burning “the saltpetres of the
- Arsenal;”—had not a woman run screaming; had not a Patriot, with
- some tincture of Natural Philosophy, instantly struck the wind
- out of him (butt of musket on pit of stomach), overturned
- barrels, and stayed the devouring element. A young beautiful
- lady, seized escaping in these Outer Courts, and thought falsely
- to be de Launay’s daughter, shall be burnt in de Launay’s sight;
- she lies swooned on a paillasse: but again a Patriot, it is brave
- Aubin Bonnemere the old soldier, dashes in, and rescues her.
- Straw is burnt; three cartloads of it, hauled thither, go up in
- white smoke: almost to the choking of Patriotism itself; so that
- Elie had, with singed brows, to drag back one cart; and Reole the
- “gigantic haberdasher” another. Smoke as of Tophet; confusion as
- of Babel; noise as of the Crack of Doom!
-
- Blood flows, the aliment of new madness. The wounded are carried
- into houses of the Rue Cerisaie; the dying leave their last
- mandate not to yield till the accursed Stronghold fall. And yet,
- alas, how fall? The walls are so thick! Deputations, three in
- number, arrive from the Hôtel-de-Ville; Abbé Fouchet (who was of
- one) can say, with what almost superhuman courage of
- benevolence.[184] These wave their Town-flag in the arched
- Gateway; and stand, rolling their drum; but to no purpose. In
- such Crack of Doom, de Launay cannot hear them, dare not believe
- them: they return, with justified rage, the whew of lead still
- singing in their ears. What to do? The Firemen are here,
- squirting with their fire-pumps on the Invalides’ cannon, to wet
- the touchholes; they unfortunately cannot squirt so high; but
- produce only clouds of spray. Individuals of classical knowledge
- propose _catapults_. Santerre, the sonorous Brewer of the Suburb
- Saint-Antoine, advises rather that the place be fired, by a
- “mixture of phosphorous and oil-of-turpentine spouted up through
- forcing pumps:” O Spinola-Santerre, hast thou the mixture
- _ready?_ Every man his own engineer! And still the fire-deluge
- abates not; even women are firing, and Turks; at least one woman
- (with her sweetheart), and one Turk.[185] Gardes Françaises have
- come: real cannon, real cannoneers. Usher Maillard is busy;
- half-pay Elie, half-pay Hulin rage in the midst of thousands.
-
- How the great Bastille Clock ticks (inaudible) in its Inner Court
- there, at its ease, hour after hour; as if nothing special, for
- it or the world, were passing! It tolled One when the firing
- began; and is now pointing towards Five, and still the firing
- slakes not.—Far down, in their vaults, the seven Prisoners hear
- muffled din as of earthquakes; their Turnkeys answer vaguely.
-
- Wo to thee, de Launay, with thy poor hundred Invalides! Broglie
- is distant, and his ears heavy: Besenval hears, but can send no
- help. One poor troop of Hussars has crept, reconnoitring,
- cautiously along the Quais, as far as the Pont Neuf. ‘We are come
- to join you,’ said the Captain; for the crowd seems shoreless. A
- large-headed dwarfish individual, of smoke-bleared aspect,
- shambles forward, opening his blue lips, for there is sense in
- him; and croaks: ‘Alight then, and give up your arms!’ the
- Hussar-Captain is too happy to be escorted to the Barriers, and
- dismissed on parole. Who the squat individual was? Men answer, it
- is M. Marat, author of the excellent pacific _Avis au Peuple!_
- Great truly, O thou remarkable Dogleech, is this thy day of
- emergence and new birth: and yet this same day come four
- years—!—But let the curtains of the future hang.
-
- What shall de Launay do? One thing only de Launay could have
- done: what he said he would do. Fancy him sitting, from the
- first, with lighted taper, within arm’s length of the
- Powder-Magazine; motionless, like old Roman Senator, or bronze
- Lamp-holder; coldly apprising Thuriot, and all men, by a slight
- motion of his eye, what his resolution was:—Harmless he sat
- there, while unharmed; but the King’s Fortress, meanwhile, could,
- might, would, or should, in nowise, be surrendered, save to the
- King’s Messenger: one old man’s life worthless, so it be lost
- with honour; but think, ye brawling _canaille_, how will it be
- when a whole Bastille springs skyward!—In such statuesque,
- taper-holding attitude, one fancies de Launay might have left
- Thuriot, the red Clerks of the Bazoche, Curé of Saint-Stephen and
- all the tagrag-and-bobtail of the world, to work their will.
-
- And yet, withal, he could not do it. Hast thou considered how
- each man’s heart is so tremulously responsive to the hearts of
- all men; hast thou noted how omnipotent is the very sound of many
- men? How their shriek of indignation palsies the strong soul;
- their howl of contumely withers with unfelt pangs? The Ritter
- Gluck confessed that the ground-tone of the noblest passage, in
- one of his noblest Operas, was the voice of the Populace he had
- heard at Vienna, crying to their Kaiser: Bread! Bread! Great is
- the combined voice of men; the utterance of their _instincts_,
- which are truer than their _thoughts:_ it is the greatest a man
- encounters, among the sounds and shadows, which make up this
- World of Time. He who can resist that, has his footing some where
- _beyond_ Time. De Launay could not do it. Distracted, he hovers
- between the two; hopes in the middle of despair; surrenders not
- his Fortress; declares that he will blow it up, seizes torches to
- blow it up, and does not blow it. Unhappy old de Launay, it is
- the death-agony of thy Bastille and thee! Jail, Jailoring and
- Jailor, all three, such as they may have been, must finish.
-
- For four hours now has the World-Bedlam roared: call it the
- World-Chimaera, blowing fire! The poor Invalides have sunk under
- their battlements, or rise only with reversed muskets: they have
- made a white flag of napkins; go beating the _chamade_, or
- seeming to beat, for one can hear nothing. The very Swiss at the
- Portcullis look weary of firing; disheartened in the fire-deluge:
- a porthole at the drawbridge is opened, as by one that would
- speak. See Huissier Maillard, the shifty man! On his plank,
- swinging over the abyss of that stone-Ditch; plank resting on
- parapet, balanced by weight of Patriots,—he hovers perilous: such
- a Dove towards such an Ark! Deftly, thou shifty Usher: one man
- already fell; and lies smashed, far down there, against the
- masonry! Usher Maillard falls not: deftly, unerring he walks,
- with outspread palm. The Swiss holds a paper through his
- porthole; the shifty Usher snatches it, and returns. Terms of
- surrender: Pardon, immunity to all! Are they accepted?—‘_Foi
- d’officier_, On the word of an officer,’ answers half-pay
- Hulin,—or half-pay Elie, for men do not agree on it, ‘they are!’
- Sinks the drawbridge,—Usher Maillard bolting it when down;
- rushes-in the living deluge: the Bastille is fallen! _Victoire!
- La Bastille est prise!_[186]
-
-
- Chapter 1.5.VII.
- Not a Revolt.
-
- Why dwell on what follows? Hulin’s _foi d’officier_ should have
- been kept, but could not. The Swiss stand drawn up; disguised in
- white canvas smocks; the Invalides without disguise; their arms
- all piled against the wall. The first rush of victors, in ecstacy
- that the death-peril is passed, “leaps joyfully on their necks;”
- but new victors rush, and ever new, also in ecstacy not wholly of
- joy. As we said, it was a living deluge, plunging headlong; had
- not the Gardes Françaises, in their cool military way, “wheeled
- round with arms levelled,” it would have plunged suicidally, by
- the hundred or the thousand, into the Bastille-ditch.
-
- And so it goes plunging through court and corridor; billowing
- uncontrollable, firing from windows—on itself: in hot frenzy of
- triumph, of grief and vengeance for its slain. The poor Invalides
- will fare ill; one Swiss, running off in his white smock, is
- driven back, with a death-thrust. Let all prisoners be marched to
- the Townhall, to be judged!—Alas, already one poor Invalide has
- his right hand slashed off him; his maimed body dragged to the
- Place de Grève, and hanged there. This same right hand, it is
- said, turned back de Launay from the Powder-Magazine, and saved
- Paris.
-
- De Launay, “discovered in gray frock with poppy-coloured riband,”
- is for killing himself with the sword of his cane. He shall to
- the Hôtel-de-Ville; Hulin Maillard and others escorting him; Elie
- marching foremost “with the capitulation-paper on his sword’s
- point.” Through roarings and cursings; through hustlings,
- clutchings, and at last through strokes! Your escort is hustled
- aside, felled down; Hulin sinks exhausted on a heap of stones.
- Miserable de Launay! He shall never enter the Hotel de Ville:
- only his “bloody hair-queue, held up in a bloody hand;” that
- shall enter, for a sign. The bleeding trunk lies on the steps
- there; the head is off through the streets; ghastly, aloft on a
- pike.
-
- Rigorous de Launay has died; crying out, ‘O friends, kill me
- fast!’ Merciful de Losme must die; though Gratitude embraces him,
- in this fearful hour, and will die for him; it avails not.
- Brothers, your wrath is cruel! Your Place de Grève is become a
- Throat of the Tiger; full of mere fierce bellowings, and thirst
- of blood. One other officer is massacred; one other Invalide is
- hanged on the Lamp-iron: with difficulty, with generous
- perseverance, the Gardes Françaises will save the rest. Provost
- Flesselles stricken long since with the paleness of death, must
- descend from his seat, “to be judged at the Palais Royal:”—alas,
- to be shot dead, by an unknown hand, at the turning of the first
- street!—
-
- O evening sun of July, how, at this hour, thy beams fall slant on
- reapers amid peaceful woody fields; on old women spinning in
- cottages; on ships far out in the silent main; on Balls at the
- Orangerie of Versailles, where high-rouged Dames of the Palace
- are even now dancing with double-jacketted Hussar-Officers;—and
- also on this roaring Hell porch of a Hôtel-de-Ville! Babel Tower,
- with the confusion of tongues, were not Bedlam added with the
- conflagration of thoughts, was no type of it. One forest of
- distracted steel bristles, endless, in front of an Electoral
- Committee; points itself, in horrid radii, against this and the
- other accused breast. It was the Titans warring with Olympus; and
- they scarcely crediting it, have _conquered:_ prodigy of
- prodigies; delirious,—as it could not but be. Denunciation,
- vengeance; blaze of triumph on a dark ground of terror: all
- outward, all inward things fallen into one general wreck of
- madness!
-
- Electoral Committee? Had it a thousand throats of brass, it would
- not suffice. Abbé Lefevre, in the Vaults down below, is black as
- Vulcan, distributing that “five thousand weight of Powder;” with
- what perils, these eight-and-forty hours! Last night, a Patriot,
- in liquor, insisted on sitting to smoke on the edge of one of the
- Powder-barrels; there smoked he, independent of the world,—till
- the Abbé “purchased his pipe for three francs,” and pitched it
- far.
-
- Elie, in the grand Hall, Electoral Committee looking on, sits
- “with drawn sword bent in three places;” with battered helm, for
- he was of the Queen’s Regiment, Cavalry; with torn regimentals,
- face singed and soiled; comparable, some think, to “an antique
- warrior;”—judging the people; forming a list of Bastille Heroes.
- O Friends, stain not with blood the greenest laurels ever gained
- in this world: such is the burden of Elie’s song; could it but be
- listened to. Courage, Elie! Courage, ye Municipal Electors! A
- declining sun; the need of victuals, and of telling news, will
- bring assuagement, dispersion: all earthly things must end.
-
- Along the streets of Paris circulate Seven Bastille Prisoners,
- borne shoulder-high: seven Heads on pikes; the Keys of the
- Bastille; and much else. See also the Garde Françaises, in their
- steadfast military way, marching home to their barracks, with the
- Invalides and Swiss kindly enclosed in hollow square. It is one
- year and two months since these same men stood unparticipating,
- with Brennus d’Agoust at the Palais de Justice, when Fate
- overtook d’Espréménil; and now they have participated; and will
- participate. Not Gardes Françaises henceforth, but _Centre
- Grenadiers of the National Guard:_ men of iron discipline and
- humour,—not without a kind of thought in them!
-
- Likewise ashlar stones of the Bastille continue thundering
- through the dusk; its paper-archives shall fly white. Old secrets
- come to view; and long-buried Despair finds voice. Read this
- portion of an old Letter:[187] “If for my consolation Monseigneur
- would grant me for the sake of God and the Most Blessed Trinity,
- that I could have news of my dear wife; were it only her name on
- card to shew that she is alive! It were the greatest consolation
- I could receive; and I should for ever bless the greatness of
- Monseigneur.” Poor Prisoner, who namest thyself _Quéret Démery_,
- and hast no other history,—she is _dead_, that dear wife of
- thine, and thou art dead! ’Tis fifty years since thy breaking
- heart put this question; to be heard now first, and long heard,
- in the hearts of men.
-
- But so does the July twilight thicken; so must Paris, as sick
- children, and all distracted creatures do, brawl itself finally
- into a kind of sleep. Municipal Electors, astonished to find
- their heads still uppermost, are home: only Moreau de Saint-Méry
- of tropical birth and heart, of coolest judgment; he, with two
- others, shall sit permanent at the Townhall. Paris sleeps; gleams
- upward the illuminated City: patrols go clashing, without common
- watchword; there go rumours; alarms of war, to the extent of
- “fifteen thousand men marching through the Suburb
- Saint-Antoine,”—who never got it marched through. Of the day’s
- distraction judge by this of the night: Moreau de Saint-Méry,
- “before rising from his seat, gave upwards of three thousand
- orders.”[188] What a head; comparable to Friar Bacon’s Brass
- Head! Within it lies all Paris. Prompt must the answer be, right
- or wrong; in Paris is no other Authority extant. Seriously, a
- most cool clear head;—for which also thou O brave Saint-Méry, in
- many capacities, from august Senator to Merchant’s-Clerk,
- Book-dealer, Vice-King; in many places, from Virginia to
- Sardinia, shalt, ever as a brave man, find employment.[189]
-
- Besenval has decamped, under cloud of dusk, “amid a great
- affluence of people,” who did not harm him; he marches, with
- faint-growing tread, down the left bank of the Seine, all
- night,—towards infinite space. Resummoned shall Besenval himself
- be; for trial, for difficult acquittal. His King’s-troops, his
- Royal Allemand, are gone hence for ever.
-
- The Versailles Ball and lemonade is done; the Orangery is silent
- except for nightbirds. Over in the Salle des Menus,
- Vice-president Lafayette, with unsnuffed lights, “with some
- hundred of members, stretched on tables round him,” sits erect;
- outwatching the Bear. This day, a second solemn Deputation went
- to his Majesty; a second, and then a third: with no effect. What
- will the end of these things be?
-
- In the Court, all is mystery, not without whisperings of terror;
- though ye dream of lemonade and epaulettes, ye foolish women! His
- Majesty, kept in happy ignorance, perhaps dreams of
- double-barrels and the Woods of Meudon. Late at night, the Duke
- de Liancourt, having official right of entrance, gains access to
- the Royal Apartments; unfolds, with earnest clearness, in his
- constitutional way, the Job’s-news. ‘_Mais_,’ said poor Louis,
- ‘_c’est une révolte_, Why, that is a revolt!’—‘Sire,’ answered
- Liancourt, ‘It is not a revolt, it is a revolution.’
-
-
- Chapter 1.5.VIII.
- Conquering your King.
-
- On the morrow a fourth Deputation to the Château is on foot: of a
- more solemn, not to say awful character, for, besides “orgies in
- the Orangery,” it seems, “the grain convoys are all stopped;” nor
- has Mirabeau’s thunder been silent. Such Deputation is on the
- point of setting out—when lo, his Majesty himself attended only
- by his two Brothers, step in; quite in the paternal manner;
- announces that the troops, and all causes of offence, are gone,
- and henceforth there shall be nothing but trust, reconcilement,
- good-will; whereof he “permits and even requests,” a National
- Assembly to assure Paris in his name! Acclamation, as of men
- suddenly delivered from death, gives answer. The whole Assembly
- spontaneously rises to escort his Majesty back; “interlacing
- their arms to keep off the excessive pressure from him;” for all
- Versailles is crowding and shouting. The Château Musicians, with
- a felicitous promptitude, strike up the _Sein de sa Famille_
- (Bosom of one’s Family): the Queen appears at the balcony with
- her little boy and girl, “kissing them several times;” infinite
- _Vivats_ spread far and wide;—and suddenly there has come, as it
- were, a new Heaven-on-Earth.
-
- Eighty-eight august Senators, Bailly, Lafayette, and our
- repentant Archbishop among them, take coach for Paris, with the
- great intelligence; benedictions without end on their heads. From
- the Place Louis Quinze, where they alight, all the way to the
- Hôtel-de-Ville, it is one sea of Tricolor cockades, of clear
- National muskets; one tempest of huzzaings, hand-clappings, aided
- by “occasional rollings” of drum-music. Harangues of due fervour
- are delivered; especially by Lally Tollendal, pious son of the
- ill-fated murdered Lally; on whose head, in consequence, a civic
- crown (of oak or parsley) is forced,—which he forcibly transfers
- to Bailly’s.
-
- But surely, for one thing, the National Guard must have a
- General! Moreau de Saint-Méry, he of the “three thousand orders,”
- casts one of his significant glances on the Bust of Lafayette,
- which has stood there ever since the American War of Liberty.
- Whereupon, by acclamation, Lafayette is nominated. Again, in room
- of the slain traitor or quasi-traitor Flesselles, President
- Bailly shall be—Provost of the Merchants? No: Mayor of Paris! So
- be it. _Maire de Paris!_ Mayor Bailly, General Lafayette; _vive
- Bailly, vive Lafayette_—the universal out-of-doors multitude
- rends the welkin in confirmation.—And now, finally, let us to
- Notre-Dame for a _Te Deum._
-
- Towards Notre-Dame Cathedral, in glad procession, these
- Regenerators of the Country walk, through a jubilant people; in
- fraternal manner; Abbé Lefevre, still black with his gunpowder
- services, walking arm in arm with the white-stoled Archbishop.
- Poor Bailly comes upon the Foundling Children, sent to kneel to
- him; and “weeps.” _Te Deum_, our Archbishop officiating, is not
- only sung, but _shot_—with blank cartridges. Our joy is boundless
- as our wo threatened to be. Paris, by her own pike and musket,
- and the valour of her own heart, has conquered the very
- wargods,—to the satisfaction now of Majesty itself. A courier is,
- this night, getting under way for Necker: the People’s Minister,
- invited back by King, by National Assembly, and Nation, shall
- traverse France amid shoutings, and the sound of trumpet and
- timbrel.
-
- Seeing which course of things, Messeigneurs of the Court
- Triumvirate, Messieurs of the dead-born Broglie-Ministry, and
- others such, consider that their part also is clear: to mount and
- ride. Off, ye too-loyal Broglies, Polignacs, and Princes of the
- Blood; off while it is yet time! Did not the Palais-Royal in its
- late nocturnal “violent motions,” set a specific price (place of
- payment not mentioned) on each of your heads?—With precautions,
- with the aid of pieces of cannon and regiments that can be
- depended on, Messeigneurs, between the 16th night and the 17th
- morning, get to their several roads. Not without risk! Prince
- Condé has (or seems to have) “men galloping at full speed;” with
- a view, it is thought, to fling him into the river Oise, at
- Pont-Sainte-Mayence.[190] The Polignacs travel disguised;
- friends, not servants, on their coach-box. Broglie has his own
- difficulties at Versailles, runs his own risks at Metz and
- Verdun; does nevertheless get safe to Luxemburg, and there rests.
-
- This is what they call the First Emigration; determined on, as
- appears, in full Court-conclave; his Majesty assisting; prompt
- he, for his share of it, to follow any counsel whatsoever. “Three
- Sons of France, and four Princes of the blood of Saint Louis,”
- says Weber, “could not more effectually humble the Burghers of
- Paris than by appearing to withdraw in fear of their life.” Alas,
- the Burghers of Paris bear it with unexpected Stoicism! The Man
- d’Artois indeed is gone; but has he carried, for example, the
- Land D’Artois with him? Not even Bagatelle the Country-house
- (which shall be useful as a Tavern); hardly the four-valet
- Breeches, leaving the Breeches-maker!—As for old Foulon, one
- learns that he is dead; at least a “sumptuous funeral” is going
- on; the undertakers honouring him, if no other will. Intendant
- Berthier, his son-in-law, is still living; lurking: he joined
- Besenval, on that Eumenides’ Sunday; appearing to treat it with
- levity; and is now fled no man knows whither.
-
- The Emigration is not gone many miles, Prince Condé hardly across
- the Oise, when his Majesty, according to arrangement, for the
- Emigration also thought it might do good,—undertakes a rather
- daring enterprise: that of visiting Paris in person. With a
- Hundred Members of Assembly; with small or no military escort,
- which indeed he dismissed at the Bridge of Sèvres, poor Louis
- sets out; leaving a desolate Palace; a Queen weeping, the
- Present, the Past, and the Future all so unfriendly for her.
-
- At the Barrier of Passy, Mayor Bailly, in grand gala, presents
- him with the keys; harangues him, in Academic style; mentions
- that it is a great day; that in Henri Quatre’s case, the King had
- to make conquest of his People, but in this happier case, the
- People makes conquest of its King (_a conquis son Roi_). The
- King, so happily conquered, drives forward, slowly, through a
- steel people, all silent, or shouting only _Vive la Nation;_ is
- harangued at the Townhall, by Moreau of the three-thousand
- orders, by King’s Procureur M. Ethys de Corny, by Lally
- Tollendal, and others; knows not what to think of it, or say of
- it; learns that he is “Restorer of French Liberty,”—as a Statue
- of him, to be raised on the site of the Bastille, shall testify
- to all men. Finally, he is shewn at the Balcony, with a Tricolor
- cockade in his hat; is greeted now, with vehement acclamation,
- from Square and Street, from all windows and roofs:—and so drives
- home again amid glad mingled and, as it were, intermarried
- shouts, of _Vive le Roi_ and _Vive la Nation;_ wearied but safe.
-
- It was Sunday when the red-hot balls hung over us, in mid air: it
- is now but Friday, and “the Revolution is sanctioned.” An August
- National Assembly shall make the Constitution; and neither
- foreign Pandour, domestic Triumvirate, with levelled Cannon,
- Guy-Faux powder-plots (for that too was spoken of); nor any
- tyrannic Power on the Earth, or under the Earth, shall say to it,
- What dost thou?—So jubilates the people; sure now of a
- Constitution. Cracked Marquis Saint-Huruge is heard under the
- windows of the Château; murmuring sheer speculative-treason.[191]
-
-
- Chapter 1.5.IX.
- The Lanterne.
-
- The Fall of the Bastille may be said to have shaken all France to
- the deepest foundations of its existence. The rumour of these
- wonders flies every where: with the natural speed of Rumour; with
- an effect thought to be preternatural, produced by plots. Did
- d’Orléans or Laclos, nay did Mirabeau (not overburdened with
- money at this time) send riding Couriers out from Paris; to
- gallop “on all radii,” or highways, towards all points of France?
- It is a miracle, which no penetrating man will call in
- question.[192]
-
- Already in most Towns, Electoral Committees were met; to regret
- Necker, in harangue and resolution. In many a Town, as Rennes,
- Caen, Lyons, an ebullient people was already regretting him in
- brickbats and musketry. But now, at every Town’s-end in France,
- there do arrive, in these days of terror,—“men,” as men will
- arrive; nay, “men on horseback,” since Rumour oftenest travels
- riding. These men declare, with alarmed countenance, _The_
- BRIGANDS to be coming, to be just at hand; and do then—ride on,
- about their further business, be what it might! Whereupon the
- whole population of such Town, defensively flies to arms.
- Petition is soon thereafter forwarded to National Assembly; in
- such peril and terror of peril, leave to organise yourself cannot
- be withheld: the armed population becomes everywhere an enrolled
- National Guard. Thus rides Rumour, careering along all radii,
- from Paris outwards, to such purpose: in few days, some say in
- not many hours, all France to the utmost borders bristles with
- bayonets. Singular, but undeniable,—miraculous or not!—But thus
- may any chemical liquid; though cooled to the freezing-point, or
- far lower, still continue liquid; and then, on the slightest
- stroke or shake, it at once rushes wholly into ice. Thus has
- France, for long months and even years, been chemically dealt
- with; brought below zero; and now, shaken by the Fall of a
- Bastille, it instantaneously congeals: into one crystallised
- mass, of sharp-cutting steel! _Guai a chi la tocca;_ ’Ware who
- touches it!
-
- In Paris, an Electoral Committee, with a new Mayor and General,
- is urgent with belligerent workmen to resume their handicrafts.
- Strong Dames of the Market (_Dames de la Halle_) deliver
- congratulatory harangues; present “bouquets to the Shrine of
- Sainte Genevieve.” Unenrolled men deposit their arms,—not so
- readily as could be wished; and receive “nine francs.” With _Te
- Deums_, Royal Visits, and sanctioned Revolution, there is halcyon
- weather; weather even of preternatural brightness; the hurricane
- being overblown.
-
- Nevertheless, as is natural, the waves still run high, hollow
- rocks retaining their murmur. We are but at the 22nd of the
- month, hardly above a week since the Bastille fell, when it
- suddenly appears that old Foulon is alive; nay, that he is here,
- in early morning, in the streets of Paris; the extortioner, the
- plotter, who would make the people eat grass, and was a liar from
- the beginning!—It is even so. The deceptive “sumptuous funeral”
- (of some domestic that died); the hiding-place at Vitry towards
- Fontainbleau, have not availed that wretched old man. Some living
- domestic or dependant, for none loves Foulon, has betrayed him to
- the Village. Merciless boors of Vitry unearth him; pounce on him,
- like hell-hounds: Westward, old Infamy; to Paris, to be judged at
- the Hôtel-de-Ville! His old head, which seventy-four years have
- bleached, is bare; they have tied an emblematic bundle of grass
- on his back; a garland of nettles and thistles is round his neck:
- in this manner; led with ropes; goaded on with curses and
- menaces, must he, with his old limbs, sprawl forward; the
- pitiablest, most unpitied of all old men.
-
- Sooty Saint-Antoine, and every street, mustering its crowds as he
- passes,—the Place de Grève, the Hall of the Hôtel-de-Ville will
- scarcely hold his escort and him. Foulon must not only be judged
- righteously; but judged there where he stands, without any delay.
- Appoint seven judges, ye Municipals, or seventy-and-seven; name
- them yourselves, or we will name them: but judge him![193]
- Electoral rhetoric, eloquence of Mayor Bailly, is wasted
- explaining the beauty of the Law’s delay. Delay, and still delay!
- Behold, O Mayor of the People, the morning has worn itself into
- noon; and he is still unjudged!—Lafayette, pressingly sent for,
- arrives; gives voice: This Foulon, a known man, is guilty almost
- beyond doubt; but may he not have accomplices? Ought not the
- truth to be cunningly pumped out of him,—in the Abbaye Prison? It
- is a new light! Sansculottism claps hands;—at which
- hand-clapping, Foulon (in his fainness, as his Destiny would have
- it) also claps. ‘See! they understand one another!’ cries dark
- Sansculottism, blazing into fury of suspicion.—‘Friends,’ said “a
- person in good clothes,” stepping forward, ‘what is the use of
- judging this man? Has he not been judged these thirty years?’
- With wild yells, Sansculottism clutches him, in its hundred
- hands: he is whirled across the Place de Grève, to the
- “_Lanterne_,” Lamp-iron which there is at the corner of the _Rue
- de la Vannerie;_ pleading bitterly for life,—to the deaf winds.
- Only with the third rope (for two ropes broke, and the quavering
- voice still pleaded), can he be so much as got hanged! His Body
- is dragged through the streets; his Head goes aloft on a pike,
- the mouth filled with grass: amid sounds as of Tophet, from a
- grass-eating people.[194]
-
- Surely if Revenge is a “kind of Justice,” it is a “wild” kind! O
- mad Sansculottism hast thou risen, in thy mad darkness, in thy
- soot and rags; unexpectedly, like an Enceladus, living-buried,
- from under his Trinacria? They that would make grass be eaten do
- now eat grass, in _this_ manner? After long dumb-groaning
- generations, has the turn suddenly become thine?—To such abysmal
- overturns, and frightful instantaneous inversions of the
- centre-of-gravity, are human Solecisms all liable, if they but
- knew it; the more liable, the falser (and topheavier) they are!—
-
- To add to the horror of Mayor Bailly and his Municipals, word
- comes that Berthier has also been arrested; that he is on his way
- hither from Compiègne. Berthier, Intendant (say, _Tax-levier_) of
- Paris; sycophant and tyrant; forestaller of Corn; contriver of
- Camps against the people;—accused of many things: is he not
- Foulon’s son-in-law; and, in that one point, guilty of all? In
- these hours too, when Sansculottism has its blood up! The
- shuddering Municipals send one of their number to escort him,
- with mounted National Guards.
-
- At the fall of day, the wretched Berthier, still wearing a face
- of courage, arrives at the Barrier; in an open carriage; with the
- Municipal beside him; five hundred horsemen with drawn sabres;
- unarmed footmen enough, not without noise! Placards go brandished
- round him; bearing legibly his indictment, as Sansculottism, with
- unlegal brevity, “in huge letters,” draws it up.[195] Paris is
- come forth to meet him: with hand-clappings, with windows flung
- up; with dances, triumph-songs, as of the Furies! Lastly the Head
- of Foulon: this also meets him on a pike. Well might his “look
- become glazed,” and sense fail him, at such sight!—Nevertheless,
- be the man’s conscience what it may, his nerves are of iron. At
- the Hôtel-de-Ville, he will answer nothing. He says, he obeyed
- superior order; they have his papers; they may judge and
- determine: as for himself, not having closed an eye these two
- nights, he demands, before all things, to have sleep. Leaden
- sleep, thou miserable Berthier! Guards rise with him, in motion
- towards the Abbaye. At the very door of the Hôtel-de-Ville, they
- are clutched; flung asunder, as by a vortex of mad arms; Berthier
- whirls towards the Lanterne. He snatches a musket; fells and
- strikes, defending himself like a mad lion; is borne down,
- trampled, hanged, mangled: his Head too, and even his Heart,
- flies over the City on a pike.
-
- Horrible, in Lands that had known equal justice! Not so unnatural
- in Lands that had never known it. _Le sang qui coule est-il donc
- si pure?_ asks Barnave; intimating that the Gallows, though by
- irregular methods, has its own.—Thou thyself, O Reader, when thou
- turnest that corner of the Rue de la Vannerie, and discernest
- still that same grim Bracket of old Iron, wilt not want for
- reflections. “Over a grocer’s shop,” or otherwise; with “a bust
- of Louis XIV. in the niche under it,” or now no longer in the
- niche,—_it_ still sticks there: still holding out an ineffectual
- light, of fish-oil; and has seen worlds wrecked, and says
- nothing.
-
- But to the eye of enlightened Patriotism, what a thunder-cloud
- was this; suddenly shaping itself in the radiance of the halcyon
- weather! Cloud of Erebus blackness: betokening latent electricity
- without limit. Mayor Bailly, General Lafayette throw up their
- commissions, in an indignant manner;—need to be flattered back
- again. The cloud disappears, as thunder-clouds do. The halcyon
- weather returns, though of a grayer complexion; of a character
- more and more evidently _not_ supernatural.
-
- Thus, in any case, with what rubs soever, shall the Bastille be
- abolished from our Earth; and with it, Feudalism, Despotism; and,
- one hopes, Scoundrelism generally, and all hard usage of man by
- his brother man. Alas, the Scoundrelism and hard usage are not so
- easy of abolition! But as for the Bastille, it sinks day after
- day, and month after month; its ashlars and boulders tumbling
- down continually, by express order of our Municipals. Crowds of
- the curious roam through its caverns; gaze on the skeletons found
- walled up, on the _oubliettes_, iron cages, monstrous
- stone-blocks with padlock chains. One day we discern Mirabeau
- there; along with the Genevese Dumont.[196] Workers and onlookers
- make reverent way for him; fling verses, flowers on his path,
- Bastille-papers and curiosities into his carriage, with _vivats._
-
- Able Editors compile Books from the _Bastille Archives;_ from
- what of them remain unburnt. The Key of that Robber-Den shall
- cross the Atlantic; shall lie on Washington’s hall-table. The
- great Clock ticks now in a private patriotic Clockmaker’s
- apartment; no longer measuring hours of mere heaviness. Vanished
- is the Bastille, what we call vanished: the _body_, or
- sandstones, of it hanging, in benign metamorphosis, for centuries
- to come, over the Seine waters, as _Pont Louis Seize_;[197] the
- soul of it living, perhaps still longer, in the memories of men.
-
- So far, ye august Senators, with your Tennis-Court Oaths, your
- inertia and impetus, your sagacity and pertinacity, have ye
- brought us. ‘And yet think, Messieurs,’ as the Petitioner justly
- urged, ‘you who were our saviours, did yourselves need
- saviours,’—the brave Bastillers, namely; workmen of Paris; many
- of them in straightened pecuniary circumstances! [198]
- Subscriptions are opened; Lists are formed, more accurate than
- Elie’s; harangues are delivered. A Body of _Bastille Heroes_,
- tolerably complete, did get together;—comparable to the
- Argonauts; hoping to endure like them. But in little more than a
- year, the whirlpool of things threw them asunder again, and they
- sank. So many highest superlatives achieved by man are followed
- by new higher; and dwindle into comparatives and positives! The
- Siege of the Bastille, weighed with which, in the Historical
- balance, most other sieges, including that of Troy Town, are
- gossamer, cost, as we find, in killed and mortally wounded, on
- the part of the Besiegers, some Eighty-three persons: on the part
- of the Besieged, after all that straw-burning, fire-pumping, and
- deluge of musketry, One poor solitary invalid, shot stone-dead
- (_roide-mort_) on the battlements;[199] The Bastille Fortress,
- like the City of Jericho, was overturned by miraculous _sound._
-
-
- BOOK VI.
- CONSOLIDATION
-
-
- Chapter 1.6.I.
- Make the Constitution.
-
- Here perhaps is the place to fix, a little more precisely, what
- these two words, _French Revolution_, shall mean; for, strictly
- considered, they may have as many meanings as there are speakers
- of them. All things are in revolution; in change from moment to
- moment, which becomes sensible from epoch to epoch: in this
- Time-World of ours there is properly nothing else but revolution
- and mutation, and even nothing else conceivable. Revolution, you
- answer, means _speedier_ change. Whereupon one has still to ask:
- How speedy? At what degree of speed; in what particular points of
- this variable course, which varies in velocity, but can never
- stop till Time itself stops, does revolution begin and end; cease
- to be ordinary mutation, and again become such? It is a thing
- that will depend on definition more or less arbitrary.
-
- For ourselves we answer that French Revolution means here the
- open violent Rebellion, and Victory, of disimprisoned Anarchy
- against corrupt worn-out Authority: how Anarchy breaks prison;
- bursts up from the infinite Deep, and rages uncontrollable,
- immeasurable, enveloping a world; in phasis after phasis of
- fever-frenzy;—till the frenzy burning itself out, and what
- elements of new Order it held (since all Force holds such)
- developing themselves, the Uncontrollable be got, if not
- reimprisoned, yet harnessed, and its mad forces made to work
- towards their object as sane regulated ones. For as Hierarchies
- and Dynasties of all kinds, Theocracies, Aristocracies,
- Autocracies, Strumpetocracies, have ruled over the world; so it
- was appointed, in the decrees of Providence, that this same
- Victorious Anarchy, Jacobinism, Sansculottism, French Revolution,
- Horrors of French Revolution, or what else mortals name it,
- should have its turn. The “destructive wrath” of Sansculottism:
- this is what we speak, having unhappily no voice for singing.
-
- Surely a great Phenomenon: nay it is a _transcendental_ one,
- overstepping all rules and experience; the crowning Phenomenon of
- our Modern Time. For here again, most unexpectedly, comes antique
- Fanaticism in new and newest vesture; miraculous, as all
- Fanaticism is. Call it the Fanaticism of “making away with
- formulas, _de humer les formules_.” The world of formulas, the
- _formed_ regulated world, which all habitable world is,—must
- needs hate such Fanaticism like death; and be at deadly variance
- with it. The world of formulas must conquer it; or failing that,
- must die execrating it, anathematising it;—can nevertheless in
- nowise prevent its being and its having been. The Anathemas are
- there, and the miraculous Thing is there.
-
- Whence it cometh? Whither it goeth? These are questions! When the
- age of Miracles lay faded into the distance as an incredible
- tradition, and even the age of Conventionalities was now old; and
- Man’s Existence had for long generations rested on mere formulas
- which were grown hollow by course of time; and it seemed as if no
- Reality any longer existed but only Phantasms of realities, and
- God’s Universe were the work of the Tailor and Upholsterer
- mainly, and men were buckram masks that went about becking and
- grimacing there,—on a sudden, the Earth yawns asunder, and amid
- Tartarean smoke, and glare of fierce brightness, rises
- SANSCULOTTISM, many-headed, fire-breathing, and asks: What think
- ye of _me?_ Well may the buckram masks start together,
- terror-struck; “into expressive well-concerted groups!” It is
- indeed, Friends, a most singular, most fatal thing. Let whosoever
- is but buckram and a phantasm look to it: ill verily may it fare
- with him; here methinks he cannot much longer be. Wo also to many
- a one who is not wholly buckram, but partially real and human!
- The age of Miracles has come back! “Behold the World-Phoenix, in
- fire-consummation and fire-creation; wide are her fanning wings;
- loud is her death-melody, of battle-thunders and falling towns;
- skyward lashes the funeral flame, enveloping all things: it is
- the Death-Birth of a World!”
-
- Whereby, however, as we often say, shall one unspeakable blessing
- seem attainable. This, namely: that Man and his Life rest no more
- on hollowness and a Lie, but on solidity and some kind of Truth.
- Welcome, the beggarliest truth, so it _be_ one, in exchange for
- the royallest sham! Truth of any kind breeds ever new and better
- truth; thus hard granite rock will crumble down into soil, under
- the blessed skyey influences; and cover itself with verdure, with
- fruitage and umbrage. But as for Falsehood, which in like
- contrary manner, grows ever falser,—what can it, or what should
- it do but decease, being ripe; decompose itself, gently or even
- violently, and return to the Father of it,—too probably in flames
- of fire?
-
- Sansculottism will burn much; but what is incombustible it will
- not burn. Fear not Sansculottism; recognise it for what it is,
- the portentous, inevitable end of much, the miraculous beginning
- of much. One other thing thou mayest understand of it: that it
- too came from God; for has it not _been?_ From of old, as it is
- written, are His goings forth; in the great Deep of things;
- fearful and wonderful now as in the beginning: in the whirlwind
- also He speaks! and the wrath of men is made to praise Him.—But
- to gauge and measure this immeasurable Thing, and what is called
- _account for it_, and reduce it to a dead logic-formula, attempt
- not! Much less shalt thou shriek thyself hoarse, cursing it; for
- that, to all needful lengths, has been already done. As an
- actually existing Son of Time, _look_, with unspeakable manifold
- interest, oftenest in silence, at what the Time did bring:
- therewith edify, instruct, nourish thyself, or were it but to
- amuse and gratify thyself, as it is given thee.
-
- Another question which at every new turn will rise on us,
- requiring ever new reply is this: Where the French Revolution
- specially _is?_ In the King’s Palace, in his Majesty’s or her
- Majesty’s managements, and maltreatments, cabals, imbecilities
- and woes, answer some few:—whom we do not answer. In the National
- Assembly, answer a large mixed multitude: who accordingly seat
- themselves in the Reporter’s Chair; and therefrom noting what
- Proclamations, Acts, Reports, passages of logic-fence, bursts of
- parliamentary eloquence seem notable within doors, and what
- tumults and rumours of tumult become audible from
- without,—produce volume on volume; and, naming it History of the
- French Revolution, contentedly publish the same. To do the like,
- to almost any extent, with so many Filed Newspapers, _Choix des
- Rapports, Histoires Parlementaires_ as there are, amounting to
- many horseloads, were easy for us. Easy but unprofitable. The
- National Assembly, named now Constituent Assembly, goes its
- course; making the Constitution; but the French Revolution also
- goes _its_ course.
-
- In general, may we not say that the French Revolution lies in the
- heart and head of every violent-speaking, of every
- violent-thinking French Man? How the Twenty-five Millions of
- such, in their perplexed combination, acting and counter-acting
- may give birth to events; which event successively is the
- cardinal one; and from what point of vision it may best be
- surveyed: this is a problem. Which problem the best insight,
- seeking light from all possible sources, shifting its point of
- vision whithersoever vision or glimpse of vision can be had, may
- employ itself in solving; and be well content to solve in some
- tolerably approximate way.
-
- As to the National Assembly, in so far as it still towers eminent
- over France, after the manner of a car-borne _Carroccio_, though
- now no longer in the van; and rings signals for retreat or for
- advance,—it is and continues a reality among other realities. But
- in so far as it sits making the Constitution, on the other hand,
- it is a fatuity and chimera mainly. Alas, in the never so heroic
- building of Montesquieu-Mably card-castles, though shouted over
- by the world, what interest is there? Occupied in that way, an
- august National Assembly becomes for us little other than a
- Sanhedrim of pedants, not of the gerund-grinding, yet of no
- fruitfuller sort; and its loud debatings and recriminations about
- Rights of Man, Right of Peace and War, _Veto suspensif, Veto
- absolu_, what are they but so many Pedant’s-curses, “May God
- confound you for your _Theory of Irregular Verbs!_”
-
- A Constitution can be built, Constitutions enough _à la Sieyes:_
- but the frightful difficulty is that of getting men to come and
- live in them! Could Sieyes have drawn thunder and lightning out
- of Heaven to sanction his Constitution, it had been well: but
- without any thunder? Nay, strictly considered, is it not still
- true that without some such celestial sanction, given visibly in
- thunder or invisibly otherwise, no Constitution can in the long
- run be worth much more than the waste-paper it is written on? The
- Constitution, the set of Laws, or prescribed Habits of Acting,
- that men will live under, is the one which images their
- Convictions,—their Faith as to this wondrous Universe, and what
- rights, duties, capabilities they have there; which stands
- sanctioned therefore, by Necessity itself, if not by a seen
- Deity, then by an unseen one. Other laws, whereof there are
- always enough _ready_-made, are usurpations; which men do not
- obey, but rebel against, and abolish, by their earliest
- convenience.
-
- The question of questions accordingly were, Who is it that
- especially for rebellers and abolishers, can make a Constitution?
- He that can image forth the general Belief when there is one;
- that can impart one when, as here, there is none. A most rare
- man; ever as of old a god-missioned man! Here, however, in defect
- of such transcendent supreme man, Time with its infinite
- succession of merely superior men, each yielding his little
- contribution, does much. Force likewise (for, as Antiquarian
- Philosophers teach, the royal Sceptre was from the first
- something of a Hammer, to _crack_ such heads as could not be
- convinced) will all along find somewhat to do. And thus in
- perpetual abolition and reparation, rending and mending, with
- struggle and strife, with present evil and the hope and effort
- towards future good, must the Constitution, as all human things
- do, build itself forward; or unbuild itself, and sink, as it can
- and may. O Sieyes, and ye other Committeemen, and Twelve Hundred
- miscellaneous individuals from all parts of France! What is the
- Belief of France, and yours, if ye knew it? Properly that there
- shall be no Belief; that all formulas be swallowed. The
- Constitution which will suit that? Alas, too clearly, a
- No-Constitution, an Anarchy;—which also, in due season, shall be
- vouchsafed you.
-
- But, after all, what can an unfortunate National Assembly do?
- Consider only this, that there are Twelve Hundred miscellaneous
- individuals; not a unit of whom but has his own
- thinking-apparatus, his own speaking-apparatus! In every unit of
- them is some belief and wish, different for each, both that
- France should be regenerated, and also that he individually
- should do it. Twelve Hundred separate Forces, yoked
- miscellaneously to any object, miscellaneously to all sides of
- it; and bid pull for life!
-
- Or is it the nature of National Assemblies generally to do, with
- endless labour and clangour, Nothing? Are Representative
- Governments mostly at bottom Tyrannies too! Shall we say, the
- _Tyrants_, the ambitious contentious Persons, from all corners of
- the country do, in this manner, get gathered into one place; and
- there, with motion and counter-motion, with jargon and hubbub,
- _cancel_ one another, like the fabulous Kilkenny Cats; and
- produce, for net-result, _zero;_—the country meanwhile
- _governing_ or guiding _itself_, by such wisdom, recognised or
- for most part unrecognised, as may exist in individual heads here
- and there?—Nay, even that were a great improvement: for, of old,
- with their Guelf Factions and Ghibelline Factions, with their Red
- Roses and White Roses, they were wont to cancel the whole country
- as well. Besides they do it now in a much narrower cockpit;
- within the four walls of their Assembly House, and here and there
- an outpost of Hustings and Barrel-heads; do it with tongues too,
- not with swords:—all which improvements, in the art of producing
- zero, are they not great? Nay, best of all, some happy Continents
- (as the Western one, with its Savannahs, where whosoever has four
- willing limbs finds food under his feet, and an infinite sky over
- his head) can do without governing.—What Sphinx-questions; which
- the distracted world, in these very generations, must answer or
- die!
-
-
- Chapter 1.6.II.
- The Constituent Assembly.
-
- One thing an elected Assembly of Twelve Hundred is fit for:
- Destroying. Which indeed is but a more decided exercise of its
- natural talent for Doing Nothing. Do nothing, only keep
- agitating, debating; and things will destroy themselves.
-
- So and not otherwise proved it with an august National Assembly.
- It took the name, Constituent, as if its mission and function had
- been to construct or build; which also, with its whole soul, it
- endeavoured to do: yet, in the fates, in the nature of things,
- there lay for it precisely of all functions the most opposite to
- that. Singular, what Gospels men will believe; even Gospels
- according to Jean Jacques! It was the fixed Faith of these
- National Deputies, as of all thinking Frenchmen, that the
- Constitution could be _made;_ that they, there and then, were
- called to make it. How, with the toughness of Old Hebrews or
- Ishmaelite Moslem, did the otherwise light unbelieving People
- persist in this their _Credo quia impossibile;_ and front the
- armed world with it; and grow fanatic, and even heroic, and do
- exploits by it! The Constituent Assembly’s Constitution, and
- several others, will, being printed and not manuscript, survive
- to future generations, as an instructive well-nigh incredible
- document of the Time: the most significant Picture of the then
- existing France; or at lowest, Picture of these men’s Picture of
- it.
-
- But in truth and seriousness, what could the National Assembly
- have done? The thing to _be_ done was, actually as they said, to
- regenerate France; to abolish the old France, and make a new one;
- quietly or forcibly, by concession or by violence, this, by the
- Law of Nature, has become inevitable. With what degree of
- violence, depends on the wisdom of those that preside over it.
- With perfect wisdom on the part of the National Assembly, it had
- all been otherwise; but whether, in any wise, it could have been
- pacific, nay other than bloody and convulsive, may still be a
- question.
-
- Grant, meanwhile, that this Constituent Assembly does to the last
- continue to be something. With a sigh, it sees itself incessantly
- forced away from its infinite divine task, of perfecting “the
- Theory of Irregular Verbs,”—to finite terrestrial tasks, which
- latter have still a significance for us. It is the cynosure of
- revolutionary France, this National Assembly. All work of
- Government has fallen into its hands, or under its control; all
- men look to it for guidance. In the middle of that huge Revolt of
- Twenty-five millions, it hovers always aloft as _Carroccio_ or
- Battle-Standard, impelling and impelled, in the most confused
- way; if it cannot give much guidance, it will still seem to give
- some. It emits pacificatory Proclamations, not a few; with more
- or with less result. It authorises the enrolment of National
- Guards,—lest Brigands come to devour us, and reap the unripe
- crops. It sends missions to quell “effervescences;” to deliver
- men from the Lanterne. It can listen to congratulatory Addresses,
- which arrive daily by the sackful; mostly in King Cambyses’ vein:
- also to Petitions and complaints from all mortals; so that every
- mortal’s complaint, if it cannot get redressed, may at least hear
- itself complain. For the rest, an august National Assembly can
- produce Parliamentary Eloquence; and appoint Committees.
- Committees of the Constitution, of Reports, of Researches; and of
- much else: which again yield mountains of Printed Paper; the
- theme of new Parliamentary Eloquence, in bursts, or in plenteous
- smooth-flowing floods. And so, from the waste vortex whereon all
- things go whirling and grinding, Organic Laws, or the similitude
- of such, slowly emerge.
-
- With endless debating, we get the _Rights of Man_ written down
- and promulgated: true paper basis of all paper Constitutions.
- Neglecting, cry the opponents, to declare the Duties of Man!
- Forgetting, answer we, to ascertain the _Mights_ of Man;—one of
- the fatalest omissions!—Nay, sometimes, as on the Fourth of
- August, our National Assembly, fired suddenly by an almost
- preternatural enthusiasm, will get through whole masses of work
- in one night. A memorable night, this Fourth of August:
- Dignitaries temporal and spiritual; Peers, Archbishops,
- Parlement-Presidents, each outdoing the other in patriotic
- devotedness, come successively to throw their (untenable)
- possessions on the “altar of the fatherland.” With louder and
- louder vivats, for indeed it is “after dinner” too,—they abolish
- Tithes, Seignorial Dues, Gabelle, excessive Preservation of Game;
- nay Privilege, Immunity, Feudalism root and branch; then appoint
- a _Te Deum_ for it; and so, finally, disperse about three in the
- morning, striking the stars with their sublime heads. Such night,
- unforeseen but for ever memorable, was this of the Fourth of
- August 1789. Miraculous, or semi-miraculous, some seem to think
- it. A new Night of Pentecost, shall we say, shaped according to
- the new Time, and new Church of Jean Jacques Rousseau? It had its
- causes; also its effects.
-
- In such manner labour the National Deputies; perfecting their
- Theory of Irregular Verbs; governing France, and being governed
- by it; with toil and noise;—cutting asunder ancient intolerable
- bonds; and, for new ones, assiduously spinning ropes of sand.
- Were their labours a nothing or a something, yet the eyes of all
- France being reverently fixed on them, History can never very
- long leave them altogether out of sight.
-
- For the present, if we glance into that Assembly Hall of theirs,
- it will be found, as is natural, “most irregular.” As many as “a
- hundred members are on their feet at once;” no rule in making
- motions, or only commencements of a rule; Spectators’ Gallery
- allowed to applaud, and even to hiss;[200] President, appointed
- once a fortnight, raising many times no serene head above the
- waves. Nevertheless, as in all human Assemblages, like does begin
- arranging itself to like; the perennial rule, _Ubi homines sunt
- modi sunt_, proves valid. Rudiments of Methods disclose
- themselves; rudiments of Parties. There is a Right Side (_Côté
- Droit_), a Left Side (_Côté Gauche_); sitting on M. le
- President’s right hand, or on his left: the _Côté Droit_
- conservative; the _Côté Gauche_ destructive. Intermediate is
- Anglomaniac Constitutionalism, or Two-Chamber Royalism; with its
- Mouniers, its Lallys,—fast verging towards nonentity. Preeminent,
- on the Right Side, pleads and perorates Cazalès, the
- Dragoon-captain, eloquent, mildly fervent; earning for himself
- the shadow of a name. There also blusters Barrel-Mirabeau, the
- Younger Mirabeau, not without wit: dusky d’Espréménil does
- nothing but sniff and ejaculate; _might_, it is fondly thought,
- lay prostrate the Elder Mirabeau himself, would he but
- try,[201]—which he does not. Last and greatest, see, for one
- moment, the Abbé Maury; with his jesuitic eyes, his impassive
- brass face, “image of all the cardinal sins.” Indomitable,
- unquenchable, he fights jesuitico-rhetorically; with toughest
- lungs and heart; for Throne, especially for Altar and Tithes. So
- that a shrill voice exclaims once, from the Gallery: ‘Messieurs
- of the Clergy, you _have_ to be shaved; if you wriggle too much,
- you will get cut.’[202]
-
- The Left side is also called the d’Orléans side; and sometimes
- derisively, the Palais Royal. And yet, so confused,
- real-imaginary seems everything, “it is doubtful,” as Mirabeau
- said, “whether d’Orléans himself belong to that same d’Orléans
- Party.” What can be known and seen is, that his moon-visage does
- beam forth from that point of space. There likewise sits seagreen
- Robespierre; throwing in his light weight, with decision, not yet
- with effect. A thin lean Puritan and Precisian; he would make
- away with formulas; yet lives, moves, and has his being, wholly
- in formulas, of another sort. “_Peuple_,” such according to
- Robespierre ought to be the Royal method of promulgating laws,
- “_Peuple_, this is the Law I have framed for thee; dost thou
- accept it?”—answered from Right Side, from Centre and Left, by
- inextinguishable laughter.[203] Yet men of insight discern that
- the Seagreen may by chance go far: ‘this man,’ observes Mirabeau,
- ‘will do somewhat; he believes every word he says.’
-
- Abbé Sieyes is busy with mere Constitutional work: wherein,
- unluckily, fellow-workmen are less pliable than, with one who has
- completed the Science of Polity, they ought to be. Courage,
- Sieyes nevertheless! Some twenty months of heroic travail, of
- contradiction from the stupid, and the Constitution shall be
- built; the top-stone of it brought out with shouting,—say rather,
- the top-paper, for it is all Paper; and _thou_ hast done in it
- what the Earth or the Heaven could require, thy utmost. Note
- likewise this Trio; memorable for several things; memorable were
- it only that their history is written in an epigram: “whatsoever
- these Three have in hand,” it is said, “Duport thinks it, Barnave
- speaks it, Lameth does it.”[204]
-
- But royal Mirabeau? Conspicuous among all parties, raised above
- and beyond them all, this man rises more and more. As we often
- say, he has an _eye_, he is a reality; while others are formulas
- and _eye_-glasses. In the Transient he will detect the Perennial,
- find some firm footing even among Paper-vortexes. His fame is
- gone forth to all lands; it gladdened the heart of the crabbed
- old Friend of Men himself before he died. The very Postilions of
- inns have heard of Mirabeau: when an impatient Traveller
- complains that the team is insufficient, his Postilion answers,
- ‘Yes, Monsieur, the wheelers are weak; but my _mirabeau_ (main
- horse), you see, is a right one, _mais mon mirabeau est
- excellent_.’[205]
-
- And now, Reader, thou shalt quit this noisy Discrepancy of a
- National Assembly; not (if thou be of humane mind) without pity.
- Twelve Hundred brother men are there, in the centre of
- Twenty-five Millions; fighting so fiercely with Fate and with one
- another; struggling their lives out, as most sons of Adam do, for
- that which profiteth not. Nay, on the whole, it is admitted
- further to be very _dull_. ‘Dull as this day’s Assembly,’ said
- some one. ‘Why date, _Pourquoi dater?_’ answered Mirabeau.
-
- Consider that they are Twelve Hundred; that they not only speak,
- but _read_ their speeches; and even borrow and steal speeches to
- read! With Twelve Hundred fluent speakers, and their Noah’s
- Deluge of vociferous commonplace, unattainable silence may well
- seem the one blessing of Life. But figure Twelve Hundred
- pamphleteers; droning forth perpetual pamphlets: and no man to
- gag them! Neither, as in the American Congress, do the
- arrangements seem perfect. A Senator has not his own Desk and
- Newspaper here; of Tobacco (much less of Pipes) there is not the
- slightest provision. Conversation itself must be transacted in a
- low tone, with continual interruption: only “pencil Notes”
- circulate freely; “in incredible numbers to the foot of the very
- tribune.”[206]—Such work is it, regenerating a Nation; perfecting
- one’s Theory of Irregular Verbs!
-
-
- Chapter 1.6.III.
- The General Overturn.
-
- Of the King’s Court, for the present, there is almost nothing
- whatever to be said. Silent, deserted are these halls; Royalty
- languishes forsaken of its war-god and all its hopes, till once
- the Œil-de-Bœuf rally again. The sceptre is departed from King
- Louis; is gone over to the _Salles des Menus_, to the Paris
- Townhall, or one knows not whither. In the July days, while all
- ears were yet deafened by the crash of the Bastille, and
- Ministers and Princes were scattered to the four winds, it seemed
- as if the very Valets had grown heavy of hearing. Besenval, also
- in flight towards Infinite Space, but hovering a little at
- Versailles, was addressing his Majesty personally for an Order
- about post-horses; when, lo, “the Valet in waiting places himself
- familiarly between his Majesty and me,” stretching out his rascal
- neck to learn what it was! His Majesty, in sudden choler, whirled
- round; made a clutch at the tongs: “I gently prevented him; he
- grasped my hand in thankfulness; and I noticed tears in his
- eyes.”[207]
-
- Poor King; for French Kings also are men! Louis Fourteenth
- himself once clutched the tongs, and even smote with them; but
- then it was at Louvois, and Dame Maintenon ran up.—The Queen sits
- weeping in her inner apartments, surrounded by weak women: she is
- “at the height of unpopularity;” universally regarded as the evil
- genius of France. Her friends and familiar counsellors have all
- fled; and fled, surely, on the foolishest errand. The Château
- Polignac still frowns aloft, on its “bold and enormous” cubical
- rock, amid the blooming champaigns, amid the blue girdling
- mountains of Auvergne:[208] but no Duke and Duchess Polignac look
- forth from it; they have fled, they have “met Necker at Bale;”
- they shall not return. That France should see her Nobles resist
- the Irresistible, Inevitable, with the face of angry men, was
- unhappy, not unexpected: but with the face and sense of pettish
- children? This was her peculiarity. They understood nothing;
- would understand nothing. Does not, at this hour, a new Polignac,
- first-born of these Two, sit reflective in the Castle of
- Ham;[209] in an astonishment he will never recover from; the most
- confused of existing mortals?
-
- King Louis has his new Ministry: mere Popularities; Old-President
- Pompignan; Necker, coming back in triumph; and other such.[210]
- But what will it avail him? As was said, the sceptre, all but the
- wooden gilt sceptre, has departed elsewhither. Volition,
- determination is not in this man: only innocence, indolence;
- dependence on all persons but himself, on all circumstances but
- the circumstances he were lord of. So troublous internally is our
- Versailles and its work. Beautiful, if seen from afar,
- resplendent like a Sun; seen near at hand, a mere
- Sun’s-Atmosphere, hiding darkness, confused ferment of ruin!
-
- But over France, there goes on the indisputablest “destruction of
- formulas;” transaction of realities that follow therefrom. So
- many millions of persons, all gyved, and nigh strangled, with
- formulas; whose Life nevertheless, at least the digestion and
- hunger of it, was real enough! Heaven has at length sent an
- abundant harvest; but what profits it the poor man, when Earth
- with her formulas interposes? Industry, in these times of
- Insurrection, must needs lie dormant; capital, as usual, not
- circulating, but stagnating timorously in nooks. The poor man is
- short of work, is therefore short of money; nay even had he
- money, bread is not to be bought for it. Were it plotting of
- Aristocrats, plotting of d’Orléans; were it Brigands,
- preternatural terror, and the clang of Phoebus Apollo’s silver
- bow,—enough, the markets are scarce of grain, plentiful only in
- tumult. Farmers seem lazy to thresh;—being either “bribed;” or
- needing no bribe, with prices ever rising, with perhaps rent
- itself no longer so pressing. Neither, what is singular, do
- municipal enactments, “That along with so many measures of wheat
- you shall sell so many of rye,” and other the like, much mend the
- matter. Dragoons with drawn swords stand ranked among the
- corn-sacks, often more dragoons than sacks.[211] Meal-mobs
- abound; growing into mobs of a still darker quality.
-
- Starvation has been known among the French Commonalty before
- this; known and familiar. Did we not see them, in the year 1775,
- presenting, in sallow faces, in wretchedness and raggedness,
- their Petition of Grievances; and, for answer, getting a
- brand-new Gallows forty feet high? Hunger and Darkness, through
- long years! For look back on that earlier Paris Riot, when a
- Great Personage, worn out by debauchery, was believed to be in
- want of Blood-baths; and Mothers, in worn raiment, yet with
- living hearts under it, “filled the public places” with their
- wild Rachel-cries,—stilled also by the Gallows. Twenty years ago,
- the Friend of Men (preaching to the deaf) described the Limousin
- Peasants as wearing a pain-stricken (_souffre-douleur_) look, a
- look _past_ complaint, “as if the oppression of the great were
- like the hail and the thunder, a thing irremediable, the
- ordinance of Nature.”[212] And now, if in some great hour, the
- shock of a falling Bastille should awaken you; and it were found
- to be the ordinance of Art merely; and remediable, reversible!
-
- Or has the Reader forgotten that “flood of savages,” which, in
- sight of the same Friend of Men, descended from the mountains at
- Mont d’Or? Lank-haired haggard faces; shapes rawboned, in high
- sabots; in woollen jupes, with leather girdles studded with
- copper-nails! They rocked from foot to foot, and beat time with
- their elbows too, as the quarrel and battle which was not long in
- beginning went on; shouting fiercely; the lank faces distorted
- into the similitude of a cruel laugh. For they were darkened and
- hardened: long had they been the prey of excise-men and tax-men;
- of “clerks with the cold spurt of their pen.” It was the fixed
- prophecy of our old Marquis, which no man would listen to, that
- “such Government by Blind-man’s-buff, stumbling along too far,
- would end by the General Overturn, the _Culbute Générale!_”
-
- No man would listen, each went his thoughtless way;—and Time and
- Destiny also travelled on. The Government by Blind-man’s-buff,
- stumbling along, has reached the precipice inevitable for it.
- Dull Drudgery, driven on, by clerks with the cold dastard spurt
- of their pen, has been driven—into a Communion of Drudges! For
- now, moreover, there have come the strangest confused tidings; by
- Paris Journals with their paper wings; or still more portentous,
- where no Journals are,[213] by rumour and conjecture: Oppression
- _not_ inevitable; a Bastille prostrate, and the Constitution fast
- getting ready! Which Constitution, if it be something and not
- nothing, what can it be but bread to eat?
-
- The Traveller, “walking up hill bridle in hand,” overtakes “a
- poor woman;” the image, as such commonly are, of drudgery and
- scarcity; “looking sixty years of age, though she is not yet
- twenty-eight.” They have seven children, her poor drudge and she:
- a farm, with one cow, which helps to make the children soup; also
- one little horse, or garron. They have rents and quit-rents, Hens
- to pay to this Seigneur, Oat-sacks to that; King’s taxes,
- Statute-labour, Church-taxes, taxes enough;—and think the times
- inexpressible. She has heard that some_where_, in some manner,
- some_thing_ is to be done for the poor: ‘God send it soon; for
- the dues and taxes crush us down (_nous écrasent_)!’[214]
-
- Fair prophecies are spoken, but they are not fulfilled. There
- have been Notables, Assemblages, turnings out and comings in.
- Intriguing and manœuvring; Parliamentary eloquence and arguing,
- Greek meeting Greek in high places, has long gone on; yet still
- bread comes not. The harvest is reaped and garnered; yet still we
- have no bread. Urged by despair and by hope, what can Drudgery
- do, but rise, as predicted, and produce the General Overturn?
-
- Fancy, then, some Five full-grown Millions of such gaunt figures,
- with their haggard faces (_figures hâves_); in woollen jupes,
- with copper-studded leather girths, and high sabots,—starting up
- to ask, as in forest-roarings, their washed Upper-Classes, after
- long unreviewed centuries, virtually this question: How have ye
- treated us; how have ye taught us, fed us, and led us, while we
- toiled for you? The answer can be read in flames, over the
- nightly summer sky. _This_ is the feeding and leading we have had
- of you: EMPTINESS,—of pocket, of stomach, of head, and of heart.
- Behold there is _nothing in us;_ nothing but what Nature gives
- her wild children of the desert: Ferocity and Appetite; Strength
- grounded on Hunger. Did ye mark among your Rights of Man, that
- man was not to die of starvation, while there was bread reaped by
- him? It is among the Mights of Man.
-
- Seventy-two Châteaus have flamed aloft in the Maconnais and
- Beaujolais alone: this seems the centre of the conflagration; but
- it has spread over Dauphiné, Alsace, the Lyonnais; the whole
- South-East is in a blaze. All over the North, from Rouen to Metz,
- disorder is abroad: smugglers of salt go openly in armed bands:
- the barriers of towns are burnt; toll-gatherers, tax-gatherers,
- official persons put to flight. “It was thought,” says Young,
- “the people, from hunger, would revolt;” and we see they have
- done it. Desperate Lackalls, long prowling aimless, now finding
- hope in desperation itself, everywhere form a nucleus. They ring
- the Church bell by way of tocsin: and the Parish turns out to the
- work.[215] Ferocity, atrocity; hunger and revenge: such work as
- we can imagine!
-
- Ill stands it now with the Seigneur, who, for example, “has
- walled up the only Fountain of the Township;” who has ridden high
- on his _chartier_ and parchments; who has preserved Game not
- wisely but too well. Churches also, and Canonries, are sacked,
- without mercy; which have shorn the flock too close, forgetting
- to feed it. Wo to the land over which Sansculottism, in its day
- of vengeance, tramps roughshod,—shod in sabots! Highbred
- Seigneurs, with their delicate women and little ones, had to “fly
- half-naked,” under cloud of night; glad to escape the flames, and
- even worse. You meet them at the _tables-d’hôte_ of inns; making
- wise reflections or foolish that “rank is destroyed;” uncertain
- whither they shall now wend.[216] The _métayer_ will find it
- convenient to be slack in paying rent. As for the Tax-gatherer,
- he, long hunting as a biped of prey, may now get hunted as one;
- his Majesty’s Exchequer will not “fill up the Deficit,” this
- season: it is the notion of many that a Patriot Majesty, being
- the Restorer of French Liberty, has abolished most taxes, though,
- for their private ends, some men make a secret of it.
-
- Where this will end? In the Abyss, one may prophecy; whither all
- Delusions are, at all moments, travelling; where this Delusion
- has now arrived. For if there be a Faith, from of old, it is
- this, as we often repeat, that no Lie can live for ever. The very
- Truth has to change its vesture, from time to time; and be born
- again. But all Lies have sentence of death written down against
- them, and Heaven’s Chancery itself; and, slowly or fast, advance
- incessantly towards their hour. “The sign of a Grand Seigneur
- being landlord,” says the vehement plain-spoken Arthur Young,
- “are wastes, _landes_, deserts, ling: go to his residence, you
- will find it in the middle of a forest, peopled with deer, wild
- boars and wolves. The fields are scenes of pitiable management,
- as the houses are of misery. To see so many millions of hands,
- that would be industrious, all idle and starving: Oh, if I were
- legislator of France, for one day, I would make these great lords
- skip again!”[217] O Arthur, thou now actually beholdest them
- _skip;_—wilt thou grow to grumble at that too?
-
- For long years and generations it lasted, but the time came.
- Featherbrain, whom no reasoning and no pleading could touch, the
- glare of the firebrand had to illuminate: there remained but that
- method. Consider it, look at it! The widow is gathering nettles
- for her children’s dinner; a perfumed Seigneur, delicately
- lounging in the Œil-de-Bœuf, has an alchemy whereby he will
- extract from her the third nettle, and name it Rent and Law: such
- an arrangement must end. Ought it? But, O most fearful is _such_
- an ending! Let those, to whom God, in His great mercy, has
- granted time and space, prepare another and milder one.
-
- To some it is a matter of wonder that the Seigneurs did not do
- something to help themselves; say, combine, and arm: for there
- were a “hundred and fifty thousand of them,” all violent enough.
- Unhappily, a hundred and fifty thousand, scattered over wide
- Provinces, divided by mutual ill-will, cannot combine. The
- highest Seigneurs, as we have seen, had already emigrated,—with a
- view of putting France to the blush. Neither are arms now the
- peculiar property of Seigneurs; but of every mortal who has ten
- shillings, wherewith to buy a secondhand firelock.
-
- Besides, those starving Peasants, after all, have not four feet
- and claws, that you could keep them down permanently in that
- manner. They are not even of black colour; they are mere Unwashed
- Seigneurs; and a Seigneur too has human bowels!—The Seigneurs did
- what they could; enrolled in National Guards; fled, with shrieks,
- complaining to Heaven and Earth. One Seigneur, famed Memmay of
- Quincey, near Vesoul, invited all the rustics of his
- neighbourhood to a banquet; blew up his Château and them with
- gunpowder; and instantaneously vanished, no man yet knows
- whither.[218] Some half dozen years after, he came back; and
- demonstrated that it was by accident.
-
- Nor are the authorities idle: though unluckily, all Authorities,
- Municipalities and such like, are in the uncertain transitionary
- state; getting regenerated from old Monarchic to new Democratic;
- no Official yet knows clearly what he is. Nevertheless, Mayors
- old or new do gather _Marechaussées_, National Guards, Troops of
- the line; justice, of the most summary sort, is not wanting. The
- Electoral Committee of Macon, though but a Committee, goes the
- length of hanging, for its own behoof, as many as twenty. The
- Prévôt of Dauphiné traverses the country “with a movable column,”
- with tipstaves, gallows-ropes; for gallows any tree will serve,
- and suspend its culprit, or “thirteen” culprits.
-
- Unhappy country! How is the fair gold-and-green of the ripe
- bright Year defaced with horrid blackness: black ashes of
- Châteaus, black bodies of gibetted Men! Industry has ceased in
- it; not sounds of the hammer and saw, but of the tocsin and
- alarm-drum. The sceptre has departed, _whither_ one knows
- not;—breaking itself in pieces: here impotent, there tyrannous.
- National Guards are unskilful, and of doubtful purpose; Soldiers
- are inclined to mutiny: there is danger that they two may
- quarrel, danger that they may _agree_. Strasburg has seen riots:
- a Townhall torn to shreds, its archives scattered white on the
- winds; drunk soldiers embracing drunk citizens for three days,
- and Mayor Dietrich and Marshal Rochambeau reduced nigh to
- desperation.[219]
-
- Through the middle of all which phenomena, is seen, on his
- triumphant transit, “escorted,” through Béfort for instance, “by
- fifty National Horsemen and all the military music of the
- place,”—M. Necker, returning from Bale! Glorious as the meridian;
- though poor Necker himself partly guesses whither it is
- leading.[220] One highest culminating day, at the Paris Townhall;
- with immortal vivats, with wife and daughter kneeling publicly to
- kiss his hand; with Besenval’s pardon granted,—but indeed revoked
- before sunset: one highest day, but then lower days, and ever
- lower, down even to lowest! Such magic is in a name; and in the
- want of a name. Like some enchanted Mambrino’s Helmet, essential
- to victory, comes this “Saviour of France;” beshouted,
- becymballed by the world:—alas, so soon, to be _dis_enchanted, to
- be pitched shamefully over the lists as a Barber’s Bason! Gibbon
- “could wish to shew him” (in this ejected, Barber’s-Bason state)
- to any man of solidity, who were minded to have the soul burnt
- out of him, and become a _caput mortuum_, by Ambition,
- unsuccessful or successful.[221]
-
- Another small phasis we add, and no more: how, in the Autumn
- months, our sharp-tempered Arthur has been “pestered for some
- days past,” by shot, lead-drops and slugs, “rattling five or six
- times into my chaise and about my ears;” all the mob of the
- country gone out to kill game![222] It is even so. On the Cliffs
- of Dover, over all the Marches of France, there appear, this
- autumn, two Signs on the Earth: emigrant flights of French
- Seigneurs; emigrant winged flights of French Game! Finished, one
- may say, or as good as finished, is the Preservation of Game on
- this Earth; completed for endless Time. What part it had to play
- in the History of Civilisation is played _plaudite; exeat!_
-
- In this manner does Sansculottism blaze up, illustrating many
- things;—producing, among the rest, as we saw, on the Fourth of
- August, that semi-miraculous Night of Pentecost in the National
- Assembly; semi miraculous, which had its causes, and its effects.
- Feudalism is struck dead; not on parchment only, and by ink; but
- in very fact, by fire; say, by self-combustion. This
- conflagration of the South-East will abate; will be got
- scattered, to the West, or elsewhither: extinguish it will not,
- till the _fuel_ be all done.
-
-
- Chapter 1.6.IV.
- In Queue.
-
- If we look now at Paris, one thing is too evident: that the
- Baker’s shops have got their _Queues_, or Tails; their long
- strings of purchasers, arranged _in tail_, so that the first come
- be the first served,—were the shop once open! This waiting in
- tail, not seen since the early days of July, again makes its
- appearance in August. In time, we shall see it perfected by
- practice to the rank almost of an art; and the art, or quasi-art,
- of standing in tail become one of the characteristics of the
- Parisian People, distinguishing them from all other Peoples
- whatsoever.
-
- But consider, while work itself is so scarce, how a man must not
- only realise money; but stand waiting (if his wife is too weak to
- wait and struggle) for half days in the Tail, till he get it
- changed for dear bad bread! Controversies, to the length,
- sometimes of blood and battery, must arise in these exasperated
- Queues. Or if no controversy, then it is but one accordant _Pange
- Lingua_ of complaint against the Powers that be. France has begun
- her long Curriculum of Hungering, instructive and productive
- beyond Academic Curriculums; which extends over some seven most
- strenuous years. As Jean Paul says, of his own Life, “to a great
- height shall the business of Hungering go.”
-
- Or consider, in strange contrast, the jubilee Ceremonies; for, in
- general, the aspect of Paris presents these two features: jubilee
- ceremonials and scarcity of victual. Processions enough walk in
- jubilee; of Young Women, decked and dizened, their ribands all
- tricolor; moving with song and tabor, to the Shrine of Sainte
- Genevieve, to thank her that the Bastille is down. The Strong Men
- of the Market, and the Strong Women, fail not with their bouquets
- and speeches. Abbé Fauchet, famed in such work (for Abbé Lefevre
- could only distribute powder) blesses tricolor cloth for the
- National Guard; and makes it a National Tricolor Flag;
- victorious, or to be victorious, in the cause of civil and
- religious liberty all over the world. Fauchet, we say, is the man
- for _Te-Deums_, and public Consecrations;—to which, as in this
- instance of the Flag, our National Guard will “reply with volleys
- of musketry,” Church and Cathedral though it be;[223] filling
- Notre Dame with such noisiest fuliginous Amen, significant of
- several things.
-
- On the whole, we will say our new Mayor Bailly; our new Commander
- Lafayette, named also “Scipio-Americanus,” have bought their
- preferment dear. Bailly rides in gilt state-coach, with
- beefeaters and sumptuosity; Camille Desmoulins, and others,
- sniffing at him for it: Scipio bestrides the “white charger,” and
- waves with civic plumes in sight of all France. Neither of them,
- however, does it for nothing; but, in truth, at an exorbitant
- rate. At this rate, namely: of feeding Paris, and keeping it from
- fighting. Out of the City-funds, some seventeen thousand of the
- utterly destitute are employed digging on Montmartre, at tenpence
- a day, which buys them, at market price, almost two pounds of bad
- bread;—they look very yellow, when Lafayette goes to harangue
- them. The Townhall is in travail, night and day; it must bring
- forth Bread, a Municipal Constitution, regulations of all kinds,
- curbs on the Sansculottic Press; above all, Bread, Bread.
-
- Purveyors prowl the country far and wide, with the appetite of
- lions; detect hidden grain, purchase open grain; by gentle means
- or forcible, must and will find grain. A most thankless task; and
- so difficult, so dangerous,—even if a man did gain some trifle by
- it! On the 19th August, there is food for one day.[224]
- Complaints there are that the food is spoiled, and produces an
- effect on the intestines: not corn but plaster-of-Paris! Which
- effect on the intestines, as well as that “smarting in the throat
- and palate,” a Townhall Proclamation warns you to disregard, or
- even to consider as drastic-beneficial. The Mayor of Saint-Denis,
- so black was his bread, has, by a dyspeptic populace, been hanged
- on the Lanterne there. National Guards protect the Paris
- Corn-Market: first ten suffice; then six hundred.[225] Busy are
- ye, Bailly, Brissot de Warville, Condorcet, and ye others!
-
- For, as just hinted, there is a Municipal Constitution to be made
- too. The old Bastille Electors, after some ten days of
- psalmodying over their glorious victory, began to hear it asked,
- in a splenetic tone, Who put you there? They accordingly had to
- give place, not without moanings, and audible growlings on both
- sides, to a new larger Body, specially elected for that post.
- Which new Body, augmented, altered, then fixed finally at the
- number of Three Hundred, with the title of Town Representatives
- (_Représentans de la Commune_), now sits there; rightly portioned
- into Committees; assiduous making a Constitution; at all moments
- when not seeking flour.
-
- And such a Constitution; little short of miraculous: one that
- shall “consolidate the Revolution”! The Revolution is finished,
- then? Mayor Bailly and all respectable friends of Freedom would
- fain think so. Your Revolution, like jelly sufficiently _boiled_,
- needs only to be poured into _shapes_, of Constitution, and
- “consolidated” therein? Could it, indeed, contrive to _cool;_
- which last, however, is precisely the doubtful thing, or even the
- not doubtful!
-
- Unhappy friends of Freedom; consolidating a Revolution! They must
- sit at work there, their pavilion spread on very Chaos; between
- two hostile worlds, the Upper Court-world, the Nether
- Sansculottic one; and, beaten on by both, toil painfully,
- perilously,—doing, in sad literal earnest, “the impossible.”
-
-
- Chapter 1.6.V.
- The Fourth Estate.
-
- Pamphleteering opens its abysmal throat wider and wider: never to
- close more. Our Philosophes, indeed, rather withdraw; after the
- manner of Marmontel, “retiring in disgust the first day.” Abbé
- Raynal, grown gray and quiet in his Marseilles domicile, is
- little content with this work; the last literary act of the man
- will again be an act of rebellion: an indignant _Letter to the
- Constituent Assembly;_ answered by “the order of the day.” Thus
- also Philosophe Morellet puckers discontented brows; being indeed
- threatened in his benefices by that Fourth of August: it is
- clearly going too far. How astonishing that those “haggard
- figures in woollen jupes” would not rest as satisfied with
- Speculation, and victorious Analysis, as we!
-
- Alas, yes: Speculation, Philosophism, once the ornament and
- wealth of the saloon, will now coin itself into mere Practical
- Propositions, and circulate on street and highway, universally;
- with results! A Fourth Estate, of Able Editors, springs up;
- increases and multiplies; irrepressible, incalculable. New
- Printers, new Journals, and ever new (so prurient is the world),
- let our Three Hundred curb and consolidate as they can!
- Loustalot, under the wing of Prudhomme dull-blustering Printer,
- edits weekly his _Révolutions de Paris;_ in an acrid, emphatic
- manner. Acrid, corrosive, as the spirit of sloes and copperas, is
- Marat, _Friend of the People;_ struck already with the fact that
- the National Assembly, so full of Aristocrats, “can do nothing,”
- except dissolve itself, and make way for a better; that the
- Townhall Representatives are little other than babblers and
- imbeciles, if not even knaves. Poor is this man; squalid, and
- dwells in garrets; a man unlovely to the sense, outward and
- inward; a man forbid;—and is becoming fanatical, possessed with
- fixed-idea. Cruel _lusus_ of Nature! Did Nature, O poor Marat, as
- in cruel sport, knead thee out of her _leavings_, and
- miscellaneous waste clay; and fling thee forth stepdamelike, a
- Distraction into this distracted Eighteenth Century? Work is
- appointed thee there; which thou shalt do. The Three Hundred have
- summoned and will again summon Marat: but always he croaks forth
- answer sufficient; always he will defy them, or elude them; and
- endure no gag.
-
- Carra, “Ex-secretary of a decapitated Hospodar,” and then of a
- Necklace-Cardinal; likewise pamphleteer, Adventurer in many
- scenes and lands,—draws nigh to Mercier, of the _Tableau de
- Paris;_ and, with foam on his lips, proposes an _Annales
- Patriotiques_. The _Moniteur_ goes its prosperous way; Barrère
- “weeps,” on Paper as yet loyal; Rivarol, Royou are not idle. Deep
- calls to deep: your _Domine Salvum Fac Regem_ shall awaken _Pange
- Lingua;_ with an _Ami-du-Peuple_ there is a King’s-Friend
- Newspaper, _Ami-du-Roi_. Camille Desmoulins has appointed himself
- _Procureur-Général de la Lanterne_, Attorney-General of the
- Lamp-iron; and pleads, _not_ with atrocity, under an atrocious
- title; editing weekly his brilliant _Revolutions of Paris and
- Brabant_. Brilliant, we say: for if, in that thick murk of
- Journalism, with its dull blustering, with its fixed or loose
- fury, any ray of genius greet thee, be sure it is Camille’s. The
- thing that Camille teaches he, with his light finger, adorns:
- brightness plays, gentle, unexpected, amid horrible confusions;
- often is the word of Camille worth reading, when no other’s is.
- Questionable Camille, how thou glitterest with a fallen,
- rebellious, yet still semi-celestial light; as is the star-light
- on the brow of Lucifer! Son of the Morning, into what times and
- what lands, art thou fallen!
-
- But in all things is good;—though not good for “consolidating
- Revolutions.” Thousand wagon-loads of this Pamphleteering and
- Newspaper matter, lie rotting slowly in the Public Libraries of
- our Europe. Snatched from the great gulf, like oysters by
- bibliomaniac pearl-divers, there must they first _rot_, then what
- was pearl, in Camille or others, may be seen as such, and
- continue as such.
-
- Nor has public speaking declined, though Lafayette and his
- Patrols look sour on it. Loud always is the Palais Royal, loudest
- the Café de Foy; such a miscellany of Citizens and Citizenesses
- circulating there. “Now and then,” according to Camille, “some
- Citizens employ the liberty of the _press_ for a private purpose;
- so that this or the other Patriot finds himself short of his
- watch or pocket-handkerchief!” But, for the rest, in Camille’s
- opinion, nothing can be a livelier image of the Roman Forum. “A
- Patriot proposes his motion; if it finds any supporters, they
- make him mount on a chair, and speak. If he is applauded, he
- prospers and redacts; if he is hissed, he goes his ways.” Thus
- they, circulating and perorating. Tall shaggy Marquis
- Saint-Huruge, a man that has had losses, and has deserved them,
- is seen eminent, and also heard. “Bellowing” is the character of
- his voice, like that of a Bull of Bashan; voice which drowns all
- voices, which causes frequently the hearts of men to leap.
- Cracked or half-cracked is this tall Marquis’s head; uncracked
- are his lungs; the cracked and the uncracked shall alike avail
- him.
-
- Consider farther that each of the Forty-eight Districts has its
- own Committee; speaking and motioning continually; aiding in the
- search for grain, in the search for a Constitution; checking and
- spurring the poor Three Hundred of the Townhall. That Danton,
- with a “voice reverberating from the domes,” is President of the
- Cordeliers District; which has already become a Goshen of
- Patriotism. That apart from the “seventeen thousand utterly
- necessitous, digging on Montmartre,” most of whom, indeed, have
- got passes, and been dismissed into Space “with four
- shillings,”—there is a _strike_, or union, of Domestics out of
- place; who assemble for public speaking: next, a strike of
- Tailors, for even they will strike and speak; further, a strike
- of Journeymen Cordwainers; a strike of Apothecaries: so dear is
- bread.[226] All these, having struck, must speak; generally under
- the open canopy; and pass resolutions;—Lafayette and his Patrols
- watching them suspiciously from the distance.
-
- Unhappy mortals: such tugging and lugging, and throttling of one
- another, to divide, in some not intolerable way, the joint
- Felicity of man in this Earth; when the whole lot to be divided
- is such a “feast of _shells!_”—Diligent are the Three Hundred;
- none equals Scipio Americanus in dealing with mobs. But surely
- all these things bode ill for the consolidating of a Revolution.
-
-
- BOOK VII.
- THE INSURRECTION OF WOMEN
-
-
- Chapter 1.7.I.
- Patrollotism.
-
- No, Friends, this Revolution is not of the consolidating kind. Do
- not fires, fevers, sown seeds, chemical mixtures, men, events;
- all embodiments of Force that work in this miraculous Complex of
- Forces, named Universe,—go on _growing_, through their natural
- phases and developments, each according to its kind; reach their
- height, reach their visible decline; finally sink under,
- vanishing, and what we call _die?_ They all grow; there is
- nothing but what grows, and shoots forth into its special
- expansion,—once give it leave to spring. Observe too that each
- grows with a rapidity proportioned, in general, to the madness
- and unhealthiness there is in it: slow regular growth, though
- this also ends in death, is what we name health and sanity.
-
- A Sansculottism, which has prostrated Bastilles, which has got
- pike and musket, and now goes burning Châteaus, passing
- resolutions and haranguing under roof and sky, may be said to
- have sprung; and, by law of Nature, must grow. To judge by the
- madness and diseasedness both of itself, and of the soil and
- element it is in, one might expect the rapidity and monstrosity
- would be extreme.
-
- Many things too, especially all diseased things, grow by shoots
- and fits. The first grand fit and shooting forth of Sansculottism
- with that of Paris conquering its King; for Bailly’s figure of
- rhetoric was all-too sad a reality. The King is conquered; going
- at large on his parole; on condition, say, of absolutely good
- behaviour,—which, in these circumstances, will unhappily mean no
- behaviour whatever. A quite untenable position, that of Majesty
- put on its good behaviour! Alas, is it not natural that whatever
- lives try to keep itself living? Whereupon his Majesty’s
- behaviour will soon become exceptionable; and so the Second grand
- Fit of Sansculottism, that of putting him in durance, cannot be
- distant.
-
- Necker, in the National Assembly, is making moan, as usual about
- his Deficit: Barriers and Customhouses burnt; the Tax-gatherer
- hunted, not hunting; his Majesty’s Exchequer all but empty. The
- remedy is a Loan of thirty millions; then, on still more enticing
- terms, a Loan of eighty millions: neither of which Loans,
- unhappily, will the Stockjobbers venture to lend. The Stockjobber
- has no country, except his own black pool of _Agio_.
-
- And yet, in those days, for men that have a country, what a glow
- of patriotism burns in many a heart; penetrating inwards to the
- very purse! So early as the 7th of August, a _Don Patriotique_,
- “a Patriotic Gift of jewels to a considerable extent,” has been
- solemnly made by certain Parisian women; and solemnly accepted,
- with honourable mention. Whom forthwith all the world takes to
- imitating and emulating. Patriotic Gifts, always with some heroic
- eloquence, which the President must answer and the Assembly
- listen to, flow in from far and near: in such number that the
- honourable mention can only be performed in “lists published at
- stated epochs.” Each gives what he can: the very cordwainers have
- behaved munificently; one landed proprietor gives a forest;
- fashionable society gives its shoebuckles, takes cheerfully to
- shoe-ties. Unfortunate females give what they “have amassed in
- loving.”[227] The smell of all cash, as Vespasian thought, is
- good.
-
- Beautiful, and yet inadequate! The Clergy must be “invited” to
- melt their superfluous Church-plate,—in the Royal Mint. Nay
- finally, a Patriotic Contribution, of the forcible sort, must be
- determined on, though unwillingly: let the fourth part of your
- declared yearly revenue, for this once only, be paid down; so
- shall a National Assembly make the Constitution, undistracted at
- least by insolvency. Their own wages, as settled on the 17th of
- August, are but Eighteen Francs a day, each man; but the Public
- Service must have sinews, must have money. To _appease_ the
- Deficit; not to “_combler_, or choke the Deficit,” if you or
- mortal could! For withal, as Mirabeau was heard saying, ‘it is
- the Deficit that saves us.’
-
- Towards the end of August, our National Assembly in its
- constitutional labours, has got so far as the question of _Veto:_
- shall Majesty have a Veto on the National Enactments; or not have
- a Veto? What speeches were spoken, within doors and without;
- clear, and also passionate logic; imprecations, comminations;
- gone happily, for most part, to Limbo! Through the cracked brain,
- and uncracked lungs of Saint-Huruge, the Palais Royal rebellows
- with Veto. Journalism is busy, France rings with Veto. “I shall
- never forget,” says Dumont, “my going to Paris, one of these
- days, with Mirabeau; and the crowd of people we found waiting for
- his carriage, about Le Jay the Bookseller’s shop. They flung
- themselves before him; conjuring him with tears in their eyes not
- to suffer the _Veto Absolu_. They were in a frenzy: ‘Monsieur le
- Comte, you are the people’s father; you must save us; you must
- defend us against those villains who are bringing back Despotism.
- If the King get this Veto, what is the use of National Assembly?
- We are slaves, all is done.’”[228] Friends, _if_ the sky fall,
- there will be catching of larks! Mirabeau, adds Dumont, was
- eminent on such occasions: he answered vaguely, with a Patrician
- imperturbability, and bound himself to nothing.
-
- Deputations go to the Hôtel-de-Ville; anonymous Letters to
- Aristocrats in the National Assembly, threatening that fifteen
- thousand, or sometimes that sixty thousand, “will march to
- illuminate you.” The Paris Districts are astir; Petitions
- signing: Saint-Huruge sets forth from the Palais Royal, with an
- escort of fifteen hundred individuals, to petition in person.
- Resolute, or seemingly so, is the tall shaggy Marquis, is the
- Café de Foy: but resolute also is Commandant-General Lafayette.
- The streets are all beset by Patrols: Saint-Huruge is stopped at
- the _Barrière des Bon Hommes;_ he may bellow like the bulls of
- Bashan; but absolutely must return. The brethren of the Palais
- Royal “circulate all night,” and make motions, under the open
- canopy; all Coffee-houses being shut. Nevertheless Lafayette and
- the Townhall do prevail: Saint-Huruge is thrown into prison;
- _Veto Absolu_ adjusts itself into _Suspensive Veto_, prohibition
- not forever, but for a term of time; and this doom’s-clamour will
- grow silent, as the others have done.
-
- So far has Consolidation prospered, though with difficulty;
- repressing the Nether Sansculottic world; and the Constitution
- shall be made. With difficulty: amid jubilee and scarcity;
- Patriotic Gifts, Bakers’-queues; Abbé-Fauchet Harangues, with
- their _Amen_ of platoon-musketry! Scipio Americanus has deserved
- thanks from the National Assembly and France. They offer him
- stipends and emoluments, to a handsome extent; all which stipends
- and emoluments he, covetous of far other blessedness than mere
- money, does, in his chivalrous way, without scruple, refuse.
-
- To the Parisian common man, meanwhile, one thing remains
- inconceivable: that now when the Bastille is down, and French
- Liberty restored, grain should continue so dear. Our Rights of
- Man are voted, Feudalism and all Tyranny abolished; yet behold we
- stand _in queue!_ Is it Aristocrat forestallers; a Court still
- bent on intrigues? Something is rotten, somewhere.
-
- And yet, alas, what to do? Lafayette, with his Patrols prohibits
- every thing, even complaint. Saint-Huruge and other heroes of the
- _Veto_ lie in durance. People’s-Friend Marat was seized; Printers
- of Patriotic Journals are fettered and forbidden; the very
- Hawkers cannot cry, till they get license, and leaden badges.
- Blue National Guards ruthlessly dissipate all groups; scour, with
- levelled bayonets, the Palais Royal itself. Pass, on your
- affairs, along the Rue Taranne, the Patrol, presenting his
- bayonet, cries, _To the left!_ Turn into the Rue Saint-Benoit, he
- cries, _To the right!_ A judicious Patriot (like Camille
- Desmoulins, in this instance) is driven, for quietness’s sake, to
- take the gutter.
-
- O much-suffering People, our glorious Revolution is evaporating
- in tricolor ceremonies, and complimentary harangues! Of which
- latter, as Loustalot acridly calculates, “upwards of two thousand
- have been delivered within the last month, at the Townhall
- alone.”[229] And our mouths, unfilled with bread, are to be shut,
- under penalties? The Caricaturist promulgates his emblematic
- Tablature: _Le Patrouillotisme chassant le Patriotisme_,
- Patriotism driven out by Patrollotism. Ruthless Patrols; long
- superfine harangues; and scanty ill-baked loaves, more like baked
- Bath bricks,—which produce an effect on the intestines! Where
- will this end? In consolidation?
-
-
- Chapter 1.7.II.
- O Richard, O my King.
-
- For, alas, neither is the Townhall itself without misgivings. The
- Nether Sansculottic world has been suppressed hitherto: but then
- the Upper Court-world! Symptoms there are that the Œil-de-Bœuf is
- rallying.
-
- More than once in the Townhall Sanhedrim; often enough, from
- those outspoken Bakers’-queues, has the wish uttered itself: O
- that our Restorer of French Liberty were here; that he could see
- with his own eyes, not with the false eyes of Queens and Cabals,
- and his really good heart be enlightened! For falsehood still
- environs him; intriguing Dukes de Guiche, with Bodyguards; scouts
- of Bouillé; a new flight of intriguers, now that the old is
- flown. What else means this advent of the _Regiment de Flandre;_
- entering Versailles, as we hear, on the 23rd of September, with
- two pieces of cannon? Did not the Versailles National Guard do
- duty at the Château? Had they not Swiss; Hundred Swiss;
- _Gardes-du-Corps_, Bodyguards so-called? Nay, it would seem, the
- number of Bodyguards on duty has, by a manœuvre, been doubled:
- the new relieving Battalion of them arrived at its time; but the
- old relieved one does not _depart!_
-
- Actually, there runs a whisper through the best informed
- Upper-Circles, or a nod still more potentous than whispering, of
- his Majesty’s flying to Metz; of a Bond (to stand by him therein)
- which has been signed by Noblesse and Clergy, to the incredible
- amount of thirty, or even of sixty thousand. Lafayette coldly
- whispers it, and coldly asseverates it, to Count d’Estaing at the
- Dinner-table; and d’Estaing, one of the bravest men, quakes to
- the core lest some lackey overhear it; and tumbles thoughtful,
- without sleep, all night.[230] Regiment Flandre, as we said, is
- clearly arrived. His Majesty, they say, hesitates about
- sanctioning the Fourth of August; makes observations, of chilling
- tenor, on the very Rights of Man! Likewise, may not all persons,
- the Bakers’-queues themselves discern on the streets of Paris,
- the most astonishing number of Officers on furlough, Crosses of
- St. Louis, and such like? Some reckon “from a thousand to twelve
- hundred.” Officers of all uniforms; nay one uniform never before
- seen by eye: green faced with red! The tricolor cockade is not
- always visible: but what, in the name of Heaven, may these
- _black_ cockades, which some wear, foreshadow?
-
- Hunger whets everything, especially Suspicion and Indignation.
- Realities themselves, in this Paris, have grown unreal:
- preternatural. Phantasms once more stalk through the brain of
- hungry France. O ye laggards and dastards, cry shrill voices from
- the Queues, if ye had the hearts of men, ye would take your pikes
- and secondhand firelocks, and look into it; not leave your wives
- and daughters to be starved, murdered, and worse!—Peace, women!
- The heart of man is bitter and heavy; Patriotism, driven out by
- Patrollotism, knows not what to resolve on.
-
- The truth is, the Œil-de-Bœuf has rallied; to a certain unknown
- extent. A changed Œil-de-Bœuf; with Versailles National Guards,
- in their tricolor cockades, doing duty there; a Court all flaring
- with tricolor! Yet even to a tricolor Court men will rally. Ye
- loyal hearts, burnt-out Seigneurs, rally round your Queen! With
- wishes; which will produce hopes; which will produce attempts!
-
- For indeed self-preservation being such a law of Nature, what can
- a rallied Court do, but attempt and endeavour, or call it
- _plot_,—with such wisdom and unwisdom as it has? They will fly,
- escorted, to Metz, where brave Bouillé commands; they will raise
- the Royal Standard: the Bond-signatures shall become armed men.
- Were not the King so languid! Their Bond, if at all signed, must
- be signed without his privity.—Unhappy King, _he_ has but one
- resolution: not to have a civil war. For the rest, he still
- hunts, having ceased lockmaking; he still dozes, and digests; is
- clay in the hands of the potter. Ill will it fare with him, in a
- world where all is helping itself; where, as has been written,
- “whosoever is not hammer must be stithy;” and “the very hyssop on
- the wall grows there, in that chink, because the whole Universe
- could not prevent its growing!”
-
- But as for the coming up of this Regiment de Flandre, may it not
- be urged that there were Saint-Huruge Petitions, and continual
- meal-mobs? Undebauched Soldiers, be there plot, or only dim
- elements of a plot, are always good. Did not the Versailles
- Municipality (an old Monarchic one, not yet refounded into a
- Democratic) instantly second the proposal? Nay the very
- Versailles National Guard, wearied with continual duty at the
- Château, did not object; only Draper Lecointre, who is now Major
- Lecointre, shook his head.—Yes, Friends, surely it was natural
- this Regiment de Flandre should be sent for, since it could be
- got. It was natural that, at sight of military bandoleers, the
- heart of the rallied Œil-de-Bœuf should revive; and Maids of
- Honour, and gentlemen of honour, speak comfortable words to
- epauletted defenders, and to one another. Natural also, and mere
- common civility, that the Bodyguards, a Regiment of Gentlemen,
- should invite their Flandre brethren to a Dinner of welcome!—Such
- invitation, in the last days of September, is given and accepted.
-
- Dinners are defined as “the _ultimate_ act of communion;” men
- that can have communion in nothing else, can sympathetically eat
- together, can still rise into some glow of brotherhood over food
- and wine. The dinner is fixed on, for Thursday the First of
- October; and ought to have a fine effect. Further, as such Dinner
- may be rather extensive, and even the Noncommissioned and the
- Common man be introduced, to see and to hear, could not His
- Majesty’s Opera Apartment, which has lain quite silent ever since
- Kaiser Joseph was here, be obtained for the purpose?—The Hall of
- the Opera is granted; the Salon d’Hercule shall be drawingroom.
- Not only the Officers of Flandre, but of the Swiss, of the
- Hundred Swiss, nay of the Versailles National Guard, such of them
- as have any loyalty, shall feast: it will be a Repast like few.
-
- And now suppose this Repast, the solid part of it, transacted;
- and the first bottle over. Suppose the customary loyal toasts
- drunk; the King’s health, the Queen’s with deafening vivats;—that
- of the Nation “omitted,” or even “rejected.” Suppose champagne
- flowing; with pot-valorous speech, with instrumental music; empty
- feathered heads growing ever the noisier, in their own emptiness,
- in each other’s noise! Her Majesty, who looks unusually sad
- tonight (his Majesty sitting dulled with the day’s hunting), is
- told that the sight of it would cheer her. Behold! She enters
- there, issuing from her State-rooms, like the Moon from the
- clouds, this fairest unhappy Queen of Hearts; royal Husband by
- her side, young Dauphin in her arms! She descends from the Boxes,
- amid splendour and acclaim; walks queen-like, round the Tables;
- gracefully escorted, gracefully nodding; her looks full of
- sorrow, yet of gratitude and daring, with the hope of France on
- her mother-bosom! And now, the band striking up, _O Richard, O
- mon Roi, l’univers t’abandonne_ (O Richard, O my King, and world
- is all forsaking thee)—could man do other than rise to height of
- pity, of loyal valour? Could featherheaded young ensigns do other
- than, by white Bourbon Cockades, handed them from fair fingers;
- by waving of swords, drawn to pledge the Queen’s health; by
- trampling of National Cockades; by scaling the Boxes, whence
- intrusive murmurs may come; by vociferation, tripudiation, sound,
- fury and distraction, within doors and without,—testify what
- tempest-tost state of vacuity they are in? Till champagne and
- tripudiation do their work; and all lie silent, horizontal;
- passively slumbering, with meed-of-battle dreams!—
-
- A natural Repast, in ordinary times, a harmless one: now fatal,
- as that of Thyestes; as that of Job’s Sons, when a strong wind
- smote the four corners of their banquet-house! Poor ill-advised
- Marie-Antoinette; with a woman’s vehemence, not with a
- sovereign’s foresight! It was so natural, yet so unwise. Next
- day, in public speech of ceremony, her Majesty declares herself
- “delighted with the Thursday.”
-
- The heart of the Œil-de-Bœuf glows into hope; into daring, which
- is premature. Rallied Maids of Honour, waited on by Abbés, sew
- “white cockades;” distribute them, with words, with glances, to
- epauletted youths; who in return, may kiss, not without fervour,
- the fair sewing fingers. Captains of horse and foot go swashing
- with “enormous white cockades;” nay one Versailles National
- Captain had mounted the like, so witching were the words and
- glances; and laid aside his tricolor! Well may Major Lecointre
- shake his head with a look of severity; and speak audible
- resentful words. But now a swashbuckler, with enormous white
- cockade, overhearing the Major, invites him insolently, once and
- then again elsewhere, to recant; and failing that, to duel. Which
- latter feat Major Lecointre declares that he will not perform,
- not at least by any known laws of fence; that he nevertheless
- will, according to mere law of Nature, by dirk and blade,
- “exterminate” any “vile gladiator,” who may insult him or the
- Nation;—whereupon (for the Major is actually drawing his
- implement) “they are parted,” and no weasands slit.[231]
-
-
- Chapter 1.7.III.
- Black Cockades.
-
- But fancy what effect this Thyestes Repast and trampling on the
- National Cockade, must have had in the _Salle des Menus;_ in the
- famishing Bakers’-queues at Paris! Nay such Thyestes Repasts, it
- would seem, continue. Flandre has given its Counter-Dinner to the
- Swiss and Hundred Swiss; then on Saturday there has been another.
-
- Yes, here with us is famine; but yonder at Versailles is food;
- enough and to spare! Patriotism stands in queue, shivering
- hungerstruck, insulted by Patrollotism; while bloodyminded
- Aristocrats, heated with excess of high living, trample on the
- National Cockade. Can the atrocity be true? Nay, look: green
- uniforms faced with red; black cockades,—the colour of Night! Are
- we to have military onfall; and death also by starvation? For
- behold the Corbeil Cornboat, which used to come twice a-day, with
- its Plaster-of-Paris meal, now comes only once. And the Townhall
- is deaf; and the men are laggard and dastard!—At the Café de Foy,
- this Saturday evening, a new thing is seen, not the last of its
- kind: a woman engaged in public speaking. Her poor man, she says,
- was put to silence by his District; their Presidents and
- Officials would not let him speak. Wherefore she here with her
- shrill tongue will speak; denouncing, while her breath endures,
- the Corbeil-Boat, the Plaster-of-Paris bread, sacrilegious
- Opera-dinners, green uniforms, Pirate Aristocrats, and those
- black cockades of theirs!—
-
- Truly, it is time for the black cockades at least, to vanish.
- Them Patrollotism itself will not protect. Nay, sharp-tempered
- “M. Tassin,” at the Tuileries parade on Sunday morning, forgets
- all National military rule; starts from the ranks, wrenches down
- one black cockade which is swashing ominous there; and tramples
- it fiercely into the soil of France. Patrollotism itself is not
- without suppressed fury. Also the Districts begin to stir; the
- voice of President Danton reverberates in the Cordeliers:
- People’s-Friend Marat has flown to Versailles and back
- again;—swart bird, not of the halcyon kind![232]
-
- And so Patriot meets promenading Patriot, this Sunday; and sees
- his own grim care reflected on the face of another. Groups, in
- spite of Patrollotism, which is not so alert as usual, fluctuate
- deliberative: groups on the Bridges, on the Quais, at the
- patriotic Cafés. And ever as any black cockade may emerge, rises
- the many-voiced growl and bark: _À bas_, Down! All black cockades
- are ruthlessly plucked off: one individual picks his up again;
- kisses it, attempts to refix it; but a “hundred canes start into
- the air,” and he desists. Still worse went it with another
- individual; doomed, by extempore _Plebiscitum_, to the Lanterne;
- saved, with difficulty, by some active
- _Corps-de-Garde_.—Lafayette sees signs of an effervescence; which
- he doubles his Patrols, doubles his diligence, to prevent. So
- passes Sunday, the 4th of October 1789.
-
- Sullen is the male heart, repressed by Patrollotism; vehement is
- the female, irrepressible. The public-speaking woman at the
- Palais Royal was not the only speaking one:—Men know not what the
- pantry is, when it grows empty, only house-mothers know. O women,
- wives of men that will only calculate and not act! Patrollotism
- is strong; but Death, by starvation and military onfall, is
- stronger. Patrollotism represses male Patriotism: but female
- Patriotism? Will Guards named National thrust their bayonets into
- the bosoms of women? Such thought, or rather such dim unshaped
- raw-material of a thought, ferments universally under the female
- night-cap; and, by earliest daybreak, on slight hint, will
- explode.
-
-
- Chapter 1.7.IV.
- The Menads.
-
- If Voltaire once, in splenetic humour, asked his countrymen: ‘But
- you, _Gualches_, what have you invented?’ they can now answer:
- The Art of Insurrection. It was an art needed in these last
- singular times: an art, for which the French nature, so full of
- vehemence, so free from depth, was perhaps of all others the
- fittest.
-
- Accordingly, to what a height, one may well say of perfection,
- has this branch of human industry been carried by France, within
- the last half-century! Insurrection, which, Lafayette thought,
- might be “the most sacred of duties,” ranks now, for the French
- people, among the duties which they can perform. Other mobs are
- dull masses; which roll onwards with a dull fierce tenacity, a
- dull fierce heat, but emit no light-flashes of genius as they go.
- The French mob, again, is among the liveliest phenomena of our
- world. So rapid, audacious; so clear-sighted, inventive, prompt
- to seize the moment; instinct with life to its finger-ends! That
- talent, were there no other, of spontaneously standing in queue,
- distinguishes, as we said, the French People from all Peoples,
- ancient and modern.
-
- Let the Reader confess too that, taking one thing with another,
- perhaps few terrestrial Appearances are better worth considering
- than mobs. Your mob is a genuine outburst of Nature; issuing
- from, or communicating with, the deepest deep of Nature. When so
- much goes grinning and grimacing as a lifeless Formality, and
- under the stiff buckram no heart can be felt beating, here once
- more, if nowhere else, is a Sincerity and Reality. Shudder at it;
- or even shriek over it, if thou must; nevertheless consider it.
- Such a Complex of human Forces and Individualities hurled forth,
- in their transcendental mood, to act and react, on circumstances
- and on one another; to work out what it is in them to work. The
- thing they will do is known to no man; least of all to
- themselves. It is the inflammablest immeasurable Fire-work,
- generating, consuming itself. With what phases, to what extent,
- with what results it will burn off, Philosophy and Perspicacity
- conjecture in vain.
-
- “Man,” as has been written, “is for ever interesting to man; nay
- properly there is nothing else interesting.” In which light also,
- may we not discern why most Battles have become so wearisome?
- Battles, in these ages, are transacted by mechanism; with the
- slightest possible developement of human individuality or
- spontaneity: men now even die, and kill one another, in an
- artificial manner. Battles ever since Homer’s time, when they
- were Fighting Mobs, have mostly ceased to be worth looking at,
- worth reading of, or remembering. How many wearisome bloody
- Battles does History strive to represent; or even, in a husky
- way, to sing:—and she would omit or carelessly slur-over this one
- Insurrection of Women?
-
- A thought, or dim raw-material of a thought, was fermenting all
- night, universally in the female head, and might explode. In
- squalid garret, on Monday morning, Maternity awakes, to hear
- children weeping for bread. Maternity must forth to the streets,
- to the herb-markets and Bakers’—queues; meets there with
- hunger-stricken Maternity, sympathetic, exasperative. O we
- unhappy women! But, instead of Bakers’-queues, why not to
- Aristocrats’ palaces, the root of the matter? _Allons!_ Let us
- assemble. To the Hôtel-de-Ville; to Versailles; to the Lanterne!
-
- In one of the Guardhouses of the Quartier Saint-Eustache, “a
- young woman” seizes a drum,—for how shall National Guards give
- fire on women, on a young woman? The young woman seizes the drum;
- sets forth, beating it, “uttering cries relative to the dearth of
- grains.” Descend, O mothers; descend, ye Judiths, to food and
- revenge!—All women gather and go; crowds storm all stairs, force
- out all women: the female Insurrectionary Force, according to
- Camille, resembles the English Naval one; there is a universal
- “Press of women.” Robust Dames of the Halle, slim Mantua-makers,
- assiduous, risen with the dawn; ancient Virginity tripping to
- matins; the Housemaid, with early broom; all must go. Rouse ye, O
- women; the laggard men will not act; they say, we ourselves may
- act!
-
- And so, like snowbreak from the mountains, for every staircase is
- a melted brook, it storms; tumultuous, wild-shrilling, towards
- the Hôtel-de-Ville. Tumultuous, with or without drum-music: for
- the Faubourg Saint-Antoine also has tucked up its gown; and, with
- besom-staves, fire-irons, and even rusty pistols (void of
- ammunition), is flowing on. Sound of it flies, with a velocity of
- sound, to the outmost Barriers. By seven o’clock, on this raw
- October morning, fifth of the month, the Townhall will see
- wonders. Nay, as chance would have it, a male party are already
- there; clustering tumultuously round some National Patrol, and a
- Baker who has been seized with short weights. They are there; and
- have even lowered the rope of the Lanterne. So that the official
- persons have to smuggle forth the short-weighing Baker by back
- doors, and even send “to all the Districts” for more force.
-
- Grand it was, says Camille, to see so many Judiths, from eight to
- ten thousand of them in all, rushing out to search into the root
- of the matter! Not unfrightful it must have been;
- ludicro-terrific, and most unmanageable. At such hour the
- overwatched Three Hundred are not yet stirring: none but some
- Clerks, a company of National Guards; and M. de Gouvion, the
- Major-general. Gouvion has fought in America for the cause of
- civil Liberty; a man of no inconsiderable heart, but deficient in
- head. He is, for the moment, in his back apartment; assuaging
- Usher Maillard, the Bastille-serjeant, who has come, as too many
- do, with “representations.” The assuagement is still incomplete
- when our Judiths arrive.
-
- The National Guards form on the outer stairs, with levelled
- bayonets; the ten thousand Judiths press up, resistless; with
- obtestations, with outspread hands,—merely to speak to the Mayor.
- The rear forces them; nay, from male hands in the rear, stones
- already fly: the National Guards must do one of two things; sweep
- the Place de Grève with cannon, or else open to right and left.
- They open; the living deluge rushes in. Through all rooms and
- cabinets, upwards to the topmost belfry: ravenous; seeking arms,
- seeking Mayors, seeking justice;—while, again, the better-cressed
- (dressed?) speak kindly to the Clerks; point out the misery of
- these poor women; also their ailments, some even of an
- interesting sort.[233]
-
- Poor M. de Gouvion is shiftless in this extremity;—a man
- shiftless, perturbed; who will one day commit suicide. How happy
- for him that Usher Maillard, the shifty, was there, at the
- moment, though making representations! Fly back, thou shifty
- Maillard; seek the Bastille Company; and O return fast with it;
- above all, with thy own shifty head! For, behold, the Judiths can
- find no Mayor or Municipal; scarcely, in the topmost belfry, can
- they find poor Abbé Lefevre the Powder-distributor. Him, for want
- of a better, they suspend there; in the pale morning light; over
- the top of all Paris, which swims in one’s failing eyes:—a
- horrible end? Nay, the rope broke, as French ropes often did; or
- else an Amazon cut it. Abbé Lefevre falls, some twenty feet,
- rattling among the leads; and lives long years after, though
- always with “a _tremblement_ in the limbs.”[234]
-
- And now doors fly under hatchets; the Judiths have broken the
- Armoury; have seized guns and cannons, three money-bags,
- paper-heaps; torches flare: in few minutes, our brave
- Hôtel-de-Ville which dates from the Fourth Henry, will, with all
- that it holds, be in flames!
-
-
- Chapter 1.7.V.
- Usher Maillard.
-
- In flames, truly,—were it not that Usher Maillard, swift of foot,
- shifty of head, has returned!
-
- Maillard, of his own motion, for Gouvion or the rest would not
- even sanction him,—snatches a drum; descends the Porch-stairs,
- ran-tan, beating sharp, with loud rolls, his Rogues’-march: To
- Versailles! _Allons; a Versailles!_ As men beat on kettle or
- warmingpan, when angry she-bees, or say, flying desperate wasps,
- are to be hived; and the desperate insects hear it, and cluster
- round it,—simply as round a guidance, where there was none: so
- now these Menads round shifty Maillard, Riding-Usher of the
- Châtelet. The axe pauses uplifted; Abbé Lefevre is left
- half-hanged; from the belfry downwards all vomits itself. What
- rub-a-dub is that? Stanislas Maillard, Bastille-hero, will lead
- us to Versailles? Joy to thee, Maillard; blessed art thou above
- Riding-Ushers! Away then, away!
-
- The seized cannon are yoked with seized cart-horses: brown-locked
- Demoiselle Théroigne, with pike and helmet, sits there as
- gunneress, “with haughty eye and serene fair countenance;”
- comparable, some think, to the _Maid_ of Orléans, or even
- recalling “the idea of Pallas Athene.”[235] Maillard (for his
- drum still rolls) is, by heaven-rending acclamation, admitted
- General. Maillard hastens the languid march. Maillard, beating
- rhythmic, with sharp ran-tan, all along the Quais, leads forward,
- with difficulty his Menadic host. Such a host—marched not in
- silence! The bargeman pauses on the River; all wagoners and
- coachdrivers fly; men peer from windows,—not women, lest they be
- pressed. Sight of sights: Bacchantes, in these ultimate
- Formalized Ages! Bronze Henri looks on, from his Pont-Neuf; the
- Monarchic Louvre, Medicean Tuileries see a day not theretofore
- seen.
-
- And now Maillard has his Menads in the _Champs Elysées_ (Fields
- _Tartarean_ rather); and the Hôtel-de-Ville has suffered
- comparatively nothing. Broken doors; an Abbé Lefevre, who shall
- never more distribute powder; three sacks of money, most part of
- which (for Sansculottism, though famishing, is not without
- honour) shall be returned:[236] this is all the damage. Great
- Maillard! A small nucleus of Order is round his drum; but his
- outskirts fluctuate like the mad Ocean: for Rascality male and
- female is flowing in on him, from the four winds; guidance there
- is none but in his single head and two drumsticks.
-
- O Maillard, when, since War first was, had General of Force such
- a task before him, as thou this day? Walter the Penniless still
- touches the feeling heart: but then Walter had sanction; had
- space to turn in; and also his Crusaders were of the male sex.
- Thou, this day, disowned of Heaven and Earth, art General of
- Menads. Their inarticulate frenzy thou must on the spur of the
- instant, render into articulate words, into actions that are not
- frantic. Fail in it, this way or that! Pragmatical Officiality,
- with its penalties and law-books, waits before thee; Menads storm
- behind. If such hewed off the melodious head of Orpheus, and
- hurled it into the Peneus waters, what may they not make of
- thee,—thee rhythmic merely, with no music but a sheepskin
- drum!—Maillard did not fail. Remarkable Maillard, if fame were
- not an accident, and History a distillation of Rumour, how
- remarkable wert thou!
-
- On the Elysian Fields, there is pause and fluctuation; but, for
- Maillard, no return. He persuades his Menads, clamorous for arms
- and the Arsenal, that no arms are in the Arsenal; that an unarmed
- attitude, and petition to a National Assembly, will be the best:
- he hastily nominates or sanctions generalesses, captains of tens
- and fifties;—and so, in loosest-flowing order, to the rhythm of
- some “eight drums” (having laid aside his own), with the Bastille
- Volunteers bringing up his rear, once more takes the road.
-
- Chaillot, which will promptly yield baked loaves, is not
- plundered; nor are the Sèvres Potteries broken. The old arches of
- Sèvres Bridge echo under Menadic feet; Seine River gushes on with
- his perpetual murmur; and Paris flings after us the boom of
- tocsin and alarm-drum,—inaudible, for the present, amid
- shrill-sounding hosts, and the splash of rainy weather. To
- Meudon, to Saint Cloud, on both hands, the report of them is gone
- abroad; and hearths, this evening, will have a topic. The press
- of women still continues, for it is the cause of all Eve’s
- Daughters, mothers that are, or that hope to be. No
- carriage-lady, were it with never such hysterics, but must
- dismount, in the mud roads, in her silk shoes, and walk.[237] In
- this manner, amid wild October weather, they a wild unwinged
- stork-flight, through the astonished country, wend their way.
- Travellers of all sorts they stop; especially travellers or
- couriers from Paris. Deputy Lechapelier, in his elegant vesture,
- from his elegant vehicle, looks forth amazed through his
- spectacles; apprehensive for life;—states eagerly that he is
- Patriot-Deputy Lechapelier, and even Old-President Lechapelier,
- who presided on the Night of Pentecost, and is original member of
- the Breton Club. Thereupon “rises huge shout of _Vive
- Lechapelier_, and several armed persons spring up behind and
- before to escort him.”[238]
-
- Nevertheless, news, despatches from Lafayette, or vague noise of
- rumour, have pierced through, by side roads. In the National
- Assembly, while all is busy discussing the order of the day;
- regretting that there should be Anti-national Repasts in
- Opera-Halls; that his Majesty should still hesitate about
- accepting the Rights of Man, and hang conditions and
- peradventures on them,—Mirabeau steps up to the President,
- experienced Mounier as it chanced to be; and articulates, in bass
- under-tone: ‘_Mounier, Paris marche sur nous_ (Paris is marching
- on us).’—‘May be (_Je n’en sais rien_)!’—‘Believe it or
- disbelieve it, that is not my concern; but Paris, I say, is
- marching on us. Fall suddenly unwell; go over to the Château;
- tell them this. There is not a moment to lose.’—‘Paris marching
- on us?’ responds Mounier, with an atrabiliar accent, ‘Well, so
- much the better! We shall the sooner be a Republic.’ Mirabeau
- quits him, as one quits an experienced President getting
- blindfold into deep waters; and the order of the day continues as
- before.
-
- Yes, Paris is marching on us; and more than the women of Paris!
- Scarcely was Maillard gone, when M. de Gouvion’s message to all
- the Districts, and such tocsin and drumming of the _générale_,
- began to take effect. Armed National Guards from every District;
- especially the Grenadiers of the Centre, who are our old Gardes
- Françaises, arrive, in quick sequence, on the Place de Grève. An
- “immense people” is there; Saint-Antoine, with pike and rusty
- firelock, is all crowding thither, be it welcome or unwelcome.
- The Centre Grenadiers are received with cheering: ‘it is not
- cheers that we want,’ answer they gloomily; ‘the nation has been
- insulted; to arms, and come with us for orders!’ Ha, sits the
- wind _so?_ Patriotism and Patrollotism are now one!
-
- The Three Hundred have assembled; “all the Committees are in
- activity;” Lafayette is dictating despatches for Versailles, when
- a Deputation of the Centre Grenadiers introduces itself to him.
- The Deputation makes military obeisance; and thus speaks, not
- without a kind of thought in it: ‘_Mon Général_, we are deputed
- by the Six Companies of Grenadiers. We do not think you a
- traitor, but we think the Government betrays you; it is time that
- this end. We cannot turn our bayonets against women crying to us
- for bread. The people are miserable, the source of the mischief
- is at Versailles: we must go seek the King, and bring him to
- Paris. We must exterminate (_exterminer_) the _Regiment de
- Flandre_ and the _Gardes-du-Corps_, who have dared to trample on
- the National Cockade. If the King be too weak to wear his crown,
- let him lay it down. You will crown his Son, you will name a
- Council of Regency; and all will go better.’[239] Reproachful
- astonishment paints itself on the face of Lafayette; speaks
- itself from his eloquent chivalrous lips: in vain. ‘My General,
- we would shed the last drop of our blood for you; but the root of
- the mischief is at Versailles; we must go and bring the King to
- Paris; all the people wish it, _tout le peuple le veut_.’
-
- My General descends to the outer staircase; and harangues: once
- more in vain. ‘To Versailles! To Versailles!’ Mayor Bailly, sent
- for through floods of Sansculottism, attempts academic oratory
- from his gilt state-coach; realizes nothing but infinite hoarse
- cries of: ‘Bread! To Versailles!’—and gladly shrinks within
- doors. Lafayette mounts the white charger; and again harangues
- and reharangues: with eloquence, with firmness, indignant
- demonstration; with all things but persuasion. ‘To Versailles! To
- Versailles!’ So lasts it, hour after hour; for the space of half
- a day.
-
- The great Scipio Americanus can do nothing; not so much as
- escape. ‘_Morbleu, mon Général_,’ cry the Grenadiers serrying
- their ranks as the white charger makes a motion that way, ‘You
- will not leave us, you will abide with us!’ A perilous juncture:
- Mayor Bailly and the Municipals sit quaking within doors; My
- General is prisoner without: the Place de Grève, with its thirty
- thousand Regulars, its whole irregular Saint-Antoine and
- Saint-Marceau, is one minatory mass of clear or rusty steel; all
- hearts set, with a moody fixedness, on one object. Moody, fixed
- are all hearts: tranquil is no heart,—if it be not that of the
- white charger, who paws there, with arched neck, composedly
- champing his bit; as if no world, with its Dynasties and Eras,
- were now rushing down. The drizzly day tends westward; the cry is
- still: ‘To Versailles!’
-
- Nay now, borne from afar, come quite sinister cries; hoarse,
- reverberating in longdrawn hollow murmurs, with syllables too
- like those of _Lanterne!_ Or else, irregular Sansculottism may be
- marching off, of itself; with pikes, nay with cannon. The
- inflexible Scipio does at length, by aide-de-camp, ask of the
- Municipals: Whether or not he may go? A Letter is handed out to
- him, over armed heads; sixty thousand faces flash fixedly on his,
- there is stillness and no bosom breathes, till he have read. By
- Heaven, he grows suddenly pale! Do the Municipals permit? “Permit
- and even order,”—since he can no other. Clangour of approval
- rends the welkin. To your ranks, then; let us march!
-
- It is, as we compute, towards three in the afternoon. Indignant
- National Guards may dine for once from their haversack: dined or
- undined, they march with one heart. Paris flings up her windows,
- claps hands, as the Avengers, with their shrilling drums and
- shalms tramp by; she will then sit pensive, apprehensive, and
- pass rather a sleepless night.[240] On the white charger,
- Lafayette, in the slowest possible manner, going and coming, and
- eloquently haranguing among the ranks, rolls onward with his
- thirty thousand. Saint-Antoine, with pike and cannon, has
- preceded him; a mixed multitude, of all and of no arms, hovers on
- his flanks and skirts; the country once more pauses agape: _Paris
- marche sur nous_.
-
-
- Chapter 1.7.VI.
- To Versailles.
-
- For, indeed, about this same moment, Maillard has halted his
- draggled Menads on the last hill-top; and now Versailles, and the
- Château of Versailles, and far and wide the inheritance of
- Royalty opens to the wondering eye. From far on the right, over
- Marly and Saint-Germains-en-Laye; round towards Rambouillet, on
- the left: beautiful all; softly embosomed; as if in sadness, in
- the dim moist weather! And near before us is Versailles, New and
- Old; with that broad frondent _Avenue de Versailles_
- between,—stately-frondent, broad, three hundred feet as men
- reckon, with four Rows of Elms; and then the _Château de
- Versailles_, ending in royal Parks and Pleasances, gleaming
- lakelets, arbours, Labyrinths, the _Ménagerie_, and Great and
- Little Trianon. High-towered dwellings, leafy pleasant places;
- where the gods of this lower world abide: whence, nevertheless,
- black Care cannot be excluded; whither Menadic Hunger is even now
- advancing, armed with pike-thyrsi!
-
- Yes, yonder, Mesdames, where our straight frondent Avenue,
- joined, as you note, by Two frondent brother Avenues from this
- hand and from that, spreads out into Place Royale and Palace
- Forecourt; yonder is the _Salle des Menus_. Yonder an august
- Assembly sits regenerating France. Forecourt, Grand Court, Court
- of Marble, Court narrowing into Court you may discern next, or
- fancy: on the extreme verge of which that glass-dome, visibly
- glittering like a star of hope, is the—Œil-de-Bœuf! Yonder, or
- nowhere in the world, is bread baked for us. But, O Mesdames,
- were not one thing good: That our cannons, with Demoiselle
- Théroigne and all show of war, be put to the rear? Submission
- beseems petitioners of a National Assembly; we are strangers in
- Versailles,—whence, too audibly, there comes even now sound as of
- tocsin and _générale!_ Also to put on, if possible, a cheerful
- countenance, hiding our sorrows; and even to sing? Sorrow, pitied
- of the Heavens, is hateful, suspicious to the Earth.—So counsels
- shifty Maillard; haranguing his Menads, on the heights near
- Versailles.[241]
-
- Cunning Maillard’s dispositions are obeyed. The draggled
- Insurrectionists advance up the Avenue, “in three columns”, among
- the four Elm-rows; “singing _Henri Quatre_,” with what melody
- they can; and shouting _Vive le Roi_. Versailles, though the
- Elm-rows are dripping wet, crowds from both sides, with: ‘_Vivent
- nos Parisiennes_, Our Paris ones for ever!’
-
- Prickers, scouts have been out towards Paris, as the rumour
- deepened: whereby his Majesty, gone to shoot in the Woods of
- Meudon, has been happily discovered, and got home; and the
- _générale_ and tocsin set a-sounding. The Bodyguards are already
- drawn up in front of the Palace Grates; and look down the Avenue
- de Versailles; sulky, in wet buckskins. Flandre too is there,
- repentant of the Opera-Repast. Also Dragoons dismounted are
- there. Finally Major Lecointre, and what he can gather of the
- Versailles National Guard; though, it is to be observed, our
- Colonel, that same sleepless Count d’Estaing, giving neither
- order nor ammunition, has vanished most improperly; one supposes,
- into the Œil-de-Bœuf. Red-coated Swiss stand within the Grates,
- under arms. There likewise, in their inner room, “all the
- Ministers,” Saint-Priest, Lamentation Pompignan and the rest, are
- assembled with M. Necker: they sit with him there; blank,
- expecting what the hour will bring.
-
- President Mounier, though he answered Mirabeau with a _tant
- mieux_, and affected to slight the matter, had his own
- forebodings. Surely, for these four weary hours, he has reclined
- not on roses! The order of the day is getting forward: a
- Deputation to his Majesty seems proper, that it might please him
- to grant “Acceptance pure and simple” to those
- Constitution-Articles of ours; the “mixed qualified Acceptance,”
- with its peradventures, is satisfactory to neither gods nor men.
-
- So much is clear. And yet there is more, which no man speaks,
- which all men now vaguely understand. Disquietude, absence of
- mind is on every face; Members whisper, uneasily come and go: the
- order of the day is evidently not the day’s want. Till at length,
- from the outer gates, is heard a rustling and justling, shrill
- uproar and squabbling, muffled by walls; which testifies that the
- hour is come! Rushing and crushing one hears now; then enter
- Usher Maillard, with a Deputation of Fifteen muddy dripping
- Women,—having by incredible industry, and aid of all the macers,
- persuaded the rest to wait out of doors. National Assembly shall
- now, therefore, look its august task directly in the face:
- regenerative Constitutionalism has an unregenerate Sansculottism
- bodily in front of it; crying, ‘Bread! Bread!’
-
- Shifty Maillard, translating frenzy into articulation; repressive
- with the one hand, expostulative with the other, does his best;
- and really, though not bred to public speaking, manages rather
- well:—In the present dreadful rarity of grains, a Deputation of
- Female Citizens has, as the august Assembly can discern, come out
- from Paris to petition. Plots of Aristocrats are too evident in
- the matter; for example, one miller has been bribed “by a
- banknote of 200 livres” not to grind,—name unknown to the Usher,
- but fact provable, at least indubitable. Further, it seems, the
- National Cockade has been trampled on; also there are Black
- Cockades, or were. All which things will not an august National
- Assembly, the hope of France, take into its wise immediate
- consideration?
-
- And Menadic Hunger, impressible, crying ‘Black Cockades,’ crying
- ‘Bread, Bread,’ adds, after such fashion: ‘Will it not?—Yes,
- Messieurs, if a Deputation to his Majesty, for the “Acceptance
- pure and simple,” seemed proper,—how much more now, for “the
- afflicting situation of Paris;” for the calming of this
- effervescence!’ President Mounier, with a speedy Deputation,
- among whom we notice the respectable figure of Doctor Guillotin,
- gets himself forthwith on march. Vice-President shall continue
- the order of the day; Usher Maillard shall stay by him to repress
- the women. It is four o’clock, of the miserablest afternoon, when
- Mounier steps out.
-
- O experienced Mounier, what an afternoon; the last of thy
- political existence! Better had it been to “fall suddenly
- unwell,” while it was yet time. For, behold, the Esplanade, over
- all its spacious expanse, is covered with groups of squalid
- dripping Women; of lankhaired male Rascality, armed with axes,
- rusty pikes, old muskets, ironshod clubs (_batons ferrés_, which
- end in knives or sword-blades, a kind of extempore
- billhook);—looking nothing but hungry revolt. The rain pours:
- Gardes-du-Corps go caracoling through the groups “amid hisses;”
- irritating and agitating what is but dispersed here to reunite
- there.
-
- Innumerable squalid women beleaguer the President and Deputation;
- insist on going with him: has not his Majesty himself, looking
- from the window, sent out to ask, What we wanted? ‘Bread and
- speech with the King (_Du pain, et parler au Roi_),’ that was the
- answer. Twelve women are clamorously added to the Deputation; and
- march with it, across the Esplanade; through dissipated groups,
- caracoling Bodyguards, and the pouring rain.
-
- President Mounier, unexpectedly augmented by Twelve Women,
- copiously escorted by Hunger and Rascality, is himself mistaken
- for a group: himself and his Women are dispersed by caracolers;
- rally again with difficulty, among the mud.[242] Finally the
- Grates are opened: the Deputation gets access, with the Twelve
- Women too in it; of which latter, Five shall even see the face of
- his Majesty. Let wet Menadism, in the best spirits it can expect
- their return.
-
-
- Chapter 1.7.VII.
- At Versailles.
-
- But already Pallas Athene (in the shape of Demoiselle Théroigne)
- is busy with Flandre and the dismounted Dragoons. She, and such
- women as are fittest, go through the ranks; speak with an earnest
- jocosity; clasp rough troopers to their patriot bosom, crush down
- spontoons and musketoons with soft arms: can a man, that were
- worthy of the name of man, attack famishing patriot women?
-
- One reads that Théroigne had bags of money, which she distributed
- over Flandre:—furnished by whom? Alas, with money-bags one seldom
- sits on insurrectionary cannon. Calumnious Royalism! Théroigne
- had only the limited earnings of her profession of
- unfortunate-female; money she had not, but brown locks, the
- figure of a heathen Goddess, and an eloquent tongue and heart.
-
- Meanwhile, Saint-Antoine, in groups and troops, is continually
- arriving; wetted, sulky; with pikes and impromptu billhooks:
- driven thus far by popular fixed-idea. So many hirsute figures
- driven hither, in that manner: figures that have come to do they
- know not what; figures that have come to see it done!
- Distinguished among all figures, who is this, of gaunt stature,
- with leaden breastplate, though a small one;[243] bushy in red
- grizzled locks; nay, with long tile-beard? It is Jourdan, unjust
- dealer in mules; a dealer no longer, but a Painter’s Layfigure,
- playing truant this day. From the necessities of Art comes his
- long tile-beard; whence his leaden breastplate (unless indeed he
- were some Hawker licensed by leaden badge) may have come,—will
- perhaps remain for ever a Historical Problem. Another Saul among
- the people we discern: “_Père Adam_, Father Adam,” as the groups
- name him; to us better known as bull-voiced Marquis Saint-Huruge;
- hero of the _Veto;_ a man that has had losses, and deserved them.
- The tall Marquis, emitted some days ago from limbo, looks
- peripatetically on this scene, from under his umbrella, not
- without interest. All which persons and things, hurled together
- as we see; Pallas Athene, busy with Flandre; patriotic Versailles
- National Guards, short of ammunition, and deserted by d’Estaing
- their Colonel, and commanded by Lecointre their Major; then
- caracoling Bodyguards, sour, dispirited, with their buckskins
- wet; and finally this flowing sea of indignant Squalor,—may they
- not give rise to occurrences?
-
- Behold, however, the Twelve She-deputies return from the Château.
- Without President Mounier, indeed; but radiant with joy, shouting
- ‘_Life to the King and his House_.’ Apparently the news are good,
- Mesdames? News of the best! Five of us were admitted to the
- internal splendours, to the Royal Presence. This slim damsel,
- “Louison Chabray, worker in sculpture, aged only seventeen,” as
- being of the best looks and address, her we appointed speaker. On
- whom, and indeed on all of us, his Majesty looked nothing but
- graciousness. Nay, when Louison, addressing him, was like to
- faint, he took her in his royal arms; and said gallantly, ‘It was
- well worth while (_Elle en valût bien la peine_).’ Consider, O
- women, what a King! His words were of comfort, and that only:
- there shall be provision sent to Paris, if provision is in the
- world; grains shall circulate free as air; millers shall grind,
- or do worse, while their millstones endure; and nothing be left
- wrong which a Restorer of French Liberty can right.
-
- Good news these; but, to wet Menads, all too incredible! There
- seems no proof, then? _Words_ of comfort are words only; which
- will feed nothing. O miserable people, betrayed by Aristocrats,
- who corrupt thy very messengers! In his royal arms, Mademoiselle
- Louison? In his arms? Thou shameless minx, worthy of a name—that
- shall be nameless! Yes, thy skin is soft: ours is rough with
- hardship; and well wetted, waiting here in the rain. No children
- hast thou hungry at home; only alabaster dolls, that weep not!
- The traitress! To the Lanterne!—And so poor Louison Chabray, no
- asseveration or shrieks availing her, fair slim damsel, late in
- the arms of Royalty, has a garter round her neck, and furibund
- Amazons at each end; is about to perish so,—when two Bodyguards
- gallop up, indignantly dissipating; and rescue her. The
- miscredited Twelve hasten back to the Château, for an “answer in
- writing.”
-
- Nay, behold, a new flight of Menads, with “M. Brunout Bastille
- Volunteer,” as impressed-commandant, at the head of it. These
- also will advance to the Grate of the Grand Court, and see what
- is toward. Human patience, in wet buckskins, has its limits.
- Bodyguard Lieutenant, M. de Savonnières, for one moment, lets his
- temper, long provoked, long pent, give way. He not only
- dissipates these latter Menads; but caracoles and cuts, or
- indignantly flourishes, at M. Brunout, the impressed-commandant;
- and, finding great relief in it, even chases him; Brunout flying
- nimbly, though in a pirouette manner, and now with sword also
- drawn. At which sight of wrath and victory two other Bodyguards
- (for wrath is contagious, and to pent Bodyguards is so solacing)
- do likewise give way; give chase, with brandished sabre, and in
- the air make horrid circles. So that poor Brunout has nothing for
- it but to retreat with accelerated nimbleness, through rank after
- rank; Parthian-like, fencing as he flies; above all, shouting
- lustily, ‘_On nous laisse assassiner_, They are getting us
- assassinated?’
-
- Shameful! Three against one! Growls come from the Lecointrian
- ranks; bellowings,—lastly shots. Savonnières” arm is raised to
- strike: the bullet of a Lecointrian musket shatters it; the
- brandished sabre jingles down harmless. Brunout has escaped, this
- duel well ended: but the wild howl of war is everywhere beginning
- to pipe!
-
- The Amazons recoil; Saint-Antoine has its cannon pointed (full of
- grapeshot); thrice applies the lit flambeau; which thrice refuses
- to catch,—the touchholes are so wetted; and voices cry:
- ‘_Arrêtez, il n’est pas temps encore_, Stop, it is not yet
- time!’[244] Messieurs of the Garde-du-Corps, ye had orders not to
- fire; nevertheless two of you limp dismounted, and one war-horse
- lies slain. Were it not well to draw back out of shot-range;
- finally to file off,—into the interior? If in so filing off,
- there did a musketoon or two discharge itself, at these armed
- shopkeepers, hooting and crowing, could man wonder? Draggled are
- your white cockades of an enormous size; would to Heaven they
- were got exchanged for tricolor ones! Your buckskins are wet,
- your hearts heavy. Go, and return not!
-
- The Bodyguards file off, as we hint; giving and receiving shots;
- drawing no life-blood; leaving boundless indignation. Some three
- times in the thickening dusk, a glimpse of them is seen, at this
- or the other Portal: saluted always with execrations, with the
- whew of lead. Let but a Bodyguard shew face, he is hunted by
- Rascality;—for instance, poor “M. de Moucheton of the Scotch
- Company,” owner of the slain war-horse; and has to be smuggled
- off by Versailles Captains. Or rusty firelocks belch after him,
- shivering asunder his—hat. In the end, by superior Order, the
- Bodyguards, all but the few on immediate duty, disappear; or as
- it were abscond; and march, under cloud of night, to
- Rambouillet.[245]
-
- We remark also that the Versaillese have now got ammunition: all
- afternoon, the official Person could find none; till, in these so
- critical moments, a patriotic Sublieutenant set a pistol to his
- ear, and would thank him to find some,—which he thereupon
- succeeded in doing. Likewise that Flandre, disarmed by Pallas
- Athene, says openly, it will not fight with citizens; and for
- token of peace, has exchanged cartridges with the Versaillese.
-
- Sansculottism is now among mere friends; and can “circulate
- freely;” indignant at Bodyguards;—complaining also considerably
- of hunger.
-
-
- Chapter 1.7.VIII.
- The Equal Diet.
-
- But why lingers Mounier; returns not with his Deputation? It is
- six, it is seven o’clock; and still no Mounier, no Acceptance
- pure and simple.
-
- And, behold, the dripping Menads, not now in deputation but in
- mass, have penetrated into the Assembly: to the shamefullest
- interruption of public speaking and order of the day. Neither
- Maillard nor Vice-President can restrain them, except within wide
- limits; not even, except for minutes, can the lion-voice of
- Mirabeau, though they applaud it: but ever and anon they break in
- upon the regeneration of France with cries of: ‘Bread; not so
- much discoursing! _Du pain; pas tant de longs discours!_’—So
- insensible were these poor creatures to bursts of Parliamentary
- eloquence!
-
- One learns also that the royal Carriages are getting yoked, as if
- for Metz. Carriages, royal or not, have verily showed themselves
- at the back Gates. They even produced, or quoted, a written order
- from our Versailles Municipality,—which is a Monarchic not a
- Democratic one. However, Versailles Patroles drove them in again;
- as the vigilant Lecointre had strictly charged them to do.
-
- A busy man, truly, is Major Lecointre, in these hours. For
- Colonel d’Estaing loiters invisible in the Œil-de-Bœuf;
- invisible, or still more questionably _visible_, for instants:
- then also a too loyal Municipality requires supervision: no
- order, civil or military, taken about any of these thousand
- things! Lecointre is at the Versailles Townhall: he is at the
- Grate of the Grand Court; communing with Swiss and Bodyguards. He
- is in the ranks of Flandre; he is here, he is there: studious to
- prevent bloodshed; to prevent the Royal Family from flying to
- Metz; the Menads from plundering Versailles.
-
- At the fall of night, we behold him advance to those armed groups
- of Saint-Antoine, hovering all-too grim near the Salle des Menus.
- They receive him in a half-circle; twelve speakers behind
- cannons, with lighted torches in hand, the cannon-mouths
- _towards_ Lecointre: a picture for Salvator! He asks, in
- temperate but courageous language: What they, by this their
- journey to Versailles, do specially want? The twelve speakers
- reply, in few words inclusive of much: ‘Bread, and the end of
- these brabbles, _Du pain, et la fin des affaires_.’ When the
- _affairs_ will end, no Major Lecointre, nor no mortal, can say;
- but as to bread, he inquires, How many are you?—learns that they
- are six hundred, that a loaf each will suffice; and rides off to
- the Municipality to get six hundred loaves.
-
- Which loaves, however, a Municipality of Monarchic temper will
- not give. It will give two tons of rice rather,—could you but
- know whether it should be boiled or raw. Nay when this too is
- accepted, the Municipals have disappeared;—ducked under, as the
- Six-and-Twenty Long-gowned of Paris did; and, leaving not the
- smallest vestage of rice, in the boiled or raw state, they there
- vanish from History!
-
- Rice comes not; one’s hope of food is baulked; even one’s hope of
- vengeance: is not M. de Moucheton of the Scotch Company, as we
- said, deceitfully smuggled off? Failing all which, behold only M.
- de Moucheton’s slain warhorse, lying on the Esplanade there!
- Saint-Antoine, baulked, esurient, pounces on the slain warhorse;
- flays it; roasts it, with such fuel, of paling, gates, portable
- timber as can be come at,—not without shouting: and, after the
- manner of ancient Greek Heroes, _they lifted their hands to the
- daintily readied repast;_ such as it might be.[246] Other
- Rascality prowls discursive; seeking what it may devour. Flandre
- will retire to its barracks; Lecointre also with his
- Versaillese,—all but the vigilant Patrols, charged to be doubly
- vigilant.
-
- So sink the shadows of Night, blustering, rainy; and all paths
- grow dark. Strangest Night ever seen in these regions,—perhaps
- since the Bartholomew Night, when Versailles, as Bassompierre
- writes of it, was a _chétif château_. O for the Lyre of some
- Orpheus, to constrain, with touch of melodious strings, these mad
- masses into Order! For here all seems fallen asunder, in
- wide-yawning dislocation. The highest, as in down-rushing of a
- World, is come in contact with the lowest: the Rascality of
- France beleaguering the Royalty of France; “ironshod batons”
- lifted round the diadem, not to guard it! With denunciations of
- bloodthirsty Anti-national Bodyguards, are heard dark growlings
- against a Queenly Name.
-
- The Court sits tremulous, powerless; varies with the varying
- temper of the Esplanade, with the varying colour of the rumours
- from Paris. Thick-coming rumours; now of peace, now of war.
- Necker and all the Ministers consult; with a blank issue. The
- Œil-de-Bœuf is one tempest of whispers:—We will fly to Metz; we
- will not fly. The royal Carriages again attempt egress;—though
- for trial merely; they are again driven in by Lecointre’s
- Patrols. In six hours, nothing has been resolved on; not even the
- Acceptance pure and simple.
-
- In six hours? Alas, he who, in such circumstances, cannot resolve
- in six minutes, may give up the enterprise: him Fate has already
- resolved for. And Menadism, meanwhile, and Sansculottism takes
- counsel with the National Assembly; grows more and more
- tumultuous there. Mounier returns not; Authority nowhere shews
- itself: the Authority of France lies, for the present, with
- Lecointre and Usher Maillard.—This then is the abomination of
- desolation; come suddenly, though long foreshadowed as
- inevitable! For, to the blind, all things are sudden. Misery
- which, through long ages, had no spokesman, no helper, will now
- be its own helper and speak for itself. The dialect, one of the
- rudest, is, what it could be, _this_.
-
- At eight o’clock there returns to our Assembly not the
- Deputation; but Doctor Guillotin announcing that it will return;
- also that there is hope of the Acceptance pure and simple. He
- himself has brought a Royal Letter, authorising and commanding
- the freest “circulation of grains.” Which Royal Letter Menadism
- with its whole heart applauds. Conformably to which the Assembly
- forthwith passes a Decree; also received with rapturous Menadic
- plaudits:—Only could not an august Assembly contrive further to
- ‘_fix_ the price of bread at eight sous the half-quartern;
- butchers’-meat at six sous the pound;’ which seem fair rates?
- Such motion do “a multitude of men and women,” irrepressible by
- Usher Maillard, now make; does an august Assembly hear made.
- Usher Maillard himself is not always perfectly measured in
- speech; but if rebuked, he can justly excuse himself by the
- peculiarity of the circumstances.[247]
-
- But finally, this Decree well passed, and the disorder
- continuing; and Members melting away, and no President Mounier
- returning,—what can the Vice-President do but also melt away? The
- Assembly melts, under such pressure, into deliquium; or, as it is
- officially called, adjourns. Maillard is despatched to Paris,
- with the “Decree concerning Grains” in his pocket; he and some
- women, in carriages belonging to the King. Thitherward slim
- Louison Chabray has already set forth, with that “written
- answer,” which the Twelve She-deputies returned in to seek. Slim
- sylph, she has set forth, through the black muddy country: she
- has much to tell, her poor nerves so flurried; and travels, as
- indeed today on this road all persons do, with extreme slowness.
- President Mounier has not come, nor the Acceptance pure and
- simple; though six hours with their events have come; though
- courier on courier reports that Lafayette is coming. Coming, with
- war or with peace? It is time that the Château also should
- determine on one thing or another; that the Château also should
- show itself alive, if it would continue living!
-
- Victorious, joyful after such delay, Mounier does arrive at last,
- and the hard-earned Acceptance with him; which now, alas, is of
- small value. Fancy Mounier’s surprise to find his Senate, whom he
- hoped to charm by the Acceptance pure and simple,—all gone; and
- in its stead a Senate of Menads! For as Erasmus’s Ape mimicked,
- say with wooden splint, Erasmus shaving, so do these Amazons
- hold, in mock majesty, some confused parody of National Assembly.
- They make motions; deliver speeches; pass enactments; productive
- at least of loud laughter. All galleries and benches are filled;
- a strong Dame of the Market is in Mounier’s Chair. Not without
- difficulty, Mounier, by aid of macers, and persuasive speaking,
- makes his way to the Female-President: the Strong Dame before
- abdicating signifies that, for one thing, she and indeed her
- whole senate male and female (for what was one roasted warhorse
- among so many?) are suffering very considerably from hunger.
-
- Experienced Mounier, in these circumstances, takes a twofold
- resolution: To reconvoke his Assembly Members by sound of drum;
- also to procure a supply of food. Swift messengers fly, to all
- bakers, cooks, pastrycooks, vintners, restorers; drums beat,
- accompanied with shrill vocal proclamation, through all streets.
- They come: the Assembly Members come; what is still better, the
- provisions come. On tray and barrow come these latter; loaves,
- wine, great store of sausages. The nourishing baskets circulate
- harmoniously along the benches; nor, according to the Father of
- Epics, _did any soul lack a fair share of victual_ (δαῖτος
- ὲἱσης), _an equal diet_); highly desirable, at the moment.[248]
-
- Gradually some hundred or so of Assembly members get edged in,
- Menadism making way a little, round Mounier’s Chair; listen to
- the Acceptance pure and simple; and begin, what is the order of
- the night, “discussion of the Penal Code.” All benches are
- crowded; in the dusky galleries, duskier with unwashed heads, is
- a strange “coruscation,”—of impromptu billhooks.[249] It is
- exactly five months this day since these same galleries were
- filled with high-plumed jewelled Beauty, raining bright
- influences; and now? To such length have we got in regenerating
- France. Methinks the travail-throes are of the sharpest!—Menadism
- will not be restrained from occasional remarks; asks, ‘What is
- use of the Penal Code? The thing we want is Bread.’ Mirabeau
- turns round with lion-voiced rebuke; Menadism applauds him; but
- recommences.
-
- Thus they, chewing tough sausages, discussing the Penal Code,
- make night hideous. What the issue will be? Lafayette with his
- thirty thousand must arrive first: him, who cannot now be
- distant, all men expect, as the messenger of Destiny.
-
-
- Chapter 1.7.IX.
- Lafayette.
-
- Towards midnight lights flare on the hill; Lafayette’s lights!
- The roll of his drums comes up the Avenue de Versailles. With
- peace, or with war? Patience, friends! With neither. Lafayette is
- come, but not yet the catastrophe.
-
- He has halted and harangued so often, on the march; spent nine
- hours on four leagues of road. At Montreuil, close on Versailles,
- the whole Host had to pause; and, with uplifted right hand, in
- the murk of Night, to these pouring skies, swear solemnly to
- respect the King’s Dwelling; to be faithful to King and National
- Assembly. Rage is driven down out of sight, by the laggard march;
- the thirst of vengeance slaked in weariness and soaking clothes.
- Flandre is again drawn out under arms: but Flandre, grown so
- patriotic, now needs no “exterminating.” The wayworn Batallions
- halt in the Avenue: they have, for the present, no wish so
- pressing as that of shelter and rest.
-
- Anxious sits President Mounier; anxious the Château. There is a
- message coming from the Château, that M. Mounier would please
- return thither with a fresh Deputation, swiftly; and so at least
- _unite_ our two anxieties. Anxious Mounier does of himself send,
- meanwhile, to apprise the General that his Majesty has been so
- gracious as to grant us the Acceptance pure and simple. The
- General, with a small advance column, makes answer in passing;
- speaks vaguely some smooth words to the National
- President,—glances, only with the eye, at that so mixtiform
- National Assembly; then fares forward towards the Château. There
- are with him two Paris Municipals; they were chosen from the
- Three Hundred for that errand. He gets admittance through the
- locked and padlocked Grates, through sentries and ushers, to the
- Royal Halls.
-
- The Court, male and female, crowds on his passage, to read their
- doom on his face; which exhibits, say Historians, a mixture “of
- sorrow, of fervour and valour,” singular to behold.[250] The
- King, with Monsieur, with Ministers and Marshals, is waiting to
- receive him: He ‘is come,’ in his highflown chivalrous way, ‘to
- offer his head for the safety of his Majesty’s.’ The two
- Municipals state the wish of Paris: four things, of quite pacific
- tenor. First, that the honour of Guarding his sacred person be
- conferred on patriot National Guards;—say, the Centre Grenadiers,
- who as Gardes Françaises were wont to have that privilege.
- Second, that provisions be got, if possible. Third, that the
- Prisons, all crowded with political delinquents, may have judges
- sent them. Fourth, _that it would please his Majesty to come and
- live in Paris._ To all which four wishes, except the fourth, his
- Majesty answers readily, Yes; or indeed may almost say that he
- has already answered it. To the fourth he can answer only, Yes or
- No; would so gladly answer, Yes _and_ No!—But, in any case, are
- not their dispositions, thank Heaven, so entirely pacific? There
- is time for deliberation. The brunt of the danger seems past!
-
- Lafayette and d’Estaing settle the watches; Centre Grenadiers are
- to take the Guard-room they of old occupied as Gardes
- Françaises;—for indeed the Gardes du Corps, its late ill-advised
- occupants, are gone mostly to Rambouillet. That is the order of
- _this_ night; sufficient for the night is the evil thereof.
- Whereupon Lafayette and the two Municipals, with highflown
- chivalry, take their leave.
-
- So brief has the interview been, Mounier and his Deputation were
- not yet got up. So brief and satisfactory. A stone is rolled from
- every heart. The fair Palace Dames publicly declare that this
- Lafayette, detestable though he be, is their saviour for once.
- Even the ancient vinaigrous _Tantes_ admit it; the King’s Aunts,
- ancient _Graille_ and Sisterhood, known to us of old. Queen
- Marie-Antoinette has been heard often say the like. She alone,
- among all women and all men, wore a face of courage, of lofty
- calmness and resolve, this day. She alone saw clearly what she
- _meant_ to do; and Theresa’s Daughter _dares_ do what she means,
- were all France threatening her: abide where her children are,
- where her husband is.
-
- Towards three in the morning all things are settled: the watches
- set, the Centre Grenadiers put into their old Guard-room, and
- harangued; the Swiss, and few remaining Bodyguards harangued. The
- wayworn Paris Batallions, consigned to “the hospitality of
- Versailles,” lie dormant in spare-beds, spare-barracks,
- coffeehouses, empty churches. A troop of them, on their way to
- the Church of Saint-Louis, awoke poor Weber, dreaming troublous,
- in the Rue Sartory. Weber has had his waistcoat-pocket full of
- balls all day; “two hundred balls, and two _pears_ of powder!”
- For waistcoats were waistcoats then, and had flaps down to
- mid-thigh. So many balls he has had all day; but no opportunity
- of using them: he turns over now, execrating disloyal bandits;
- swears a prayer or two, and straight to sleep again.
-
- Finally, the National Assembly is harangued; which thereupon, on
- motion of Mirabeau, discontinues the Penal Code, and dismisses
- for this night. Menadism, Sansculottism has cowered into
- guard-houses, barracks of Flandre, to the light of cheerful fire;
- failing that, to churches, office-houses, sentry-boxes,
- wheresoever wretchedness can find a lair. The troublous Day has
- brawled itself to rest: no lives yet lost but that of one
- warhorse. Insurrectionary Chaos lies slumbering round the Palace,
- like Ocean round a Diving-bell,—no crevice yet disclosing itself.
-
- Deep sleep has fallen promiscuously on the high and on the low;
- suspending most things, even wrath and famine. Darkness covers
- the Earth. But, far on the North-east, Paris flings up her great
- yellow gleam; far into the wet black Night. For all is
- illuminated there, as in the old July Nights; the streets
- deserted, for alarm of war; the Municipals all wakeful; Patrols
- hailing, with their hoarse _Who-goes_. There, as we discover, our
- poor slim Louison Chabray, her poor nerves all fluttered, is
- arriving about this very hour. There Usher Maillard will arrive,
- about an hour hence, “towards four in the morning.” They report,
- successively, to a wakeful Hôtel-de-Ville what comfort they can
- report; which again, with early dawn, large comfortable Placards,
- shall impart to all men.
-
- Lafayette, in the Hôtel de Noailles, not far from the Château,
- having now finished haranguing, sits with his Officers
- consulting: at five o’clock the unanimous best counsel is, that a
- man so tost and toiled for twenty-four hours and more, fling
- himself on a bed, and seek some rest.
-
- Thus, then, has ended the First Act of the Insurrection of Women.
- How it will turn on the morrow? The morrow, as always, is with
- the Fates! But his Majesty, one may hope, will consent to come
- honourably to Paris; at all events, he can visit Paris.
- Anti-national Bodyguards, here and elsewhere, must take the
- National Oath; make reparation to the Tricolor; Flandre will
- swear. There may be much swearing; much public speaking there
- will infallibly be: and so, with harangues and vows, may the
- matter in some handsome way, wind itself up.
-
- Or, alas, may it not be all otherwise, unhandsome: the consent
- not honourable, but extorted, ignominious? Boundless Chaos of
- Insurrection presses slumbering round the Palace, like Ocean
- round a Diving-bell; and may penetrate at any crevice. Let but
- that accumulated insurrectionary mass find entrance! Like the
- infinite inburst of water; or say rather, of inflammable,
- self-igniting fluid; for example, “turpentine-and-phosphorus
- oil,”—fluid known to Spinola Santerre!
-
-
- Chapter 1.7.X.
- The Grand Entries.
-
- The dull dawn of a new morning, drizzly and chill, had but broken
- over Versailles, when it pleased Destiny that a Bodyguard should
- look out of window, on the right wing of the Château, to see what
- prospect there was in Heaven and in Earth. Rascality male and
- female is prowling in view of him. His fasting stomach is, with
- good cause, sour; he perhaps cannot forbear a passing malison on
- them; least of all can he forbear answering such.
-
- Ill words breed worse: till the worst word came; and then the ill
- deed. Did the maledicent Bodyguard, getting (as was too
- inevitable) better malediction than he gave, load his musketoon,
- and threaten to fire; and actually fire? Were wise who wist! It
- stands asserted; to us not credibly. Be this as it may, menaced
- Rascality, in whinnying scorn, is shaking at all Grates: the
- fastening of one (some write, it was a chain merely) gives way;
- Rascality is in the Grand Court, whinnying louder still.
-
- The maledicent Bodyguard, more Bodyguards than he do now give
- fire; a man’s arm is shattered. Lecointre will depose[251] that
- “the Sieur Cardaine, a National Guard without arms, was stabbed.”
- But see, sure enough, poor Jerôme l’Héritier, an unarmed National
- Guard he too, “cabinet-maker, a saddler’s son, of Paris,” with
- the down of youthhood still on his chin,—he reels death-stricken;
- rushes to the pavement, scattering it with his blood and
- brains!—Allelew! Wilder than Irish wakes, rises the howl: of
- pity; of infinite revenge. In few moments, the Grate of the inner
- and inmost Court, which they name Court of Marble, this too is
- forced, or surprised, and burst open: the Court of Marble too is
- overflowed: up the Grand Staircase, up all stairs and entrances
- rushes the living Deluge! Deshuttes and Varigny, the two sentry
- Bodyguards, are trodden down, are massacred with a hundred pikes.
- Women snatch their cutlasses, or any weapon, and storm-in
- Menadic:—other women lift the corpse of shot Jerôme; lay it down
- on the Marble steps; there shall the livid face and smashed head,
- dumb for ever, _speak_.
-
- Wo now to all Bodyguards, mercy is none for them! Miomandre de
- Sainte-Marie pleads with soft words, on the Grand Staircase,
- “descending four steps:”—to the roaring tornado. His comrades
- snatch him up, by the skirts and belts; literally, from the jaws
- of Destruction; and slam-to their Door. This also will stand few
- instants; the panels shivering in, like potsherds. Barricading
- serves not: fly fast, ye Bodyguards; rabid Insurrection, like the
- hellhound Chase, uproaring at your heels!
-
- The terrorstruck Bodyguards fly, bolting and barricading; it
- follows. Whitherward? Through hall on hall: wo, now! towards the
- Queen’s Suite of Rooms, in the furtherest room of which the Queen
- is now asleep. Five sentinels rush through that long Suite; they
- are in the Anteroom knocking loud: ‘Save the Queen!’ Trembling
- women fall at their feet with tears; are answered: ‘Yes, we will
- die; save ye the Queen!’
-
- Tremble not, women, but haste: for, lo, another voice shouts far
- through the outermost door, ‘Save the Queen!’ and the door shut.
- It is brave Miomandre’s voice that shouts this second warning. He
- has stormed across imminent death to do it; fronts imminent
- death, having done it. Brave Tardivet du Repaire, bent on the
- same desperate service, was borne down with pikes; his comrades
- hardly snatched him in again alive. Miomandre and Tardivet: let
- the names of these two Bodyguards, as the names of brave men
- should, live long.
-
- Trembling Maids of Honour, one of whom from afar caught glimpse
- of Miomandre as well as heard him, hastily wrap the Queen; not in
- robes of State. She flies for her life, across the Œil-de-Bœuf;
- against the main door of which too Insurrection batters. She is
- in the King’s Apartment, in the King’s arms; she clasps her
- children amid a faithful few. The Imperial-hearted bursts into
- mother’s tears: ‘O my friends, save me and my children, _O mes
- amis, sauvez moi et mes enfans!_’ The battering of
- Insurrectionary axes clangs audible across the Œil-de-Bœuf. What
- an hour!
-
- Yes, Friends: a hideous fearful hour; shameful alike to Governed
- and Governor; wherein Governed and Governor ignominiously testify
- that their relation is at an end. Rage, which had brewed itself
- in twenty thousand hearts, for the last four-and-twenty hours,
- has taken fire: Jerome’s brained corpse lies there as live-coal.
- It is, as we said, the infinite Element bursting in: wild-surging
- through all corridors and conduits.
-
- Meanwhile, the poor Bodyguards have got hunted mostly into the
- Œil-de-Bœuf. They may die there, at the King’s threshhold; they
- can do little to defend it. They are heaping _tabourets_ (stools
- of honour), benches and all moveables, against the door; at which
- the axe of Insurrection thunders.—But did brave Miomandre perish,
- then, at the Queen’s door? No, he was fractured, slashed,
- lacerated, left for dead; he has nevertheless crawled hither; and
- shall live, honoured of loyal France. Remark also, in flat
- contradiction to much which has been said and sung, that
- Insurrection did _not_ burst that door he had defended; but
- hurried elsewhither, seeking new bodyguards.[252]
-
- Poor Bodyguards, with their Thyestes’ Opera-Repast! Well for
- them, that Insurrection has only pikes and axes; no right sieging
- tools! It shakes and thunders. Must they all perish miserably,
- and Royalty with them? Deshuttes and Varigny, massacred at the
- first inbreak, have been beheaded in the Marble Court: a
- sacrifice to Jerôme’s _manes:_ Jourdan with the tile-beard did
- that duty willingly; and asked, If there were no more? Another
- captive they are leading round the corpse, with howl-chauntings:
- may not Jourdan again tuck up his sleeves?
-
- And louder and louder rages Insurrection within, plundering if it
- cannot kill; louder and louder it thunders at the Œil-de-Bœuf:
- what can now hinder its bursting in?—On a sudden it ceases; the
- battering has ceased! Wild rushing: the cries grow fainter: there
- is silence, or the tramp of regular steps; then a friendly
- knocking: ‘We are the Centre Grenadiers, old Gardes Françaises:
- Open to us, Messieurs of the Garde-du-Corps; we have not
- forgotten how you saved us at Fontenoy!’[253] The door is opened;
- enter Captain Gondran and the Centre Grenadiers: there are
- military embracings; there is sudden deliverance from death into
- life.
-
- Strange Sons of Adam! It was to “exterminate” these
- Gardes-du-Corps that the Centre Grenadiers left home: and now
- they have rushed to save them from extermination. The memory of
- common peril, of old help, melts the rough heart; bosom is
- clasped to bosom, not in war. The King shews himself, one moment,
- through the door of his Apartment, with: ‘Do not hurt my
- Guards!’—‘_Soyons frères_, Let us be brothers!’ cries Captain
- Gondran; and again dashes off, with levelled bayonets, to sweep
- the Palace clear.
-
- Now too Lafayette, suddenly roused, not from sleep (for his eyes
- had not yet closed), arrives; with passionate popular eloquence,
- with prompt military word of command. National Guards, suddenly
- roused, by sound of trumpet and alarm-drum, are all arriving. The
- death-melly ceases: the first sky-lambent blaze of Insurrection
- is got damped down; it burns now, if unextinguished, yet
- flameless, as charred coals do, and not inextinguishable. The
- King’s Apartments are safe. Ministers, Officials, and even some
- loyal National deputies are assembling round their Majesties. The
- consternation will, with sobs and confusion, settle down
- gradually, into plan and counsel, better or worse.
-
- But glance now, for a moment, from the royal windows! A roaring
- sea of human heads, inundating both Courts; billowing against all
- passages: Menadic women; infuriated men, mad with revenge, with
- love of mischief, love of plunder! Rascality has slipped its
- muzzle; and now bays, three-throated, like the Dog of Erebus.
- Fourteen Bodyguards are wounded; two massacred, and as we saw,
- beheaded; Jourdan asking, ‘Was it worth while to come so far for
- two?’ Hapless Deshuttes and Varigny! Their fate surely was sad.
- Whirled down so suddenly to the abyss; as men are, suddenly, by
- the wide thunder of the Mountain Avalanche, awakened not by
- _them_, awakened far off by others! When the Château Clock last
- struck, they two were pacing languid, with poised musketoon;
- anxious mainly that the next hour would strike. It has struck; to
- them inaudible. Their trunks lie mangled: their heads parade, “on
- pikes twelve feet long,” through the streets of Versailles; and
- shall, about noon reach the Barriers of Paris,—a too ghastly
- contradiction to the large comfortable Placards that have been
- posted there!
-
- The other captive Bodyguard is still circling the corpse of
- Jerome, amid Indian war-whooping; bloody Tilebeard, with tucked
- sleeves, brandishing his bloody axe; when Gondran and the
- Grenadiers come in sight. ‘Comrades, will you see a man massacred
- in cold blood?’—‘Off, butchers!’ answer they; and the poor
- Bodyguard is free. Busy runs Gondran, busy run Guards and
- Captains; scouring at all corridors; dispersing Rascality and
- Robbery; sweeping the Palace clear. The mangled carnage is
- removed; Jerome’s body to the Townhall, for inquest: the fire of
- Insurrection gets damped, more and more, into measurable,
- manageable heat.
-
- Transcendent things of all sorts, as in the general outburst of
- multitudinous Passion, are huddled together; the ludicrous, nay
- the ridiculous, with the horrible. Far over the billowy sea of
- heads, may be seen Rascality, caprioling on horses from the Royal
- Stud. The Spoilers these; for Patriotism is always infected so,
- with a proportion of mere thieves and scoundrels. Gondran
- snatched their prey from them in the Château; whereupon they
- hurried to the Stables, and took horse there. But the generous
- Diomedes’ steeds, according to Weber, disdained such
- scoundrel-burden; and, flinging up their royal heels, did soon
- project most of it, in parabolic curves, to a distance, amid
- peals of laughter: and were caught. Mounted National Guards
- secured the rest.
-
- Now too is witnessed the touching last-flicker of Etiquette;
- which sinks not here, in the Cimmerian World-wreckage, without a
- sign, as the house-cricket might still chirp in the pealing of a
- Trump of Doom. ‘Monsieur,’ said some Master of Ceremonies (one
- hopes it might be de Brézé), as Lafayette, in these fearful
- moments, was rushing towards the inner Royal Apartments,
- ‘_Monsieur, le Roi vous accorde les grandes entrées_, Monsieur,
- the King grants you the Grand Entries,’—not finding it convenient
- to refuse them![254]
-
-
- Chapter 1.7.XI.
- From Versailles.
-
- However, the Paris National Guard, wholly under arms, has cleared
- the Palace, and even occupies the nearer external spaces;
- extruding miscellaneous Patriotism, for most part, into the Grand
- Court, or even into the Forecourt.
-
- The Bodyguards, you can observe, have now of a verity, “hoisted
- the National Cockade:” for they step forward to the windows or
- balconies, hat aloft in hand, on each hat a huge tricolor; and
- fling over their bandoleers in sign of surrender; and shout _Vive
- la Nation_. To which how can the generous heart respond but with,
- _Vive le Roi; vivent les Gardes-du-Corps?_ His Majesty himself
- has appeared with Lafayette on the balcony, and again appears:
- _Vive le Roi_ greets him from all throats; but also from some one
- throat is heard ‘_Le Roi à Paris_, The King to Paris!’
-
- Her Majesty too, on demand, shows herself, though there is peril
- in it: she steps out on the balcony, with her little boy and
- girl. ‘No children, _Point d’enfans!_’ cry the voices. She gently
- pushes back her children; and stands alone, her hands serenely
- crossed on her breast: ‘should I die,’ she had said, ‘I will do
- it.’ Such serenity of heroism has its effect. Lafayette, with
- ready wit, in his highflown chivalrous way, takes that fair
- queenly hand; and reverently kneeling, kisses it: thereupon the
- people do shout _Vive la Reine_. Nevertheless, poor Weber “saw”
- (or even thought he saw; for hardly the third part of poor
- Weber’s experiences, in such hysterical days, will stand
- scrutiny) “one of these brigands level his musket at her
- Majesty,”—with or without intention to shoot; for another of the
- brigands “angrily struck it down.”
-
- So that all, and the Queen herself, nay the very Captain of the
- Bodyguards, have grown National! The very Captain of the
- Bodyguards steps out now with Lafayette. On the hat of the
- repentant man is an enormous tricolor; large as a soup-platter,
- or sun-flower; visible to the utmost Forecourt. He takes the
- National Oath with a loud voice, elevating his hat; at which
- sight all the army raise their bonnets on their bayonets, with
- shouts. Sweet is reconcilement to the heart of man. Lafayette has
- sworn Flandre; he swears the remaining Bodyguards, down in the
- Marble Court; the people clasp them in their arms:—O, my
- brothers, why would ye force us to slay you? Behold there is joy
- over you, as over returning prodigal sons!—The poor Bodyguards,
- now National and tricolor, exchange bonnets, exchange arms; there
- shall be peace and fraternity. And still ‘_Vive le Roi;_’ and
- also ‘_Le Roi à Paris_,’ not now from one throat, but from all
- throats as one, for it is the heart’s wish of all mortals.
-
- Yes, _The King to Paris:_ what else? Ministers may consult, and
- National Deputies wag their heads: but there is now no other
- possibility. You have forced him to go willingly. ‘At one
- o’clock!’ Lafayette gives audible assurance to that purpose; and
- universal Insurrection, with immeasurable shout, and a discharge
- of all the firearms, clear and rusty, great and small, that it
- has, returns him acceptance. What a sound; heard for leagues: a
- doom peal!—That sound too rolls away, into the Silence of Ages.
- And the Château of Versailles stands ever since vacant, hushed
- still; its spacious Courts grassgrown, responsive to the hoe of
- the weeder. Times and generations roll on, in their confused
- Gulf-current; and buildings like builders have their destiny.
-
- Till one o’clock, then, there will be three parties, National
- Assembly, National Rascality, National Royalty, all busy enough.
- Rascality rejoices; women trim themselves with tricolor. Nay
- motherly Paris has sent her Avengers sufficient “cartloads of
- loaves;” which are shouted over, which are gratefully consumed.
- The Avengers, in return, are searching for grain-stores; loading
- them in fifty waggons; that so a National King, probable
- harbinger of all blessings, may be the evident bringer of plenty,
- for one.
-
- And thus has Sansculottism made prisoner its King; _revoking_ his
- parole. The Monarchy has fallen; and not so much as honourably:
- no, ignominiously; with struggle, indeed, oft repeated; but then
- with unwise struggle; wasting its strength in fits and paroxysms;
- at every new paroxysm, foiled more pitifully than before. Thus
- Broglie’s whiff of grapeshot, which might have been something,
- has dwindled to the pot-valour of an Opera Repast, and _O
- Richard, O mon Roi_. Which again we shall see dwindle to a
- Favras’ Conspiracy, a thing to be settled by the hanging of one
- Chevalier.
-
- Poor Monarchy! But what save foulest defeat can await that man,
- who wills, and yet wills not? Apparently the King either has a
- right, assertible as such to the death, before God and man; or
- else he has no right. Apparently, the one or the other; could he
- but know which! May Heaven pity him! Were Louis wise he would
- this day abdicate.—Is it not strange so few Kings abdicate; and
- none yet heard of has been known to commit suicide? Fritz the
- First, of Prussia, alone tried it; and they cut the rope.[255]
-
- As for the National Assembly, which decrees this morning that it
- “is inseparable from his Majesty,” and will follow him to Paris,
- there may one thing be noted: its extreme want of bodily health.
- After the Fourteenth of July there was a certain sickliness
- observable among honourable Members; so many demanding passports,
- on account of infirm health. But now, for these following days,
- there is a perfect murrian: President Mounier, Lally Tollendal,
- Clermont Tonnere, and all Constitutional Two-Chamber Royalists
- needing change of air; as most No-Chamber Royalists had formerly
- done.
-
- For, in truth, it is the _second Emigration_ this that has now
- come; most extensive among Commons Deputies, Noblesse, Clergy: so
- that “to Switzerland alone there go sixty thousand.” They will
- return in the day of accounts! Yes, and have hot welcome.—But
- Emigration on Emigration is the peculiarity of France. One
- Emigration follows another; grounded on reasonable fear,
- unreasonable hope, largely also on childish pet. The highflyers
- have gone first, now the lower flyers; and ever the lower will go
- down to the crawlers. Whereby, however, cannot our National
- Assembly so much the more commodiously make the Constitution;
- your Two-Chamber Anglomaniacs being all safe, distant on foreign
- shores? Abbé Maury is seized, and sent back again: he, tough as
- tanned leather, with eloquent Captain Cazalès and some others,
- will stand it out for another year.
-
- But here, meanwhile, the question arises: Was Philippe d’Orléans
- seen, this day, “in the Bois de Boulogne, in grey surtout;”
- waiting under the wet sere foliage, what the day might bring
- forth? Alas, yes, the Eidolon of him was,—in Weber’s and other
- such brains. The Chatelet shall make large inquisition into the
- matter, examining a hundred and seventy witnesses, and Deputy
- Chabroud publish his Report; but disclose nothing _farther_.[256]
- What then has caused these two unparalleled October Days? For
- surely such dramatic exhibition never yet enacted itself without
- Dramatist and Machinist. Wooden Punch emerges not, with his
- domestic sorrows, into the light of day, unless the wire be
- pulled: how can human mobs? Was it not d’Orléans then, and
- Laclos, Marquis Sillery, Mirabeau and the sons of confusion,
- hoping to drive the King to Metz, and gather the spoil? Nay was
- it not, quite contrariwise, the Œil-de-Bœuf, Bodyguard Colonel de
- Guiche, Minister Saint-Priest and highflying Loyalists; hoping
- also to drive him to Metz; and try it by the sword of civil war?
- Good Marquis Toulongeon, the Historian and Deputy, feels
- constrained to admit that it was _both_.[257]
-
- Alas, my Friends, credulous incredulity is a strange matter. But
- when a whole Nation is smitten with Suspicion, and sees a
- dramatic miracle in the very operation of the gastric juices,
- what help is there? Such Nation is already a mere hypochondriac
- bundle of diseases; as good as changed into glass; atrabiliar,
- decadent; and will suffer crises. Is not Suspicion itself the one
- thing to be suspected, as Montaigne feared only fear?
-
- Now, however, the short hour has struck. His Majesty is in his
- carriage, with his Queen, sister Elizabeth, and two royal
- children. Not for another hour can the infinite Procession get
- marshalled, and under way. The weather is dim drizzling; the mind
- confused; and noise great.
-
- Processional marches not a few our world has seen; Roman triumphs
- and ovations, Cabiric cymbal-beatings, Royal progresses, Irish
- funerals: but this of the French Monarchy marching to its bed
- remained to be seen. Miles long, and of breadth losing itself in
- vagueness, for all the neighbouring country crowds to see. Slow;
- stagnating along, like shoreless Lake, yet with a noise like
- Niagara, like Babel and Bedlam. A splashing and a tramping; a
- hurrahing, uproaring, musket-volleying;—the truest segment of
- Chaos seen in these latter Ages! Till slowly it disembogue
- itself, in the thickening dusk, into expectant Paris, through a
- double row of faces all the way from Passy to the Hôtel-de-Ville.
-
- Consider this: Vanguard of National troops; with trains of
- artillery; of pikemen and pikewomen, mounted on cannons, on
- carts, hackney-coaches, or on foot;—tripudiating, in tricolor
- ribbons from head to heel; loaves stuck on the points of
- bayonets, green boughs stuck in gun barrels.[258] Next, as
- main-march, “fifty cartloads of corn,” which have been lent, for
- peace, from the stores of Versailles. Behind which follow
- stragglers of the Garde-du-Corps; all humiliated, in Grenadier
- bonnets. Close on these comes the Royal Carriage; come Royal
- Carriages: for there are an Hundred National Deputies too, among
- whom sits Mirabeau,—his remarks not given. Then finally,
- pellmell, as rearguard, Flandre, Swiss, Hundred Swiss, other
- Bodyguards, Brigands, whosoever cannot get before. Between and
- among all which masses, flows without limit Saint-Antoine, and
- the Menadic Cohort. Menadic especially about the Royal Carriage;
- tripudiating there, covered with tricolor; singing “allusive
- songs;” pointing with one hand to the Royal Carriage, which the
- illusions hit, and pointing to the Provision-wagons, with the
- other hand, and these words: ‘Courage, Friends! We shall not want
- bread now; we are bringing you the Baker, the Bakeress, and
- Baker’s Boy (_le Boulanger, la Boulangère, et le petit
- Mitron_).’[259]
-
- The wet day draggles the tricolor, but the joy is
- unextinguishable. Is not all well now? ‘_Ah, Madame, notre bonne
- Reine_,’ said some of these Strong-women some days hence, ‘Ah
- Madame, our good Queen, don’t be a traitor any more (_ne soyez
- plus traître_), and we will all love you!’ Poor Weber went
- splashing along, close by the Royal carriage, with the tear in
- his eye: “their Majesties did me the honour,” or I thought they
- did it, “to testify, from time to time, by shrugging of the
- shoulders, by looks directed to Heaven, the emotions they felt.”
- Thus, like frail cockle, floats the Royal Life-boat, helmless, on
- black deluges of Rascality.
-
- Mercier, in his loose way, estimates the Procession and
- assistants at two hundred thousand. He says it was one boundless
- inarticulate Haha;—_transcendent_ World-Laughter; comparable to
- the Saturnalia of the Ancients. Why not? Here too, as we said, is
- Human Nature once more human; shudder at it whoso is of
- shuddering humour: yet behold it is human. It has “swallowed all
- formulas;” it tripudiates even so. For which reason they that
- collect Vases and Antiques, with figures of Dancing Bacchantes
- “in wild and all but impossible positions,” may look with some
- interest on it.
-
- Thus, however, has the slow-moving Chaos or modern Saturnalia of
- the Ancients, reached the Barrier; and must halt, to be harangued
- by Mayor Bailly. Thereafter it has to lumber along, between the
- double row of faces, in the transcendent heaven-lashing Haha; two
- hours longer, towards the Hôtel-de-Ville. Then again to be
- harangued there, by several persons; by Moreau de Saint-Méry,
- among others; Moreau of the Three-thousand orders, now National
- Deputy for St. Domingo. To all which poor Louis, who seemed to
- “experience a slight emotion” on entering this Townhall, can
- answer only that he ‘comes with pleasure, with confidence among
- his people.’ Mayor Bailly, in reporting it, forgets “confidence;”
- and the poor Queen says eagerly: ‘Add, with
- confidence.’—‘Messieurs,’ rejoins Bailly, ‘You are happier than
- if I had not forgot.’
-
- Finally, the King is shewn on an upper balcony, by torchlight,
- with a huge tricolor in his hat: “And all the ‘people,’ says
- Weber, grasped one another’s hands;—thinking _now_ surely the New
- Era was born.” Hardly till eleven at night can Royalty get to its
- vacant, long-deserted Palace of the Tuileries: to lodge there,
- somewhat in strolling-player fashion. It is Tuesday, the sixth of
- October, 1789.
-
- Poor Louis has Two other Paris Processions to make: one
- ludicrous-ignominious like this; the other not ludicrous nor
- ignominious, but serious, nay sublime.
-
- END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.
-
-
- VOLUME II.
- THE CONSTITUTION
-
-Mauern seh ich’ gestürzt, und Mauern seh’ ich errichtet
- Hier Gefangene, dort auch der Gefangenen viel.
-Ist vielleicht nur die Welt ein grosser Kerker? Und frei ist
- Wohl der Tolle, der sich Ketten zu Kränzen erkiest?
-
- GOETHE.
-
-
- BOOK 2.I.
- THE FEAST OF PIKES
-
-
- Chapter 2.1.I.
- In the Tuileries.
-
- The victim having once got his stroke-of-grace, the catastrophe
- can be considered as almost come. There is small interest now in
- watching his long low moans: notable only are his sharper
- agonies, what convulsive struggles he may take to cast the
- torture off from him; and then finally the last departure of life
- itself, and how he lies extinct and ended, either wrapt like
- Cæsar in decorous mantle-folds, or unseemly sunk together, like
- one that had not the force even to die.
-
- Was French Royalty, when wrenched forth from its tapestries in
- that fashion, on that Sixth of October 1789, such a victim?
- Universal France, and Royal Proclamation to all the Provinces,
- answers anxiously, _No._ Nevertheless one may fear the worst.
- Royalty was beforehand so decrepit, moribund, there is little
- life in it to heal an injury. How much of its strength, which was
- of the imagination merely, has fled; Rascality having looked
- plainly in the King’s face, and not died! When the assembled
- crows can pluck up their scarecrow, and say to it, Here shalt
- thou stand and not there; and can treat with it, and make it,
- from an infinite, a quite finite Constitutional scarecrow,—what
- is to be looked for? Not in the finite Constitutional scarecrow,
- but in what still unmeasured, infinite-seeming force may rally
- round it, is there thenceforth any hope. For it is most true that
- all available Authority is _mystic_ in its conditions, and comes
- “by the grace of God.”
-
- Cheerfuller than watching the death-struggles of Royalism will it
- be to watch the growth and gambollings of Sansculottism; for, in
- human things, especially in human society, all death is but a
- death-birth: thus if the sceptre is departing from Louis, it is
- only that, in other forms, other sceptres, were it even
- pike-sceptres, may bear sway. In a prurient element, rich with
- nutritive influences, we shall find that Sansculottism grows
- lustily, and even frisks in not ungraceful sport: as indeed most
- young creatures are sportful; nay, may it not be noted further,
- that as the grown cat, and cat-species generally, is the
- cruellest thing known, so the merriest is precisely the kitten,
- or growing cat?
-
- But fancy the Royal Family risen from its truckle-beds on the
- morrow of that mad day: fancy the Municipal inquiry, ‘How would
- your Majesty please to lodge?’—and then that the King’s rough
- answer, ‘Each may lodge as he can, I am well enough,’ is congeed
- and bowed away, in expressive grins, by the Townhall
- Functionaries, with obsequious upholsterers at their back; and
- how the Château of the Tuileries is repainted, regarnished into a
- golden Royal Residence; and Lafayette with his blue National
- Guards lies encompassing it, as blue Neptune (in the language of
- poets) does an island, wooingly. Thither may the wrecks of
- rehabilitated Loyalty gather; if it will become Constitutional;
- for Constitutionalism thinks no evil; Sansculottism itself
- rejoices in the King’s countenance. The rubbish of a Menadic
- Insurrection, as in this ever-kindly world all rubbish can and
- must be, is swept aside; and so again, on clear arena, under new
- conditions, with something even of a new stateliness, we begin a
- new course of action.
-
- Arthur Young has witnessed the strangest scene: Majesty walking
- unattended in the Tuileries Gardens; and miscellaneous tricolor
- crowds, who cheer it, and reverently make way for it: the very
- Queen commands at lowest respectful silence, regretful
- avoidance.[260] Simple ducks, in those royal waters, quackle for
- crumbs from young royal fingers: the little Dauphin has a little
- railed garden, where he is seen delving, with ruddy cheeks and
- flaxen curled hair; also a little hutch to put his tools in, and
- screen himself against showers. What peaceable simplicity! Is it
- peace of a Father restored to his children? Or of a Taskmaster
- who has lost his whip? Lafayette and the Municipality and
- universal Constitutionalism assert the former, and do what is in
- them to realise it. Such Patriotism as snarls dangerously, and
- shows teeth, Patrollotism shall suppress; or far better, Royalty
- shall soothe down the angry hair of it, by gentle pattings; and,
- most effectual of all, by fuller diet. Yes, not only shall Paris
- be fed, but the King’s hand be seen in that work. The household
- goods of the Poor shall, up to a certain amount, by royal bounty,
- be disengaged from pawn, and that insatiable _Mont de Piété_
- disgorge: rides in the city with their _Vive-le-Roi_ need not
- fail; and so by substance and show, shall Royalty, if man’s art
- can popularise it, be popularised.[261]
-
- Or, alas, is it neither restored Father nor diswhipped Taskmaster
- that walks there; but an anomalous complex of both these, and of
- innumerable other heterogeneities; reducible to no rubric, if not
- to this newly devised one: _King Louis Restorer of French
- Liberty?_ Man indeed, and King Louis like other men, lives in
- this world to make rule out of the ruleless; by his living
- energy, he shall force the absurd itself to become less absurd.
- But then if there _be_ no living energy; living passivity only?
- King Serpent, hurled into his unexpected watery dominion, did at
- least bite, and assert credibly that he was there: but as for the
- poor King Log, tumbled hither and thither as thousandfold chance
- and other will than his might direct, how happy for him that he
- was indeed wooden; and, doing nothing, could also see and suffer
- nothing! It is a distracted business.
-
- For his French Majesty, meanwhile, one of the worst things is
- that he can get no hunting. Alas, no hunting henceforth; only a
- fatal being-hunted! Scarcely, in the next June weeks, shall he
- taste again the joys of the game-destroyer; in next June, and
- never more. He sends for his smith-tools; gives, in the course of
- the day, official or ceremonial business being ended, “a few
- strokes of the file, _quelques coups de lime._[262] Innocent
- brother mortal, why wert thou not an obscure substantial maker of
- locks; but doomed in that other far-seen craft, to be a maker
- only of world-follies, unrealities; things self destructive,
- which no mortal hammering could rivet into coherence!
-
- Poor Louis is not without insight, nor even without the elements
- of will; some sharpness of temper, spurting at times from a
- stagnating character. If harmless inertness could save him, it
- were well; but he will slumber and painfully dream, and to _do_
- aught is not given him. Royalist Antiquarians still shew the
- rooms where Majesty and suite, in these extraordinary
- circumstances, had their lodging. Here sat the Queen;
- reading,—for she had her library brought hither, though the King
- refused his; taking vehement counsel of the vehement
- uncounselled; sorrowing over altered times; yet with sure hope of
- better: in her young rosy Boy, has she not the living emblem of
- hope! It is a murky, working sky; yet with golden gleams—of dawn,
- or of deeper meteoric night? Here again this chamber, on the
- other side of the main entrance, was the King’s: here his Majesty
- breakfasted, and did official work; here daily after breakfast he
- received the Queen; sometimes in pathetic friendliness; sometimes
- in human sulkiness, for flesh is weak; and, when questioned about
- business would answer: ‘Madame, your business is with the
- children.’ Nay, Sire, were it not better you, your Majesty’s
- self, took the children? So asks impartial History; scornful that
- the _thicker_ vessel was not also the stronger; pity-struck for
- the porcelain-clay of humanity rather than for the
- tile-clay,—though indeed _both_ were broken!
-
- So, however, in this Medicean Tuileries, shall the French King
- and Queen now sit, for one-and-forty months; and see a
- wild-fermenting France work out its own destiny, and theirs.
- Months bleak, ungenial, of rapid vicissitude; yet with a mild
- pale splendour, here and there: as of an April that were leading
- to leafiest Summer; as of an October that led only to everlasting
- Frost. Medicean Tuileries, how changed since it was a peaceful
- Tile field! Or is the ground itself fate-stricken, accursed: an
- Atreus’ Palace; for that Louvre window is still nigh, out of
- which a Capet, whipt of the Furies, fired his signal of the Saint
- Bartholomew! Dark is the way of the Eternal as mirrored in this
- world of Time: God’s way is in the sea, and His path in the great
- deep.
-
-
- Chapter 2.1.II.
- In the Salle de Manége.
-
- To believing Patriots, however, it is now clear, that the
- Constitution will march, _marcher_,—had it once legs to stand on.
- Quick, then, ye Patriots, bestir yourselves, and make it; shape
- legs for it! In the _Archevêché_, or Archbishop’s Palace, his
- Grace himself having fled; and afterwards in the Riding-hall,
- named Manege, close on the Tuileries: there does a National
- Assembly apply itself to the miraculous work. Successfully, had
- there been any heaven-scaling Prometheus among them; not
- successfully since there was none! There, in noisy debate, for
- the sessions are occasionally “scandalous,” and as many as three
- speakers have been seen in the Tribune at once,—let us continue
- to fancy it wearing the slow months.
-
- Tough, dogmatic, long of wind is Abbé Maury; Ciceronian pathetic
- is Cazalès. Keen-trenchant, on the other side, glitters a young
- Barnave; abhorrent of sophistry; sheering, like keen Damascus
- sabre, all sophistry asunder,—reckless what else he sheer with
- it. Simple seemest thou, O solid Dutch-built Pétion; if solid,
- surely dull. Nor lifegiving in that tone of thine, livelier
- polemical Rabaut. With ineffable serenity sniffs great Sieyes,
- aloft, alone; his Constitution ye may babble over, ye may mar,
- but can by no possibility mend: is not Polity a science he has
- exhausted? Cool, slow, two military Lameths are visible, with
- their quality sneer, or demi-sneer; they shall gallantly refund
- their Mother’s Pension, when the Red Book is produced; gallantly
- be wounded in duels. A Marquis Toulongeon, whose Pen we yet
- thank, sits there; in stoical meditative humour, oftenest silent,
- accepts what destiny will send. Thouret and Parlementary Duport
- produce mountains of Reformed Law; liberal, Anglomaniac,
- available and unavailable. Mortals rise and fall. Shall goose
- Gobel, for example,—or Go(with an umlaut)bel, for he is of
- Strasburg German breed, be a Constitutional Archbishop?
-
- Alone of all men there, Mirabeau may begin to discern clearly
- whither all this is tending. Patriotism, accordingly, regrets
- that his zeal seems to be getting cool. In that famed
- Pentecost-Night of the Fourth of August, when new Faith rose
- suddenly into miraculous fire, and old Feudality was burnt up,
- men remarked that Mirabeau took no hand in it; that, in fact, he
- luckily happened to be absent. But did he not defend the _Veto_,
- nay _Veto Absolu;_ and tell vehement Barnave that six hundred
- irresponsible senators would make of all tyrannies the
- insupportablest? Again, how anxious was he that the King’s
- Ministers should have seat and voice in the National
- Assembly;—doubtless with an eye to being Minister himself!
- Whereupon the National Assembly decides, what is very momentous,
- that no Deputy shall be Minister; he, in his haughty stormful
- manner, advising us to make it, “no Deputy called Mirabeau.”[263]
- A man of perhaps inveterate Feudalisms; of stratagems; too often
- visible leanings towards the Royalist side: a man suspect; whom
- Patriotism will unmask! Thus, in these June days, when the
- question _Who shall have right to declare war?_ comes on, you
- hear hoarse Hawkers sound dolefully through the streets, ‘Grand
- Treason of Count Mirabeau, price only one sou;’—because he pleads
- that it shall be not the Assembly but the King! Pleads; nay
- prevails: for in spite of the hoarse Hawkers, and an endless
- Populace raised by them to the pitch even of “_Lanterne_,” he
- mounts the Tribune next day; grim-resolute; murmuring aside to
- his friends that speak of danger: ‘I know it: I must come hence
- either in triumph, or else torn in fragments;’ and it was in
- triumph that he came.
-
- A man of stout heart; whose popularity is not of the populace,
- “_pas populacière;_” whom no clamour of unwashed mobs without
- doors, or of washed mobs within, can scarce from his way! Dumont
- remembers hearing him deliver a Report on Marseilles; “every word
- was interrupted on the part of the _Côté Droit_ by abusive
- epithets; calumniator, liar, assassin, scoundrel (_scélérat_):
- Mirabeau pauses a moment, and, in a honeyed tone, addressing the
- most furious, says: ‘I wait, Messieurs, till these amenities be
- exhausted.’”[264] A man enigmatic, difficult to unmask! For
- example, whence comes his money? Can the profit of a Newspaper,
- sorely eaten into by Dame Le Jay; can this, and the eighteen
- francs a-day your National Deputy has, be supposed equal to this
- expenditure? House in the Chaussée d’Antin; Country-house at
- Argenteuil; splendours, sumptuosities, orgies;—living as if he
- had a mint! All saloons barred against Adventurer Mirabeau, are
- flung wide open to King Mirabeau, the cynosure of Europe, whom
- female France flutters to behold,—though the Man Mirabeau is one
- and the same. As for money, one may conjecture that Royalism
- furnishes it; which if Royalism do, will not the same be welcome,
- as money always is to him?
-
- “Sold,” whatever Patriotism thinks, he cannot readily be: the
- spiritual fire which is in that man; which shining through such
- confusions is nevertheless Conviction, and makes him strong, and
- without which he had no strength,—is not buyable nor saleable; in
- such transference of barter, it would vanish and not _be_.
- Perhaps “paid and not sold, _payé pas vendu:_” as poor Rivarol,
- in the unhappier converse way, calls himself “sold and not paid!”
- A man travelling, comet-like, in splendour and nebulosity, his
- wild way; whom telescopic Patriotism may long watch, but, without
- higher mathematics, will not make out. A questionable most
- blameable man; yet to us the far notablest of all. With rich
- munificence, as we often say, in a most blinkard, bespectacled,
- logic-chopping generation, Nature has gifted this man with an
- eye. Welcome is his word, there where he speaks and works; and
- growing ever welcomer; for it alone goes to the heart of the
- business: logical cobwebbery shrinks itself together; and thou
- seest a _thing_, how it is, how is may be worked with.
-
- Unhappily our National Assembly has much to do: a France to
- regenerate; and France is short of so many requisites; short even
- of cash! These same Finances give trouble enough; no choking of
- the Deficit; which gapes ever, _Give, give!_ To appease the
- Deficit we venture on a hazardous step, sale of the Clergy’s
- Lands and superfluous Edifices; most hazardous. Nay, given the
- sale, who is to buy them, ready-money having fled? Wherefore, on
- the 19th day of December, a paper-money of “_Assignats_,” of
- Bonds secured, or _assigned_, on that Clerico-National Property,
- and unquestionable at least in payment of that,—is decreed: the
- first of a long series of like financial performances, which
- shall astonish mankind. So that now, while old rags last, there
- shall be no lack of circulating medium; whether of commodities to
- circulate thereon is another question. But, after all, does not
- this Assignat business speak volumes for modern science?
- Bankruptcy, we may say, was come, as the _end_ of all Delusions
- needs must come: yet how gently, in softening diffusion, in mild
- succession, was it hereby made to fall;—like no all-destroying
- avalanche; like gentle showers of a powdery impalpable snow,
- shower after shower, till all was indeed buried, and yet little
- was destroyed that could not be replaced, be dispensed with! To
- such length has modern machinery reached. Bankruptcy, we said,
- was great; but indeed Money itself is a standing miracle.
-
- On the whole, it is a matter of endless difficulty, that of the
- Clergy. Clerical property may be made the Nation’s, and the
- Clergy hired servants of the State; but if so, is it not an
- altered Church? Adjustment enough, of the most confused sort, has
- become unavoidable. Old landmarks, in any sense, avail not in a
- new France. Nay literally, the very Ground is new divided; your
- old party-coloured _Provinces_ become new uniform _Departments_,
- Eighty-three in number;—whereby, as in some sudden shifting of
- the Earth’s axis, no mortal knows his new latitude at once. The
- Twelve old Parlements too, what is to be done with them? The old
- Parlements are declared to be all “in permanent vacation,”—till
- once the new equal-justice, of Departmental Courts, National
- Appeal-Court, of elective Justices, Justices of Peace, and other
- Thouret-and-Duport apparatus be got ready. They have to sit
- there, these old Parlements, uneasily waiting; as it were, with
- the rope round their neck; crying as they can, _Is there none to
- deliver us?_ But happily the answer being, _None, none_, they are
- a manageable class, these Parlements. They can be bullied, even
- into silence; the Paris Parliament, wiser than most, has never
- whimpered. They will and must sit there; in such vacation as is
- fit; their Chamber of Vacation distributes in the interim what
- little justice is going. With the rope round their neck, their
- destiny may be succinct! On the 13th of November 1790, Mayor
- Bailly shall walk to the Palais de Justice, few even heeding him;
- and with municipal seal-stamp and a little hot wax, seal up the
- Parlementary Paper-rooms,—and the dread Parlement of Paris pass
- away, into Chaos, gently as does a Dream! So shall the Parlements
- perish, succinctly; and innumerable eyes be dry.
-
- Not so the Clergy. For granting even that Religion were dead;
- that it had died, half-centuries ago, with unutterable Dubois; or
- emigrated lately, to Alsace, with Necklace-Cardinal Rohan; or
- that it now walked as goblin _revenant_ with Bishop Talleyrand of
- Autun; yet does not the Shadow of Religion, the Cant of Religion,
- still linger? The Clergy have means and material: means, of
- number, organization, social weight; a material, at lowest, of
- public ignorance, known to be the mother of devotion. Nay,
- withal, is it incredible that there might, in simple hearts,
- latent here and there like gold grains in the mud-beach, still
- dwell some real Faith in God, of so singular and tenacious a sort
- that even a Maury or a Talleyrand, could still be the symbol for
- it?—Enough, and Clergy has strength, the Clergy has craft and
- indignation. It is a most fatal business this of the Clergy. A
- weltering hydra-coil, which the National Assembly has stirred up
- about its ears; hissing, stinging; which cannot be appeased,
- alive; which cannot be trampled dead! Fatal, from first to last!
- Scarcely after fifteen months’ debating, can a _Civil
- Constitution of the Clergy_ be so much as got to paper; and then
- for getting it into reality? Alas, such Civil Constitution is but
- an agreement to disagree. It divides France from end to end, with
- a new split, infinitely complicating all the other
- splits;—Catholicism, what of it there is left, with the Cant of
- Catholicism, raging on the one side, and sceptic Heathenism on
- the other; both, by contradiction , waxing fanatic. What endless
- jarring, of Refractory hated Priests, and Constitutional despised
- ones; of tender consciences, like the King’s, and consciences
- hot-seared, like certain of his People’s: the whole to end in
- Feasts of Reason and a War of La Vendée! So deep-seated is
- Religion in the heart of man, and holds of all infinite passions.
- If the dead echo of it still did so much, what could not the
- living voice of it once do?
-
- Finance and Constitution, Law and Gospel: this surely were work
- enough; yet this is not all. In fact, the Ministry, and Necker
- himself whom a brass inscription “fastened by the people over his
- door-lintel” testifies to be the “_Ministre adoré_,” are
- dwindling into clearer and clearer nullity. Execution or
- legislation, arrangement or detail, from their nerveless fingers
- all drops undone; all lights at last on the toiled shoulders of
- an august Representative Body. Heavy-laden National Assembly! It
- has to hear of innumerable fresh revolts, Brigand expeditions; of
- Châteaus in the West, especially of Charter-chests, _Chartiers_,
- set on fire; for there too the overloaded Ass frightfully
- recalcitrates. Of Cities in the South full of heats and
- jealousies; which will end in crossed sabres, Marseilles against
- Toulon, and Carpentras beleaguered by Avignon;—such Royalist
- collision in a career of Freedom; nay Patriot collision, which a
- mere difference of _velocity_ will bring about! Of a Jourdan
- Coup-tete, who has skulked thitherward, from the claws of the
- Chatelet; and will raise whole scoundrel-regiments.
-
- Also it has to hear of Royalist _Camp of Jalès:_ Jalès
- mountain-girdled Plain, amid the rocks of the Cevennes; whence
- Royalism, as is feared and hoped, may dash down like a mountain
- deluge, and submerge France! A singular thing this camp of Jalès;
- existing mostly on paper. For the Soldiers at Jalès, being
- peasants or National Guards, were in heart sworn Sansculottes;
- and all that the Royalist Captains could do was, with false
- words, to keep them, or rather keep the report of them, drawn up
- there, visible to all imaginations, for a terror and a sign,—if
- peradventure France might be reconquered by theatrical machinery,
- by the _picture_ of a Royalist Army done to the life![265] Not
- till the third summer was this portent, burning out by fits and
- then fading, got finally extinguished; was the old Castle of
- Jalès, no Camp being visible to the bodily eye, got blown asunder
- by some National Guards.
-
- Also it has to hear not only of Brissot and his _Friends of the
- Blacks_, but by and by of a whole St. Domingo blazing skyward;
- blazing in literal fire, and in far worse metaphorical; beaconing
- the nightly main. Also of the shipping interest, and the
- landed-interest, and all manner of interests, reduced to
- distress. Of Industry every where manacled, bewildered; and only
- Rebellion thriving. Of sub-officers, soldiers and sailors in
- mutiny by land and water. Of soldiers, at Nanci, as we shall see,
- needing to be cannonaded by a brave Bouillé. Of sailors, nay the
- very galley-slaves, at Brest, needing also to be cannonaded; but
- with no Bouillé to do it. For indeed, to say it in a word, in
- those days there was _no King_ in Israel, and every man did that
- which was right in his own eyes.[266]
-
- Such things has an august National Assembly to hear of, as it
- goes on regenerating France. Sad and stern: but what remedy? Get
- the Constitution ready; and all men will swear to it: for do not
- “Addresses of adhesion” arrive by the cartload? In this manner,
- by Heaven’s blessing, and a Constitution got ready, shall the
- bottomless fire-gulf be vaulted in, with rag-paper; and Order
- will wed Freedom, and live with her there,—till it grow too hot
- for them. _O Côté Gauche_, worthy are ye, as the adhesive
- Addresses generally say, to “fix the regards of the Universe;”
- the regards of this one poor Planet, at lowest!—
-
- Nay, it must be owned, the _Côté Droit_ makes a still madder
- figure. An irrational generation; irrational, imbecile, and with
- the vehement obstinacy characteristic of that; a generation which
- will not learn. Falling Bastilles, Insurrections of Women,
- thousands of smoking Manorhouses, a country bristling with no
- crop but that of Sansculottic steel: these were tolerably
- didactic lessons; but them they have not taught. There are still
- men, of whom it was of old written, Bray them in a mortar! Or, in
- milder language, They have _wedded_ their delusions: fire nor
- steel, nor any sharpness of Experience, shall sever the bond;
- till death do us part! Of such may the Heavens have mercy; for
- the Earth, with her rigorous Necessity, will have none.
-
- Admit, at the same time, that it was most natural. Man lives by
- Hope: Pandora when her box of gods’-gifts flew all out, and
- became gods’-curses, still retained Hope. How shall an irrational
- mortal, when his high-place is never so evidently pulled down,
- and he, being irrational, is left resourceless,—part with the
- belief that it will be rebuilt? It would make all so straight
- again; it seems so unspeakably desirable; so reasonable,—would
- you but look at it aright! For, must not the thing which was
- continue to be; or else the solid World dissolve? Yes, persist, O
- infatuated Sansculottes of France! Revolt against constituted
- Authorities; hunt out your rightful Seigneurs, who at bottom so
- loved you, and readily shed their blood for you,—in country’s
- battles as at Rossbach and elsewhere; and, even in preserving
- game, were preserving _you_, could ye but have understood it:
- hunt them out, as if they were wild wolves; set fire to their
- Châteaus and Chartiers as to wolf-dens; and what then? Why, then
- turn every man his hand against his fellow! In confusion, famine,
- desolation, regret the days that are gone; rueful recall them,
- recall us with them. To repentant prayers we will not be deaf.
-
- So, with dimmer or clearer consciousness, must the Right Side
- reason and act. An inevitable position perhaps; but a most false
- one for them. Evil, be thou our good: this henceforth must
- virtually be their prayer. The fiercer the effervescence grows,
- the sooner will it pass; for after all it is but some mad
- effervescence; the World is solid, and cannot dissolve.
-
- For the rest, if they have any positive industry, it is that of
- plots, and backstairs conclaves. Plots which cannot be executed;
- which are mostly theoretic on their part;—for which nevertheless
- this and the other practical Sieur Augeard, Sieur Maillebois,
- Sieur Bonne Savardin, gets into trouble, gets imprisoned, and
- escapes with difficulty. Nay there is a poor practical Chevalier
- Favras who, not without some passing reflex on Monsieur himself,
- gets hanged for them, amid loud uproar of the world. Poor Favras,
- he keeps dictating his last will at the “Hôtel-de-Ville, through
- the whole remainder of the day,” a weary February day; offers to
- reveal secrets, if they will save him; handsomely declines since
- they will not; then dies, in the flare of torchlight, with
- politest composure; remarking, rather than exclaiming, with
- outspread hands: ‘People, I die innocent; pray for me.’[267] Poor
- Favras;—type of so much that has prowled indefatigable over
- France, in days now ending; and, in freer field, might have
- _earned_ instead of prowling,—to thee it is no theory!
-
- In the Senate-house again, the attitude of the Right Side is that
- of calm unbelief. Let an august National Assembly make a
- Fourth-of-August Abolition of Feudality; declare the Clergy
- State-servants who shall have wages; vote Suspensive Vetos, new
- Law-Courts; vote or decree what contested thing it will; have it
- responded to from the four corners of France, nay get King’s
- Sanction, and what other Acceptance were conceivable,—the Right
- Side, as we find, persists, with imperturbablest tenacity, in
- considering, and ever and anon shews that it still considers, all
- these so-called Decrees as mere temporary whims, which indeed
- stand on paper, but in practice and fact are not, and cannot be.
- Figure the brass head of an Abbé Maury flooding forth Jesuitic
- eloquence in this strain; dusky d’Espréménil, Barrel Mirabeau
- (probably in liquor), and enough of others, cheering him from the
- Right; and, for example, with what visage a seagreen Robespierre
- eyes him from the Left. And how Sieyes ineffably sniffs on him,
- or does not deign to sniff; and how the Galleries groan in
- spirit, or bark rabid on him: so that to escape the Lanterne, on
- stepping forth, he needs presence of mind, and a pair of pistols
- in his girdle! For he is one of the toughest of men.
-
- Here indeed becomes notable one great difference between our two
- kinds of civil war; between the modern _lingual_ or
- Parliamentary-logical kind, and the ancient, or _manual_ kind, in
- the steel battle-field;—much to the disadvantage of the former.
- In the manual kind, where you front your foe with drawn weapon,
- one right stroke is final; for, physically speaking, when the
- brains are out the man does honestly die, and trouble you no
- more. But how different when it is with arguments you fight! Here
- no victory yet definable can be considered as final. Beat him
- down, with Parliamentary invective, till sense be fled; cut him
- in two, hanging one half in this dilemma-horn, the other on that;
- blow the brains or thinking-faculty quite out of him for the
- time: it skills not; he rallies and revives on the morrow;
- tomorrow he repairs his golden fires! The think that _will_
- logically extinguish him is perhaps still a desideratum in
- Constitutional civilisation. For how, till a man know, in some
- measure, at what point he becomes logically defunct, can
- Parliamentary Business be carried on, and Talk cease or slake?
-
- Doubtless it was some feeling of this difficulty; and the clear
- insight how little such knowledge yet existed in the French
- Nation, new in the Constitutional career, and how defunct
- Aristocrats would continue to walk for unlimited periods, as
- Partridge the Alamanack-maker did,—that had sunk into the deep
- mind of People’s-friend Marat, an eminently practical mind; and
- had grown there, in that richest putrescent soil, into the most
- original plan of action ever submitted to a People. Not yet has
- it grown; but it has germinated, it is growing; rooting itself
- into Tartarus, branching towards Heaven: the second season hence,
- we shall see it risen out of the bottomless Darkness, full-grown,
- into disastrous Twilight,—a Hemlock-tree, great as the world; on
- or under whose boughs all the People’s-friends of the world may
- lodge. “Two hundred and sixty thousand Aristocrat heads:” that is
- the precisest calculation, though one would not stand on a few
- hundreds; yet we never rise as high as the round three hundred
- thousand. Shudder at it, O People; but it is as true as that ye
- yourselves, and your People’s-friend, are alive. These prating
- Senators of yours hover ineffectual on the barren letter, and
- will never save the Revolution. A Cassandra-Marat cannot do it,
- with his single shrunk arm; but with a few determined men it were
- possible. ‘Give me,’ said the People’s-friend, in his cold way,
- when young Barbaroux, once his pupil in a course of what was
- called Optics, went to see him, ‘Give me two hundred Naples
- Bravoes, armed each with a good dirk, and a muff on his left arm
- by way of shield: with them I will traverse France, and
- accomplish the Revolution.’[268] Nay, be brave, young Barbaroux;
- for thou seest, there is no jesting in those rheumy eyes; in that
- soot-bleared figure, most earnest of created things; neither
- indeed is there madness, of the strait-waistcoat sort.
-
- Such produce shall the Time ripen in cavernous Marat, the man
- forbid; living in Paris cellars, lone as fanatic Anchorite in his
- Thebaid; say, as far-seen Simon on his Pillar,—taking peculiar
- views therefrom. Patriots may smile; and, using him as bandog now
- to be muzzled, now to be let bark, name him, as Desmoulins does,
- “Maximum of Patriotism” and “Cassandra-Marat:” but were it not
- singular if this dirk-and-muff plan of his (with superficial
- modifications) proved to be precisely the plan adopted?
-
- After this manner, in these circumstances, do august Senators
- regenerate France. Nay, they are, in very deed, _believed_ to be
- regenerating it; on account of which great fact, main fact of
- their history, the wearied eye can never be permitted wholly to
- ignore them.
-
- But, looking away now from these precincts of the Tuileries,
- where Constitutional Royalty, let Lafayette water it as he will,
- languishes too like a cut branch; and august Senators are perhaps
- at bottom only perfecting their “theory of defective verbs,”—how
- does the young Reality, young Sansculottism thrive? The attentive
- observer can answer: It thrives bravely; putting forth new buds;
- expanding the old buds into leaves, into boughs. Is not French
- Existence, as before, most prurient, all _loosened_, most
- nutrient for it? Sansculottism has the property of growing by
- what other things die of: by agitation, contention,
- disarrangement; nay in a word, by what is the symbol and fruit of
- all these: Hunger.
-
- In such a France as this, Hunger, as we have remarked, can hardly
- fail. The Provinces, the Southern Cities feel it in their turn;
- and what it brings: Exasperation, preternatural Suspicion. In
- Paris some halcyon days of abundance followed the Menadic
- Insurrection, with its Versailles grain-carts, and recovered
- Restorer of Liberty; but they could not continue. The month is
- still October when famishing Saint-Antoine, in a moment of
- passion, seizes a poor Baker, innocent “François the Baker;”[269]
- and hangs him, in Constantinople wise;—but even this, singular as
- it my seem, does not cheapen bread! Too clear it is, no Royal
- bounty, no Municipal dexterity can adequately feed a
- Bastille-destroying Paris. Wherefore, on view of the hanged
- Baker, Constitutionalism in sorrow and anger demands “_Loi
- Martiale_,” a kind of Riot Act;—and indeed gets it, most readily,
- almost before the sun goes down.
-
- This is that famed _Martial law_, with its Red Flag, its
- “_Drapeau Rouge:_” in virtue of which Mayor Bailly, or any Mayor,
- has but henceforth to hang out that new _Oriflamme_ of his; then
- to read or mumble something about the King’s peace; and, after
- certain pauses, serve any undispersing Assemblage with
- musket-shot, or whatever shot will disperse it. A decisive Law;
- and most just on one proviso: that all Patrollotism be of God,
- and all mob-assembling be of the Devil;—otherwise not so just.
- Mayor Bailly be unwilling to use it! Hang not out that new
- Oriflamme, _flame_ not _of gold_ but of the want of gold! The
- thrice-blessed Revolution is _done_, thou thinkest? If so it will
- be well with thee.
-
- But now let no mortal say henceforth that an august National
- Assembly wants riot: all it ever wanted was riot enough to
- balance Court-plotting; all it now wants, of Heaven or of Earth,
- is to get its theory of defective verbs perfected.
-
-
- Chapter 2.1.III.
- The Muster.
-
- With famine and a Constitutional theory of defective verbs going
- on, all other excitement is conceivable. A universal shaking and
- sifting of French Existence this is: in the course of which, for
- one thing, what a multitude of low-lying figures are sifted to
- the top, and set busily to work there!
-
- Dogleech Marat, now for-seen as Simon Stylites, we already know;
- him and others, raised aloft. The mere sample, these, of what is
- coming, of what continues coming, upwards from the realm of
- Night!—Chaumette, by and by Anaxagoras Chaumette, one already
- descries: mellifluous in street-groups; not now a sea-boy on the
- high and giddy mast: a mellifluous tribune of the common people,
- with long curling locks, on _bourne_stone of the thoroughfares;
- able sub-editor too; who shall rise—to the very gallows. Clerk
- Tallien, he also is become sub-editor; shall become able editor;
- and more. Bibliopolic Momoro, Typographic Pruhomme see new trades
- opening. Collot d’Herbois, tearing a passion to rags, pauses on
- the Thespian boards; listens, with that black bushy head, to the
- sound of the world’s drama: shall the Mimetic become Real? Did ye
- hiss him, O men of Lyons?[270] Better had ye clapped!
-
- Happy now, indeed, for all manner of _mimetic_, half-original
- men! Tumid blustering, with more or less of sincerity, which need
- not be entirely sincere, yet the sincerer the better, is like to
- go far. Shall we say, the Revolution-element works itself rarer
- and rarer; so that only lighter and lighter bodies will float in
- it; till at last the mere blown-bladder is your only swimmer?
- Limitation of mind, then vehemence, promptitude, audacity, shall
- all be available; to which add only these two: cunning and good
- lungs. Good fortune must be presupposed. Accordingly, of all
- classes the rising one, we observe, is now the Attorney class:
- witness Bazires, Carriers, Fouquier-Tinvilles, Bazoche-Captain
- Bourdons: more than enough. Such figures shall Night, from her
- wonder-bearing bosom, emit; swarm after swarm. Of another deeper
- and deepest swarm, not yet dawned on the astonished eye; of
- pilfering Candle-snuffers, Thief-valets, disfrocked Capuchins,
- and so many Héberts, Henriots, Ronsins, Rossignols, let us, as
- long as possible, forbear speaking.
-
- Thus, over France, all stirs that has what the Physiologists call
- _irritability_ in it: how much more all wherein irritability has
- perfected itself into vitality; into actual vision, and force
- that can will! All stirs; and if not in Paris, flocks thither.
- Great and greater waxes President Danton in his Cordeliers
- Section; his rhetorical tropes are all “gigantic:” energy flashes
- from his black brows, menaces in his athletic figure, rolls in
- the sound of his voice “reverberating from the domes;” this man
- also, like Mirabeau, has a natural _eye_, and begins to see
- whither Constitutionalism is tending, though with a wish in it
- different from Mirabeau’s.
-
- Remark, on the other hand, how General Dumouriez has quitted
- Normandy and the Cherbourg Breakwater, to come—whither we may
- guess. It is his second or even third trial at Paris, since this
- New Era began; but now it is in right earnest, for he has quitted
- all else. Wiry, elastic unwearied man; whose life was but a
- battle and a march! No, _not_ a creature of Choiseul’s; ‘the
- creature of God and of my sword,’—he fiercely answered in old
- days. Overfalling Corsican batteries, in the deadly fire-hail;
- wriggling invincible from under his horse, at Closterkamp of the
- Netherlands, though tethered with “crushed stirrup-iron and
- nineteen wounds;” tough, minatory, standing at bay, as forlorn
- hope, on the skirts of Poland; intriguing, battling in cabinet
- and field; roaming far out, obscure, as King’s spial, or sitting
- sealed up, enchanted in Bastille; fencing, pamphleteering,
- scheming and struggling from the very birth of him,[271]—the man
- has come thus far. How repressed, how irrepressible! Like some
- incarnate spirit in prison, which indeed he _was;_ hewing on
- granite walls for deliverance; striking fire flashes from them.
- And now has the general earthquake rent his cavern too? Twenty
- years younger, what might he not have done! But his hair has a
- shade of gray: his way of thought is all fixed, military. He can
- _grow_ no further, and the new world is in such growth. We will
- name him, on the whole, one of Heaven’s Swiss; without faith;
- wanting above all things work, work on _any_ side. Work also is
- appointed him; and he will do it.
-
- Not from over France only are the unrestful flocking towards
- Paris; but from all sides of Europe. Where the carcase is,
- thither will the eagles gather. Think how many a Spanish Guzman,
- Martinico Fournier named “Fournier _l’Américain_,” Engineer
- Miranda from the very Andes, were flocking or had flocked!
- Walloon Pereyra might boast of the strangest parentage: him, they
- say, Prince Kaunitz the Diplomatist heedlessly dropped;” like
- ostrich-egg, to be hatched of Chance—into an ostrich-_eater!_
- Jewish or German Freys do business in the great Cesspool of
- _Agio;_ which Cesspool this _Assignat_-fiat has quickened, into a
- Mother of dead dogs. Swiss Clavière could found no Socinian
- Genevese Colony in Ireland; but he paused, years ago, prophetic
- before the Minister’s Hôtel at Paris; and said, it was borne on
- his mind that _he_ one day was to be Minister, and laughed.[272]
- Swiss Pachc, on the other hand, sits sleekheaded, frugal; the
- wonder of his own alley, and even of neighbouring ones, for
- humility of mind, and a thought deeper than most men’s: sit
- there, Tartuffe, till wanted! Ye Italian Dufournys, Flemish
- Prolys, flit hither all ye bipeds of prey! Come whosesoever head
- is hot; thou of mind _ungoverned_, be it chaos as of
- undevelopment or chaos as of ruin; the man who cannot get known,
- the man who is too well known; if thou have any vendible faculty,
- nay if thou have but edacity and loquacity, come! They come; with
- hot unutterabilities in their heart; as Pilgrims towards a
- miraculous shrine. Nay how many come as vacant Strollers,
- aimless, of whom Europe is full merely towards _something!_ For
- benighted fowls, when you beat their bushes, rush towards any
- light. Thus Frederick Baron Trenck too is here; mazed, purblind,
- from the cells of Magdeburg; Minotauric cells, and his Ariadne
- lost! Singular to say, Trenck, in these years, sells wine; not
- indeed in bottle, but in wood.
-
- Nor is our England without her missionaries. She has her
- live-saving Needham;[273] to whom was solemnly presented a “civic
- sword,”—long since rusted into nothingness. Her Paine: rebellious
- Staymaker; unkempt; who feels that he, a single Needleman, did by
- his “_Common-Sense_” Pamphlet, free America;—that he can and will
- free all this World; perhaps even the other. Price-Stanhope
- Constitutional Association sends over to congratulate;[274]
- welcomed by National Assembly, though they are but a London Club;
- whom Burke and Toryism eye askance.
-
- On thee too, for country’s sake, O Chevalier John Paul, be a word
- spent, or misspent! In faded naval uniform, Paul Jones lingers
- visible here; like a wine-skin from which the wine is all drawn.
- Like the ghost of himself! Low is his once loud bruit; scarcely
- audible, save, with extreme tedium in ministerial ante-chambers;
- in this or the other charitable dining-room, mindful of the past.
- What changes; culminatings and declinings! Not now, poor Paul,
- thou lookest wistful over the Solway brine, by the foot of native
- Criffel, into blue mountainous Cumberland, into blue Infinitude;
- environed with thrift, with humble friendliness; thyself, young
- fool, longing to be aloft from it, or even to be away from it.
- Yes, beyond that sapphire Promontory, which men name St. Bees,
- which is not sapphire either, but dull sandstone, when one gets
- _close_ to it, there is a world. Which world thou too shalt taste
- of!—From yonder White Haven rise his smoke-clouds; ominous though
- ineffectual. Proud Forth quakes at his bellying sails; had not
- the wind suddenly shifted. Flamborough reapers, homegoing, pause
- on the hill-side: for what sulphur-cloud is that that defaces the
- sleek sea; sulphur-cloud spitting streaks of fire? A sea
- cockfight it is, and of the hottest; where British _Serapis_ and
- French-American _Bon Homme Richard_ do lash and throttle each
- other, in their fashion; and lo the desperate valour has
- suffocated the deliberate, and Paul Jones too is of the Kings of
- the Sea!
-
- The Euxine, the Méotian waters felt thee next, and long-skirted
- Turks, O Paul; and thy fiery soul has wasted itself in thousand
- contradictions;—to no purpose. For, in far lands, with scarlet
- Nassau-Siegens, with sinful Imperial Catherines, is not the
- heart-broken, even as at home with the mean? Poor Paul! hunger
- and dispiritment track thy sinking footsteps: once or at most
- twice, in this Revolution-tumult the figure of thee emerges;
- mute, ghost-like, as “with stars dim-twinkling through.” And
- then, when the light is gone quite out, a National Legislature
- grants “ceremonial funeral!” As good had been the natural
- Presbyterian Kirk-bell, and six feet of Scottish earth, among the
- dust of thy loved ones.—_Such_ world lay beyond the Promontory of
- St. Bees. Such is the life of sinful mankind here below.
-
- But of all strangers, far the notablest for us is Baron Jean
- Baptiste de Clootz;—or, dropping baptisms and feudalisms,
- World-Citizen Anacharsis Clootz, from Cleves. Him mark, judicious
- Reader. Thou hast known his Uncle, sharp-sighted thorough-going
- Cornelius de Pauw, who mercilessly cuts down cherished illusions;
- and of the finest antique Spartans, will make mere modern
- cutthroat Mainots.[275] The like stuff is in Anacharsis: hot
- metal; full of scoriae, which should and could have been smelted
- out, but which will not. He has wandered over this terraqueous
- Planet; seeking, one may say, the Paradise we lost long ago. He
- has seen English Burke; has been seen of the Portugal
- Inquisition; has roamed, and fought, and written; is writing,
- among other things, “Evidences of the _Mahometan_ Religion.” But
- now, like his Scythian adoptive godfather, he finds himself in
- the Paris Athens; surely, at last, the haven of his soul. A
- dashing man, beloved at Patriotic dinner-tables; with gaiety, nay
- with humour; headlong, trenchant, of free purse; in suitable
- costume; though what mortal ever more despised costumes? Under
- all costumes Anacharsis seeks the man; not Stylites Marat will
- more freely trample costumes, if they hold no man. This is the
- faith of Anacharsis: That there is a Paradise discoverable; that
- all costumes ought to hold men. O Anacharsis, it is a headlong,
- swift-going faith. Mounted thereon, meseems, thou art bound
- hastily for the City of _Nowhere;_ and wilt _arrive!_ At best, we
- may say, arrive _in good riding attitude;_ which indeed is
- something.
-
- So many new persons, and new things, have come to occupy this
- France. Her old Speech and Thought, and Activity which springs
- from those, are all changing; fermenting towards unknown issues.
- To the dullest peasant, as he sits sluggish, overtoiled, by his
- evening hearth, one idea has come: that of Châteaus burnt; of
- Châteaus combustible. How altered all Coffeehouses, in Province
- or Capital! The _Antre de Procope_ has now other questions than
- the Three Stagyrite Unities to settle; not theatre-controversies,
- but a world-controversy: there, in the ancient pigtail mode, or
- with modern Brutus’ heads, do well-frizzed logicians hold hubbub,
- and Chaos umpire sits. The ever-enduring Melody of Paris Saloons
- has got a new ground-tone: ever-enduring; which has been heard,
- and by the listening Heaven too, since Julian the Apostate’s time
- and earlier; mad now as formerly.
-
- Ex-Censor Suard, _Ex_-Censor, for we have freedom of the Press;
- he may be seen there; impartial, even neutral. Tyrant Grimm rolls
- large eyes, over a questionable coming Time. Atheist Naigeon,
- beloved disciple of Diderot, crows, in his small difficult way,
- heralding glad dawn.[276] But, on the other hand, how many
- Morellets, Marmontels, who had sat all their life hatching
- Philosophe eggs, cackle now, in a state bordering on distraction,
- at the brood they have brought out![277] It was so delightful to
- have one’s Philosophe Theorem demonstrated, crowned in the
- saloons: and now an infatuated people will not continue
- speculative, but have Practice?
-
- There also observe Preceptress Genlis, or Sillery, or
- Sillery-Genlis,—for our husband is both Count and Marquis, and we
- have more than one title. Pretentious, frothy; a puritan yet
- creedless; darkening counsel by words without wisdom! For, it is
- in that thin element of the Sentimentalist and
- Distinguished-Female that Sillery-Genlis works; she would gladly
- be sincere, yet can grow no sincerer than sincere-cant:
- sincere-cant of many forms, ending in the devotional form. For
- the present, on a neck still of moderate whiteness, she wears as
- jewel a miniature Bastille, cut on mere sandstone, but then
- actual Bastille sandstone. M. le Marquis is one of d’Orléans’s
- errandmen; in National Assembly, and elsewhere. Madame, for her
- part, trains up a youthful d’Orléans generation in what
- superfinest morality one can; gives meanwhile rather enigmatic
- account of fair Mademoiselle Pamela, the Daughter whom she has
- _adopted_. Thus she, in Palais Royal saloon;—whither, we remark,
- d’Orléans himself, spite of Lafayette, has returned from that
- English “mission” of his: surely no pleasant mission: for the
- English would not speak to him; and Saint Hannah More of England,
- so unlike Saint Sillery-Genlis of France, saw him shunned, in
- Vauxhall Gardens, like one pest-struck,[278] and his red-blue
- impassive visage waxing hardly a shade bluer.
-
-
- Chapter 2.1.IV.
- Journalism.
-
- As for Constitutionalism, with its National Guards, it is doing
- what it can; and has enough to do: it must, as ever, with one
- hand wave persuasively, repressing Patriotism; and keep the other
- clenched to menace Royalty plotters. A most delicate task;
- requiring tact.
-
- Thus, if People’s-friend Marat has today his writ of “_prise de
- corps_, or seizure of body,” served on him, and dives out of
- sight, tomorrow he is left at large; or is even encouraged, as a
- sort of bandog whose baying may be useful. President Danton, in
- open Hall, with reverberating voice, declares that, in a case
- like Marat’s, ‘force may be resisted by force.’ Whereupon the
- Chatelet serves Danton also with a writ;—which, however, as the
- whole Cordeliers District responds to it, what Constable will be
- prompt to execute? Twice more, on new occasions, does the
- Chatelet launch its writ; and twice more in vain: the body of
- Danton cannot be seized by Châtelet; he unseized, should he even
- fly for a season, shall behold the Châtelet itself flung into
- limbo.
-
- Municipality and Brissot, meanwhile, are far on with their
- Municipal Constitution. The Sixty _Districts_ shall become
- Forty-eight _Sections;_ much shall be adjusted, and Paris have
- its Constitution. A Constitution wholly Elective; as indeed all
- French Government shall and must be. And yet, one fatal element
- has been introduced: that of _citoyen actif_. No man who does not
- pay the _marc d’argent_, or yearly tax equal to three days’
- labour, shall be other than a _passive_ citizen: not the
- slightest vote for him; were he _acting_, all the year round,
- with sledge hammer, with forest-levelling axe! Unheard of! cry
- Patriot Journals. Yes truly, my Patriot Friends, if Liberty, the
- passion and prayer of all men’s souls, means Liberty to send your
- fifty-thousandth part of a new Tongue-fencer into National
- Debating-club, then, be the gods witness, ye are hardly
- entreated. Oh, if in National _Palaver_ (as the Africans name
- it), such blessedness is verily found, what tyrant would deny it
- to Son of Adam! Nay, might there not be a Female Parliament too,
- with “screams from the Opposition benches,” and “the honourable
- Member borne out in hysterics?” To a Children’s Parliament would
- I gladly consent; or even lower if ye wished it. Beloved
- Brothers! Liberty, one might fear, is actually, as the ancient
- wise men said, of Heaven. On this Earth, where, thinks the
- enlightened public, did a brave little Dame de Staal (not
- Necker’s Daughter, but a far shrewder than she) find the nearest
- approach to Liberty? After mature computation, cool as
- Dilworth’s, her answer is, _In the Bastille._[279] ‘Of Heaven?’
- answer many, asking. Wo that they should _ask;_ for that is the
- very misery! ‘Of Heaven’ means much; share in the National
- Palaver it may, or may as probably _not_ mean.
-
- One Sansculottic bough that cannot fail to flourish is
- Journalism. The voice of the People _being_ the voice of God,
- shall not such divine voice make itself heard? To the ends of
- France; and in as many dialects as when the _first_ great Babel
- was to be built! Some loud as the lion; some small as the sucking
- dove. Mirabeau himself has his instructive Journal or Journals,
- with Geneva hodmen working in them; and withal has quarrels
- enough with Dame le Jay, his Female Bookseller, so
- ultra-compliant otherwise.[280]
-
- _King’s-friend_ Royou still prints himself. Barrère sheds tears
- of loyal sensibility in _Break of Day_ Journal, though with
- declining sale. But why is Fréron so hot, democratic; Fréron, the
- King’s-friend’s Nephew? He has it by kind, that heat of his:
- _wasp_ Fréron begot him; Voltaire’s _Frélon;_ who fought
- stinging, while sting and poison-bag were left, were it only as
- Reviewer, and over Printed Waste-paper. Constant, illuminative,
- as the nightly lamplighter, issues the useful _Moniteur_, for it
- is now become diurnal: with facts and few commentaries; official,
- safe in the middle:—its able Editors sunk long since, recoverably
- or irrecoverably, in deep darkness. Acid Loustalot, with his
- “vigour,” as of young sloes, shall never ripen, but die untimely:
- his Prudhomme, however, will not let that _Révolutions de Paris_
- die; but edit it himself, with much else,—dull-blustering Printer
- though he be.
-
- Of Cassandra-Marat we have spoken often; yet the most surprising
- truth remains to be spoken: that he actually does not want sense;
- but, with croaking gelid throat, croaks out masses of the truth,
- on several things. Nay sometimes, one might almost fancy he had a
- perception of humour, and were laughing a little, far down in his
- inner man. Camille is wittier than ever, and more outspoken,
- cynical; yet sunny as ever. A light melodious creature; “born,”
- as he shall yet say with bitter tears, “to write verses;” light
- Apollo, so clear, soft-lucent, in this war of the Titans, wherein
- he shall not conquer!
-
- Folded and hawked Newspapers exist in all countries; but, in such
- a Journalistic element as this of France, other and stranger
- sorts are to be anticipated. What says the English reader to a
- _Journal-Affiche_, Placard Journal; legible to him that has no
- halfpenny; in bright prismatic colours, calling the eye from
- afar? Such, in the coming months, as Patriot Associations, public
- and private, advance, and can subscribe funds, shall plenteously
- hang themselves out: _leaves_, limed leaves, to catch what they
- can! The very Government shall have its Pasted Journal; Louvet,
- busy yet with a new “charming romance,” shall write
- _Sentinelles_, and post them with effect; nay Bertrand de
- Moleville, in his extremity, shall still more cunningly try
- it.[281] Great is Journalism. Is not every Able Editor a Ruler of
- the World, being a persuader of it; though self-elected, yet
- sanctioned, by the sale of his Numbers? Whom indeed the world has
- the readiest method of deposing, should need be: that of merely
- doing _nothing_ to him; which ends in starvation!
-
- Nor esteem it small what those Bill-stickers had to do in Paris:
- above Three Score of them: all with their crosspoles, haversacks,
- pastepots; nay with leaden badges, for the Municipality licenses
- them. A Sacred College, properly of World-rulers’ Heralds, though
- not respected as such, in an Era still incipient and raw. They
- made the walls of Paris didactic, suasive, with an ever fresh
- Periodical Literature, wherein he that ran might read: Placard
- Journals, Placard Lampoons, Municipal Ordinances, Royal
- Proclamations; the whole other or vulgar Placard-department
- super-added,—or omitted from contempt! What unutterable things
- the stone-walls spoke, during these five years! But it is all
- gone; Today swallowing Yesterday, and then being in its turn
- swallowed of Tomorrow, even as Speech ever is. Nay what, O thou
- immortal Man of Letters, is Writing itself but Speech conserved
- for a time? The Placard Journal conserved it for one day; some
- Books conserve it for the matter of ten years; nay some for three
- thousand: but what then? Why, _then_, the years being all run, it
- also dies, and the world is rid of it. Oh, were there not a
- spirit in the word of man, as in man himself, that survived the
- audible bodied word, and tended either Godward, or else Devilward
- for evermore, why should he trouble himself much with the truth
- of it, or the falsehood of it, except for commercial purposes?
- His immortality indeed, and whether it shall last half a
- lifetime, or a lifetime and half; is not that a very considerable
- thing? As mortality, was to the runaway, whom Great Fritz bullied
- back into the battle with a: ‘_R—, wollt ihr ewig leben_,
- Unprintable Off-scouring of Scoundrels, would ye live for ever!’
-
- This is the Communication of Thought: how happy when there is any
- Thought to communicate! Neither let the simpler old methods be
- neglected, in their sphere. The Palais-Royal Tent, a tyrannous
- Patrollotism has removed; but can it remove the lungs of man?
- Anaxagoras Chaumette we saw mounted on bourne-stones, while
- Tallien worked sedentary at the subeditorial desk. In any corner
- of the civilised world, a tub can be inverted, and an
- articulate-speaking biped mount thereon. Nay, with contrivance, a
- portable trestle, or folding-stool, can be procured, for love or
- money; this the peripatetic Orator can take in his hand, and,
- driven out here, set it up again there; saying mildly, with a
- Sage Bias, _Omnia mea mecum porto._
-
- Such is Journalism, hawked, pasted, spoken. How changed since One
- old Métra walked this same Tuileries Garden, in gilt cocked hat,
- with Journal at his nose, or held loose-folded behind his back;
- and was a notability of Paris, “Métra the Newsman;”[282] and
- Louis himself was wont to say: _Qu’en dit Métra?_ Since the first
- Venetian News-sheet was sold for a _gazza_, or farthing, and
- named _Gazette!_ We live in a fertile world.
-
-
- Chapter 2.1.V.
- Clubbism.
-
- Where the heart is full, it seeks, for a thousand reasons, in a
- thousand ways, to impart itself. How sweet, indispensable, in
- such cases, is fellowship; soul mystically strengthening soul!
- The meditative Germans, some think, have been of opinion that
- Enthusiasm in the general means simply excessive
- Congregating—_Schwärmerey_, or _Swarming_. At any rate, do we not
- see glimmering half-red embers, if laid _together_, get into the
- brightest white glow?
-
- In such a France, gregarious Reunions will needs multiply,
- intensify; French Life will step out of doors, and, from
- domestic, become a public Club Life. Old Clubs, which already
- germinated, grow and flourish; new every where bud forth. It is
- the sure symptom of Social Unrest: in such way, most infallibly
- of all, does Social Unrest exhibit itself; find solacement, and
- also nutriment. In every French head there hangs now, whether for
- terror or for hope, some prophetic picture of a New France:
- prophecy which brings, nay which almost is, its own fulfilment;
- and in all ways, consciously and unconsciously, works towards
- that.
-
- Observe, moreover, how the Aggregative Principle, let it be but
- deep enough, goes on aggregating, and this even in a geometrical
- progression: how when the whole world, in such a plastic time, is
- forming itself into Clubs, some One Club, the strongest or
- luckiest, shall, by friendly attracting, by victorious
- compelling, grow ever stronger, till it become immeasurably
- strong; and all the others, with their strength, be either
- lovingly absorbed into it, or hostilely abolished by it! This if
- the Club-spirit is universal; if the time _is_ plastic. Plastic
- enough is the time, universal the Club-spirit: such an all
- absorbing, paramount One Club cannot be wanting.
-
- What a progress, since the first salient-point of the Breton
- Committee! It worked long in secret, not languidly; it has come
- with the National Assembly to Paris; calls itself _Club;_ calls
- itself in imitation, as is thought, of those generous
- Price-Stanhope English, _French Revolution Club;_ but soon, with
- more originality, _Club of Friends of the Constitution._ Moreover
- it has leased, for itself, at a fair rent, the Hall of the
- Jacobin’s Convent, one of our “superfluous edifices;” and does
- therefrom now, in these spring months, begin shining out on an
- admiring Paris. And so, by degrees, under the shorter popular
- title of _Jacobins’ Club_, it shall become memorable to all times
- and lands. Glance into the interior: strongly yet modestly
- benched and seated; as many as Thirteen Hundred chosen Patriots;
- Assembly Members not a few. Barnave, the two Lameths are seen
- there; occasionally Mirabeau, perpetually Robespierre; also the
- ferret-visage of Fouquier-Tinville with other attorneys;
- Anacharsis of Prussian Scythia, and miscellaneous
- Patriots,—though all is yet in the most perfectly clean-washed
- state; decent, nay dignified. President on platform, President’s
- bell are not wanting; oratorical Tribune high-raised; nor
- strangers’ galleries, wherein also sit women. Has any French
- Antiquarian Society preserved that written Lease of the Jacobins
- Convent Hall? Or was it, unluckier even than Magna Charta,
- _clipt_ by sacrilegious Tailors? Universal History is not
- indifferent to it.
-
- These Friends of the Constitution have met mainly, as their name
- may foreshadow, to look after Elections when an Election comes,
- and procure fit men; but likewise to consult generally that the
- Commonweal take no damage; one as yet sees not how. For indeed
- let two or three gather together any where, if it be not in
- Church, where all are bound to the _passive_ state; no mortal can
- say accurately, themselves as little as any, for _what_ they are
- gathered. How often has the broached barrel proved not to be for
- joy and heart effusion, but for duel and head-breakage; and the
- promised feast become a Feast of the Lapithae! This Jacobins
- Club, which at first shone resplendent, and was thought to be a
- new celestial Sun for enlightening the Nations, had, as things
- all have, to work through its appointed phases: it burned
- unfortunately more and more lurid, more sulphurous,
- distracted;—and swam at last, through the astonished Heaven, like
- a Tartarean Portent, and lurid-burning Prison of Spirits in Pain.
-
- Its style of eloquence? Rejoice, Reader, that thou knowest it
- not, that thou canst never perfectly know. The Jacobins published
- a Journal of Debates, where they that have the heart may examine:
- Impassioned, full-droning Patriotic-eloquence; implacable,
- unfertile—save for Destruction, which was indeed its work: most
- wearisome, though most deadly. Be thankful that Oblivion covers
- so much; that all carrion is by and by buried in the green
- Earth’s bosom, and even makes her grow the greener. The Jacobins
- are buried; but their work is not; it continues “making the tour
- of the world,” as it can. It might be seen lately, for instance,
- with bared bosom and death-defiant eye, as far on as Greek
- Missolonghi; and, strange enough, old slumbering Hellas was
- resuscitated, into _somnambulism_ which will become clear
- wakefulness, by a voice from the Rue St. Honoré! All dies, as we
- often say; except the spirit of man, of what man _does_. Thus has
- not the very House of the Jacobins vanished; scarcely lingering
- in a few old men’s memories? The St. Honoré Market has brushed it
- away, and now where dull-droning eloquence, like a Trump of Doom,
- once shook the world, there is pacific chaffering for poultry and
- greens. The sacred National Assembly Hall itself has become
- common ground; President’s platform permeable to wain and
- dustcart; for the Rue de Rivoli runs there. Verily, at Cockcrow
- (of this Cock or the other), _all_ Apparitions do melt and
- dissolve in space.
-
- The Paris _Jacobins_ became “the Mother-Society, _Société-Mère;_”
- and had as many as “three hundred” shrill-tongued daughters in
- “direct correspondence” with her. Of indirectly corresponding,
- what we may call grand-daughters and minute progeny, she counted
- “forty-four thousand!”—But for the present we note only two
- things: the first of them a mere anecdote. One night, a couple of
- brother Jacobins are doorkeepers; for the members take this post
- of duty and honour in rotation, and admit none that have not
- tickets: one doorkeeper was the worthy Sieur Laïs, a patriotic
- Opera-singer, stricken in years, whose windpipe is long since
- closed without result; the other, young, and named Louis
- Philippe, D’Orléans’s firstborn, has in this latter time, after
- unheard-of destinies, become Citizen-King, and struggles to rule
- for a season. All-flesh is grass; higher reedgrass or creeping
- herb.
-
- The second thing we have to note is historical: that the
- Mother-Society, even in this its effulgent period, cannot content
- all Patriots. Already it must throw off, so to speak, two
- dissatisfied swarms; a swarm to the right, a swarm to the left.
- One party, which thinks the Jacobins lukewarm, constitutes itself
- into _Club of the Cordeliers;_ a hotter Club: it is Danton’s
- element: with whom goes Desmoulins. The other party, again, which
- thinks the Jacobins scalding-hot, flies off to the right, and
- becomes “Club of 1789, Friends of the _Monarchic_ Constitution.”
- They are afterwards named “_Feuillans Club;_” their place of
- meeting being the Feuillans Convent. Lafayette is, or becomes,
- their chief-man; supported by the respectable Patriot everywhere,
- by the mass of Property and Intelligence,—with the most
- flourishing prospects. They, in these June days of 1790, do, in
- the Palais Royal, dine solemnly with open windows; to the cheers
- of the people; with toasts, with inspiriting songs,—with one song
- at least, among the feeblest ever sung.[283] They shall, in due
- time be hooted forth, over the borders, into Cimmerian Night.
-
- Another expressly Monarchic or Royalist Club, “_Club des
- Monarchiens_,” though a Club of ample funds, and all sitting in
- damask sofas, cannot realise the smallest momentary cheer;
- realises only scoffs and groans;—till, ere long, certain Patriots
- in disorderly sufficient number, proceed thither, for a night or
- for nights, and groan it out of pain. Vivacious alone shall the
- Mother-Society and her family be. The very Cordeliers may, as it
- were, return into her bosom, which will have grown warm enough.
-
- Fatal-looking! Are not such Societies an incipient New Order of
- Society itself? The Aggregative Principle anew at work in a
- Society grown obsolete, cracked asunder, dissolving into rubbish
- and primary atoms?
-
-
- Chapter 2.1.VI.
- Je le jure.
-
- With these signs of the times, is it not surprising that the
- dominant feeling all over France was still continually Hope? O
- blessed Hope, sole boon of man; whereby, on his strait prison
- walls, are painted beautiful far-stretching landscapes; and into
- the night of very Death is shed holiest dawn! Thou art to all an
- indefeasible possession in this God’s-world: to the wise a sacred
- Constantine’s-banner, written on the eternal skies; under which
- they _shall_ conquer, for the battle itself is victory: to the
- foolish some secular _mirage_, or shadow of still waters, painted
- on the parched Earth; whereby at least their dusty pilgrimage, if
- devious, becomes cheerfuller, becomes possible.
-
- In the death-tumults of a sinking Society, French Hope sees only
- the birth-struggles of a new unspeakably better Society; and
- sings, with full assurance of faith, her brisk Melody, which some
- inspired fiddler has in these very days composed for her,—the
- world-famous _Ça-ira_. Yes; “that will go:” and then there will
- _come—?_ All men hope: even Marat hopes—that Patriotism will take
- muff and dirk. King Louis is not without hope: in the chapter of
- chances; in a flight to some Bouillé; in getting popularized at
- Paris. But what a hoping People he had, judge by the fact, and
- series of facts, now to be noted.
-
- Poor Louis, meaning the best, with little insight and even less
- determination of his own, has to follow, in that dim wayfaring of
- his, such signal as may be given him; by backstairs Royalism, by
- official or backstairs Constitutionalism, whichever for the month
- may have convinced the royal mind. If flight to Bouillé, and
- (horrible to think!) a drawing of the civil sword do hang as
- theory, portentous in the background, much nearer is this fact of
- these Twelve Hundred Kings, who sit in the _Salle de Manége_.
- Kings uncontrollable by him, not yet irreverent to him. Could
- kind management of these but prosper, how much better were it
- than armed Emigrants, Turin-intrigues, and the help of Austria!
- Nay, are the _two_ hopes inconsistent? Rides in the suburbs, we
- have found, cost little; yet they always brought _vivats_.[284]
- Still cheaper is a soft word; such as has many times turned away
- wrath. In these rapid days, while France is all getting divided
- into Departments, Clergy about to be remodelled, Popular
- Societies rising, and Feudalism and so much ever is ready to be
- hurled into the melting-pot,—might one not try?
-
- On the 4th of February, accordingly, M. le Président reads to his
- National Assembly a short autograph, announcing that his Majesty
- will step over, quite in an unceremonious way, probably about
- noon. Think, therefore, Messieurs, what it may mean; especially,
- how ye will get the Hall decorated a little. The Secretaries’
- Bureau can be shifted down from the platform; on the President’s
- chair be slipped this cover of velvet, “of a violet colour
- sprigged with gold fleur-de-lys;”—for indeed M. le Président has
- had previous notice underhand, and taken counsel with Doctor
- Guillotin. Then some fraction of “velvet carpet,” of like texture
- and colour, cannot that be spread in front of the chair, where
- the Secretaries usually sit? So has judicious Guillotin advised:
- and the effect is found satisfactory. Moreover, as it is probable
- that his Majesty, in spite of the fleur-de-lys-velvet, will stand
- and not sit at all, the President himself, in the interim,
- presides standing. And so, while some honourable Member is
- discussing, say, the division of a Department, Ushers announce:
- ‘His Majesty!’ In person, with small suite, enter Majesty: the
- honourable Member stops short; the Assembly starts to its feet;
- the Twelve Hundred Kings “almost all,” and the Galleries no less,
- do welcome the Restorer of French Liberty with loyal shouts. His
- Majesty’s Speech, in diluted conventional phraseology, expresses
- this mainly: That he, most of all Frenchmen, rejoices to see
- France getting regenerated; is sure, at the same time, that they
- will deal gently with her in the process, and not regenerate her
- _roughly_. Such was his Majesty’s Speech: the feat he performed
- was coming to speak it, and going back again.
-
- Surely, except to a very hoping People, there was not much here
- to build upon. Yet what did they not build! The fact that the
- King has spoken, that he has voluntarily come to speak, how
- inexpressibly encouraging! Did not the glance of his royal
- countenance, like concentrated sunbeams, kindle all hearts in an
- august Assembly; nay thereby in an inflammable enthusiastic
- France? To move “Deputation of thanks” can be the happy lot of
- but one man; to go in such Deputation the lot of not many. The
- Deputed have gone, and returned with what highest-flown
- compliment they could; whom also the Queen met, Dauphin in hand.
- And still do not our hearts burn with insatiable gratitude; and
- to one other man a still higher blessedness suggests itself: To
- move that we all renew the National Oath.
-
- Happiest honourable Member, with his word so in season as word
- seldom was; magic Fugleman of a whole National Assembly, which
- sat there bursting to do somewhat; Fugleman of a whole onlooking
- France! The President swears; declares that every one shall
- swear, in distinct _je le jure_. Nay the very Gallery sends him
- down a written slip signed, with their Oath on it; and as the
- Assembly now casts an eye that way, the Gallery all stands up and
- swears again. And then out of doors, consider at the
- Hôtel-de-Ville how Bailly, the great Tennis-Court swearer, again
- swears, towards nightful, with all the Municipals, and Heads of
- Districts assembled there. And “M. Danton suggests that the
- public would like to partake:” whereupon Bailly, with escort of
- Twelve, steps forth to the great outer staircase; sways the
- ebullient multitude with stretched hand: takes their oath, with a
- thunder of “rolling drums,” with shouts that rend the welkin. And
- on all streets the glad people, with moisture and fire in their
- eyes, “spontaneously formed groups, and swore one
- another,”[285]—and the whole City was illuminated. This was the
- Fourth of February 1790: a day to be marked white in
- Constitutional annals.
-
- Nor is the illumination for a night only, but partially or
- totally it lasts a series of nights. For each District, the
- Electors of each District, will swear specially; and always as
- the District swears; it illuminates itself. Behold them, District
- after District, in some open square, where the Non-Electing
- People can all see and join: with their uplifted right hands, and
- _je le jure:_ with rolling drums, with embracings, and that
- infinite hurrah of the enfranchised,—which any tyrant that there
- may be can consider! Faithful to the King, to the Law, to the
- Constitution which the National Assembly _shall_ make.
-
- Fancy, for example, the Professors of Universities parading the
- streets with their young France, and swearing, in an enthusiastic
- manner, not without tumult. By a larger exercise of fancy, expand
- duly this little word: The like was repeated in every Town and
- District of France! Nay one Patriot Mother, in Lagnon of
- Brittany, assembles her ten children; and, with her own aged
- hand, swears them all herself, the highsouled venerable woman. Of
- all which, moreover, a National Assembly must be eloquently
- apprised. Such three weeks of swearing! Saw the sun ever such a
- swearing people? Have they been bit by a swearing tarantula? No:
- but they are men and Frenchmen; they have Hope; and, singular to
- say, they have Faith, were it only in the Gospel according to
- Jean Jacques. O my Brothers! would to Heaven it were even as ye
- think and have sworn! But there are Lovers’ Oaths, which, had
- they been true as love itself, _cannot_ be kept; not to speak of
- Dicers’ Oaths, also a known sort.
-
-
- Chapter 2.1.VII.
- Prodigies.
-
- To such length had the _Contrat Social_ brought it, in believing
- hearts. Man, as is well said, lives by faith; each generation has
- its own faith, more or less; and laughs at the faith of its
- predecessor,—most unwisely. Grant indeed that this faith in the
- Social Contract belongs to the stranger sorts; that an unborn
- generation may very wisely, if not laugh, yet stare at it, and
- piously consider. For, alas, what is _Contrat?_ If all men were
- such that a mere spoken or sworn Contract would bind them, all
- men were then true men, and Government a superfluity. Not what
- thou and I have promised to each other, but what the balance of
- our forces can make us perform to each other: that, in so sinful
- a world as ours, is the thing to be counted on. But above all, a
- People and a Sovereign promising to one another; as if a whole
- People, changing from generation to generation, nay from hour to
- hour, could ever by any method be made to _speak_ or promise; and
- to speak mere solecisms:‘We, be the Heavens witness, which
- Heavens however do no miracles now; we, ever-changing Millions,
- will _allow_ thee, changeful Unit, to _force_ us or govern us!’
- The world has perhaps seen few faiths comparable to that.
-
- So nevertheless had the world then construed the matter. Had they
- _not_ so construed it, how different had their hopes been, their
- attempts, their results! But so and not otherwise did the Upper
- Powers will it to be. Freedom by Social Contract: such was verily
- the Gospel of that Era. And all men had believed in it, as in a
- Heaven’s Glad-tidings men should; and with overflowing heart and
- uplifted voice clave to it, and stood fronting Time and Eternity
- on it. Nay smile not; or only with a smile sadder than tears!
- This too was a better faith than the one it had replaced: than
- faith merely in the Everlasting Nothing and man’s Digestive
- Power; lower than _which_ no faith can go.
-
- Not that such universally prevalent, universally jurant, feeling
- of Hope, could be a unanimous one. Far from that! The time was
- ominous: social dissolution near and certain; social renovation
- still a problem, difficult and distant even though sure. But if
- ominous to some clearest onlooker, whose faith stood not with one
- side or with the other, nor in the ever-vexed jarring of Greek
- with Greek at all,—how unspeakably ominous to dim Royalist
- participators; for whom Royalism was Mankind’s palladium; for
- whom, with the abolition of Most-Christian Kingship and
- Most-Talleyrand Bishopship, all loyal obedience, all religious
- faith was to expire, and final Night envelope the Destinies of
- Man! On serious hearts, of that persuasion, the matter sinks down
- deep; prompting, as we have seen, to backstairs Plots, to
- Emigration with pledge of war, to Monarchic Clubs; nay to still
- madder things.
-
- The Spirit of Prophecy, for instance, had been considered extinct
- for some centuries: nevertheless these last-times, as indeed is
- the tendency of last-times, do revive it; that so, of French mad
- things, we might have sample also of the maddest. In remote rural
- districts, whither Philosophism has not yet radiated, where a
- heterodox Constitution of the Clergy is bringing strife round the
- altar itself, and the very Church-bells are getting melted into
- small money-coin, it appears probable that the End of the World
- cannot be far off. Deep-musing atrabiliar old men, especially old
- women, hint in an obscure way that they know what they know. The
- Holy Virgin, silent so long, has not gone dumb;—and truly now, if
- ever more in this world, were the time for her to speak. One
- Prophetess, though careless Historians have omitted her name,
- condition, and whereabout, becomes audible to the general ear;
- credible to not a few: credible to Friar Gerle, poor Patriot
- Chartreux, in the National Assembly itself! She, in Pythoness’
- recitative, with wildstaring eye, sings that there shall be a
- Sign; that the heavenly Sun himself will hang out a Sign, or
- Mock-Sun,—which, many say, shall be stamped with the Head of
- hanged Favras. List, Dom Gerle, with that poor addled poll of
- thine; list, O list;—and hear nothing.[286]
-
- Notable however was that “magnetic vellum, _vélin magnétique_,”
- of the Sieurs d’Hozier and Petit-Jean, Parlementeers of Rouen.
- Sweet young d’Hozier, “bred in the faith of his Missal, and of
- parchment genealogies,” and of parchment generally: adust,
- melancholic, middle-aged Petit-Jean: why came these two to
- Saint-Cloud, where his Majesty was hunting, on the festival of
- St. Peter and St. Paul; and waited there, in antechambers, a
- wonder to whispering Swiss, the livelong day; and even waited
- without the Grates, when turned out; and had dismissed their
- valets to Paris, as with purpose of endless waiting? They have a
- _magnetic vellum_, these two; whereon the Virgin, wonderfully
- clothing herself in Mesmerean Cagliostric Occult-Philosophy, has
- inspired them to jot down instructions and predictions for a
- much-straitened King. To whom, by Higher Order, they will this
- day present it; and save the Monarchy and World. Unaccountable
- pair of visual-objects! Ye should be men, and of the Eighteenth
- Century; but your magnetic vellum forbids us so to interpret.
- Say, are ye aught? Thus ask the Guardhouse Captains, the Mayor of
- St. Cloud; nay, at great length, thus asks the Committee of
- Researches, and not the Municipal, but the National Assembly one.
- No distinct answer, for weeks. At last it becomes plain that the
- right answer is _negative_. Go, ye Chimeras, with your magnetic
- vellum; sweet young Chimera, adust middle-aged one! The
- Prison-doors are open. Hardly again shall ye preside the Rouen
- Chamber of Accounts; but vanish obscurely into Limbo.[287]
-
-
- Chapter 2.1.VIII.
- Solemn League and Covenant.
-
- Such dim masses, and specks of even deepest black, work in that
- white-hot glow of the French mind, now wholly in fusion, and
- _con_fusion. Old women here swearing their ten children on the
- new Evangel of Jean Jacques; old women there looking up for
- Favras’ Heads in the celestial Luminary: these _are_
- preternatural signs, prefiguring somewhat.
-
- In fact, to the Patriot children of Hope themselves, it is
- undeniable that difficulties exist: emigrating Seigneurs;
- Parlements in sneaking but most malicious mutiny (though the rope
- is round their neck); above all, the most decided “deficiency of
- grains.” Sorrowful: but, to a Nation that hopes, not
- irremediable. To a Nation which is in fusion and ardent communion
- of thought; which, for example, on signal of one Fugleman, will
- lift its right hand like a drilled regiment, and swear and
- illuminate, till every village from Ardennes to the Pyrenees has
- rolled its village-drum, and sent up its little oath, and glimmer
- of tallow-illumination some fathoms into the reign of Night!
-
- If grains are defective, the fault is not of Nature or National
- Assembly, but of Art and Antinational Intriguers. Such malign
- individuals, of the scoundrel species, have power to vex us,
- while the Constitution is a-making. Endure it, ye heroic
- Patriots: nay rather, why not cure it? Grains do grow, they lie
- extant there in sheaf or sack; only that regraters and Royalist
- plotters, to provoke the people into illegality, obstruct the
- transport of grains. Quick, ye organised Patriot Authorities,
- armed National Guards, meet together; unite your goodwill; in
- union is tenfold strength: let the concentred flash of your
- Patriotism strike stealthy Scoundrelism blind, paralytic, as with
- a _coup de soleil._
-
- Under which hat or nightcap of the Twenty-five millions, this
- pregnant Idea first rose, for in some one head it did rise, no
- man can now say. A most small idea, near at hand for the whole
- world: but a living one, fit; and which waxed, whether into
- greatness or not, into immeasurable size. When a Nation is in
- this state that the Fugleman can operate on it, what will the
- word in season, the act in season, not do! It will grow verily,
- like the Boy’s Bean in the Fairy-Tale, heaven-high, with
- habitations and adventures on it, in one night. It is
- nevertheless unfortunately still a Bean (for your long-lived Oak
- grows _not_ so); and, the next night, it may lie felled,
- horizontal, trodden into common mud.—But remark, at least, how
- natural to any agitated Nation, which has Faith, this business of
- Covenanting is. The Scotch, believing in a righteous Heaven above
- them, and also in a Gospel, far other than the Jean-Jacques one,
- swore, in their extreme need, a Solemn League and Covenant,—as
- Brothers on the forlorn-hope, and imminence of battle, who
- embrace looking Godward; and got the whole Isle to swear it; and
- even, in their tough Old-Saxon Hebrew-Presbyterian way, to keep
- it more or less;—for the thing, as such things are, was heard in
- Heaven, and partially ratified there; neither is it yet dead, if
- thou wilt look, nor like to die. The French too, with their
- Gallic-Ethnic excitability and effervescence, have, as we have
- seen, real Faith, of a sort; they are hard bestead, though in the
- middle of Hope: a National Solemn League and Covenant there may
- be in France too; under how different conditions; with how
- different developement and issue!
-
- Note, accordingly, the small commencement; first spark of a
- mighty firework: for if the particular _hat_ cannot be fixed
- upon, the particular District can. On the 29th day of last
- November, were National Guards by the thousand seen filing, from
- far and near, with military music, with Municipal officers in
- tricolor sashes, towards and along the Rhone-stream, to the
- little town of Etoile. There with ceremonial evolution and
- manœuvre, with fanfaronading, musketry-salvoes, and what else the
- Patriot genius could devise, they made oath and obtestation to
- stand faithfully by one another, under Law and King; in
- particular, to have all manner of grains, while grains there
- were, freely circulated, in spite both of robber and regrater.
- This was the meeting of Etoile, in the mild end of November 1789.
-
- But now, if a mere empty Review, followed by Review-dinner, ball,
- and such gesticulation and flirtation as there may be, interests
- the happy County-town, and makes it the envy of surrounding
- County-towns, how much more might this! In a fortnight, larger
- Montélimart, half ashamed of itself, will do as good, and better.
- On the Plain of Montélimart, or what is equally sonorous, “under
- the Walls of Montélimart,” the thirteenth of December sees new
- gathering and obtestation; six thousand strong; and now indeed,
- with these three remarkable improvements, as unanimously resolved
- on there. First that the men of Montélimart do federate with the
- already federated men of Etoile. Second, that, implying not
- expressing the circulation of grain, they “swear in the face of
- God and their Country” with much more emphasis and
- comprehensiveness, “to obey all decrees of the National Assembly,
- and see them obeyed, till death, _jusqu’à la mort_.” Third, and
- most important, that official record of all this be solemnly
- delivered in to the National Assembly, to M. de Lafayette, and
- “to the Restorer of French Liberty;” who shall all take what
- comfort from it they can. Thus does larger Montélimart vindicate
- its Patriot importance, and maintain its rank in the municipal
- scale.[288]
-
- And so, with the New-year, the signal is hoisted; for is not a
- National Assembly, and solemn deliverance there, at lowest a
- National Telegraph? Not only grain shall circulate, while there
- is grain, on highways or the Rhone-waters, over all that
- South-Eastern region,—where also if Monseigneur d’Artois saw good
- to break in from Turin, hot welcome might wait him; but
- whatsoever Province of France is straitened for grain, or vexed
- with a mutinous Parlement, unconstitutional plotters, Monarchic
- Clubs, or any other Patriot ailment,—can go and do likewise, or
- even do better. And now, especially, when the February swearing
- has set them all agog! From Brittany to Burgundy, on most plains
- of France, under most City-walls, it is a blaring of trumpets,
- waving of banners, a constitutional manœuvring: under the vernal
- skies, while Nature too is putting forth her green Hopes, under
- bright sunshine defaced by the stormful East; like Patriotism
- victorious, though with difficulty, over Aristocracy and defect
- of grain! There march and constitutionally wheel, to the
- _ça-ira_-ing mood of fife and drum, under their tricolor
- Municipals, our clear-gleaming Phalanxes; or halt, with uplifted
- right-hand, and artillery-salvoes that imitate Jove’s thunder;
- and all the Country, and metaphorically all “the Universe,” is
- looking on. Wholly, in their best apparel, brave men, and
- beautifully dizened women, most of whom have lovers there;
- swearing, by the eternal Heavens and this green-growing
- all-nutritive Earth, that France is free!
-
- Sweetest days, when (astonishing to say) mortals have actually
- met together in communion and fellowship; and man, were it only
- once through long despicable centuries, is for moments verily the
- brother of man!—And then the Deputations to the National
- Assembly, with highflown descriptive harangue; to M. de
- Lafayette, and the Restorer; very frequently moreover to the
- Mother of Patriotism sitting on her stout benches in that Hall of
- the Jacobins! The general ear is filled with Federation. New
- names of Patriots emerge, which shall one day become familiar:
- Boyer-Fonfrede eloquent denunciator of a rebellious Bourdeaux
- Parlement; Max Isnard eloquent reporter of the Federation of
- Draguignan; eloquent pair, separated by the whole breadth of
- France, who are nevertheless to meet. Ever wider burns the flame
- of Federation; ever wider and also brighter. Thus the Brittany
- and Anjou brethren mention a Fraternity of _all_ true Frenchmen;
- and go the length of invoking “perdition and death” on any
- renegade: moreover, if in their National-Assembly harangue, they
- glance plaintively at the _marc d’argent_ which makes so many
- citizens _passive_, they, over in the Mother-Society, ask, being
- henceforth themselves “neither Bretons nor Angevins but French,”
- Why all France has not one Federation, and universal Oath of
- Brotherhood, once for all?[289] A most pertinent suggestion;
- dating from the end of March. Which pertinent suggestion the
- whole Patriot world cannot but catch, and reverberate and agitate
- till it become _loud;_—which, in that case, the Townhall
- Municipals had better take up, and meditate.
-
- Some universal Federation seems inevitable: the Where is given;
- clearly Paris: only the When, the How? These also productive Time
- will give; is already giving. For always as the Federative work
- goes on, it perfects itself, and Patriot genius adds contribution
- after contribution. Thus, at Lyons, in the end of the May month,
- we behold as many as fifty, or some say sixty thousand, met to
- federate; and a multitude looking on, which it would be difficult
- to number. From dawn to dusk! For our Lyons Guardsmen took rank,
- at five in the bright dewy morning; came pouring in,
- bright-gleaming, to the Quai de Rhone, to march thence to the
- Federation-field; amid wavings of hats and lady-handkerchiefs;
- glad shoutings of some two hundred thousand Patriot voices and
- hearts; the beautiful and brave! Among whom, courting no notice,
- and yet the notablest of all, what queenlike Figure is this; with
- her escort of house-friends and Champagneux the Patriot Editor;
- come abroad with the earliest? Radiant with enthusiasm are those
- dark eyes, is that strong Minerva-face, looking dignity and
- earnest joy; joyfullest she where all are joyful. It is Roland de
- la Platrière’s Wife![290] Strict elderly Roland, King’s Inspector
- of Manufactures here; and now likewise, by popular choice, the
- strictest of our new Lyons Municipals: a man who has gained much,
- if worth and faculty be gain; but above all things, has gained to
- wife Phlipon the Paris Engraver’s daughter. Reader, mark that
- queenlike burgher-woman: beautiful, Amazonian-graceful to the
- eye; more so to the mind. Unconscious of her worth (as all worth
- is), of her greatness, of her crystal clearness; genuine, the
- creature of Sincerity and Nature, in an age of Artificiality,
- Pollution and Cant; there, in her still completeness, in her
- still invincibility, _she_, if thou knew it, is the noblest of
- all living Frenchwomen,—and will be seen, one day. O blessed
- rather while unseen, even of herself! For the present she gazes,
- nothing doubting, into this grand theatricality; and thinks her
- young dreams are to be fulfilled.
-
- From dawn to dusk, as we said, it lasts; and truly a sight like
- few. Flourishes of drums and trumpets are something: but think of
- an “artificial Rock fifty feet high,” all cut into crag-steps,
- not without the similitude of “shrubs!” The interior cavity, for
- in sooth it is made of deal,—stands solemn, a “Temple of
- Concord:” on the outer summit rises “a Statue of Liberty,”
- colossal, seen for miles, with her Pike and Phrygian Cap, and
- civic column; at her feet a Country’s Altar, “_Autel de la
- Patrie:_”—on all which neither deal-timber nor lath and plaster,
- with paint of various colours, have been spared. But fancy then
- the banners all placed on the steps of the Rock; high-mass
- chaunted; and the civic oath of fifty thousand: with what
- volcanic outburst of sound from iron and other throats, enough to
- frighten back the very Saone and Rhone; and how the brightest
- fireworks, and balls, and even repasts closed in that night of
- the gods![291] And so the Lyons Federation vanishes too,
- swallowed of darkness;—and yet not wholly, for our brave fair
- Roland was there; also she, though in the deepest privacy, writes
- her Narrative of it in Champagneux’s _Courier de Lyons;_ a piece
- which “circulates to the extent of sixty thousand;” which one
- would like now to read.
-
- But on the whole, Paris, we may see, will have little to devise;
- will only have to borrow and apply. And then as to the day, what
- day of all the calendar is fit, if the Bastille Anniversary be
- not? The particular spot too, it is easy to see, must be the
- Champ-de-Mars; where many a Julian the Apostate has been lifted
- on bucklers, to France’s or the world’s sovereignty; and iron
- Franks, loud-clanging, have responded to the voice of a
- Charlemagne; and from of old mere sublimities have been familiar.
-
-
- Chapter 2.1.IX.
- Symbolic.
-
- How natural, in all decisive circumstances, is Symbolic
- Representation to all kinds of men! Nay, what is man’s whole
- terrestrial Life but a Symbolic Representation, and making
- visible, of the Celestial invisible Force that is in him? By act
- and word he strives to do it; with sincerity, if possible;
- failing that, with theatricality, which latter also may have its
- meaning. An Almack’s Masquerade is not nothing; in more genial
- ages, your Christmas Guisings, Feasts of the Ass, Abbots of
- Unreason, were a considerable something: since sport they were;
- as Almacks may still be sincere wish for sport. But what, on the
- other hand, must not sincere earnest have been: say, a Hebrew
- Feast of Tabernacles have been! A whole Nation gathered, in the
- name of the Highest, under the eye of the Highest; imagination
- herself flagging under the reality; and all noblest Ceremony as
- yet not grown ceremonial, but solemn, significant to the outmost
- fringe! Neither, in modern private life, are theatrical scenes,
- of tearful women wetting whole ells of cambric in concert, of
- impassioned bushy-whiskered youth threatening suicide, and such
- like, to be so entirely detested: drop thou a tear over them
- thyself rather.
-
- At any rate, one can remark that no Nation will throw-by its
- work, and deliberately go out to make a scene, without meaning
- something thereby. For indeed no scenic individual, with knavish
- hypocritical views, will take the trouble to _soliloquise_ a
- scene: and now consider, is not a scenic Nation placed precisely
- in that predicament of soliloquising; for its own behoof alone;
- to solace its own sensibilities, maudlin or other?—Yet in this
- respect, of readiness for scenes, the difference of Nations, as
- of men, is very great. If our Saxon-Puritanic friends, for
- example, swore and signed their National Covenant, without
- discharge of gunpowder, or the beating of any drum, in a dingy
- Covenant-Close of the Edinburgh High-street, in a mean room,
- where men now drink mean liquor, it was consistent with their
- ways so to swear it. Our Gallic-Encyclopedic friends, again, must
- have a Champ-de-Mars, seen of all the world, or universe; and
- such a Scenic Exhibition, to which the Coliseum Amphitheatre was
- but a stroller’s barn, as this old Globe of ours had never or
- hardly ever beheld. Which method also we reckon natural, then and
- there. Nor perhaps was the respective _keeping_ of these two
- Oaths far out of due proportion to such respective display in
- taking them: inverse proportion, namely. For the theatricality of
- a People goes in a compound-ratio: ratio indeed of their
- trustfulness, sociability, fervency; but then also of their
- excitability, of their porosity, not _continent;_ or say, of
- their explosiveness, hot-flashing, but which does not last.
-
- How true also, once more, is it that no man or Nation of men,
- _conscious_ of doing a great thing, was ever, in that thing,
- doing other than a small one! O Champ-de-Mars Federation, with
- three hundred drummers, twelve hundred wind-musicians, and
- artillery planted on height after height to boom the tidings of
- it all over France, in few minutes! Could no Atheist-Naigeon
- contrive to discern, eighteen centuries off, those Thirteen most
- poor mean-dressed men, at frugal Supper, in a mean Jewish
- dwelling, with no symbol but hearts god-initiated into the
- “Divine depth of Sorrow,” and a _Do this in remembrance of
- me;_—and so cease that small difficult crowing of his, if he were
- not doomed to it?
-
-
- Chapter 2.1.X.
- Mankind.
-
- Pardonable are human theatricalities; nay perhaps touching, like
- the passionate utterance of a tongue which with sincerity
- _stammers;_ of a head which with insincerity _babbles_,—having
- gone distracted. Yet, in comparison with unpremeditated outbursts
- of Nature, such as an Insurrection of Women, how foisonless,
- unedifying, undelightful; like small ale palled, like an
- effervescence that has effervesced! Such scenes, coming of
- forethought, were they world-great, and never so cunningly
- devised, are at bottom mainly pasteboard and paint. But the
- others are original; emitted from the great everliving heart of
- Nature herself: what figure _they_ will assume is unspeakably
- significant. To us, therefore, let the French National Solemn
- League, and Federation, be the highest recorded triumph of the
- Thespian Art; triumphant surely, since the whole Pit, which was
- of Twenty-five Millions, not only claps hands, but does itself
- spring on the boards and passionately set to playing there. And
- being such, be it treated as such: with sincere cursory
- admiration; with wonder from afar. A whole Nation gone mumming
- deserves so much; but deserves not that loving minuteness a
- Menadic Insurrection did. Much more let prior, and as it were,
- rehearsal scenes of Federation come and go, henceforward, as they
- list; and, on Plains and under City-walls, innumerable regimental
- bands blare off into the Inane, without note from us.
-
- One scene, however, the hastiest reader will momentarily pause
- on: that of Anacharsis Clootz and the Collective sinful Posterity
- of Adam.—For a Patriot Municipality has now, on the 4th of June,
- got its plan concocted, and got it sanctioned by National
- Assembly; a Patriot King assenting; to whom, were he even free to
- dissent, Federative harangues, overflowing with loyalty, have
- doubtless a transient sweetness. There shall come Deputed
- National Guards, so many in the hundred, from each of the
- Eighty-three Departments of France. Likewise from all Naval and
- Military King’s Forces, shall Deputed quotas come; such
- Federation of National with Royal Soldier has, taking place
- spontaneously, been already seen and sanctioned. For the rest, it
- is hoped, as many as forty thousand may arrive: expenses to be
- borne by the Deputing District; of all which let District and
- Department take thought, and elect fit men,—whom the Paris
- brethren will fly to meet and welcome.
-
- Now, therefore, judge if our Patriot Artists are busy; taking
- deep counsel how to make the Scene worthy of a look from the
- Universe! As many as fifteen thousand men, spade-men, barrow-men,
- stone-builders, rammers, with their engineers, are at work on the
- Champ-de-Mars; hollowing it out into a natural Amphitheatre, fit
- for such solemnity. For one may hope it will be annual and
- perennial; a “Feast of Pikes, _Fête des Piques_,” notablest among
- the high-tides of the year: in any case ought not a Scenic free
- Nation to have some permanent National Amphitheatre? The
- Champ-de-Mars is getting hollowed out; and the daily talk and the
- nightly dream in most Parisian heads is of Federation, and that
- only. Federate Deputies are already under way. National Assembly,
- what with its natural work, what with hearing and answering
- harangues of Federates, of this Federation, will have enough to
- do! Harangue of “American Committee,” among whom is that faint
- figure of Paul Jones “as with the stars dim-twinkling through
- it,”—come to congratulate us on the prospect of such auspicious
- day. Harangue of Bastille Conquerors, come to “renounce” any
- special recompense, any peculiar place at the solemnity;—since
- the Centre Grenadiers rather grumble. Harangue of “Tennis-Court
- Club,” who enter with far-gleaming Brass-plate, aloft on a pole,
- and the Tennis-Court Oath engraved thereon; which far gleaming
- Brass-plate they purpose to affix solemnly in the Versailles
- original locality, on the 20th of this month, which is the
- anniversary, as a deathless memorial, for some years: they will
- then dine, as they come back, in the Bois de
- Boulogne;[292]—cannot, however, do it without apprising the
- world. To such things does the august National Assembly ever and
- anon cheerfully listen, suspending its regenerative labours; and
- with some touch of impromptu eloquence, make friendly reply;—as
- indeed the wont has long been; for it is a gesticulating,
- sympathetic People, and has a heart, and wears it on its sleeve.
-
- In which circumstances, it occurred to the mind of Anacharsis
- Clootz that while so much was embodying itself into Club or
- Committee, and perorating applauded, there yet remained a greater
- and greatest; of which, if _it_ also took body and perorated,
- what might not the effect be: Humankind namely, _le Genre Humain_
- itself! In what rapt creative moment the Thought rose in
- Anacharsis’s soul; all his throes, while he went about giving
- shape and birth to it; how he was sneered at by cold worldlings;
- but did sneer again, being a man of polished sarcasm; and moved
- to and fro persuasive in coffeehouse and soirée, and dived down
- assiduous-obscure in the great deep of Paris, making his Thought
- a Fact: of all this the spiritual biographies of that period say
- nothing. Enough that on the 19th evening of June 1790, the Sun’s
- slant rays lighted a spectacle such as our foolish little Planet
- has not often had to show: Anacharsis Clootz entering the august
- Salle de Manége, with the Human Species at his heels. Swedes,
- Spaniards, Polacks; Turks, Chaldeans, Greeks, dwellers in
- Mesopotamia: behold them all; they have come to claim place in
- the grand Federation, having an undoubted interest in it.
-
- ‘Our ambassador titles,’ said the fervid Clootz, ‘are not written
- on parchment, but on the living hearts of all men.’ These
- whiskered Polacks, long-flowing turbaned Ishmaelites,
- astrological Chaldeans, who stand so mute here, let them plead
- with you, august Senators, more eloquently than eloquence could.
- They are the mute representatives of their tongue-tied,
- befettered, heavy-laden Nations; who from out of that dark
- bewilderment gaze wistful, amazed, with half-incredulous hope,
- towards you, and this your bright light of a French Federation:
- bright particular day-star, the herald of universal day. We claim
- to stand there, as mute monuments, pathetically adumbrative of
- much.—From bench and gallery comes “repeated applause;” for what
- august Senator but is flattered even by the very shadow of Human
- Species depending on him? From President Sieyes, who presides
- this remarkable fortnight, in spite of his small voice, there
- comes eloquent though shrill reply. Anacharsis and the
- “Foreigners Committee” shall have place at the Federation; on
- condition of telling their respective Peoples what they see
- there. In the mean time, we invite them to the “honours of the
- sitting, _honneur de la séance_.” A long-flowing Turk, for
- rejoinder, bows with Eastern solemnity, and utters articulate
- sounds: but owing to his imperfect knowledge of the French
- dialect,[293] his words are like spilt water; the thought he had
- in him remains conjectural to this day.
-
- Anacharsis and Mankind accept the honours of the sitting; and
- have forthwith, as the old Newspapers still testify, the
- satisfaction to see several things. First and chief, on the
- motion of Lameth, Lafayette, Saint-Fargeau and other Patriot
- Nobles, let the others repugn as they will: all Titles of
- Nobility, from Duke to Esquire, or lower, are henceforth
- _abolished_. Then, in like manner, Livery Servants, or rather the
- Livery of Servants. Neither, for the future, shall any man or
- woman, self-styled noble, be “incensed,”—foolishly fumigated with
- incense, in Church; as the wont has been. In a word, Feudalism
- being dead these ten months, why should her empty trappings and
- scutcheons survive? The very Coats-of-arms will require to be
- obliterated;—and yet Cassandra Marat on this and the other
- coach-panel notices that they “are but painted-over,” and
- threaten to peer through again.
-
- So that henceforth de Lafayette is but the Sieur Motier, and
- Saint-Fargeau is plain Michel Lepelletier; and Mirabeau soon
- after has to say huffingly, ‘With your _Riquetti_ you have set
- Europe at cross-purposes for three days.’ For his Counthood is
- not indifferent to this man; which indeed the admiring People
- treat him with to the last. But let extreme Patriotism rejoice,
- and chiefly Anacharsis and Mankind; for now it seems to be taken
- for granted that one Adam is Father of us all!—
-
- Such was, in historical accuracy, the famed feat of Anacharsis.
- Thus did the most extensive of Public Bodies find a sort of
- spokesman. Whereby at least we may judge of one thing: what a
- humour the once sniffing mocking City of Paris and Baron Clootz
- had got into; when such exhibition could appear a propriety, next
- door to a sublimity. It is true, Envy did in after times, pervert
- this success of Anacharsis; making him, from incidental “Speaker
- of the Foreign-Nations Committee,” claim to be official permanent
- “Speaker, _Orateur_, of the Human Species,” which he only
- deserved to be; and alleging, calumniously, that his astrological
- Chaldeans, and the rest, were a mere French tag-rag-and-bobtail
- disguised for the nonce; and, in short, sneering and fleering at
- him in _her_ cold barren way; all which, however, he, the man he
- was, could receive on thick enough panoply, or even rebound
- therefrom, and also go _his_ way.
-
- Most extensive of Public Bodies, we may call it; and also the
- most unexpected: for who could have thought to see All Nations in
- the Tuileries Riding-Hall? But so it is; and truly as strange
- things may happen when a whole People goes mumming and miming.
- Hast not thou thyself perchance seen diademed Cleopatra, daughter
- of the Ptolemies, pleading, almost with bended knee, in unheroic
- tea-parlour, or dimlit retail-shop, to inflexible gross Burghal
- Dignitary, for leave to reign and die; being dressed for it, and
- moneyless, with small children;—while suddenly Constables have
- shut the Thespian barn, and her Antony pleaded in vain? Such
- visual spectra flit across this Earth, if the Thespian Stage be
- rudely interfered with: but much more, when, as was said, Pit
- jumps on Stage, then is it verily, as in Herr Tieck’s Drama, a
- _Verkehrte Welt_, of World Topsy-turvied!
-
- Having seen the Human Species itself, to have seen the “_Dean_ of
- the Human Species,” ceased now to be a miracle. Such “_Doyen du
- Genre Humain_, Eldest of Men,” had shewn himself there, in these
- weeks: Jean Claude Jacob, a born Serf, deputed from his native
- Jura Mountains to thank the National Assembly for enfranchising
- them. On his bleached worn face are ploughed the furrowings of
- one hundred and twenty years. He has heard dim _patois_-talk, of
- immortal Grand-Monarch victories; of a burnt Palatinate, as _he_
- toiled and moiled to make a little speck of this Earth greener;
- of Cevennes Dragoonings; of Marlborough going to the war. Four
- generations have bloomed out, and loved and hated, and rustled
- off: he was forty-six when Louis Fourteenth died. The Assembly,
- as one man, spontaneously rose, and did reverence to the Eldest
- of the World; old Jean is to take _séance_ among them,
- honourably, with covered head. He gazes feebly there, with his
- old eyes, on that new wonder-scene; dreamlike to him, and
- uncertain, wavering amid fragments of old memories and dreams.
- For Time is all growing unsubstantial, dreamlike; Jean’s eyes and
- mind are weary, and about to close,—and open on a far other
- wonder-scene, which shall be real. Patriot Subscription, Royal
- Pension was got for him, and he returned home glad; but in two
- months more he left it all, and went on his unknown way.[294]
-
-
- Chapter 2.1.XI.
- As in the Age of Gold.
-
- Meanwhile to Paris, ever going and returning, day after day, and
- all day long, towards that Field of Mars, it becomes painfully
- apparent that the spadework there cannot be got done in time.
- There is such an area of it; three hundred thousand square feet:
- for from the Ecole militaire (which will need to be done up in
- wood with balconies and galleries) westward to the Gate by the
- river (where also shall be wood, in triumphal arches), we count
- same thousand yards of length; and for breadth, from this
- umbrageous Avenue of eight rows, on the South side, to that
- corresponding one on the North, some thousand feet, more or less.
- All this to be scooped out, and wheeled up in slope along the
- sides; high enough; for it must be rammed down there, and shaped
- stair-wise into as many as “thirty ranges of convenient seats,”
- firm-trimmed with turf, covered with enduring timber;—and then
- our huge pyramidal Fatherland’s-Altar, _Autel de la Patrie_, in
- the centre, also to be raised and stair-stepped! Force-work with
- a vengeance; it is a World’s Amphitheatre! There are but fifteen
- days good; and at this languid rate, it might take half as many
- weeks. What is singular too, the spademen seem to work lazily;
- they will not work double-tides, even for offer of more wages,
- though their tide is but seven hours; they declare angrily that
- the human tabernacle requires occasional rest!
-
- Is it Aristocrats secretly bribing? Aristocrats were capable of
- that. Only six months since, did not evidence get afloat that
- subterranean Paris, for we stand over quarries and catacombs,
- dangerously, as it were midway between Heaven and the Abyss, and
- are hollow underground,—was charged with gunpowder, which should
- make us “leap?” Till a Cordelier’s Deputation actually went to
- examine, and found it—carried off again![295] An accursed,
- incurable brood; all asking for “passports,” in these sacred
- days. Trouble, of rioting, château-burning, is in the Limousin
- and elsewhere; for they are busy! Between the best of Peoples and
- the best of Restorer-Kings, they would sow grudges; with what a
- fiend’s-grin would they see this Federation, looked for by the
- Universe, fail!
-
- Fail for want of spadework, however, it shall not. He that has
- four limbs, and a French heart, can do spadework; and will! On
- the first July Monday, scarcely has the signal-cannon boomed;
- scarcely have the languescent mercenary Fifteen Thousand laid
- down their tools, and the eyes of onlookers turned sorrowfully of
- the still high Sun; when this and the other Patriot, fire in his
- eye, snatches barrow and mattock, and himself begins indignantly
- wheeling. Whom scores and then hundreds follow; and soon a
- volunteer Fifteen Thousand are shovelling and trundling; with the
- heart of giants; and all in right order, with that extemporaneous
- adroitness of theirs: whereby _such_ a lift has been given, worth
- three mercenary ones;—which may end when the late twilight
- thickens, in triumph shouts, heard or heard of beyond Montmartre!
-
- A sympathetic population will _wait_, next day, with eagerness,
- till the tools are free. Or why wait? Spades elsewhere exist! And
- so now bursts forth that effulgence of Parisian enthusiasm,
- good-heartedness and brotherly love; such, if Chroniclers are
- trustworthy, as was not witnessed since the Age of Gold. Paris,
- male and female, precipitates itself towards its South-west
- extremity, spade on shoulder. Streams of men, without order; or
- in order, as ranked fellow-craftsmen, as natural or accidental
- reunions, march towards the Field of Mars. Three-deep these
- march; to the sound of stringed music; preceded by young girls
- with green boughs, and tricolor streamers: they have shouldered,
- soldier-wise, their shovels and picks; and with one throat are
- singing _ça-ira_. Yes, _pardieu ça-ira_, cry the passengers on
- the streets. All corporate Guilds, and public and private Bodies
- of Citizens, from the highest to the lowest, march; the very
- Hawkers, one finds, have ceased bawling for one day. The
- neighbouring Villages turn out: their able men come marching, to
- village fiddle or tambourine and triangle, under their Mayor, or
- Mayor and Curate, who also walk bespaded, and in tricolor sash.
- As many as one hundred and fifty thousand workers: nay at certain
- seasons, as some count, two hundred and fifty thousand; for, in
- the afternoon especially, what mortal but, finishing his hasty
- day’s work, would run! A stirring city: from the time you reach
- the Place Louis Quinze, southward over the River, by all Avenues,
- it is one living throng. So many workers; and no mercenary
- mock-workers, but real ones that lie freely to it: each Patriot
- _stretches_ himself against the stubborn glebe; hews and wheels
- with the whole weight that is in him.
-
- Amiable infants, _aimables enfans!_ They do the “_police des
- l’atelier_” too, the guidance and governance, themselves; with
- that ready will of theirs, with that extemporaneous adroitness.
- It is a true brethren’s work; all distinctions confounded,
- abolished; as it was in the beginning, when Adam himself delved.
- Longfrocked tonsured Monks, with short-skirted Water-carriers,
- with swallow-tailed well-frizzled _Incroyables_ of a Patriot
- turn; dark Charcoalmen, meal-white Peruke-makers; or
- Peruke-wearers, for Advocate and Judge are there, and all Heads
- of Districts: sober Nuns sisterlike with flaunting Nymphs of the
- Opera, and females in common circumstances named unfortunate: the
- patriot Rag-picker, and perfumed dweller in palaces; for
- Patriotism like New-birth, and also like Death, levels all. The
- Printers have come marching, Prudhomme’s all in Paper-caps with
- _Révolutions de Paris_ printed on them; as Camille notes; wishing
- that in these great days there should be a _Pacte des Ecrivains_
- too, or Federation of Able Editors.[296] Beautiful to see! The
- snowy linen and delicate pantaloon alternates with the soiled
- check-shirt and bushel-breeches; for both have cast their coats,
- and under both are four limbs and a set of Patriot muscles. There
- do they pick and shovel; or bend forward, yoked in long strings
- to box-barrow or overloaded tumbril; joyous, with one mind. Abbé
- Sieyes is seen pulling, wiry, vehement, if too light for draught;
- by the side of Beauharnais, who shall get Kings though he be
- none. Abbé Maury did not pull; but the Charcoalmen brought a
- mummer guised like him, so he had to pull in effigy. Let no
- august Senator disdain the work: Mayor Bailly, Generalissimo
- Lafayette are there;—and, alas, shall be there again another day!
- The King himself comes to see: sky-rending _Vive-le-Roi;_ “and
- suddenly with shouldered spades they form a guard of honour round
- him.” Whosoever can come comes, to work, or to look, and bless
- the work.
-
- Whole families have come. One whole family we see clearly, of
- three generations: the father picking, the mother shovelling, the
- young ones wheeling assiduous; old grandfather, hoary with
- ninety-three years, holds in his arms the youngest of all:[297]
- frisky, not helpful this one; who nevertheless may tell it to
- _his_ grandchildren; and how the Future and the Past alike looked
- on, and with failing or with half-formed voice, faltered their
- _ça-ira_. A vintner has wheeled in, on Patriot truck, beverage of
- wine: ‘Drink not, my brothers, if ye are not dry; that your cask
- may last the longer;’ neither did any drink, but men “evidently
- exhausted.” A dapper Abbé looks on, sneering. ‘To the barrow!’
- cry several; whom he, lest a worse thing befal him, obeys:
- nevertheless one wiser Patriot barrowman, arriving now,
- interposes his ‘_arrêtez;_’ setting down his own barrow, he
- snatches the Abbé’s; trundles it fast, like an infected thing;
- forth of the Champ-de-Mars circuit, and discharges it _there_.
- Thus too a certain person (of some quality, or private capital,
- to appearance), entering hastily, flings down his coat, waistcoat
- and two watches, and is rushing to the thick of the work: ‘But
- your watches?’ cries the general voice.—‘Does one distrust his
- brothers?’ answers he; nor were the watches stolen. How beautiful
- is noble-sentiment: like gossamer gauze, beautiful and cheap;
- which will stand no tear and wear! Beautiful cheap gossamer
- gauze, thou film-shadow of a raw-material of Virtue, which art
- not woven, nor likely to be, into Duty; thou art better than
- nothing, and also worse!
-
- Young Boarding-school Boys, College Students, shout _Vive la
- Nation_, and regret that they have yet “only their sweat to
- give.” What say we of Boys? Beautifullest Hebes; the loveliest of
- Paris, in their light air-robes, with riband-girdle of tricolor,
- are there; shovelling and wheeling with the rest; their Hebe eyes
- brighter with enthusiasm, and long hair in beautiful
- dishevelment: hard-pressed are their small fingers; but they make
- the patriot barrow go, and even force it to the summit of the
- slope (with a little tracing, which what man’s arm were not too
- happy to lend?)—then bound down with it again, and go for more;
- with their long locks and tricolors blown back: graceful as the
- rosy Hours. O, as that evening Sun fell over the Champ-de-Mars,
- and tinted with fire the thick umbrageous boscage that shelters
- it on this hand and on that, and struck direct on those Domes and
- two-and-forty Windows of the Ecole Militaire, and made them all
- of burnished gold,—saw he on his wide zodiac road other such
- sight? A living garden spotted and dotted with such flowerage;
- all colours of the prism; the beautifullest blent friendly with
- the usefullest; all growing and working brotherlike there, under
- one warm feeling, were it but for days; once and no second time!
- But Night is sinking; these Nights too, into Eternity. The
- hastiest Traveller Versailles-ward has drawn bridle on the
- heights of Chaillot: and looked for moments over the River;
- reporting at Versailles what he saw, not without tears.[298]
-
- Meanwhile, from all points of the compass, Federates are
- arriving: fervid children of the South, “who glory in their
- Mirabeau;” considerate North-blooded Mountaineers of Jura; sharp
- Bretons, with their Gaelic suddenness; Normans not to be
- overreached in bargain: all now animated with one noblest fire of
- Patriotism. Whom the Paris brethren march forth to receive; with
- military solemnities, with fraternal embracing, and a hospitality
- worthy of the heroic ages. They assist at the Assembly’s Debates,
- these Federates: the Galleries are reserved for them. They assist
- in the toils of the Champ-de-Mars; each new troop will put its
- hand to the spade; lift a hod of earth on the Altar of the
- Fatherland. But the flourishes of rhetoric, for it is a
- gesticulating People; the moral-sublime of those Addresses to an
- august Assembly, to a Patriot Restorer! Our Breton Captain of
- Federates kneels even, in a fit of enthusiasm, and gives up his
- sword; he wet-eyed to a King wet-eyed. Poor Louis! These, as he
- said afterwards, were among the bright days of his life.
-
- Reviews also there must be; royal Federate-reviews, with King,
- Queen and tricolor Court looking on: at lowest, if, as is too
- common, it rains, our Federate Volunteers will file through the
- inner gateways, Royalty standing dry. Nay there, should some stop
- occur, the beautifullest fingers in France may take you softly by
- the lapelle, and, in mild flute-voice, ask: ‘Monsieur, of what
- Province are you?’ Happy he who can reply, chivalrously lowering
- his sword’s point, ‘Madame, from the Province your ancestors
- reigned over.’ He that happy “Provincial Advocate,” now
- Provincial Federate, shall be rewarded by a sun-smile, and such
- melodious glad words addressed to a King: ‘Sire, these are your
- faithful Lorrainers.’ Cheerier verily, in these holidays, is this
- “skyblue faced with red” of a National Guardsman, than the dull
- black and gray of a Provincial Advocate, which in workdays one
- was used to. For the same thrice-blessed Lorrainer shall, this
- evening, stand sentry at a Queen’s door; and feel that he could
- die a thousand deaths for her: then again, at the outer gate, and
- even a third time, she shall see him; nay he will make her do it;
- presenting arms with emphasis, “making his musket jingle again”:
- and in her salute there shall again be a sun-smile, and that
- little blonde-locked too hasty Dauphin shall be admonished,
- ‘Salute then, Monsieur, don’t be unpolite;’ and therewith she,
- like a bright Sky-wanderer or Planet with her little Moon, issues
- forth peculiar.[299]
-
- But at night, when Patriot spadework is over, figure the sacred
- rights of hospitality! Lepelletier Saint-Fargeau, a mere private
- senator, but with great possessions, has daily his “hundred
- dinner-guests;” the table of Generalissimo Lafayette may double
- that number. In lowly parlour, as in lofty saloon, the wine-cup
- passes round; crowned by the smiles of Beauty; be it of
- lightly-tripping Grisette, or of high-sailing Dame, for both
- equally have beauty, and smiles precious to the brave.
-
-
- Chapter 2.1.XII.
- Sound and Smoke.
-
- And so now, in spite of plotting Aristocrats, lazy hired
- spademen, and almost of Destiny itself (for there has been much
- rain), the Champ-de-Mars, on the 13th of the month is fairly
- ready; trimmed, rammed, buttressed with firm masonry; and
- Patriotism can stroll over it admiring; and as it were
- rehearsing, for in every head is some unutterable image of the
- morrow. Pray Heaven there be not clouds. Nay what far worse cloud
- is this, of a misguided Municipality that talks of admitting
- Patriotism, to the solemnity, by tickets! Was it by tickets we
- were admitted to the work; and to what brought the work? Did we
- take the Bastille by tickets? A misguided Municipality sees the
- error; at late midnight, rolling drums announce to Patriotism
- starting half out of its bed-clothes, that it is to be
- ticketless. Pull down thy night-cap therefore; and, with
- demi-articulate grumble, significant of several things, go
- pacified to sleep again. Tomorrow is Wednesday morning;
- unforgetable among the _fasti_ of the world.
-
- The morning comes, cold for a July one; but such a festivity
- would make Greenland smile. Through every inlet of that National
- Amphitheatre (for it is a league in circuit, cut with openings at
- due intervals), floods-in the living throng; covers without
- tumult space after space. The Ecole Militaire has galleries and
- overvaulting canopies, where Carpentry and Painting have vied,
- for the upper Authorities; triumphal arches, at the Gate by the
- River, bear inscriptions, if weak, yet well-meant, and orthodox.
- Far aloft, over the Altar of the Fatherland, on their tall crane
- standards of iron, swing pensile our antique _Cassolettes_ or
- pans of incense; dispensing sweet incense-fumes,—unless for the
- Heathen Mythology, one sees not for whom. Two hundred thousand
- Patriotic Men; and, twice as good, one hundred thousand Patriotic
- Women, all decked and glorified as one can fancy, sit waiting in
- this Champ-de-Mars.
-
- What a picture: that circle of bright-eyed Life, spread up there,
- on its thirty-seated Slope; leaning, one would say, on the thick
- umbrage of those Avenue-Trees, for the stems of them are hidden
- by the height; and all beyond it mere greenness of Summer Earth,
- with the gleams of waters, or white sparklings of stone-edifices:
- little circular enamel-picture in the centre of such a vase—of
- emerald! A vase not empty: the Invalides Cupolas want not their
- population, nor the distant Windmills of Montmartre; on remotest
- steeple and invisible village belfry, stand men with spy-glasses.
- On the heights of Chaillot are many-coloured undulating groups;
- round and far on, over all the circling heights that embosom
- Paris, it is as one more or less peopled Amphitheatre; which the
- eye grows dim with measuring. Nay heights, as was before hinted,
- have cannon; and a floating-battery of cannon is on the Seine.
- When eye fails, ear shall serve; and all France properly is but
- one Amphitheatre: for in paved town and unpaved hamlet, men walk
- listening; till the muffled thunder sound audible on their
- horizon, that they too may begin swearing and firing![300] But
- now, to streams of music, come Federates enough,—for they have
- assembled on the Boulevard Saint-Antoine or thereby, and come
- marching through the City, with their Eighty-three Department
- Banners, and blessings not loud but deep; comes National
- Assembly, and takes seat under its Canopy; comes Royalty, and
- takes seat on a throne beside it. And Lafayette, on white
- charger, is here, and all the civic Functionaries; and the
- Federates form dances, till their strictly military evolutions
- and manœuvres can begin.
-
- Evolutions and manœuvres? Task not the pen of mortal to describe
- them: truant imagination droops;—declares that it is not worth
- while. There is wheeling and sweeping, to slow, to quick, and
- double quick-time: Sieur Motier, or Generalissimo Lafayette, for
- they are one and the same, and he is General of France, in the
- King’s stead, for four-and-twenty hours; Sieur Motier must step
- forth, with that sublime chivalrous gait of his; solemnly ascend
- the steps of the Fatherland’s Altar, in sight of Heaven and of
- the scarcely breathing Earth; and, under the creak of those
- swinging _Cassolettes_, “pressing his sword’s point firmly
- there,” pronounce the Oath, _To King, to Law, and Nation_ (not to
- mention “grains” with their circulating), in his own name and
- that of armed France. Whereat there is waving of banners and
- acclaim sufficient. The National Assembly must swear, standing in
- its place; the King himself audibly. The King swears; and now
- _be_ the welkin split with vivats; let citizens enfranchised
- embrace, each smiting heartily his palm into his fellow’s; and
- armed Federates clang their arms; above all, that floating
- battery speak! It has spoken,—to the four corners of France. From
- eminence to eminence, bursts the thunder; faint-heard,
- loud-repeated. What a stone, cast into what a lake; in circles
- that do _not_ grow fainter. From Arras to Avignon; from Metz to
- Bayonne! Over Orléans and Blois it rolls, in cannon-recitative;
- Puy bellows of it amid his granite mountains; Pau where is the
- shell-cradle of Great Henri. At far Marseilles, one can think,
- the ruddy evening witnesses it; over the deep-blue Mediterranean
- waters, the Castle of If ruddy-tinted darts forth, from every
- cannon’s mouth, its tongue of fire; and all the people shout:
- Yes, France is free. O glorious France that has burst out so;
- into universal sound and smoke; and attained—the Phrygian _Cap_
- of Liberty! In all Towns, Trees of Liberty also may be planted;
- with or without advantage. Said we not, it is the highest stretch
- attained by the Thespian Art on this Planet, or perhaps
- attainable?
-
- The Thespian Art, unfortunately, one must still call it; for
- behold there, on this Field of Mars, the National Banners, before
- there could be any swearing, were to be all blessed. A most
- proper operation; since surely without Heaven’s blessing
- bestowed, say even, audibly or inaudibly _sought_, no Earthly
- banner or contrivance can prove victorious: but now the means of
- doing it? By what thrice-divine Franklin thunder-rod shall
- miraculous fire be drawn out of Heaven; and descend gently,
- life-giving, with health to the souls of men? Alas, by the
- simplest: by Two Hundred shaven-crowned Individuals, “in
- snow-white albs, with tricolor girdles,” arranged on the steps of
- Fatherland’s Altar; and, at their head for spokesman, Soul’s
- Overseer Talleyrand-Perigord! These shall act as miraculous
- thunder-rod,—to such length as they can. O ye deep azure Heavens,
- and thou green all-nursing Earth; ye Streams ever-flowing;
- deciduous Forests that die and are born again, continually, like
- the sons of men; stone Mountains that die daily with every
- rain-shower, yet are not dead and levelled for ages of ages, nor
- born again (it seems) but with new world-explosions, and such
- tumultuous seething and tumbling, steam half way to the Moon; O
- thou unfathomable mystic All, garment and dwellingplace of the
- UNNAMED; O spirit, lastly, of Man, who mouldest and modellest
- that Unfathomable Unnameable even as we see,—is not _there_ a
- miracle: That some French mortal should, we say not have
- believed, but pretended to imagine that he believed that
- Talleyrand and Two Hundred pieces of white Calico could do it!
-
- Here, however, we are to remark with the sorrowing Historians of
- that day, that suddenly, while Episcopus Talleyrand, long-stoled,
- with mitre and tricolor belt, was yet but hitching up the
- Altar-steps, to do his miracle, the material Heaven grew black; a
- north-wind, moaning cold moisture, began to sing; and there
- descended a very deluge of rain. Sad to see! The thirty-staired
- Seats, all round our Amphitheatre, get instantaneously slated
- with mere umbrellas, fallacious when so thick set: our antique
- _Cassolettes_ become Water-pots; their incense-smoke gone
- hissing, in a whiff of muddy vapour. Alas, instead of vivats,
- there is nothing now but the furious peppering and rattling. From
- three to four hundred thousand human individuals feel that they
- have a skin; happily _im_pervious. The General’s sash runs water:
- how all military banners droop; and will not wave, but lazily
- flap, as if metamorphosed into painted tin-banners! Worse, far
- worse, these hundred thousand, such is the Historian’s testimony,
- of the fairest of France! Their snowy muslins all splashed and
- draggled; the ostrich feather shrunk shamefully to the backbone
- of a feather: all caps are ruined; innermost pasteboard molten
- into its original pap: Beauty no longer swims decorated in her
- garniture, like Love-goddess hidden-revealed in her Paphian
- clouds, but struggles in disastrous imprisonment in it, for “the
- shape was noticeable;” and now only sympathetic interjections,
- titterings, teeheeings, and resolute good-humour will avail. A
- deluge; an incessant sheet or fluid-column of rain;—such that our
- Overseer’s very mitre must be filled; not a mitre, but a filled
- and leaky fire-bucket on his reverend head!—Regardless of which,
- Overseer Talleyrand performs his miracle: the Blessing of
- Talleyrand, another than that of Jacob, is on all the
- Eighty-three departmental flags of France; which wave or flap,
- with such thankfulness as needs. Towards three o’clock, the sun
- beams out again: the remaining evolutions can be transacted under
- bright heavens, though with decorations much damaged.[301]
-
- On Wednesday our Federation is consummated: but the festivities
- last out the week, and over into the next. Festivities such as no
- Bagdad Caliph, or Aladdin with the Lamp, could have equalled.
- There is a Jousting on the River; with its water-somersets,
- splashing and haha-ing: Abbé Fauchet, _Te-Deum_ Fauchet,
- preaches, for his part, in “the rotunda of the Corn-market,” a
- Harangue on Franklin; for whom the National Assembly has lately
- gone three days in black. The Motier and Lepelletier tables still
- groan with viands; roofs ringing with patriotic toasts. On the
- fifth evening, which is the Christian Sabbath, there is a
- universal Ball. Paris, out of doors and in, man, woman and child,
- is jigging it, to the sound of harp and four-stringed fiddle. The
- hoariest-headed man will tread one other measure, under this
- nether Moon; speechless nurselings, _infants_ as we call them,
- νήπια τέκνα, crow in arms; and sprawl out numb-plump little
- limbs,—impatient for muscularity, they know not why. The stiffest
- balk bends more or less; all joists creak.
-
- Or out, on the Earth’s breast itself, behold the Ruins of the
- Bastille. All lamplit, allegorically decorated: a Tree of Liberty
- sixty feet high; and Phrygian Cap on it, of size enormous, under
- which King Arthur and his round-table might have dined! In the
- depths of the background, is a single lugubrious lamp, rendering
- dim-visible one of your iron cages, half-buried, and some Prison
- stones,—Tyranny vanishing downwards, all gone but the skirt: the
- rest wholly lamp-festoons, trees real or of pasteboard; in the
- similitude of a fairy grove; with this inscription, readable to
- runner: “_Ici l’on danse_, Dancing Here.” As indeed had been
- obscurely foreshadowed by Cagliostro[302] prophetic Quack of
- Quacks, when he, four years ago, quitted the grim durance;—to
- fall into a grimmer, of the Roman Inquisition, and not quit it.
-
- But, after all, what is this Bastille business to that of the
- _Champs Elysées!_ Thither, to these Fields well named Elysian,
- all feet tend. It is radiant as day with festooned lamps; little
- oil-cups, like variegated fire-flies, daintily illumine the
- highest leaves: trees there are all sheeted with variegated fire,
- shedding far a glimmer into the dubious wood. There, under the
- free sky, do tight-limbed Federates, with fairest newfound
- sweethearts, elastic as Diana, and not of that coyness and tart
- humour of Diana, thread their jocund mazes, all through the
- ambrosial night; and hearts were touched and fired; and seldom
- surely had our old Planet, in that huge conic Shadow of hers
- “which goes beyond the Moon, and is named _Night_,” curtained
- such a Ball-room. O if, according to Seneca, the very gods look
- down on a good man struggling with adversity, and smile; what
- must they think of Five-and-twenty million indifferent ones
- victorious over it,—for eight days and more?
-
- In this way, and in such ways, however, has the Feast of Pikes
- danced itself off; gallant Federates wending homewards, towards
- every point of the compass, with feverish nerves, heart and head
- much heated; some of them, indeed, as Dampmartin’s elderly
- respectable friend, from Strasbourg, quite “burnt out with
- liquors,” and flickering towards extinction.[303] The Feast of
- Pikes has danced itself off, and become defunct, and the ghost of
- a Feast;—nothing of it now remaining but this vision in men’s
- memory; and the place that knew it (for the slope of that
- Champ-de-Mars is crumbled to half the original height[304]) now
- knowing it no more. Undoubtedly one of the memorablest National
- Hightides. Never or hardly ever, as we said, was Oath sworn with
- such heart-effusion, emphasis and expenditure of joyance; and
- then it was broken irremediably within year and day. Ah, why?
- When the swearing of it was so heavenly-joyful, bosom clasped to
- bosom, and Five-and-twenty million hearts all burning together: O
- ye inexorable Destinies, why?—Partly _because_ it was sworn with
- such over-joyance; but chiefly, indeed, for an older reason: that
- Sin had come into the world and Misery by Sin! These
- Five-and-twenty millions, if we will consider it, have now
- henceforth, with that Phrygian Cap of theirs, no force _over_
- them, to bind and guide; neither in them, more than heretofore,
- is guiding force, or rule of just living: how then, while they
- all go rushing at such a _pace_, on unknown ways, with no bridle,
- towards no aim, can hurlyburly unutterable fail? For verily not
- Federation-rosepink is the colour of this Earth and her work: not
- by outbursts of noble-sentiment, but with far other ammunition,
- shall a man front the world.
-
- But how wise, in all cases, to “husband your fire;” to keep it
- deep down, rather, as genial radical-heat! Explosions, the
- forciblest, and never so well directed, are questionable; far
- oftenest futile, always frightfully wasteful: but think of a man,
- of a Nation of men, spending its whole stock of fire in one
- artificial Firework! So have we seen fond weddings (for
- individuals, like Nations, have their Hightides) celebrated with
- an outburst of triumph and deray, at which the elderly shook
- their heads. Better had a serious cheerfulness been; for the
- enterprise was great. Fond pair! the more triumphant ye feel, and
- victorious over terrestrial evil, which seems all abolished, the
- wider-eyed will your disappointment be to find terrestrial evil
- still extant. ‘And why extant?’ will each of you cry: ‘Because my
- false mate has played the traitor: evil was abolished; I meant
- faithfully, and did, or would have done.’ Whereby the oversweet
- moon of honey changes itself into long years of vinegar; perhaps
- divulsive vinegar, like Hannibal’s.
-
- Shall we say then, the French Nation has led Royalty, or wooed
- and teased poor Royalty to lead _her_, to the hymeneal
- Fatherland’s Altar, in such oversweet manner; and has, most
- thoughtlessly, to celebrate the nuptials with due shine and
- demonstration,—burnt her bed?
-
-
- BOOK 2.II.
- NANCI
-
-
- Chapter 2.2.I.
- Bouillé.
-
- Dimly visible, at Metz on the North-Eastern frontier, a certain
- brave Bouillé, last refuge of Royalty in all straits and
- meditations of flight, has for many months hovered occasionally
- in our eye; some name or shadow of a brave Bouillé: let us now,
- for a little, look fixedly at him, till he become a substance and
- person for us. The man himself is worth a glance; his position
- and procedure there, in these days, will throw light on many
- things.
-
- For it is with Bouillé as with all French Commanding Officers;
- only in a more emphatic degree. The grand National Federation, we
- already guess, was but empty sound, or worse: a last loudest
- universal _Hep-hep-hurrah_, with full bumpers, in that National
- Lapithae-feast of Constitution-making; as in loud denial of the
- palpably existing; as if, with hurrahings, you would shut out
- notice of the inevitable already knocking at the gates! Which new
- National bumper, one may say, can but deepen the drunkenness; and
- so, the _louder_ it swears Brotherhood, will the sooner and the
- more surely lead to Cannibalism. Ah, under that fraternal shine
- and clangour, what a deep world of irreconcileable discords lie
- momentarily assuaged, damped down for one moment! Respectable
- military Federates have barely got home to their quarters; and
- the inflammablest, “dying, burnt up with liquors, and kindness,”
- has not yet got extinct; the shine is hardly out of men’s eyes,
- and still blazes filling all men’s memories,—when your discords
- burst forth again very considerably darker than ever. Let us look
- at Bouillé, and see how.
-
- Bouillé for the present commands in the Garrison of Metz, and far
- and wide over the East and North; being indeed, by a late act of
- Government with sanction of National Assembly, appointed one of
- our Four supreme Generals. Rochambeau and Mailly, men and
- Marshals of note in these days, though to us of small moment, are
- two of his colleagues; tough old babbling Lückner, also of small
- moment for us, will probably be the third. Marquis de Bouillé is
- a determined Loyalist; not indeed disinclined to moderate reform,
- but resolute against immoderate. A man long suspect to
- Patriotism; who has more than once given the august Assembly
- trouble; who would not, for example, take the National Oath, as
- he was bound to do, but always put it off on this or the other
- pretext, till an autograph of Majesty requested him to do it as a
- favour. There, in this post if not of honour, yet of eminence and
- danger, he waits, in a silent concentered manner; very dubious of
- the future. “Alone,” as he says, or almost alone, of all the old
- military Notabilities, he has not emigrated; but thinks always,
- in atrabiliar moments, that there will be nothing for him too but
- to cross the marches. He might cross, say, to Treves or Coblentz
- where Exiled Princes will be one day ranking; or say, over into
- Luxemburg where old Broglie loiters and languishes. Or is there
- not the great dim Deep of European Diplomacy; where your
- Calonnes, your Bréteuils are beginning to hover, dimly
- discernible?
-
- With immeasurable confused outlooks and purposes, with no clear
- purpose but this of still trying to do His Majesty a service,
- Bouillé waits; struggling what he can to keep his district loyal,
- his troops faithful, his garrisons furnished. He maintains, as
- yet, with his Cousin Lafayette, some thin diplomatic
- correspondence, by letter and messenger; chivalrous
- constitutional professions on the one side, military gravity and
- brevity on the other; which thin correspondence one can see
- growing ever the thinner and hollower, towards the verge of
- entire vacuity.[305] A quick, choleric, sharply discerning,
- stubbornly endeavouring man; with suppressed-explosive
- resolution, with valour, nay headlong audacity: a man who was
- more in his place, lionlike defending those Windward Isles, or,
- as with military tiger-spring, clutching Nevis and Montserrat
- from the English,—than here in this suppressed condition, muzzled
- and fettered by diplomatic packthreads; looking out for a civil
- war, which may never arrive. Few years ago Bouillé was to have
- led a French East-Indian Expedition, and reconquered or conquered
- Pondicherri and the Kingdoms of the Sun: but the whole world is
- suddenly changed, and he with it; Destiny willed it not in that
- way but in this.
-
-
- Chapter 2.2.II.
- Arrears and Aristocrats.
-
- Indeed, as to the general outlook of things, Bouillé himself
- augurs not well of it. The French Army, ever since those old
- Bastille days, and earlier, has been universally in the
- questionablest state, and growing daily worse. Discipline, which
- is at all times a kind of miracle, and works by faith, broke down
- then; one sees not with that near prospect of recovering itself.
- The Gardes Françaises played a deadly game; but how they won it,
- and wear the prizes of it, all men know. In that general
- overturn, we saw the Hired Fighters refuse to fight. The very
- Swiss of Château-Vieux, which indeed is a kind of French Swiss,
- from Geneva and the Pays de Vaud, are understood to have
- declined. Deserters glided over; Royal-Allemand itself looked
- disconsolate, though stanch of purpose. In a word, we there saw
- _Military Rule_, in the shape of poor Besenval with that
- convulsive unmanageable Camp of his, pass two martyr days on the
- Champ-de-Mars; and then, veiling itself, so to speak, “under the
- cloud of night,” depart “down the left bank of the Seine,” to
- seek refuge elsewhere; _this_ ground having clearly become too
- hot for it.
-
- But what new ground to seek, what remedy to try? Quarters that
- were “uninfected:” this doubtless, with judicious strictness of
- drilling, were the plan. Alas, in all quarters and places, from
- Paris onward to the remotest hamlet, is infection, is seditious
- contagion: inhaled, propagated by contact and converse, till the
- dullest soldier catch it! There is speech of men in uniform with
- men not in uniform; men in uniform read journals, and even write
- in them.[306] There are public petitions or remonstrances,
- private emissaries and associations; there is discontent,
- jealousy, uncertainty, sullen suspicious humour. The whole French
- Army, fermenting in dark heat, glooms ominous, boding good to no
- one.
-
- So that, in the general social dissolution and revolt, we are to
- have this deepest and dismallest kind of it, a revolting
- soldiery? Barren, desolate to look upon is this same business of
- revolt under all its aspects; but how infinitely more so, when it
- takes the aspect of military mutiny! The very implement of rule
- and restraint, whereby all the rest was managed and held in
- order, has become precisely the frightfullest immeasurable
- implement of misrule; like the element of Fire, our indispensable
- all-ministering servant, when it gets the _mastery_, and becomes
- conflagration. Discipline we called a kind of miracle: in fact,
- is it not miraculous how one man moves hundreds of thousands;
- each unit of whom it may be loves him not, and singly fears him
- not, yet has to obey him, to go hither or go thither, to march
- and halt, to give death, and even to receive it, as if a Fate had
- spoken; and the word-of-command becomes, almost in the literal
- sense, a magic-word?
-
- Which magic-word, again, if it be once _forgotten;_ the spell of
- it once broken! The legions of assiduous ministering spirits rise
- on you now as menacing fiends; your free orderly arena becomes a
- tumult-place of the Nether Pit, and the hapless magician is rent
- limb from limb. Military mobs are mobs with muskets in their
- hands; and also with death hanging over their heads, for death is
- the penalty of disobedience and they have disobeyed. And now if
- all mobs are properly frenzies, and work frenetically with mad
- fits of hot and of cold, fierce rage alternating so incoherently
- with panic terror, consider what your military mob will be, with
- such a conflict of duties and penalties, whirled between remorse
- and fury, and, for the hot fit, loaded fire-arms in its hand! To
- the soldier himself, revolt is frightful, and oftenest perhaps
- pitiable; and yet so dangerous, it can only be hated, cannot be
- pitied. An anomalous class of mortals these poor Hired Killers!
- With a frankness, which to the Moralist in these times seems
- surprising, they have sworn to become machines; and nevertheless
- they are still partly men. Let no prudent person in authority
- remind them of this latter fact; but always let force, let
- injustice above all, stop short clearly on _this_ side of the
- rebounding-point! Soldiers, as we often say, do revolt: were it
- not so, several things which are transient in this world might be
- perennial.
-
- Over and above the general quarrel which all sons of Adam
- maintain with their lot here below, the grievances of the French
- soldiery reduce themselves to two, First that their Officers are
- Aristocrats; secondly that they cheat them of their Pay. Two
- grievances; or rather we might say one, capable of becoming a
- hundred; for in that single first proposition, that the Officers
- are Aristocrats, what a multitude of corollaries lie ready! It is
- a bottomless ever-flowing fountain of grievances this; what you
- may call a general raw-material of grievance, wherefrom
- individual grievance after grievance will daily body itself
- forth. Nay there will even be a kind of comfort in getting it,
- from time to time, so embodied. Peculation of one’s Pay! It is
- embodied; made tangible, made denounceable; exhalable, if only in
- angry words.
-
- For unluckily that grand fountain of grievances does exist:
- Aristocrats almost all our Officers necessarily are; they have it
- in the blood and bone. By the law of the case, no man can pretend
- to be the pitifullest lieutenant of militia, till he have first
- verified, to the satisfaction of the Lion-King, a Nobility of
- four generations. Not Nobility only, but four generations of it:
- this latter is the improvement hit upon, in comparatively late
- years, by a certain War-minister much pressed for
- commissions.[307] An improvement which did relieve the
- over-pressed War-minister, but which split France still further
- into yawning contrasts of Commonalty and Nobility, nay of new
- Nobility and old; as if already with your new and old, and then
- with your old, older and oldest, there were not contrasts and
- discrepancies enough;—the general clash whereof men now see and
- hear, and in the singular whirlpool, all contrasts gone together
- to the bottom! Gone to the bottom or going; with uproar, without
- return; going every where save in the Military section of things;
- and there, it may be asked, can they hope to continue always at
- the top? Apparently, not.
-
- It is true, in a time of external Peace, when there is no
- fighting but only drilling, this question, How you rise from the
- ranks, may seem theoretical rather. But in reference to the
- Rights of Man it is continually practical. The soldier has sworn
- to be faithful not to the King only, but to the Law and the
- Nation. Do our commanders love the Revolution? ask all soldiers.
- Unhappily no, they hate it, and love the Counter-Revolution.
- Young epauletted men, with quality-blood in them, poisoned with
- quality-pride, do sniff openly, with indignation struggling to
- become contempt, at our Rights of Man, as at some newfangled
- cobweb, which shall be brushed down again. Old officers, more
- cautious, keep silent, with closed uncurled lips; but one guesses
- what is passing within. Nay who knows, how, under the plausiblest
- word of command, might lie Counter-Revolution itself, sale to
- Exiled Princes and the Austrian Kaiser: treacherous Aristocrats
- hoodwinking the small insight of us common men?—In such manner
- works that general raw-material of grievance; disastrous; instead
- of trust and reverence, breeding hate, endless suspicion, the
- impossibility of commanding and obeying. And now when this second
- more tangible grievance has articulated itself universally in the
- mind of the common man: Peculation of his Pay! Peculation of the
- despicablest sort does exist, and has long existed; but, unless
- the new-declared Rights of Man, and all rights whatsoever, be a
- cobweb, it shall no longer exist.
-
- The French Military System seems dying a sorrowful suicidal
- death. Nay more, citizen, as is natural, ranks himself against
- citizen in this cause. The soldier finds audience, of numbers and
- sympathy unlimited, among the Patriot lower-classes. Nor are the
- higher wanting to the officer. The officer still dresses and
- perfumes himself for such sad unemigrated _soirée_ as there may
- still be; and speaks his woes,—which woes, are they not Majesty’s
- and Nature’s? Speaks, at the same time, his gay defiance, his
- firm-set resolution. Citizens, still more Citizenesses, see the
- right and the wrong; not the Military System alone will die by
- suicide, but much along with it. As was said, there is yet
- possible a deepest overturn than any yet witnessed: that deepest
- _up_turn of the black-burning sulphurous stratum whereon all
- rests and grows!
-
- But how these things may act on the rude soldier-mind, with its
- military pedantries, its inexperience of all that lies off the
- parade-ground; inexperience as of a child, yet fierceness of a
- man and vehemence of a Frenchman! It is long that secret
- communings in mess-room and guard-room, sour looks, thousandfold
- petty vexations between commander and commanded, measure every
- where the weary military day. Ask Captain Dampmartin; an
- authentic, ingenious literary officer of horse; who loves the
- Reign of Liberty, after a sort; yet has had his heart grieved to
- the quick many times, in the hot South-Western region and
- elsewhere; and has seen riot, civil battle by daylight and by
- torchlight, and anarchy hatefuller than death. How insubordinate
- Troopers, with drink in their heads, meet Captain Dampmartin and
- another on the ramparts, where there is no escape or side-path;
- and make military salute punctually, for we look calm on them;
- yet make it in a snappish, almost insulting manner: how one
- morning they “leave all their chamois shirts” and superfluous
- buffs, which they are tired of, laid in piles at the Captain’s
- doors; whereat “we laugh,” as the ass does, eating thistles: nay
- how they “knot two forage-cords together,” with universal noisy
- cursing, with evident intent to hang the Quarter-master:—all this
- the worthy Captain, looking on it through the ruddy-and-sable of
- fond regretful memory, has flowingly written down.[308] Men growl
- in vague discontent; officers fling up their commissions, and
- emigrate in disgust.
-
- Or let us ask another literary Officer; not yet Captain;
- Sublieutenant only, in the Artillery Regiment La Fère: a young
- man of twenty-one; not unentitled to speak; the name of him is
- _Napoleon Buonaparte._ To such height of Sublieutenancy has he
- now got promoted, from Brienne School, five years ago; “being
- found qualified in mathematics by La Place.” He is lying at
- Auxonne, in the West, in these months; not sumptuously lodged—“in
- the house of a Barber, to whose wife he did not pay the customary
- degree of respect;” or even over at the Pavilion, in a chamber
- with bare walls; the only furniture an indifferent “bed without
- curtains, two chairs, and in the recess of a window a table
- covered with books and papers: his Brother Louis sleeps on a
- coarse mattrass in an adjoining room.” However, he is doing
- something great: writing his first Book or Pamphlet,—eloquent
- vehement _Letter to M. Matteo Buttafuoco_, our Corsican Deputy,
- who is not a Patriot but an Aristocrat, unworthy of Deputyship.
- Joly of Dôle is Publisher. The literary Sublieutenant corrects
- the proofs; “sets out on foot from Auxonne, every morning at four
- o’clock, for Dôle: after looking over the proofs, he partakes of
- an extremely frugal breakfast with Joly, and immediately prepares
- for returning to his Garrison; where he arrives before noon,
- having thus walked above twenty miles in the course of the
- morning.”
-
- This Sublieutenant can remark that, in drawing-rooms, on streets,
- on highways, at inns, every where men’s minds are ready to kindle
- into a flame. That a Patriot, if he appear in the drawing-room,
- or amid a group of officers, is liable enough to be discouraged,
- so great is the majority against him: but no sooner does he get
- into the street, or among the soldiers, than he feels again as if
- the whole Nation were with him. That after the famous Oath, _To
- the King, to the Nation and Law_, there was a great change; that
- before this, if ordered to fire on the people, he for one would
- have done it in the King’s name; but that after this, in the
- Nation’s name, he would not have done it. Likewise that the
- Patriot officers, more numerous too in the Artillery and
- Engineers than elsewhere, were few in number; yet that having the
- soldiers on their side, they ruled the regiment; and did often
- deliver the Aristocrat brother officer out of peril and strait.
- One day, for example, “a member of our own mess roused the mob,
- by singing, from the windows of our dining-room, _O Richard, O my
- King;_ and I had to snatch him from their fury.”[309]
-
- All which let the reader multiply by ten thousand; and spread it
- with slight variations over all the camps and garrisons of
- France. The French Army seems on the verge of universal mutiny.
-
- Universal mutiny! There is in that what may well make Patriot
- Constitutionalism and an august Assembly shudder. Something
- behoves to be done; yet what to do no man can tell. Mirabeau
- proposes even that the Soldiery, having come to such a pass, be
- forthwith disbanded, the whole Two Hundred and Eighty Thousands
- of them; and organised anew.[310] Impossible this, in so sudden a
- manner! cry all men. And yet literally, answer we, it is
- inevitable, in one manner or another. Such an Army, with its
- four-generation Nobles, its Peculated Pay, and men knotting
- forage cords to hang their quartermaster, cannot subsist beside
- such a Revolution. Your alternative is a slow-pining chronic
- dissolution and new organization; or a swift decisive one; the
- agonies spread over years, or concentrated into an hour. With a
- Mirabeau for Minister or Governor the latter had been the choice;
- with no Mirabeau for Governor it will naturally be the former.
-
-
- Chapter 2.2.III.
- Bouillé at Metz.
-
- To Bouillé, in his North-Eastern circle, none of these things are
- altogether hid. Many times flight over the marches gleams out on
- him as a last guidance in such bewilderment: nevertheless he
- continues here: struggling always to hope the best, not from new
- organisation but from happy Counter-Revolution and return to the
- old. For the rest it is clear to him that this same National
- Federation, and universal swearing and fraternising of People and
- Soldiers, has done “incalculable mischief.” So much that
- fermented secretly has hereby got vent and become open: National
- Guards and Soldiers of the line, solemnly embracing one another
- on all parade-fields, drinking, swearing patriotic oaths, fall
- into disorderly street-processions, constitutional unmilitary
- exclamations and hurrahings. On which account the Regiment
- Picardie, for one, has to be drawn out in the square of the
- barracks, here at Metz, and sharply harangued by the General
- himself; but expresses penitence.[311]
-
- Far and near, as accounts testify, insubordination has begun
- grumbling louder and louder. Officers have been seen shut up in
- their mess-rooms; assaulted with clamorous demands, not without
- menaces. The insubordinate ringleader is dismissed with “yellow
- furlough,” yellow infamous thing they call _cartouche jaune:_ but
- ten new ringleaders rise in his stead, and the yellow _cartouche_
- ceases to be thought disgraceful. “Within a fortnight,” or at
- furthest a month, of that sublime Feast of Pikes, the whole
- French Army, demanding Arrears, forming Reading Clubs,
- frequenting Popular Societies, is in a state which Bouillé can
- call by no name but that of mutiny. Bouillé knows it as few do;
- and speaks by dire experience. Take one instance instead of many.
-
- It is still an early day of August, the precise date now
- undiscoverable, when Bouillé, about to set out for the waters of
- Aix la Chapelle, is once more suddenly summoned to the barracks
- of Metz. The soldiers stand ranked in fighting order, muskets
- loaded, the officers all there on compulsion; and require, with
- many-voiced emphasis, to have their arrears paid. Picardie was
- penitent; but we see it has relapsed: the wide space bristles and
- lours with mere mutinous armed men. Brave Bouillé advances to the
- nearest Regiment, opens his commanding lips to harangue; obtains
- nothing but querulous-indignant discordance, and the sound of so
- many thousand livres legally due. The moment is trying; there are
- some ten thousand soldiers now in Metz, and one spirit seems to
- have spread among them.
-
- Bouillé is firm as the adamant; but what shall he do? A German
- Regiment, named of Salm, is thought to be of better temper:
- nevertheless Salm too may have heard of the precept, _Thou shalt
- not steal;_ Salm too may know that money is money. Bouillé walks
- trustfully towards the Regiment de Salm, speaks trustful words;
- but here again is answered by the cry of forty-four thousand
- livres odd sous. A cry waxing more and more vociferous, as Salm’s
- humour mounts; which cry, as it will produce no cash or promise
- of cash, ends in the wide simultaneous whirr of shouldered
- muskets, and a determined quick-time march on the part of
- Salm—towards its Colonel’s house, in the next street, there to
- seize the colours and military chest. Thus does Salm, for its
- part; strong in the faith that _meum_ is not _tuum_, that fair
- speeches are not forty-four thousand livres odd sous.
-
- Unrestrainable! Salm tramps to military time, quick consuming the
- way. Bouillé and the officers, drawing sword, have to dash into
- double quick _pas-de-charge_, or unmilitary running; to get the
- start; to station themselves on the outer staircase, and stand
- there with what of death-defiance and sharp steel they have; Salm
- truculently coiling itself up, rank after rank, opposite them, in
- such humour as we can fancy, which happily has not yet mounted to
- the murder-pitch. There will Bouillé stand, certain at least of
- _one_ man’s purpose; in grim calmness, awaiting the issue. What
- the intrepidest of men and generals can do is done. Bouillé,
- though there is a barricading picket at each end of the street,
- and death under his eyes, contrives to send for a Dragoon
- Regiment with orders to charge: the dragoon officers mount; the
- dragoon men will not: hope is none there for him. The street, as
- we say, barricaded; the Earth all shut out, only the indifferent
- heavenly Vault overhead: perhaps here or there a timorous
- householder peering out of window, with prayer for Bouillé;
- copious Rascality, on the pavement, with prayer for Salm: there
- do the two parties stand;—like chariots locked in a narrow
- thoroughfare; like locked wrestlers at a dead-grip! For two hours
- they stand; Bouillé’s sword glittering in his hand, adamantine
- resolution clouding his brows: for two hours by the clocks of
- Metz. Moody-silent stands Salm, with occasional clangour; but
- does not fire. Rascality from time to time urges some grenadier
- to level his musket at the General; who looks on it as a bronze
- General would; and always some corporal or other strikes it up.
-
- In such remarkable attitude, standing on that staircase for two
- hours, does brave Bouillé, long a shadow, dawn on us visibly out
- of the dimness, and become a person. For the rest, since Salm has
- not shot him at the first instant, and since in himself there is
- no variableness, the danger will diminish. The Mayor, “a man
- infinitely respectable,” with his Municipals and tricolor sashes,
- finally gains entrance; remonstrates, perorates, promises; gets
- Salm persuaded home to its barracks. Next day, our respectable
- Mayor lending the money, the officers pay down the _half_ of the
- demand in ready cash. With which liquidation Salm pacifies
- itself, and for the present all is hushed up, as much as may
- be.[312]
-
- Such scenes as this of Metz, or preparations and demonstrations
- towards such, are universal over France: Dampmartin, with his
- knotted forage-cords and piled chamois jackets, is at Strasburg
- in the South-East; in these same days or rather nights, Royal
- Champagne is “shouting _Vive la Nation, au diable les
- Aristocrates_, with some thirty lit candles,” at Hesdin, on the
- far North-West. ‘The garrison of Bitche,’ Deputy Rewbell is sorry
- to state, ‘went out of the town, with drums beating; deposed its
- officers; and then returned into the town, sabre in hand.’[313]
- Ought not a National Assembly to occupy itself with these
- objects? Military France is everywhere full of sour inflammatory
- humour, which exhales itself fuliginously, this way or that: a
- whole continent of smoking flax; which, blown on here or there by
- any angry wind, might so easily start into a blaze, into a
- continent of fire!
-
- Constitutional Patriotism is in deep natural alarm at these
- things. The august Assembly sits diligently deliberating; dare
- nowise resolve, with Mirabeau, on an instantaneous disbandment
- and extinction; finds that a course of palliatives is easier. But
- at least and lowest, this grievance of the Arrears shall be
- rectified. A plan, much noised of in those days, under the name
- “Decree of the Sixth of August,” has been devised for that.
- Inspectors shall visit all armies; and, with certain elected
- corporals and “soldiers able to write,” verify what arrears and
- peculations do lie due, and make them good. Well, if in this way
- the smoky heat be cooled down; if it be not, as we say,
- ventilated over-much, or, by sparks and collision somewhere, sent
- _up!_
-
-
- Chapter 2.2.IV.
- Arrears at Nanci.
-
- We are to remark, however, that of all districts, this of
- Bouillé’s seems the inflammablest. It was always to Bouillé and
- Metz that Royalty would fly: Austria lies near; here more than
- elsewhere must the disunited People look over the borders, into a
- dim sea of Foreign Politics and Diplomacies, with hope or
- apprehension, with mutual exasperation.
-
- It was but in these days that certain Austrian troops, marching
- peaceably across an angle of this region, seemed an Invasion
- realised; and there rushed towards Stenai, with musket on
- shoulder, from all the winds, some thirty thousand National
- Guards, to inquire what the matter was.[314] A matter of mere
- diplomacy it proved; the Austrian Kaiser, in haste to get to
- Belgium, had bargained for this short cut. The infinite dim
- movement of European Politics waved a skirt over these spaces,
- passing on its way; like the passing shadow of a condor; and such
- a winged flight of thirty thousand, with mixed cackling and
- crowing, rose in consequence! For, in addition to all, this
- people, as we said, is much divided: Aristocrats abound;
- Patriotism has both Aristocrats and Austrians to watch. It is
- Lorraine, this region; not so illuminated as old France: it
- remembers ancient Feudalisms; nay, within man’s memory, it had a
- Court and King of its own, or indeed the splendour of a Court and
- King, without the burden. Then, contrariwise, the Mother Society,
- which sits in the Jacobins Church at Paris, has Daughters in the
- Towns here; shrill-tongued, driven acrid: consider how the memory
- of good King Stanislaus, and ages of Imperial Feudalism, may
- comport with this New acrid Evangel, and what a virulence of
- discord there may be! In all which, the Soldiery, officers on one
- side, private men on the other, takes part, and now indeed
- principal part; a Soldiery, moreover, all the hotter here as it
- lies the denser, the frontier Province requiring more of it.
-
- So stands Lorraine: but the capital City, more especially so. The
- pleasant City of Nanci, which faded Feudalism loves, where King
- Stanislaus personally dwelt and shone, has an Aristocrat
- Municipality, and then also a Daughter Society: it has some forty
- thousand divided souls of population; and three large Regiments,
- one of which is Swiss Château-Vieux, dear to Patriotism ever
- since it refused fighting, or was thought to refuse, in the
- Bastille days. Here unhappily all evil influences seem to meet
- concentered; here, of all places, may jealousy and heat evolve
- itself. These many months, accordingly, man has been set against
- man, Washed against Unwashed; Patriot Soldier against Aristocrat
- Captain, ever the more bitterly; and a long score of grudges has
- been running up.
-
- Nameable grudges, and likewise unnameable: for there is a
- punctual nature in Wrath; and daily, were there but glances of
- the eye, tones of the voice, and minutest commissions or
- omissions, it will jot down somewhat, to account, under the head
- of sundries, which always swells the sum-total. For example, in
- April last, in those times of preliminary Federation, when
- National Guards and Soldiers were every where swearing
- brotherhood, and all France was locally federating, preparing for
- the grand National Feast of Pikes, it was observed that these
- Nanci Officers threw cold water on the whole brotherly business;
- that they first hung back from appearing at the Nanci Federation;
- then did appear, but in mere _rédingote_ and undress, with
- scarcely a clean shirt on; nay that one of them, as the National
- Colours flaunted by in that solemn moment, did, without visible
- necessity, take occasion to _spit_.[315]
-
- Small “sundries as per journal,” but then incessant ones! The
- Aristocrat Municipality, pretending to be Constitutional, keeps
- mostly quiet; not so the Daughter Society, the five thousand
- adult male Patriots of the place, still less the five thousand
- female: not so the young, whiskered or whiskerless,
- four-generation Noblesse in epaulettes; the grim Patriot Swiss of
- Château-Vieux, effervescent infantry of Regiment du Roi, hot
- troopers of Mestre-de-Camp! Walled Nanci, which stands so bright
- and trim, with its straight streets, spacious squares, and
- Stanislaus’ Architecture, on the fruitful alluvium of the
- Meurthe; so bright, amid the yellow cornfields in these
- Reaper-Months,—is inwardly but a den of discord, anxiety,
- inflammability, not far from exploding. Let Bouillé look to it.
- If that universal military heat, which we liken to a vast
- continent of smoking flax, do any where take fire, his beard,
- here in Lorraine and Nanci, may the most readily of all get
- singed by it.
-
- Bouillé, for his part, is busy enough, but only with the general
- superintendence; getting his pacified Salm, and all other still
- tolerable Regiments, marched out of Metz, to southward towns and
- villages; to rural Cantonments as at Vic, Marsal and thereabout,
- by the still waters; where is plenty of horse-forage, sequestered
- parade-ground, and the soldier’s speculative faculty can be
- stilled by drilling. Salm, as we said, received only half payment
- of arrears; naturally not without grumbling. Nevertheless that
- scene of the drawn sword may, after all, have raised Bouillé in
- the mind of Salm; for men and soldiers love intrepidity and swift
- inflexible decision, even when they suffer by it. As indeed is
- not this fundamentally the quality of qualities for a man? A
- quality which by itself is next to nothing, since inferior
- animals, asses, dogs, even mules have it; yet, in due
- combination, it is the indispensable basis of all.
-
- Of Nanci and its heats, Bouillé, commander of the whole, knows
- nothing special; understands generally that the troops in that
- City are perhaps the _worst_.[316] The Officers there have it
- all, as they have long had it, to themselves; and unhappily seem
- to manage it ill. “Fifty yellow furloughs,” given out in one
- batch, do surely betoken difficulties. But what was Patriotism to
- think of certain light-fencing Fusileers “set on,” or supposed to
- be set on, “to insult the Grenadier-club,” considerate
- speculative Grenadiers, and that reading-room of theirs? With
- shoutings, with hootings; till the speculative Grenadier drew his
- side-arms too; and there ensued battery and duels! Nay more, are
- not swashbucklers of the same stamp “sent out” visibly, or sent
- out presumably, now in the dress of Soldiers to pick quarrels
- with the Citizens; now, disguised as Citizens, to pick quarrels
- with the Soldiers? For a certain Roussière, expert in fence, was
- taken in the very fact; four Officers (presumably of tender
- years) hounding him on, who thereupon fled precipitately!
- Fence-master Roussière, haled to the guardhouse, had sentence of
- three months’ imprisonment: but his comrades demanded “yellow
- furlough” for _him_ of all persons; nay, thereafter they produced
- him on parade; capped him in paper-helmet inscribed, _Iscariot;_
- marched him to the gate of City; and there sternly commanded him
- to vanish for evermore.
-
- On all which suspicions, accusations and noisy procedure, and on
- enough of the like continually accumulating, the Officer could
- not but look with disdainful indignation; perhaps disdainfully
- express the same in words, and “soon after fly over to the
- Austrians.”
-
- So that when it here as elsewhere comes to the question of
- Arrears, the humour and procedure is of the bitterest: Regiment
- Mestre-de-Camp getting, amid loud clamour, some three gold louis
- a-man,—which have, as usual, to be borrowed from the
- Municipality; Swiss Château-Vieux applying for the like, but
- getting instead instantaneous _courrois_, or cat-o’-nine-tails,
- with subsequent unsufferable hisses from the women and children;
- Regiment du Roi, sick of hope deferred, at length seizing its
- military chest, and marching it to quarters, but next day
- marching it back again, through streets all struck
- silent:—unordered paradings and clamours, not without strong
- liquor; objurgation, insubordination; your military ranked
- Arrangement going all (as the Typographers say of set types, in a
- similar case) rapidly _to pie!_[317] Such is Nanci in these early
- days of August; the sublime Feast of Pikes not yet a month old.
-
- Constitutional Patriotism, at Paris and elsewhere, may well quake
- at the news. War-Minister Latour du Pin runs breathless to the
- National Assembly, with a written message that “all is burning,
- _tout brûle, tout presse_.” The National Assembly, on spur of the
- instant, renders such _Decret_, and “order to submit and repent,”
- as he requires; if it will avail any thing. On the other hand,
- Journalism, through all its throats, gives hoarse outcry,
- condemnatory, elegiac-applausive. The Forty-eight Sections, lift
- up voices; sonorous Brewer, or call him now _Colonel_ Santerre,
- is not silent, in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. For, meanwhile, the
- Nanci Soldiers have sent a Deputation of Ten, furnished with
- documents and proofs; who will tell another story than the
- “all-is-burning” one. Which deputed Ten, before ever they reach
- the Assembly Hall, assiduous Latour du Pin picks up, and on
- warrant of Mayor Bailly, claps in prison! Most
- unconstitutionally; for they had officers’ furloughs. Whereupon
- Saint-Antoine, in indignant uncertainty of the future, closes its
- shops. Is Bouillé a traitor then, sold to Austria? In that case,
- these poor private sentinels have revolted mainly out of
- Patriotism?
-
- New Deputation, Deputation of National Guardsmen now, sets forth
- from Nanci to enlighten the Assembly. It meets the old deputed
- Ten returning, quite unexpectedly _un_hanged; and proceeds
- thereupon with better prospects; but effects nothing.
- Deputations, Government Messengers, Orderlies at hand-gallops,
- Alarms, thousand-voiced Rumours, go vibrating continually;
- backwards and forwards,—scattering distraction. Not till the last
- week of August does M. de Malseigne, selected as Inspector, get
- down to the scene of mutiny; with Authority, with cash, and
- “Decree of the Sixth of August.” He now shall see these Arrears
- liquidated, justice done, or at least tumult quashed.
-
-
- Chapter 2.2.V.
- Inspector Malseigne.
-
- Of Inspector Malseigne we discern, by direct light, that he is
- “of Herculean stature;” and infer, with probability, that he is
- of truculent moustachioed aspect,—for _Royalist_ Officers now
- leave the upper lip unshaven; that he is of indomitable
- bull-heart; and also, unfortunately, of thick bull-head.
-
- On Tuesday the 24th of August, 1790, he opens session as
- Inspecting Commissioner; meets those “elected corporals, and
- soldiers that can write.” He finds the accounts of Château-Vieux
- to be complex; to require delay and reference: he takes to
- haranguing, to reprimanding; ends amid audible grumbling. Next
- morning, he resumes session, not at the Townhall as prudent
- Municipals counselled, but once more at the barracks.
- Unfortunately Château-Vieux, grumbling all night, will now hear
- of no delay or reference; from reprimanding on his part, it goes
- to bullying,—answered with continual cries of ‘_Jugez tout de
- suite_, Judge it at once;’ whereupon M. de Malseigne will off in
- a huff. But lo, Château Vieux, swarming all about the
- barrack-court, has sentries at every gate; M. de Malseigne,
- demanding egress, cannot get it, though Commandant Denoue backs
- him; can get only ‘_Jugez tout de suite_.’ Here is a nodus!
-
- Bull-hearted M. de Malseigne draws his sword; and will force
- egress. Confused splutter. M. de Malseigne’s sword breaks; he
- snatches Commandant Denoue’s: the sentry is wounded. M. de
- Malseigne, whom one is loath to kill, does force egress,—followed
- by Château-Vieux all in disarray; a spectacle to Nanci. M. de
- Malseigne walks at a sharp pace, yet never runs; wheeling from
- time to time, with menaces and movements of fence; and so reaches
- Denoue’s house, unhurt; which house Château-Vieux, in an agitated
- manner, invests,—hindered as yet from entering, by a crowd of
- officers formed on the staircase. M. de Malseigne retreats by
- back ways to the Townhall, flustered though undaunted; amid an
- escort of National Guards. From the Townhall he, on the morrow,
- emits fresh orders, fresh plans of settlement with Château-Vieux;
- to none of which will Château-Vieux listen: whereupon finally he,
- amid noise enough, emits order that Château-Vieux shall march on
- the morrow morning, and quarter at Sarre Louis. Château-Vieux
- flatly refuses marching; M. de Malseigne “takes _act_,” due
- notarial protest, of such refusal,—if happily that may avail him.
-
- This is end of Thursday; and, indeed, of M. de Malseigne’s
- Inspectorship, which has lasted some fifty hours. To such length,
- in fifty hours, has he unfortunately brought it. Mestre-de-Camp
- and Regiment du Roi hang, as it were, fluttering: Château-Vieux
- is clean gone, in what way we see. Over night, an Aide-de-Camp of
- Lafayette’s, stationed here for such emergency, sends swift
- emissaries far and wide, to summon National Guards. The slumber
- of the country is broken by clattering hoofs, by loud fraternal
- knockings; every where the Constitutional Patriot must clutch his
- fighting-gear, and take the road for Nanci.
-
- And thus the Herculean Inspector has sat all Thursday, among
- terror-struck Municipals, a centre of confused noise: all
- Thursday, Friday, and till Saturday towards noon. Château-Vieux,
- in spite of the notarial protest, will not march a step. As many
- as four thousand National Guards are dropping or pouring in;
- uncertain what is expected of them, still more uncertain what
- will be obtained of them. For all is uncertainty, commotion, and
- suspicion: there goes a word that Bouillé, beginning to bestir
- himself in the rural Cantonments eastward, is but a Royalist
- traitor; that Château-Vieux and Patriotism are sold to Austria,
- of which latter M. de Malseigne is probably some agent.
- Mestre-de-Camp and Roi flutter still more questionably:
- Château-Vieux, far from marching, “waves red flags out of two
- carriages,” in a passionate manner, along the streets; and next
- morning answers its Officers: ‘Pay us, then; and we will march
- with you to the world’s end!’
-
- Under which circumstances, towards noon on Saturday, M. de
- Malseigne thinks it were good perhaps to inspect the ramparts,—on
- horseback. He mounts, accordingly, with escort of three troopers.
- At the gate of the city, he bids two of them wait for his return;
- and with the third, a trooper to be depended upon, he—gallops off
- for Lunéville; where lies a certain Carabineer Regiment not yet
- in a mutinous state! The two left troopers soon get uneasy;
- discover how it is, and give the alarm. Mestre-de-Camp, to the
- number of a hundred, saddles in frantic haste, as if sold to
- Austria; gallops out pellmell in chase of its Inspector. And so
- they spur, and the Inspector spurs; careering, with noise and
- jingle, up the valley of the River Meurthe, towards Lunéville and
- the midday sun: through an astonished country; indeed almost
- their own astonishment.
-
- What a hunt, Actæon-like;—which Actæon de Malseigne happily
- _gains._ To arms, ye Carabineers of Lunéville: to chastise
- mutinous men, insulting your General Officer, insulting your own
- quarters;—above all things, fire _soon_, lest there be parleying
- and ye refuse to fire! The Carabineers fire soon, exploding upon
- the first stragglers of Mestre-de-Camp; who shrink at the very
- flash, and fall back hastily on Nanci, in a state not far from
- distraction. Panic and fury: sold to Austria without an _if;_ so
- much per regiment, the very sums can be specified; and traitorous
- Malseigne is fled! Help, O Heaven; help, thou Earth,—ye unwashed
- Patriots; ye too are sold like us!
-
- Effervescent Regiment du Roi primes its firelocks, Mestre-de-Camp
- saddles wholly: Commandant Denoue is seized, is flung in prison
- with a “canvass shirt” (_sarreau de toile_) about him;
- Château-Vieux bursts up the magazines; distributes “three
- thousand fusils” to a Patriot people: Austria shall have a hot
- bargain. Alas, the unhappy hunting-dogs, as we said, have _hunted
- away_ their huntsman; and do now run howling and baying, on what
- trail they know not; nigh rabid!
-
- And so there is tumultuous march of men, through the night; with
- halt on the heights of Flinval, whence Lunéville can be seen all
- illuminated. Then there is parley, at four in the morning; and
- reparley; finally there is agreement: the Carabineers give in;
- Malseigne is surrendered, with apologies on all sides. After
- weary confused hours, he is even got under way; the Lunévillers
- all turning out, in the idle Sunday, to see such departure:
- home-going of mutinous Mestre-de-Camp with its Inspector captive.
- Mestre-de-Camp accordingly marches; the Lunévillers look. See! at
- the corner of the first street, our Inspector bounds off again,
- bull-hearted as he is; amid the slash of sabres, the crackle of
- musketry; and escapes, full gallop, with only a ball lodged in
- his buff-_jerkin_. The Herculean man! And yet it is an escape to
- no purpose. For the Carabineers, to whom after the hardest
- Sunday’s ride on record, he has come circling back, “stand
- deliberating by their nocturnal watch-fires;” deliberating of
- Austria, of traitors, and the rage of Mestre-de-Camp. So that, on
- the whole, the next sight we have is that of M. de Malseigne, on
- the Monday afternoon, faring bull-hearted through the streets of
- Nanci; in open carriage, a soldier standing over him with drawn
- sword; amid the “furies of the women,” hedges of National Guards,
- and confusion of Babel: to the Prison beside Commandant Denoue!
- That finally is the lodging of Inspector Malseigne.[318]
-
- Surely it is time Bouillé were drawing near. The Country all
- round, alarmed with watchfires, illuminated towns, and marching
- and rout, has been sleepless these several nights. Nanci, with
- its uncertain National Guards, with its distributed fusils,
- mutinous soldiers, black panic and redhot ire, is not a City but
- a Bedlam.
-
-
- Chapter 2.2.VI.
- Bouillé at Nanci.
-
- Haste with help, thou brave Bouillé: if swift help come not, all
- is now verily “burning;” and may burn,—to what lengths and
- breadths! Much, in these hours, depends on Bouillé; as it shall
- now fare with him, the whole Future may be this way or be that.
- If, for example, he were to loiter dubitating, and not come: if
- he were to come, and fail: the whole Soldiery of France to blaze
- into mutiny, National Guards going some this way, some that; and
- Royalism to draw its rapier, and Sansculottism to snatch its
- pike; and the Spirit if Jacobinism, as yet young, girt with
- sun-rays, to grow instantaneously mature, girt with hell-fire,—as
- mortals, in one night of deadly crisis, have had their heads
- turned gray!
-
- Brave Bouillé is advancing fast, with the old inflexibility;
- gathering himself, unhappily “in small affluences,” from East,
- from West and North; and now on Tuesday morning, the last day of
- the month, he stands all concentred, unhappily still in small
- force, at the village of Frouarde, within some few miles. Son of
- Adam with a more dubious task before him is not in the world this
- Tuesday morning. A weltering inflammable sea of doubt and peril,
- and Bouillé sure of simply one thing, his own determination.
- Which one thing, indeed, may be worth many. He puts a most firm
- face on the matter: “Submission, or unsparing battle and
- destruction; twenty-four hours to make your choice:” this was the
- tenor of his Proclamation; thirty copies of which he sent
- yesterday to Nanci:—all which, we find, were intercepted and not
- posted.[319]
-
- Nevertheless, at half-past eleven, this morning, seemingly by way
- of answer, there does wait on him at Frouarde, some Deputation
- from the mutinous Regiments, from the Nanci Municipals, to see
- what can be done. Bouillé receives this Deputation, “in a large
- open court adjoining his lodging:” pacified Salm, and the rest,
- attend also, being invited to do it,—all happily still in the
- right humour. The Mutineers pronounce themselves with a
- decisiveness, which to Bouillé seems insolence; and happily to
- Salm also. Salm, forgetful of the Metz staircase and sabre,
- demands that the scoundrels “be hanged” there and then. Bouillé
- represses the hanging; but answers that mutinous Soldiers have
- one course, and not more than one: To liberate, with heartfelt
- contrition, Messieurs Denoue and de Malseigne; to get ready
- forthwith for marching off, whither he shall order; and “submit
- and repent,” as the National Assembly has decreed, as he
- yesterday did in thirty printed Placards proclaim. These are his
- terms, unalterable as the decrees of Destiny. Which terms as
- they, the Mutineer deputies, seemingly do not accept, it were
- good for them to vanish from this spot, and even promptly; with
- him too, in few instants, the word will be, Forward! The Mutineer
- deputies vanish, not unpromptly; the Municipal ones, anxious
- beyond right for their own individualities, prefer abiding with
- Bouillé.
-
- Brave Bouillé, though he puts a most firm face on the matter,
- knows his position full well: how at Nanci, what with rebellious
- soldiers, with uncertain National Guards, and so many distributed
- fusils, there rage and roar some ten thousand fighting men; while
- with himself is scarcely the third part of that number, in
- National Guards also uncertain, in mere pacified Regiments,—for
- the present full of rage, and clamour to march; but whose rage
- and clamour may next moment take such a fatal new figure. On the
- top of one uncertain billow, therewith to calm billows! Bouillé
- must “abandon himself to Fortune;” who is said sometimes to
- favour the brave. At half-past twelve, the Mutineer deputies
- having vanished, our drums beat; we march: for Nanci! Let Nanci
- bethink itself, then; for Bouillé has thought and determined.
-
- And yet how shall Nanci think: not a City but a Bedlam! Grim
- Château-Vieux is for defence to the death; forces the
- Municipality to order, by tap of drum, all citizens acquainted
- with artillery to turn out, and assist in managing the cannon. On
- the other hand, effervescent Regiment du Roi, is drawn up in its
- barracks; quite disconsolate, hearing the humour Salm is in; and
- ejaculates dolefully from its thousand throats: ‘_La loi, la
- loi_, Law, law!’ Mestre-de-Camp blusters, with profane swearing,
- in mixed terror and furor; National Guards look this way and
- that, not knowing what to do. What a Bedlam-City: as many plans
- as heads; all ordering, none obeying: quiet none,—except the
- Dead, who sleep underground, having _done_ their fighting!
-
- And, behold, Bouillé proves as good as his word: “at half-past
- two” scouts report that he is within half a league of the gates;
- rattling along, with cannon, and array; breathing nothing but
- destruction. A new Deputation, Municipals, Mutineers, Officers,
- goes out to meet him; with passionate entreaty for yet one other
- hour. Bouillé grants an hour. Then, at the end thereof, no Denoue
- or Malseigne appearing as promised, he rolls his drums, and again
- takes the road. Towards four o’clock, the terror-struck Townsmen
- may see him face to face. His cannons rattle there, in their
- carriages; his vanguard is within thirty paces of the Gate
- Stanislaus. Onward like a Planet, by appointed times, by law of
- Nature! What next? Lo, flag of truce and chamade; conjuration to
- halt: Malseigne and Denoue are on the street, coming hither; the
- soldiers all repentant, ready to submit and march! Adamantine
- Bouillé’s look alters not; yet the word _Halt_ is given: gladder
- moment he never saw. Joy of joys! Malseigne and Denoue do verily
- issue; escorted by National Guards; from streets all frantic,
- with sale to Austria and so forth: they salute Bouillé,
- unscathed. Bouillé steps aside to speak with them, and with other
- heads of the Town there; having already ordered by what Gates and
- Routes the mutineer Regiments shall file out.
-
- Such colloquy with these two General Officers and other principal
- Townsmen, was natural enough; nevertheless one wishes Bouillé had
- postponed it, and _not_ stepped aside. Such tumultuous
- inflammable masses, tumbling along, making way for each other;
- this of keen nitrous oxide, that of sulphurous fire-damp,—were it
- not well to stand _between_ them, keeping them well separate,
- till the space be cleared? Numerous stragglers of Château-Vieux
- and the rest have not marched with their main columns, which are
- filing out by the appointed Gates, taking station in the open
- meadows. National Guards are in a state of nearly distracted
- uncertainty; the populace, armed and unharmed, roll openly
- delirious,—betrayed, sold to the Austrians, sold to the
- Aristocrats. There are loaded cannon with lit matches among them,
- and Bouillé’s vanguard is halted within thirty paces of the Gate.
- Command dwells not in that mad inflammable mass; which smoulders
- and tumbles there, in blind smoky rage; which will not open the
- Gate when summoned; says it will open the cannon’s throat
- sooner!—Cannonade not, O Friends, or be it through my body! cries
- heroic young Desilles, young Captain of _Roi_, clasping the
- murderous engine in his arms, and holding it. Château-Vieux
- Swiss, by main force, with oaths and menaces, wrench off the
- heroic youth; who undaunted, amid still louder oaths seats
- himself on the touch-hole. Amid still louder oaths; with ever
- louder clangour,—and, alas, with the loud crackle of first one,
- and then three other muskets; which explode into his body; which
- roll _it_ in the dust,—and do also, in the loud madness of such
- moment, bring lit cannon-match to ready priming; and so, with one
- thunderous belch of grapeshot, blast some fifty of Bouillé’s
- vanguard into air!
-
- Fatal! That sputter of the first musket-shot has kindled such a
- cannon-shot, such a death-blaze; and all is now redhot madness,
- conflagration as of Tophet. With demoniac rage, the Bouillé
- vanguard storms through that Gate Stanislaus; with fiery sweep,
- sweeps Mutiny clear away, to death, or into shelters and cellars;
- from which latter, again, Mutiny continues firing. The ranked
- Regiments hear it in their meadow; they rush back again through
- the nearest Gates; Bouillé gallops in, distracted, inaudible;—and
- now has begun, in Nanci, as in that doomed Hall of the
- Nibelungen, “a murder grim and great.”
-
- Miserable: such scene of dismal aimless madness as the anger of
- Heaven but rarely permits among men! From cellar or from garret,
- from open street in front, from successive corners of
- cross-streets on each hand, Château-Vieux and Patriotism keep up
- the murderous rolling-fire, on murderous not Unpatriotic fires.
- Your blue National Captain, riddled with balls, one hardly knows
- on whose side fighting, requests to be laid on the colours to
- die: the patriotic Woman (name not given, deed surviving) screams
- to Château-Vieux that it must _not_ fire the other cannon; and
- even flings a pail of water on it, since screaming avails
- not.[320] Thou shalt fight; thou shalt not fight; and with whom
- shalt thou fight! Could tumult awaken the old Dead, Burgundian
- Charles the Bold might stir from under that Rotunda of his: never
- since he, raging, sank in the ditches, and lost Life and Diamond,
- was such a noise heard here.
-
- Three thousand, as some count, lie mangled, gory; the half of
- Château-Vieux has been shot, without need of Court Martial.
- Cavalry, of Mestre-de-Camp or their foes, can do little. Regiment
- du Roi was persuaded to its barracks; stands there palpitating.
- Bouillé, armed with the terrors of the Law, and favoured of
- Fortune, finally triumphs. In two murderous hours he has
- penetrated to the grand Squares, dauntless, though with loss of
- forty officers and five hundred men: the shattered remnants of
- Château-Vieux are seeking covert. Regiment du Roi, not
- effervescent now, alas no, but _having_ effervesced, will offer
- to ground its arms; will “march in a quarter of an hour.” Nay
- these poor effervesced require “escort” to march with, and get
- it; though they are thousands strong, and have thirty
- ball-cartridges a man! The Sun is not yet down, when Peace, which
- might have come bloodless, has come bloody: the mutinous
- Regiments are on march, doleful, on their three Routes; and from
- Nanci rises wail of women and men, the voice of weeping and
- desolation; the City weeping for its slain who awaken not. These
- streets are empty but for victorious patrols.
-
- Thus has Fortune, favouring the brave, dragged Bouillé, as
- himself says, out of such a frightful peril, “by the hair of the
- head.” An intrepid adamantine man this Bouillé:—had _he_ stood in
- old Broglie’s place, in those Bastille days, it might have been
- all different! He has extinguished mutiny, and immeasurable civil
- war. Not for nothing, as we see; yet at a rate which he and
- Constitutional Patriotism considers cheap. Nay, as for Bouillé,
- he, urged by subsequent contradiction which arose, declares
- coldly, it was rather against his own private mind, and more by
- public military rule of duty, that he did extinguish
- it,[321]—immeasurable civil war being now the only chance. Urged,
- we say, by subsequent contradiction! Civil war, indeed, is Chaos;
- and in all vital Chaos, there is new Order shaping itself free:
- but what a faith this, that of all new Orders out of Chaos and
- Possibility of Man and his Universe, Louis Sixteenth and
- Two-Chamber Monarchy were precisely the one that would shape
- itself! It is like undertaking to throw deuce-ace, say only five
- hundred successive times, and any other throw to be fatal—for
- Bouillé. Rather thank Fortune, and Heaven, always, thou intrepid
- Bouillé; and let contradiction of its way! Civil war,
- conflagrating universally over France at this moment, might have
- led to one thing or to another thing: meanwhile, to _quench_
- conflagration, wheresoever one finds it, wheresoever one can;
- this, in all times, is the rule for man and General Officer.
-
- But at Paris, so agitated and divided, fancy how it went, when
- the continually vibrating Orderlies vibrated _thither_ at hand
- gallop, with such questionable news! High is the gratulation; and
- also deep the indignation. An august Assembly, by overwhelming
- majorities, passionately thanks Bouillé; a King’s autograph, the
- voices of all Loyal, all Constitutional men run to the same
- tenor. A solemn National funeral-service, for the Law-defenders
- slain at Nanci; is said and sung in the Champ de Mars; Bailly,
- Lafayette and National Guards, all except the few that protested,
- assist. With pomp and circumstance, with episcopal Calicoes in
- tricolor girdles, Altar of Fatherland smoking with cassolettes,
- or incense-kettles; the vast Champ-de-Mars wholly hung round with
- black mortcloth,—which mortcloth and expenditure Marat thinks had
- better have been laid out in bread, in these dear days, and given
- to the hungry living Patriot.[322] On the other hand, living
- Patriotism, and Saint-Antoine, which we have seen noisily closing
- its shops and such like, assembles now “to the number of forty
- thousand;” and, with loud cries, under the very windows of the
- thanking National Assembly, demands revenge for murdered
- Brothers, judgment on Bouillé, and instant dismissal of
- War-Minister Latour du Pin.
-
- At sound and sight of which things, if not War-Minister Latour,
- yet “Adored Minister” Necker, sees good on the 3d of September
- 1790, to withdraw softly almost privily,—with an eye to the
- “recovery of his health.” Home to native Switzerland; not as he
- last came; lucky to reach it alive! Fifteen months ago, we saw
- him coming, with escort of horse, with sound of clarion and
- trumpet: and now at Arcis-sur-Aube, while he departs unescorted
- soundless, the Populace and Municipals stop him as a fugitive,
- are not unlike massacring him as a traitor; the National
- Assembly, consulted on the matter, gives him free egress as a
- nullity. Such an unstable “drift-mould of Accident” is the
- substance of this lower world, for them that dwell in houses of
- clay; so, especially in hot regions and times, do the proudest
- palaces we build of it take wings, and become Sahara
- sand-palaces, spinning many pillared in the whirlwind, and bury
- us under their sand!—
-
- In spite of the forty thousand, the National Assembly persists in
- its thanks; and Royalist Latour du Pin continues Minister. The
- forty thousand assemble next day, as loud as ever; roll towards
- Latour’s Hôtel; find cannon on the porch-steps with flambeau lit;
- and have to retire elsewhither, and digest their spleen, or
- re-absorb it into the blood.
-
- Over in Lorraine, meanwhile, they of the distributed fusils,
- ringleaders of Mestre-de-Camp, of Roi, have got marked out for
- judgment;—yet shall never get judged. Briefer is the doom of
- Château-Vieux. Château-Vieux is, by Swiss law, given up for
- instant trial in Court-Martial of its own officers. Which
- Court-Martial, with all brevity (in not many hours), has hanged
- some Twenty-three, on conspicuous gibbets; marched some
- Three-score in chains to the Galleys; and so, to appearance,
- finished the matter off. Hanged men do cease for ever from this
- Earth; but out of chains and the Galleys there may be
- resuscitation in triumph. Resuscitation for the chained Hero; and
- even for the chained Scoundrel, or Semi-scoundrel! Scottish John
- Knox, such World-Hero, as we know, sat once nevertheless pulling
- grim-taciturn at the oar of French Galley, “in the _Water of
- Lore;_” and even flung their Virgin-Mary over, instead of kissing
- her,—as “a _pented bredd_,” or timber Virgin, who could naturally
- swim.[323] So, ye of Château-Vieux, tug patiently, not without
- hope!
-
- But indeed at Nanci generally, Aristocracy rides triumphant,
- rough. Bouillé is gone again, the second day; an Aristocrat
- Municipality, with free course, is as cruel as it had before been
- cowardly. The Daughter Society, as the mother of the whole
- mischief, lies ignominiously suppressed; the Prisons can hold no
- more; bereaved down-beaten Patriotism murmurs, not loud but deep.
- Here and in the neighbouring Towns, “flattened balls” picked from
- the streets of Nanci are worn at buttonholes: balls flattened in
- carrying death to Patriotism; men wear them there, in perpetual
- memento of revenge. Mutineer Deserters roam the woods; have to
- demand charity at the musket’s end. All is dissolution, mutual
- rancour, gloom and despair:—till National-Assembly Commissioners
- arrive, with a steady gentle flame of Constitutionalism in their
- hearts; who gently lift up the down-trodden, gently pull down the
- too uplifted; reinstate the Daughter Society, recall the Mutineer
- Deserter; gradually levelling, strive in all wise ways to smooth
- and soothe. With such gradual mild levelling on the one side; as
- with solemn funeral-service, Cassolettes, Courts-Martial,
- National thanks,—all that Officiality can do is done. The
- buttonhole will drop its flat ball; the black ashes, so far as
- may be, get green again.
-
- This is the “Affair of Nanci;” by some called the “Massacre of
- Nanci;”—properly speaking, the unsightly _wrong_-side of that
- thrice glorious Feast of Pikes, the right-side of which formed a
- spectacle for the very gods. Right-side and wrong lie always so
- near: the one was in July, in August the other! Theatres, the
- theatres over in London, are bright with their pasteboard
- simulacrum of that “Federation of the French People,” brought out
- as Drama: this of Nanci, we may say, though not played in any
- pasteboard Theatre, did for many months enact itself, and even
- walk spectrally—in all French heads. For the news of it fly
- pealing through all France; awakening, in town and village, in
- clubroom, messroom, to the utmost borders, some mimic reflex or
- imaginative repetition of the business; always with the angry
- questionable assertion: It was right; It was wrong. Whereby come
- controversies, duels, embitterment, vain jargon; the hastening
- forward, the augmenting and intensifying of whatever new
- explosions lie in store for us.
-
- Meanwhile, at this cost or at that, the mutiny, as we say, is
- stilled. The French Army has neither burst up in universal
- simultaneous delirium; nor been at once disbanded, put an end to,
- and made new again. It must die in the chronic manner, through
- years, by inches; with partial revolts, as of Brest Sailors or
- the like, which dare not spread; with men unhappy, insubordinate;
- officers unhappier, in Royalist moustachioes, taking horse,
- singly or in bodies, across the Rhine:[324] sick dissatisfaction,
- sick disgust on both sides; the Army moribund, fit for no
- duty:—till it do, in that unexpected manner, Phoenix-like, with
- long throes, get both dead and newborn; then start forth strong,
- nay stronger and even strongest.
-
- Thus much was the brave Bouillé hitherto fated to do. Wherewith
- let him again fade into dimness; and at Metz or the rural
- Cantonments, assiduously drilling, mysteriously diplomatising, in
- scheme within scheme, hover as formerly a faint shadow, the hope
- of Royalty.
-
-
- BOOK 2.III.
- THE TUILERIES
-
-
- Chapter 2.3.I.
- Epimenides.
-
- How true that there is nothing dead in this Universe; that what
- we call dead is only changed, its forces working in inverse
- order! “The leaf that lies rotting in moist winds,” says one,
- “has still force; else how could it _rot?_” Our whole Universe is
- but an infinite Complex of Forces; thousandfold, from Gravitation
- up to Thought and Will; man’s Freedom environed with Necessity of
- Nature: in all which nothing at any moment slumbers, but all is
- for ever awake and busy. The thing that lies isolated inactive
- thou shalt nowhere discover; seek every where from the granite
- mountain, slow-mouldering since Creation, to the passing
- cloud-vapour, to the living man; to the action, to the spoken
- word of man. The word that is spoken, as we know,
- flies-irrevocable: not less, but more, the action that is done.
- “The gods themselves,” sings Pindar, “cannot annihilate the
- action that is done.” No: this, once done, is done always; cast
- forth into endless Time; and, long conspicuous or soon hidden,
- must verily work and grow for ever there, an indestructible new
- element in the Infinite of Things. Or, indeed, what _is_ this
- Infinite of Things itself, which men name Universe, but an
- action, a sum-total of Actions and Activities? The living
- ready-made sum-total of these three,—which Calculation cannot
- add, cannot bring on its tablets; yet the sum, we say, is written
- visible: All that has been done, All that is doing, All that will
- be done! Understand it well, the Thing thou beholdest, that Thing
- is an Action, the product and expression of exerted Force: the
- All of Things is an infinite conjugation of the verb _To do._
- Shoreless Fountain-Ocean of Force, of power to _do;_ wherein
- Force rolls and circles, billowing, many-streamed, harmonious;
- wide as Immensity, deep as Eternity; beautiful and terrible, not
- to be comprehended: this is what man names Existence and
- Universe; this thousand-tinted Flame-image, at once veil and
- revelation, reflex such as he, in his poor brain and heart, can
- paint, of One Unnameable dwelling in inaccessible light! From
- beyond the Star-galaxies, from before the Beginning of Days, it
- billows and rolls,—round _thee_, nay thyself art of it, in this
- point of Space where thou now standest, in this moment which thy
- clock measures.
-
- Or apart from all Transcendentalism, is it not a plain truth of
- sense, which the duller mind can even consider as a truism, that
- human things wholly are in continual movement, and action and
- reaction; working continually forward, phasis after phasis, by
- unalterable laws, towards prescribed issues? How often must we
- say, and yet not rightly lay to heart: The seed that is sown, it
- will spring! Given the summer’s blossoming, then there is also
- given the autumnal withering: so is it ordered not with
- seedfields only, but with transactions, arrangements,
- philosophies, societies, French Revolutions, whatsoever man works
- with in this lower world. The Beginning holds in it the End, and
- all that leads thereto; as the acorn does the oak and its
- fortunes. Solemn enough, did we think of it,—which unhappily and
- also happily we do not very much! Thou there canst begin; the
- Beginning is for thee, and there: but where, and of what sort,
- and for whom will the End be? All grows, and seeks and endures
- its destinies: consider likewise how much grows, as the trees do,
- whether _we_ think of it or not. So that when your Epimenides,
- your somnolent Peter Klaus, since named Rip van Winkle, awakens
- again, he finds it a changed world. In that seven-years’ sleep of
- his, so much has changed! All that is without us will change
- while we think not of it; much even that is within us. The truth
- that was yesterday a restless Problem, has today grown a Belief
- burning to be uttered: on the morrow, contradiction has
- exasperated it into mad Fanaticism; obstruction has dulled it
- into sick Inertness; it is sinking towards silence, of
- satisfaction or of resignation. Today is not Yesterday, for man
- or for thing. Yesterday there was the oath of Love; today has
- come the curse of Hate. Not willingly: ah, no; but it could not
- help coming. The golden radiance of youth, would it willingly
- have tarnished itself into the dimness of old age?—Fearful: how
- we stand enveloped, deep-sunk, in that Mystery of TIME; and are
- Sons of Time; fashioned and woven out of Time; and on us, and on
- all that we have, or see, or do, is written: Rest not, Continue
- not, Forward to thy doom!
-
- But in seasons of Revolution, which indeed distinguish themselves
- from common seasons by their _velocity_ mainly, your miraculous
- Seven-sleeper might, with miracle enough, wake _sooner:_ not by
- the century, or seven years, need he sleep; often not by the
- seven months. Fancy, for example, some new Peter Klaus, sated
- with the jubilee of that Federation day, had lain down, say
- directly after the Blessing of Talleyrand; and, reckoning it all
- safe _now_, had fallen composedly asleep under the timber-work of
- the Fatherland’s Altar; to sleep there, not twenty-one years, but
- as it were year and day. The cannonading of Nanci, so far off,
- does not disturb him; nor does the black mortcloth, close at
- hand, nor the requiems chanted, and minute guns, incense-pans and
- concourse right over his head: none of these; but Peter sleeps
- through them all. Through one circling year, as we say; from July
- 14th of 1790, till July the 17th of 1791: but on that latter day,
- no Klaus, nor most leaden Epimenides, only the Dead could
- continue sleeping; and so our miraculous Peter Klaus awakens.
- With what eyes, O Peter! Earth and sky have still their joyous
- July look, and the Champ-de-Mars is multitudinous with men: but
- the jubilee-huzzahing has become Bedlam-shrieking, of terror and
- revenge; not blessing of Talleyrand, or any blessing, but
- cursing, imprecation and shrill wail; our cannon-salvoes are
- turned to sharp shot; for swinging of incense-pans and
- Eighty-three Departmental Banners, we have waving of the one
- sanguinous _Drapeau-Rouge_.—Thou foolish Klaus! The one lay in
- the other, the one _was_ the other _minus_ Time; even as
- Hannibal’s rock-rending vinegar lay in the sweet new wine. That
- sweet Federation was of last year; this sour Divulsion is the
- self-same substance, only older by the appointed days.
-
- No miraculous Klaus or Epimenides sleeps in these times: and yet,
- may not many a man, if of due opacity and levity, act the same
- miracle in a natural way; we mean, with his eyes open? Eyes has
- he, but he sees not, except what is under his nose. With a
- sparkling briskness of glance, as if he not only saw but saw
- through, such a one goes whisking, assiduous, in his circle of
- officialities; not dreaming but that _it_ is the whole world: as,
- indeed, where your vision terminates, does not inanity begin
- _there_, and the world’s end clearly declares itself—to you?
- Whereby our brisk sparkling assiduous official person (call him,
- for instance, Lafayette), suddenly startled, after year and day,
- by huge grape-shot tumult, stares not less astonished at it than
- Peter Klaus would have done. Such natural-miracle Lafayette can
- perform; and indeed not he only but most other officials,
- non-officials, and generally the whole French People can perform
- it; and do bounce up, ever and anon, like amazed Seven-sleepers
- awakening; awakening amazed at the noise they themselves _make_.
- So strangely is Freedom, as we say, environed in Necessity; such
- a singular Somnambulism, of Conscious and Unconscious, of
- Voluntary and Involuntary, is this life of man. If any where in
- the world there was astonishment that the Federation Oath went
- into grape-shot, surely of all persons the French, first swearers
- and then shooters, felt astonished the most.
-
- Alas, offences must come. The sublime Feast of Pikes, with its
- effulgence of brotherly love, unknown since the Age of Gold, has
- changed nothing. That prurient heat in Twenty-five millions of
- hearts is not cooled thereby; but is still hot, nay hotter. Lift
- off the pressure of command from so many millions; all pressure
- or binding rule, except such melodramatic Federation Oath as they
- have bound _themselves_ with! For _Thou shalt_ was from of old
- the condition of man’s being, and his weal and blessedness was in
- obeying that. Wo for him when, were it on hest of the clearest
- necessity, rebellion, disloyal isolation, and mere _I will_,
- becomes his rule! But the Gospel of Jean-Jacques has come, and
- the first Sacrament of it has been celebrated: all things, as we
- say, are got into hot and hotter prurience; and must go on
- pruriently fermenting, in continual change noted or unnoted.
-
- “Worn out with disgusts,” Captain after Captain, in Royalist
- moustachioes, mounts his warhorse, or his Rozinante war-garron,
- and rides minatory across the Rhine; till all have ridden.
- Neither does civic Emigration cease: Seigneur after Seigneur
- must, in like manner, ride or roll; impelled to it, and even
- compelled. For the very Peasants despise him in that he dare not
- join his order and fight.[325] Can he bear to have a Distaff, a
- _Quenouille_ sent to him; say in copper-plate shadow, by post; or
- fixed up in wooden reality over his gate-lintel: as if he were no
- Hercules but an Omphale? Such scutcheon they forward to him
- diligently from behind the Rhine; till he too bestir himself and
- march, and in sour humour, another Lord of Land is gone, _not_
- taking the Land with him. Nay, what of Captains and emigrating
- Seigneurs? There is not an angry word on any of those Twenty-five
- million French tongues, and indeed not an angry thought in their
- hearts, but is some fraction of the great Battle. Add many
- successions of angry words together, you have the manual brawl;
- add brawls together, with the festering sorrows they leave, and
- they rise to riots and revolts. One reverend thing after another
- ceases to meet reverence: in visible material combustion, château
- after château mounts up; in spiritual invisible combustion, one
- authority after another. With noise and glare, or noisily and
- unnoted, a whole Old System of things is vanishing piecemeal: on
- the morrow thou shalt look and it is not.
-
-
- Chapter 2.3.II.
- The Wakeful.
-
- Sleep who will, cradled in hope and short vision, like Lafayette,
- “who always in the danger done sees the last danger that will
- threaten him,”—Time is not sleeping, nor Time’s seedfield.
-
- That sacred Herald’s-College of a _new_ Dynasty; we mean the
- Sixty and odd Billstickers with their leaden badges, are not
- sleeping. Daily they, with pastepot and cross-staff, new clothe
- the walls of Paris in colours of the rainbow: authoritative
- heraldic, as we say, or indeed almost magical thaumaturgic; for
- no Placard-Journal that they paste but will convince some soul or
- souls of man. The Hawkers bawl; and the Balladsingers: great
- Journalism blows and blusters, through all its throats, forth
- from Paris towards all corners of France, like an Aeolus’ Cave;
- keeping alive all manner of fires.
-
- Throats or Journals there are, as men count,[326] to the number
- of some hundred and thirty-three. Of various calibre; from your
- Chéniers, Gorsases, Camilles, down to your Marat, down now to
- your incipient Hébert of the _Père Duchesne;_ these blow, with
- fierce weight of argument or quick light banter, for the Rights
- of man: Durosoys, Royous, Peltiers, Sulleaus, equally with mixed
- tactics, inclusive, singular to say, of much profane Parody,[327]
- are blowing for Altar and Throne. As for Marat the
- People’s-Friend, his voice is as that of the bullfrog, or bittern
- by the solitary pools; he, unseen of men, croaks harsh thunder,
- and that alone continually,—of indignation, suspicion, incurable
- sorrow. The People are sinking towards ruin, near starvation
- itself: “My dear friends,” cries he, “your indigence is not the
- fruit of vices nor of idleness, you have a right to life, as good
- as Louis XVI., or the happiest of the century. What man can say
- he has a right to dine, when you have no bread?”[328] The People
- sinking on the one hand: on the other hand, nothing but wretched
- Sieur Motiers, treasonous Riquetti Mirabeaus; traitors, or else
- shadows, and simulacra of Quacks, to be seen in high places, look
- where you will! Men that go mincing, grimacing, with plausible
- speech and brushed raiment; hollow within: Quacks Political;
- Quacks scientific, Academical; all with a fellow-feeling for each
- other, and kind of Quack public-spirit! Not great Lavoisier
- himself, or any of the Forty can escape this rough tongue; which
- wants not fanatic sincerity, nor, strangest of all, a certain
- rough caustic sense. And then the “three thousand gaming-houses”
- that are in Paris; cesspools for the scoundrelism of the world;
- sinks of iniquity and debauchery,—whereas without good morals
- Liberty is impossible! There, in these Dens of Satan, which one
- knows, and perseveringly denounces, do Sieur Motier’s mouchards
- consort and colleague; battening vampyre-like on a People
- next-door to starvation. “_O Peuple!_” cries he oftimes, with
- heart-rending accent. Treason, delusion, vampyrism, scoundrelism,
- from Dan to Beersheba! The soul of Marat is sick with the sight:
- but what remedy? To erect “Eight Hundred gibbets,” in convenient
- rows, and proceed to hoisting; “Riquetti on the first of them!”
- Such is the brief recipe of Marat, Friend of the People.
-
- So blow and bluster the Hundred and thirty-three: nor, as would
- seem, are these sufficient; for there are benighted nooks in
- France, to which Newspapers do not reach; and every where is
- “such an appetite for news as was never seen in any country.” Let
- an expeditious Dampmartin, on furlough, set out to return home
- from Paris,[329] he cannot get along for “peasants stopping him
- on the highway; overwhelming him with questions:” the _Maître de
- Poste_ will not send out the horses till you have well nigh
- quarrelled with him, but asks always, What news? At Autun, “in
- spite of the rigorous frost” for it is now January, 1791, nothing
- will serve but you must gather your wayworn limbs, and thoughts,
- and “speak to the multitudes from a window opening into the
- market-place.” It is the shortest method: _This_, good Christian
- people, is verily what an August Assembly seemed to me to be
- doing; this and no other is the news;
-
- “Now my weary lips I close;
- Leave me, leave me to repose.”
-
-
- The good Dampmartin!—But, on the whole, are not Nations
- astonishingly true to their National character; which indeed runs
- in the blood? Nineteen hundred years ago, Julius Cæsar, with his
- quick sure eye, took note how the Gauls waylaid men. “It is a
- habit of theirs,” says he, “to stop travellers, were it even by
- constraint, and inquire whatsoever each of them may have heard or
- known about any sort of matter: in their towns, the common people
- beset the passing trader; demanding to hear from what regions he
- came, what things he got acquainted with there. Excited by which
- rumours and hearsays they will decide about the weightiest
- matters; and necessarily repent next moment that they did it, on
- such guidance of uncertain reports, and many a traveller
- answering with mere fictions to please them, and get off.”[330]
- Nineteen hundred years; and good Dampmartin, wayworn, in winter
- frost, probably with scant light of stars and fish-oil, still
- perorates from the Inn-window! This People is no longer called
- Gaulish; and it has _wholly_ become _braccatus_, has got
- breeches, and suffered change enough: certain fierce German
- _Franken_ came storming over; and, so to speak, vaulted on the
- back of it; and always after, in their grim tenacious way, have
- ridden it bridled; for German is, by his very name, _Guerre_-man,
- or man that _wars_ and _gars_. And so the People, as we say, is
- now called French or Frankish: nevertheless, does not the old
- Gaulish and Gaelic Celthood, with its vehemence, effervescent
- promptitude, and what good and ill it had, still vindicate itself
- little adulterated?—
-
- For the rest, that in such prurient confusion, Clubbism thrives
- and spreads, need not be said. Already the Mother of Patriotism,
- sitting in the Jacobins, shines supreme over all; and has paled
- the poor lunar light of that Monarchic Club near to final
- extinction. She, we say, shines supreme, girt with sun-light, not
- yet with infernal lightning; reverenced, not without fear, by
- Municipal Authorities; counting her Barnaves, Lameths, Pétions,
- of a National Assembly; most gladly of all, her Robespierre.
- Cordeliers, again, your Hébert, Vincent, Bibliopolist Momoro,
- groan audibly that a tyrannous Mayor and Sieur Motier harrow them
- with the sharp _tribula_ of Law, intent apparently to suppress
- them by tribulation. How the Jacobin Mother-Society, as hinted
- formerly, sheds forth Cordeliers on this hand, and then Feuillans
- on that; the Cordeliers on this hand, and then Feuillans on that;
- the Cordeliers “an elixir or double-distillation of Jacobin
- Patriotism;” the other a wide-spread weak dilution thereof; how
- she will re-absorb the former into her Mother-bosom, and
- stormfully dissipate the latter into Nonentity: how she breeds
- and brings forth Three Hundred Daughter-Societies; her rearing of
- them, her correspondence, her endeavourings and continual
- travail: how, under an old figure, Jacobinism shoots forth
- organic filaments to the utmost corners of confused dissolved
- France; organising it anew:—this properly is the grand fact of
- the Time.
-
- To passionate Constitutionalism, still more to Royalism, which
- see all their own Clubs fail and die, Clubbism will naturally
- grow to seem the root of all evil. Nevertheless Clubbism is not
- death, but rather new organisation, and life out of death:
- destructive, indeed, of the remnants of the Old; but to the New
- important, indispensable. That man can co-operate and hold
- communion with man, herein lies his miraculous strength. In hut
- or hamlet, Patriotism mourns not now like voice in the desert: it
- can walk to the nearest Town; and there, in the Daughter-Society,
- make its ejaculation into an articulate oration, into an action,
- guided forward by the Mother of Patriotism herself. All Clubs of
- Constitutionalists, and such like, fail, one after another, as
- shallow fountains: Jacobinism alone has gone down to the deep
- subterranean lake of waters; and may, unless _filled in_, flow
- there, copious, continual, like an Artesian well. Till the Great
- Deep have drained itself up: and all be flooded and submerged,
- and Noah’s Deluge out-deluged!
-
- On the other hand, Claude Fauchet, preparing mankind for a Golden
- Age now apparently just at hand, has opened his _Cercle Social_,
- with clerks, corresponding boards, and so forth; in the precincts
- of the Palais Royal. It is _Te-Deum_ Fauchet; the same who
- preached on Franklin’s Death, in that huge Medicean rotunda of
- the _Halle aux bleds_. He here, this winter, by Printing-press
- and melodious Colloquy, spreads bruit of himself to the utmost
- City-barriers. “Ten thousand persons” of respectability attend
- there; and listen to this “_Procureur-Général de la Vérité_,
- Attorney-General of Truth,” so has he dubbed himself; to his sage
- Condorcet, or other eloquent coadjutor. Eloquent
- Attorney-General! He blows out from him, better or worse, what
- crude or ripe thing he holds: not without result to himself; for
- it leads to a Bishoprick, though only a Constitutional one.
- Fauchet approves himself a glib-tongued, strong-lunged,
- whole-hearted human individual: much flowing matter there is, and
- really of the better sort, about Right, Nature, Benevolence,
- Progress; which flowing matter, whether “it is pantheistic,” or
- is pot-theistic, only the greener mind, in these days, need read.
- Busy Brissot was long ago of purpose to establish precisely some
- such regenerative _Social Circle:_ nay he had tried it, in
- “Newman-street Oxford-street,” of the Fog Babylon; and failed,—as
- some say, surreptitiously pocketing the cash. Fauchet, not
- Brissot, was fated to be the happy man; whereat, however,
- generous Brissot will with sincere heart sing a timber-toned
- _Nunc Domine_.[331] But “ten thousand persons of respectability:”
- what a bulk have many things in proportion to their magnitude!
- This _Cercle Social_, for which Brissot chants in sincere
- timber-tones such _Nunc Domine_, what is it? Unfortunately wind
- and shadow. The main reality one finds in it now, is perhaps
- this: that an “Attorney-General of Truth” did once take shape of
- a body, as Son of Adam, on our Earth, though but for months or
- moments; and ten thousand persons of respectability attended, ere
- yet Chaos and Nox had reabsorbed him.
-
- Hundred and thirty-three Paris Journals; regenerative Social
- Circle; oratory, in Mother and Daughter Societies, from the
- balconies of Inns, by chimney-nook, at dinner-table,—polemical,
- ending many times in duel! Add ever, like a constant growling
- accompaniment of bass Discord: scarcity of work, scarcity of
- food. The winter is hard and cold; ragged Bakers’-queues, like a
- black tattered flag-of-distress, wave out ever and anon. It is
- the third of our Hunger-years this new year of a glorious
- Revolution. The rich man when invited to dinner, in such
- distress-seasons, feels bound in politeness to carry his own
- bread in his pocket: how the poor dine? And your glorious
- Revolution has done it, cries one. And our glorious Revolution is
- subtilety, by black traitors worthy of the Lamp-iron, _perverted_
- to do it, cries another! Who will paint the huge whirlpool
- wherein France, all shivered into wild incoherence, whirls? The
- jarring that went on under every French roof, in every French
- heart; the diseased things that were spoken, done, the sum-total
- whereof is the French Revolution, tongue of man cannot tell. Nor
- the laws of action that work unseen in the depths of that huge
- blind Incoherence! With amazement, not with measurement, men look
- on the Immeasurable; not knowing its laws; _seeing_, with all
- different degrees of knowledge, what new phases, and results of
- event, its laws bring forth. France is as a monstrous Galvanic
- Mass, wherein all sorts of far stranger than chemical galvanic or
- electric forces and substances are at work; electrifying one
- another, positive and negative; filling with electricity your
- Leyden-jars,—Twenty-five millions in number! As the jars get
- full, there will, from time to time, be, on slight hint, an
- explosion.
-
-
- Chapter 2.3.III.
- Sword in Hand.
-
- On such wonderful basis, however, has Law, Royalty, Authority,
- and whatever yet exists of visible Order, to maintain itself,
- while it can. Here, as in that Commixture of the Four Elements
- did the Anarch Old, has an august Assembly spread its pavilion;
- curtained by the dark infinite of discords; founded on the
- wavering bottomless of the Abyss; and keeps continual hubbub.
- Time is around it, and Eternity, and the Inane; and it does what
- it can, what is given it to do.
-
- Glancing reluctantly in, once more, we discern little that is
- edifying: a Constitutional Theory of Defective Verbs struggling
- forward, with perseverance, amid endless interruptions: Mirabeau,
- from his tribune, with the weight of his name and genius, awing
- down much Jacobin violence; which in return vents itself the
- louder over in its Jacobins Hall, and even reads him sharp
- lectures there.[332] This man’s path is mysterious, questionable;
- difficult, and he walks without companion in it. Pure Patriotism
- does not now count him among her chosen; pure Royalism abhors
- him: yet his weight with the world is overwhelming. Let him
- travel on, companionless, unwavering, whither he is bound,—while
- it is yet day with him, and the night has not come.
-
- But the chosen band of pure Patriot brothers is small; counting
- only some Thirty, seated now on the extreme tip of the Left,
- separate from the world. A virtuous Pétion; an incorruptible
- Robespierre, most consistent, incorruptible of thin acrid men;
- Triumvirs Barnave, Duport, Lameth, great in speech, thought,
- action, each according to his kind; a lean old Goupil de Prefeln:
- on these and what will follow them has pure Patriotism to depend.
-
- There too, conspicuous among the Thirty, if seldom audible,
- Philippe d’Orléans may be seen sitting: in dim fuliginous
- bewilderment; having, one might say, _arrived_ at Chaos! Gleams
- there are, at once of a Lieutenancy and Regency; debates in the
- Assembly itself, of succession to the Throne “in case the present
- Branch should fail;” and Philippe, they say, walked anxiously, in
- silence, through the corridors, till such high argument were
- done: but it came all to nothing; Mirabeau, glaring into the man,
- and through him, had to ejaculate in strong untranslatable
- language: _Ce j—f—ne vaut pas la peine qu’on se donne pour lui_.
- It came all to nothing; and in the meanwhile Philippe’s money,
- they say, is gone! Could he refuse a little cash to the gifted
- Patriot, in want only of that; he himself in want of all _but_
- that? Not a pamphlet can be printed without cash; or indeed
- written, without food purchasable by cash. Without cash your
- hopefullest Projector cannot stir from the spot: individual
- patriotic or other Projects require cash: how much more do
- wide-spread Intrigues, which live and exist by cash; lying
- widespread, with dragon-appetite for cash; fit to swallow
- Princedoms! And so Prince Philippe, amid his Sillerys, Lacloses,
- and confused Sons of Night, has rolled along: the centre of the
- strangest cloudy coil; out of which has visibly come, as we often
- say, an Epic Preternatural Machinery of SUSPICION; and _within_
- which there has dwelt and worked,—what specialties of treason,
- stratagem, aimed or aimless endeavour towards mischief, no party
- living (if it be not the Presiding Genius of it, Prince of the
- Power of the Air) has now any chance to know. Camille’s
- conjecture is the likeliest: that poor Philippe did mount up, a
- little way, in treasonable speculation, as he mounted formerly in
- one of the earliest Balloons; but, frightened at the new position
- he was getting into, had soon turned the cock again, and come
- down. More fool than he rose! To create Preternatural Suspicion,
- this was his function in the Revolutionary Epos. But now if he
- have lost his cornucopia of ready-money, what else had he to
- lose? In thick darkness, inward and outward, he must welter and
- flounder on, in that piteous death-element, the hapless man.
- Once, or even twice, we shall still behold him emerged;
- struggling out of the thick death-element: in vain. For one
- moment, it is the last moment, he starts aloft, or is flung
- aloft, even into clearness and a kind of memorability,—to sink
- then for evermore!
-
- The _Côté Droit_ persists no less; nay with more animation than
- ever, though hope has now well nigh fled. Tough Abbé Maury, when
- the obscure country Royalist grasps his hand with transport of
- thanks, answers, rolling his indomitable brazen head: ‘_Hélas,
- Monsieur_, all that I do here is as good as simply _nothing_.’
- Gallant Faussigny, visible this one time in History, advances
- frantic, into the middle of the Hall, exclaiming: ‘There is but
- one way of dealing with it, and that is to fall sword in hand on
- those gentry there, _sabre à la main sur ces gaillards là_,’[333]
- franticly indicating our chosen Thirty on the extreme tip of the
- Left! Whereupon is clangour and clamour, debate,
- repentance,—evaporation. Things ripen towards downright
- incompatibility, and what is called “scission:” that fierce
- theoretic onslaught of Faussigny’s was in August, 1790; next
- August will not have come, till a famed Two Hundred and
- Ninety-two, the chosen of Royalism, make solemn final “scission”
- from an Assembly given up to faction; and depart, shaking the
- dust off their feet.
-
- Connected with this matter of sword in hand, there is yet another
- thing to be noted. Of duels we have sometimes spoken: how, in all
- parts of France, innumerable duels were fought; and argumentative
- men and messmates, flinging down the wine-cup and weapons of
- reason and repartee, met in the measured field; to part bleeding;
- or perhaps _not_ to part, but to fall mutually skewered through
- with iron, their wrath and life alike ending,—and die as fools
- die. Long has this lasted, and still lasts. But now it would seem
- as if in an august Assembly itself, traitorous Royalism, in its
- despair, had taken to a new course: that of cutting off
- Patriotism by systematic duel! Bully-swordsmen, “_Spadassins_” of
- that party, go swaggering; or indeed they can be had for a trifle
- of money. “Twelve _Spadassins_” were _seen_, by the yellow eye of
- Journalism, “arriving recently out of Switzerland;” also “a
- considerable number of Assassins, _nombre considérable
- d’assassins_, exercising in fencing-schools and at
- pistol-targets.” Any Patriot Deputy of mark can be called out;
- let him escape one time, or ten times, a time there necessarily
- is when he must fall, and France mourn. How many cartels has
- Mirabeau had; especially while he was the People’s champion!
- Cartels by the hundred: which he, since the Constitution must be
- made first, and his time is precious, answers now always with a
- kind of stereotype formula: ‘Monsieur, you are put upon my List;
- but I warn you that it is long, and I grant no preferences.’
-
- Then, in Autumn, had we not the Duel of Cazalès and Barnave; the
- two chief masters of tongue-shot meeting now to exchange
- pistol-shot? For Cazalès, chief of the Royalists, whom we call
- “Blacks or _Noirs_,” said, in a moment of passion, ‘the Patriots
- were sheer Brigands,’ nay in so speaking, he darted or seemed to
- dart, a fire-glance specially at Barnave; who thereupon could not
- but reply by fire-glances,—by adjournment to the
- Bois-de-Boulogne. Barnave’s second shot took effect: on Cazalès’s
- _hat_. The “front nook” of a triangular Felt, such as mortals
- then wore, deadened the ball; and saved that fine brow from more
- than temporary injury. But how easily might the lot have fallen
- the other way, and Barnave’s hat not been so good! Patriotism
- raises its loud denunciation of Duelling in general; petitions an
- august Assembly to stop such Feudal barbarism by law. Barbarism
- and solecism: for will it convince or convict any man to blow
- half an ounce of lead through the head of him? Surely
- not.—Barnave was received at the Jacobins with embraces, yet with
- rebukes.
-
- Mindful of which, and also that his repetition in America was
- that of headlong foolhardiness rather, and want of brain not of
- heart, Charles Lameth does, on the eleventh day of November, with
- little emotion, decline attending some hot young Gentleman from
- Artois, come expressly to challenge him: nay indeed he first
- coldly engages to attend; then coldly permits two Friends to
- attend instead of him, and shame the young Gentleman out of it,
- which they successfully do. A cold procedure; satisfactory to the
- two Friends, to Lameth and the hot young Gentleman; whereby, one
- might have fancied, the whole matter was cooled down.
-
- Not so, however: Lameth, proceeding to his senatorial duties, in
- the decline of the day, is met in those Assembly corridors by
- nothing but Royalist _brocards;_ sniffs, huffs, and open insults.
- Human patience has its limits: ‘Monsieur,’ said Lameth, breaking
- silence to one Lautrec, a man with hunchback, or natural
- deformity, but sharp of tongue, and a _Black_ of the deepest
- tint, ‘Monsieur, if you were a man to be fought with!’—‘I am
- one,’ cries the young Duke de Castries. Fast as fire-flash Lameth
- replies, ‘_Tout à l’heure_, On the instant, then!’ And so, as the
- shades of dusk thicken in that Bois-de-Boulogne, we behold two
- men with lion-look, with alert attitude, side foremost, right
- foot advanced; flourishing and thrusting, stoccado and passado,
- in tierce and quart; intent to skewer one another. See, with most
- skewering purpose, headlong Lameth, with his whole weight, makes
- a furious lunge; but deft Castries whisks aside: Lameth skewers
- only the air,—and slits deep and far, on Castries’ sword’s-point,
- his own extended left arm! Whereupon with bleeding, pallor,
- surgeon’s-lint, and formalities, the Duel is considered
- satisfactorily done.
-
- But will there be no end, then? Beloved Lameth lies deep-slit,
- not out of danger. Black traitorous Aristocrats kill the People’s
- defenders, cut up not with arguments, but with rapier-slits. And
- the Twelve _Spadassins_ out of Switzerland, and the considerable
- number of Assassins exercising at the pistol-target? So meditates
- and ejaculates hurt Patriotism, with ever-deepening ever-widening
- fervour, for the space of six and thirty hours.
-
- The thirty-six hours past, on Saturday the 13th, one beholds a
- new spectacle: The Rue de Varennes, and neighbouring Boulevard
- des Invalides, covered with a mixed flowing multitude: the
- Castries Hotel gone distracted, devil-ridden, belching from every
- window, “beds with clothes and curtains,” plate of silver and
- gold with filigree, mirrors, pictures, images, commodes,
- chiffoniers, and endless crockery and jingle: amid steady popular
- cheers, absolutely without theft; for there goes a cry, ‘He shall
- be hanged that steals a nail!’ It is a _Plebiscitum_, or informal
- iconoclastic Decree of the Common People, in the course of being
- executed!—The Municipality sit tremulous; deliberating whether
- they will hang out the _Drapeau Rouge_ and Martial Law: National
- Assembly, part in loud wail, part in hardly suppressed applause:
- Abbé Maury unable to decide whether the iconoclastic Plebs amount
- to forty thousand or to two hundred thousand.
-
- Deputations, swift messengers, for it is at a distance over the
- River, come and go. Lafayette and National Guardes, though
- without _Drapeau Rouge_, get under way; apparently in no hot
- haste. Nay, arrived on the scene, Lafayette salutes with doffed
- hat, before ordering to fix bayonets. What avails it? The
- Plebeian ‘Court of _Cassation_,’ as Camille might punningly name
- it, has done its work; steps forth, with unbuttoned vest, with
- pockets turned inside out: sack, and just ravage, not plunder!
- With inexhaustible patience, the Hero of two Worlds remonstrates;
- persuasively, with a kind of sweet constraint, though also with
- fixed bayonets, dissipates, hushes down: on the morrow it is once
- more all as usual.
-
- Considering which things, however, Duke Castries may justly
- “write to the President,” justly transport himself across the
- Marches; to raise a corps, or do what else is in him. Royalism
- totally abandons that Bobadilian method of contest, and the
- Twelve _Spadassins_ return to Switzerland,—or even to Dreamland
- through the Horn-gate, whichsoever their home is. Nay Editor
- Prudhomme is authorised to publish a curious thing: “We are
- authorised to publish,” says he, dull-blustering Publisher, that
- M. Boyer, champion of good Patriots, is at the head of Fifty
- _Spadassinicides_ or Bully-_killers_. His address is: Passage du
- Bois-de-Boulonge, Faubourg St. Denis.”[334] One of the strangest
- Institutes, this of Champion Boyer and the Bully-killers! Whose
- services, however, are not wanted; Royalism having abandoned the
- rapier-method as plainly impracticable.
-
-
- Chapter 2.3.IV.
- To fly or not to fly.
-
- The truth is Royalism sees itself verging towards sad
- extremities; nearer and nearer daily. From over the Rhine it
- comes asserted that the King in his Tuileries is not free: this
- the poor King may contradict, with the official mouth, but in his
- heart feels often to be undeniable. Civil Constitution of the
- Clergy; Decree of ejectment against Dissidents from it: not even
- to this latter, though almost his conscience rebels, can he say
- “Nay; but, after two months’ hesitating, signs this also. It was
- on January 21st,” of this 1790, that he signed it; to the sorrow
- of his poor/ heart yet, on _another_ Twenty-first of January!
- Whereby come Dissident ejected Priests; unconquerable Martyrs
- according to some, incurable chicaning Traitors according to
- others. And so there has arrived what we once foreshadowed: with
- Religion, or with the Cant and Echo of Religion, all France is
- rent asunder in a new rupture of continuity; complicating,
- embittering all the older;—to be cured only, by stern surgery, in
- La Vendée!
-
- Unhappy Royalty, unhappy Majesty, Hereditary (Representative),
- _Représentant Héréditaire_, or however they can name him; of whom
- much is expected, to whom little is given! Blue National Guards
- encircle that Tuileries; a Lafayette, thin constitutional Pedant;
- clear, thin, inflexible, as water, turned to thin ice; whom no
- Queen’s heart can love. National Assembly, its pavilion spread
- where we know, sits near by, keeping continual hubbub. From
- without nothing but Nanci Revolts, sack of Castries Hotels, riots
- and seditions; riots, North and South, at Aix, at Douai, at
- Béfort, Usez, Perpignan, at Nismes, and that incurable Avignon of
- the Pope’s: a continual crackling and sputtering of riots from
- the whole face of France;—testifying how electric it grows. Add
- only the hard winter, the famished _strikes_ of operatives; that
- continual running-bass of Scarcity, ground-tone and basis of all
- other Discords!
-
- The plan of Royalty, so far as it can be said to have any fixed
- plan, is still, as ever, that of flying towards the frontiers. In
- very truth, the only plan of the smallest promise for it! Fly to
- Bouillé; bristle yourself round with cannon, served by your
- “forty-thousand undebauched Germans:” summon the National
- Assembly to follow you, summon what of it is Royalist,
- Constitutional, gainable by money; dissolve the rest, by
- grapeshot if need be. Let Jacobinism and Revolt, with one wild
- wail, fly into Infinite Space; driven by grapeshot. Thunder over
- France with the cannon’s mouth; commanding, not entreating, that
- this riot cease. And then to rule afterwards with utmost possible
- Constitutionality; doing justice, loving mercy; _being_ Shepherd
- of this indigent People, not Shearer merely, and
- Shepherd’s-similitude! All this, if ye dare. If ye dare not, then
- in Heaven’s name go to sleep: other handsome alternative seems
- none.
-
- Nay, it were perhaps possible; with a man to do it. For if such
- inexpressible whirlpool of Babylonish confusions (which our Era
- is) cannot be stilled by man, but only by Time and men, a man may
- moderate its paroxysms, may balance and sway, and keep himself
- unswallowed on the top of it,—as several men and Kings in these
- days do. Much is possible for a man; men will obey a man that
- _kens_ and _cans_, and name him reverently their _Ken-ning_ or
- King. Did not Charlemagne rule? Consider too whether he had
- smooth times of it; hanging “thirty-thousand Saxons over the
- Weser-Bridge,” at one dread swoop! So likewise, who knows but, in
- this same distracted fanatic France, the right man may verily
- exist? An olive-complexioned taciturn man; for the present,
- Lieutenant in the Artillery-service, who once sat studying
- Mathematics at Brienne? The same who walked in the morning to
- correct proof-sheets at Dôle, and enjoyed a frugal breakfast with
- M. Joly? Such a one is gone, whither also famed General Paoli his
- friend is gone, in these very days, to see old scenes in native
- Corsica, and what Democratic good can be done there.
-
- Royalty never executes the evasion-plan, yet never abandons it;
- living in variable hope; undecisive, till fortune shall decide.
- In utmost secrecy, a brisk Correspondence goes on with Bouillé;
- there is also a plot, which emerges more than once, for carrying
- the King to Rouen:[335] plot after plot, emerging and submerging,
- like “_ignes fatui_ in foul weather, which lead no whither. About
- “ten o’clock at night,” the Hereditary Representative, in _partie
- quarrée_, with the Queen, with Brother Monsieur, and Madame, sits
- playing “_wisk_,” or whist. Usher Campan enters mysteriously,
- with a message he only half comprehends: How a certain Compte
- d’Inisdal waits anxious in the outer antechamber; National
- Colonel, Captain of the watch for this night, is gained over;
- post-horses ready all the way; party of Noblesse sitting armed,
- determined; will His Majesty, before midnight, consent to go?
- Profound silence; Campan waiting with upturned ear. ‘Did your
- Majesty hear what Campan said?’ asks the Queen. ‘Yes, I heard,’
- answers Majesty, and plays on. ‘’Twas a pretty couplet, that of
- Campan’s,’ hints Monsieur, who at times showed a pleasant wit:
- Majesty, still unresponsive, plays wisk. ‘After all, one must say
- something to Campan,’ remarks the Queen. ‘Tell M. d’Inisdal,’
- said the King, and the Queen puts an emphasis on it, ‘that the
- King cannot _consent_ to be forced away.’—‘I see!’ said
- d’Inisdal, whisking round, peaking himself into flame of
- irritancy: ‘we have the risk; we are to have all the blame if it
- fail,’[336]—and vanishes, he and his plot, as will-o’-wisps do.
- The Queen sat till far in the night, packing jewels: but it came
- to nothing; in that peaked frame of irritancy the Will-o’-wisp
- had gone _out_.
-
- Little hope there is in all this. Alas, with whom to fly? Our
- loyal _Gardes-du-Corps_, ever since the Insurrection of Women,
- are disbanded; gone to their homes; gone, many of them, across
- the Rhine towards Coblentz and Exiled Princes: brave Miomandre
- and brave Tardivet, these faithful Two, have received, in
- nocturnal interview with both Majesties, their _viaticum_ of gold
- louis, of heartfelt thanks from a Queen’s lips, though unluckily
- “his Majesty stood, back to fire, not speaking;”[337] and do now
- dine through the Provinces; recounting hairsbreadth escapes,
- insurrectionary horrors. Great horrors; to be swallowed yet of
- greater. But on the whole what a falling off from the old
- splendour of Versailles! Here in this poor Tuileries, a National
- Brewer-Colonel, sonorous Santerre, parades officially behind her
- Majesty’s chair. Our high dignitaries, all fled over the Rhine:
- nothing now to be gained at Court; but hopes, for which life
- itself must be risked! Obscure busy men frequent the back stairs;
- with hearsays, wind projects, unfruitful fanfaronades. Young
- Royalists, at the _Théâtre de Vaudeville_, “sing couplets;” if
- that could do any thing. Royalists enough, Captains on furlough,
- burnt-out Seigneurs, may likewise be met with, “in the Café de
- Valois, and at Méot the Restaurateur’s.” There they fan one
- another into high loyal glow; drink, in such wine as can be
- procured, confusion to Sansculottism; shew purchased dirks, of an
- improved structure, made to order; and, greatly daring,
- dine.[338] It is in these places, in these months, that the
- epithet _Sansculotte_ first gets applied to indigent Patriotism;
- in the last age we had Gilbert _Sansculotte_, the indigent
- Poet.[339] Destitute-of-Breeches: a mournful Destitution; which
- however, if Twenty millions share it, may become more effective
- than most Possessions!
-
- Meanwhile, amid this vague dim whirl of fanfaronades,
- wind-projects, poniards made to order, there does disclose itself
- one _punctum-saliens_ of life and feasibility: the finger of
- Mirabeau! Mirabeau and the Queen of France have met; have parted
- with mutual trust! It is strange; secret as the Mysteries; but it
- is indubitable. Mirabeau took horse, one evening; and rode
- westward, unattended,—to see Friend Clavière in that country
- house of his? Before getting to Clavière’s, the much-musing
- horseman struck aside to a back gate of the Garden of
- Saint-Cloud: some Duke d’Aremberg, or the like, was there to
- introduce him; the Queen was not far: on a “round knoll, _rond
- point_, the highest of the Garden of Saint-Cloud,” he beheld the
- Queen’s face; spake with her, alone, under the void canopy of
- Night. What an interview; fateful secret for us, after all
- searching; like the colloquies of the gods![340] She called him
- “a Mirabeau:” elsewhere we read that she “was charmed with him,”
- the wild submitted Titan; as indeed it is among the honourable
- tokens of this high ill-fated heart that no mind of any
- endowment, no Mirabeau, nay no Barnave, no Dumouriez, ever came
- face to face with her but, in spite of all prepossessions, she
- was forced to recognise it, to draw nigh to it, with trust. High
- imperial heart; with the instinctive attraction towards all that
- had any height! ‘You know not the Queen,’ said Mirabeau once in
- confidence; ‘her force of mind is prodigious; she is a man for
- courage.’[341]—And so, under the void Night, on the crown of that
- knoll, she has spoken with a Mirabeau: he has kissed loyally the
- queenly hand, and said with enthusiasm: ‘Madame, the Monarchy is
- saved!’—Possible? The Foreign Powers, mysteriously sounded, gave
- favourable guarded response;[342] Bouillé is at Metz, and could
- find forty-thousand sure Germans. With a Mirabeau for head, and a
- Bouillé for hand, something verily is possible,—if Fate intervene
- not.
-
- But figure under what thousandfold wrappages, and cloaks of
- darkness, Royalty, meditating these things, must involve itself.
- There are men with “Tickets of Entrance;” there are chivalrous
- consultings, mysterious plottings. Consider also whether, involve
- as it like, plotting Royalty can escape the glance of Patriotism;
- lynx-eyes, by the ten thousand fixed on it, which see in the
- dark! Patriotism knows much: know the dirks made to order, and
- can specify the shops; knows Sieur Motier’s legions of mouchards;
- the Tickets of _Entrée_, and men in black; and how plan of
- evasion succeeds plan,—or may be supposed to succeed it. Then
- conceive the couplets chanted at the _Théâtre de Vaudeville;_ or
- worse, the whispers, significant nods of traitors in moustaches.
- Conceive, on the other hand, the loud cry of alarm that came
- through the Hundred-and-Thirty Journals; the Dionysius’-Ear of
- each of the Forty-eight Sections, wakeful night and day.
-
- Patriotism is patient of much; not patient of all. The _Café de
- Procope_ has sent, visibly along the streets, a Deputation of
- Patriots, “to expostulate with bad Editors,” by trustful word of
- mouth: singular to see and hear. The bad Editors promise to
- amend, but do not. Deputations for change of Ministry were many;
- Mayor Bailly joining even with Cordelier Danton in such: and they
- have prevailed. With what profit? Of Quacks, willing or
- constrained to be Quacks, the race is everlasting: Ministers
- Duportail and Dutertre will have to manage much as Ministers
- Latour-du-Pin and Cicé did. So welters the confused world.
-
- But now, beaten on for ever by such inextricable contradictory
- influences and evidences, what is the indigent French Patriot, in
- these unhappy days, to believe, and walk by? Uncertainty all;
- except that he is wretched, indigent; that a glorious Revolution,
- the wonder of the Universe, has hitherto brought neither Bread
- nor Peace; being marred by traitors, difficult to discover.
- Traitors that dwell in the dark, invisible there;—or seen for
- moments, in pallid dubious twilight, stealthily vanishing
- thither! Preternatural Suspicion once more rules the minds of
- men.
-
- “Nobody here,” writes Carra of the _Annales Patriotiques_, so
- early as the first of February, “can entertain a doubt of the
- constant obstinate project these people have on foot to get the
- King away; or of the perpetual succession of manœuvres they
- employ for that.” Nobody: the watchful Mother of Patriotism
- deputed two Members to her Daughter at Versailles, to examine how
- the matter looked there. Well, and there? Patriotic Carra
- continues: “The Report of these two deputies we all heard with
- our own ears last Saturday. They went with others of Versailles,
- to inspect the King’s Stables, also the stables of the whilom
- _Gardes du Corps;_ they found there from seven to eight hundred
- horses standing always saddled and bridled, ready for the road at
- a moment’s notice. The same deputies, moreover, saw with their
- own two eyes several Royal Carriages, which men were even then
- busy loading with large well-stuffed luggage-bags,” leather cows,
- as we call them, “_vaches de cuir;_ the Royal Arms on the panels
- almost entirely effaced.” Momentous enough! Also, “on the same
- day the whole _Maréchaussée_, or Cavalry Police, did assemble
- with arms, horses and baggage,”—and disperse again. They want the
- King over the marches, that so Emperor Leopold and the German
- Princes, whose troops are ready, may have a pretext for
- beginning: “this,” adds Carra, “is the word of the riddle: this
- is the reason why our fugitive Aristocrats are now making levies
- of men on the frontiers; expecting that, one of these mornings,
- the Executive Chief Magistrate will be brought over to them, and
- the civil war commence.”[343]
-
- If indeed the Executive Chief Magistrate, bagged, say in one of
- these leather _cows_, were once brought safe over to them! But
- the strangest thing of all is that Patriotism, whether barking at
- a venture, or guided by some instinct of preternatural sagacity,
- is actually barking _aright_ this time; at something, not at
- nothing. Bouillé’s Secret Correspondence, since made public,
- testifies as much.
-
- Nay, it is undeniable, visible to all, that _Mesdames_ the King’s
- Aunts are taking steps for departure: asking passports of the
- Ministry, safe-conducts of the Municipality; which Marat warns
- all men to beware of. They will carry gold with them, “these old
- _Béguines;_” nay they will carry the little Dauphin, “having
- nursed a changeling, for some time, to leave in his stead!”
- Besides, they are as some light substance flung up, to shew how
- the wind sits; a kind of proof-kite you fly off to ascertain
- whether the grand paper-kite, Evasion of the King, may mount!
-
- In these alarming circumstances, Patriotism is not wanting to
- itself. Municipality deputes to the King; Sections depute to the
- Municipality; a National Assembly will soon stir. Meanwhile,
- behold, on the 19th of February 1791, Mesdames, quitting Bellevue
- and Versailles with all privacy, are off! Towards Rome,
- seemingly; or one knows not whither. They are not without King’s
- passports, countersigned; and what is more to the purpose, a
- serviceable Escort. The Patriotic Mayor or Mayorlet of the
- Village of Moret tried to detain them; but brisk Louis de
- Narbonne, of the Escort, dashed off at hand-gallop; returned soon
- with thirty dragoons, and victoriously cut them out. And so the
- poor ancient women go their way; to the terror of France and
- Paris, whose nervous excitability is become extreme. Who else
- would hinder poor _Loque_ and _Graille_, now grown so old, and
- fallen into such unexpected circumstances, when gossip itself
- turning only on terrors and horrors is no longer pleasant to the
- mind, and you cannot get so much as an orthodox confessor in
- peace,—from going what way soever the hope of any solacement
- might lead them?
-
- They go, poor ancient dames,—whom the heart were hard that does
- not pity: they go; with palpitations, with unmelodious suppressed
- screechings; all France, screeching and cackling, in loud
- _un_suppressed terror, behind and on both hands of them: such
- mutual suspicion is among men. At Arnay le Duc, above halfway to
- the frontiers, a Patriotic Municipality and Populace again takes
- courage to stop them: Louis Narbonne must now back to Paris, must
- consult the National Assembly. National Assembly answers, not
- without an effort, that Mesdames may go. Whereupon Paris rises
- worse than ever, screeching half-distracted. Tuileries and
- precincts are filled with women and men, while the National
- Assembly debates this question of questions; Lafayette is needed
- at night for dispersing them, and the streets are to be
- illuminated. Commandant Berthier, a Berthier before whom are
- great things unknown, lies for the present under blockade at
- Bellevue in Versailles. By no tactics could he get Mesdames’
- Luggage stirred from the Courts there; frantic Versaillese women
- came screaming about him; his very troops cut the waggon-traces;
- he retired to the interior, waiting better times.[344]
-
- Nay, in these same hours, while Mesdames hardly cut out from
- Moret by the sabre’s edge, are driving rapidly, to foreign parts,
- and not yet stopped at Arnay, their august nephew poor Monsieur,
- at Paris has dived deep into his cellars of the Luxembourg for
- shelter; and according to Montgaillard can hardly be persuaded up
- again. Screeching multitudes environ that Luxembourg of his:
- drawn thither by report of his departure: but, at sight and sound
- of Monsieur, they become crowing multitudes; and escort Madame
- and him to the Tuileries with vivats.[345] It is a state of
- nervous excitability such as few Nations know.
-
-
- Chapter 2.3.V.
- The Day of Poniards.
-
- Or, again, what means this visible reparation of the Castle of
- Vincennes? Other Jails being all crowded with prisoners, new
- space is wanted here: that is the Municipal account. For in such
- changing of Judicatures, Parlements being abolished, and New
- Courts but just set up, prisoners have accumulated. Not to say
- that in these times of discord and club-law, offences and
- committals are, at any rate, more numerous. Which Municipal
- account, does it not sufficiently explain the phenomenon? Surely,
- to repair the Castle of Vincennes was of all enterprises that an
- enlightened Municipality could undertake, the most innocent.
-
- Not so however does neighbouring Saint-Antoine look on it:
- Saint-Antoine to whom these peaked turrets and grim donjons,
- all-too near her own dark dwelling, are of themselves an offence.
- Was not Vincennes a kind of minor Bastille? Great Diderot and
- Philosophes have lain in durance here; great Mirabeau, in
- disastrous eclipse, for forty-two months. And now when the old
- Bastille has become a dancing-ground (had any one the mirth to
- dance), and its stones are getting built into the Pont
- Louis-Seize, does this minor, comparative insignificance of a
- Bastille flank itself with fresh-hewn mullions, spread out
- tyrannous wings; menacing Patriotism? New space for prisoners:
- and what prisoners? A d’Orléans, with the chief Patriots on the
- tip of the Left? It is said, there runs “a subterranean passage”
- all the way from the Tuileries hither. Who knows? Paris, mined
- with quarries and catacombs, does hang wondrous over the abyss;
- Paris was once to be blown up,—though the powder, when we went to
- look, had got withdrawn. A Tuileries, sold to Austria and
- Coblentz, should have no subterranean passage. Out of which might
- not Coblentz or Austria issue, some morning; and, with cannon of
- long range, “_foudroyer_,” bethunder a patriotic Saint-Antoine
- into smoulder and ruin!
-
- So meditates the benighted soul of Saint-Antoine, as it sees the
- aproned workmen, in early spring, busy on these towers. An
- official-speaking Municipality, a Sieur Motier with his legions
- of _mouchards_, deserve no trust at all. Were Patriot Santerre,
- indeed, Commander! But the sonorous Brewer commands only our own
- Battalion: of such secrets he can explain nothing, knows nothing,
- perhaps suspects much. And so the work goes on; and afflicted
- benighted Saint-Antoine hears rattle of hammers, sees stones
- suspended in air.[346]
-
- Saint-Antoine prostrated the first great Bastille: will it falter
- over this comparative insignificance of a Bastille? Friends, what
- if we took pikes, firelocks, sledgehammers; and helped
- ourselves!—Speedier is no remedy; nor so certain. On the 28th day
- of February, Saint-Antoine turns out, as it has now often done;
- and, apparently with little superfluous tumult, moves eastward to
- that eye-sorrow of Vincennes. With grave voice of authority, no
- need of bullying and shouting, Saint-Antoine signifies to parties
- concerned there that its purpose is, To have this suspicious
- Stronghold razed level with the general soil of the country.
- Remonstrance may be proffered, with zeal: but it avails not. The
- outer gate goes up, drawbridges tumble; iron window-stanchions,
- smitten out with sledgehammers, become iron-crowbars: it rains
- furniture, stone-masses, slates: with chaotic clatter and rattle,
- Demolition clatters down. And now hasty expresses rush through
- the agitated streets, to warn Lafayette, and the Municipal and
- Departmental Authorities; Rumour warns a National Assembly, a
- Royal Tuileries, and all men who care to hear it: That
- Saint-Antoine is up; that Vincennes, and probably the last
- remaining Institution of the Country, is coming down.[347]
-
- Quick, then! Let Lafayette roll his drums and fly eastward; for
- to all Constitutional Patriots this is again bad news. And you,
- ye Friends of Royalty, snatch your poniards of improved
- structure, made to order; your sword-canes, secret arms, and
- tickets of entry; quick, by backstairs passages, rally round the
- Son of Sixty Kings. An effervescence probably got up by d’Orléans
- and Company, for the overthrow of Throne and Altar: it is said
- her Majesty shall be put in prison, put out of the way; what then
- will _his_ Majesty be? Clay for the Sansculottic Potter! Or were
- it impossible to fly this day; a brave Noblesse suddenly all
- rallying? Peril threatens, hope invites: Dukes de Villequier, de
- Duras, Gentlemen of the Chamber give tickets and admittance; a
- brave Noblesse is suddenly all rallying. Now were the time to
- “fall sword in hand on those gentry there,” could it be done with
- effect.
-
- The Hero of two Worlds is on his white charger; blue Nationals,
- horse and foot, hurrying eastward: Santerre, with the
- Saint-Antoine Battalion, is already there,—apparently indisposed
- to act. Heavy-laden Hero of two Worlds, what tasks are these! The
- jeerings, provocative gambollings of that Patriot Suburb, which
- is all out on the streets now, are hard to endure; unwashed
- Patriots jeering in sulky sport; one unwashed Patriot “seizing
- the General by the boot” to unhorse him. Santerre, ordered to
- fire, makes answer obliquely, ‘These are the men that took the
- Bastille;’ and not a trigger stirs! Neither dare the Vincennes
- Magistracy give warrant of arrestment, or the smallest
- countenance: wherefore the General “will take it on himself” to
- arrest. By promptitude, by cheerful adroitness, patience and
- brisk valour without limits, the riot may be again bloodlessly
- appeased.
-
- Meanwhile, the rest of Paris, with more or less unconcern, may
- mind the rest of its business: for what is this but an
- effervescence, of which there are now so many? The National
- Assembly, in one of its stormiest moods, is debating a Law
- against Emigration; Mirabeau declaring aloud, ‘I swear beforehand
- that I will not obey it.’ Mirabeau is often at the Tribune this
- day; with endless impediments from without; with the old unabated
- energy from within. What can murmurs and clamours, from Left or
- from Right, do to this man; like Teneriffe or Atlas unremoved?
- With clear thought; with strong bass-voice, though at first low,
- uncertain, he claims audience, sways the storm of men: anon the
- sound of him waxes, softens; he rises into far-sounding melody of
- strength, triumphant, which subdues all hearts; his rude-seamed
- face, desolate fire-scathed, becomes fire-lit, and radiates: once
- again men feel, in these beggarly ages, what is the potency and
- omnipotency of man’s word on the souls of men. ‘I will triumph or
- be torn in fragments,’ he was once heard to say. ‘Silence,’ he
- cries now, in strong word of command, in imperial consciousness
- of strength, ‘Silence, the thirty voices, _Silence aux trente
- voix!_’—and Robespierre and the Thirty Voices die into
- mutterings; and the Law is once more as Mirabeau would have it.
-
- How different, at the same instant, is General Lafayette’s street
- eloquence; wrangling with sonorous Brewers, with an ungrammatical
- Saint-Antoine! Most different, again, from both is the
- Café-de-Valois eloquence, and suppressed fanfaronade, of this
- multitude of men with Tickets of Entry; who are now inundating
- the Corridors of the Tuileries. Such things can go on
- simultaneously in one City. How much more in one Country; in one
- Planet with its discrepancies, every Day a mere crackling
- infinitude of discrepancies—which nevertheless do yield some
- coherent net-product, though an infinitesimally small one!
-
- Be this as it may. Lafayette has saved Vincennes; and is marching
- homewards with some dozen of arrested demolitionists. Royalty is
- not yet saved;—nor indeed specially endangered. But to the King’s
- Constitutional Guard, to these old Gardes Françaises, or Centre
- Grenadiers, as it chanced to be, this affluence of men with
- Tickets of Entry is becoming more and more unintelligible. Is his
- Majesty verily for Metz, then; to be carried off by these men, on
- the spur of the instant? That revolt of Saint-Antoine got up by
- traitor Royalists for a stalking-horse? Keep a sharp outlook, ye
- Centre Grenadiers on duty here: good never came from the “men in
- black.” Nay they have cloaks, _rédingotes;_ some of them
- leather-breeches, boots,—as if for instant riding! Or what is
- this that sticks visible from the lapelle of Chevalier de
- Court?[348] Too like the handle of some cutting or stabbing
- instrument! He glides and goes; and still the dudgeon sticks from
- his left lapelle. ‘Hold, Monsieur!’—a Centre Grenadier clutches
- him; clutches the protrusive dudgeon, whisks it out in the face
- of the world: by Heaven, a very dagger; hunting-knife, or
- whatsoever you call it; fit to drink the life of Patriotism!
-
- So fared it with Chevalier de Court, early in the day; not
- without noise; not without commentaries. And now this continually
- increasing multitude at nightfall? Have they daggers too? Alas,
- with them too, after angry parleyings, there has begun a groping
- and a rummaging; all men in black, spite of their Tickets of
- Entry, are clutched by the collar, and groped. Scandalous to
- think of; for always, as the dirk, sword-cane, pistol, or were it
- but tailor’s bodkin, is found on him, and with loud scorn drawn
- forth from him, he, the hapless man in black, is flung all too
- rapidly down stairs. Flung; and ignominiously descends, head
- foremost; accelerated by ignominious shovings from sentry after
- sentry; nay, as is written, by smitings, twitchings,—spurnings,
- _à posteriori_, not to be named. In this accelerated way,
- emerges, uncertain which end uppermost, man after man in black,
- through all issues, into the Tuileries Garden. Emerges, alas,
- into the arms of an indignant multitude, now gathered and
- gathering there, in the hour of dusk, to see what is toward, and
- whether the Hereditary Representative is carried off or not.
- Hapless men in black; at last _convicted_ of poniards made to
- order; convicted “Chevaliers of the Poniard!” Within is as the
- burning ship; without is as the deep sea. Within is no help; his
- Majesty, looking forth, one moment, from his interior
- sanctuaries, coldly bids all visitors “give up their weapons;”
- and shuts the door again. The weapons given up form a heap: the
- convicted Chevaliers of the poniard keep descending pellmell,
- with impetuous velocity; and at the bottom of all staircases, the
- mixed multitude receives them, hustles, buffets, chases and
- disperses them.[349]
-
- Such sight meets Lafayette, in the dusk of the evening, as he
- returns, successful with difficulty at Vincennes: Sansculotte
- Scylla hardly weathered, here is Aristocrat Charybdis gurgling
- under his lee! The patient Hero of two Worlds almost loses
- temper. He accelerates, does not retard, the flying Chevaliers;
- delivers, indeed, this or the other hunted Loyalist of quality,
- but rates him in bitter words, such as the hour suggested; such
- as no saloon could pardon. Hero ill-bested; hanging, so to speak,
- in mid-air; hateful to Rich divinities above; hateful to Indigent
- mortals below! Duke de Villequier, Gentleman of the Chamber, gets
- such contumelious rating, in presence of all people there, that
- he may see good first to exculpate himself in the Newspapers;
- then, that not prospering, to retire over the Frontiers, and
- begin plotting at Brussels.[350] His Apartment will stand vacant;
- usefuller, as we may find, than when it stood occupied.
-
- So fly the Chevaliers of the Poniard; hunted of Patriotic men,
- shamefully in the thickening dusk. A dim miserable business; born
- of darkness; dying away there in the thickening dusk and dimness!
- In the midst of which, however, let the reader discern clearly
- one figure running for its life: Crispin-Cataline
- d’Espréménil,—for the last time, or the last but one. It is not
- yet three years since these same Centre Grenadiers, Gardes
- Françaises then, marched him towards the Calypso Isles, in the
- gray of the May morning; and he and they have got thus far.
- Buffeted, beaten down, delivered by popular Pétion, he might well
- answer bitterly: ‘And I too, Monsieur, have been carried on the
- People’s shoulders.’[351] A fact which popular Pétion, if he
- like, can meditate.
-
- But happily, one way and another, the speedy night covers up this
- ignominious Day of Poniards; and the Chevaliers escape, though
- maltreated, with torn coat-skirts and heavy hearts, to their
- respective dwelling-houses. Riot twofold is quelled; and little
- blood shed, if it be not insignificant blood from the nose:
- Vincennes stands undemolished, reparable; and the Hereditary
- Representative has not been stolen, nor the Queen smuggled into
- Prison. A Day long remembered: commented on with loud hahas and
- deep grumblings; with bitter scornfulness of triumph, bitter
- rancour of defeat. Royalism, as usual, imputes it to d’Orléans
- and the Anarchists intent on insulting Majesty: Patriotism, as
- usual, to Royalists, and even Constitutionalists, intent on
- stealing Majesty to Metz: we, also as usual, to Preternatural
- Suspicion, and Phoebus Apollo having made himself like the Night.
-
- Thus, however, has the reader seen, in an unexpected arena, on
- this last day of February 1791, the Three long-contending
- elements of French Society, dashed forth into singular
- comico-tragical collision; acting and reacting openly to the eye.
- Constitutionalism, at once quelling Sansculottic riot at
- Vincennes, and Royalist treachery from the Tuileries, is great,
- this day, and prevails. As for poor Royalism, tossed to and fro
- in that manner, its daggers all left in a heap, what can one
- think of it? Every dog, the Adage says, has its day: _has_ it;
- has had it; or will have it. For the present, the day is
- Lafayette’s and the Constitution’s. Nevertheless Hunger and
- Jacobinism, fast growing fanatical, still work; their-day, were
- they once fanatical, will come. Hitherto, in all tempests,
- Lafayette, like some divine Sea-ruler, raises his serene head:
- the upper Æolus’s blasts fly back to their caves, like foolish
- unbidden winds: the under sea-billows they had vexed into froth
- allay themselves. But if, as we often write, the _sub_marine
- Titanic Fire-powers came into play, the Ocean bed from beneath
- being _burst?_ If they hurled Poseidon Lafayette and his
- Constitution out of Space; and, in the Titanic melee, sea were
- mixed with sky?
-
-
- Chapter 2.3.VI.
- Mirabeau.
-
- The spirit of France waxes ever more acrid, fever-sick: towards
- the final outburst of dissolution and delirium. Suspicion rules
- all minds: contending parties cannot now commingle; stand
- separated sheer asunder, eying one another, in most aguish mood,
- of cold terror or hot rage. Counter-Revolution, Days of Poniards,
- Castries Duels; Flight of Mesdames, of Monsieur and Royalty!
- Journalism shrills ever louder its cry of alarm. The sleepless
- Dionysius’s Ear of the Forty-eight Sections, how feverishly quick
- has it grown; convulsing with strange pangs the whole sick Body,
- as in such sleeplessness and sickness, the ear will do!
-
- Since Royalists get Poniards made to order, and a Sieur Motier is
- no better than he should be, shall not Patriotism too, even of
- the indigent sort, have Pikes, secondhand Firelocks, in readiness
- for the worst? The anvils ring, during this March month, with
- hammering of Pikes. A Constitutional Municipality promulgated its
- Placard, that no citizen except the “active or cash-citizen” was
- entitled to have arms; but there rose, instantly responsive, such
- a tempest of astonishment from Club and Section, that the
- Constitutional Placard, almost next morning, had to cover itself
- up, and die away into inanity, in a second improved edition.[352]
- So the hammering continues; as all that it betokens does.
-
- Mark, again, how the extreme tip of the Left is mounting in
- favour, if not in its own National Hall, yet with the Nation,
- especially with Paris. For in such universal panic of doubt, the
- opinion that is sure of itself, as the meagrest opinion may the
- soonest be, is the one to which all men will rally. Great is
- Belief, were it never so meagre; and leads captive the doubting
- heart! Incorruptible Robespierre has been elected Public Accuser
- in our new Courts of Judicature; virtuous Pétion, it is thought,
- may rise to be Mayor. Cordelier Danton, called also by triumphant
- majorities, sits at the Departmental Council-table; colleague
- there of Mirabeau. Of incorruptible Robespierre it was long ago
- predicted that he might go far, mean meagre mortal though he was;
- for Doubt dwelt not in him.
-
- Under which circumstances ought not Royalty likewise to cease
- doubting, and begin deciding and acting? Royalty has always that
- sure trump-card in its hand: Flight out of Paris. Which sure
- trump-card, Royalty, as we see, keeps ever and anon clutching at,
- grasping; and swashes it forth tentatively; yet never tables it,
- still puts it back again. Play it, O Royalty! If there be a
- chance left, this seems it, and verily the last chance; and now
- every hour is rendering this a doubtfuller. Alas, one would so
- fain both fly and not fly; play one’s card and have it to play.
- Royalty, in all human likelihood, will not play its trump-card
- till the honours, one after one, be mainly lost; and such
- trumping of it prove to be the sudden finish of the game!
-
- Here accordingly a question always arises; of the prophetic sort;
- which cannot now be answered. Suppose Mirabeau, with whom Royalty
- takes deep counsel, as with a Prime Minister that cannot yet
- legally avow himself as such, had got his arrangements
- _completed?_ Arrangements he has; far-stretching plans that dawn
- fitfully on us, by fragments, in the confused darkness. Thirty
- Departments ready to sign loyal Addresses, of prescribed tenor:
- King carried out of Paris, but only to Compiègne and Rouen,
- hardly to Metz, since, once for all, no Emigrant rabble shall
- take the lead in it: National Assembly consenting, by dint of
- loyal Addresses, by management, by force of Bouillé, to hear
- reason, and follow thither![353] Was it so, on _these_ terms,
- that Jacobinism and Mirabeau were then to grapple, in their
- Hercules-and-Typhon duel; death inevitable for the one or the
- other? The duel itself is determined on, and sure: but on what
- terms; much more, with what issue, we in vain guess. It is vague
- darkness all: unknown what is to be; unknown even what has
- already been. The giant Mirabeau walks in darkness, as we said;
- companionless, on wild ways: what his thoughts during these
- months were, no record of Biographer, not vague _Fils Adoptif_,
- will now ever disclose.
-
- To us, endeavouring to cast his horoscope, it of course remains
- doubly vague. There is one Herculean man, in internecine duel
- with him, there is Monster after Monster. Emigrant Noblesse
- return, sword on thigh, vaunting of their Loyalty never sullied;
- descending from the air, like Harpy-swarms with ferocity, with
- obscene greed. Earthward there is the Typhon of Anarchy,
- Political, Religious; sprawling hundred-headed, say with
- Twenty-five million heads; wide as the area of France; fierce as
- Frenzy; strong in very Hunger. With these shall the
- Serpent-queller do battle continually, and expect no rest.
-
- As for the King, he as usual will go wavering chameleonlike;
- changing colour and purpose with the colour of his
- environment;—good for no Kingly use. On one royal person, on the
- Queen only, can Mirabeau perhaps place dependance. It is
- possible, the greatness of this man, not unskilled too in
- blandishments, courtiership, and graceful adroitness, might, with
- most legitimate sorcery, fascinate the volatile Queen, and fix
- her to him. She has courage for all noble daring; an eye and a
- heart: the soul of Theresa’s Daughter. “_Faut il-donc_, Is it
- fated then,” she passionately writes to her Brother, “that I with
- the blood I am come of, with the sentiments I have, must live and
- die among such mortals?”[354] Alas, poor Princess, Yes. “She is
- the only _man_,” as Mirabeau observes, “whom his Majesty has
- about him.” Of one other man Mirabeau is still surer: of himself.
- There lies his resources; sufficient or insufficient.
-
- Dim and great to the eye of Prophecy looks the future! A
- perpetual life-and-death battle; confusion from above and from
- below;—mere confused darkness for us; with here and there some
- streak of faint lurid light. We see King perhaps laid aside; not
- tonsured, tonsuring is out of fashion now; but say, sent away any
- whither, with handsome annual allowance, and stock of
- smith-tools. We see a Queen and Dauphin, Regent and Minor; a
- Queen “mounted on horseback,” in the din of battles, with
- _Moriamur pro rege nostro!_ “Such a day,” Mirabeau writes, “may
- come.”
-
- Din of battles, wars more than civil, confusion from above and
- from below: in such environment the eye of Prophecy sees Comte de
- Mirabeau, like some Cardinal de Retz, stormfully maintain
- himself; with head all-devising, heart all-daring, if not
- victorious, yet unvanquished, while life is left him. The
- specialties and issues of it, no eye of Prophecy can guess at: it
- is clouds, we repeat, and tempestuous night; and in the middle of
- it, now visible, far darting, now labouring in eclipse, is
- Mirabeau indomitably struggling to be Cloud-Compeller!—One can
- say that, had Mirabeau lived, the History of France and of the
- World had been different. Further, that the man would have
- needed, as few men ever did, the whole compass of that same “Art
- of Daring, _Art d’Oser_,” which he so prized; and likewise that
- he, above all men then living, would have practised and
- manifested it. Finally, that some substantiality, and no empty
- simulacrum of a formula, would have been the result realised by
- him: a result you could have loved, a result you could have
- hated; by no likelihood, a result you could only have rejected
- with closed lips, and swept into quick forgetfulness for ever.
- Had Mirabeau lived one other year!
-
-
- Chapter 2.3.VII.
- Death of Mirabeau.
-
- But Mirabeau could not live another year, any more than he could
- live another thousand years. Men’s years are numbered, and the
- tale of Mirabeau’s was now complete. Important, or unimportant;
- to be mentioned in World-History for some centuries, or not to be
- mentioned there beyond a day or two,—it matters not to peremptory
- Fate. From amid the press of ruddy busy Life, the Pale Messenger
- beckons silently: wide-spreading interests, projects, salvation
- of French Monarchies, what thing soever man has on hand, he must
- suddenly quit it all, and go. Wert thou saving French Monarchies;
- wert thou blacking shoes on the Pont Neuf! The most important of
- men cannot stay; did the World’s History depend on an hour, that
- hour is not to be given. Whereby, indeed, it comes that these
- same _would-have-beens_ are mostly a vanity; and the World’s
- History could never in the least be what it would, or might, or
- should, by any manner of potentiality, but simply and altogether
- what it _is_.
-
- The fierce wear and tear of such an existence has wasted out the
- giant oaken strength of Mirabeau. A fret and fever that keeps
- heart and brain on fire: excess of effort, of excitement; excess
- of all kinds: labour incessant, almost beyond credibility! “If I
- had not lived with him,” says Dumont, “I should never have known
- what a man can make of one day; what things may be placed within
- the interval of twelve hours. A day for this man was more than a
- week or a month is for others: the mass of things he guided on
- together was prodigious; from the scheming to the executing not a
- moment lost.” ‘Monsieur le Comte,’ said his Secretary to him
- once, ‘what you require is impossible.’—‘Impossible!’ answered he
- starting from his chair, ‘_Ne me dites jamais ce bête de mot_,
- Never name to me that blockhead of a word.’[355] And then the
- social repasts; the dinner which he gives as Commandant of
- National Guards, which “costs five hundred pounds;” alas, and
- “the Sirens of the Opera;” and all the ginger that is hot in the
- mouth:—down what a course is this man hurled! Cannot Mirabeau
- stop; cannot he fly, and save himself alive? No! There is a
- Nessus’ Shirt on this Hercules; he must storm and burn there,
- without rest, till he be consumed. Human strength, never so
- Herculean, has its measure. Herald shadows flit pale across the
- fire-brain of Mirabeau; heralds of the pale repose. While he
- tosses and storms, straining every nerve, in that sea of ambition
- and confusion, there comes, sombre and still, a monition that for
- him the issue of it will be swift death.
-
- In January last, you might see him as President of the Assembly;
- “his neck wrapt in linen cloths, at the evening session:” there
- was sick heat of the blood, alternate darkening and flashing in
- the eye-sight; he had to apply leeches, after the morning labour,
- and preside bandaged. “At parting he embraced me,” says Dumont,
- “with an emotion I had never seen in him: ‘I am dying, my friend;
- dying as by slow fire; we shall perhaps not meet again. When I am
- gone, they will know what the value of me was. The miseries I
- have held back will burst from all sides on France.’”[356]
- Sickness gives louder warning; but cannot be listened to. On the
- 27th day of March, proceeding towards the Assembly, he had to
- seek rest and help in Friend de Lamarck’s, by the road; and lay
- there, for an hour, half-fainted, stretched on a sofa. To the
- Assembly nevertheless he went, as if in spite of Destiny itself;
- spoke, loud and eager, five several times; then quitted the
- Tribune—for ever. He steps out, utterly exhausted, into the
- Tuileries Gardens; many people press round him, as usual, with
- applications, memorials; he says to the Friend who was with him:
- Take me out of this!
-
- And so, on the last day of March 1791, endless anxious multitudes
- beset the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin; incessantly inquiring:
- within doors there, in that House numbered in our time “42,” the
- over wearied giant has fallen down, to die.[357] Crowds, of all
- parties and kinds; of all ranks from the King to the meanest man!
- The King sends publicly twice a-day to inquire; privately
- besides: from the world at large there is no end of inquiring. “A
- written bulletin is handed out every three hours,” is copied and
- circulated; in the end, it is printed. The People spontaneously
- keep silence; no carriage shall enter with its noise: there is
- crowding pressure; but the Sister of Mirabeau is reverently
- recognised, and has free way made for her. The People stand mute,
- heart-stricken; to all it seems as if a great calamity were nigh:
- as if the last man of France, who could have swayed these coming
- troubles, lay there at hand-grips with the unearthly Power.
-
- The silence of a whole People, the wakeful toil of Cabanis,
- Friend and Physician, skills not: on Saturday, the second day of
- April, Mirabeau feels that the last of the Days has risen for
- him; that, on this day, he has to depart and be no more. His
- death is Titanic, as his life has been. Lit up, for the last
- time, in the glare of coming dissolution, the mind of the man is
- all glowing and burning; utters itself in sayings, such as men
- long remember. He longs to live, yet acquiesces in death, argues
- not with the inexorable. His speech is wild and wondrous:
- unearthly Phantasms dancing now their torch-dance round his soul;
- the soul itself looking out, fire-radiant, motionless, girt
- together for that great hour! At times comes a beam of light from
- him on the world he is quitting. ‘I carry in my heart the
- death-dirge of the French Monarchy; the dead remains of it will
- now be the spoil of the factious.’ Or again, when he heard the
- cannon fire, what is characteristic too: ‘Have we the Achilles’
- Funeral already?’ So likewise, while some friend is supporting
- him: ‘Yes, support that head; would I could bequeath it thee!’
- For the man dies as he has lived; self-conscious, conscious of a
- world looking on. He gazes forth on the young Spring, which for
- him will never be Summer. The Sun has risen; he says: ‘_Si ce
- n’est pas là Dieu, c’est du moins son cousin
- germain_.’[358]—Death has mastered the outworks; power of speech
- is gone; the citadel of the heart still holding out: the moribund
- giant, passionately, by sign, demands paper and pen; writes his
- passionate demand for opium, to end these agonies. The sorrowful
- Doctor shakes his head: _Dormir_ “To sleep,” writes the other,
- passionately pointing at it! So dies a gigantic Heathen and
- Titan; stumbling blindly, undismayed, down to his rest. At
- half-past eight in the morning, Dr. Petit, standing at the foot
- of the bed, says ‘_Il ne souffre plus_.’ His suffering and his
- working are now ended.
-
- Even so, ye silent Patriot multitudes, all ye men of France; this
- man is rapt away from you. He has fallen suddenly, without
- bending till he broke; as a tower falls, smitten by sudden
- lightning. His word ye shall hear no more, his guidance follow no
- more.—The multitudes depart, heartstruck; spread the sad tidings.
- How touching is the loyalty of men to their Sovereign Man! All
- theatres, public amusements close; no joyful meeting can be held
- in these nights, joy is not for them: the People break in upon
- private dancing-parties, and sullenly command that they cease. Of
- such dancing-parties apparently but two came to light; and these
- also have gone out. The gloom is universal: never in this City
- was such sorrow for one death; never since that old night when
- Louis XII. departed, “and the _Crieurs des Corps_ went sounding
- their bells, and crying along the streets: _Le bon roi Louis,
- père du peuple, est mort_, The good King Louis, Father of the
- People, is dead!”[359] King Mirabeau is now the lost King; and
- one may say with little exaggeration, all the People mourns for
- him.
-
- For three days there is low wide moan: weeping in the National
- Assembly itself. The streets are all mournful; orators mounted on
- the _bornes_, with large silent audience, preaching the funeral
- sermon of the dead. Let no coachman whip fast, distractively with
- his rolling wheels, or almost at all, through these groups! His
- traces may be cut; himself and his fare, as incurable
- Aristocrats, hurled sulkily into the kennels. The bourne-stone
- orators speak as it is given them; the Sansculottic People, with
- its rude soul, listens eager,—as men will to any Sermon, or
- _Sermo_, when it _is_ a spoken Word meaning a Thing, and not a
- Babblement meaning No-thing. In the Restaurateur’s of the Palais
- Royal, the waiter remarks, ‘Fine weather, Monsieur:’—‘Yes, my
- friend,’ answers the ancient Man of Letters, ‘very fine; but
- Mirabeau is dead.’ Hoarse rhythmic threnodies comes also from the
- throats of balladsingers; are sold on gray-white paper at a _sou_
- each.[360] But of Portraits, engraved, painted, hewn, and
- written; of Eulogies, Reminiscences, Biographies, nay
- _Vaudevilles_, Dramas and Melodramas, in all Provinces of France,
- there will, through these coming months, be the due immeasurable
- crop; thick as the leaves of Spring. Nor, that a tincture of
- burlesque might be in it, is Gobel’s Episcopal _Mandement_
- wanting; goose Gobel, who has just been made Constitutional
- Bishop of Paris. A Mandement wherein _Ça ira_ alternates very
- strangely with _Nomine Domini_, and you are, with a grave
- countenance, invited to “rejoice at possessing in the midst of
- you a body of Prelates created by Mirabeau, zealous followers of
- his doctrine, faithful imitators of his virtues.”[361] So speaks,
- and cackles manifold, the Sorrow of France; wailing articulately,
- inarticulately, as it can, that a Sovereign Man is snatched away.
- In the National Assembly, when difficult questions are astir, all
- eyes will “turn mechanically to the place where Mirabeau
- sat,”—and Mirabeau is absent now.
-
- On the third evening of the lamentation, the fourth of April,
- there is solemn Public Funeral; such as deceased mortal seldom
- had. Procession of a league in length; of mourners reckoned
- loosely at a hundred thousand! All roofs are thronged with
- onlookers, all windows, lamp-irons, branches of trees. “Sadness
- is painted on every countenance; many persons weep.” There is
- double hedge of National Guards; there is National Assembly in a
- body; Jacobin Society, and Societies; King’s Ministers,
- Municipals, and all Notabilities, Patriot or Aristocrat. Bouillé
- is noticeable there, “with his hat on;” say, hat drawn over his
- brow, hiding many thoughts! Slow-wending, in religious silence,
- the Procession of a league in length, under the level sun-rays,
- for it is five o’clock, moves and marches: with its sable plumes;
- itself in a religious silence; but, by fits, with the muffled
- roll of drums, by fits with some long-drawn wail of music, and
- strange new clangour of trombones, and metallic dirge-voice; amid
- the infinite hum of men. In the Church of Saint-Eustache, there
- is funeral oration by Cerutti; and discharge of fire-arms, which
- “brings down pieces of the plaster.” Thence, forward again to the
- Church of Sainte-Genevieve; which has been consecrated, by
- supreme decree, on the spur of this time, into a Pantheon for the
- Great Men of the Fatherland, _Aux Grands Hommes la Patrie
- réconnaissante_. Hardly at midnight is the business done; and
- Mirabeau left in his dark dwelling: first tenant of that
- Fatherland’s Pantheon.
-
- Tenant, alas, who inhabits but at will, and shall be cast out!
- For, in these days of convulsion and disjection, not even the
- dust of the dead is permitted to rest. Voltaire’s bones are, by
- and by, to be carried from their stolen grave in the Abbéy of
- Scellières, to an eager _stealing_ grave, in Paris his
- birth-city: all mortals processioning and perorating there; cars
- drawn by eight white horses, goadsters in classical costume, with
- fillets and wheat-ears enough;—though the weather is of the
- wettest.[362] Evangelist Jean Jacques, too, as is most proper,
- must be dug up from Ermenonville, and processioned, with pomp,
- with sensibility, to the Pantheon of the Fatherland.[363] He and
- others: while again Mirabeau, we say, is cast forth from it,
- happily incapable of being replaced; and rests now,
- irrecognisable, reburied hastily at dead of night, in the central
- “part of the Churchyard Sainte-Catherine, in the Suburb
- Saint-Marceau,” to be disturbed no further.
-
- So blazes out, farseen, a Man’s Life, and becomes ashes and a
- _caput mortuum_, in this World-Pyre, which we name French
- Revolution: not the first that consumed itself there; nor, by
- thousands and many millions, the last! A man who “had swallowed
- all formulas;” who, in these strange times and circumstances,
- felt called to live Titanically, and also to die so. As he, for
- his part had swallowed all formulas, what Formula is there, never
- so comprehensive, that will express truly the _plus_ and the
- _minus_, give us the accurate net-result of him? There is
- hitherto none such. Moralities not a few must shriek condemnatory
- over this Mirabeau; the Morality by which he could be judged has
- not yet got uttered in the speech of men. We shall say this of
- him, again: That he is a Reality, and no Simulacrum: a living son
- of Nature our general Mother; not a hollow Artfice, and mechanism
- of Conventionalities, son of nothing, _brother_ to nothing. In
- which little word, let the earnest man, walking sorrowful in a
- world mostly of “Stuffed Clothes-suits,” that chatter and grin
- meaningless on him, quite _ghastly_ to the earnest soul,—think
- what significance there is!
-
- Of men who, in such sense, are alive, and see with eyes, the
- number is now not great: it may be well, if in this huge French
- Revolution itself, with its all-developing fury, we find some
- Three. Mortals driven rabid we find; sputtering the acridest
- logic; baring their breast to the battle-hail, their neck to the
- guillotine; of whom it is so painful to say that they too are
- still, in good part, manufactured Formalities, not Facts but
- Hearsays!
-
- Honour to the strong man, in these ages, who has shaken himself
- loose of shams, and is something. For in the way of being
- _worthy_, the first condition surely is that one _be_. Let Cant
- cease, at all risks and at all costs: till Cant cease, nothing
- else can begin. Of human Criminals, in these centuries, writes
- the Moralist, I find but one unforgivable: the Quack. “Hateful to
- God,” as divine Dante sings, “and to the Enemies of God,
-
- ‘A Dio spiacente ed a’ nemici sui!’
-
-
- But whoever will, with sympathy, which is the first essential
- towards insight, look at this questionable Mirabeau, may find
- that there lay verily in him, as the basis of all, a Sincerity, a
- great free Earnestness; nay call it Honesty, for the man did
- before all things see, with that clear flashing vision, into what
- was, into what existed as fact; and did, with his wild heart,
- follow that and no other. Whereby on what ways soever he travels
- and struggles, often enough falling, he is still a brother man.
- Hate him not; thou canst not hate him! Shining through such soil
- and tarnish, and now victorious effulgent, and oftenest
- struggling eclipsed, the light of genius itself is in this man;
- which was never yet base and hateful: but at worst was
- lamentable, loveable with pity. They say that he was ambitious,
- that he wanted to be Minister. It is most true; and was he not
- simply the one man in France who could have done any good as
- Minister? Not vanity alone, not pride alone; far from that! Wild
- burstings of affection were in this great heart; of fierce
- lightning, and soft dew of pity. So sunk, bemired in wretchedest
- defacements, it may be said of him, like the Magdalen of old,
- that he loved much: his Father the harshest of old crabbed men he
- loved with warmth, with veneration.
-
- Be it that his falls and follies are manifold,—as himself often
- lamented even with tears.[364] Alas, is not the Life of every
- such man already a poetic Tragedy; made up “of Fate and of one’s
- own Deservings,” of _Schicksal und eigene Schuld;_ full of the
- elements of Pity and Fear? This brother man, if not Epic for us,
- is Tragic; if not great, is large; large in his qualities,
- world-large in his destinies. Whom other men, recognising him as
- such, may, through long times, remember, and draw nigh to examine
- and consider: these, in their several dialects, will say of him
- and sing of him,—till the right thing be said; and so the Formula
- that _can_ judge him be no longer an undiscovered one.
-
- Here then the wild Gabriel Honoré drops from the tissue of our
- History; not without a tragic farewell. He is gone: the flower of
- the wild Riquetti or Arrighetti kindred; which seems as if in
- him, with one last effort, it had done its best, and then
- expired, or sunk down to the undistinguished level. Crabbed old
- Marquis Mirabeau, the Friend of Men, sleeps sound. The Bailli
- Mirabeau, worthy uncle, will soon die forlorn, alone.
- Barrel-Mirabeau, already gone across the Rhine, his Regiment of
- Emigrants will drive nigh desperate. “Barrel-Mirabeau,” says a
- biographer of his, “went indignantly across the Rhine, and
- drilled Emigrant Regiments. But as he sat one morning in his
- tent, sour of stomach doubtless and of heart, meditating in
- Tartarean humour on the turn things took, a certain Captain or
- Subaltern demanded admittance on business. Such Captain is
- refused; he again demands, with refusal; and then again, till
- Colonel Viscount Barrel-Mirabeau, blazing up into a mere burning
- brandy barrel, clutches his sword, and tumbles out on this
- _canaille_ of an intruder,—alas, on the _canaille_ of an
- intruder’s sword’s point, who had drawn with swift dexterity; and
- dies, and the Newspapers name it _apoplexy_ and _alarming
- accident_.” So die the Mirabeaus.
-
- New Mirabeaus one hears not of: the wild kindred, as we said, is
- gone out with this its greatest. As families and kindreds
- sometimes do; producing, after long ages of unnoted notability,
- some living quintescence of all the qualities they had, to flame
- forth as a man world-noted; after whom they rest as if exhausted;
- the sceptre passing to others. The chosen Last of the Mirabeaus
- is gone; the chosen man of France is gone. It was he who shook
- old France from its basis; and, as if with his single hand, has
- held it toppling there, still unfallen. What things depended on
- that one man! He is as a ship suddenly shivered on sunk rocks:
- much swims on the waste waters, far from help.
-
-
- BOOK 2.IV.
- VARENNES
-
-
- Chapter 2.4.I.
- Easter at Saint-Cloud.
-
- The French Monarchy may now therefore be considered as, in all
- human probability, lost; as struggling henceforth in blindness as
- well as weakness, the last light of reasonable guidance having
- gone out. What remains of resources their poor Majesties will
- waste still further, in uncertain loitering and wavering.
- Mirabeau himself had to complain that they only gave him half
- confidence, and always had some plan within his plan. Had they
- fled frankly with him, to Rouen or anywhither, long ago! They may
- fly now with chance immeasurably lessened; which will go on
- lessening towards absolute zero. Decide, O Queen; poor Louis can
- decide nothing: execute this Flight-project, or at least abandon
- it. Correspondence with Bouillé there has been enough; what
- profits consulting, and hypothesis, while all around is in fierce
- activity of practice? The Rustic sits waiting till the river run
- dry: alas with you it is not a common river, but a Nile
- Inundation; snow melting in the unseen mountains; till all, and
- you where you sit, be submerged.
-
- Many things invite to flight. The voice Journals invites;
- Royalist Journals proudly hinting it as a threat, Patriot
- Journals rabidly denouncing it as a terror. Mother Society,
- waxing more and more emphatic, invites;—so emphatic that, as was
- prophesied, Lafayette and your limited Patriots have ere long to
- branch off from her, and form themselves into Feuillans; with
- infinite public controversy; the victory in which, doubtful
- though it look, will remain with the _un_limited Mother.
- Moreover, ever since the Day of Poniards, we have seen unlimited
- Patriotism openly equipping itself with arms. Citizens denied
- “activity,” which is facetiously made to signify a certain weight
- of purse, cannot buy blue uniforms, and be Guardsmen; but man is
- greater than blue cloth; man can fight, if need be, in multiform
- cloth, or even almost without cloth—as Sansculotte. So Pikes
- continued to be hammered, whether those Dirks of improved
- structure with barbs be “meant for the West-India market,” or not
- meant. Men beat, the wrong way, their ploughshares into swords.
- Is there not what we may call an “Austrian Committee,” _Comité
- Autrichein_, sitting daily and nightly in the Tuileries?
- Patriotism, by vision and suspicion, knows it too well! If the
- King fly, will there not be Aristocrat-Austrian Invasion;
- butchery, replacement of Feudalism; wars more than civil? The
- hearts of men are saddened and maddened.
-
- Dissident Priests likewise give trouble enough. Expelled from
- their Parish Churches, where Constitutional Priests, elected by
- the Public, have replaced them, these unhappy persons resort to
- Convents of Nuns, or other such receptacles; and there, on
- Sabbath, collecting assemblages of Anti-Constitutional
- individuals, who have grown devout all on a sudden,[365] they
- worship or pretend to worship in their strait-laced contumacious
- manner; to the scandal of Patriotism. Dissident Priests, passing
- along with their sacred wafer for the dying, seem wishful to be
- massacred in the streets; wherein Patriotism will not gratify
- them. Slighter palm of martyrdom, however, shall not be denied:
- martyrdom not of massacre, yet of fustigation. At the refractory
- places of worship, Patriot men appear; Patriot women with strong
- hazel wands, which they apply. Shut thy eyes, O Reader; see not
- this misery, peculiar to these later times,—of martyrdom without
- sincerity, with only cant and contumacy! A dead Catholic Church
- is not allowed to lie dead; no, it is _galvanised_ into the
- detestablest death-life; whereat Humanity, we say, shuts its
- eyes. For the Patriot women take their hazel wands, and
- fustigate, amid laughter of bystanders, with alacrity: broad
- bottom of Priests; alas, Nuns too reversed, and _cotillons
- retroussés!_ The National Guard does what it can: Municipality
- “invokes the Principles of Toleration;” grants Dissident
- worshippers the Church of the _Théatins;_ promising protection.
- But it is to no purpose: at the door of that _Théatins;_ Church,
- appears a Placard, and suspended atop, like Plebeian Consular
- _fasces_,—a Bundle of Rods! The Principles of Toleration must do
- the best they may: but no Dissident man shall worship
- contumaciously; there is a _Plebiscitum_ to that effect; which,
- though unspoken, is like the laws of the Medes and Persians.
- Dissident contumacious Priests ought not to be harboured, even in
- private, by any man: the Club of the Cordeliers openly denounces
- Majesty himself as doing it.[366]
-
- Many things invite to flight: but probably this thing above all
- others, that it has become impossible! On the 15th of April,
- notice is given that his Majesty, who has suffered much from
- catarrh lately, will enjoy the Spring weather, for a few days, at
- Saint-Cloud. Out at Saint-Cloud? Wishing to celebrate his Easter,
- his _Pâques_, or Pasch, there; with refractory
- Anti-Constitutional Dissidents?—Wishing rather to make off for
- Compiègne, and thence to the Frontiers? As were, in good sooth,
- perhaps feasible, or would once have been; nothing but some two
- _chasseurs_ attending you; chasseurs easily corrupted! It is a
- pleasant possibility, execute it or not. Men say there are thirty
- thousand Chevaliers of the Poniard lurking in the woods there:
- lurking in the woods, and thirty thousand,—for the human
- Imagination is not fettered. But now, how easily might these,
- dashing out on Lafayette, snatch off the Hereditary
- Representative; and roll away with him, after the manner of a
- whirlblast, whither they listed!—Enough, it were well the King
- did not go. Lafayette is forewarned and forearmed: but, indeed,
- is the risk his only; or his and all France’s?
-
- Monday the eighteenth of April is come; the Easter Journey to
- Saint-Cloud shall take effect. National Guard has got its orders;
- a First Division, as Advanced Guard, has even marched, and
- probably arrived. His Majesty’s _Maison-bouche_, they say, is all
- busy stewing and frying at Saint-Cloud; the King’s Dinner not far
- from ready there. About one o’clock, the Royal Carriage, with its
- eight royal blacks, shoots stately into the Place du Carrousel;
- draws up to receive its royal burden. But hark! From the
- neighbouring Church of Saint-Roch, the tocsin begins
- ding-donging. Is the King stolen then; he is going; gone?
- Multitudes of persons crowd the Carrousel: the Royal Carriage
- still stands there;—and, by Heaven’s strength, shall stand!
-
- Lafayette comes up, with aide-de-camps and oratory; pervading the
- groups: ‘_Taisez vous_,’ answer the groups, ‘the King shall not
- go.’ Monsieur appears, at an upper window: ten thousand voices
- bray and shriek, ‘_Nous ne voulons pas que le Roi parte_.’ Their
- Majesties have mounted. Crack go the whips; but twenty Patriot
- arms have seized each of the eight bridles: there is rearing,
- rocking, vociferation; not the smallest headway. In vain does
- Lafayette fret, indignant; and perorate and strive: Patriots in
- the passion of terror, bellow round the Royal Carriage; it is one
- bellowing sea of Patriot terror run frantic. Will Royalty fly off
- towards Austria; like a lit rocket, towards endless Conflagration
- of Civil War? Stop it, ye Patriots, in the name of Heaven! Rude
- voices passionately apostrophise Royalty itself. Usher Campan,
- and other the like official persons, pressing forward with help
- or advice, are clutched by the sashes, and hurled and whirled, in
- a confused perilous manner; so that her Majesty has to plead
- passionately from the carriage-window.
-
- Order cannot be heard, cannot be followed; National Guards know
- not how to act. Centre Grenadiers, of the Observatoire Battalion,
- are there; not on duty; alas, in quasi-mutiny; speaking rude
- disobedient words; threatening the mounted Guards with sharp shot
- if they hurt the people. Lafayette mounts and dismounts; runs
- haranguing, panting; on the verge of despair. For an hour and
- three-quarters; “seven quarters of an hour,” by the Tuileries
- Clock! Desperate Lafayette will open a passage, were it by the
- cannon’s mouth, if his Majesty will order. Their Majesties,
- counselled to it by Royalist friends, by Patriot foes, dismount;
- and retire in, with heavy indignant heart; giving up the
- enterprise. _Maison-bouche_ may eat that cooked dinner
- themselves; his Majesty shall not see Saint-Cloud this day,—or
- any day.[367]
-
- The pathetic fable of imprisonment in one’s own Palace has become
- a sad fact, then? Majesty complains to Assembly; Municipality
- deliberates, proposes to petition or address; Sections respond
- with sullen brevity of negation. Lafayette flings down his
- Commission; appears in civic pepper-and-salt frock; and cannot be
- flattered back again;—not in less than three days; and by
- unheard-of entreaty; National Guards kneeling to him, and
- declaring that it is not sycophancy, that they are free men
- kneeling here to the _Statue of Liberty_. For the rest, those
- Centre Grenadiers of the Observatoire are disbanded,—yet indeed
- are reinlisted, all but fourteen, under a new name, and with new
- quarters. The King must keep his Easter in Paris: meditating much
- on this singular posture of things: but as good as determined now
- to fly from it, desire being whetted by difficulty.
-
-
- Chapter 2.4.II.
- Easter at Paris.
-
- For above a year, ever since March 1790, it would seem, there has
- hovered a project of Flight before the royal mind; and ever and
- anon has been condensing itself into something like a purpose;
- but this or the other difficulty always vaporised it again. It
- seems so full of risks, perhaps of civil war itself; above all,
- it cannot be done without effort. Somnolent laziness will not
- serve: to fly, if not in a leather _vache_, one must verily stir
- himself. Better to adopt that Constitution of theirs; execute it
- so as to shew all men that it is inexecutable? Better or not so
- good; surely it is _easier_. To all difficulties you need only
- say, There is a lion in the path, behold your Constitution will
- not act! For a somnolent person it requires no effort to
- counterfeit death,—as Dame de Staël and Friends of Liberty can
- see the King’s Government long doing, _faisant le mort_.
-
- Nay now, when desire whetted by difficulty has brought the matter
- to a head, and the royal mind no longer halts between two, what
- can come of it? Grant that poor Louis were safe with Bouillé,
- what on the whole could he look for there? Exasperated Tickets of
- Entry answer, Much, all. But cold Reason answers, Little almost
- nothing. Is not loyalty a law of Nature? ask the Tickets of
- Entry. Is not love of your King, and even death for him, the
- glory of all Frenchmen,—except these few Democrats? Let Democrat
- Constitution-builders see what they will do without their
- Keystone; and France rend its hair, having lost the Hereditary
- Representative!
-
- Thus will King Louis fly; one sees not reasonably towards what.
- As a maltreated Boy, shall we say, who, having a Stepmother,
- rushes sulky into the wide world; and will wring the paternal
- heart?—Poor Louis escapes from known unsupportable evils, to an
- unknown mixture of good and evil, coloured by Hope. He goes, as
- Rabelais did when dying, to seek a great May-be: _je vais
- chercher un grand Peut-être!_ As not only the sulky Boy but the
- wise grown Man is obliged to do, so often, in emergencies.
-
- For the rest, there is still no lack of stimulants, and stepdame
- maltreatments, to keep one’s resolution at the due pitch.
- Factious disturbance ceases not: as indeed how can they, unless
- authoritatively _conjured_, in a Revolt which is by nature
- bottomless? If the ceasing of faction be the price of the King’s
- somnolence, he may awake when he will, and take wing.
-
- Remark, in any case, what somersets and contortions a dead
- Catholicism is making,—skilfully galvanised: hideous, and even
- piteous, to behold! Jurant and Dissident, with their shaved
- crowns, argue frothing everywhere; or are ceasing to argue, and
- stripping for battle. In Paris was scourging while need
- continued: contrariwise, in the Morbihan of Brittany, without
- scourging, armed Peasants are up, roused by pulpit-drum, they
- know not why. General Dumouriez, who has got missioned
- thitherward, finds all in sour heat of darkness; finds also that
- explanation and conciliation will still do much.[368]
-
- But again, consider this: that his Holiness, Pius Sixth, has seen
- good to excommunicate Bishop Talleyrand! Surely, we will say
- then, considering it, there is no living or dead Church in the
- Earth that has not the indubitablest right to excommunicate
- Talleyrand. Pope Pius has right and might, in his way. But truly
- so likewise has Father Adam, _ci-devant_ Marquis Saint-Huruge, in
- his way. Behold, therefore, on the Fourth of May, in the
- Palais-Royal, a mixed loud-sounding multitude; in the middle of
- whom, Father Adam, bull-voiced Saint-Huruge, in white hat, towers
- visible and audible. With him, it is said, walks Journalist
- Gorsas, walk many others of the washed sort; for no authority
- will interfere. Pius Sixth, with his plush and tiara, and power
- of the Keys, they bear aloft: of natural size,—made of lath and
- combustible gum. Royou, the King’s Friend, is borne too in
- effigy; with a pile of Newspaper _King’s-Friends_, condemned
- numbers of the _Ami-du-Roi;_ fit fuel of the sacrifice. Speeches
- are spoken; a judgment is held, a doom proclaimed, audible in
- bull-voice, towards the four winds. And thus, amid great
- shouting, the holocaust is consummated, under the summer sky; and
- our lath-and-gum Holiness, with the attendant victims, mounts up
- in flame, and sinks down in ashes; a decomposed Pope: and right
- or might, among all the parties, has better or worse accomplished
- itself, as it could.[369] But, on the whole, reckoning from
- Martin Luther in the Marketplace of Wittenberg to Marquis
- Saint-Huruge in this Palais-Royal of Paris, what a journey have
- we gone; into what strange territories has it carried us! No
- Authority can now interfere. Nay Religion herself, mourning for
- such things, may after all ask, What have _I_ to do with them?
-
- In such extraordinary manner does dead Catholicism somerset and
- caper, skilfully galvanised. For, does the reader inquire into
- the subject-matter of controversy in this case; what the
- difference between Orthodoxy or _My-doxy_ and Heterodoxy or
- _Thy-doxy_ might here be? My-doxy is that an august National
- Assembly can equalize the extent of Bishopricks; that an
- equalized Bishop, his Creed and Formularies being left quite as
- they were, can swear Fidelity to King, Law and Nation, and so
- become a Constitutional Bishop. Thy-doxy, if thou be Dissident,
- is that he cannot; but that he must become an accursed thing.
- Human ill-nature needs but some Homoiousian _iota_, or even the
- pretence of one; and will flow copiously through the eye of a
- needle: thus always must mortals go jargoning and fuming,
-
- And, like the ancient Stoics in their porches
- With fierce dispute maintain their churches.
-
-
- This _Auto-da-fé_ of Saint-Huruge’s was on the Fourth of May,
- 1791. Royalty sees it; but says nothing.
-
-
- Chapter 2.4.III.
- Count Fersen.
-
- Royalty, in fact, should, by this time, be far on with its
- preparations. Unhappily much preparation is needful: could a
- Hereditary Representative be carried in leather _vache_, how easy
- were it! But it is not so.
-
- New clothes are needed, as usual, in all Epic transactions, were
- it in the grimmest iron ages; consider “Queen Chrimhilde, with
- her sixty semstresses,” in that iron _Nibelungen Song!_ No Queen
- can stir without new clothes. Therefore, now, Dame Campan whisks
- assiduous to this mantua-maker and to that: and there is clipping
- of frocks and gowns, upper clothes and under, great and small;
- such a clipping and sewing, as might have been dispensed with.
- Moreover, her Majesty cannot go a step anywhither without her
- _Nécessaire;_ dear _Nécessaire_, of inlaid ivory and rosewood;
- cunningly devised; which holds perfumes, toilet-implements,
- infinite small queenlike furnitures: Necessary to terrestrial
- life. Not without a cost of some five hundred louis, of much
- precious time, and difficult hoodwinking which does not blind,
- can this same Necessary of life be forwarded by the Flanders
- Carriers,—never to get to hand.[370] All which, you would say,
- augurs ill for the prospering of the enterprise. But the whims of
- women and queens must be humoured.
-
- Bouillé, on his side, is making a fortified Camp at Montmédi;
- gathering Royal-Allemand, and all manner of other German and true
- French Troops thither, “to watch the Austrians.” His Majesty will
- not cross the Frontiers, unless on compulsion. Neither shall the
- Emigrants be much employed, hateful as they are to all
- people.[371] Nor shall old war-god Broglie have any hand in the
- business; but solely our brave Bouillé; to whom, on the day of
- meeting, a Marshal’s Baton shall be delivered, by a rescued King,
- amid the shouting of all the troops. In the meanwhile, Paris
- being so suspicious, were it not perhaps good to write your
- Foreign Ambassadors an ostensible Constitutional Letter; desiring
- all Kings and men to take heed that King Louis loves the
- Constitution, that he has voluntarily sworn, and does again
- swear, to maintain the same, and will reckon those his enemies
- who affect to say otherwise? Such a Constitutional circular is
- despatched by Couriers, is communicated confidentially to the
- Assembly, and printed in all Newspapers; with the finest
- effect.[372] Simulation and dissimulation mingle extensively in
- human affairs.
-
- We observe, however, that Count Fersen is often using his Ticket
- of Entry; which surely he has clear right to do. A gallant
- Soldier and Swede, devoted to this fair Queen;—as indeed the
- Highest Swede now is. Has not King Gustav, famed fiery _Chevalier
- du Nord_, sworn himself, by the old laws of chivalry, her Knight?
- He will descend on fire-wings, of Swedish musketry, and deliver
- her from these foul dragons,—if, alas, the assassin’s pistol
- intervene not!
-
- But, in fact, Count Fersen does seem a likely young soldier, of
- alert decisive ways: he circulates widely, seen, unseen; and has
- business on hand. Also Colonel the Duke de Choiseul, nephew of
- Choiseul the great, of Choiseul the now deceased; he and Engineer
- Goguelat are passing and repassing between Metz and the
- Tuileries; and Letters go in cipher,—one of them, a most
- important one, hard to _de_cipher; Fersen having ciphered it in
- haste.[373] As for Duke de Villequier, he is gone ever since the
- Day of Poniards; but his Apartment is useful for her Majesty.
-
- On the other side, poor Commandment Gouvion, watching at the
- Tuileries, second in National Command, sees several things hard
- to interpret. It is the same Gouvion who sat, long months ago, at
- the Townhall, gazing helpless into that Insurrection of Women;
- motionless, as the brave stabled steed when conflagration rises,
- till Usher Maillard snatched his drum. Sincerer Patriot there is
- not; but many a shiftier. He, if Dame Campan gossip credibly, is
- paying some similitude of love-court to a certain false
- Chambermaid of the Palace, who betrays much to him: the
- _Nécessaire_, the clothes, the packing of the jewels,[374]—could
- he understand it when betrayed. Helpless Gouvion gazes with
- sincere glassy eyes into it; stirs up his sentries to vigilence;
- walks restless to and fro; and hopes the best.
-
- But, on the whole, one finds that, in the second week of June,
- Colonel de Choiseul is privately in Paris; having come “to see
- his children.” Also that Fersen has got a stupendous new Coach
- built, of the kind named _Berline;_ done by the first artists;
- according to a model: they bring it home to him, in Choiseul’s
- presence; the two friends take a proof-drive in it, along the
- streets; in meditative mood; then send it up to “Madame
- Sullivan’s, in the Rue de Clichy,” far North, to wait there till
- wanted. Apparently a certain Russian Baroness de Korff, with
- Waiting-woman, Valet, and two Children, will travel homewards
- with some state: in whom these young military gentlemen take
- interest? A Passport has been procured for her; and much
- assistance shewn, with Coach-builders and such like;—so helpful
- polite are young military men. Fersen has likewise purchased a
- Chaise fit for two, at least for two waiting-maids; further,
- certain necessary horses: one would say, he is himself quitting
- France, not without outlay? We observe finally that their
- Majesties, Heaven willing, will assist at _Corpus-Christi Day_,
- this blessed Summer Solstice, in Assumption Church, here at
- Paris, to the joy of all the world. For which same day, moreover,
- brave Bouillé, at Metz, as we find, has invited a party of
- friends to dinner; but indeed is gone from home, in the interim,
- over to Montmédi.
-
- These are of the Phenomena, or visual Appearances, of this
- wide-working terrestrial world: which truly is all phenomenal,
- what they call spectral; and never rests at any moment; one never
- at any moment can know why.
-
- On Monday night, the Twentieth of June 1791, about eleven
- o’clock, there is many a hackney-coach, and glass-coach
- (_carrosse de remise_), still rumbling, or at rest, on the
- streets of Paris. But of all Glass-coaches, we recommend this to
- thee, O Reader, which stands drawn up, in the Rue de l’Echelle,
- hard by the Carrousel and outgate of the Tuileries; in the Rue de
- l’Echelle that then was; “opposite Ronsin the saddler’s door,” as
- if waiting for a fare there! Not long does it wait: a hooded
- Dame, with two hooded Children has issued from Villequier’s door,
- where no sentry walks, into the Tuileries Court-of-Princes; into
- the Carrousel; into the Rue de l’Echelle; where the
- Glass-coachman readily admits them; and again waits. Not long;
- another Dame, likewise hooded or shrouded, leaning on a servant,
- issues in the same manner, by the Glass-coachman, cheerfully
- admitted. Whither go, so many Dames? ’Tis His Majesty’s
- _Couchée_, Majesty just gone to bed, and all the Palace-world is
- retiring home. But the Glass-coachman still waits; his fare
- seemingly incomplete.
-
- By and by, we note a thickset Individual, in round hat and
- peruke, arm-and-arm with some servant, seemingly of the Runner or
- Courier sort; he also issues through Villequier’s door; starts a
- shoebuckle as he passes one of the sentries, stoops down to clasp
- it again; is however, by the Glass-coachman, still more
- cheerfully admitted. And _now_, is his fare complete? Not yet;
- the Glass-coachman still waits.—Alas! and the false Chambermaid
- has warned Gouvion that she thinks the Royal Family will fly this
- very night; and Gouvion distrusting his own glazed eyes, has sent
- express for Lafayette; and Lafayette’s Carriage, flaring with
- lights, rolls this moment through the inner Arch of the
- Carrousel,—where a Lady shaded in broad gypsy-hat, and leaning on
- the arm of a servant, also of the Runner or Courier sort, stands
- aside to let it pass, and has even the whim to touch a spoke of
- it with her _badine_,—light little magic rod which she calls
- _badine_, such as the Beautiful then wore. The flare of
- Lafayette’s Carriage, rolls past: all is found quiet in the
- Court-of-Princes; sentries at their post; Majesties’ Apartments
- closed in smooth rest. Your false Chambermaid must have been
- mistaken? Watch thou, Gouvion, with Argus’ vigilance; for, of a
- truth, treachery is within these walls.
-
- But where is the Lady that stood aside in gypsy hat, and touched
- the wheel-spoke with her _badine?_ O Reader, that Lady that
- touched the wheel-spoke was the Queen of France! She has issued
- safe through that inner Arch, into the Carrousel itself; but not
- into the Rue de l’Echelle. Flurried by the rattle and rencounter,
- she took the right hand not the left; neither she nor her Courier
- knows Paris; he indeed is no Courier, but a loyal stupid
- _ci-devant_ Bodyguard disguised as one. They are off, quite
- wrong, over the Pont Royal and River; roaming disconsolate in the
- Rue du Bac; far from the Glass-coachman, who still waits. Waits,
- with flutter of heart; with thoughts—which he must button close
- up, under his jarvie surtout!
-
- Midnight clangs from all the City-steeples; one precious hour has
- been spent so; most mortals are asleep. The Glass-coachman waits;
- and what mood! A brother jarvie drives up, enters into
- conversation; is answered cheerfully in jarvie dialect: the
- brothers of the whip exchange a pinch of snuff;[375] decline
- drinking together; and part with good night. Be the Heavens
- blest! here at length is the Queen-lady, in gypsy-hat; safe after
- perils; who has had to inquire her way. She too is admitted; her
- Courier jumps aloft, as the other, who is also a disguised
- Bodyguard, has done: and now, O Glass-coachman of a
- thousand,—Count Fersen, for the Reader sees it is thou,—drive!
-
- Dust shall not stick to the hoofs of Fersen: crack! crack! the
- Glass-coach rattles, and every soul breathes lighter. But is
- Fersen on the right road? Northeastward, to the Barrier of
- Saint-Martin and Metz Highway, thither were we bound: and lo, he
- drives right Northward! The royal Individual, in round hat and
- peruke, sits astonished; but right or wrong, there is no remedy.
- Crack, crack, we go incessant, through the slumbering City.
- Seldom, since Paris rose out of mud, or the Longhaired Kings went
- in Bullock-carts, was there such a drive. Mortals on each hand of
- you, close by, stretched out horizontal, dormant; and we alive
- and quaking! Crack, crack, through the Rue de Grammont; across
- the Boulevard; up the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin,—these windows,
- all silent, of Number 42, were Mirabeau’s. Towards the Barrier
- not of Saint-Martin, but of Clichy on the utmost North! Patience,
- ye royal Individuals; Fersen understands what he is about.
- Passing up the Rue de Clichy, he alights for one moment at Madame
- Sullivan’s: ‘Did Count Fersen’s Coachman get the Baroness de
- Korff’s new Berline?’—‘Gone with it an hour-and-half ago,’
- grumbles responsive the drowsy Porter.—‘_C’est bien_.’ Yes, it is
- well;—though had not such hour-and half been _lost_, it were
- still better. Forth therefore, O Fersen, fast, by the Barrier de
- Clichy; then Eastward along the Outward Boulevard, what horses
- and whipcord can do!
-
- Thus Fersen drives, through the ambrosial night. Sleeping Paris
- is now all on the right hand of him; silent except for some
- snoring hum; and now he is Eastward as far as the Barrier de
- Saint-Martin; looking earnestly for Baroness de Korff’s Berline.
- This Heaven’s Berline he at length does descry, drawn up with its
- six horses, his own German Coachman waiting on the box. Right,
- thou good German: now haste, whither thou knowest!—And as for us
- of the Glass-coach, haste too, O haste; much time is already
- lost! The august Glass-coach fare, six Insides, hastily packs
- itself into the new Berline; two Bodyguard Couriers behind. The
- Glass-coach itself is turned adrift, its head towards the City;
- to wander whither it lists,—and be found next morning tumbled in
- a ditch. But Fersen is on the new box, with its brave new
- hammer-cloths; flourishing his whip; he bolts forward towards
- Bondy. There a third and final Bodyguard Courier of ours ought
- surely to be, with post-horses ready-ordered. There likewise
- ought that purchased Chaise, with the two Waiting-maids and their
- bandboxes to be; whom also her Majesty could not travel without.
- Swift, thou deft Fersen, and may the Heavens turn it well!
-
- Once more, by Heaven’s blessing, it is all well. Here is the
- sleeping Hamlet of Bondy; Chaise with Waiting-women; horses all
- ready, and postillions with their churn-boots, impatient in the
- dewy dawn. Brief harnessing done, the postillions with their
- churn-boots vault into the saddles; brandish circularly their
- little noisy whips. Fersen, under his jarvie-surtout, bends in
- lowly silent reverence of adieu; royal hands wave speechless in
- expressible response; Baroness de Korff’s Berline, with the
- Royalty of France, bounds off: for ever, as it proved. Deft
- Fersen dashes obliquely Northward, through the country, towards
- Bougret; gains Bougret, finds his German Coachman and chariot
- waiting there; cracks off, and drives undiscovered into unknown
- space. A deft active man, we say; what he undertook to do is
- nimbly and successfully done.
-
- And so the Royalty of France is actually fled? This precious
- night, the shortest of the year, it flies and drives! _Baroness
- de Korff_ is, at bottom, Dame de Tourzel, Governess of the Royal
- Children: she who came hooded with the two hooded little ones;
- little Dauphin; little Madame Royale, known long afterwards as
- Duchess d’Angouleme. Baroness de Korff’s _Waiting-maid_ is the
- Queen in gypsy-hat. The royal Individual in round hat and peruke,
- he is _Valet_, for the time being. That other hooded Dame, styled
- _Travelling-companion_, is kind Sister Elizabeth; she had sworn,
- long since, when the Insurrection of Women was, that only death
- should part her and them. And so they rush there, not too
- impetuously, through the Wood of Bondy:—over a Rubicon in their
- own and France’s History.
-
- Great; though the future is all vague! If we reach Bouillé? If we
- do not reach him? O Louis! and this all round thee is the great
- slumbering Earth (and overhead, the great watchful Heaven); the
- slumbering Wood of Bondy,—where Longhaired Childeric Donothing
- was struck through with iron;[376] not unreasonably. These peaked
- stone-towers are Raincy; towers of wicked d’Orléans. All slumbers
- save the multiplex rustle of our new Berline. Loose-skirted
- scarecrow of an Herb-merchant, with his ass and early greens,
- toilsomely plodding, seems the only creature we meet. But right
- ahead the great North-East sends up evermore his gray brindled
- dawn: from dewy branch, birds here and there, with short deep
- warble, salute the coming Sun. Stars fade out, and Galaxies;
- Street-lamps of the City of God. The Universe, O my brothers, is
- flinging wide its portals for the Levee of the GREAT HIGH KING.
- Thou, poor King Louis, farest nevertheless, as mortals do,
- towards Orient lands of Hope; and the Tuileries with _its_
- Levees, and France and the Earth itself, is but a larger kind of
- doghutch,—occasionally going rabid.
-
-
- Chapter 2.4.IV.
- Attitude.
-
- But in Paris, at six in the morning; when some Patriot Deputy,
- warned by a billet, awoke Lafayette, and they went to the
- Tuileries?—Imagination may paint, but words cannot, the surprise
- of Lafayette; or with what bewilderment helpless Gouvion rolled
- glassy Argus’s eyes, discerning now that his false Chambermaid
- told true!
-
- However, it is to be recorded that Paris, thanks to an august
- National Assembly, did, on this seeming doomsday, surpass itself.
- Never, according to Historian eye-witnesses, was there seen such
- an “imposing attitude.”[377] Sections all “in permanence;” our
- Townhall, too, having first, about ten o’clock, fired three
- solemn alarm-cannons: above all, our National Assembly! National
- Assembly, likewise permanent, decides what is needful; with
- unanimous consent, for the _Côté Droit_ sits dumb, afraid of the
- Lanterne. Decides with a calm promptitude, which rises towards
- the sublime. One must needs vote, for the thing is self-evident,
- that his Majesty has been _abducted_, or spirited away,
- “_enlevé_,” by some person or persons unknown: in which case,
- what will the Constitution have us do? Let us return to first
- principles, as we always say; ‘_revenons aux principes_.’
-
- By first or by second principles, much is promptly decided:
- Ministers are sent for, instructed how to continue their
- functions; Lafayette is examined; and Gouvion, who gives a most
- helpless account, the best he can. Letters are found written: one
- Letter, of immense magnitude; all in his Majesty’s hand, and
- evidently of his Majesty’s own composition; addressed to the
- National Assembly. It details, with earnestness, with a childlike
- simplicity, what woes his Majesty has suffered. Woes great and
- small: A Necker seen applauded, a Majesty not; then insurrection;
- want of due cash in Civil List; _general_ want of cash, furniture
- and order; anarchy everywhere; Deficit never yet, in the
- smallest, “choked or _comblé:_”—wherefore in brief His Majesty
- has retired towards a Place of Liberty; and, leaving Sanctions,
- Federation, and what Oaths there may be, to shift for themselves,
- does now refer—to what, thinks an august Assembly? To that
- “Declaration of the Twenty-third of June,” with its ‘_Seul il
- fera_, He alone will make his People happy.’ As if _that_ were
- not buried, deep enough, under two irrevocable Twelvemonths, and
- the wreck and rubbish of a whole Feudal World! This strange
- autograph Letter the National Assembly decides on printing; on
- transmitting to the Eighty-three Departments, with exegetic
- commentary, short but pithy. Commissioners also shall go forth on
- all sides; the People be exhorted; the Armies be increased; care
- taken that the Commonweal suffer no damage.—And now, with a
- sublime air of calmness, nay of indifference, we “pass to the
- order of the day!”
-
- By such sublime calmness, the terror of the People is calmed.
- These gleaming Pike forests, which bristled fateful in the early
- sun, disappear again; the far-sounding Street-orators cease, or
- spout milder. We are to have a civil war; let us have it then.
- The King is gone; but National Assembly, but France and we
- remain. The People also takes a great attitude; the People also
- is calm; motionless as a couchant lion. With but a few
- _broolings_, some waggings of the tail; to shew what it _will_
- do! Cazalès, for instance, was beset by street-groups, and cries
- of _Lanterne;_ but National Patrols easily delivered him.
- Likewise all King’s effigies and statues, at least stucco ones,
- get abolished. Even King’s names; the word Roi fades suddenly out
- of all shop-signs; the Royal Bengal Tiger itself, on the
- Boulevards, becomes the National Bengal one, _Tigre
- National_.[378]
-
- How great is a calm couchant People! On the morrow, men will say
- to one another: ‘We have no King, yet we slept sound enough.’ On
- the morrow, fervent Achille de Chatelet, and Thomas Paine the
- rebellious Needleman, shall have the walls of Paris profusely
- plastered with their Placard; announcing that there must be a
- _Republic!_[379]—Need we add that Lafayette too, though at first
- menaced by Pikes, has taken a great attitude, or indeed the
- greatest of all? Scouts and Aides-de-camp fly forth, vague, in
- quest and pursuit; young Romœuf towards Valenciennes, though with
- small hope.
-
- Thus Paris; sublimely calmed, in its bereavement. But from the
- _Messageries Royales_, in all Mail-bags, radiates forth
- far-darting the electric news: Our Hereditary Representative is
- flown. Laugh, black Royalists: yet be it in your sleeve only;
- lest Patriotism notice, and waxing frantic, lower the Lanterne!
- In Paris alone is a sublime National Assembly with its calmness;
- truly, other places must take it as they can: with open mouth and
- eyes; with panic cackling, with wrath, with conjecture. How each
- one of those dull leathern Diligences, with its leathern bag and
- “The King is fled,” furrows up smooth France as it goes; through
- town and hamlet, ruffles the smooth public mind into quivering
- agitation of death-terror; then lumbers on, as if nothing had
- happened! Along all highways; towards the utmost borders; till
- all France is ruffled,—roughened up (metaphorically speaking)
- into one enormous, desperate-minded, red-guggling Turkey Cock!
-
- For example, it is under cloud of night that the leathern Monster
- reaches Nantes; deep sunk in sleep. The word spoken rouses all
- Patriot men: General Dumouriez, enveloped in roquelaures, has to
- descend from his bedroom; finds the street covered with “four or
- five thousand citizens in their shirts.”[380] Here and there a
- faint farthing rushlight, hastily kindled; and so many
- swart-featured haggard faces, with nightcaps pushed back; and the
- more or less flowing drapery of night-shirt: open-mouthed till
- the General say his word! And overhead, as always, the Great Bear
- is turning so quiet round Boötes; steady, indifferent as the
- leathern Diligence itself. Take comfort, ye men of Nantes: Boötes
- and the steady Bear are turning; ancient Atlantic still sends his
- brine, loud-billowing, up your Loire-stream; brandy shall be hot
- in the stomach: this is not the Last of the Days, but one before
- the Last.—The fools! If they knew what was doing, in these very
- instants, also by candle-light, in the far North-East!
-
- Perhaps we may say the most terrified man in Paris or France
- is—who thinks the Reader?—seagreen Robespierre. Double paleness,
- with the shadow of gibbets and halters, overcasts the seagreen
- features: it is too clear to him that there is to be “a
- Saint-Bartholomew of Patriots,” that in four-and-twenty hours he
- will not be in life. These horrid anticipations of the soul he is
- heard uttering at Pétion’s; by a notable witness. By Madame
- Roland, namely; her whom we saw, last year, radiant at the Lyons
- Federation! These four months, the Rolands have been in Paris;
- arranging with Assembly Committees the Municipal affairs of
- Lyons, affairs all sunk in debt;—communing, the while, as was
- most natural, with the best Patriots to be found here, with our
- Brissots, Pétions, Buzots, Robespierres; who were wont to come to
- us, says the fair Hostess, four evenings in the week. They,
- running about, busier than ever this day, would fain have
- comforted the seagreen man: spake of Achille du Chatelet’s
- Placard; of a Journal to be called _The Republican;_ of preparing
- men’s minds for a Republic. ‘A Republic?’ said the Seagreen, with
- one of his dry husky _un_sportful laughs, ‘What is that?’[381] O
- seagreen Incorruptible, thou shalt see!
-
-
- Chapter 2.4.V.
- The New Berline.
-
- But scouts all this while and aide-de-camps, have flown forth
- faster than the leathern Diligences. Young Romœuf, as we said,
- was off early towards Valenciennes: distracted Villagers seize
- him, as a traitor with a finger of his own in the plot; drag him
- back to the Townhall; to the National Assembly, which speedily
- grants a new passport. Nay now, that same scarecrow of an
- Herb-merchant with his ass has bethought him of the grand new
- Berline seen in the Wood of Bondy; and delivered evidence of
- it:[382] Romœuf, furnished with new passport, is sent forth with
- double speed on a hopefuller track; by Bondy, Claye, and Châlons,
- towards Metz, to track the new Berline; and gallops _à franc
- étrier_.
-
- Miserable new Berline! Why could not Royalty go in some old
- Berline similar to that of other men? Flying for life, one does
- not stickle about his vehicle. Monsieur, in a commonplace
- travelling-carriage is off Northwards; Madame, his Princess, in
- another, with variation of route: they cross one another while
- changing horses, without look of recognition; and reach Flanders,
- no man questioning them. Precisely in the same manner, beautiful
- Princess de Lamballe set off, about the same hour; and will reach
- England safe:—would she had continued there! The beautiful, the
- good, but the unfortunate; reserved for a frightful end!
-
- All runs along, unmolested, speedy, except only the new Berline.
- Huge leathern vehicle;—huge Argosy, let us say, or Acapulco-ship;
- with its heavy stern-boat of Chaise-and-pair; with its three
- yellow Pilot-boats of mounted Bodyguard Couriers, rocking aimless
- round it and ahead of it, to bewilder, not to guide! It lumbers
- along, lurchingly with stress, at a snail’s pace; noted of all
- the world. The Bodyguard Couriers, in their yellow liveries, go
- prancing and clattering; loyal but stupid; unacquainted with all
- things. Stoppages occur; and breakages to be repaired at Etoges.
- King Louis too will dismount, will walk up hills, and enjoy the
- blessed sunshine:—with eleven horses and double drink money, and
- all furtherances of Nature and Art, it will be found that
- Royalty, flying for life, accomplishes Sixty-nine miles in
- Twenty-two incessant hours. Slow Royalty! And yet not a minute of
- these hours but is precious: on minutes hang the destinies of
- Royalty now.
-
- Readers, therefore, can judge in what humour Duke de Choiseul
- might stand waiting, in the Village of Pont-de-Sommevelle, some
- leagues beyond Chalons, hour after hour, now when the day bends
- visibly westward. Choiseul drove out of Paris, in all privity,
- ten hours before their Majesties’ fixed time; his Hussars, led by
- Engineer Goguelat, are here duly, come “to escort a Treasure that
- is expected:” but, hour after hour, is no Baroness de Korff’s
- Berline. Indeed, over all that North-east Region, on the skirts
- of Champagne and of Lorraine, where the Great Road runs, the
- agitation is considerable. For all along, from this
- Pont-de-Sommevelle Northeastward as far as Montmédi, at
- Post-villages and Towns, escorts of Hussars and Dragoons do
- lounge waiting: a train or chain of Military Escorts; at the
- Montmédi end of it our brave Bouillé: an electric thunder-chain;
- which the invisible Bouillé, like a Father Jove, holds in his
- hand—for wise purposes! Brave Bouillé has done what man could;
- has spread out his electric thunder-chain of Military Escorts,
- onwards to the threshold of Chalons: it waits but for the new
- Korff Berline; to receive it, escort it, and, if need be, bear it
- off in whirlwind of military fire. They lie and lounge there, we
- say, these fierce Troopers; from Montmédi and Stenai, through
- Clermont, Sainte-Menehould to utmost Pont-de-Sommevelle, in all
- Post-villages; for the route shall avoid Verdun and great Towns:
- they loiter impatient “till the Treasure arrive.”
-
- Judge what a day this is for brave Bouillé: perhaps the first day
- of a new glorious life; surely the last day of the old! Also, and
- indeed still more, what a day, beautiful and terrible, for your
- young full-blooded Captains: your Dandoins, Comte de Damas, Duke
- de Choiseul, Engineer Goguelat, and the like; entrusted with the
- secret!—Alas, the day bends ever more westward; and no Korff
- Berline comes to sight. It is four hours beyond the time, and
- still no Berline. In all Village-streets, Royalist Captains go
- lounging, looking often Paris-ward; with face of unconcern, with
- heart full of black care: rigorous Quartermasters can hardly keep
- the private dragoons from _cafés_ and dramshops.[383] Dawn on our
- bewilderment, thou new Berline; dawn on us, thou Sun-chariot of a
- new Berline, with the destinies of France!
-
- It was of His Majesty’s ordering, this military array of Escorts:
- a thing solacing the Royal imagination with a look of security
- and rescue; yet, in reality, creating only alarm, and where there
- was otherwise no danger, danger without end. For each Patriot, in
- these Post-villages, asks naturally: This clatter of cavalry, and
- marching and lounging of troops, what means it? To escort a
- Treasure? Why escort, when no Patriot will steal from the Nation;
- or where is your Treasure?—There has been such marching and
- counter-marching: for it is another fatality, that certain of
- these Military Escorts came out so early as yesterday; the
- Nineteenth not the Twentieth of the month being the day _first_
- appointed, which her Majesty, for some necessity or other, saw
- good to alter. And now consider the suspicious nature of
- Patriotism; suspicious, above all, of Bouillé the Aristocrat; and
- how the sour doubting humour has had leave to accumulate and
- exacerbate for four-and-twenty hours!
-
- At Pont-de-Sommevelle, these Forty foreign Hussars of Goguelat
- and Duke Choiseul are becoming an unspeakable mystery to all men.
- They lounged long enough, already, at Sainte-Menehould; lounged
- and loitered till our National Volunteers there, all risen into
- hot wrath of doubt, “demanded three hundred fusils of their
- Townhall,” and got them. At which same moment too, as it chanced,
- our Captain Dandoins was just coming in, from Clermont with _his_
- troop, at the other end of the Village. A fresh troop; alarming
- enough; though happily they are only Dragoons and French! So that
- Goguelat with his Hussars had to ride, and even to do it fast;
- till here at Pont-de-Sommevelle, where Choiseul lay waiting, he
- found resting-place. Resting-place, as on burning marle. For the
- rumour of him flies abroad; and men run to and fro in fright and
- anger: Chalons sends forth exploratory pickets, coming from
- Sainte-Menehould, on that. What is it, ye whiskered Hussars, men
- of foreign guttural speech; in the name of Heaven, what is it
- that brings you? A Treasure?—exploratory pickets shake their
- heads. The hungry Peasants, however, know too well what Treasure
- it is: Military seizure for rents, feudalities; which no Bailiff
- could make us pay! This they know;—and set to jingling their
- Parish-bell by way of tocsin; with rapid effect! Choiseul and
- Goguelat, if the whole country is not to take fire, must needs,
- be there Berline, be there no Berline, saddle and ride.
-
- They mount; and this Parish tocsin happily ceases. They ride
- slowly Eastward, towards Sainte-Menehould; still hoping the
- Sun-Chariot of a Berline may overtake them. Ah me, no Berline!
- And near now is that Sainte-Menehould, which expelled us in the
- morning, with its “three hundred National fusils;” which looks,
- belike, not too lovingly on Captain Dandoins and his fresh
- Dragoons, though only French;—which, in a word, one dare not
- enter the _second_ time, under pain of explosion! With rather
- heavy heart, our Hussar Party strikes off to the left; through
- byways, through pathless hills and woods, they, avoiding
- Sainte-Menehould and all places which have seen them heretofore,
- will make direct for the distant Village of Varennes. It is
- probable they will have a rough evening-ride.
-
- This first military post, therefore, in the long thunder-chain,
- has gone off with no effect; or with worse, and your chain
- threatens to entangle itself!—The Great Road, however, is got
- hushed again into a kind of quietude, though one of the
- wakefullest. Indolent Dragoons cannot, by any Quartermaster, be
- kept altogether from the dramshop; where Patriots drink, and will
- even treat, eager enough for news. Captains, in a state near
- distraction, beat the dusky highway, with a face of indifference;
- and no Sun-Chariot appears. Why lingers it? Incredible, that with
- eleven horses and such yellow Couriers and furtherances, its rate
- should be under the weightiest dray-rate, some three miles an
- hour! Alas, one knows not whether it ever even got out of
- Paris;—and yet also one knows not whether, this very moment, it
- is not at the Village-end! One’s heart flutters on the verge of
- unutterabilities.
-
-
- Chapter 2.4.VI.
- Old-Dragoon Drouet.
-
- In this manner, however, has the Day bent downwards. Wearied
- mortals are creeping home from their field-labour; the
- village-artisan eats with relish his supper of herbs, or has
- strolled forth to the village-street for a sweet mouthful of air
- and human news. Still summer-eventide everywhere! The great Sun
- hangs flaming on the utmost North-West; for it is his longest day
- this year. The hill-tops rejoicing will ere long be at their
- ruddiest, and blush Good-night. The thrush, in green dells, on
- long-shadowed leafy spray, pours gushing his glad serenade, to
- the babble of brooks grown audibler; silence is stealing over the
- Earth. Your dusty Mill of Valmy, as all other mills and
- drudgeries, may furl its canvass, and cease swashing and
- circling. The swenkt grinders in this Treadmill of an Earth have
- ground out another Day; and lounge there, as we say, in
- village-groups; movable, or ranked on social stone-seats;[384]
- their children, mischievous imps, sporting about their feet.
- Unnotable hum of sweet human gossip rises from this Village of
- Sainte-Menehould, as from all other villages. Gossip mostly
- sweet, unnotable; for the very Dragoons are French and gallant;
- nor as yet has the Paris-and-Verdun Diligence, with its leathern
- bag, rumbled in, to terrify the minds of men.
-
- One figure nevertheless we do note at the last door of the
- Village: that figure in loose-flowing nightgown, of Jean Baptiste
- Drouet, Master of the Post here. An acrid choleric man, rather
- dangerous-looking; still in the prime of life, though he has
- served, in his time as a Condé Dragoon. This day from an early
- hour, Drouet got his choler stirred, and has been kept fretting.
- Hussar Goguelat in the morning saw good, by way of thrift, to
- bargain with his own Innkeeper, not with Drouet regular _Maître
- de Poste_, about some gig-horse for the sending back of his gig;
- which thing Drouet perceiving came over in red ire, menacing the
- Inn-keeper, and would not be appeased. Wholly an unsatisfactory
- day. For Drouet is an acrid Patriot too, was at the Paris Feast
- of Pikes: and what do these Bouillé Soldiers mean? Hussars, with
- their gig, and a vengeance to it!—have hardly been thrust out,
- when Dandoins and his fresh Dragoons arrive from Clermont, and
- stroll. For what purpose? Choleric Drouet steps out and steps in,
- with long-flowing nightgown; looking abroad, with that sharpness
- of faculty which stirred choler gives to man.
-
- On the other hand, mark Captain Dandoins on the street of that
- same Village; sauntering with a face of indifference, a heart
- eaten of black care! For no Korff Berline makes its appearance.
- The great Sun flames broader towards setting: one’s heart
- flutters on the verge of dread unutterabilities.
-
- By Heaven! Here is the yellow Bodyguard Courier; spurring fast,
- in the ruddy evening light! Steady, O Dandoins, stand with
- inscrutable indifferent face; though the yellow blockhead spurs
- past the Post-house; inquires to find it; and stirs the Village,
- all delighted with his fine livery.—Lumbering along with its
- mountains of bandboxes, and Chaise behind, the Korff Berline
- rolls in; huge Acapulco-ship with its Cockboat, having got thus
- far. The eyes of the Villagers look enlightened, as such eyes do
- when a coach-transit, which is an event, occurs for them.
- Strolling Dragoons respectfully, so fine are the yellow liveries,
- bring hand to helmet; and a lady in gipsy-hat responds with a
- grace peculiar to her.[385] Dandoins stands with folded arms, and
- what look of indifference and disdainful garrison-air a man can,
- while the heart is like leaping out of him. Curled disdainful
- moustachio; careless glance,—which however surveys the
- Village-groups, and does not like them. With his eye he bespeaks
- the yellow Courier. Be quick, be quick! Thick-headed Yellow
- cannot understand the eye; comes up mumbling, to ask in words:
- seen of the Village!
-
- Nor is Post-master Drouet unobservant, all this while; but steps
- out and steps in, with his long-flowing nightgown, in the level
- sunlight; prying into several things. When a man’s faculties, at
- the right time, are sharpened by choler, it may lead to much.
- That Lady in slouched gypsy-hat, though sitting back in the
- Carriage, does she not resemble some one we have seen, some
- time;—at the Feast of Pikes, or elsewhere? And this _Grosse-Tête_
- in round hat and peruke, which, looking rearward, pokes itself
- out from time to time, methinks there are features in it—? Quick,
- Sieur Guillaume, Clerk of the _Directoire_, bring me a new
- Assignat! Drouet scans the new Assignat; compares the Paper-money
- Picture with the Gross-Head in round hat there: by Day and Night!
- you might say the one was an attempted Engraving of the other.
- And this march of Troops; this sauntering and whispering,—I see
- it!
-
- Drouet Post-master of this Village, hot Patriot, Old Dragoon of
- Condé, consider, therefore, what thou wilt do. And fast: for
- behold the new Berline, expeditiously yoked, cracks whipcord, and
- rolls away!—Drouet dare not, on the spur of the instant, clutch
- the bridles in his own two hands; Dandoins, with broadsword,
- might hew you off. Our poor Nationals, not one of them here, have
- three hundred fusils but then no powder; besides one is not sure,
- only morally-certain. Drouet, as an adroit Old-Dragoon of Condé
- does what is advisablest: privily bespeaks Clerk Guillaume,
- Old-Dragoon of Condé he too; privily, while Clerk Guillaume is
- saddling two of the fleetest horses, slips over to the Townhall
- to whisper a word; then mounts with Clerk Guillaume; and the two
- bound eastward in pursuit, to _see_ what can be done.
-
- They bound eastward, in sharp trot; their moral-certainty
- permeating the Village, from the Townhall outwards, in busy
- whispers. Alas! Captain Dandoins orders his Dragoons to mount;
- but they, complaining of long fast, demand bread-and-cheese
- first;—before which brief repast can be eaten, the whole Village
- is permeated; not whispering now, but blustering and shrieking!
- National Volunteers, in hurried muster, shriek for gunpowder;
- Dragoons halt between Patriotism and Rule of the Service, between
- bread and cheese and fixed bayonets: Dandoins hands secretly his
- Pocket-book, with its secret despatches, to the rigorous
- Quartermaster: the very Ostlers have stable-forks and flails. The
- rigorous Quartermaster, half-saddled, cuts out his way with the
- sword’s edge, amid levelled bayonets, amid Patriot vociferations,
- adjurations, flail-strokes; and rides frantic;[386]—few or even
- none following him; the rest, so sweetly constrained consenting
- to stay there.
-
- And thus the new Berline rolls; and Drouet and Guillaume gallop
- after it, and Dandoins’s Troopers or Trooper gallops after them;
- and Sainte-Menehould, with some leagues of the King’s Highway, is
- in explosion;—and your Military thunder-chain has gone off in a
- self-destructive manner; one may fear with the frightfullest
- issues!
-
-
- Chapter 2.4.VII.
- The Night of Spurs.
-
- This comes of mysterious Escorts, and a new Berline with eleven
- horses: “he that has a secret should not only hide it, but hide
- that he has it to hide.” Your first Military Escort has exploded
- self-destructive; and all Military Escorts, and a suspicious
- Country will now be up, explosive; comparable _not_ to victorious
- thunder. Comparable, say rather, to the first stirring of an
- Alpine Avalanche; which, once stir it, as here at
- Sainte-Menehould, will spread,—all round, and on and on, as far
- as Stenai; thundering with wild ruin, till Patriot Villagers,
- Peasantry, Military Escorts, new Berline and Royalty are
- down,—jumbling in the Abyss!
-
- The thick shades of Night are falling. Postillions crack the
- whip: the Royal Berline is through Clermont, where Colonel Comte
- de Damas got a word whispered to it; is safe through, towards
- Varennes; rushing at the rate of double drink-money: an Unknown
- “_Inconnu_ on horseback” shrieks earnestly some hoarse whisper,
- not audible, into the rushing Carriage-window, and vanishes, left
- in the night.[387] August Travellers palpitate; nevertheless
- overwearied Nature sinks every one of them into a kind of sleep.
- Alas, and Drouet and Clerk Guillaume spur; taking side-roads, for
- shortness, for safety; scattering abroad that moral-certainty of
- theirs; which flies, a bird of the air carrying it!
-
- And your rigorous Quartermaster spurs; awakening hoarse
- trumpet-tone, as here at Clermont, calling out Dragoons gone to
- bed. Brave Colonel de Damas has them mounted, in part, these
- Clermont men; young Cornet Remy dashes off with a few. But the
- Patriot Magistracy is out here at Clermont too; National Guards
- shrieking for ball-cartridges; and the Village “illuminates
- itself;”—deft Patriots springing out of bed; alertly, in shirt or
- shift, striking a light; sticking up each his farthing candle, or
- penurious oil-cruise, till all glitters and glimmers; so deft are
- they! A _camisado_, or shirt-tumult, every where: stormbell set
- a-ringing; village-drum beating furious _générale_, as here at
- Clermont, under illumination; distracted Patriots pleading and
- menacing! Brave young Colonel de Damas, in that uproar of
- distracted Patriotism, speaks some fire-sentences to what
- Troopers he has: ‘Comrades insulted at Sainte-Menehould; King and
- Country calling on the brave;’ then gives the fire-word, _Draw
- swords_. Whereupon, alas, the Troopers only _smite_ their
- sword-handles, driving them further home! ‘To me, whoever is for
- the King!’ cries Damas in despair; and gallops, he with some poor
- loyal Two, of the subaltern sort, into the bosom of the
- Night.[388]
-
- Night unexampled in the Clermontais; shortest of the year;
- remarkablest of the century: Night deserving to be named of
- Spurs! Cornet Remy, and those Few he dashed off with, has missed
- his road; is galloping for hours towards Verdun; then, for hours,
- across hedged country, through roused hamlets, towards Varennes.
- Unlucky Cornet Remy; unluckier Colonel Damas, with whom there
- ride desperate only some loyal Two! More ride not of that
- Clermont Escort: of other Escorts, in other Villages, not even
- Two may ride; but only all curvet and prance,—impeded by
- stormbell and your Village illuminating itself.
-
- And Drouet rides and Clerk Guillaume; and the Country
- runs.—Goguelat and Duke Choiseul are plunging through morasses,
- over cliffs, over stock and stone, in the shaggy woods of the
- Clermontais; by tracks; or trackless, with guides; Hussars
- tumbling into pitfalls, and lying “swooned three quarters of an
- hour,” the rest refusing to march without them. What an
- evening-ride from Pont-de-Sommerville; what a thirty hours, since
- Choiseul quitted Paris, with Queen’s-valet Leonard in the chaise
- by him! Black Care sits behind the rider. Thus go they plunging;
- rustle the owlet from his branchy nest; champ the sweet-scented
- forest-herb, queen-of-the-meadows _spilling_ her spikenard; and
- frighten the ear of Night. But hark! towards twelve o’clock, as
- one guesses, for the very stars are gone out: sound of the tocsin
- from Varennes? Checking bridle, the Hussar Officer listens: ‘Some
- fire undoubtedly!’—yet rides on, with double breathlessness, to
- verify.
-
- Yes, gallant friends that do your utmost, it is a certain sort of
- fire: difficult to quench.—The Korff Berline, fairly ahead of all
- this riding Avalanche, reached the little paltry Village of
- Varennes about eleven o’clock; hopeful, in spite of that
- horse-whispering Unknown. Do not all towns now lie behind us;
- Verdun avoided, on our right? Within wind of Bouillé himself, in
- a manner; and the darkest of midsummer nights favouring us! And
- so we halt on the hill-top at the South end of the Village;
- expecting our relay; which young Bouillé, Bouillé’s own son, with
- his Escort of Hussars, was to have ready; for in this Village is
- no Post. Distracting to think of: neither horse nor Hussar is
- here! Ah, and stout horses, a proper relay belonging to Duke
- Choiseul, do stand at hay, but in the Upper Village over the
- Bridge; and we know not of them. Hussars likewise do wait, but
- drinking in the taverns. For indeed it is six hours beyond the
- time; young Bouillé, silly stripling, thinking the matter over
- for this night, has retired to bed. And so our yellow Couriers,
- inexperienced, must rove, groping, bungling, through a Village
- mostly asleep: Postillions will not, for any money, go on with
- the tired horses; not at least without refreshment; not they, let
- the Valet in round hat argue as he likes.
-
- Miserable! “For five-and-thirty minutes” by the King’s watch, the
- Berline is at a dead stand; Round-hat arguing with Churnboots;
- tired horses slobbering their meal-and-water; yellow Couriers
- groping, bungling;—young Bouillé asleep, all the while, in the
- Upper Village, and Choiseul’s fine team standing there at hay. No
- help for it; not with a King’s ransom: the horses deliberately
- slobber, Round-hat argues, Bouillé sleeps. And mark now, in the
- thick night, do not two Horsemen, with jaded trot, come
- clank-clanking; and start with half-pause, if one noticed them,
- at sight of this dim mass of a Berline, and its dull slobbering
- and arguing; then prick off faster, into the Village? It is
- Drouet, he and Clerk Guillaume! Still ahead, they two, of the
- whole riding hurlyburly; unshot, though some brag of having
- chased them. Perilous is Drouet’s errand also; but he is an
- Old-Dragoon, with his wits shaken thoroughly awake.
-
- The Village of Varennes lies dark and slumberous; a most unlevel
- Village, of inverse saddle-shape, as men write. It sleeps; the
- rushing of the River Aire singing lullaby to it. Nevertheless
- from the Golden Arms, _Bras d’Or_ Tavern, across that sloping
- marketplace, there still comes shine of social light; comes voice
- of rude drovers, or the like, who have not yet taken the
- stirrup-cup; Boniface Le Blanc, in white apron, serving them:
- cheerful to behold. To this _Bras d’Or_, Drouet enters, alacrity
- looking through his eyes: he nudges Boniface, in all privacy,
- ‘_Camarade, es-tu bon Patriote_, Art thou a good Patriot?’—‘_Si
- je suis!_’ answers Boniface.—‘In that case,’ eagerly whispers
- Drouet—what whisper is needful, heard of Boniface alone.[389]
-
- And now see Boniface Le Blanc bustling, as he never did for the
- jolliest toper. See Drouet and Guillaume, dexterous Old-Dragoons,
- instantly down blocking the Bridge, with a “furniture waggon they
- find there,” with whatever waggons, tumbrils, barrels, barrows
- their hands can lay hold of;—till no carriage can pass. Then
- swiftly, the Bridge once blocked, see them take station hard by,
- under Varennes Archway: joined by Le Blanc, Le Blanc’s Brother,
- and one or two alert Patriots he has roused. Some half-dozen in
- all, with National Muskets, they stand close, waiting under the
- Archway, till that same Korff Berline rumble up.
-
- It rumbles up: _Alte là!_ lanterns flash out from under
- coat-skirts, bridles chuck in strong fists, two National Muskets
- level themselves fore and aft through the two Coach-doors:
- ‘Mesdames, your Passports?’—Alas! Alas! Sieur Sausse, Procureur
- of the Township, Tallow-chandler also and Grocer is there, with
- official grocer-politeness; Drouet with fierce logic and ready
- wit:—The respected Travelling Party, be it Baroness de Korff’s,
- or persons of still higher consequence, will perhaps please to
- rest itself in M. Sausse’s till the dawn strike up!
-
- O Louis; O hapless Marie-Antoinette, fated to pass thy life with
- such men! Phlegmatic Louis, art thou but lazy semi-animate phlegm
- then, to the centre of thee? King, Captain-General, Sovereign
- Frank! If thy heart ever formed, since it began beating under the
- name of heart, any resolution at all, be it now then, or never in
- this world: ‘Violent nocturnal individuals, and if it were
- persons of high consequence? And if it were the King himself? Has
- the King not the power, which all beggars have, of travelling
- unmolested on his own Highway? Yes: it is the King; and tremble
- ye to know it! The King has said, in this one small matter; and
- in France, or under God’s Throne, is no power that shall gainsay.
- Not the King shall ye stop here under this your miserable
- Archway; but his dead body only, and answer it to Heaven and
- Earth. To me, Bodyguards: Postillions, _en avant!_’—One fancies
- in that case the pale paralysis of these two Le Blanc musketeers;
- the drooping of Drouet’s under-jaw; and how Procureur Sausse had
- melted like tallow in furnace-heat: Louis faring on; in some few
- steps awakening Young Bouillé, awakening relays and hussars:
- triumphant entry, with cavalcading high-brandishing Escort, and
- Escorts, into Montmédi; and the whole course of French History
- different!
-
- Alas, it was not _in_ the poor phlegmatic man. Had it been in
- him, French History had never come under this Varennes Archway to
- decide itself.—He steps out; all step out. Procureur Sausse gives
- his grocer-arms to the Queen and Sister Elizabeth; Majesty taking
- the two children by the hand. And thus they walk, coolly back,
- over the Marketplace, to Procureur Sausse’s; mount into his small
- upper story; where straightway his Majesty “demands
- refreshments.” Demands refreshments, as is written; gets
- bread-and-cheese with a bottle of Burgundy; and remarks, that it
- is the best Burgundy he ever drank!
-
- Meanwhile, the Varennes Notables, and all men, official, and
- non-official, are hastily drawing on their breeches; getting
- their fighting-gear. Mortals half-dressed tumble out barrels, lay
- felled trees; scouts dart off to all the four winds,—the tocsin
- begins clanging, “the Village illuminates itself.” Very singular:
- how these little Villages do manage, so adroit are they, when
- startled in midnight alarm of war. Like little adroit municipal
- rattle-snakes, suddenly awakened: for their stormbell rattles and
- rings; their eyes glisten luminous (with tallow-light), as in
- rattle-snake ire; and the Village will _sting!_ Old-Dragoon
- Drouet is our engineer and generalissimo; valiant as a Ruy
- Diaz:—Now or never, ye Patriots, for the Soldiery is coming;
- massacre by Austrians, by Aristocrats, wars more than civil, it
- all depends on you and the hour!—National Guards rank themselves,
- half-buttoned: mortals, we say, still only in breeches, in
- under-petticoat, tumble out barrels and lumber, lay felled trees
- for barricades: the Village will _sting_. Rabid Democracy, it
- would seem, is _not_ confined to Paris, then? Ah no, whatsoever
- Courtiers might talk; too clearly no. This of dying for one’s
- King is grown into a dying for one’s self, _against_ the King, if
- need be.
-
- And so our riding and running Avalanche and Hurlyburly has
- _reached_ the Abyss, Korff Berline foremost; and may pour itself
- thither, and jumble: endless! For the next six hours, need we ask
- if there was a clattering far and wide? Clattering and tocsining
- and hot tumult, over all the Clermontais, spreading through the
- Three Bishopricks: Dragoon and Hussar Troops galloping on roads
- and no-roads; National Guards arming and starting in the dead of
- night; tocsin after tocsin transmitting the alarm. In some forty
- minutes, Goguelat and Choiseul, with their wearied Hussars, reach
- Varennes. Ah, it is no fire then; or a fire difficult to quench!
- They leap the tree-barricades, in spite of National serjeant;
- they enter the village, Choiseul instructing his Troopers how the
- matter really is; who respond interjectionally, in their guttural
- dialect, ‘_Der König; die Königinn!_’ and seem stanch. These now,
- in their stanch humour, will, for one thing, beset Procureur
- Sausse’s house. Most beneficial: had not Drouet stormfully
- ordered otherwise; and even bellowed, in his extremity,
- ‘Cannoneers to your guns!’—two old honey-combed Field-pieces,
- empty of all but cobwebs; the rattle whereof, as the Cannoneers
- with assured countenance trundled them up, did nevertheless abate
- the Hussar ardour, and produce a respectfuller ranking further
- back. Jugs of wine, handed over the ranks, for the German throat
- too has sensibility, will complete the business. When Engineer
- Goguelat, some hour or so afterwards, steps forth, the response
- to him is—a hiccuping _Vive la Nation!_
-
- What boots it? Goguelat, Choiseul, now also Count Damas, and all
- the Varennes Officiality are with the King; and the King can give
- no order, form no opinion; but sits there, as he has ever done,
- like clay on potter’s wheel; perhaps the absurdest of all
- pitiable and pardonable clay-figures that now circle under the
- Moon. He will go on, next morning, and take the National Guard
- _with_ him; Sausse permitting! Hapless Queen: with her two
- children laid there on the mean bed, old Mother Sausse kneeling
- to Heaven, with tears and an audible prayer, to bless them;
- imperial Marie-Antoinette near kneeling to Son Sausse and Wife
- Sausse, amid candle-boxes and treacle-barrels,—in vain! There are
- Three-thousand National Guards got in; before long they will
- count Ten-thousand; tocsins spreading like fire on dry heath, or
- far faster.
-
- Young Bouillé, roused by this Varennes tocsin, has taken horse,
- and—fled towards his Father. Thitherward also rides, in an almost
- hysterically desperate manner, a certain Sieur Aubriot,
- Choiseul’s Orderly; swimming dark rivers, our Bridge being
- blocked; spurring as if the Hell-hunt were at his heels.[390]
- Through the village of Dun, he, galloping still on, scatters the
- alarm; at Dun, brave Captain Deslons and _his_ Escort of a
- Hundred, saddle and ride. Deslons too gets into Varennes; leaving
- his Hundred outside, at the tree-barricade; offers to cut King
- Louis out, if he will order it: but unfortunately ‘the work
- _will_ prove hot;’ whereupon King Louis has ‘no orders to
- give.’[391]
-
- And so the tocsin clangs, and Dragoons gallop; and can do
- nothing, having gallopped: National Guards stream in like the
- gathering of ravens: your exploding Thunder-chain, falling
- Avalanche, or what else we liken it to, does play, with a
- vengeance,—up now as far as Stenai and Bouillé himself.[392]
- Brave Bouillé, son of the whirlwind, he saddles Royal Allemand;
- speaks fire-words, kindling heart and eyes; distributes
- twenty-five gold-louis a company:—Ride, Royal-Allemand,
- long-famed: no Tuileries Charge and Necker-Orleans
- Bust-Procession; a very King made captive, and world all to
- win!—Such is the Night deserving to be named of Spurs.
-
- At six o’clock two things have happened. Lafayette’s
- Aide-de-camp, Romœuf, riding _à franc étrier_, on that old
- Herb-merchant’s route, quickened during the last stages, has got
- to Varennes; where the Ten thousand now furiously demand, with
- fury of panic terror, that Royalty shall forthwith return
- Paris-ward, that there be not infinite bloodshed. Also, on the
- other side, “English Tom,” Choiseul’s _jokei_, flying with that
- Choiseul relay, has met Bouillé on the heights of Dun; the
- adamantine brow flushed with dark thunder; thunderous rattle of
- Royal Allemand at his heels. English Tom answers as he can the
- brief question, How it is at Varennes?—then asks in turn what he,
- English Tom, with M. de Choiseul’s horses, is to do, and whither
- to ride?—To the Bottomless Pool! answers a thunder-voice; then
- again speaking and spurring, orders Royal Allemand to the gallop;
- and vanishes, swearing (_en jurant_).[393] ’Tis the last of our
- brave Bouillé. Within sight of Varennes, he having drawn bridle,
- calls a council of officers; finds that it is in vain. King Louis
- has departed, consenting: amid the clangour of universal
- stormbell; amid the tramp of Ten thousand armed men, already
- arrived; and say, of Sixty thousand flocking thither. Brave
- Deslons, even without “orders,” darted at the River Aire with his
- Hundred![394] swam one branch of it, could not the other; and
- stood there, dripping and panting, with inflated nostril; the Ten
- thousand answering him with a shout of mockery, the new Berline
- lumbering Paris-ward its weary inevitable way. No help, then in
- Earth; nor in an age, not of miracles, in Heaven!
-
- That night, “Marquis de Bouillé and twenty-one more of us rode
- over the Frontiers; the Bernardine monks at Orval in Luxemburg
- gave us supper and lodging.”[395] With little of speech, Bouillé
- rides; with thoughts that do not brook speech. Northward, towards
- uncertainty, and the Cimmerian Night: towards West-Indian Isles,
- for with thin Emigrant delirium the son of the whirlwind cannot
- act; towards England, towards premature Stoical death; not
- towards France any more. Honour to the Brave; who, be it in this
- quarrel or in that, _is_ a substance and articulate-speaking
- piece of Human Valour, not a fanfaronading hollow Spectrum and
- squeaking and gibbering Shadow! One of the few Royalist
- Chief-actors this Bouillé, of whom so much can be said.
-
- The brave Bouillé too, then, vanishes from the tissue of our
- Story. Story and tissue, faint ineffectual Emblem of that grand
- Miraculous Tissue, and Living Tapestry named _French Revolution_,
- which did weave itself then in very fact, “on the loud-sounding
- “LOOM OF TIME!” The old Brave drop out from it, with their
- strivings; and new acrid Drouets, of new strivings and colour,
- come in:—as is the manner of that weaving.
-
-
- Chapter 2.4.VIII.
- The Return.
-
- So then our grand Royalist Plot, of Flight to Metz, has
- _executed_ itself. Long hovering in the background, as a dread
- royal _ultimatum_, it has rushed forward in its terrors: verily
- to some purpose. How many Royalist Plots and Projects, one after
- another, cunningly-devised, that were to explode like
- powder-mines and thunderclaps; not one solitary Plot of which has
- issued otherwise! Powder-mine of a _Séance Royale_ on the
- Twenty-third of June 1789, which exploded as we then said,
- “through the touchhole;” which next, your wargod Broglie having
- reloaded it, brought a Bastille about your ears. Then came
- fervent Opera-Repast, with flourishing of sabres, and _O Richard,
- O my King;_ which, aided by Hunger, produces Insurrection of
- Women, and Pallas Athene in the shape of Demoiselle Théroigne.
- Valour profits not; neither has fortune smiled on Fanfaronade.
- The Bouillé Armament ends as the Broglie one had done. Man after
- man spends himself in this cause, only to work it quicker ruin;
- it seems a cause doomed, forsaken of Earth and Heaven.
-
- On the Sixth of October gone a year, King Louis, escorted by
- Demoiselle Théroigne and some two hundred thousand, made a Royal
- Progress and Entrance into Paris, such as man had never
- witnessed: we prophesied him Two more such; and accordingly
- another of them, after this Flight to Metz, is now coming to
- pass. Théroigne will not escort here, neither does Mirabeau now
- “sit in one of the accompanying carriages.” Mirabeau lies dead,
- in the Pantheon of Great Men. Théroigne lies living, in dark
- Austrian Prison; having gone to Liège, professionally, and been
- seized there. Bemurmured now by the hoarse-flowing Danube; the
- light of her Patriot Supper-Parties gone quite out; so lies
- Théroigne: she shall speak with the Kaiser face to face, and
- return. And France lies how! Fleeting Time shears down the great
- and the little; and in two years alters many things.
-
- But at all events, here, we say, is a second Ignominious Royal
- Procession, though much altered; to be witnessed also by its
- hundreds of thousands. Patience, ye Paris Patriots; the Royal
- Berline is returning. Not till Saturday: for the Royal Berline
- travels by slow stages; amid such loud-voiced confluent sea of
- National Guards, sixty thousand as they count; amid such tumult
- of all people. Three National-Assembly Commissioners, famed
- Barnave, famed Pétion, generally-respectable Latour-Maubourg,
- have gone to meet it; of whom the two former ride in the Berline
- itself beside Majesty, day after day. Latour, as a mere
- respectability, and man of whom all men speak well, can ride in
- the rear, with Dame Tourzel and the _Soubrettes_.
-
- So on Saturday evening, about seven o’clock, Paris by hundreds of
- thousands is again drawn up: not now dancing the tricolor
- joy-dance of hope; nor as yet dancing in fury-dance of hate and
- revenge; but in silence, with vague look of conjecture and
- curiosity mostly scientific. A Sainte-Antoine Placard has given
- notice this morning that “whosoever insults Louis shall be caned,
- whosoever applauds him shall be hanged.” Behold then, at last,
- that wonderful New Berline; encircled by blue National sea with
- fixed bayonets, which flows slowly, floating it on, through the
- silent assembled hundreds of thousands. Three yellow Couriers sit
- atop bound with ropes; Pétion, Barnave, their Majesties, with
- Sister Elizabeth, and the Children of France, are within.
-
- Smile of embarrassment, or cloud of dull sourness, is on the
- broad phlegmatic face of his Majesty: who keeps declaring to the
- successive Official-persons, what is evident, ‘_Eh bien, me
- voilà_, Well, here you have me;’ and what is not evident, ‘I do
- assure you I did not mean to pass the frontiers;’ and so forth:
- speeches natural for that poor Royal man; which Decency would
- veil. Silent is her Majesty, with a look of grief and scorn;
- natural for that Royal Woman. Thus lumbers and creeps the
- ignominious Royal Procession, through many streets, amid a
- silent-gazing people: comparable, Mercier thinks,[396] to some
- _Procession de Roi de Bazoche;_ or say, Procession of King
- Crispin, with his Dukes of Sutor-mania and royal blazonry of
- Cordwainery. Except indeed that this is not comic; ah no, it is
- comico-tragic; with bound Couriers, and a Doom hanging over it;
- most fantastic, yet most miserably real. Miserablest _flebile
- ludibrium_ of a Pickleherring Tragedy! It sweeps along there, in
- most ungorgeous pall, through many streets, in the dusty summer
- evening; gets itself at length wriggled out of sight; vanishing
- in the Tuileries Palace—towards its doom, of slow torture, _peine
- forte et dure_.
-
- Populace, it is true, seizes the three rope-bound yellow
- Couriers; will at least massacre _them_. But our august Assembly,
- which is sitting at this great moment, sends out Deputation of
- rescue; and the whole is got huddled up. Barnave, “all dusty,” is
- already there, in the National Hall; making brief discreet
- address and report. As indeed, through the whole journey, this
- Barnave has been most discreet, sympathetic; and has gained the
- Queen’s trust, whose noble instinct teaches her always who is to
- be trusted. Very different from heavy Pétion; who, if Campan
- speak truth, ate his luncheon, comfortably filled his wine-glass,
- in the Royal Berline; flung out his chicken-bones past the nose
- of Royalty itself; and, on the King’s saying ‘France cannot be a
- Republic,’ answered ‘No, it is not ripe yet.’ Barnave is
- henceforth a Queen’s adviser, if advice could profit: and her
- Majesty astonishes Dame Campan by signifying almost a regard for
- Barnave: and that, in a day of retribution and Royal triumph,
- Barnave shall _not_ be executed.[397]
-
- On Monday night Royalty went; on Saturday evening it returns: so
- much, within one short week, has Royalty accomplished for itself.
- The Pickleherring Tragedy has vanished in the Tuileries Palace,
- towards “pain strong and hard.” Watched, fettered, and humbled,
- as Royalty never was. Watched even in its sleeping-apartments and
- inmost recesses: for it has to sleep with door set ajar, blue
- National Argus watching, his eye fixed on the Queen’s curtains;
- nay, on one occasion, as the Queen cannot sleep, he offers to sit
- by her pillow, and converse a little![398]
-
-
- Chapter 2.4.IX.
- Sharp Shot.
-
- In regard to all which, this most pressing question arises: What
- is to be done with it? ‘Depose it!’ resolutely answer Robespierre
- and the thoroughgoing few. For truly, with a King who runs away,
- and needs to be watched in his very bedroom that he may stay and
- govern you, what other reasonable thing can be done? Had Philippe
- d’Orléans not been a _caput mortuum!_ But of him, known as one
- defunct, no man now dreams. ‘Depose it not; say that it is
- inviolable, that it was spirited away, was _enlevé;_ at any cost
- of sophistry and solecism, reestablish it!’ so answer with loud
- vehemence all manner of Constitutional Royalists; as all your
- Pure Royalists do naturally likewise, with low vehemence, and
- rage compressed by fear, still more passionately answer. Nay
- Barnave and the two Lameths, and what will follow them, do
- likewise answer so. Answer, with their whole might: terror-struck
- at the unknown Abysses on the verge of which, driven thither by
- themselves mainly, all now reels, ready to plunge.
-
- By mighty effort and combination this latter course, of
- reestablish it, is the course fixed on; and it shall by the
- strong arm, if not by the clearest logic, be made good. With the
- sacrifice of all their hard-earned popularity, this notable
- Triumvirate, says Toulongeon, “set the Throne up again, which
- they had so toiled to overturn: as one might set up an overturned
- pyramid, on its vertex; to stand so long as it is _held_.”
-
- Unhappy France; unhappy in King, Queen, and Constitution; one
- knows not in which unhappiest! Was the meaning of our so glorious
- French Revolution this, and no other, That when Shams and
- Delusions, long soul-killing, had become body-killing, and got
- the length of Bankruptcy and Inanition, a great People rose and,
- with one voice, said, in the Name of the Highest: _Shams shall be
- no more?_ So many sorrows and bloody horrors, endured, and to be
- yet endured through dismal coming centuries, were they not the
- heavy price paid and payable for this same: Total Destruction of
- Shams from among men? And now, O Barnave Triumvirate! is it in
- such _double_-distilled Delusion, and Sham even of a Sham, that
- an Effort of this kind will rest acquiescent? Messieurs of the
- popular Triumvirate: Never! But, after all, what can poor popular
- Triumvirates and fallible august Senators do? They can, when the
- Truth is all too-horrible, stick their heads ostrich-like into
- what sheltering Fallacy is nearest: and wait there, _à
- posteriori._
-
- Readers who saw the Clermontais and Three-Bishopricks gallop, in
- the Night of Spurs; Diligences ruffling up all France into one
- terrific terrified Cock of India; and the Town of Nantes in its
- shirt,—may fancy what an affair to settle this was. Robespierre,
- on the extreme Left, with perhaps Pétion and lean old Goupil, for
- the very Triumvirate has defalcated, are shrieking hoarse;
- drowned in Constitutional clamour. But the debate and arguing of
- a whole Nation; the bellowings through all Journals, for and
- against; the reverberant voice of Danton; the Hyperion-shafts of
- Camille; the porcupine-quills of implacable Marat:—conceive all
- this.
-
- Constitutionalists in a body, as we often predicted, do now
- recede from the Mother Society, and become _Feuillans;_
- threatening her with inanition, the rank and respectability being
- mostly gone. Petition after Petition, forwarded by Post, or borne
- in Deputation, comes praying for Judgment and _Déchéance_, which
- is our name for Deposition; praying, at lowest, for Reference to
- the Eighty-three Departments of France. Hot Marseillese
- Deputation comes declaring, among other things: ‘Our Phocean
- Ancestors flung a Bar of Iron into the Bay at their first
- landing; this Bar will float again on the Mediterranean brine
- before we consent to be slaves.’ All this for four weeks or more,
- while the matter still hangs doubtful; Emigration streaming with
- double violence over the frontiers;[399] France seething in
- fierce agitation of this question and prize-question: What is to
- be done with the fugitive Hereditary Representative?
-
- Finally, on Friday the 15th of July 1791, the National Assembly
- decides; in what negatory manner we know. Whereupon the Theatres
- all close, the _Bourne_-stones and Portable-chairs begin
- spouting, Municipal Placards flaming on the walls, and
- Proclamations published by sound of trumpet, “invite to repose;”
- with small effect. And so, on Sunday the 17th, there shall be a
- thing seen, worthy of remembering. Scroll of a Petition, drawn up
- by Brissots, Dantons, by Cordeliers, Jacobins; for the thing was
- infinitely shaken and manipulated, and many had a hand in it:
- such Scroll lies now visible, on the wooden framework of the
- Fatherland’s Altar, for signature. Unworking Paris, male and
- female, is crowding thither, all day, to sign or to see. Our fair
- Roland herself the eye of History can discern there, “in the
- morning;”[400] not without interest. In few weeks the fair
- Patriot will quit Paris; yet perhaps only to return.
-
- But, what with sorrow of baulked Patriotism, what with closed
- theatres, and Proclamations still publishing themselves by sound
- of trumpet, the fervour of men’s minds, this day, is great. Nay,
- over and above, there has fallen out an incident, of the nature
- of Farce-Tragedy and Riddle; enough to stimulate all creatures.
- Early in the day, a Patriot (or some say, it was a Patriotess,
- and indeed Truth is undiscoverable), while standing on the firm
- deal-board of Fatherland’s Altar, feels suddenly, with
- indescribable torpedo-shock of amazement, his bootsole pricked
- through from below; he clutches up suddenly this electrified
- bootsole and foot; discerns next instant—the point of a gimlet or
- brad-awl playing up, through the firm deal-board, and now hastily
- drawing itself back! Mystery, perhaps Treason? The wooden
- frame-work is impetuously broken up; and behold, verily a
- mystery; never explicable fully to the end of the world! Two
- human individuals, of mean aspect, one of them with a wooden leg,
- lie ensconced there, gimlet in hand: they must have come in
- overnight; they have a supply of provisions,—no “barrel of
- gunpowder” that one can _see;_ they affect to be asleep; look
- blank enough, and give the lamest account of themselves. ‘Mere
- curiosity; they were boring up to get an eye-hole; to see,
- perhaps “with lubricity,” whatsoever, from that _new_ point of
- vision, could be seen:’—little that was edifying, one would
- think! But indeed what stupidest thing may not human Dulness,
- Pruriency, Lubricity, Chance and the Devil, choosing Two out of
- Half-a-million idle human heads, tempt them to?[401]
-
- Sure enough, the two human individuals with their gimlet are
- there. Ill-starred pair of individuals! For the result of it all
- is that Patriotism, fretting itself, in this state of nervous
- excitability, with hypotheses, suspicions and reports, keeps
- questioning these two distracted human individuals, and again
- questioning them; claps them into the nearest Guardhouse,
- clutches them out again; one hypothetic group snatching them from
- another: till finally, in such extreme state of nervous
- excitability, Patriotism hangs them as spies of Sieur Motier; and
- the life and secret is choked out of them forevermore.
- Forevermore, alas! Or is a day to be looked for when these two
- evidently mean individuals, who are human nevertheless, will
- become Historical Riddles; and, like him of the _Iron Mask_ (also
- a human individual, and evidently nothing more),—have their
- Dissertations? To us this only is certain, that they had a
- gimlet, provisions and a wooden leg; and have died there on the
- Lanterne, as the unluckiest fools might die.
-
- And so the signature goes on, in a still more excited manner. And
- Chaumette, for Antiquarians possess the very Paper to this
- hour,[402]—has signed himself “in a flowing saucy hand slightly
- leaned;” and Hébert, detestable _Père Duchesne_, as if “an inked
- spider had dropped on the paper;” Usher Maillard also has signed,
- and many Crosses, which cannot write. And Paris, through its
- thousand avenues, is welling to the Champ-de-Mars and from it, in
- the utmost excitability of humour; central Fatherland’s Altar
- quite heaped with signing Patriots and Patriotesses; the
- Thirty-benches and whole internal Space crowded with onlookers,
- with comers and goers; one regurgitating whirlpool of men and
- women in their Sunday clothes. All which a Constitutional Sieur
- Motier sees; and Bailly, looking into it with his long visage
- made still longer. Auguring no good; perhaps _Déchéance_ and
- Deposition after all! Stop it, ye Constitutional Patriots; fire
- itself is quenchable, yet only quenchable at _first._
-
- Stop it, truly: but how stop it? Have not the first Free People
- of the Universe a right to petition?—Happily, if also unhappily,
- here is one proof of riot: these two human individuals, hanged at
- the Lanterne. Proof, O treacherous Sieur Motier? Were they not
- two human individuals sent thither by thee to be hanged; to be a
- pretext for thy bloody _Drapeau Rouge?_ This question shall many
- a Patriot, one day, ask; and answer affirmatively, strong in
- Preternatural Suspicion.
-
- Enough, towards half past seven in the evening, the mere natural
- eye can behold this thing: Sieur Motier, with Municipals in
- scarf, with blue National Patrollotism, rank after rank, to the
- clang of drums; wending resolutely to the Champ-de-Mars; Mayor
- Bailly, with elongated visage, bearing, as in sad duty bound, the
- _Drapeau Rouge._ Howl of angry derision rises in treble and bass
- from a hundred thousand throats, at the sight of Martial Law;
- which nevertheless waving its Red sanguinary Flag, advances
- there, from the Gros-Caillou Entrance; advances, drumming and
- waving, towards Altar of Fatherland. Amid still wilder howls,
- with objurgation, obtestation; with flights of pebbles and mud,
- _saxa et fæces;_ with crackle of a pistol-shot;—finally with
- volley-fire of Patrollotism; levelled muskets; roll of volley on
- volley! Precisely after one year and three days, our sublime
- Federation Field is wetted, in this manner, with French blood.
-
- Some “Twelve unfortunately shot,” reports Bailly, counting by
- units; but Patriotism counts by tens and even by hundreds. Not to
- be forgotten, nor forgiven! Patriotism flies, shrieking,
- execrating. Camille ceases Journalising, this day; great Danton
- with Camille and Fréron have taken wing, for their life; Marat
- burrows deep in the Earth, and is silent. Once more Patrollotism
- has triumphed: one other time; but it is the last.
-
- This was the Royal Flight to Varennes. Thus was the Throne
- overturned thereby; but thus also was it victoriously set up
- again—on its vertex; and will stand while it can be held.
-
-
- BOOK 2.V.
- PARLIAMENT FIRST
-
-
- Chapter 2.5.I.
- Grande Acceptation.
-
- In the last nights of September, when the autumnal equinox is
- past, and grey September fades into brown October, why are the
- Champs Elysées illuminated; why is Paris dancing, and flinging
- fire-works? They are gala-nights, these last of September; Paris
- may well dance, and the Universe: the Edifice of the Constitution
- is completed! Completed; nay _revised_, to see that there was
- nothing insufficient in it; solemnly proferred to his Majesty;
- solemnly accepted by him, to the sound of cannon-salvoes, on the
- fourteenth of the month. And now by such illumination, jubilee,
- dancing and fire-working, do we joyously handsel the new Social
- Edifice, and first raise heat and reek there, in the name of
- Hope.
-
- The Revision, especially with a throne standing on its vertex,
- has been a work of difficulty, of delicacy. In the way of
- propping and buttressing, so indispensable now, something could
- be done; and yet, as is feared, not enough. A repentant Barnave
- Triumvirate, our Rabauts, Duports, Thourets, and indeed all
- Constitutional Deputies did strain every nerve: but the Extreme
- Left was so noisy; the People were so suspicious, clamorous to
- have the work ended: and then the loyal Right Side sat feeble
- petulant all the while, and as it were, pouting and petting;
- unable to help, had they even been willing; the two Hundred and
- Ninety had solemnly made scission, before that: and departed,
- shaking the dust off their feet. To such transcendency of fret,
- and desperate hope that worsening of the bad might the sooner end
- it and bring back the good, had our unfortunate loyal Right Side
- now come![403]
-
- However, one finds that this and the other little prop has been
- added, where possibility allowed. Civil-list and Privy-purse were
- from of old well cared for. King’s Constitutional Guard, Eighteen
- hundred loyal men from the Eighty-three Departments, under a
- loyal Duke de Brissac; this, with trustworthy Swiss besides, is
- of itself something. The old loyal Bodyguards are indeed
- dissolved, in name as well as in fact; and gone mostly towards
- Coblentz. But now also those Sansculottic violent Gardes
- Françaises, or Centre Grenadiers, shall have their mittimus: they
- do ere long, in the Journals, not without a hoarse pathos,
- publish their Farewell; “wishing all Aristocrats the graves in
- Paris which to us are denied.”[404] They depart, these first
- Soldiers of the Revolution; they hover very dimly in the distance
- for about another year; till they can be remodelled, new-named,
- and sent to fight the Austrians; and then History beholds them no
- more. A most notable Corps of men; which has its place in
- World-History;—though to us, so is History written, they remain
- mere rubrics of men; nameless; a shaggy Grenadier Mass, crossed
- with buff-belts. And yet might we not ask: What Argonauts, what
- Leonidas’ Spartans had done such a work? Think of their destiny:
- since that May morning, some three years ago, when they,
- unparticipating, trundled off d’Espréménil to the Calypso Isles;
- since that July evening, some two years ago, when they,
- participating and _sacre_ing with knit brows, poured a volley
- into Besenval’s Prince de Lambesc! History waves them her mute
- adieu.
-
- So that the Sovereign Power, these Sansculottic Watchdogs, more
- like wolves, being leashed and led away from his Tuileries,
- breathes freer. The Sovereign Power is guarded henceforth by a
- loyal Eighteen hundred,—whom Contrivance, under various pretexts,
- may gradually swell to Six thousand; who will hinder no Journey
- to Saint-Cloud. The sad Varennes business has been soldered up;
- cemented, even in the blood of the Champ-de-Mars, these two
- months and more; and indeed ever since, as formerly, Majesty has
- had its privileges, its “choice of residence,” though, for good
- reasons, the royal mind “prefers continuing in Paris.” Poor royal
- mind, poor Paris; that have to go mumming; enveloped in
- speciosities, in falsehood which knows itself false; and to enact
- mutually your sorrowful farce-tragedy, being bound to it; and on
- the whole, to hope always, in spite of hope!
-
- Nay, now that his Majesty has accepted the Constitution, to the
- sound of cannon-salvoes, who would not hope? Our good King was
- misguided but he meant well. Lafayette has moved for an Amnesty,
- for universal forgiving and forgetting of Revolutionary faults;
- and now surely the glorious Revolution cleared of its rubbish, is
- complete! Strange enough, and touching in several ways, the old
- cry of _Vive le Roi_ once more rises round King Louis the
- Hereditary Representative. Their Majesties went to the Opera;
- gave money to the Poor: the Queen herself, now when the
- Constitution is accepted, hears voice of cheering. Bygone shall
- be bygone; the New Era _shall_ begin! To and fro, amid those
- lamp-galaxies of the Elysian Fields, the Royal Carriage slowly
- wends and rolls; every where with _vivats_, from a multitude
- striving to be glad. Louis looks out, mainly on the variegated
- lamps and gay human groups, with satisfaction enough for the
- hour. In her Majesty’s face, “under that kind graceful smile a
- deep sadness is legible.”[405] Brilliancies, of valour and of
- wit, stroll here observant: a Dame de Staël, leaning most
- probably on the arm of her Narbonne. She meets Deputies; who have
- built this Constitution; who saunter here with vague
- communings,—not without thoughts whether it will stand. But as
- yet melodious fiddlestrings twang and warble every where, with
- the rhythm of light fantastic feet; long lamp-galaxies fling
- their coloured radiance; and brass-lunged Hawkers elbow and bawl,
- ‘_Grande Acceptation, Constitution Monarchique:_’ it behoves the
- Son of Adam to hope. Have not Lafayette, Barnave, and all
- Constitutionalists set their shoulders handsomely to the inverted
- pyramid of a throne? Feuillans, including almost the whole
- Constitutional Respectability of France, perorate nightly from
- their tribune; correspond through all Post-offices; denouncing
- unquiet Jacobinism; trusting well that _its_ time is nigh done.
- Much is uncertain, questionable: but if the Hereditary
- Representative be wise and lucky, may one not, with a sanguine
- Gaelic temper, hope that he will get in motion better or worse;
- that what is wanting to him will gradually be gained and added?
-
- For the rest, as we must repeat, in this building of the
- Constitutional Fabric, especially in this Revision of it, nothing
- that one could think of to give it new strength, especially to
- steady it, to give it permanence, and even eternity, has been
- forgotten. Biennial Parliament, to be called Legislative,
- _Assemblée Legislative;_ with Seven Hundred and Forty-five
- Members, chosen in a judicious manner by the “active citizens”
- alone, and even by electing of electors still more active: this,
- with privileges of Parliament shall meet, self-authorized if need
- be, and self-dissolved; shall grant money-supplies and talk;
- watch over the administration and authorities; discharge for ever
- the functions of a Constitutional Great Council, Collective
- Wisdom, and National Palaver,—as the Heavens will enable. Our
- First biennial Parliament, which indeed has been a-choosing since
- early in August, is now as good as chosen. Nay it has mostly got
- to Paris: it arrived gradually;—not without pathetic greeting to
- its venerable Parent, the now moribund Constituent; and sat there
- in the Galleries, reverently listening; ready to begin, the
- instant the ground were clear.
-
- Then as to changes in the Constitution itself? This, impossible
- for any Legislative, or common biennial Parliament, and possible
- solely for some resuscitated Constituent or National
- Convention,—is evidently one of the most ticklish points. The
- august moribund Assembly debated it for four entire days. Some
- thought a change, or at least reviewal and new approval, might be
- admissible in thirty years; some even went lower, down to twenty,
- nay to fifteen. The august Assembly had once decided for thirty
- years; but it revoked that, on better thoughts; and did not fix
- any date of time, but merely some vague outline of a posture of
- circumstances, and on the whole left the matter hanging.[406]
- Doubtless a National Convention can be assembled even _within_
- the thirty years: yet one may hope, not; but that Legislatives,
- biennial Parliaments of the common kind, with their limited
- faculty, and perhaps quiet successive additions thereto, may
- suffice, for generations, or indeed while computed Time runs.
-
- Furthermore, be it noted that no member of this Constituent has
- been, or could be, elected to the new Legislative. So
- noble-minded were these Law-makers! cry some: and Solon-like
- would banish themselves. So splenetic! cry more: each grudging
- the other, none daring to be outdone in self-denial by the other.
- So unwise in either case! answer all practical men. But consider
- this other self-denying ordinance, That none of us can be King’s
- Minister, or accept the smallest Court Appointment, for the space
- of four, or at lowest (and on long debate and Revision), for the
- space of two years! So moves the incorruptible seagreen
- Robespierre; with cheap magnanimity he; and none dare be outdone
- by him. It was such a law, not so superfluous _then_, that sent
- Mirabeau to the Gardens of Saint-Cloud, under cloak of darkness,
- to that colloquy of the gods; and thwarted many things. Happily
- and unhappily there is no Mirabeau now to thwart.
-
- Welcomer meanwhile, welcome surely to all right hearts, is
- Lafayette’s chivalrous Amnesty. Welcome too is that hard-wrung
- Union of Avignon; which has cost us, first and last, “thirty
- sessions of debate,” and so much else: may it at length prove
- lucky! Rousseau’s statue is decreed: virtuous Jean-Jacques,
- Evangelist of the Contrat Social. Not Drouet of Varennes; nor
- worthy Lataille, master of the old world-famous Tennis Court in
- Versailles, is forgotten; but each has his honourable mention,
- and due reward in money.[407] Whereupon, things being all so
- neatly winded up, and the Deputations, and Messages, and royal
- and other Ceremonials having rustled by; and the King having now
- affectionately perorated about peace and tranquilisation, and
- members having answered ‘_Oui! oui!_’ with effusion, even with
- tears,—President Thouret, he of the Law Reforms, rises, and, with
- a strong voice, utters these memorable last-words: ‘The National
- Constituent Assembly declares that it has finished its mission;
- and that its sittings are all ended.’ Incorruptible Robespierre,
- virtuous Pétion are borne home on the shoulders of the people;
- with vivats heaven-high. The rest glide quietly to their
- respective places of abode. It is the last afternoon of
- September, 1791; on the morrow morning the new Legislative will
- begin.
-
- So, amid glitter of illuminated streets and Champs Elysées, and
- crackle of fireworks and glad deray, has the first National
- Assembly vanished; _dissolving_, as they well say, into blank
- Time; and is no more. National Assembly is gone, its work
- remaining; as all Bodies of men go, and as man himself goes: it
- had its beginning, and must likewise have its end. A
- Phantasm-Reality born of Time, as the rest of us are; flitting
- ever backwards now on the tide of Time: to be long remembered of
- men. Very strange Assemblages, Sanhedrims, Amphictyonics, Trades
- Unions, Ecumenic Councils, Parliaments and Congresses, have met
- together on this Planet, and dispersed again; but a stranger
- Assemblage than this august Constituent, or with a stranger
- mission, perhaps never met there. Seen from the distance, this
- also will be a miracle. Twelve Hundred human individuals, with
- the Gospel of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in their pocket, congregating
- in the name of Twenty-five Millions, with full assurance of
- faith, to “make the Constitution:” such sight, the acme and main
- product of the Eighteenth Century, our World can witness once
- only. For Time is rich in wonders, in monstrosities most rich;
- and is observed never to repeat himself, or any of his
- Gospels:—surely least of all, this Gospel according to
- Jean-Jacques. Once it was right and indispensable, since such had
- become the Belief of men; but once also is enough.
-
- They have made the Constitution, these Twelve Hundred
- Jean-Jacques Evangelists; not without result. Near twenty-nine
- months they sat, with various fortune; in various
- capacity;—always, we may say, in that capacity of carborne
- Caroccio, and miraculous Standard of the Revolt of Men, as a
- Thing high and lifted up; whereon whosoever looked might hope
- healing. They have seen much: cannons levelled on them; then
- suddenly, by interposition of the Powers, the cannons drawn back;
- and a war-god Broglie vanishing, in thunder _not_ his own, amid
- the dust and downrushing of a Bastille and Old Feudal France.
- They have suffered somewhat: Royal Session, with rain and Oath of
- the Tennis-Court; Nights of Pentecost; Insurrections of Women.
- Also have they not done somewhat? Made the Constitution, and
- managed all things the while; passed, in these twenty-nine
- months, “twenty-five hundred Decrees,” which on the average is
- some three for each day, including Sundays! Brevity, one finds,
- is possible, at times: had not Moreau de St. Mery to give three
- thousand orders before rising from his seat?—There was valour (or
- value) in these men; and a kind of faith,—were it only faith in
- this, That cobwebs are not cloth; that a Constitution could be
- made. Cobwebs and chimeras ought verily to disappear; for _a_
- Reality there is. Let formulas, soul-killing, and now grown
- body-killing, insupportable, begone, in the name of Heaven and
- Earth!—Time, as we say, brought forth these Twelve Hundred;
- Eternity was before them, Eternity behind: they worked, as we all
- do, in the confluence of Two Eternities; what work was given
- them. Say not that it was nothing they did. Consciously they did
- somewhat; unconsciously how much! They had their giants and their
- dwarfs, they accomplished their good and their evil; they are
- gone, and return no more. Shall they not go with our blessing, in
- these circumstances; with our mild farewell?
-
- By post, by diligence, on saddle or sole; they are gone: towards
- the four winds! Not a few over the marches, to rank at Coblentz.
- Thither wended Maury, among others; but in the end towards
- Rome,—to be clothed there in red Cardinal plush; in falsehood as
- in a garment; pet son (her _last_-born?) of the Scarlet Woman.
- Talleyrand-Perigord, excommunicated Constitutional Bishop, will
- make his way to London; to be Ambassador, spite of the
- Self-denying Law; brisk young Marquis Chauvelin acting as
- Ambassador’s-Cloak. In London too, one finds Pétion the virtuous;
- harangued and haranguing, pledging the wine-cup with
- Constitutional Reform Clubs, in solemn tavern-dinner.
- Incorruptible Robespierre retires for a little to native Arras:
- seven short weeks of quiet; the last appointed him in this world.
- Public Accuser in the Paris Department, acknowledged highpriest
- of the Jacobins; the glass of incorruptible thin Patriotism, for
- his narrow emphasis is loved of all the narrow,—this man seems to
- be rising, somewhither? He sells his small heritage at Arras;
- accompanied by a Brother and a Sister, he returns, scheming out
- with resolute timidity a small sure destiny for himself and them,
- to his old lodging, at the Cabinet-maker’s, in the Rue St.
- Honoré:—O resolute-tremulous incorruptible seagreen man, towards
- _what_ a destiny!
-
- Lafayette, for his part, will lay down the command. He retires
- Cincinnatus-like to his hearth and farm; but soon leaves them
- again. Our National Guard, however, shall henceforth have no one
- Commandant; but all Colonels shall command in succession, month
- about. Other Deputies we have met, or Dame de Staël has met,
- “sauntering in a thoughtful manner;” perhaps uncertain what to
- do. Some, as Barnave, the Lameths, and their Duport, will
- continue here in Paris: watching the new biennial Legislative,
- Parliament the First; teaching it to walk, if so might be; and
- the Court to lead it.
-
- Thus these: sauntering in a thoughtful manner; travelling by post
- or diligence,—whither Fate beckons. Giant Mirabeau slumbers in
- the Pantheon of Great Men: and France? and Europe?—The
- brass-lunged Hawkers sing ‘Grand Acceptation, Monarchic
- Constitution’ through these gay crowds: the Morrow, grandson of
- Yesterday, must be what it can, as Today its father is. Our new
- biennial Legislative begins to constitute itself on the first of
- October, 1791.
-
-
- Chapter 2.5.II.
- The Book of the Law.
-
- If the august Constituent Assembly itself, fixing the regards of
- the Universe, could, at the present distance of time and place,
- gain comparatively small attention from us, how much less can
- this poor Legislative! It has its Right Side and its Left; the
- less Patriotic and the more, for Aristocrats exist not here or
- now: it spouts and speaks: listens to Reports, reads Bills and
- Laws; works in its vocation, for a season: but the history of
- France, one finds, is seldom or never there. Unhappy Legislative,
- what can History do with it; if not drop a tear over it, almost
- in silence? First of the two-year Parliaments of France, which,
- if Paper Constitution and oft-repeated National Oath could avail
- aught, were to follow in softly-strong indissoluble sequence
- while Time ran,—it had to vanish dolefully within one year; and
- there came no second like it. Alas! your biennial Parliaments in
- endless indissoluble sequence; they, and all that Constitutional
- Fabric, built with such explosive Federation Oaths, and its
- top-stone brought out with dancing and variegated radiance, went
- to pieces, like frail crockery, in the crash of things; and
- already, in eleven short months, were in that Limbo near the
- Moon, with the ghosts of other Chimeras. There, except for rare
- specific purposes, let them rest, in melancholy peace.
-
- On the whole, how unknown is a man to himself; or a public Body
- of men to itself! Æsop’s fly sat on the chariot-wheel,
- exclaiming, What a dust I do raise! Great Governors, clad in
- purple with fasces and insignia, are governed by their valets, by
- the pouting of their women and children; or, in Constitutional
- countries, by the paragraphs of their Able Editors. Say not, I am
- this or that; I am doing this or that! For thou knowest _it_ not,
- thou knowest only the name it as yet goes by. A purple
- Nebuchadnezzar rejoices to feel himself now verily Emperor of
- this great Babylon which he has builded; and _is_ a nondescript
- biped-quadruped, on the eve of a seven-years course of grazing!
- These Seven Hundred and Forty-five elected individuals doubt not
- but they are the First biennial Parliament, come to govern France
- by parliamentary eloquence: and they _are_ what? And they have
- come to do what? Things foolish and not wise!
-
- It is much lamented by many that this First Biennial had no
- members of the old Constituent in it, with their experience of
- parties and parliamentary tactics; that such was their foolish
- Self-denying Law. Most surely, old members of the Constituent had
- been welcome to us here. But, on the other hand, what old or what
- new members of any Constituent under the Sun could have
- effectually profited? There are First biennial Parliaments so
- postured as to be, in a sense, _beyond_ wisdom; where wisdom and
- folly differ only in degree, and wreckage and dissolution are the
- appointed issue for both.
-
- Old-Constituents, your Barnaves, Lameths and the like, for whom a
- special Gallery has been set apart, where they may sit in honour
- and listen, are in the habit of sneering at these new
- Legislators;[408] but let not us! The poor Seven Hundred and
- Forty-five, sent together by the active citizens of France, are
- what they could be; do what is fated them. That they are of
- Patriot temper we can well understand. Aristocrat Noblesse had
- fled over the marches, or sat brooding silent in their unburnt
- Châteaus; small prospect had they in Primary Electoral
- Assemblies. What with Flights to Varennes, what with Days of
- Poniards, with plot after plot, the People are left to
- themselves; the People must needs choose Defenders of the People,
- such as can be had. Choosing, as _they_ also will ever do, “if
- not the ablest man, yet the man ablest to be chosen!” Fervour of
- character, decided Patriot-Constitutional feeling; these are
- qualities: but free utterance, mastership in tongue-fence; this
- is the quality of qualities. Accordingly one finds, with little
- astonishment, in this First Biennial, that as many as Four
- hundred Members are of the Advocate or Attorney species. Men who
- can speak, if there be aught to speak: nay here are men also who
- can think, and even act. Candour will say of this ill-fated First
- French Parliament that it wanted not its modicum of talent, its
- modicum of honesty; that it, neither in the one respect nor in
- the other, sank below the average of Parliaments, but rose above
- the average. Let average Parliaments, whom the world does _not_
- guillotine, and cast forth to long infamy, be thankful not to
- themselves but to their stars!
-
- France, as we say, has once more done what it could: fervid men
- have come together from wide separation; for strange issues.
- Fiery Max Isnard is come, from the utmost South-East; fiery
- Claude Fauchet, Te-Deum Fauchet Bishop of Calvados, from the
- utmost North-West. No Mirabeau now sits here, who had swallowed
- formulas: our only Mirabeau now is Danton, working as yet out of
- doors; whom some call “Mirabeau of the Sansculottes.”
-
- Nevertheless we have our gifts,—especially of speech and logic.
- An eloquent Vergniaud we have; most mellifluous yet most
- impetuous of public speakers; from the region named Gironde, of
- the Garonne: a man unfortunately of indolent habits; who will sit
- playing with your children, when he ought to be scheming and
- perorating. Sharp bustling Guadet; considerate grave Censonne;
- kind-sparkling mirthful young Ducos; Valazé doomed to a sad end:
- all these likewise are of that Gironde, or Bourdeaux region: men
- of fervid Constitutional principles; of quick talent,
- irrefragable logic, clear respectability; who will have the Reign
- of Liberty establish itself, but only by respectable methods.
- Round whom others of like temper will gather; known by and by as
- _Girondins_, to the sorrowing wonder of the world. Of which sort
- note Condorcet, Marquis and Philosopher; who has worked at much,
- at Paris Municipal Constitution, Differential Calculus, Newspaper
- _Chronique de Paris_, Biography, Philosophy; and now sits here as
- two-years Senator: a notable Condorcet, with stoical Roman face,
- and fiery heart; “volcano hid under snow;” styled likewise, in
- irreverent language, “_mouton enragé_,” peaceablest of creatures
- bitten rabid! Or note, lastly, Jean-Pierre Brissot; whom Destiny,
- long working noisily with him, has hurled hither, say, to have
- done with him. A biennial Senator he too; nay, for the present,
- the king of such. Restless, scheming, scribbling Brissot; who
- took to himself the style _de Warville_, heralds know not in the
- least why;—unless it were that the father of him did, in an
- unexceptionable manner, perform Cookery and Vintnery in the
- Village of _Ouar_ville? A man of the windmill species, that
- grinds always, turning towards all winds; not in the steadiest
- manner.
-
- In all these men there is talent, faculty to work; and they will
- do it: working and shaping, not _without_ effect, though alas not
- in marble, only in quicksand!—But the highest faculty of them all
- remains yet to be mentioned; or indeed has yet to unfold itself
- for mention: Captain Hippolyte Carnot, sent hither from the Pas
- de Calais; with his cold mathematical head, and silent
- stubbornness of will: iron Carnot, far-planning, imperturbable,
- unconquerable; who, in the hour of need, shall not be found
- wanting. His hair is yet black; and it shall grow grey, under
- many kinds of fortune, bright and troublous; and with iron aspect
- this man shall face them all.
-
- Nor is _Côté Droit_, and band of King’s friends, wanting:
- Vaublanc, Dumas, Jaucourt the honoured Chevalier; who love
- Liberty, yet with Monarchy over it; and speak fearlessly
- according to that faith;—whom the thick-coming hurricanes will
- sweep away. With them, let a new military Theodore Lameth be
- named;—were it only for his two Brothers’ sake, who look down on
- him, approvingly there, from the Old-Constituents’ Gallery.
- Frothy professing Pastorets, honey-mouthed conciliatory
- Lamourettes, and speechless nameless individuals sit plentiful,
- as Moderates, in the middle. Still less is a _Côté Gauche_
- wanting: extreme Left; sitting on the topmost benches, as if
- aloft on its speculatory Height or _Mountain_, which will become
- a practical fulminatory Height, and make the name of Mountain
- famous-infamous to all times and lands.
-
- Honour waits not on this Mountain; nor as yet even loud
- dishonour. Gifts it boasts not, nor graces, of speaking or of
- thinking; solely this one gift of assured faith, of audacity that
- will defy the Earth and the Heavens. Foremost here are the
- Cordelier Trio: hot Merlin from Thionville, hot Bazire, Attorneys
- both; Chabot, disfrocked Capuchin, skilful in agio. Lawyer
- Lacroix, who wore once as subaltern the single epaulette, has
- loud lungs and a hungry heart. There too is Couthon, little
- dreaming _what_ he is;—whom a sad chance has paralysed in the
- lower extremities. For, it seems, he sat once a whole night, not
- warm in his true love’s bower (who indeed was by law another’s),
- but sunken to the middle in a cold peat-bog, being hunted out;
- quaking for his life, in the cold quaking morass;[409] and goes
- now on crutches to the end. Cambon likewise, in whom slumbers
- undeveloped such a finance-talent for printing of Assignats;
- Father of Paper-money; who, in the hour of menace, shall utter
- this stern sentence, “War to the Manorhouse, peace to the Hut,
- _Guerre aux Châteaux, paix aux Chaumières!_”[410] Lecointre, the
- intrepid Draper of Versailles, is welcome here; known since the
- Opera-Repast and Insurrection of Women. Thuriot too; Elector
- Thuriot, who stood in the embrasures of the Bastille, and saw
- Saint-Antoine rising in mass; who has many other things to see.
- Last and grimmest of all note old Ruhl, with his brown dusky face
- and long white hair; of Alsatian Lutheran breed; a man whom age
- and book-learning have not taught; who, haranguing the old men of
- Rheims, shall hold up the Sacred _Ampulla_ (Heaven-sent,
- wherefrom Clovis and all Kings have been anointed) as a mere
- worthless oil-bottle, and dash it to sherds on the pavement
- there; who, alas, shall dash much to sherds, and finally his own
- wild head, by pistol-shot, and so end it.
-
- Such lava welters redhot in the bowels of this Mountain; unknown
- to the world and to itself! A mere commonplace Mountain hitherto;
- distinguished from the Plain chiefly by its superior
- _barrenness_, its baldness of look: at the utmost it may, to the
- most observant, perceptibly _smoke_. For as yet all lies so
- solid, peaceable; and doubts not, as was said, that it will
- endure while Time runs. Do not all love Liberty and the
- Constitution? All heartily;—and yet with degrees. Some, as
- Chevalier Jaucourt and his Right Side, may love Liberty less than
- Royalty, were the trial made; others, as Brissot and his Left
- Side, may love it more than Royalty. Nay again of these latter
- some may love Liberty more than Law itself; others not more.
- Parties _will_ unfold themselves; no mortal as yet knows how.
- Forces work within these men and without: dissidence grows
- opposition; ever widening; waxing into incompatibility and
- internecine feud: till the strong is abolished by a stronger;
- himself in his turn by a strongest! Who can help it? Jaucourt and
- his Monarchists, Feuillans, or Moderates; Brissot and his
- Brissotins, Jacobins, or Girondins; these, with the Cordelier
- Trio, and all men, must work what is appointed them, and in the
- way appointed them.
-
- And to think what fate these poor Seven Hundred and Forty-five
- are assembled, most unwittingly, to meet! Let no heart be so hard
- as not to pity them. Their soul’s wish was to live and work as
- the First of the French Parliaments: and make the Constitution
- march. Did they not, at their very instalment, go through the
- most affecting Constitutional ceremony, almost with tears? The
- Twelve Eldest are sent solemnly to fetch the Constitution itself,
- the printed book of the Law. Archivist Camus, an Old-Constituent
- appointed Archivist, he and the Ancient Twelve, amid blare of
- military pomp and clangour, enter, bearing the divine Book: and
- President and all Legislative Senators, laying their hand on the
- same, successively take the Oath, with cheers and heart-effusion,
- universal three-times-three.[411] In this manner they begin their
- Session. Unhappy mortals! For, that same day, his Majesty having
- received their Deputation of welcome, as seemed, rather drily,
- the Deputation cannot but feel slighted, cannot but lament such
- slight: and thereupon our cheering swearing First Parliament sees
- itself, on the morrow, obliged to explode into fierce retaliatory
- sputter, of anti-royal Enactment as to how they, for their part,
- will receive Majesty; and how Majesty shall not be called Sire
- any more, except they please: and then, on the following day, to
- recall this Enactment of theirs, as too hasty, and a mere sputter
- though not unprovoked.
-
- An effervescent well-intentioned set of Senators; too
- combustible, where continual sparks are flying! Their History is
- a series of sputters and quarrels; true desire to do their
- function, fatal impossibility to do it. Denunciations,
- reprimandings of King’s Ministers, of traitors supposed and real;
- hot rage and fulmination against fulminating Emigrants; terror of
- Austrian Kaiser, of “Austrian Committee” in the Tuileries itself:
- rage and haunting terror, haste and dim desperate
- bewilderment!—Haste, we say; and yet the Constitution had
- provided against haste. No Bill can be passed till it have been
- printed, till it have been thrice read, with intervals of eight
- days;—“unless the Assembly shall beforehand decree that there is
- urgency.” Which, accordingly, the Assembly, scrupulous of the
- Constitution, never omits to do: Considering this, and also
- considering that, and then that other, the Assembly decrees
- always “_qu’il y a urgence;_” and thereupon “the Assembly, having
- decreed that there is urgence,” is free to decree—what
- indispensable distracted thing seems best to it. Two thousand and
- odd decrees, as men reckon, within Eleven months![412] The haste
- of the Constituent seemed great; but this is treble-quick. For
- the time itself is rushing treble-quick; and they have to keep
- pace with that. Unhappy Seven Hundred and Forty-five:
- true-patriotic, but so combustible; being fired, they must needs
- fling fire: Senate of touchwood and rockets, in a world of
- smoke-storm, with sparks wind-driven continually flying!
-
- Or think, on the other hand, looking forward some months, of that
- scene they call _Baiser de Lamourette!_ The dangers of the
- country are now grown imminent, immeasurable; National Assembly,
- hope of France, is divided against itself. In such extreme
- circumstances, honey-mouthed Abbé Lamourette, new Bishop of
- Lyons, rises, whose name, _l’amourette_, signifies the
- _sweetheart_, or Delilah doxy,—he rises, and, with pathetic
- honied eloquence, calls on all august Senators to forget mutual
- griefs and grudges, to swear a new oath, and unite as brothers.
- Whereupon they all, with vivats, embrace and swear; Left Side
- confounding itself with Right; barren Mountain rushing down to
- fruitful Plain, Pastoret into the arms of Condorcet, injured to
- the breast of injurer, with tears; and all swearing that
- whosoever wishes either Feuillant Two-Chamber Monarchy or
- Extreme-Jacobin Republic, or any thing but the Constitution and
- that only, shall be anathema maranatha.[413] Touching to behold!
- For, literally on the morrow morning, they must again quarrel,
- driven by Fate; and their sublime reconcilement is called
- derisively _Baiser de L’amourette_, or Delilah Kiss.
-
- Like fated Eteocles-Polynices Brothers, embracing, though in
- vain; weeping that they must not love, that they must hate only,
- and die by each other’s hands! Or say, like doomed Familiar
- Spirits; ordered, by Art Magic under penalties, to do a harder
- than twist ropes of sand: “to make the Constitution march.” If
- the Constitution would but march! Alas, the Constitution will not
- stir. It falls on its face; they tremblingly lift it on end
- again: march, thou gold Constitution! The Constitution will not
- march.—‘He shall march, by—!’ said kind Uncle Toby, and even
- swore. The Corporal answered mournfully: ‘He will never march in
- this world.’
-
- A constitution, as we often say, will march when it images, if
- not the old Habits and Beliefs of the Constituted; then
- accurately their Rights, or better indeed, their Mights;—for
- these two, well-understood, are they not one and the same? The
- old Habits of France are gone: her new Rights and Mights are not
- yet ascertained, except in Paper-theorem; nor can be, in any
- sort, till she have _tried_. Till she have measured herself, in
- fell death-grip, and were it in utmost preternatural spasm of
- madness, with Principalities and Powers, with the upper and the
- under, internal and external; with the Earth and Tophet and the
- very Heaven! Then will she know.—Three things bode ill for the
- marching of this French Constitution: the French People; the
- French King; thirdly the French Noblesse and an assembled
- European World.
-
-
- Chapter 2.5.III.
- Avignon.
-
- But quitting generalities, what strange Fact is this, in the far
- South-West, towards which the eyes of all men do now, in the end
- of October, bend themselves? A tragical combustion, long smoking
- and smouldering unluminous, has now burst into flame there.
-
- Hot is that Southern Provençal blood: alas, collisions, as was
- once said, must occur in a career of Freedom; different
- directions will produce such; nay different _velocities_ in the
- same direction will! To much that went on there History, busied
- elsewhere, would not specially give heed: to troubles of Uzez,
- troubles of Nismes, Protestant and Catholic, Patriot and
- Aristocrat; to troubles of Marseilles, Montpelier, Arles; to
- Aristocrat Camp of Jalès, that wondrous real-imaginary Entity,
- now fading pale-dim, then always again glowing forth deep-hued
- (in the Imagination mainly);—ominous magical, “an Aristocrat
- _picture_ of war done naturally!” All this was a tragical deadly
- combustion, with plot and riot, tumult by night and by day; but a
- _dark_ combustion, not luminous, not noticed; which now, however,
- one cannot help noticing.
-
- Above all places, the unluminous combustion in Avignon and the
- Comtat Venaissin was fierce. Papal Avignon, with its Castle
- rising sheer over the Rhone-stream; beautifullest Town, with its
- purple vines and gold-orange groves: why must foolish old rhyming
- Réné, the last Sovereign of Provence, bequeath it to the Pope and
- Gold Tiara, not rather to Louis Eleventh with the Leaden Virgin
- in his hatband? For good and for evil! Popes, Anti-popes, with
- their pomp, have dwelt in that Castle of Avignon rising sheer
- over the Rhone-stream: there Laura de Sade went to hear mass; her
- Petrarch twanging and singing by the Fountain of Vaucluse hard
- by, surely in a most melancholy manner. This was in the old days.
-
- And now in these new days, such issues do come from a squirt of
- the pen by some foolish rhyming Réné, after centuries, this is
- what we have: Jourdan _Coupe-tête_, leading to siege and warfare
- an Army, from three to fifteen thousand strong, called the
- Brigands of Avignon; which title they themselves accept, with the
- addition of an epithet, “The _brave_ Brigands of Avignon!” It is
- even so. Jourdan the Headsman fled hither from that Chatelet
- Inquest, from that Insurrection of Women; and began dealing in
- madder; but the scene was rife in other than dye-stuffs; so
- Jourdan shut his madder shop, and has risen, for he was the man
- to do it. The tile-beard of Jourdan is shaven off; his fat visage
- has got coppered and studded with black carbuncles; the Silenus
- trunk is swollen with drink and high living: he wears blue
- National uniform with epaulettes, “an enormous sabre, two
- horse-pistols crossed in his belt, and other two smaller,
- sticking from his pockets;” styles himself General, and is the
- tyrant of men.[414] Consider this one fact, O Reader; and what
- sort of facts must have preceded it, must accompany it! Such
- things come of old Réné; and of the question which has risen,
- Whether Avignon cannot now cease wholly to be Papal and become
- French and free?
-
- For some twenty-five months the confusion has lasted. Say three
- months of arguing; then seven of raging; then finally some
- fifteen months now of fighting, and even of hanging. For already
- in February 1790, the Papal Aristocrats had set up four gibbets,
- for a sign; but the People rose in June, in retributive frenzy;
- and, forcing the public Hangman to act, hanged four Aristocrats,
- on each Papal gibbet a Papal Haman. Then were Avignon
- Emigrations, Papal Aristocrats emigrating over the Rhone River;
- demission of Papal Consul, flight, victory: re-entrance of Papal
- Legate, truce, and new onslaught; and the various turns of war.
- Petitions there were to National Assembly; Congresses of
- Townships; three-score and odd Townships voting for French
- Reunion, and the blessings of Liberty; while some twelve of the
- smaller, manipulated by Aristocrats, gave vote the other way:
- with shrieks and discord! Township against Township, Town against
- Town: Carpentras, long jealous of Avignon, is now turned out in
- open war with it;—and Jourdan _Coupe-tête_, your first General
- being killed in mutiny, closes his dye-shop; and does there
- visibly, with siege-artillery, above all with bluster and tumult,
- with the “brave Brigands of Avignon,” beleaguer the rival Town,
- for two months, in the face of the world!
-
- Feats were done, doubt it not, far-famed in Parish History; but
- to Universal History unknown. Gibbets we see rise, on the one
- side and on the other; and wretched carcasses swinging there, a
- dozen in the row; wretched Mayor of Vaison buried before
- dead.[415] The fruitful seedfield, lie unreaped, the vineyards
- trampled down; there is red cruelty, madness of universal choler
- and gall. Havoc and anarchy everywhere; a combustion most fierce,
- but _un_lucent, not to be noticed here!—Finally, as we saw, on
- the 14th of September last, the National Constituent Assembly,
- having sent Commissioners and heard them;[416] having heard
- Petitions, held Debates, month after month ever since August
- 1789; and on the whole “spent thirty sittings” on this matter,
- did solemnly decree that Avignon and the Comtat were incorporated
- with France, and His Holiness the Pope should have what indemnity
- was reasonable.
-
- And so hereby all is amnestied and finished? Alas, when madness
- of choler has gone through the blood of men, and gibbets have
- swung on this side and on that, what will a parchment Decree and
- Lafayette Amnesty do? Oblivious Lethe flows not _above_ ground!
- Papal Aristocrats and Patriot Brigands are still an eye-sorrow to
- each other; suspected, suspicious, in what they do and forbear.
- The august Constituent Assembly is gone but a fortnight, when, on
- Sunday the Sixteenth morning of October 1791, the unquenched
- combustion suddenly becomes luminous! For Anti-constitutional
- Placards are up, and the Statue of the Virgin is said to have
- shed tears, and grown red.[417] Wherefore, on that morning,
- Patriot l’Escuyer, one of our “six leading Patriots,” having
- taken counsel with his brethren and General Jourdan, determines
- on going to Church, in company with a friend or two: not to hear
- mass, which he values little; but to meet all the Papalists there
- in a body, nay to meet that same weeping Virgin, for it is the
- Cordeliers Church; and give them a word of admonition.
- Adventurous errand; which has the fatallest issue! What
- L’Escuyer’s word of admonition might be no History records; but
- the answer to it was a shrieking howl from the Aristocrat Papal
- worshippers, many of them women. A thousand-voiced shriek and
- menace; which as L’Escuyer did not fly, became a thousand-handed
- hustle and jostle; a thousand-footed kick, with tumblings and
- tramplings, with the pricking of semstresses stilettos, scissors,
- and female pointed instruments. Horrible to behold; the ancient
- Dead, and Petrarchan Laura, sleeping round it there;[418] high
- Altar and burning tapers looking down on it; the Virgin quite
- tearless, and of the natural stone-colour!—L’Escuyer’s friend or
- two rush off, like Job’s Messengers, for Jourdan and the National
- Force. But heavy Jourdan will seize the Town-Gates first; does
- not run treble-fast, as he might: on arriving at the Cordeliers
- Church, the Church is silent, vacant; L’Escuyer, all alone, lies
- there, swimming in his blood, at the foot of the high Altar;
- pricked with scissors; trodden, massacred;—gives one dumb sob,
- and gasps out his miserable life for evermore.
-
- Sight to stir the heart of any man; much more of many men,
- self-styled Brigands of Avignon! The corpse of L’Escuyer,
- stretched on a bier, the ghastly head girt with laurel, is borne
- through the streets; with many-voiced unmelodious _Nenia;_
- funeral-wail still deeper than it is loud! The copper-face of
- Jourdan, of bereft Patriotism, has grown black. Patriot
- Municipality despatches official Narrative and tidings to Paris;
- orders numerous or innumerable arrestments for inquest and
- perquisition. Aristocrats male and female are haled to the
- Castle; lie crowded in subterranean dungeons there, bemoaned by
- the hoarse rushing of the Rhone; cut out from help.
-
- So lie they; waiting inquest and perquisition. Alas! with a
- Jourdan Headsman for Generalissimo, with his copper-face grown
- black, and armed Brigand Patriots chanting their _Nenia_, the
- inquest is likely to be brief. On the next day and the next, let
- Municipality consent or not, a Brigand Court-Martial establishes
- itself in the subterranean stories of the Castle of Avignon;
- Brigand Executioners, with naked sabre, waiting at the door, for
- a Brigand verdict. Short judgment, no appeal! There is Brigand
- wrath and vengeance; not unrefreshed by brandy. Close by is the
- Dungeon of the _Glacière_, or Ice-Tower: there may be deeds
- done—? For which language has no name!—Darkness and the shadow of
- horrid cruelty envelopes these Castle Dungeons, that _Glacière_
- Tower: clear only that many have entered, that few have returned.
- Jourdan and the Brigands, supreme now over Municipals, over all
- Authorities Patriot or Papal, reign in Avignon, waited on by
- Terror and Silence.
-
- The result of all which is that, on the 15th of November 1791, we
- behold Friend Dampmartin, and subalterns beneath him, and General
- Choisi above him, with Infantry and Cavalry, and proper
- cannon-carriages rattling in front, with spread banners, to the
- sound of fife and drum, wend, in a deliberate formidable manner,
- towards that sheer Castle Rock, towards those broad Gates of
- Avignon; three new National-Assembly Commissioners following at
- safe distance in the rear.[419] Avignon, summoned in the name of
- Assembly and Law, flings its Gates wide open; Choisi with the
- rest, Dampmartin and the _Bons Enfans_, “Good Boys of
- _Baufremont_,” so they name these brave Constitutional Dragoons,
- known to them of old,—do enter, amid shouts and scattered
- flowers. To the joy of all honest persons; to the terror only of
- Jourdan Headsman and the Brigands. Nay next we behold carbuncled
- swollen Jourdan himself shew copper-face, with sabre and four
- pistols; affecting to talk high: engaging, meanwhile, to
- surrender the Castle that instant. So the Choisi Grenadiers enter
- with him there. They start and stop, passing that _Glacière_,
- snuffing its horrible breath; with wild yell, with cries of ‘Cut
- the Butcher down!’—and Jourdan has to whisk himself through
- secret passages, and instantaneously vanish.
-
- Be the mystery of iniquity laid bare then! A Hundred and Thirty
- Corpses, of men, nay of women and even children (for the
- trembling mother, hastily seized, could not leave her infant),
- lie heaped in that _Glacière;_ putrid, under putridities: the
- horror of the world. For three days there is mournful lifting
- out, and recognition; amid the cries and movements of a
- passionate Southern people, now kneeling in prayer, now storming
- in wild pity and rage: lastly there is solemn sepulture, with
- muffled drums, religious requiem, and all the people’s wail and
- tears. Their Massacred rest now in holy ground; buried in one
- grave.
-
- And Jourdan _Coupe-tête?_ Him also we behold again, after a day
- or two: in flight, through the most romantic Petrarchan
- hill-country; vehemently spurring his nag; young Ligonnet, a
- brisk youth of Avignon, with Choisi Dragoons, close in his rear!
- With such swollen mass of a rider no nag can run to advantage.
- The tired nag, spur-driven, does take the River Sorgue; but
- sticks in the middle of it; firm on that _chiaro fondo di Sorga;_
- and will proceed no further for spurring! Young Ligonnet dashes
- up; the Copper-face menaces and bellows, draws pistol, perhaps
- even snaps it; is nevertheless seized by the collar; is tied
- firm, ancles under horse’s belly, and ridden back to Avignon,
- hardly to be saved from massacre on the streets there.[420]
-
- Such is the combustion of Avignon and the South-West, when it
- becomes luminous! Long loud debate is in the august Legislative,
- in the Mother-Society as to what now shall be done with it.
- Amnesty, cry eloquent Vergniaud and all Patriots: let there be
- mutual pardon and repentance, restoration, pacification, and if
- so might any how be, an end! Which vote ultimately prevails. So
- the South-West smoulders and welters again in an “Amnesty,” or
- Non-remembrance, which alas cannot but remember, no Lethe flowing
- above ground! Jourdan himself remains unchanged; gets loose again
- as one not yet gallows-ripe; nay, as we transciently discern from
- the distance, is “carried in triumph through the cities of the
- South.”[421] What things men carry!
-
- With which transient glimpse, of a Copper-faced Portent faring in
- this manner through the cities of the South, we must quit these
- regions;—and let them smoulder. They want not their Aristocrats;
- proud old Nobles, not yet emigrated. Arles has its “_Chiffonne_,”
- so, in symbolical cant, they name that Aristocrat
- Secret-Association; Arles has its pavements piled up, by and by,
- into Aristocrat barricades. Against which Rebecqui, the hot-clear
- Patriot, must lead Marseilles with cannon. The Bar of Iron has
- not yet risen to the top in the Bay of Marseilles; neither have
- these hot Sons of the Phoceans submitted to be slaves. By clear
- management and hot instance, Rebecqui dissipates that
- _Chiffonne_, without bloodshed; restores the pavement of Arles.
- He sails in Coast-barks, this Rebecqui, scrutinising suspicious
- Martello-towers, with the keen eye of Patriotism; marches
- overland with despatch, singly, or in force; to City after City;
- dim scouring far and wide;[422]—argues, and if it must be,
- fights. For there is much to do; Jalès itself is looking
- suspicious. So that Legislator Fauchet, after debate on it, has
- to propose Commissioners and a Camp on the Plain of Beaucaire:
- with or without result.
-
- Of all which, and much else, let us note only this small
- consequence, that young Barbaroux, Advocate, Town-Clerk of
- Marseilles, being charged to have these things remedied, arrived
- at Paris in the month of February 1792. The beautiful and brave:
- young Spartan, ripe in energy, not ripe in wisdom; over whose
- black doom there shall flit nevertheless a certain ruddy fervour,
- streaks of bright Southern tint, not wholly swallowed of Death!
- Note also that the Rolands of Lyons are again in Paris; for the
- second and final time. King’s Inspectorship is abrogated at
- Lyons, as elsewhere: Roland has his retiring-pension to claim, if
- attainable; has Patriot friends to commune with; at lowest, has a
- book to publish. That young Barbaroux and the Rolands came
- together; that elderly Spartan Roland liked, or even loved the
- young Spartan, and was loved by him, one can fancy: and Madame—?
- Breathe not, thou poison-breath, Evil-speech! That soul is
- taintless, clear, as the mirror-sea. And yet if they too did look
- into each other’s eyes, and each, in silence, in tragical
- renunciance, did find that the other was all too lovely? _Honi
- soit!_ She calls him “beautiful as Antinous:” he “will speak
- elsewhere of that astonishing woman.”—A Madame d’Udon (or some
- such name, for Dumont does not recollect quite clearly) gives
- copious Breakfast to the Brissotin Deputies and us Friends of
- Freedom, at her house in the Place Vendôme; with temporary
- celebrity, with graces and wreathed smiles; not without cost.
- There, amid wide babble and jingle, our plan of Legislative
- Debate is settled for the day, and much counselling held. Strict
- Roland is seen there, but does not go often.[423]
-
-
- Chapter 2.5.IV.
- No Sugar.
-
- Such are our inward troubles; seen in the Cities of the South;
- extant, seen or unseen, in all cities and districts, North as
- well as South. For in all are Aristocrats, more or less
- malignant; watched by Patriotism; which again, being of various
- shades, from light Fayettist-Feuillant down to deep-sombre
- Jacobin, has to watch _itself!_
-
- Directories of Departments, what we call County Magistracies,
- being chosen by Citizens of a too “active” class, are found to
- pull one way; Municipalities, Town Magistracies, to pull the
- other way. In all places too are Dissident Priests; whom the
- Legislative will have to deal with: contumacious individuals,
- working on that angriest of passions; plotting, enlisting for
- Coblentz; or suspected of plotting: fuel of a universal
- unconstitutional heat. What to do with them? They may be
- conscientious as well as contumacious: gently they should be
- dealt with, and yet it must be speedily. In unilluminated La
- Vendée the simple are like to be seduced by them; many a simple
- peasant, a Cathelineau the wool-dealer wayfaring meditative with
- his wool-packs, in these hamlets, dubiously shakes his head! Two
- Assembly Commissioners went thither last Autumn; considerate
- Gensonné, not yet called to be a Senator; Gallois, an editorial
- man. These Two, consulting with General Dumouriez, spake and
- worked, softly, with judgment; they have hushed down the
- irritation, and produced a soft Report,—for the time.
-
- The General himself doubts not in the least but he can keep peace
- there; being an able man. He passes these frosty months among the
- pleasant people of Niort, occupies “tolerably handsome apartments
- in the Castle of Niort,” and tempers the minds of men.[424] Why
- is there but one Dumouriez? Elsewhere you find South or North,
- nothing but untempered obscure jarring; which breaks forth ever
- and anon into open clangour of riot. Southern Perpignan has its
- tocsin, by torch light; with rushing and onslaught: Northern Caen
- not less, by daylight; with Aristocrats ranged in arms at Places
- of Worship; Departmental compromise proving impossible; breaking
- into musketry and a Plot discovered![425] Add Hunger too: for
- Bread, always dear, is getting dearer: not so much as Sugar can
- be had; for good reasons. Poor Simoneau, Mayor of Etampes, in
- this Northern region, hanging out his Red Flag in some riot of
- grains, is trampled to death by a hungry exasperated People. What
- a trade this of Mayor, in these times! Mayor of Saint-Denis hung
- at the Lanterne, by Suspicion and Dyspepsia, as we saw long
- since; Mayor of Vaison, as we saw lately, buried before dead; and
- now this poor Simoneau, the Tanner, of Etampes,—whom legal
- Constitutionalism will not forget.
-
- With factions, suspicions, want of bread and sugar, it is verily
- what they call _déchiré_, torn asunder this poor country: France
- and all that is French. For, over seas too come bad news. In
- black Saint-Domingo, before that variegated Glitter in the Champs
- Elysées was lit for an Accepted Constitution, there had risen,
- and was burning contemporary with it, quite another variegated
- Glitter and nocturnal Fulgor, had we known it: of molasses and
- ardent-spirits; of sugar-boileries, plantations, furniture,
- cattle and men: skyhigh; the Plain of Cap Français one huge whirl
- of smoke and flame!
-
- What a change here, in these two years; since that first “Box of
- Tricolor Cockades” got through the Custom-house, and atrabiliar
- Creoles too rejoiced that there was a levelling of Bastilles!
- Levelling is comfortable, as we often say: levelling, yet only
- down to oneself. Your pale-white Creoles, have their
- grievances:—and your yellow Quarteroons? And your dark-yellow
- Mulattoes? And your Slaves soot-black? Quarteroon Ogé, Friend of
- our Parisian Brissotin _Friends of the Blacks_, felt, for his
- share too, that Insurrection was the most sacred of duties. So
- the tricolor Cockades had fluttered and swashed only some three
- months on the Creole hat, when Ogé’s signal-conflagrations went
- aloft; with the voice of rage and terror. Repressed, doomed to
- die, he took black powder or seedgrains in the hollow of his
- hand, this Ogé; sprinkled a film of white ones on the top, and
- said to his Judges, ‘Behold they are white;’—then _shook_ his
- hand, and said ‘Where are the Whites, _Où sont les Blancs?_’
-
- So now, in the Autumn of 1791, looking from the sky-windows of
- Cap Français, thick clouds of smoke girdle our horizon, smoke in
- the day, in the night fire; preceded by fugitive shrieking white
- women, by Terror and Rumour. Black demonised squadrons are
- massacring and harrying, with nameless cruelty. They fight and
- fire “from behind thickets and coverts,” for the Black man loves
- the Bush; they rush to the attack, thousands strong, with
- brandished cutlasses and fusils, with caperings, shoutings and
- vociferation,—which, if the White Volunteer Company stands firm,
- dwindle into staggerings, into quick gabblement, into panic
- flight at the first volley, perhaps before it.[426] Poor Ogé
- could be broken on the wheel; this fire-whirlwind too can be
- abated, driven up into the Mountains: but Saint-Domingo is
- _shaken_, as Ogé’s seedgrains were; shaking, writhing in long
- horrid death-throes, it is Black without remedy; and remains, as
- African Haiti, a monition to the world.
-
- O my Parisian Friends, is not _this_, as well as Regraters and
- Feuillant Plotters, one cause of the astonishing dearth of Sugar!
- The Grocer, palpitant, with drooping lip, sees his Sugar _taxé;_
- weighed out by Female Patriotism, in instant retail, at the
- inadequate rate of twenty-five sous, or thirteen pence a pound.
- ‘Abstain from it?’ yes, ye Patriot Sections, all ye Jacobins,
- abstain! Louvet and Collot-d’Herbois so advise; resolute to make
- the sacrifice: though ‘how shall literary men do without coffee?’
- Abstain, with an oath; that is the surest![427]
-
- Also, for like reason, must not Brest and the Shipping Interest
- languish? Poor Brest languishes, sorrowing, not without spleen;
- denounces an Aristocrat Bertrand-Moleville traitorous Aristocrat
- Marine-Minister. Do not her Ships and King’s Ships lie rotting
- piecemeal in harbour; Naval Officers mostly fled, and on furlough
- too, with pay? Little stirring there; if it be not the Brest
- Gallies, whip-driven, with their Galley-Slaves,—alas, with some
- Forty of our hapless Swiss Soldiers of Château-Vieux, among
- others! These Forty Swiss, too mindful of Nanci, do now, in their
- red wool caps, tug sorrowfully at the oar; looking into the
- Atlantic brine, which reflects only their own sorrowful shaggy
- faces; and seem forgotten of Hope.
-
- But, on the whole, may we not say, in fugitive language, that the
- French Constitution which shall march is very _rheumatic_, full
- of shooting internal pains, in joint and muscle; and will not
- march without difficulty?
-
-
- Chapter 2.5.V.
- Kings and Emigrants.
-
- Extremely rheumatic Constitutions have been known to march, and
- keep on their feet, though in a staggering sprawling manner, for
- long periods, in virtue of one thing only: that the _Head_ were
- healthy. But this Head of the French Constitution! What King
- Louis is and cannot help being, Readers already know. A King who
- cannot take the Constitution, nor reject the Constitution: nor do
- anything at all, but miserably ask, What shall I do? A King
- environed with endless confusions; in whose own mind is no germ
- of order. Haughty implacable remnants of Noblesse struggling with
- humiliated repentant Barnave-Lameths: struggling in that obscure
- element of fetchers and carriers, of Half-pay braggarts from the
- Café Valois, of Chambermaids, whisperers, and subaltern officious
- persons; fierce Patriotism looking on all the while, more and
- more suspicious, from without: what, in such struggle, can they
- do? At best, _cancel_ one another, and produce _zero_. Poor King!
- Barnave and your Senatorial Jaucourts speak earnestly into this
- ear; Bertrand-Moleville, and Messengers from Coblentz, speak
- earnestly into that: the poor Royal head turns to the one side
- and to the other side; can turn itself fixedly to no side. Let
- Decency drop a veil over it: sorrier misery was seldom enacted in
- the world. This one small fact, does it not throw the saddest
- light on much? The Queen is lamenting to Madam Campan: ‘What am I
- to do? When they, these Barnaves, get us advised to any step
- which the Noblesse do not like, then I am pouted at; nobody comes
- to my card table; the King’s Couchée is solitary.’[428] In such a
- case of dubiety, what _is_ one to do? Go inevitably to the
- ground!
-
- The King has accepted this Constitution, knowing beforehand that
- it will not serve: he studies it, and executes it in the hope
- mainly that it will be found inexecutable. King’s Ships lie
- rotting in harbour, their officers gone; the Armies disorganised;
- robbers scour the highways, which wear down unrepaired; all
- Public Service lies slack and waste: the Executive makes no
- effort, or an effort only to throw the blame on the Constitution.
- Shamming death, “_faisant le mort!_” What Constitution, use it in
- this manner, can march? “Grow to disgust the Nation” it will
- truly,[429]—unless _you_ first grow to disgust the Nation! It is
- Bertrand de Moleville’s plan, and his Majesty’s; the best they
- can form.
-
- Or if, after all, this best-plan proved too slow; proved a
- failure? Provident of that too, the Queen, shrouded in deepest
- mystery, “writes all day, in cipher, day after day, to Coblentz;”
- Engineer Goguelat, he of the _Night of Spurs_, whom the Lafayette
- Amnesty has delivered from Prison, rides and runs. Now and then,
- on fit occasion, a Royal familiar visit can be paid to that Salle
- de Manége, an affecting encouraging Royal Speech (sincere, doubt
- it not, for the moment) can be delivered there, and the Senators
- all cheer and almost weep;—at the same time Mallet du Pan has
- visibly ceased editing, and invisibly bears abroad a King’s
- Autograph, soliciting help from the Foreign Potentates.[430]
- Unhappy Louis, _do_ this thing or else that other,—if thou
- couldst!
-
- The thing which the King’s Government did do was to stagger
- distractedly from contradiction to contradiction; and wedding
- Fire to Water, envelope itself in hissing, and ashy steam! Danton
- and needy corruptible Patriots are sopped with presents of cash:
- they accept the sop: they rise refreshed by it, and travel their
- own way.[431] Nay, the King’s Government did likewise hire
- Hand-clappers, or _claqueurs_, persons to applaud. Subterranean
- Rivarol has Fifteen Hundred men in King’s pay, at the rate of
- some ten thousand pounds sterling per month; what he calls “a
- staff of genius:” Paragraph-writers, Placard-Journalists; “two
- hundred and eighty Applauders, at three shillings a day:” one of
- the strangest Staffs ever commanded by man. The muster-rolls and
- account-books of which still exist.[432] Bertrand-Moleville
- himself, in a way he thinks very dexterous, contrives to pack the
- Galleries of the Legislative; gets Sansculottes hired to go
- thither, and applaud at a signal given, they fancying it was
- Pétion that bid them: a device which was not detected for almost
- a week. Dexterous enough; as if a man finding the Day fast
- decline should determine on altering the Clockhands: _that_ is a
- thing possible for him.
-
- Here too let us note an unexpected apparition of Philippe
- d’Orléans at Court: his last at the Levee of any King. D’Orléans,
- sometime in the winter months seemingly, has been appointed to
- that old first-coveted rank of Admiral,—though only over ships
- rotting in port. The wished-for comes too late! However, he waits
- on Bertrand-Moleville to give thanks: nay to state that he would
- willingly thank his Majesty in person; that, in spite of all the
- horrible things men have said and sung, he is far from being his
- Majesty’s enemy; at bottom, how far! Bertrand delivers the
- message, brings about the royal Interview, which does pass to the
- satisfaction of his Majesty; d’Orléans seeming clearly repentant,
- determined to turn over a new leaf. And yet, next Sunday, what do
- we see? “Next Sunday,” says Bertrand, “he came to the King’s
- Levee; but the Courtiers ignorant of what had passed, the crowd
- of Royalists who were accustomed to resort thither on that day
- specially to pay their court, gave him the most humiliating
- reception. They came pressing round him; managing, as if by
- mistake, to tread on his toes, to elbow him towards the door, and
- not let him enter again. He went downstairs to her Majesty’s
- Apartments, where cover was laid; so soon as he shewed face,
- sounds rose on all sides, ‘_Messieurs, take care of the dishes_,’
- as if he had carried poison in his pockets. The insults which his
- presence every where excited forced him to retire without having
- seen the Royal Family: the crowd followed him to the Queen’s
- Staircase; in descending, he received a spitting (_crachat_) on
- the head, and some others, on his clothes. Rage and spite were
- seen visibly painted on his face:”[433] as indeed how could they
- miss to be? He imputes it all to the King and Queen, who know
- nothing of it, who are even much grieved at it; and so descends,
- to his Chaos again. Bertrand was there at the Château that day
- himself, and an eye-witness to these things.
-
- For the rest, Non-jurant Priests, and the repression of them,
- will distract the King’s conscience; Emigrant Princes and
- Noblesse will force him to double-dealing: there must be _veto_
- on _veto;_ amid the ever-waxing indignation of men. For
- Patriotism, as we said, looks on from without, more and more
- suspicious. Waxing tempest, blast after blast, of Patriot
- indignation, from without; dim inorganic whirl of Intrigues,
- Fatuities, within! Inorganic, fatuous; from which the eye turns
- away. De Staël intrigues for her so gallant Narbonne, to get him
- made War-Minister; and ceases not, having got him made. The King
- shall fly to Rouen; shall there, with the gallant Narbonne,
- properly “modify the Constitution.” This is the same brisk
- Narbonne, who, last year, cut out from their entanglement, by
- force of dragoons, those poor fugitive Royal Aunts: men say he is
- at bottom their Brother, or even _more_, so scandalous is
- scandal. He drives now, with his de Staël, rapidly to the Armies,
- to the Frontier Towns; produces rose-coloured Reports, not too
- credible; perorates, gesticulates; wavers poising himself on the
- top, for a moment, seen of men; then tumbles, dismissed, washed
- away by the Time-flood.
-
- Also the fair Princess de Lamballe intrigues, bosom friend of her
- Majesty: to the angering of Patriotism. Beautiful Unfortunate,
- why did she ever return from England? Her small silver-voice,
- what can it profit in that piping of the black World-tornado?
- Which will whirl _her_, poor fragile Bird of Paradise, against
- grim rocks. Lamballe and de Staël intrigue visibly, apart or
- together: but who shall reckon how many others, and in what
- infinite ways, invisibly! Is there not what one may call an
- “Austrian Committee,” sitting invisible in the Tuileries; centre
- of an invisible Anti-National Spiderweb, which, for we sleep
- among mysteries, stretches its threads to the ends of the Earth?
- Journalist Carra has now the clearest certainty of it: to
- Brissotin Patriotism, and France generally, it is growing more
- and more probable.
-
- O Reader, hast thou no pity for this Constitution? Rheumatic
- shooting pains in its members; pressure of hydrocephale and
- hysteric vapours on its Brain: a Constitution divided against
- itself; which will never march, hardly even stagger? Why were not
- Drouet and Procureur Sausse in their beds, that unblessed
- Varennes Night! Why did they not, in the name of Heaven, let the
- Korff Berline go whither it listed! Nameless incoherency,
- incompatibility, perhaps prodigies at which the world still
- shudders, had been spared.
-
- But now comes the third thing that bodes ill for the marching of
- this French Constitution: besides the French People, and the
- French King, there is thirdly—the assembled European world? it
- has become necessary now to look at that also. Fair France is so
- luminous: and round and round it, is troublous Cimmerian Night.
- Calonnes, Bréteuils hover dim, far-flown; overnetting Europe with
- intrigues. From Turin to Vienna; to Berlin, and utmost Petersburg
- in the frozen North! Great Burke has raised his great voice long
- ago; eloquently demonstrating that the end of an Epoch is come,
- to all appearance the end of Civilised Time. Him many answer:
- Camille Desmoulins, Clootz Speaker of Mankind, Paine the
- rebellious Needleman, and honourable Gallic Vindicators in that
- country and in this: but the great Burke remains unanswerable;
- “The Age of Chivalry _is_ gone,” and could not but go, having now
- produced the still more indomitable Age of Hunger. Altars enough,
- of the Dubois-Rohan sort, changing to the Gobel-and-Talleyrand
- sort, are faring by rapid transmutation to, shall we say, the
- right Proprietor of them? French Game and French Game-Preservers
- did alight on the Cliffs of Dover, with cries of distress. Who
- will say that the end of much is not come? A set of mortals has
- risen, who believe that Truth is not a printed Speculation, but a
- practical Fact; that Freedom and Brotherhood are possible in this
- Earth, supposed always to be Belial’s, which “the Supreme Quack”
- was to inherit! Who will say that Church, State, Throne, Altar
- are not in danger; that the sacred Strong-box itself, last
- Palladium of effete Humanity, may not be blasphemously blown
- upon, and its padlocks undone?
-
- The poor Constituent Assembly might act with what delicacy and
- diplomacy it would; declare that it abjured meddling with its
- neighbours, foreign conquest, and so forth; but from the first
- this thing was to be predicted: that old Europe and new France
- could not subsist _together_. A Glorious Revolution, oversetting
- State-Prisons and Feudalism; publishing, with outburst of
- Federative Cannon, in face of all the Earth, that Appearance is
- not Reality, how shall it subsist amid Governments which, if
- Appearance is _not_ Reality, are—one knows not what? In death
- feud, and internecine wrestle and battle, it shall subsist with
- them; not otherwise.
-
- Rights of Man, printed on Cotton Handkerchiefs, in various
- dialects of human speech, pass over to the Frankfort Fair.[434]
- What say we, Frankfort Fair? They have crossed Euphrates and the
- fabulous Hydaspes; wafted themselves beyond the Ural, Altai,
- Himmalayah: struck off from wood stereotypes, in angular
- Picture-writing, they are jabbered and jingled of in China and
- Japan. Where will it stop? Kien-Lung smells mischief; not the
- remotest Dalai-Lama shall now knead his dough-pills in
- peace.—Hateful to us; as is the Night! Bestir yourselves, ye
- Defenders of Order! They do bestir themselves: all Kings and
- Kinglets, with their spiritual temporal array, are astir; their
- brows clouded with menace. Diplomatic emissaries fly swift;
- Conventions, privy Conclaves assemble; and wise wigs wag, taking
- what counsel they can.
-
- Also, as we said, the Pamphleteer draws pen, on this side and
- that: zealous fists beat the Pulpit-drum. Not without issue! Did
- not iron Birmingham, shouting “Church and King,” itself knew not
- why, burst out, last July, into rage, drunkenness, and fire; and
- your Priestleys, and the like, dining there on that Bastille day,
- get the maddest singeing: scandalous to consider! In which same
- days, as we can remark, high Potentates, Austrian and Prussian,
- with Emigrants, were faring towards Pilnitz in Saxony; there, on
- the 27th of August, they, keeping to themselves what further
- “secret Treaty” there might or might not be, did publish their
- hopes and their threatenings, their Declaration that it was “the
- common cause of Kings.”
-
- Where a will to quarrel is, there is a way. Our readers remember
- that Pentecost-Night, Fourth of August 1789, when Feudalism fell
- in a few hours? The National Assembly, in abolishing Feudalism,
- promised that “compensation” should be given; and did endeavour
- to give it. Nevertheless the Austrian Kaiser answers that his
- German Princes, for their part, cannot be unfeudalised; that they
- have Possessions in French Alsace, and Feudal Rights secured to
- them, for which no conceivable compensation will suffice. So this
- of the Possessioned Princes, “_Princes Possessionés_” is bandied
- from Court to Court; covers acres of diplomatic paper at this
- day: a weariness to the world. Kaunitz argues from Vienna;
- Delessart responds from Paris, though perhaps not sharply enough.
- The Kaiser and his Possessioned Princes will too evidently come
- and _take_ compensation—so much as they can get. Nay might one
- not _partition_ France, as we have done Poland, and are doing;
- and so pacify it with a vengeance?
-
- From South to North! For actually it is “the common cause of
- Kings.” Swedish Gustav, sworn Knight of the Queen of France, will
- lead Coalised Armies;—had not Ankarstrom treasonously shot him;
- for, indeed, there were griefs nearer home.[435] Austria and
- Prussia speak at Pilnitz; all men intensely listening: Imperial
- Rescripts have gone out from Turin; there will be secret
- Convention at Vienna. Catherine of Russia beckons approvingly;
- will help, were she ready. Spanish Bourbon stirs amid his
- pillows; from him too, even from him, shall there come help. Lean
- Pitt, “the Minister of Preparatives,” looks out from his
- watch-tower in Saint-James’s, in a suspicious manner. Councillors
- plotting, Calonnes dim-hovering;—alas, Serjeants rub-a-dubbing
- openly through all manner of German market-towns, collecting
- ragged valour![436] Look where you will, immeasurable
- Obscurantism is girdling this fair France; which, again, will not
- be girdled by it. Europe is in travail; pang after pang; what a
- shriek was that of Pilnitz! The birth will be: WAR.
-
- Nay the worst feature of the business is this last, still to be
- named; the Emigrants at Coblentz, so many thousands ranking
- there, in bitter hate and menace: King’s Brothers, all Princes of
- the Blood except wicked d’Orléans; your duelling de Castries,
- your eloquent Cazalès; bull-headed Malseignes, a wargod Broglie;
- Distaff Seigneurs, insulted Officers, all that have ridden across
- the Rhine-stream;—d’Artois welcoming Abbé Maury with a kiss, and
- clasping him publicly to his own royal heart! Emigration, flowing
- over the Frontiers, now in drops, now in streams, in various
- humours of fear, of petulance, rage and hope, ever since those
- first Bastille days when d’Artois went, “to shame the citizens of
- Paris,”—has swollen to the size of a Phenomenon of the world.
- Coblentz is become a small extra-national Versailles; a
- Versailles _in partibus:_ briguing, intriguing, favouritism,
- strumpetocracy itself, they say, goes on there; all the old
- activities, on a small scale, quickened by hungry Revenge.
-
- Enthusiasm, of loyalty, of hatred and hope, has risen to a high
- pitch; as, in any Coblentz tavern, you may hear, in speech, and
- in singing. Maury assists in the interior Council; much is
- decided on; for one thing, they keep lists of the dates of your
- emigrating; a month sooner, or a month later determines your
- greater or your less right to the coming Division of the Spoil.
- Cazalès himself, because he had occasionally spoken with a
- Constitutional tone, was looked on coldly at first: so pure are
- our principles.[437] And arms are a-hammering at Liège; “three
- thousand horses” ambling hitherward from the Fairs of Germany:
- Cavalry enrolling; likewise Foot-soldiers, “in blue coat, red
- waistcoat, and nankeen trousers!”[438] They have their secret
- domestic correspondences, as their open foreign: with disaffected
- Crypto-Aristocrats, with contumacious Priests, with Austrian
- Committee in the Tuileries. Deserters are spirited over by
- assiduous crimps; Royal-Allemand is gone almost wholly. Their
- route of march, towards France and the Division of the Spoil, is
- marked out, were the Kaiser once ready. ‘It is said, they mean to
- poison the sources; but,’ adds Patriotism making Report of it,
- ‘they will not poison the source of Liberty,’ whereat “_on
- applaudit_,” we cannot but applaud. Also they have manufactories
- of False Assignats; and men that circulate in the interior
- distributing and disbursing the same; one of these we denounce
- now to Legislative Patriotism: “A man Lebrun by name; about
- thirty years of age, with blonde hair and in quantity; has,” only
- for the time being surely, “a black-eye, _œil poché;_ goes in a
- _wiski_ with a black horse,”[439]—always keeping his Gig!
-
- Unhappy Emigrants, it was their lot, and the lot of France! They
- are ignorant of much that they should know: of themselves, of
- what is around them. A Political Party that knows not _when it is
- beaten_, may become one of the fatallist of things, to itself,
- and to all. Nothing will convince these men that they cannot
- scatter the French Revolution at the first blast of their
- war-trumpet; that the French Revolution is other than a
- blustering Effervescence, of brawlers and spouters, which, at the
- flash of chivalrous broadswords, at the rustle of gallows-ropes,
- will burrow itself, in dens the deeper the welcomer. But, alas,
- what man does know and measure himself, and the things that are
- round him;—else where were the need of physical fighting at all?
- Never, till they are cleft asunder, can these heads believe that
- a Sansculottic arm has any vigour in it: cleft asunder, it will
- be too late to believe.
-
- One may say, without spleen against his poor erring brothers of
- any side, that above all other mischiefs, this of the Emigrant
- Nobles acted fatally on France. Could they have known, could they
- have understood! In the beginning of 1789, a splendour and a
- terror still surrounded them: the Conflagration of their
- Châteaus, kindled by months of obstinacy, went out after the
- Fourth of August; and might have continued out, had they at all
- known what to defend, what to relinquish as indefensible. They
- were still a graduated Hierarchy of Authorities, or the
- accredited Similitude of such: they sat there, uniting King with
- Commonalty; transmitting and translating _gradually_, from degree
- to degree, the command of the one into the obedience of the
- other; rendering command and obedience still possible. Had they
- understood their place, and what to do in it, this French
- Revolution, which went forth explosively in years and in months,
- might have spread itself over generations; and not a
- torture-death but a quiet euthanasia have been provided for many
- things.
-
- But they were proud and high, these men; they were not wise to
- consider. They spurned all from them; in disdainful hate, they
- drew the sword and flung away the scabbard. France has not only
- no Hierarchy of Authorities, to translate command into obedience;
- its Hierarchy of Authorities has fled to the enemies of France;
- calls loudly on the enemies of France to interfere armed, who
- want but a pretext to do that. Jealous Kings and Kaisers might
- have looked on long, meditating interference, yet afraid and
- ashamed to interfere: but now do not the King’s Brothers, and all
- French Nobles, Dignitaries and Authorities that are free to
- speak, which the King himself is not,—passionately invite us, in
- the name of Right and of Might? Ranked at Coblentz, from Fifteen
- to Twenty thousand stand now brandishing their weapons, with the
- cry: On, on! Yes, Messieurs, you shall on;—and divide the spoil
- according to your dates of emigrating.
-
- Of all which things a poor Legislative Assembly, and Patriot
- France, is informed: by denunciant friend, by triumphant foe.
- Sulleau’s Pamphlets, of the Rivarol Staff of Genius, circulate;
- heralding supreme hope. Durosoy’s Placards tapestry the walls;
- _Chant du Coq_ crows day, pecked at by Tallien’s _Ami des
- Citoyens_. King’s-Friend, Royou, _Ami du Roi_, can name, in exact
- arithmetical ciphers, the contingents of the various Invading
- Potentates; in all, Four hundred and nineteen thousand Foreign
- fighting men, with Fifteen thousand Emigrants. Not to reckon
- these your daily and hourly desertions, which an Editor must
- daily record, of whole Companies, and even Regiments, crying
- _Vive le Roi, Vive la Reine_, and marching over with banners
- spread:[440]—lies all, and wind; yet to Patriotism not wind; nor,
- alas, one day, to Royou! Patriotism, therefore, may brawl and
- babble yet a little while: but its hours are numbered: Europe is
- coming with Four hundred and nineteen thousand and the Chivalry
- of France; the gallows, one may hope, will get its own.
-
-
- Chapter 2.5.VI.
- Brigands and Jalès.
-
- We shall have War, then; and on what terms! With an Executive
- “pretending,” really with less and less deceptiveness now, “to be
- dead;” casting even a wishful eye towards the enemy: on such
- terms we shall have War.
-
- Public Functionary in vigorous action there is none; if it be not
- Rivarol with his Staff of Genius and Two hundred and eighty
- Applauders. The Public Service lies waste: the very tax-gatherer
- has forgotten his cunning: in this and the other Provincial Board
- of Management (_Directoire de Départment_) it is found advisable
- to _retain_ what Taxes you can gather, to pay your own inevitable
- expenditures. Our Revenue is Assignats; emission on emission of
- Paper-money. And the Army; our Three grand Armies, of Rochambeau,
- of Lückner, of Lafayette? Lean, disconsolate hover these Three
- grand Armies, watching the Frontiers there; three Flights of
- long-necked Cranes in moulting time;—wretched, disobedient,
- disorganised; who never saw fire; the old Generals and Officers
- gone across the Rhine. War-minister Narbonne, he of the
- rose-coloured Reports, solicits recruitments, equipments, money,
- always money; threatens, since he can get none,—to “take his
- sword,” which belongs to himself, and go serve his country with
- that.[441]
-
- The question of questions is: What shall be done? Shall we, with
- a desperate defiance which Fortune sometimes favours, draw the
- sword at once, in the face of this in-rushing world of Emigration
- and Obscurantism; or wait, and temporise and diplomatise, till,
- if possible, our resources mature themselves a little? And yet
- again are our resources growing towards maturity; or growing the
- _other_ way? Dubious: the ablest Patriots are divided; Brissot
- and his Brissotins, or Girondins, in the Legislative, cry aloud
- for the former defiant plan; Robespierre, in the Jacobins, pleads
- as loud for the latter dilatory one: with responses, even with
- mutual reprimands; distracting the Mother of Patriotism. Consider
- also what agitated Breakfasts there may be at Madame d’Udon’s in
- the Place Vendôme! The alarm of all men is great. Help, ye
- Patriots; and O at least agree; for the hour presses. Frost was
- not yet gone, when in that “tolerably handsome apartment of the
- Castle of Niort,” there arrived a Letter: General Dumouriez must
- to Paris. It is War-minister Narbonne that writes; the General
- shall give counsel about many things.[442] In the month of
- February 1792, Brissotin friends welcome their Dumouriez
- _Polymetis_,—comparable really to an antique Ulysses in modern
- costume; quick, elastic, shifty, insuppressible, a
- “many-counselled man.”
-
- Let the Reader fancy this fair France with a whole Cimmerian
- Europe girdling her, rolling in on her; black, to burst in red
- thunder of War; fair France herself hand-shackled and
- foot-shackled in the weltering complexities of this Social
- Clothing, or Constitution, which they have made for her; a France
- that, in such Constitution, cannot march! And Hunger too; and
- plotting Aristocrats, and excommunicating Dissident Priests: “The
- man Lebrun by name” urging his black _wiski_, visible to the eye:
- and, still more terrible in his invisibility, Engineer Goguelat,
- with Queen’s cipher, riding and running!
-
- The excommunicatory Priests give new trouble in the Maine and
- Loire; La Vendée, nor Cathelineau the wool-dealer, has not ceased
- grumbling and rumbling. Nay behold Jalès itself once more: how
- often does that real-imaginary Camp of the Fiend require to be
- extinguished! For near two years now, it has waned faint and
- again waxed bright, in the bewildered soul of Patriotism:
- actually, if Patriotism knew it, one of the most surprising
- products of Nature working with Art. Royalist Seigneurs, under
- this or the other pretext, assemble the simple people of these
- Cevennes Mountains; men not unused to revolt, and with heart for
- fighting, could their poor heads be got persuaded. The Royalist
- Seigneur harangues; harping mainly on the religious string: ‘True
- Priests maltreated, false Priests intruded, Protestants (once
- dragooned) now triumphing, things sacred given to the dogs;’ and
- so produces, from the pious Mountaineer throat, rough growlings.
- ‘Shall we not testify, then, ye brave hearts of the Cevennes;
- march to the rescue? Holy Religion; duty to God and King?’ ‘_Si
- fait, si fait_, Just so, just so,’ answer the brave hearts
- always: ‘_Mais il y a de bien bonnes choses dans la Révolution_,
- But there are many good things in the Revolution too!’—And so the
- matter, cajole as we may, will only turn on its axis, not stir
- from the spot, and remains theatrical merely.[443]
-
- Nevertheless deepen your cajolery, harp quick and quicker, ye
- Royalist Seigneurs; with a dead-lift effort you may bring it to
- that. In the month of June next, this _Camp of Jalès_ will step
- forth as a theatricality suddenly become real; Two thousand
- strong, and with the boast that it is Seventy thousand: most
- strange to see; with flags flying, bayonets fixed; with
- Proclamation, and d’Artois Commission of civil war! Let some
- Rebecqui, or other the like hot-clear Patriot; let some
- “Lieutenant-Colonel Aubry,” if Rebecqui is busy elsewhere, raise
- instantaneous National Guards, and disperse and dissolve it; and
- blow the Old Castle asunder,[444] that so, if possible, we hear
- of it no more!
-
- In the Months of February and March, it is recorded, the terror,
- especially of rural France, had risen even to the transcendental
- pitch: not far from madness. In Town and Hamlet is rumour; of
- war, massacre: that Austrians, Aristocrats, above all, that _The
- Brigands_ are close by. Men quit their houses and huts; rush
- fugitive, shrieking, with wife and child, they know not whither.
- Such a terror, the eye-witnesses say, never fell on a Nation; nor
- shall again fall, even in Reigns of Terror expressly so-called.
- The Countries of the Loire, all the Central and South-East
- regions, start up distracted, “simultaneously as by an electric
- shock;”—for indeed grain too gets scarcer and scarcer. “The
- people barricade the entrances of Towns, pile stones in the upper
- stories, the women prepare boiling water; from moment to moment,
- expecting the attack. In the Country, the alarm-bell rings
- incessant: troops of peasants, gathered by it, scour the
- highways, seeking an imaginary enemy. They are armed mostly with
- scythes stuck in wood; and, arriving in wild troops at the
- barricaded Towns, are themselves sometimes taken for
- Brigands.”[445]
-
- So rushes old France: old France is rushing _down_. What the end
- will be is known to no mortal; that the end is near all mortals
- may know.
-
-
- Chapter 2.5.VII.
- Constitution will not march.
-
- To all which our poor Legislative, tied up by an unmarching
- Constitution, can oppose nothing, by way of remedy, but mere
- bursts of parliamentary eloquence! They go on, debating,
- denouncing, objurgating: loud weltering Chaos, which devours
- _itself._
-
- But their two thousand and odd Decrees? Reader, these happily
- concern not thee, nor me. Mere Occasional Decrees, foolish and
- not foolish; sufficient for _that_ day was its own evil! Of the
- whole two thousand there are not, now half a score, and these
- mostly blighted in the bud by royal _Veto_, that will profit or
- disprofit us. On the 17th of January, the Legislative, for one
- thing, got its High Court, its _Haute Cour_, set up at Orléans.
- The theory had been given by the Constituent, in May last, but
- this is the reality: a Court for the trial of Political Offences;
- a Court which cannot want work. To this it was decreed that there
- needed no royal Acceptance, therefore that there could be no
- _Veto_. Also Priests can now be married; ever since last October.
- A patriotic adventurous Priest had made bold to marry himself
- then; and not thinking this enough, came to the bar with his new
- spouse; that the whole world might hold honey-moon with him, and
- a Law be obtained.
-
- Less joyful are the Laws against Refractory Priests; and yet no
- less needful! Decrees on Priests and Decrees on Emigrants: these
- are the two brief Series of Decrees, worked out with endless
- debate, and then cancelled by _Veto_, which mainly concern us
- here. For an august National Assembly must needs conquer these
- Refractories, Clerical or Laic, and thumbscrew them into
- obedience; yet, behold, always as you turn your legislative
- thumbscrew, and will press and even crush till Refractories give
- way,—King’s _Veto_ steps in, with magical paralysis; and your
- thumbscrew, hardly squeezing, much less crushing, does not act!
-
- Truly a melancholy Set of Decrees, a pair of Sets; paralysed by
- _Veto!_ First, under date the 28th of October 1791, we have
- Legislative Proclamation, issued by herald and bill-sticker;
- inviting Monsieur, the King’s Brother to return within two
- months, under penalties. To which invitation Monsieur replies
- nothing; or indeed replies by Newspaper Parody, inviting the
- august Legislative “to return to common sense within two months,”
- under penalties. Whereupon the Legislative must take stronger
- measures. So, on the 9th of November, we declare all Emigrants to
- be “suspect of conspiracy;” and, in brief, to be “outlawed,” if
- they have not returned at Newyear’s-day:—Will the King say
- _Veto?_ That “triple impost” shall be levied on these men’s
- Properties, or even their Properties be “put in sequestration,”
- one can understand. But further, on Newyear’s-day itself, not an
- individual having “returned,” we declare, and with fresh emphasis
- some fortnight later again declare, That Monsieur is _déchu_,
- forfeited of his eventual Heirship to the Crown; nay more that
- Condé, Calonne, and a considerable List of others are accused of
- high treason; and shall be judged by our High Court of Orléans:
- _Veto!_—Then again as to Nonjurant Priests: it was decreed, in
- November last, that they should forfeit what Pensions they had;
- be “put under inspection, under _surveillance_,” and, if need
- were, be banished: _Veto!_ A still sharper turn is coming; but to
- this also the answer will be, _Veto_.
-
- _Veto_ after _Veto;_ your thumbscrew paralysed! Gods and men may
- see that the Legislative is in a false position. As, alas, who is
- in a true one? Voices already murmur for a “National
- Convention.”[446] This poor Legislative, spurred and stung into
- action by a whole France and a whole Europe, cannot act; can only
- objurgate and perorate; with stormy “motions,” and motion in
- which is no _way;_ with effervescence, with noise and fuliginous
- fury!
-
- What scenes in that National Hall! President jingling his
- inaudible bell; or, as utmost signal of distress, clapping on his
- hat; “the tumult subsiding in twenty minutes,” and this or the
- other indiscreet Member sent to the Abbaye Prison for three days!
- Suspected Persons must be summoned and questioned; old M. de
- Sombreuil of the _Invalides_ has to give account of himself, and
- why he leaves his Gates open. Unusual smoke rose from the Sèvres
- Pottery, indicating conspiracy; the Potters explained that it was
- Necklace-Lamotte’s _Mémoires_, bought up by her Majesty, which
- they were endeavouring to suppress by fire,[447]—which
- nevertheless he that runs may still read.
-
- Again, it would seem, Duke de Brissac and the King’s
- Constitutional-Guard are “making cartridges secretly in the
- cellars;” a set of Royalists, pure and impure; black cut-throats
- many of them, picked out of gaming houses and sinks; in all Six
- thousand instead of Eighteen hundred; who evidently gloom on us
- every time we enter the Château.[448] Wherefore, with infinite
- debate, let Brissac and King’s Guard be _disbanded_. Disbanded
- accordingly they are; after only two months of existence, for
- they did not get on foot till March of this same year. So ends
- briefly the King’s new Constitutional _Maison Militaire;_ he must
- now be guarded by mere Swiss and blue Nationals again. It seems
- the lot of Constitutional things. New Constitutional _Maison
- Civile_ he would never even establish, much as Barnave urged it;
- old resident Duchesses sniffed at it, and held aloof; on the
- whole her Majesty thought it not worth while, the Noblesse would
- so soon be back triumphant.[449]
-
- Or, looking still into this National Hall and its scenes, behold
- Bishop Torné, a Constitutional Prelate, not of severe morals,
- demanding that “religious costumes and such caricatures” be
- abolished. Bishop Torné warms, catches fire; finishes by untying,
- and indignantly flinging on the table, as if for gage or bet, his
- own pontifical cross. Which cross, at any rate, is instantly
- covered by the cross of _Te-Deum_ Fauchet, then by other crosses,
- and insignia, till all are stripped; this clerical Senator
- clutching off his skull-cap, that other his frill-collar,—lest
- Fanaticism return on us.[450]
-
- Quick is the movement here! And then so confused, unsubstantial,
- you might call it almost _spectral;_ pallid, dim, inane, like the
- Kingdoms of Dis! Unruly Liguet, shrunk to a kind of spectre for
- us, pleads here, some cause that he has: amid rumour and
- interruption, which excel human patience; he “tears his papers,
- and withdraws,” the irascible adust little man. Nay honourable
- members will tear their papers, being effervescent: Merlin of
- Thionville tears his papers, crying: ‘So, the People cannot be
- saved by _you!_’ Nor are Deputations wanting: Deputations of
- Sections; generally with complaint and denouncement, always with
- Patriot fervour of sentiment: Deputation of Women, pleading that
- they also may be allowed to take Pikes, and exercise in the
- Champ-de-Mars. Why not, ye Amazons, if it be in you? Then
- occasionally, having done our message and got answer, we “defile
- through the Hall, singing _ça-ira;_” or rather roll and whirl
- through it, “dancing our _ronde patriotique_ the while,”—our new
- _Carmagnole_, or Pyrrhic war-dance and liberty-dance. Patriot
- Huguenin, Ex-Advocate, Ex-Carabineer, Ex-Clerk of the Barriers,
- comes deputed, with Saint-Antoine at his heels; denouncing
- Anti-patriotism, Famine, Forstalment and Man-eaters; asks an
- august Legislative: ‘Is there not a _tocsin in your hearts_
- against these _mangeurs d’hommes!_’[451]
-
- But above all things, for this is a continual business, the
- Legislative has to reprimand the King’s Ministers. Of His
- Majesty’s Ministers we have said hitherto, and say, next to
- nothing. Still more spectral these! Sorrowful; of no permanency
- any of them, none at least since Montmorin vanished: the “eldest
- of the King’s Council” is occasionally not ten days old![452]
- Feuillant-Constitutional, as your respectable Cahier de Gerville,
- as your respectable unfortunate Delessarts; or
- Royalist-Constitutional, as Montmorin last Friend of Necker; or
- Aristocrat as Bertrand-Moleville: they flit there phantom-like,
- in the huge simmering confusion; poor shadows, dashed in the
- racking winds; powerless, without meaning;—whom the human memory
- need not charge itself with.
-
- But how often, we say, are these poor Majesty’s Ministers
- summoned over; to be questioned, tutored; nay, threatened, almost
- bullied! They answer what, with adroitest simulation and
- casuistry, they can: of which a poor Legislative knows not what
- to make. One thing only is clear, That Cimmerian Europe is
- girdling us in; that France (not actually dead, surely?) cannot
- march. Have a care, ye Ministers! Sharp Guadet transfixes you
- with cross-questions, with sudden Advocate-conclusions; the
- sleeping tempest that is in Vergniaud can be awakened. Restless
- Brissot brings up Reports, Accusations, endless thin Logic; it is
- the man’s highday even now. Condorcet redacts, with his firm pen,
- our “Address of the Legislative Assembly to the French
- Nation.”[453] Fiery Max Isnard, who, for the rest, will ‘carry
- not Fire and Sword’ on those Cimmerian Enemies ‘but Liberty,’—is
- for declaring ‘that we hold Ministers responsible; and that by
- responsibility we mean death, _nous entendons la mort_.’
-
- For verily it grows serious: the time presses, and traitors there
- are. Bertrand-Moleville has a smooth tongue, the known
- Aristocrat; gall in his heart. How his answers and explanations
- flow ready; jesuitic, plausible to the ear! But perhaps the
- notablest is this, which befell once when Bertrand had done
- answering and was withdrawn. Scarcely had the august Assembly
- begun considering what was to be done with him, when the Hall
- fills with _smoke_. Thick sour smoke: no oratory, only wheezing
- and barking;—irremediable; so that the august Assembly has to
- adjourn![454] A miracle? Typical miracle? One knows not: only
- this one seems to know, that “the Keeper of the Stoves _was
- appointed_ by Bertrand” or by some underling of his!—O fuliginous
- confused Kingdom of Dis, with thy Tantalus-Ixion toils, with thy
- angry Fire-floods, and Streams named of Lamentation, why hast
- thou not thy Lethe too, that so one might _finish?_
-
-
- Chapter 2.5.VIII.
- The Jacobins.
-
- Nevertheless let not Patriotism despair. Have we not, in Paris at
- least, a virtuous Pétion, a wholly Patriotic Municipality?
- Virtuous Pétion, ever since November, is Mayor of Paris: in our
- Municipality, the Public, for the Public is now admitted too, may
- behold an energetic Danton; further, an epigrammatic slow-sure
- Manuel; a resolute unrepentant Billaud-Varennes, of Jesuit
- breeding; Tallien able-editor; and nothing but Patriots, better
- or worse. So ran the November Elections: to the joy of most
- citizens; nay the very Court supported Pétion rather than
- Lafayette. And so Bailly and his Feuillants, long waning like the
- Moon, had to withdraw then, making some sorrowful obeisance, into
- extinction;—or indeed into worse, into lurid half-light, grimmed
- by the shadow of that Red Flag of theirs, and bitter memory of
- the Champ-de-Mars. How swift is the progress of things and men!
- Not now does Lafayette, as on that Federation-day, when _his_
- noon was, “press his sword firmly on the Fatherland’s Altar,” and
- swear in sight of France: ah no; he, waning and setting ever
- since that hour, hangs now, disastrous, on the edge of the
- horizon; commanding one of those Three moulting Crane-flights of
- Armies, in a most suspected, unfruitful, uncomfortable manner!
-
- But, at most, cannot Patriotism, so many thousands strong in this
- Metropolis of the Universe, help itself? Has it not right-hands,
- pikes? Hammering of pikes, which was not to be prohibited by
- Mayor Bailly, has been sanctioned by Mayor Pétion; sanctioned by
- Legislative Assembly. How not, when the King’s so-called
- Constitutional Guard “was making cartridges in secret?” Changes
- are necessary for the National Guard itself; this whole
- Feuillant-Aristocrat Staff of the Guard must be disbanded.
- Likewise, citizens without uniform may surely rank in the Guard,
- the pike beside the musket, in such a time: the “active” citizen
- and the passive who can fight for us, are they not both
- welcome?—O my Patriot friends, indubitably Yes! Nay the truth is,
- Patriotism throughout, were it never so white-frilled, logical,
- respectable, must either lean itself heartily on Sansculottism,
- the black, bottomless; or else vanish, in the frightfullest way,
- to Limbo! Thus some, with upturned nose, will altogether sniff
- and disdain Sansculottism; others will lean heartily on it; nay
- others again will lean what we call _heartlessly_ on it: three
- sorts; each sort with a destiny corresponding.[455]
-
- In such point of view, however, have we not for the present a
- Volunteer Ally, stronger than all the rest: namely, Hunger?
- Hunger; and what rushing of Panic Terror this and the sum-total
- of our other miseries may bring! For Sansculottism grows by what
- all other things die of. Stupid Peter Baille almost made an
- epigram, though unconsciously, and with the Patriot world
- laughing not at it but at him, when he wrote “_Tout va bien ici,
- le pain manque_, All goes well here, victuals not to be
- had.”[456]
-
- Neither, if you knew it, is Patriotism without her Constitution
- that _can_ march; her _not_ impotent Parliament; or call it,
- Ecumenic Council, and General-Assembly of the Jean-Jacques
- Churches: the MOTHER-SOCIETY, namely! Mother-Society with her
- three hundred full-grown Daughters; with what we can call little
- Granddaughters trying to walk, in every village of France,
- numerable, as Burke thinks, by the hundred thousand. This is the
- true Constitution; made not by Twelve-Hundred august Senators,
- but by Nature herself; and has grown, unconsciously, out of the
- wants and the efforts of these Twenty-five Millions of men. They
- are “Lords of the Articles,” our Jacobins; they originate debates
- for the Legislative; discuss Peace and War; settle beforehand
- what the Legislative is to do. Greatly to the scandal of
- philosophical men, and of most Historians;—who do in that judge
- naturally, and yet not wisely. A Governing power must exist: your
- other powers here are simulacra; this power is _it._
-
- Great is the Mother Society: She has had the honour to be
- denounced by Austrian Kaunitz;[457] and is all the dearer to
- Patriotism. By fortune and valour, she has extinguished
- Feuillantism itself, at least the Feuillant Club. This latter,
- high as it once carried its head, she, on the 18th of February,
- has the satisfaction to see shut, extinct; Patriots having gone
- thither, with tumult, to hiss it out of pain. The Mother Society
- has enlarged her locality, stretches now over the whole nave of
- the Church. Let us glance in, with the worthy Toulongeon, our old
- Ex-Constituent Friend, who happily has eyes to see: “The nave of
- the Jacobins Church,” says he, “is changed into a vast Circus,
- the seats of which mount up circularly like an amphitheatre to
- the very groin of the domed roof. A high Pyramid of black marble,
- built against one of the walls, which was formerly a funeral
- monument, has alone been left standing: it serves now as back to
- the Office-bearers’ Bureau. Here on an elevated Platform sit
- President and Secretaries, behind and above them the white Busts
- of Mirabeau, of Franklin, and various others, nay finally of
- Marat. Facing this is the Tribune, raised till it is midway
- between floor and groin of the dome, so that the speaker’s voice
- may be in the centre. From that point, thunder the voices which
- shake all Europe: down below, in silence, are forging the
- thunderbolts and the firebrands. Penetrating into this huge
- circuit, where all is out of measure, gigantic, the mind cannot
- repress some movement of terror and wonder; the imagination
- recalls those dread temples which Poetry, of old, had consecrated
- to the Avenging Deities.”[458]
-
- Scenes too are in this Jacobin Amphitheatre,—had History time for
- them. Flags of the “Three free Peoples of the Universe,” trinal
- brotherly flags of England, America, France, have been waved here
- in concert; by London Deputation, of Whigs or _Wighs_ and their
- Club, on this hand, and by young French Citizenesses on that;
- beautiful sweet-tongued Female Citizens, who solemnly send over
- salutation and brotherhood, also Tricolor stitched by their own
- needle, and finally Ears of Wheat; while the dome rebellows with
- _Vivent les trois peuples libres!_ from all throats:—a most
- dramatic scene. Demoiselle Théroigne recites, from that Tribune
- in mid air, her persecutions in Austria; comes leaning on the arm
- of Joseph Chénier, Poet Chénier, to demand Liberty for the
- hapless Swiss of Château-Vieux.[459] Be of hope, ye Forty Swiss;
- tugging there, in the Brest waters; _not_ forgotten!
-
- Deputy Brissot perorates from that Tribune; Desmoulins, our
- wicked Camille, interjecting audibly from below, ‘_Coquin!_’
- Here, though oftener in the Cordeliers, reverberates the
- lion-voice of Danton; grim Billaud-Varennes is here; Collot
- d’Herbois, pleading for the Forty Swiss; tearing a passion to
- rags. Apophthegmatic Manuel winds up in this pithy way: ‘A
- Minister must perish!’—to which the Amphitheatre responds:
- ‘_Tous, Tous_, All, All!’ But the Chief Priest and Speaker of
- this place, as we said, is Robespierre, the long-winded
- incorruptible man. What spirit of Patriotism dwelt in men in
- those times, this one fact, it seems to us, will evince: that
- fifteen hundred human creatures, not bound to it, sat quiet under
- the oratory of Robespierre; nay, listened nightly, hour after
- hour, applausive; and gaped as for the word of life. More
- insupportable individual, one would say, seldom opened his mouth
- in any Tribune. Acrid, implacable-impotent; dull-drawling, barren
- as the Harmattan-wind! He pleads, in endless earnest-shallow
- speech, against immediate War, against Woollen Caps or _Bonnets
- Rouges_, against many things; and is the Trismegistus and
- Dalai-Lama of Patriot men. Whom nevertheless a shrill-voiced
- little man, yet with fine eyes, and a broad beautifully sloping
- brow, rises respectfully to controvert: he is, say the Newspaper
- Reporters, “M. Louvet, Author of the charming Romance of
- _Faublas_.” Steady, ye Patriots! Pull not _yet_ two ways; with a
- France rushing panic-stricken in the rural districts, and a
- Cimmerian Europe storming in on you!
-
-
- Chapter 2.5.IX.
- Minister Roland.
-
- About the vernal equinox, however, one unexpected gleam of hope
- does burst forth on Patriotism: the appointment of a thoroughly
- Patriot Ministry. This also his Majesty, among his innumerable
- experiments of wedding fire to water, will try. _Quod bonum sit_.
- Madame d’Udon’s Breakfasts have jingled with a new significance;
- not even Genevese Dumont but had a word in it. Finally, on the
- 15th and onwards to the 23d day of March, 1792, when all is
- negociated,—this is the blessed issue; this Patriot Ministry that
- we see.
-
- General Dumouriez, with the Foreign Portfolio shall ply Kaunitz
- and the Kaiser, in another style than did poor Delessarts; whom
- indeed we have sent to our High Court of Orléans for his
- sluggishness. War-minister Narbonne is washed away by the
- Time-flood; poor Chevalier de Grave, chosen by the Court, is fast
- washing away: then shall austere Servan, able Engineer-Officer,
- mount suddenly to the War Department. Genevese Clavière sees an
- old omen realized: passing the Finance Hotel, long years ago, as
- a poor Genevese Exile, it was borne wondrously on his mind that
- _he_ was to be Finance Minister; and now he is it;—and his poor
- Wife, given up by the Doctors, rises and walks, not the victim of
- nerves but their vanquisher.[460] And above all, our Minister of
- the Interior? Roland de la Platrière, he of Lyons! So have the
- Brissotins, public or private Opinion, and Breakfasts in the
- Place Vendôme decided it. Strict Roland, compared to a _Quaker
- endimanché_, or Sunday Quaker, goes to kiss hands at the
- Tuileries, in round hat and sleek hair, his shoes tied with mere
- riband or ferrat! The Supreme Usher twitches Dumouriez aside:
- ‘_Quoi, Monsieur!_ No buckles to his shoes?’—‘Ah, Monsieur,’
- answers Dumouriez, glancing towards the ferrat: ‘All is lost,
- _Tout est perdu_.’[461]
-
- And so our fair Roland removes from her upper floor in the Rue
- Saint-Jacques, to the sumptuous saloons once occupied by Madame
- Necker. Nay still earlier, it was Calonne that did all this
- gilding; it was he who ground these lustres, Venetian mirrors;
- who polished this inlaying, this veneering and or-moulu; and made
- it, by rubbing of the proper _lamp_, an Aladdin’s Palace:—and now
- behold, he wanders dim-flitting over Europe, half-drowned in the
- Rhine-stream, scarcely saving his Papers! _Vos non vobis_.—The
- fair Roland, equal to either fortune, has her public Dinner on
- Fridays, the Ministers all there in a body: she withdraws to her
- desk (the cloth once removed), and seems busy writing;
- nevertheless loses no word: if for example Deputy Brissot and
- Minister Clavière get too hot in argument, she, not without
- timidity, yet with a cunning gracefulness, will interpose. Deputy
- Brissot’s head, they say, is getting giddy, in this sudden
- height: as feeble heads do.
-
- Envious men insinuate that the Wife Roland is Minister, and not
- the Husband: it is happily the worst they have to charge her
- with. For the rest, let whose head soever be getting giddy, it is
- not this brave woman’s. Serene and queenly here, as she was of
- old in her own hired garret of the Ursulines Convent! She who has
- quietly shelled French-beans for her dinner; being led to that,
- as a young maiden, by quiet insight and computation; and knowing
- what that was, and what she was: such a one will also look
- quietly on or-moulu and veneering, not ignorant of these either.
- Calonne did the veneering: he gave dinners here, old Besenval
- diplomatically whispering to him; and was great: yet Calonne we
- saw at last “walk with long strides.” Necker next: and where now
- is Necker? Us also a swift change has brought hither; a swift
- change will send us hence. Not a Palace but a Caravansera!
-
- So wags and wavers this unrestful World, day after day, month
- after month. The Streets of Paris, and all Cities, roll daily
- their oscillatory flood of men; which flood does, nightly,
- disappear, and lie hidden horizontal in beds and trucklebeds; and
- awakes on the morrow to new perpendicularity and movement. Men go
- their roads, foolish or wise;—Engineer Goguelat to and fro,
- bearing Queen’s cipher. A Madame de Staël is busy; cannot clutch
- her Narbonne from the Time-flood: a Princess de Lamballe is busy;
- cannot help her Queen. Barnave, seeing the Feuillants dispersed,
- and Coblentz so brisk, begs by way of final recompence to kiss
- her Majesty’s hand; augurs not well of her new course; and
- retires home to Grenoble, to wed an heiress there. The Café
- Valois and Méot the Restaurateur’s hear daily gasconade; loud
- babble of Half-pay Royalists, with or without Poniards; remnants
- of Aristocrat saloons call the new Ministry
- _Ministère-Sansculotte_. A Louvet, of the Romance _Faublas_, is
- busy in the Jacobins. A Cazotte, of the Romance _Diable
- Amoureux_, is busy elsewhere: better wert thou quiet, old
- Cazotte; it is a world, this, of magic become _real!_ All men are
- busy; doing they only half guess what:—flinging seeds, of tares
- mostly, into the ‘Seed-field of TIME’ this, by and by, will
- declare wholly what.
-
- But Social Explosions have in them something dread, and as it
- were mad and magical: which indeed Life always secretly has; thus
- the dumb Earth (says Fable), if you pull her mandrake-roots, will
- give a dæmonic mad-making _moan_. These Explosions and Revolts
- ripen, break forth like dumb dread Forces of Nature; and yet they
- are Men’s forces; and yet _we_ are part of them: the Dæmonic that
- is in man’s life has burst out on us, will sweep us too away!—One
- day here is like another, and yet it is not like but different.
- How much is growing, silently resistless, at all moments!
- Thoughts are growing; forms of Speech are growing, and Customs
- and even Costumes; still more visibly are actions and
- transactions growing, and that doomed Strife, of France with
- herself and with the whole world.
-
- The word _Liberty_ is never named now except in conjunction with
- another; _Liberty_ and _Equality_. In like manner, what, in a
- reign of Liberty and Equality, can these words, “Sir,” “obedient
- Servant,” “Honour to be,” and such like, signify? Tatters and
- fibres of old Feudality; which, were it only in the Grammatical
- province, ought to be rooted out! The Mother Society has long
- since had proposals to that effect: these she could not
- entertain, not at the moment. Note too how the Jacobin Brethren
- are mounting new symbolical headgear: the Woollen Cap or
- Nightcap, _bonnet de laine_, better known as _bonnet rouge_, the
- colour being _red_. A thing one wears not only by way of Phrygian
- Cap-of-Liberty, but also for convenience” sake, and then also in
- compliment to the Lower-class Patriots and Bastille-Heroes; for
- the Red Nightcap combines all the three properties. Nay cockades
- themselves begin to be made of wool, of tricolor yarn: the
- riband-cockade, as a symptom of Feuillant Upper-class temper, is
- becoming suspicious. Signs of the times.
-
- Still more, note the travail-throes of Europe: or, rather, note
- the birth she brings; for the successive throes and shrieks, of
- Austrian and Prussian Alliance, of Kaunitz Anti-jacobin Despatch,
- of French Ambassadors cast out, and so forth, were long to note.
- Dumouriez corresponds with Kaunitz, Metternich, or Cobentzel, in
- another style that Delessarts did. Strict becomes stricter;
- categorical answer, as to this Coblentz work and much else, shall
- be given. Failing which? Failing which, on the 20th day of April
- 1792, King and Ministers step over to the Salle de Manége;
- promulgate how the matter stands; and poor Louis, “with tears in
- his eyes,” proposes that the Assembly do now decree War. After
- due eloquence, War is decreed that night.
-
- War, indeed! Paris came all crowding, full of expectancy, to the
- morning, and still more to the evening session. D’Orléans with
- his two sons, is there; looks on, wide-eyed, from the opposite
- Gallery.[462] Thou canst look, O Philippe: it is a War big with
- issues, for thee and for all men. Cimmerian Obscurantism and this
- thrice glorious Revolution shall wrestle for it, then: some
- Four-and-twenty years; in immeasurable Briareus’ wrestle;
- trampling and tearing; before they can come to any, not
- agreement, but compromise, and approximate ascertainment each of
- what is in the other.
-
- Let our Three Generals on the Frontiers look to it, therefore;
- and poor Chevalier de Grave, the Warminister, consider what he
- will do. What is in the three Generals and Armies we may guess.
- As for poor Chevalier de Grave, he, in this whirl of things all
- coming to a press and pinch upon him, loses head, and merely
- whirls with them, in a totally distracted manner; signing himself
- at last, “De Grave, _Mayor of Paris;_” whereupon he demits,
- returns over the Channel, to walk in Kensington Gardens;[463] and
- austere Servan, the able Engineer-Officer, is elevated in his
- stead. To the post of Honour? To that of Difficulty, at least.
-
-
- Chapter 2.5.X.
- Pétion-National-Pique.
-
- And yet, how, on dark bottomless Cataracts there plays the
- foolishest fantastic-coloured spray and shadow; hiding the Abyss
- under vapoury rainbows! Alongside of this discussion as to
- Austrian-Prussian War, there goes on no less but more vehemently
- a discussion, Whether the Forty or Two-and-forty Swiss of
- Château-Vieux shall be liberated from the Brest Gallies? And
- then, Whether, being liberated, they shall have a public
- Festival, or only private ones?
-
- Théroigne, as we saw, spoke; and Collot took up the tale. Has not
- Bouillé’s final display of himself, in that final Night of Spurs,
- stamped your so-called “Revolt of Nanci” into a “Massacre of
- Nanci,” for all Patriot judgments? Hateful is that massacre;
- hateful the Lafayette-Feuillant “public thanks” given for it! For
- indeed, Jacobin Patriotism and dispersed Feuillantism are now at
- death-grips; and do fight with all weapons, even with scenic
- shows. The walls of Paris, accordingly, are covered with Placard
- and Counter-Placard, on the subject of Forty Swiss blockheads.
- Journal responds to Journal; Player Collot to Poetaster Roucher;
- Joseph Chénier the Jacobin, squire of Théroigne, to his Brother
- Andre the Feuillant; Mayor Pétion to Dupont de Nemours: and for
- the space of two months, there is nowhere peace for the thought
- of man,—till this thing be settled.
-
- _Gloria in excelsis!_ The Forty Swiss are at last got
- “amnestied.” Rejoice ye Forty: doff your greasy wool Bonnets,
- which shall become Caps of Liberty. The Brest Daughter-Society
- welcomes you from on board, with kisses on each cheek: your iron
- Handcuffs are disputed as Relics of Saints; the Brest Society
- indeed can have one portion, which it will beat into Pikes, a
- sort of Sacred Pikes; but the other portion must belong to Paris,
- and be suspended from the dome there, along with the Flags of the
- Three Free Peoples! Such a goose is man; and cackles over
- plush-velvet Grand Monarques and woollen Galley-slaves; over
- everything and over nothing,—and will cackle with his whole soul
- merely if others cackle!
-
- On the ninth morning of April, these Forty Swiss blockheads
- arrive. From Versailles; with _vivats_ heaven-high; with the
- affluence of men and women. To the Townhall we conduct them; nay
- to the Legislative itself, though not without difficulty. They
- are harangued, bedinnered, begifted,—the very Court, _not_ for
- conscience” sake, contributing something; and their Public
- Festival shall be next Sunday. Next Sunday accordingly it
- is.[464] They are mounted into a “triumphal Car resembling a
- ship;” are carted over Paris, with the clang of cymbals and
- drums, all mortals assisting applausive; carted to the
- Champ-de-Mars and Fatherland’s Altar; and finally carted, for
- Time always brings deliverance,—into invisibility for evermore.
-
- Whereupon dispersed Feuillantism, or that Party which loves
- Liberty yet not more than Monarchy, will likewise have its
- Festival: Festival of Simonneau, unfortunate Mayor of Etampes,
- who died for the Law; most surely for the Law, though Jacobinism
- disputes; being trampled down with his Red Flag in the riot about
- grains. At which Festival the Public again assists,
- _un_applausive: not we.
-
- On the whole, Festivals are not wanting; beautiful rainbow-spray
- when all is now rushing treble-quick towards its Niagara Fall.
- National repasts there are; countenanced by Mayor Pétion;
- Saint-Antoine, and the Strong Ones of the Halles defiling through
- Jacobin Club, ‘their felicity,’ according to Santerre, ‘not
- perfect otherwise;’ singing many-voiced their _ça-ira_, dancing
- their _ronde patriotique_. Among whom one is glad to discern
- Saint-Huruge, expressly “in white hat,” the Saint-Christopher of
- the Carmagnole. Nay a certain _Tambour_ or National Drummer,
- having just been presented with a little daughter, determines to
- have the new Frenchwoman christened on Fatherland’s Altar then
- and there. Repast once over, he accordingly has her christened;
- Fauchet the Te-Deum Bishop acting in chief, Thuriot and
- honourable persons standing gossips: by the name,
- Pétion-National-Pique![465] Does this remarkable Citizeness, now
- past the meridian of life, still walk the Earth? Or did she die
- perhaps of teething? Universal History is not indifferent.
-
-
- Chapter 2.5.XI.
- The Hereditary Representative.
-
- And yet it is not by carmagnole-dances and singing of _ça-ira_,
- that the work can be done. Duke Brunswick is not dancing
- carmagnoles, but has his drill serjeants busy.
-
- On the Frontiers, our Armies, be it treason or not, behave in the
- worst way. Troops badly commanded, shall we say? Or troops
- intrinsically bad? Unappointed, undisciplined, mutinous; that, in
- a thirty-years peace, have never seen fire? In any case,
- Lafayette’s and Rochambeau’s little clutch, which they made at
- Austrian Flanders, has prospered as badly as clutch need do:
- soldiers starting at their own shadow; suddenly shrieking, ‘_On
- nous trahit_,’ and flying off in wild panic, at or before the
- first shot;—managing only to hang some two or three Prisoners
- they had picked up, and massacre their own Commander, poor
- Theobald Dillon, driven into a granary by them in the Town of
- Lille.
-
- And poor Gouvion: he who sat shiftless in that Insurrection of
- Women! Gouvion quitted the Legislative Hall and Parliamentary
- duties, in disgust and despair, when those Galley-slaves of
- Château-Vieux were admitted there. He said, ‘Between the
- Austrians and the Jacobins there is nothing but a soldier’s death
- for it;’[466] and so, “in the dark stormy night,” he has flung
- himself into the throat of the Austrian cannon, and perished in
- the skirmish at Maubeuge on the ninth of June. Whom Legislative
- Patriotism shall mourn, with black mortcloths and melody in the
- Champ-de-Mars: many a Patriot shiftier, truer none. Lafayette
- himself is looking altogether dubious; in place of beating the
- Austrians, is about writing to denounce the Jacobins. Rochambeau,
- all disconsolate, quits the service: there remains only Lückner,
- the babbling old Prussian Grenadier.
-
- Without Armies, without Generals! And the Cimmerian Night, _has_
- gathered itself; Brunswick preparing his Proclamation; just about
- to march! Let a Patriot Ministry and Legislative say, what in
- these circumstances it will do? Suppress Internal Enemies, for
- one thing, answers the Patriot Legislative; and proposes, on the
- 24th of May, its Decree for the Banishment of Priests. Collect
- also some nucleus of determined internal friends, adds
- War-minister Servan; and proposes, on the 7th of June, his Camp
- of Twenty-thousand. Twenty-thousand National Volunteers; Five out
- of each Canton; picked Patriots, for Roland has charge of the
- Interior: they shall assemble here in Paris; and be for a
- defence, cunningly devised, against foreign Austrians and
- domestic _Austrian Committee_ alike. So much can a Patriot
- Ministry and Legislative do.
-
- Reasonable and cunningly devised as such Camp may, to Servan and
- Patriotism, appear, it appears not so to Feuillantism; to that
- Feuillant-Aristocrat Staff of the Paris Guard; a Staff, one would
- say again, which will need to be _dissolved_. These men see, in
- this proposed Camp of Servan’s, an offence; and even, as they
- pretend to say, an insult. Petitions there come, in consequence,
- from blue Feuillants in epaulettes; ill received. Nay, in the
- end, there comes one Petition, called “of the Eight Thousand
- National Guards:” so many names are on it; including women and
- children. Which famed Petition of the Eight Thousand is indeed
- received: and the Petitioners, all under arms, are admitted to
- the honours of the sitting,—if honours or even if sitting there
- be; for the instant their bayonets appear at the one door, the
- Assembly “adjourns,” and begins to flow out at the other.[467]
-
- Also, in these same days, it is lamentable to see how National
- Guards, escorting _Fête Dieu_ or _Corpus-Christi_ ceremonial, do
- collar and smite down any Patriot that does not uncover as the
- Hostie passes. They clap their bayonets to the breast of
- Cattle-butcher Legendre, a known Patriot ever since the Bastille
- days; and threaten to butcher him; though he sat quite
- respectfully, he says, in his Gig, at a distance of fifty paces,
- waiting till the thing were by. Nay, orthodox females were
- shrieking to have down the _Lanterne_ on him.[468]
-
- To such height has Feuillantism gone in this Corps. For indeed,
- are not their Officers creatures of the chief Feuillant,
- Lafayette? The Court too has, very naturally, been tampering with
- them; caressing them, ever since that dissolution of the
- so-called Constitutional Guard. Some Battalions are altogether
- “_pétris_, kneaded full” of Feuillantism, mere Aristocrats at
- bottom: for instance, the Battalion of the _Filles-Saint-Thomas_,
- made up of your Bankers, Stockbrokers, and other Full-purses of
- the Rue Vivienne. Our worthy old Friend Weber, Queen’s
- Foster-brother Weber, carries a musket in that Battalion,—one may
- judge with what degree of Patriotic intention.
-
- Heedless of all which, or rather heedful of all which, the
- Legislative, backed by Patriot France and the feeling of
- Necessity, decrees this Camp of Twenty thousand. Decisive though
- conditional Banishment of malign Priests, it has already decreed.
-
- It will now be seen, therefore, Whether the Hereditary
- Representative is for us or against us? Whether or not, to all
- our other woes, this intolerablest one is to be added; which
- renders us not a menaced Nation in extreme jeopardy and need, but
- a paralytic Solecism of a Nation; sitting wrapped as in dead
- cerements, of a Constitutional-Vesture that were no other than a
- winding-sheet; our right hand glued to our left: to wait there,
- writhing and wriggling, unable to stir from the spot, till in
- Prussian rope we mount to the gallows? Let the Hereditary
- Representative consider it well: The Decree of Priests? The Camp
- of Twenty Thousand?—By Heaven, he answers, _Veto! Veto!_—Strict
- Roland hands in his _Letter to the King;_ or rather it was
- Madame’s Letter, who wrote it all at a sitting; one of the
- plainest-spoken Letters ever handed in to any King. This
- plain-spoken Letter King Louis has the benefit of reading
- overnight. He reads, inwardly digests; and next morning, the
- whole Patriot Ministry finds itself turned out. It is the 13th of
- June 1792.[469]
-
- Dumouriez the many-counselled, he, with one Duranthon, called
- Minister of Justice, does indeed linger for a day or two; in
- rather suspicious circumstances; speaks with the Queen, almost
- weeps with her: but in the end, he too sets off for the Army;
- leaving what Un-Patriot or Semi-Patriot Ministry and Ministries
- can now accept the helm, to accept it. Name them not: new
- quick-changing Phantasms, which shift like magic-lantern figures;
- more spectral than ever!
-
- Unhappy Queen, unhappy Louis! The two _Vetos_ were so natural:
- are not the Priests martyrs; also friends? This Camp of Twenty
- Thousand, could it be other than of stormfullest Sansculottes?
- Natural; and yet, to France, unendurable. Priests that co-operate
- with Coblentz must go elsewhither with their martyrdom: stormful
- Sansculottes, these and no other kind of creatures, will drive
- back the Austrians. If thou prefer the Austrians, then for the
- love of Heaven go join them. If not, join frankly with what will
- oppose them to the death. Middle course is none.
-
- Or alas, what extreme course was there left now, for a man like
- Louis? Underhand Royalists, Ex-Minister Bertrand-Moleville,
- Ex-Constituent Malouet, and all manner of unhelpful individuals,
- advise and advise. With face of hope turned now on the
- Legislative Assembly, and now on Austria and Coblentz, and round
- generally on the Chapter of Chances, an ancient Kingship is
- reeling and spinning, one knows not whitherward, on the flood of
- things.
-
-
- Chapter 2.5.XII.
- Procession of the Black Breeches.
-
- But is there a thinking man in France who, in these
- circumstances, can persuade himself that the Constitution will
- march? Brunswick is stirring; _he_, in few days now, will march.
- Shall France sit still, wrapped in dead cerements and
- grave-clothes, its right hand glued to its left, till the
- Brunswick Saint-Bartholomew arrive; till France be as Poland, and
- its Rights of Man become a Prussian Gibbet?
-
- Verily, it is a moment frightful for all men. National Death; or
- else some preternatural convulsive outburst of National
- Life;—that same, _dæmonic_ outburst! Patriots whose audacity has
- limits had, in truth, better retire like Barnave; court private
- felicity at Grenoble. Patriots, whose audacity has no limits must
- sink down into the obscure; and, daring and defying all things,
- seek salvation in stratagem, in Plot of Insurrection. Roland and
- young Barbaroux have spread out the Map of France before them,
- Barbaroux says “with tears:” they consider what Rivers, what
- Mountain ranges are in it: they will retire behind this
- Loire-stream, defend these Auvergne stone-labyrinths; save some
- little sacred Territory of the Free; die at least in their last
- ditch. Lafayette indites his emphatic Letter to the Legislative
- against Jacobinism;[470] which emphatic Letter will not heal the
- unhealable.
-
- Forward, ye Patriots whose audacity has no limits; it is you now
- that must either do or die! The sections of Paris sit in deep
- counsel; send out Deputation after Deputation to the Salle de
- Manége, to petition and denounce. Great is their ire against
- tyrannous _Veto, Austrian Committee_, and the combined Cimmerian
- Kings. What boots it? Legislative listens to the “tocsin in our
- hearts;” grants us honours of the sitting, sees us defile with
- jingle and fanfaronade; but the Camp of Twenty Thousand, the
- Priest-Decree, be-vetoed by Majesty, are become impossible for
- Legislative. Fiery Isnard says, ‘We will have Equality, should we
- descend for it to the tomb.’ Vergniaud utters, hypothetically,
- his stern Ezekiel-visions of the fate of Anti-national Kings. But
- the question is: Will hypothetic prophecies, will jingle and
- fanfaronade demolish the _Veto;_ or will the Veto, secure in its
- Tuileries Château, remain undemolishable by these? Barbaroux,
- dashing away his tears, writes to the Marseilles Municipality,
- that they must send him “Six hundred men who know how to die,
- _qui savent mourir_.”[471] No wet-eyed message this, but a
- fire-eyed one;—which will be obeyed!
-
- Meanwhile the Twentieth of June is nigh, anniversary of that
- world-famous Oath of the Tennis-Court: on which day, it is said,
- certain citizens have in view to plant a _Mai_ or Tree of
- Liberty, in the Tuileries Terrace of the Feuillants; perhaps also
- to petition the Legislative and Hereditary Representative about
- these Vetos;—with such demonstration, jingle and evolution, as
- may seem profitable and practicable. Sections have gone singly,
- and jingled and evolved: but if they all went, or great part of
- them, and there, planting their _Mai_ in these alarming
- circumstances, sounded the tocsin in their hearts?
-
- Among King’s Friends there can be but one opinion as to such a
- step: among Nation’s Friends there may be two. On the one hand,
- might it not by possibility scare away these unblessed Vetos?
- Private Patriots and even Legislative Deputies may have each his
- own opinion, or own no-opinion: but the hardest task falls
- evidently on Mayor Pétion and the Municipals, at once Patriots
- and Guardians of the public Tranquillity. Hushing the matter down
- with the one hand; tickling it up with the other! Mayor Pétion
- and Municipality may lean this way; Department-Directory with
- Procureur-Syndic Rœderer having a Feuillant tendency, may lean
- that. On the whole, each man must act according to his one
- opinion or to his two opinions; and all manner of influences,
- official representations cross one another in the foolishest way.
- Perhaps after all, the Project, desirable and yet not desirable,
- will dissipate itself, being run athwart by so many complexities;
- and coming to nothing?
-
- Not so: on the Twentieth morning of June, a large Tree of
- Liberty, Lombardy Poplar by kind, lies visibly tied on its car,
- in the Suburb-Antoine. Suburb Saint-Marceau too, in the uttermost
- South-East, and all that remote Oriental region, Pikemen and
- Pikewomen, National Guards, and the unarmed curious are
- gathering,—with the peaceablest intentions in the world. A
- tricolor Municipal arrives; speaks. Tush, it is all peaceable, we
- tell thee, in the way of Law: are not Petitions allowable, and
- the Patriotism of _Mais?_ The tricolor Municipal returns without
- effect: your Sansculottic rills continue flowing, combining into
- brooks: towards noontide, led by tall Santerre in blue uniform,
- by tall Saint-Huruge in white hat, it moves Westward, a
- respectable river, or complication of still-swelling rivers.
-
- What Processions have we not seen: _Corpus-Christi_ and Legendre
- waiting in Gig; Bones of Voltaire with bullock-chariots, and
- goadsmen in Roman Costume; Feasts of Château-Vieux and Simonneau;
- Gouvion Funerals, Rousseau Sham-Funerals, and the Baptism of
- Pétion-National-Pike! Nevertheless this Procession has a
- character of its own. Tricolor ribands streaming aloft from
- pike-heads; ironshod batons; and emblems not a few; among which,
- see specially these two, of the tragic and the untragic sort: a
- Bull’s Heart transfixed with iron, bearing this epigraph, “_Cœur
- d’Aristocrate_, Aristocrat’s Heart;” and, more striking still,
- properly the standard of the host, a pair of old Black Breeches
- (silk, they say), extended on cross-staff high overhead, with
- these memorable words: “_Tremblez tyrans, voilà les
- Sansculottes_, Tremble tyrants, here are the
- Sans-indispensables!” Also, the Procession trails two cannons.
-
- Scarfed tricolor Municipals do now again meet it, in the Quai
- Saint-Bernard; and plead earnestly, having called halt.
- Peaceable, ye virtuous tricolor Municipals, peaceable are we as
- the sucking dove. Behold our Tennis-Court _Mai_. Petition is
- legal; and as for arms, did not an august Legislative receive the
- so-called Eight Thousand in arms, Feuillants though they were?
- Our Pikes, are they not of National iron? Law is our father and
- mother, whom we will not dishonour; but Patriotism is our own
- soul. Peaceable, ye virtuous Municipals;—and on the whole,
- limited as to time! Stop we cannot; march ye with us.—The Black
- Breeches agitate themselves, impatient; the cannon-wheels
- grumble: the many-footed Host tramps on.
-
- How it reached the Salle de Manége, like an ever-waxing river;
- got admittance, after debate; read its Address; and defiled,
- dancing and _ça-ira_-ing, led by tall sonorous Santerre and tall
- sonorous Saint-Huruge: how it flowed, not now a waxing river but
- a shut Caspian lake, round all Precincts of the Tuileries; the
- front Patriot squeezed by the rearward, against barred iron
- Grates, like to have the life squeezed out of him, and looking
- too into the dread throat of cannon, for National Battalions
- stand ranked within: how tricolor Municipals ran assiduous, and
- Royalists with Tickets of Entry; and both Majesties sat in the
- interior surrounded by men in black: all this the human mind
- shall fancy for itself, or read in old Newspapers, and Syndic
- Rœderer’s _Chronicle of Fifty Days_.[472]
-
- Our _Mai_ is planted; if not in the Feuillants Terrace, whither
- is no ingate, then in the Garden of the Capuchins, as near as we
- could get. National Assembly has adjourned till the Evening
- Session: perhaps this shut lake, finding no ingate, will retire
- to its sources again; and disappear in peace? Alas, not yet:
- rearward still presses on; rearward knows little what pressure is
- in the front. One would wish at all events, were it possible, to
- have a word with his Majesty first!
-
- The shadows fall longer, eastward; it is four o’clock: will his
- Majesty not come out? Hardly he! In that case, Commandant
- Santerre, Cattle-butcher Legendre, Patriot Huguenin with the
- tocsin in his heart; they, and others of authority, will enter
- _in_. Petition and request to wearied uncertain National Guard;
- louder and louder petition; backed by the rattle of our two
- cannons! The reluctant Grate opens: endless Sansculottic
- multitudes flood the stairs; knock at the wooden guardian of your
- privacy. Knocks, in such case, grow strokes, grow smashings: the
- wooden guardian flies in shivers. And now ensues a Scene over
- which the world has long wailed; and not unjustly; for a sorrier
- spectacle, of Incongruity fronting Incongruity, and as it were
- recognising themselves incongruous, and staring stupidly in each
- other’s face, the world seldom saw.
-
- King Louis, his door being beaten on, opens it; stands with free
- bosom; asking, ‘What do you want?’ The Sansculottic flood recoils
- awestruck; returns however, the rear pressing on the front, with
- cries of ‘Veto! Patriot Ministers! Remove Veto!’—which things,
- Louis valiantly answers, this is not the time to do, nor this the
- way to ask him to do. Honour what virtue is in a man. Louis does
- not want courage; he has even the higher kind called
- moral-courage, though only the passive half of that. His few
- National Grenadiers shuffle back with him, into the embrasure of
- a window: there he stands, with unimpeachable passivity, amid the
- shouldering and the braying; a spectacle to men. They hand him a
- Red Cap of Liberty; he sets it quietly on his head, forgets it
- there. He complains of thirst; half-drunk Rascality offers him a
- bottle, he drinks of it. ‘Sire, do not fear,’ says one of his
- Grenadiers. ‘Fear?’ answers Louis: ‘feel then,’ putting the man’s
- hand on his heart. So stands Majesty in Red woollen Cap; black
- Sansculottism weltering round him, far and wide, aimless, with
- in-articulate dissonance, with cries of ‘Veto! Patriot
- Ministers!’
-
- For the space of three hours or more! The National Assembly is
- adjourned; tricolor Municipals avail almost nothing: Mayor Pétion
- tarries absent; Authority is none. The Queen with her Children
- and Sister Elizabeth, in tears and terror not for themselves
- only, are sitting behind barricaded tables and Grenadiers in an
- inner room. The Men in Black have all wisely disappeared. Blind
- lake of Sansculottism welters stagnant through the King’s
- Château, for the space of three hours.
-
- Nevertheless all things do end. Vergniaud arrives with
- Legislative Deputation, the Evening Session having now opened.
- Mayor Pétion has arrived; is haranguing, “lifted on the shoulders
- of two Grenadiers.” In this uneasy attitude and in others, at
- various places without and within, Mayor Pétion harangues; many
- men harangue: finally Commandant Santerre defiles; passes out,
- with his Sansculottism, by the opposite side of the Château.
- Passing through the room where the Queen, with an air of dignity
- and sorrowful resignation, sat among the tables and Grenadiers, a
- woman offers her too a Red Cap; she holds it in her hand, even
- puts it on the little Prince Royal. ‘Madame,’ said Santerre,
- ‘this People loves you more than you think.’[473]—About eight
- o’clock the Royal Family fall into each other’s arms amid
- “torrents of tears.” Unhappy Family! Who would not weep for it,
- were there not a whole world to be wept for?
-
- Thus has the Age of Chivalry gone, and that of Hunger come. Thus
- does all-needing Sansculottism look in the face of its _Roi_,
- Regulator, King or Ableman; and find that _he_ has nothing to
- give it. Thus do the two Parties, brought face to face after long
- centuries, stare stupidly at one another, _This, verily, am I;
- but, Good Heaven, is that Thou?_—and depart, not knowing what to
- make of it. And yet, Incongruities having recognised themselves
- to be incongruous, something must be made of it. The Fates know
- what.
-
- This is the world-famous Twentieth of June, more worthy to be
- called the _Procession of the Black Breeches_. With which, what
- we had to say of this First French biennial Parliament, and its
- products and activities, may perhaps fitly enough terminate.
-
-
- BOOK 2.VI.
- THE MARSEILLESE
-
-
- Chapter 2.6.I.
- Executive that does not act.
-
- How could your paralytic National Executive be put “in action,”
- in any measure, by such a Twentieth of June as this? Quite
- contrariwise: a large sympathy for Majesty so insulted arises
- every where; expresses itself in Addresses, Petitions, “Petition
- of the Twenty Thousand inhabitants of Paris,” and such like,
- among all Constitutional persons; a decided rallying round the
- Throne.
-
- Of which rallying it was thought King Louis might have made
- something. However, he does make nothing of it, or attempt to
- make; for indeed his views are lifted beyond domestic sympathy
- and rallying, over to Coblentz mainly: neither in itself is the
- same sympathy worth much. It is sympathy of men who believe still
- that the Constitution can march. Wherefore the old discord and
- ferment, of Feuillant sympathy for Royalty, and Jacobin sympathy
- for Fatherland, acting against each other from within; with
- terror of Coblentz and Brunswick acting from without:—this
- discord and ferment must hold on its course, till a catastrophe
- do ripen and come. One would think, especially as Brunswick is
- near marching, such catastrophe cannot now be distant. Busy, ye
- Twenty-five French Millions; ye foreign Potentates, minatory
- Emigrants, German drill-serjeants; each do what his hand findeth!
- Thou, O Reader, at such safe distance, wilt see what they make of
- it among them.
-
- Consider therefore this pitiable Twentieth of June as a futility;
- no catastrophe, rather a _catastasis_, or heightening. Do not its
- Black Breeches wave there, in the Historical Imagination, like a
- melancholy flag of distress; soliciting help, which no mortal can
- give? Soliciting pity, which thou wert hard-hearted not to give
- freely, to one and all! Other such flags, or what are called
- Occurrences, and black or bright symbolic Phenomena; will flit
- through the Historical Imagination: these, one after one, let us
- note, with extreme brevity.
-
- The first phenomenon is that of Lafayette at the Bar of the
- Assembly; after a week and day. Promptly, on hearing of this
- scandalous Twentieth of June, Lafayette has quitted his Command
- on the North Frontier, in better or worse order; and got hither,
- on the 28th, to repress the Jacobins: not by Letter now; but by
- oral Petition, and weight of character, face to face. The august
- Assembly finds the step questionable; invites him meanwhile to
- the honours of the sitting.[474] Other honour, or advantage,
- there unhappily came almost none; the Galleries all growling;
- fiery Isnard glooming; sharp Guadet not wanting in sarcasms.
-
- And out of doors, when the sitting is over, Sieur Resson, keeper
- of the Patriot _Café_ in these regions, hears in the street a
- hurly-burly; steps forth to look, he and his Patriot customers:
- it is Lafayette’s carriage, with a tumultuous escort of blue
- Grenadiers, Cannoneers, even Officers of the Line, hurrahing and
- capering round it. They make a pause opposite Sieur Resson’s
- door; wag their plumes at him; nay shake their fists, bellowing
- _À bas les Jacobins!_ but happily pass on without onslaught. They
- pass on, to plant a _Mai_ before the General’s door, and bully
- considerably. All which the Sieur Resson cannot but report with
- sorrow, that night, in the Mother Society.[475] But what no Sieur
- Resson nor Mother Society can do more than guess is this, That a
- council of rank Feuillants, your unabolished Staff of the Guard
- and who else has status and weight, is in these very moments
- privily deliberating at the General’s: Can we not put down the
- Jacobins by force? Next day, a Review shall be held, in the
- Tuileries Garden, of such as will turn out, and try. Alas, says
- Toulongeon, hardly a hundred turned out. Put it off till
- tomorrow, then, to give better warning. On the morrow, which is
- Saturday, there turn out “some thirty;” and depart shrugging
- their shoulders![476] Lafayette promptly takes carriage again;
- returns musing on many things.
-
- The dust of Paris is hardly off his wheels, the summer Sunday is
- still young, when Cordeliers in deputation pluck up that _Mai_ of
- his: before sunset, Patriots have burnt him in effigy. Louder
- doubt and louder rises, in Section, in National Assembly, as to
- the legality of such unbidden Anti-jacobin visit on the part of a
- General: doubt swelling and spreading all over France, for six
- weeks or so: with endless talk about usurping soldiers, about
- English Monk, nay about Cromwell: O thou pour
- _Grandison_-Cromwell!—What boots it? King Louis himself looked
- coldly on the enterprize: colossal Hero of two Worlds, having
- weighed himself in the balance, finds that he is become a
- gossamer Colossus, only some thirty turning out.
-
- In a like sense, and with a like issue, works our
- Department-Directory here at Paris; who, on the 6th of July, take
- upon them to suspend Mayor Pétion and Procureur Manuel from all
- civic functions, for their conduct, replete, as is alleged, with
- omissions and commissions, on that delicate Twentieth of June.
- Virtuous Pétion sees himself a kind of martyr, or pseudo-martyr,
- threatened with several things; drawls out due heroical
- lamentation; to which Patriot Paris and Patriot Legislative duly
- respond. King Louis and Mayor Pétion have already had an
- interview on that business of the Twentieth; an interview and
- dialogue, distinguished by frankness on both sides; ending on
- King Louis’s side with the words, ‘_Taisez-vous_, Hold your
- peace.’
-
- For the rest, this of suspending our Mayor does seem a mistimed
- measure. By ill chance, it came out precisely on the day of that
- famous _Baiser de l’amourette_, or miraculous reconciliatory
- Delilah-Kiss, which we spoke of long ago. Which Delilah-Kiss was
- thereby quite hindered of effect. For now his Majesty has to
- write, almost that same night, asking a reconciled Assembly for
- advice! The reconciled Assembly will not advise; will not
- interfere. The King confirms the suspension; then perhaps, but
- not till then will the Assembly interfere, the noise of Patriot
- Paris getting loud. Whereby your Delilah-Kiss, such was the
- destiny of Parliament First, becomes a Philistine Battle!
-
- Nay there goes a word that as many as Thirty of our chief Patriot
- Senators are to be clapped in prison, by mittimus and indictment
- of Feuillant Justices, _Juges de Paix;_ who here in Paris were
- well capable of such a thing. It was but in May last that _Juge
- de Paix Larivière_, on complaint of Bertrand-Moleville touching
- that _Austrian Committee_, made bold to launch his mittimus
- against three heads of the Mountain, Deputies Bazire, Chabot,
- Merlin, the Cordelier Trio; summoning them to appear before
- _him_, and shew where that Austrian Committee was, or else suffer
- the consequences. Which mittimus the Trio, on their side, made
- bold to fling in the fire: and valiantly pleaded privilege of
- Parliament. So that, for his zeal without knowledge, poor Justice
- Larivière now sits in the prison of Orléans, waiting trial from
- the _Haute Cour_ there. Whose example, may it not deter other
- rash Justices; and so this word of the Thirty arrestments
- continue a word merely?
-
- But on the whole, though Lafayette weighed so light, and has had
- his _Mai_ plucked up, Official Feuillantism falters not a whit;
- but carries its head high, strong in the letter of the Law.
- Feuillants all of these men: a Feuillant Directory; founding on
- high character, and such like; with Duke de la Rochefoucault for
- President,—a thing which may prove dangerous for him! Dim now is
- the once bright Anglomania of these admired Noblemen. Duke de
- Liancourt offers, out of Normandy where he is Lord-Lieutenant,
- not only to receive his Majesty, thinking of flight thither, but
- to lend him money to enormous amounts. Sire, it is not a Revolt,
- it is a Revolution; and truly no rose-water one! Worthier
- Noblemen were not in France nor in Europe than those two: but the
- Time is crooked, quick-shifting, perverse; what straightest
- course will lead to any goal, in _it?_
-
- Another phasis which we note, in these early July days, is that
- of certain thin streaks of Federate National Volunteers wending
- from various points towards Paris, to hold a new
- Federation-Festival, or Feast of Pikes, on the Fourteenth there.
- So has the National Assembly wished it, so has the Nation willed
- it. In this way, perhaps, may we still have our Patriot Camp in
- spite of _Veto_. For cannot these Fédérés, having celebrated
- their Feast of Pikes, march on to Soissons; and, there being
- drilled and regimented, rush to the Frontiers, or whither we
- like? Thus were the one _Veto_ cunningly eluded!
-
- As indeed the other _Veto_, about Priests, is also like to be
- eluded; and without much cunning. For Provincial Assemblies, in
- Calvados as one instance, are proceeding on their own strength to
- judge and banish Antinational Priests. Or still worse without
- Provincial Assembly, a desperate People, as at Bourdeaux, can
- “hang two of them on the Lanterne,” on the way towards
- judgment.[477] Pity for the spoken _Veto_, when it cannot become
- an acted one!
-
- It is true, some ghost of a War-minister, or Home-minister, for
- the time being, ghost whom we do not name, does write to
- Municipalities and King’s Commanders, that they shall, by all
- conceivable methods, obstruct this Federation, and even turn back
- the Fédérés by force of arms: a message which scatters mere
- doubt, paralysis and confusion; irritates the poor Legislature;
- reduces the Fédérés as we see, to thin streaks. But being
- questioned, this ghost and the other ghosts, What it is then that
- they propose to do for saving the country?—they answer, That they
- cannot tell; that indeed they for their part have, this morning,
- resigned in a body; and do now merely respectfully take leave of
- the helm altogether. With which words they rapidly walk out of
- the Hall, _sortent brusquement de la salle_, the “Galleries
- cheering loudly,” the poor Legislature sitting “for a good while
- in silence!”[478] Thus do Cabinet-ministers themselves, in
- extreme cases, strike work; one of the strangest omens. Other
- complete Cabinet-ministry there will not be; only fragments, and
- these changeful, which never get completed; spectral Apparitions
- that cannot so much as appear! King Louis writes that he now
- views this Federation Feast with approval; and will himself have
- the pleasure to take part in the same.
-
- And so these thin streaks of Fédérés wend Parisward through a
- paralytic France. Thin grim streaks; not thick joyful ranks, as
- of old to the first Feast of Pikes! No: these poor Federates
- march now towards Austria and Austrian Committee, towards
- jeopardy and forlorn hope; men of hard fortune and temper, not
- rich in the world’s goods. Municipalities, paralyzed by
- War-ministers, are shy of affording cash: it may be, your poor
- Federates cannot arm themselves, cannot march, till the
- Daughter-Society of the place open her pocket, and subscribe.
- There will not have arrived, at the set day, Three thousand of
- them in all. And yet, thin and feeble as these streaks of
- Federates seem, they are the only thing one discerns moving with
- any clearness of aim, in this strange scene. Angry buzz and
- simmer; uneasy tossing and moaning of a huge France, all
- enchanted, spell-bound by unmarching Constitution, into frightful
- conscious and unconscious Magnetic-sleep; which frightful
- Magnetic-sleep must now issue soon in one of two things: Death or
- Madness! The Fédérés carry mostly in their pocket some earnest
- cry and Petition, to have the “National Executive put in action;”
- or as a step towards that, to have the King’s _Déchéance_, King’s
- Forfeiture, or at least his Suspension, pronounced. They shall be
- welcome to the Legislative, to the Mother of Patriotism; and
- Paris will provide for their lodging.
-
- _Déchéance_, indeed: and, what next? A France spell-free, a
- Revolution saved; and any thing, and all things next! so answer
- grimly Danton and the unlimited Patriots, down deep in their
- subterranean region of Plot, whither they have now dived.
- _Déchéance_, answers Brissot with the limited: And if next the
- little Prince Royal were crowned, and some Regency of Girondins
- and recalled Patriot Ministry set over him? Alas, poor Brissot;
- looking, as indeed poor man does always, on the nearest morrow as
- his peaceable promised land; deciding what must reach to the
- world’s end, yet with an insight that reaches not beyond his own
- nose! Wiser are the unlimited subterranean Patriots, who with
- light for the hour itself, leave the rest to the gods.
-
- Or were it not, as we now stand, the probablest issue of all,
- that Brunswick, in Coblentz, just gathering his huge limbs
- towards him to rise, might arrive first; and stop both
- _Déchéance_, and theorizing on it? Brunswick is on the eve of
- marching; with Eighty Thousand, they say; fell Prussians,
- Hessians, feller Emigrants: a General of the Great Frederick,
- with such an Army. And our Armies? And our Generals? As for
- Lafayette, on whose late visit a Committee is sitting and all
- France is jarring and censuring, he seems readier to fight _us_
- than fight Brunswick. Lückner and Lafayette pretend to be
- interchanging corps, and are making movements; which Patriotism
- cannot understand. This only is very clear, that their corps go
- marching and shuttling, in the interior of the country; much
- nearer Paris than formerly! Lückner has ordered Dumouriez down to
- him, down from Maulde, and the Fortified Camp there. Which order
- the many-counselled Dumouriez, with the Austrians hanging close
- on him, he busy meanwhile training a few thousands to stand fire
- and be soldiers, declares that, come of it what will, he cannot
- obey.[479] Will a poor Legislative, therefore, sanction
- Dumouriez; who applies to it, “not knowing whether there is any
- War-ministry?” Or sanction Lückner and these Lafayette movements?
-
- The poor Legislative knows not what to do. It decrees, however,
- that the Staff of the Paris Guard, and indeed all such Staffs,
- for they are Feuillants mostly, shall be broken and replaced. It
- decrees earnestly in what manner one can declare that the
- _Country is in Danger_. And finally, on the 11th of July, the
- morrow of that day when the Ministry struck work, it decrees that
- _the Country be_, with all despatch, _declared in Danger_.
- Whereupon let the King sanction; let the Municipality take
- measures: if such Declaration will do service, _it_ need not
- fail.
-
- In Danger, truly, if ever Country was! Arise, O Country; or be
- trodden down to ignominious ruin! Nay, are not the chances a
- hundred to one that no rising of the Country will save it;
- Brunswick, the Emigrants, and Feudal Europe drawing nigh?
-
-
- Chapter 2.6.II.
- Let us march.
-
- But to our minds the notablest of all these moving phenomena, is
- that of Barbaroux’s “Six Hundred Marseillese who know how to
- die.”
-
- Prompt to the request of Barbaroux, the Marseilles Municipality
- has got these men together: on the fifth morning of July, the
- Townhall says, ‘_Marchez, abatez le Tyran_, March, strike down
- the Tyrant;’[480] and they, with grim appropriate ‘_Marchons_,’
- are marching. Long journey, doubtful errand; _Enfans de la
- Patrie_, may a good genius guide you! Their own wild heart and
- what faith it has will guide them: and is not that the monition
- of some genius, better or worse? Five Hundred and Seventeen able
- men, with Captains of fifties and tens; well armed all, musket on
- shoulder, sabre on thigh: nay they drive three pieces of cannon;
- for who knows what obstacles may occur? Municipalities there are,
- paralyzed by War-minister; Commandants with orders to stop even
- Federation Volunteers; good, when sound arguments will not open a
- Town-gate, if you have a petard to shiver it! They have left
- their sunny Phocean City and Sea-haven, with its bustle and its
- bloom: the thronging _Course_, with high-frondent Avenues, pitchy
- dockyards, almond and olive groves, orange trees on house-tops,
- and white glittering _bastides_ that crown the hills, are all
- behind them. They wend on their wild way, from the extremity of
- French land, through unknown cities, toward an unknown destiny;
- with a purpose that they know.
-
- Much wondering at this phenomenon, and how, in a peaceable
- trading City, so many householders or hearth-holders do severally
- fling down their crafts and industrial tools; gird themselves
- with weapons of war, and set out on a journey of six hundred
- miles to “strike down the tyrant,”—you search in all Historical
- Books, Pamphlets, and Newspapers, for some light on it: unhappily
- without effect. Rumour and Terror precede this march; which still
- echo on you; the march itself an unknown thing. Weber, in the
- back-stairs of the Tuileries, has understood that they were
- _Forçats_, Galley-slaves and mere scoundrels, these Marseillese;
- that, as they marched through Lyons, the people shut their
- shops;—also that the number of them was some Four _Thousand_.
- Equally vague is Blanc Gilli, who likewise murmurs about
- _Forçats_ and danger of plunder.[481] _Forçats_ they were not;
- neither was there plunder, or danger of it. Men of regular life,
- or of the best-filled purse, they could hardly be; the one thing
- needful in them was that they “knew how to die.” Friend
- Dampmartin saw them, with his own eyes, march “gradually” through
- his quarters at Villefranche in the Beaujolais: but saw in the
- vaguest manner; being indeed preoccupied, and himself minded for
- matching just then—across the Rhine. Deep was his astonishment to
- think of such a march, without appointment or arrangement,
- station or ration: for the rest it was “the same men he had seen
- formerly” in the troubles of the South; “perfectly civil;” though
- his soldiers could not be kept from talking a little with
- them.[482]
-
- So vague are all these; _Moniteur, Histoire Parlementaire_ are as
- good as silent: garrulous History, as is too usual, will say
- nothing where you most wish her to speak! If enlightened
- Curiosity ever get sight of the Marseilles Council-Books, will it
- not perhaps explore this strangest of Municipal procedures; and
- feel called to fish up what of the Biographies, creditable or
- discreditable, of these Five Hundred and Seventeen, the stream of
- Time has not yet irrevocably swallowed?
-
- As it is, these Marseillese remain inarticulate,
- undistinguishable in feature; a blackbrowed Mass, full of grim
- fire, who wend there, in the hot sultry weather: very singular to
- contemplate. They wend; amid the infinitude of doubt and dim
- peril; they not doubtful: Fate and Feudal Europe, having decided,
- come girdling in from without: they, having also decided, do
- march within. Dusty of face, with frugal refreshment, they plod
- onwards; unweariable, not to be turned aside. Such march will
- become famous. The Thought, which works voiceless in this
- blackbrowed mass, an inspired Tyrtæan Colonel, Rouget de Lille,
- whom the Earth still holds,[483] has translated into grim melody
- and rhythm; into his _Hymn_ or March _of the Marseillese:_
- luckiest musical-composition ever promulgated. The sound of which
- will make the blood tingle in men’s veins; and whole Armies and
- Assemblages will sing it, with eyes weeping and burning, with
- hearts defiant of Death, Despot and Devil.
-
- One sees well, these Marseillese will be too late for the
- Federation Feast. In fact, it is not Champ-de-Mars Oaths that
- they have in view. They have quite another feat to do: a
- paralytic National Executive to set in action. They must “strike
- down” whatsoever “Tyrant,” or Martyr-Fainéant, there may be who
- paralyzes it; strike and be struck; and on the whole prosper and
- know how to die.
-
-
- Chapter 2.6.III.
- Some Consolation to Mankind.
-
- Of the Federation Feast itself we shall say almost nothing. There
- are Tents pitched in the Champ-de-Mars; tent for National
- Assembly; tent for Hereditary Representative,—who indeed is there
- too early, and has to wait long in it. There are Eighty-three
- symbolical Departmental Trees-of-Liberty; trees and _mais_
- enough: beautifullest of all these is one huge _mai_, hung round
- with effete Scutcheons, Emblazonries and Genealogy-books; nay
- better still, with Lawyers’-bags, “_sacs de procédure:_” which
- shall be burnt. The Thirty seat-rows of that famed Slope are
- again full; we have a bright Sun; and all is marching,
- streamering and blaring: but what avails it? Virtuous Mayor
- Pétion, whom Feuillantism had suspended, was reinstated only last
- night, by Decree of the Assembly. Men’s humour is of the sourest.
- Men’s hats have on them, written in chalk, “_Vive Pétion;_” and
- even, “Pétion or Death, _Pétion ou la Mort_.”
-
- Poor Louis, who has waited till five o’clock before the Assembly
- would arrive, swears the National Oath this time, with a quilted
- cuirass under his waistcoat which will turn pistol-bullets.[484]
- Madame de Staël, from that Royal Tent, stretches out the neck in
- a kind of agony, lest the waving multitudes which receive him may
- not render him back alive. No cry of _Vive le Roi_ salutes the
- ear; cries only of _Vive Pétion; Pétion ou la Mort_. The National
- Solemnity is as it were huddled by; each cowering off almost
- before the evolutions are gone through. The very _Mai_ with its
- Scutcheons and Lawyers’-bags is forgotten, stands unburnt; till
- “certain Patriot Deputies,” called by the people, set a torch to
- it, by way of voluntary after-piece. Sadder Feast of Pikes no man
- ever saw.
-
- Mayor Pétion, named on hats, is at his zenith in this Federation;
- Lafayette again is close upon his nadir. Why does the stormbell
- of Saint-Roch speak out, next Saturday; why do the citizens shut
- their shops?[485] It is Sections defiling, it is fear of
- effervescence. Legislative Committee, long deliberating on
- Lafayette and that Anti-jacobin Visit of his, reports, this day,
- that there is “_not_ ground for Accusation!” Peace, ye Patriots,
- nevertheless; and let that tocsin cease: the Debate is not
- finished, nor the Report accepted; but Brissot, Isnard and the
- Mountain will sift it, and resift it, perhaps for some three
- weeks longer.
-
- So many bells, stormbells and noises do ring;—scarcely audible;
- one drowning the other. For example: in this same Lafayette
- tocsin, of Saturday, was there not withal some faint bob-minor,
- and Deputation of Legislative, ringing the Chevalier Paul Jones
- to his long rest; tocsin or dirge now all one to him! Not ten
- days hence Patriot Brissot, beshouted this day by the Patriot
- Galleries, shall find himself begroaned by them, on account of
- his limited Patriotism; nay pelted at while perorating, and “hit
- with two prunes.”[486] It is a distracted empty-sounding world;
- of bob-minors and bob-majors, of triumph and terror, of rise and
- fall!
-
- The more touching is this other Solemnity, which happens on the
- morrow of the Lafayette tocsin: Proclamation that the _Country is
- in Danger_. Not till the present Sunday could such Solemnity be.
- The Legislative decreed it almost a fortnight ago; but Royalty
- and the ghost of a Ministry held back as they could. Now however,
- on this Sunday, 22nd day of July 1792, it will hold back no
- longer; and the Solemnity in very deed is. Touching to behold!
- Municipality and Mayor have on their scarfs; cannon-salvo booms
- alarm from the Pont-Neuf, and single-gun at intervals all day.
- Guards are mounted, scarfed Notabilities, Halberdiers, and a
- Cavalcade; with streamers, emblematic flags; especially with one
- huge Flag, flapping mournfully: _Citoyens, la Patrie est en
- Danger_. They roll through the streets, with stern-sounding
- music, and slow rattle of hoofs: pausing at set stations, and
- with doleful blast of trumpet, singing out through Herald’s
- throat, what the Flag says to the eye: ‘Citizens, the Country is
- in Danger!’
-
- Is there a man’s heart that hears it without a thrill? The
- many-voiced responsive hum or bellow of these multitudes is not
- of triumph; and yet it is a sound deeper than triumph. But when
- the long Cavalcade and Proclamation ended; and our huge Flag was
- fixed on the Pont Neuf, another like it on the Hôtel-de-Ville, to
- wave there till better days; and each Municipal sat in the centre
- of his Section, in a Tent raised in some open square, Tent
- surmounted with flags of _Patrie en Danger_, and topmost of all a
- Pike and _Bonnet Rouge;_ and, on two drums in front of him, there
- lay a plank-table, and on this an open Book, and a Clerk sat,
- like recording-angel, ready to write the Lists, or as we say to
- enlist! O, then, it seems, the very gods might have looked down
- on it. Young Patriotism, Culottic and Sansculottic, rushes
- forward emulous: That is my name; name, blood, and life, is all
- my Country’s; why have I nothing more! Youths of short stature
- weep that they are below size. Old men come forward, a son in
- each hand. Mothers themselves will grant the son of their
- travail; send him, though with tears. And the multitude bellows
- _Vive la Patrie_, far reverberating. And fire flashes in the eyes
- of men;—and at eventide, your Municipal returns to the Townhall,
- followed by his long train of volunteer Valour; hands in his
- List: says proudly, looking round. This is my day’s harvest.[487]
- They will march, on the morrow, to Soissons; small bundle holding
- all their chattels.
-
- So, with _Vive la Patrie, Vive la Liberté_, stone Paris
- reverberates like Ocean in his caves; day after day, Municipals
- enlisting in tricolor Tent; the Flag flapping on Pont Neuf and
- Townhall, _Citoyens, la Patrie est en Danger_. Some Ten thousand
- fighters, without discipline but full of heart, are on march in
- few days. The like is doing in every Town of France.—Consider
- therefore whether the Country will want defenders, had we but a
- National Executive? Let the Sections and Primary Assemblies, at
- any rate, become Permanent, and sit continually in Paris, and
- over France, by Legislative Decree dated Wednesday the 25th.[488]
-
- Mark contrariwise how, in these very hours, dated the 25th,
- Brunswick shakes himself “_s’ébranle_,” in Coblentz; and takes
- the road! Shakes himself indeed; one spoken word becomes such a
- shaking. Successive, simultaneous _dirl_ of thirty thousand
- muskets shouldered; prance and jingle of ten-thousand horsemen,
- fanfaronading Emigrants in the van; drum, kettle-drum; noise of
- weeping, swearing; and the immeasurable lumbering clank of
- baggage-waggons and camp-kettles that groan into motion: all this
- is Brunswick shaking himself; not without all this does the one
- man march, “covering a space of forty miles.” Still less without
- his Manifesto, dated, as we say, the 25th; a State-Paper worthy
- of attention!
-
- By this Document, it would seem great things are in store for
- France. The universal French People shall now have permission to
- rally round Brunswick and his Emigrant Seigneurs; tyranny of a
- Jacobin Faction shall oppress them no more; but they shall
- return, and find favour with their own good King; who, by Royal
- Declaration (three years ago) of the Twenty-third of June, said
- that he would himself make them happy. As for National Assembly,
- and other Bodies of Men invested with some temporary shadow of
- authority, they are charged to maintain the King’s Cities and
- Strong Places intact, till Brunswick arrive to take delivery of
- them. Indeed, quick submission may extenuate many things; but to
- this end it must be quick. Any National Guard or other unmilitary
- person found resisting in arms shall be “treated as a traitor;”
- that is to say, hanged with promptitude. For the rest, if Paris,
- before Brunswick gets thither, offer any insult to the King: or,
- for example, suffer a faction to carry the King away elsewhither;
- in that case Paris shall be blasted asunder with cannon-shot and
- “military execution.” Likewise all other Cities, which may
- witness, and not resist to the uttermost, such forced-march of
- his Majesty, shall be blasted asunder; and Paris and every City
- of them, starting-place, course and goal of said sacrilegious
- forced-march, shall, as rubbish and smoking ruin, lie there for a
- sign. Such vengeance were indeed signal, “an _insigne
- vengeance:_”—O Brunswick, what words thou writest and blusterest!
- In this Paris, as in old Nineveh, are so many score thousands
- that know not the right hand from the left, and also much cattle.
- Shall the very milk-cows, hard-living cadgers’-asses, and poor
- little canary-birds die?
-
- Nor is Royal and Imperial Prussian-Austrian Declaration wanting:
- setting forth, in the amplest manner, their Sanssouci-Schonbrunn
- version of this whole French Revolution, since the first
- beginning of it; and with what grief these high heads have seen
- such things done under the Sun: however, “as some small
- consolation to mankind,”[489] they do now despatch Brunswick;
- regardless of expense, as one might say, of sacrifices on their
- own part; for is it not the first duty to console men?
-
- Serene Highnesses, who sit there protocolling and manifestoing,
- and consoling mankind! how were it if, for once in the thousand
- years, your parchments, formularies, and reasons of state were
- blown to the four winds; and Reality Sans-indispensables stared
- you, even you, in the face; and Mankind said for itself what the
- thing was that would console it?—
-
-
- Chapter 2.6.IV.
- Subterranean.
-
- But judge if there was comfort in this to the Sections all
- sitting permanent; deliberating how a National Executive could be
- put in action!
-
- High rises the response, not of cackling terror, but of crowing
- counter-defiance, and _Vive la Nation;_ young Valour streaming
- towards the Frontiers; _Patrie en Danger_ mutely beckoning on the
- Pont Neuf. Sections are busy, in their permanent Deep; and down,
- lower still, works unlimited Patriotism, seeking salvation in
- plot. Insurrection, you would say, becomes once more the
- sacredest of duties? Committee, self-chosen, is sitting at the
- Sign of the Golden Sun: Journalist Carra, Camille Desmoulins,
- Alsatian Westermann friend of Danton, American Fournier of
- Martinique;—a Committee not unknown to Mayor Pétion, who, as an
- official person, must sleep with one eye open. Not unknown to
- Procureur Manuel; least of all to Procureur-Substitute Danton!
- He, wrapped in darkness, being also official, bears it on his
- giant shoulder; cloudy invisible Atlas of the whole.
-
- Much is invisible; the very Jacobins have their reticences.
- Insurrection is to be: but when? This only we can discern, that
- such Fédérés as are not yet gone to Soissons, as indeed are not
- inclined to go yet, ‘for reasons,’ says the Jacobin President,
- ‘which it may be interesting not to state,’ have got a _Central
- Committee_ sitting close by, under the roof of the Mother Society
- herself. Also, what in such ferment and danger of effervescence
- is surely proper, the Forty-eight Sections have got their Central
- Committee; intended “for prompt communication.” To which Central
- Committee the Municipality, anxious to have it at hand, could not
- refuse an Apartment in the Hôtel-de-Ville.
-
- Singular City! For overhead of all this, there is the customary
- baking and brewing; Labour hammers and grinds. Frilled
- promenaders saunter under the trees; white-muslin promenaderess,
- in green parasol, leaning on your arm. Dogs dance, and shoeblacks
- polish, on that Pont Neuf itself, where Fatherland is in danger.
- So much goes its course; and yet the course of all things is nigh
- altering and ending.
-
- Look at that Tuileries and Tuileries Garden. Silent all as
- Sahara; none entering save by ticket! They shut their Gates,
- after the Day of the Black Breeches; a thing they had the liberty
- to do. However, the National Assembly grumbled something about
- Terrace of the Feuillants, how said Terrace lay contiguous to the
- back entrance to their Salle, and was partly _National Property;_
- and so now National Justice has stretched a Tricolor Riband
- athwart, by way of boundary-line, respected with splenetic
- strictness by all Patriots. It hangs there that Tricolor
- boundary-line; carries “satirical inscriptions on cards,”
- generally in verse; and all beyond this is called _Coblentz_, and
- remains vacant; silent, as a fateful Golgotha; sunshine and
- umbrage alternating on it in vain. Fateful Circuit; what hope can
- dwell in it? Mysterious Tickets of Entry introduce themselves;
- speak of Insurrection very imminent. Rivarol’s Staff of Genius
- had better purchase blunderbusses; Grenadier bonnets, red Swiss
- uniforms may be useful. Insurrection will come; but likewise will
- it not be met? Staved off, one may hope, till Brunswick arrive?
-
- But consider withal if the Bourne-stones and Portable chairs
- remain silent; if the Herald’s College of Bill-Stickers sleep!
- Louvet’s _Sentinel_ warns gratis on all walls; Sulleau is busy:
- _People’s-Friend_ Marat and _King’s-Friend_ Royou croak and
- counter-croak. For the man Marat, though long hidden since that
- Champ-de-Mars Massacre, is still alive. He has lain, who knows in
- what Cellars; perhaps in Legendre’s; fed by a steak of Legendre’s
- killing: but, since April, the bull-frog voice of him sounds
- again; hoarsest of earthly cries. For the present, black terror
- haunts him: O brave Barbaroux wilt thou not smuggle me to
- Marseilles, “disguised as a jockey?”[490] In Palais-Royal and all
- public places, as we read, there is sharp activity; private
- individuals haranguing that Valour may enlist; haranguing that
- the Executive may be put in action. Royalist journals ought to be
- solemnly burnt: argument thereupon; debates which generally end
- in single-stick, _coups de cannes_.[491] Or think of this; the
- hour midnight; place Salle de Manége; august Assembly just
- adjourning: “Citizens of both sexes enter in a rush exclaiming,
- _Vengeance: they are poisoning our Brothers;_”—baking
- brayed-glass among their bread at Soissons! Vergniaud has to
- speak soothing words, How Commissioners are already sent to
- investigate this brayed-glass, and do what is needful therein:
- till the rush of Citizens “makes profound silence:” and goes home
- to its bed.
-
- Such is Paris; the heart of a France like to it. Preternatural
- suspicion, doubt, disquietude, nameless anticipation, from shore
- to shore:—and those blackbrowed Marseillese, marching, dusty,
- unwearied, through the midst of it; not doubtful they. Marching
- to the grim music of their hearts, they consume continually the
- long road, these three weeks and more; heralded by Terror and
- Rumour. The Brest Fédérés arrive on the 26th; through hurrahing
- streets. Determined men are these also, bearing or not bearing
- the Sacred Pikes of Château-Vieux; and on the whole decidedly
- disinclined for Soissons as yet. Surely the Marseillese Brethren
- do draw nigher all days.
-
-
- Chapter 2.6.V.
- At Dinner.
-
- It was a bright day for Charenton, that 29th of the month, when
- the Marseillese Brethren actually came in sight. Barbaroux,
- Santerre and Patriots have gone out to meet the grim Wayfarers.
- Patriot clasps dusty Patriot to his bosom; there is footwashing
- and refection: “dinner of twelve hundred covers at the Blue Dial,
- _Cadran Bleu;_” and deep interior consultation, that one wots not
- of.[492] Consultation indeed which comes to little; for Santerre,
- with an open purse, with a loud voice, has almost no head. Here
- however we repose this night: on the morrow is public entry into
- Paris.
-
- On which public entry the Day-Historians, _Diurnalists_, or
- Journalists as they call themselves, have preserved record
- enough. How Saint-Antoine male and female, and Paris generally,
- gave brotherly welcome, with bravo and hand-clapping, in crowded
- streets; and all passed in the peaceablest manner;—except it
- might be our Marseillese pointed out here and there a
- riband-cockade, and beckoned that it should be snatched away, and
- exchanged for a wool one; which was done. How the Mother Society
- in a body has come as far as the Bastille-ground, to embrace you.
- How you then wend onwards, triumphant, to the Townhall, to be
- embraced by Mayor Pétion; to put down your muskets in the
- Barracks of Nouvelle France, not far off;—then towards the
- appointed Tavern in the Champs Elysées to enjoy a frugal Patriot
- repast.[493]
-
- Of all which the indignant Tuileries may, by its Tickets of
- Entry, have warning. Red Swiss look doubly sharp to their
- Château-Grates;—though surely there is no danger? Blue Grenadiers
- of the Filles-Saint-Thomas Section are on duty there this day:
- men of Agio, as we have seen; with stuffed purses,
- riband-cockades; among whom serves Weber. A party of these
- latter, with Captains, with sundry Feuillant Notabilities, Moreau
- de Saint-Méry of the three thousand orders, and others, have been
- dining, much more respectably, in a Tavern hard by. They have
- dined, and are now drinking Loyal-Patriotic toasts; while the
- Marseillese, _National_-Patriotic merely, are about sitting down
- to their frugal covers of delf. How it happened remains to this
- day undemonstrable: but the external fact is, certain of these
- Filles-Saint-Thomas Grenadiers do issue from their Tavern;
- perhaps touched, surely not yet muddled with any liquor they have
- had;—issue in the professed intention of testifying to the
- Marseillese, or to the multitude of Paris Patriots who stroll in
- these spaces, That they, the Filles-Saint-Thomas men, if well
- seen into, are not a whit less Patriotic than any other class of
- men whatever.
-
- It was a rash errand! For how can the strolling multitudes credit
- such a thing; or do other indeed than hoot at it, provoking, and
- provoked;—till Grenadier sabres stir in the scabbard, and a sharp
- shriek rises: ‘_À nous Marseillais_, Help Marseillese!’ Quick as
- lightning, for the frugal repast is not yet served, that
- Marseillese Tavern flings itself open: by door, by window;
- running, bounding, vault forth the Five hundred and Seventeen
- undined Patriots; and, sabre flashing from thigh, are on the
- scene of controversy. Will ye parley, ye Grenadier Captains and
- official Persons; “with faces grown suddenly pale,” the Deponents
- say?[494] Advisabler were instant moderately swift retreat! The
- Filles-Saint-Thomas retreat, back foremost; then, alas, face
- foremost, at treble-quick time; the Marseillese, according to a
- Deponent, ‘clearing the fences and ditches after them like lions:
- Messieurs, it was an imposing spectacle.’
-
- Thus they retreat, the Marseillese following. Swift and swifter,
- towards the Tuileries: where the Drawbridge receives the bulk of
- the fugitives; and, then suddenly drawn up, saves them; or else
- the green mud of the Ditch does it. The bulk of them; not all;
- ah, no! Moreau de Saint-Méry for example, being too fat, could
- not fly fast; he got a stroke, _flat_-stroke only, over the
- shoulder-blades, and fell prone;—and disappears there from the
- History of the Revolution. Cuts also there were, pricks in the
- posterior fleshy parts; much rending of skirts, and other
- discrepant waste. But poor Sub-lieutenant Duhamel, innocent
- Change-broker, what a lot for him! He turned on his pursuer, or
- pursuers, with a pistol; he fired and missed; drew a second
- pistol, and again fired and missed; then ran: unhappily in vain.
- In the Rue Saint-Florentin, they clutched him; thrust him
- through, in red rage: that was the end of the New Era, and of all
- Eras, to poor Duhamel.
-
- Pacific readers can fancy what sort of grace-before-meat this was
- to frugal Patriotism. Also how the Battalion of the
- Filles-Saint-Thomas “drew out in arms,” luckily without further
- result; how there was accusation at the Bar of the Assembly, and
- counter-accusation and defence; Marseillese challenging the
- sentence of free jury court,—which never got to a decision. We
- ask rather, What the upshot of all these distracted wildly
- accumulating things may, by probability, be? Some upshot; and the
- time draws nigh! Busy are Central Committees, of Fédérés at the
- Jacobins Church, of Sections at the Townhall; Reunion of Carra,
- Camille and Company at the Golden Sun. Busy: like submarine
- deities, or call them mud-gods, working there in the deep murk of
- waters: till the thing be ready.
-
- And how your National Assembly, like a ship waterlogged,
- helmless, lies tumbling; the Galleries, of shrill Women, of
- Fédérés with sabres, bellowing down on it, not unfrightful;—and
- waits where the waves of chance may please to strand it;
- suspicious, nay on the Left side, conscious, what submarine
- Explosion is meanwhile a-charging! Petition for King’s Forfeiture
- rises often there: Petition from Paris Section, from Provincial
- Patriot Towns; From Alencon, Briancon, and “the Traders at the
- Fair of Beaucaire.” Or what of these? On the 3rd of August, Mayor
- Pétion and the Municipality come petitioning for Forfeiture: they
- openly, in their tricolor Municipal scarfs. Forfeiture is what
- all Patriots now want and expect. All Brissotins want Forfeiture;
- with the little Prince Royal for King, and us for Protector over
- him. Emphatic Fédérés asks the legislature: ‘Can you save us, or
- not?’ Forty-seven Sections have agreed to Forfeiture; only that
- of the Filles-Saint-Thomas pretending to disagree. Nay Section
- Mauconseil declares Forfeiture to be, properly speaking, come;
- Mauconseil for one “does from this day,” the last of July, “cease
- allegiance to Louis,” and take minute of the same before all men.
- A thing blamed aloud; but which will be praised aloud; and the
- name _Mauconseil_, of Ill-counsel, be thenceforth changed to
- _Bonconseil_, of Good-counsel.
-
- President Danton, in the Cordeliers Section, does another thing:
- invites all Passive Citizens to take place among the Active in
- Section-business, one peril threatening all. Thus he, though an
- official person; cloudy Atlas of the whole. Likewise he manages
- to have that blackbrowed Battalion of Marseillese shifted to new
- Barracks, in his own region of the remote South-East. Sleek
- Chaumette, cruel Billaud, Deputy Chabot the Disfrocked, Huguenin
- with the tocsin in his heart, will welcome them there. Wherefore,
- again and again: ‘O Legislators, can you save us or not?’ Poor
- Legislators; with their Legislature waterlogged, volcanic
- Explosion charging under it! Forfeiture shall be debated on the
- ninth day of August; that miserable business of Lafayette may be
- expected to terminate on the eighth.
-
- Or will the humane Reader glance into the Levee-day of Sunday the
- fifth? The last Levee! Not for a long time, “never,” says
- Bertrand-Moleville, had a Levee been so brilliant, at least so
- crowded. A sad presaging interest sat on every face; Bertrand’s
- own eyes were filled with tears. For, indeed, outside of that
- Tricolor Riband on the Feuillants Terrace, Legislature is
- debating, Sections are defiling, all Paris is astir this very
- Sunday, demanding _Déchéance_.[495] Here, however, within the
- riband, a grand proposal is on foot, for the hundredth time, of
- carrying his Majesty to Rouen and the Castle of Gaillon. Swiss at
- Courbevoye are in readiness; much is ready; Majesty himself seems
- almost ready. Nevertheless, for the hundredth time, Majesty, when
- near the point of action, draws back; writes, after one has
- waited, palpitating, an endless summer day, that “he has reason
- to believe the Insurrection is not so ripe as you suppose.”
- Whereat Bertrand-Moleville breaks forth “into extremity at one of
- spleen and despair, _d’humeur et de désespoir_.”[496]
-
-
- Chapter 2.6.VI.
- The Steeples at Midnight.
-
- For, in truth, the Insurrection is just about ripe. Thursday is
- the ninth of the month August: if Forfeiture be not pronounced by
- the Legislature that day, we must pronounce it ourselves.
-
- Legislature? A poor waterlogged Legislature can pronounce
- nothing. On Wednesday the eighth, after endless oratory once
- again, they cannot even pronounce Accusation again Lafayette; but
- absolve him,—hear it, Patriotism!—by a majority of two to one.
- Patriotism hears it; Patriotism, hounded on by Prussian Terror,
- by Preternatural Suspicion, roars tumultuous round the Salle de
- Manége, all day; insults many leading Deputies, of the absolvent
- Right-side; nay chases them, collars them with loud menace:
- Deputy Vaublanc, and others of the like, are glad to take refuge
- in Guardhouses, and escape by the back window. And so, next day,
- there is infinite complaint; Letter after Letter from insulted
- Deputy; mere complaint, debate and self-cancelling jargon: the
- sun of Thursday sets like the others, and no Forfeiture
- pronounced. Wherefore in fine, To your tents, O Israel!
-
- The Mother-Society ceases speaking; groups cease haranguing:
- Patriots, with closed lips now, “take one another’s arm;” walk
- off, in rows, two and two, at a brisk business-pace; and vanish
- afar in the obscure places of the East.[497] Santerre is ready;
- or we will make him ready. Forty-seven of the Forty-eight
- Sections are ready; nay Filles-Saint-Thomas itself turns up the
- Jacobin side of it, turns down the Feuillant side of it, and is
- ready too. Let the unlimited Patriot look to his weapon, be it
- pike, be it firelock; and the Brest brethren, above all, the
- blackbrowed Marseillese prepare themselves for the extreme hour!
- Syndic Rœderer knows, and laments or not as the issue may turn,
- that “five thousand ball-cartridges, within these few days, have
- been distributed to Fédérés, at the Hôtel-de-Ville.”[498]
-
- And ye likewise, gallant gentlemen, defenders of Royalty, crowd
- ye on your side to the Tuileries. Not to a Levee: no, to a
- Couchée: where much will be put to bed. Your Tickets of Entry are
- needful; needfuller your blunderbusses!—They come and crowd, like
- gallant men who also know how to die: old Maillé the Camp-Marshal
- has come, his eyes gleaming once again, though dimmed by the
- rheum of almost four-score years. Courage, Brothers! We have a
- thousand red Swiss; men stanch of heart, steadfast as the granite
- of their Alps. National Grenadiers are at least friends of Order;
- Commandant Mandat breathes loyal ardour, will ‘answer for it on
- his head.’ Mandat will, and his Staff; for the Staff, though
- there stands a doom and Decree to that effect, is happily never
- yet dissolved.
-
- Commandant Mandat has corresponded with Mayor Pétion; carries a
- written Order from him these three days, to repel force by force.
- A squadron on the Pont Neuf with cannon shall turn back these
- Marseillese coming across the River: a squadron at the Townhall
- shall cut Saint-Antoine in two, “as it issues from the Arcade
- Saint-Jean;” drive one half back to the obscure East, drive the
- other half forward through “the Wickets of the Louvre.” Squadrons
- not a few, and mounted squadrons; squadrons in the Palais Royal,
- in the Place Vendôme: all these shall charge, at the right
- moment; sweep this street, and then sweep that. Some new
- Twentieth of June we shall have; only still more ineffectual? Or
- probably the Insurrection will not dare to rise at all? Mandat’s
- Squadrons, Horse-Gendarmerie and blue Guards march, clattering,
- tramping; Mandat’s Cannoneers rumble. Under cloud of night; to
- the sound of his _générale_, which begins drumming when men
- should go to bed. It is the 9th night of August, 1792.
-
- On the other hand, the Forty-eight Sections correspond by swift
- messengers; are choosing each their “three Delegates with full
- powers.” Syndic Rœderer, Mayor Pétion are sent for to the
- Tuileries: courageous Legislators, when the drum beats danger,
- should repair to their Salle. Demoiselle Théroigne has on her
- grenadier-bonnet, short-skirted riding-habit; two pistols garnish
- her small waist, and sabre hangs in baldric by her side.
-
- Such a game is playing in this Paris Pandemonium, or City of All
- the Devils!—And yet the Night, as Mayor Pétion walks here in the
- Tuileries Garden, “is beautiful and calm;” Orion and the Pleiades
- glitter down quite serene. Pétion has come forth, the “heat”
- inside was so oppressive.[499] Indeed, his Majesty’s reception of
- him was of the roughest; as it well might be. And now there is no
- outgate; Mandat’s blue Squadrons turn you back at every Grate;
- nay the Filles-Saint-Thomas Grenadiers give themselves liberties
- of tongue, How a virtuous Mayor “shall pay for it, if there be
- mischief,” and the like; though others again are full of
- civility. Surely if any man in France is in straights this night,
- it is Mayor Pétion: bound, under pain of death, one may say, to
- smile dexterously with the one side of his face, and weep with
- the other;—death if he do it not dexterously enough! Not till
- four in the morning does a National Assembly, hearing of his
- plight, summon him over “to give account of Paris;” of which he
- knows nothing: whereby however he shall get home to bed, and only
- his gilt coach be left. Scarcely less delicate is Syndic
- Rœderer’s task; who must wait whether he will lament or not, till
- he see the issue. Janus Bifrons, or _Mr. Facing-both-ways_, as
- vernacular Bunyan has it! They walk there, in the meanwhile,
- these two Januses, with others of the like double conformation;
- and “talk of indifferent matters.”
-
- Rœderer, from time to time, steps in; to listen, to speak; to
- send for the Department-Directory itself, he their Procureur
- Syndic not seeing how to act. The Apartments are all crowded;
- some seven hundred gentlemen in black elbowing, bustling; red
- Swiss standing like rocks; ghost, or partial-ghost of a Ministry,
- with Rœderer and advisers, hovering round their Majesties; old
- Marshall Maillé kneeling at the King’s feet, to say, He and these
- gallant gentlemen are come to die for him. List! through the
- placid midnight; clang of the distant stormbell! So, in very
- sooth; steeple after steeple takes up the wondrous tale. Black
- Courtiers listen at the windows, opened for air; discriminate the
- steeple-bells:[500] this is the tocsin of Saint-Roch; that again,
- is it not Saint-Jacques, named _de la Boucherie?_ Yes, Messieurs!
- Or even Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois, hear ye _it_ not? The same
- metal that rang storm, two hundred and twenty years ago; but by a
- Majesty’s order then; on Saint-Bartholomew’s Eve[501]—So go the
- steeple-bells; which Courtiers can discriminate. Nay, meseems,
- there is the Townhall itself; we know it by its sound! Yes,
- Friends, that is the Townhall; discoursing _so_, to the Night.
- Miraculously; by miraculous metal-tongue and man’s arm: Marat
- himself, if you knew it, is pulling at the rope there! Marat is
- pulling; Robespierre lies deep, invisible for the next forty
- hours; and some men have heart, and some have as good as none,
- and not even frenzy will give them any.
-
- What struggling confusion, as the issue slowly draws on; and the
- doubtful Hour, with pain and blind struggle, brings forth its
- Certainty, never to be abolished!—The Full-power Delegates, three
- from each Section, a Hundred and forty-four in all, got gathered
- at the Townhall, about midnight. Mandat’s Squadron, stationed
- there, did not hinder their entering: are they not the “Central
- Committee of the Sections” who sit here usually; though in
- greater number tonight? They are there: presided by Confusion,
- Irresolution, and the Clack of Tongues. Swift scouts fly; Rumour
- buzzes, of black Courtiers, red Swiss, of Mandat and his
- Squadrons that shall charge. Better put off the Insurrection?
- Yes, put it off. Ha, hark! Saint-Antoine booming out eloquent
- tocsin, of its own accord!—Friends, no: ye cannot put off the
- Insurrection; but must put it on, and live with it, or die with
- it.
-
- Swift now, therefore: let these actual Old Municipals, on sight
- of the Full-powers, and mandate of the Sovereign elective People,
- lay down their functions; and this New Hundred and forty-four
- take them up! Will ye nill ye, worthy Old Municipals, go ye must.
- Nay is it not a happiness for many a Municipal that he can wash
- his hands of such a business; and sit there paralyzed,
- unaccountable, till the Hour do bring forth; or even go home to
- his night’s rest?[502] Two only of the Old, or at most three, we
- retain Mayor Pétion, for the present walking in the Tuileries;
- Procureur Manuel; Procureur Substitute Danton, invisible Atlas of
- the whole. And so, with our Hundred and forty-four, among whom
- are a Tocsin-Huguenin, a Billaud, a Chaumette; and
- Editor-Talliens, and Fabre d’Eglantines, Sergents, Panises; and
- in brief, either emergent, or else emerged and full-blown, the
- entire Flower of unlimited Patriotism: have we not, as by magic,
- made a New Municipality; ready to act in the unlimited manner;
- and declare itself roundly, “in a State of Insurrection!”—First
- of all, then, be Commandant Mandat sent for, with that
- Mayor’s-Order of his; also let the New Municipals visit those
- Squadrons that were to charge; and let the stormbell ring its
- loudest;—and, on the whole, Forward, ye Hundred and forty-four;
- retreat is now none for you!
-
- Reader, fancy not, in thy languid way, that Insurrection is easy.
- Insurrection is difficult: each individual uncertain even of his
- next neighbour; totally uncertain of his distant neighbours, what
- strength is with him, what strength is against him; certain only
- that, in case of failure, his individual portion is the gallows!
- Eight hundred thousand heads, and in each of them a separate
- estimate of these uncertainties, a separate theorem of action
- conformable to that: out of so many uncertainties, does the
- certainty, and inevitable net-result never to be abolished, go
- on, at all moments, bodying itself forth;—leading thee also
- towards civic-crowns or an ignominious noose.
-
- Could the Reader take an Asmodeus’s Flight, and waving open all
- roofs and privacies, look down from the Tower of Notre Dame, what
- a Paris were it! Of treble-voice whimperings or vehemence, of
- bass-voice growlings, dubitations; Courage screwing itself to
- desperate defiance; Cowardice trembling silent within barred
- doors;—and all round, Dulness calmly snoring; for much Dulness,
- flung on its mattresses, always sleeps. O, between the clangour
- of these high-storming tocsins and that snore of Dulness, what a
- gamut: of trepidation, excitation, desperation; and above it mere
- Doubt, Danger, Atropos and Nox!
-
- Fighters of this section draw out; hear that the next Section
- does not; and thereupon draw in. Saint-Antoine, on this side the
- River, is uncertain of Saint-Marceau on that. Steady only is the
- snore of Dulness, are the Six Hundred Marseillese that know how
- to die! Mandat, twice summoned to the Townhall, has not come.
- Scouts fly incessant, in distracted haste; and the
- many-whispering voices of Rumour. Théroigne and unofficial
- Patriots flit, dim-visible, exploratory, far and wide; like
- Night-birds on the wing. Of Nationals some Three thousand have
- followed Mandat and his _générale;_ the rest follow each his own
- theorem of the uncertainties: theorem, that one should march
- rather with Saint-Antoine; innumerable theorems, that in such a
- case the wholesomest were _sleep_. And so the drums beat, in made
- fits, and the stormbells peal. Saint-Antoine itself does but draw
- out and draw in; Commandant Santerre, over there, cannot believe
- that the Marseillese and Saint Marceau will march. Thou laggard
- sonorous Beer-vat, with the loud voice and timber head, is it
- time now to palter? Alsatian Westermann clutches him by the
- throat with drawn sabre: whereupon the Timber-headed believes. In
- this manner wanes the slow night; amid fret, uncertainty and
- tocsin; all men’s humour rising to the hysterical pitch; and
- nothing done.
-
- However, Mandat, on the third summons does come;—come, unguarded;
- astonished to find the Municipality _new_. They question him
- straitly on that Mayor’s-Order to resist force by force; on that
- strategic scheme of cutting Saint-Antoine in two halves: he
- answers what he can: they think it were right to send this
- strategic National Commandant to the Abbaye Prison, and let a
- Court of Law decide on him. Alas, a Court of Law, not Book-Law
- but primeval Club-Law, crowds and jostles out of doors; all
- fretted to the hysterical pitch; cruel as Fear, blind as the
- Night: such Court of Law, and no other, clutches poor Mandat from
- his constables; beats him down, massacres him, on the steps of
- the Townhall. Look to it, ye new Municipals; ye People, in a
- state of Insurrection! Blood is shed, blood must be answered
- for;—alas, in such hysterical humour, more blood will flow: for
- it is as with the Tiger in that; he has only to begin.
-
- Seventeen Individuals have been seized in the Champs Elysées, by
- exploratory Patriotism; they flitting dim-visible, by it flitting
- dim-visible. Ye have pistols, rapiers, ye Seventeen? One of those
- accursed “false Patrols;” that go marauding, with Anti-National
- intent; seeking what they can spy, what they can spill! The
- Seventeen are carried to the nearest Guard-house; eleven of them
- escape by back passages. ‘How is this?’ Demoiselle Théroigne
- appears at the front entrance, with sabre, pistols, and a train;
- denounces treasonous connivance; demands, seizes, the remaining
- six, that the justice of the People be not trifled with. Of which
- six two more escape in the whirl and debate of the Club-Law
- Court; the last unhappy Four are massacred, as Mandat was: Two
- Ex-Bodyguards; one dissipated Abbé; one Royalist Pamphleteer,
- Sulleau, known to us by name, Able Editor, and wit of all work.
- Poor Sulleau: his _Acts of the Apostles_, and brisk
- Placard-Journals (for he was an able man) come to _Finis_, in
- this manner; and questionable jesting issues suddenly in horrid
- earnest! Such doings usher in the dawn of the Tenth of August,
- 1792.
-
- Or think what a night the poor National Assembly has had: sitting
- there, “in great paucity,” attempting to debate;—quivering and
- shivering; pointing towards all the thirty-two azimuths at once,
- as the magnet-needle does when thunderstorm is in the air! If the
- Insurrection come? If it come, and fail? Alas, in that case, may
- not black Courtiers, with blunderbusses, red Swiss with bayonets
- rush over, flushed with victory, and ask us: Thou undefinable,
- waterlogged, self-distractive, self-destructive Legislative, what
- dost thou here _unsunk?_—Or figure the poor National Guards,
- bivouacking “in temporary tents” there; or standing ranked,
- shifting from leg to leg, all through the weary night; New
- tricolor Municipals ordering one thing, old Mandat Captains
- ordering another! Procureur Manuel has ordered the cannons to be
- withdrawn from the Pont Neuf; none ventured to disobey him. It
- seemed certain, then, the old Staff so long doomed has finally
- been dissolved, in these hours; and Mandat is not our Commandant
- now, but Santerre? Yes, friends: Santerre henceforth,—surely
- Mandat no more! The Squadrons that were to charge see nothing
- certain, except that they are cold, hungry, worn down with
- watching; that it were sad to slay French brothers; sadder to be
- slain by them. Without the Tuileries Circuit, and within it, sour
- uncertain humour sways these men: only the red Swiss stand
- steadfast. Them their officers refresh now with a slight wetting
- of brandy; wherein the Nationals, too far gone for brandy, refuse
- to participate.
-
- King Louis meanwhile had laid him down for a little sleep: his
- wig when he reappeared had lost the powder on one side.[503] Old
- Marshal Maillé and the gentlemen in black rise always in spirits,
- as the Insurrection does not rise: there goes a witty saying now,
- ‘_Le tocsin ne rend pas_.’ The tocsin, like a dry milk-cow, does
- not yield. For the rest, could one not proclaim Martial Law? Not
- easily; for now, it seems, Mayor Pétion is gone. On the other
- hand, our Interim Commandant, poor Mandat being off, “to the
- Hôtel-de-Ville,” complains that so many Courtiers in black
- encumber the service, are an eyesorrow to the National Guards. To
- which her Majesty answers with emphasis, That they will obey all,
- will suffer all, that they are sure men these.
-
- And so the yellow lamplight dies out in the gray of morning, in
- the King’s Palace, over such a scene. Scene of jostling,
- elbowing, of confusion, and indeed conclusion, for the thing is
- about to end. Rœderer and spectral Ministers jostle in the press;
- consult, in side cabinets, with one or with both Majesties.
- Sister Elizabeth takes the Queen to the window: ‘Sister, see what
- a beautiful sunrise,’ right over the Jacobins church and that
- quarter! How happy if the tocsin did not yield! But Mandat
- returns not; Pétion is gone: much hangs wavering in the invisible
- Balance. About five o’clock, there rises from the Garden a kind
- of sound; as of a shout to which had become a howl, and instead
- of _Vive le Roi_ were ending in _Vive la Nation_. ‘_Mon Dieu!_’
- ejaculates a spectral Minister, ‘what is he doing down there?’
- For it is his Majesty, gone down with old Marshal Maillé to
- review the troops; and the nearest companies of them answer _so_.
- Her Majesty bursts into a stream of tears. Yet on stepping from
- the cabinet her eyes are dry and calm, her look is even cheerful.
- “The Austrian lip, and the aquiline nose, fuller than usual, gave
- to her countenance,” says Peltier,[504] “something of Majesty,
- which they that did not see her in these moments cannot well have
- an idea of.” O thou Theresa’s Daughter!
-
- King Louis enters, much blown with the fatigue; but for the rest
- with his old air of indifference. Of all hopes now surely the
- joyfullest were, that the tocsin did not yield.
-
-
- Chapter 2.6.VII.
- The Swiss.
-
- Unhappy Friends, the tocsin does yield, has yielded! Lo ye, how
- with the first sun-rays its Ocean-tide, of pikes and fusils,
- flows glittering from the far East;—immeasurable; born of the
- Night! They march there, the grim host; Saint-Antoine on this
- side of the River; Saint-Marceau on that, the blackbrowed
- Marseillese in the van. With hum, and grim murmur, far-heard;
- like the Ocean-tide, as we say: drawn up, as if by Luna and
- Influences, from the great Deep of Waters, they roll gleaming on;
- no King, Canute or Louis, can bid them roll back. Wide-eddying
- side-currents, of onlookers, roll hither and thither, unarmed,
- not voiceless; they, the steel host, roll on. New-Commandant
- Santerre, indeed, has taken seat at the Townhall; rests there, in
- his half-way-house. Alsatian Westermann, with flashing sabre,
- does not rest; nor the Sections, nor the Marseillese, nor
- Demoiselle Théroigne; but roll continually on.
-
- And now, where are Mandat’s Squadrons that were to charge? Not a
- Squadron of them stirs: or they stir in the wrong direction, out
- of the way; their officers glad that they will even do that. It
- is to this hour uncertain whether the Squadron on the Pont Neuf
- made the shadow of resistance, or did not make the shadow:
- enough, the blackbrowed Marseillese, and Saint-Marceau following
- them, do cross without let; do cross, in sure hope now of
- Saint-Antoine and the rest; do billow on, towards the Tuileries,
- where their errand is. The Tuileries, at sound of them, rustles
- responsive: the red Swiss look to their priming; Courtiers in
- black draw their blunderbusses, rapiers, poniards, some have even
- fire-shovels; every man his weapon of war.
-
- Judge if, in these circumstances, Syndic Rœderer felt easy! Will
- the kind Heavens open no middle-course of refuge for a poor
- Syndic who halts between two? If indeed his Majesty would consent
- to go over to the Assembly! His Majesty, above all her Majesty,
- cannot agree to that. Did her Majesty answer the proposal with a
- ‘_Fi donc;_’ did she say even, she would be nailed to the walls
- sooner? Apparently not. It is written also that she offered the
- King a pistol; saying, Now or else never was the time to shew
- himself. Close eye-witnesses did not see it, nor do we. That saw
- only that she was queenlike, quiet; that she argued not,
- upbraided not, with the Inexorable; but, like Cæsar in the
- Capitol, wrapped her mantle, as it beseems Queens and Sons of
- Adam to do. But thou, O Louis! of what stuff art thou at all? Is
- there no stroke in thee, then, for Life and Crown? The silliest
- hunted deer dies not so. Art thou the languidest of all mortals;
- or the mildest-minded? Thou art the worst-starred.
-
- The tide advances; Syndic Rœderer’s and all men’s straits grow
- straiter and straiter. Fremescent clangor comes from the armed
- Nationals in the Court; far and wide is the infinite hubbub of
- tongues. What counsel? And the tide is now nigh! Messengers,
- forerunners speak hastily through the outer Grates; hold parley
- sitting astride the walls. Syndic Rœderer goes out and comes in.
- Cannoneers ask him: Are we to fire against the people? King’s
- Ministers ask him: Shall the King’s House be forced? Syndic
- Rœderer has a hard game to play. He speaks to the Cannoneers with
- eloquence, with fervour; such fervour as a man can, who has to
- blow hot and cold in one breath. Hot and cold, O Rœderer? We, for
- our part, cannot live _and_ die! The Cannoneers, by way of
- answer, fling down their linstocks.—Think of this answer, O King
- Louis, and King’s Ministers: and take a poor Syndic’s safe
- middle-course, towards the Salle de Manége. King Louis sits, his
- hands leant on knees, body bent forward; gazes for a space
- fixedly on Syndic Rœderer; then answers, looking over his
- shoulder to the Queen: _Marchons!_ They march; King Louis, Queen,
- Sister Elizabeth, the two royal children and governess: these,
- with Syndic Rœderer, and Officials of the Department; amid a
- double rank of National Guards. The men with blunderbusses, the
- steady red Swiss gaze mournfully, reproachfully; but hear only
- these words from Syndic Rœderer: ‘The King is going to the
- Assembly; make way.’ It has struck eight, on all clocks, some
- minutes ago: the King has left the Tuileries—for ever.
-
- O ye stanch Swiss, ye gallant gentlemen in black, for what a
- cause are ye to spend and be spent! Look out from the western
- windows, ye may see King Louis placidly hold on his way; the poor
- little Prince Royal “sportfully kicking the fallen leaves.”
- Fremescent multitude on the Terrace of the Feuillants whirls
- parallel to him; one man in it, very noisy, with a long pole:
- will they not obstruct the outer Staircase, and back-entrance of
- the Salle, when it comes to that? King’s Guards can go no further
- than the bottom step there. Lo, Deputation of Legislators come
- out; he of the long pole is stilled by oratory; Assembly’s Guards
- join themselves to King’s Guards, and all may mount in this case
- of necessity; the outer Staircase is free, or passable. See,
- Royalty ascends; a blue Grenadier lifts the poor little Prince
- Royal from the press; Royalty has entered in. Royalty has
- vanished for ever from your eyes.—And ye? Left standing there,
- amid the yawning abysses, and earthquake of Insurrection; without
- course; without command: if ye perish it must be as more than
- martyrs, as martyrs who are now without a cause! The black
- Courtiers disappear mostly; through such issues as they can. The
- poor Swiss know not how to act: one duty only is clear to them,
- that of standing by their post; and they will perform that.
-
- But the glittering steel tide has arrived; it beats now against
- the Château barriers, and eastern Courts; irresistible,
- loud-surging far and wide;—breaks in, fills the Court of the
- Carrousel, blackbrowed Marseillese in the van. King Louis gone,
- say you; over to the Assembly! Well and good: but till the
- Assembly pronounce Forfeiture of him, what boots it? Our post is
- in that Château or stronghold of his; there till then must we
- continue. Think, ye stanch Swiss, whether it were good that grim
- murder began, and brothers blasted one another in pieces for a
- stone edifice?—Poor Swiss! they know not how to act: from the
- southern windows, some fling cartridges, in sign of brotherhood;
- on the eastern outer staircase, and within through long stairs
- and corridors, they stand firm-ranked, peaceable and yet refusing
- to stir. Westermann speaks to them in Alsatian German;
- Marseillese plead, in hot Provençal speech and pantomime;
- stunning hubbub pleads and threatens, infinite, around. The Swiss
- stand fast, peaceable and yet immovable; red granite pier in that
- waste-flashing sea of steel.
-
- Who can help the inevitable issue; Marseillese and all France, on
- this side; granite Swiss on that? The pantomime grows hotter and
- hotter; Marseillese sabres flourishing by way of action; the
- Swiss brow also clouding itself, the Swiss thumb bringing its
- firelock to the cock. And hark! high-thundering above all the
- din, three Marseillese cannon from the Carrousel, pointed by a
- gunner of bad aim, come rattling over the roofs! Ye Swiss,
- therefore: _Fire!_ The Swiss fire; by volley, by platoon, in
- rolling-fire: Marseillese men not a few, and “a tall man that was
- louder than any,” lie silent, smashed, upon the pavement;—not a
- few Marseillese, after the long dusty march, have made halt
- _here_. The Carrousel is void; the black tide recoiling;
- “fugitives rushing as far as Saint-Antoine before they stop.” The
- Cannoneers without linstock have squatted invisible, and left
- their cannon; which the Swiss seize.
-
- Think what a volley: reverberating doomful to the four corners of
- Paris, and through all hearts; like the clang of Bellona’s
- thongs! The blackbrowed Marseillese, rallying on the instant,
- have become black Demons that know how to die. Nor is Brest
- behind-hand; nor Alsatian Westermann; Demoiselle Théroigne is
- Sybil Théroigne: Vengeance _Victoire, ou la mort!_ From all
- Patriot artillery, great and small; from Feuillants Terrace, and
- all terraces and places of the widespread Insurrectionary sea,
- there roars responsive a red whirlwind. Blue Nationals, ranked in
- the Garden, cannot help their muskets going off, _against_
- Foreign murderers. For there is a sympathy in muskets, in heaped
- masses of men: nay, are not Mankind, in whole, like tuned
- strings, and a cunning infinite concordance and unity; you smite
- one string, and all strings will begin sounding,—in soft
- sphere-melody, in deafening screech of madness! Mounted
- Gendarmerie gallop distracted; are fired on merely as a thing
- running; galloping over the Pont Royal, or one knows not whither.
- The brain of Paris, brain-fevered in the centre of it here, has
- gone mad; what you call, taken fire.
-
- Behold, the fire slackens not; nor does the Swiss rolling-fire
- slacken from within. Nay they clutched cannon, as we saw: and
- now, from the other side, they clutch three pieces more; alas,
- cannon without linstock; nor will the steel-and-flint answer,
- though they try it.[505] Had it chanced to answer! Patriot
- onlookers have their misgivings; one strangest Patriot onlooker
- thinks that the Swiss, had they a commander, would beat. He is a
- man not unqualified to judge; the name of him is Napoleon
- Buonaparte.[506] And onlookers, and women, stand gazing, and the
- witty Dr. Moore of Glasgow among them, on the other side of the
- River: cannon rush rumbling past them; pause on the Pont Royal;
- belch out their iron entrails there, against the Tuileries; and
- at every new belch, the women and onlookers shout and clap
- hands.[507] City of all the Devils! In remote streets, men are
- drinking breakfast-coffee; following their affairs; with a start
- now and then, as some dull echo reverberates a note louder. And
- here? Marseillese fall wounded; but Barbaroux has surgeons;
- Barbaroux is close by, managing, though underhand, and under
- cover. Marseillese fall death-struck; bequeath their firelock,
- specify in which pocket are the cartridges; and die, murmuring,
- ‘Revenge me, Revenge thy country!’ Brest Fédéré Officers,
- galloping in red coats, are shot as Swiss. Lo you, the Carrousel
- has burst into flame!—Paris Pandemonium! Nay the poor City, as we
- said, is in fever-fit and convulsion; such crisis has lasted for
- the space of some half hour.
-
- But what is this that, with Legislative Insignia, ventures
- through the hubbub and death-hail, from the back-entrance of the
- Manege? Towards the Tuileries and Swiss: written Order from his
- Majesty to cease firing! O ye hapless Swiss, why was there no
- order not to begin it? Gladly would the Swiss cease firing: but
- who will bid mad Insurrection cease firing? To Insurrection you
- cannot speak; neither can it, hydra-headed, hear. The dead and
- dying, by the hundred, lie all around; are borne bleeding through
- the streets, towards help; the sight of them, like a torch of the
- Furies, kindling Madness. Patriot Paris roars; as the bear
- bereaved of her whelps. On, ye Patriots: vengeance! victory or
- death! There are men seen, who rush on, armed only with
- walking-sticks.[508] Terror and Fury rule the hour.
-
- The Swiss, pressed on from without, paralyzed from within, have
- ceased to shoot; but not to be shot. What shall they do?
- Desperate is the moment. Shelter or instant death: yet How?
- Where? One party flies out by the Rue de l’Echelle; is destroyed
- utterly, “_en entier_.” A second, by the other side, throws
- itself into the Garden; “hurrying across a keen fusillade:”
- rushes suppliant into the National Assembly; finds pity and
- refuge in the back benches there. The third, and largest, darts
- out in column, three hundred strong, towards the Champs Elysées:
- Ah, could we but reach Courbevoye, where other Swiss are! Wo!
- see, in such fusillade the column “soon breaks itself by
- diversity of opinion,” into distracted segments, this way and
- that;—to escape in holes, to die fighting from street to street.
- The firing and murdering will not cease; not yet for long. The
- red Porters of Hotels are shot at, be they _Suisse_ by nature, or
- _Suisse_ only in name. The very Firemen, who pump and labour on
- that smoking Carrousel, are shot at; why should the Carrousel
- _not_ burn? Some Swiss take refuge in private houses; find that
- mercy too does still dwell in the heart of man. The brave
- Marseillese are merciful, late so wroth; and labour to save.
- Journalist Gorsas pleads hard with enfuriated groups. Clemence,
- the Wine-merchant, stumbles forward to the Bar of the Assembly, a
- rescued Swiss in his hand; tells passionately how he rescued him
- with pain and peril, how he will henceforth support him, being
- childless himself; and falls a swoon round the poor Swiss’s neck:
- amid plaudits. But the most are butchered, and even mangled.
- Fifty (some say Fourscore) were marched as prisoners, by National
- Guards, to the Hôtel-de-Ville: the ferocious people bursts
- through on them, in the Place de Grève; massacres them to the
- last man. “_O Peuple_, envy of the universe!” _Peuple_, in mad
- Gaelic effervescence!
-
- Surely few things in the history of carnage are painfuller. What
- ineffaceable red streak, flickering so sad in the memory, is
- that, of this poor column of red Swiss “breaking itself in the
- confusion of opinions;” dispersing, into blackness and death!
- Honour to you, brave men; honourable pity, through long times!
- Not martyrs were ye; and yet almost more. He was no King of
- yours, this Louis; and he forsook you like a King of shreds and
- patches; ye were but sold to him for some poor sixpence a-day;
- yet would ye work for your wages, keep your plighted word. The
- work now was to die; and ye did it. Honour to you, O Kinsmen; and
- may the old Deutsch _Biederkeit_ and _Tapferkeit_, and Valour
- which is _Worth_ and _Truth_ be they Swiss, be they Saxon, fail
- in no age! Not bastards; true-born were these men; sons of the
- men of Sempach, of Murten, who knelt, but not to thee, O
- Burgundy!—Let the traveller, as he passes through Lucerne, turn
- aside to look a little at their monumental Lion; not for
- Thorwaldsen’s sake alone. Hewn out of living rock, the Figure
- rests there, by the still Lake-waters, in lullaby of
- distant-tinkling _rance-des-vaches_, the granite Mountains dumbly
- keeping watch all round; and, though inanimate, speaks.
-
-
- Chapter 2.6.VIII.
- Constitution burst in Pieces.
-
- Thus is the Tenth of August won and lost. Patriotism reckons its
- slain by thousand on thousand, so deadly was the Swiss fire from
- these windows; but will finally reduce them to some Twelve
- hundred. No child’s play was it;—nor is it! Till two in the
- afternoon the massacring, the breaking and the burning has not
- ended; nor the loose Bedlam shut itself again.
-
- How deluges of frantic Sansculottism roared through all passages
- of this Tuileries, ruthless in vengeance, how the Valets were
- butchered, hewn down; and Dame Campan saw the Marseilles sabre
- flash over her head, but the Blackbrowed said, ‘_Va-t-en_, Get
- thee gone,’ and flung her from him unstruck:[509] how in the
- cellars wine-bottles were broken, wine-butts were staved in and
- drunk; and, upwards to the very garrets, all windows tumbled out
- their precious royal furnitures; and, with gold mirrors, velvet
- curtains, down of ript feather-beds, and dead bodies of men, the
- Tuileries was like no Garden of the Earth:—all this let him who
- has a taste for it see amply in Mercier, in acrid Montgaillard,
- or Beaulieu of the _Deux Amis_. A hundred and eighty bodies of
- Swiss lie piled there; naked, unremoved till the second day.
- Patriotism has torn their red coats into snips; and marches with
- them at the Pike’s point: the ghastly bare corpses lie there,
- under the sun and under the stars; the curious of both sexes
- crowding to look. Which let not us do. Above a hundred carts
- heaped with Dead fare towards the Cemetery of Sainte-Madeleine;
- bewailed, bewept; for all had kindred, all had mothers, if not
- here, then there. It is one of those Carnage-fields, such as you
- read of by the name “Glorious Victory,” brought home in this case
- to one’s own door.
-
- But the blackbrowed Marseillese have struck down the Tyrant of
- the Château. He is struck down; low, and hardly to rise. What a
- moment for an august Legislative was that when the Hereditary
- Representative entered, under such circumstances; and the
- Grenadier, carrying the little Prince Royal out of the Press, set
- him down on the Assembly-table! A moment,—which one had to smooth
- off with oratory; waiting what the next would bring! Louis said
- few words: ‘He was come hither to prevent a great crime; he
- believed himself safer nowhere than here.’ President Vergniaud
- answered briefly, in vague oratory as we say, about ‘defence of
- Constituted Authorities,’ about dying at our post.[510] And so
- King Louis sat him down; first here, then there; for a difficulty
- arose, the Constitution not permitting us to debate while the
- King is present: finally he settles himself with his Family in
- the “_Loge_ of the _Logographe_” in the Reporter’s-Box of a
- Journalist: which is beyond the enchanted Constitutional Circuit,
- separated from it by a rail. To such Lodge of the _Logographe_,
- measuring some ten feet square, with a small closet at the
- entrance of it behind, is the King of broad France now limited:
- here can he and his sit pent, under the eyes of the world, or
- retire into their closet at intervals; for the space of sixteen
- hours. Such quiet peculiar moment has the Legislative lived to
- see.
-
- But also what a moment was that other, few minutes later, when
- the three Marseillese cannon went off, and the Swiss rolling-fire
- and universal thunder, like the Crack of Doom, began to rattle!
- Honourable Members start to their feet; stray bullets singing
- epicedium even here, shivering in with window-glass and jingle.
- ‘No, this is our post; let us die here!’ They sit therefore, like
- stone Legislators. But may not the Lodge of the _Logographe_ be
- forced from behind? Tear down the railing that divides it from
- the enchanted Constitutional Circuit! Ushers tear and tug; his
- Majesty himself aiding from within: the railing gives way;
- Majesty and Legislative are united in place, unknown Destiny
- hovering over both.
-
- Rattle, and again rattle, went the thunder; one breathless
- wide-eyed messenger rushing in after another: King’s orders to
- the Swiss went out. It was a fearful thunder; but, as we know, it
- ended. Breathless messengers, fugitive Swiss, denunciatory
- Patriots, trepidation; finally tripudiation!—Before four o’clock
- much has come and gone.
-
- The New Municipals have come and gone; with Three Flags,
- _Liberté, Egalité, Patrie_, and the clang of vivats. Vergniaud,
- he who as President few hours ago talked of Dying for Constituted
- Authorities, has moved, as Committee-Reporter, that the
- Hereditary Representative _be suspended;_ that a NATIONAL
- CONVENTION do forthwith assemble to say what further! An able
- Report: which the President must have had ready in his pocket? A
- President, in such cases, must have much ready, and yet not
- ready; and Janus-like look before and after.
-
- King Louis listens to all; retires about midnight “to three
- little rooms on the upper floor;” till the Luxembourg be prepared
- for him, and “the safeguard of the Nation.” Safer if Brunswick
- were once here! Or, alas, not so safe? Ye hapless discrowned
- heads! Crowds came, next morning, to catch a climpse of them, in
- their three upper rooms. Montgaillard says the august Captives
- wore an air of cheerfulness, even of gaiety; that the Queen and
- Princess Lamballe, who had joined her over night, looked out of
- the open window, “shook powder from their hair on the people
- below, and laughed.”[511] He is an acrid distorted man.
-
- For the rest, one may guess that the Legislative, above all that
- the New Municipality continues busy. Messengers, Municipal or
- Legislative, and swift despatches rush off to all corners of
- France; full of triumph, blended with indignant wail, for Twelve
- hundred have fallen. France sends up its blended shout
- responsive; the Tenth of August shall be as the Fourteenth of
- July, only bloodier and greater. The Court has conspired? Poor
- Court: the Court has been vanquished; and will have both the
- scath to bear and the scorn. How the Statues of Kings do now all
- fall! Bronze Henri himself, though he wore a cockade once,
- jingles down from the Pont Neuf, where _Patrie_ floats _in
- Danger_. Much more does Louis Fourteenth, from the Place Vendôme,
- jingle down, and even breaks in falling. The curious can remark,
- written on his horse’s shoe: “12 _Août_ 1692;” a Century and a
- Day.
-
- The Tenth of August was Friday. The week is not done, when our
- old Patriot Ministry is recalled, what of it can be got: strict
- Roland, Genevese Clavière; add heavy Monge the Mathematician,
- once a stone-hewer; and, for Minister of Justice,—Danton “led
- hither,” as himself says, in one of his gigantic figures,
- “through the breach of Patriot cannon!” These, under Legislative
- Committees, must rule the wreck as they can: confusedly enough;
- with an old Legislative waterlogged, with a New Municipality so
- brisk. But National Convention will get itself together; and
- _then!_ Without delay, however, let a New Jury-Court and Criminal
- Tribunal be set up in Paris, to try the crimes and conspiracies
- of the Tenth. High Court of Orléans is distant, slow: the blood
- of the Twelve hundred Patriots, whatever become of other blood,
- shall be inquired after. Tremble, ye Criminals and Conspirators;
- the Minister of Justice is Danton! Robespierre too, after the
- victory, sits in the New Municipality; insurrectionary
- “improvised Municipality,” which calls itself Council General of
- the Commune.
-
- For three days now, Louis and his Family have heard the
- Legislative Debates in the Lodge of the _Logographe;_ and retired
- nightly to their small upper rooms. The Luxembourg and safeguard
- of the Nation could not be got ready: nay, it seems the
- Luxembourg has too many cellars and issues; no Municipality can
- undertake to watch it. The compact Prison of the Temple, not so
- elegant indeed, were much safer. To the Temple, therefore! On
- Monday, 13th day of August 1792, in Mayor Pétion’s carriage,
- Louis and his sad suspended Household, fare thither; all Paris
- out to look at them. As they pass through the Place Vendôme Louis
- Fourteenth’s Statue lies broken on the ground. Pétion is afraid
- the Queen’s looks may be thought scornful, and produce
- provocation; she casts down her eyes, and does not look at all.
- The “press is prodigious,” but quiet: here and there, it shouts
- _Vive la Nation;_ but for most part gazes in silence. French
- Royalty vanishes within the gates of the Temple: these old peaked
- Towers, like peaked Extinguisher or _Bonsoir_, do cover it
- up;—from which same Towers, poor Jacques Molay and his Templars
- were burnt out, by French Royalty, five centuries since. Such are
- the turns of Fate below. Foreign Ambassadors, English Lord Gower
- have all demanded passports; are driving indignantly towards
- their respective homes.
-
- So, then, the Constitution is over? For ever and a day! Gone is
- that wonder of the Universe; First biennial Parliament,
- waterlogged, waits only till the Convention come; and will then
- sink to endless depths.
-
- One can guess the silent rage of Old-Constituents,
- Constitution-builders, extinct Feuillants, men who thought the
- Constitution would march! Lafayette rises to the altitude of the
- situation; at the head of his Army. Legislative Commissioners are
- posting towards him and it, on the Northern Frontier, to
- congratulate and perorate: he orders the Municipality of Sedan to
- arrest these Commissioners, and keep them strictly in ward as
- Rebels, till he say further. The Sedan Municipals obey.
-
- The Sedan Municipals obey: but the Soldiers of the Lafayette
- Army? The Soldiers of the Lafayette Army have, as all Soldiers
- have, a kind of dim feeling that they themselves are Sansculottes
- in buff belts; that the victory of the Tenth of August is also a
- victory for them. They will not rise and follow Lafayette to
- Paris; they will rise and _send_ him thither! On the 18th, which
- is but next Saturday, Lafayette, with some two or three indignant
- Staff-officers, one of whom is Old-Constituent Alexandre de
- Lameth, having first put his Lines in what order he could,—rides
- swiftly over the Marches, towards Holland. Rides, alas, swiftly
- into the claws of Austrians! He, long-wavering, trembling on the
- verge of the horizon, has set, in Olmutz Dungeons; this History
- knows him no more. Adieu, thou Hero of two worlds; thinnest, but
- compact honour-worthy man! Through long rough night of captivity,
- through other tumults, triumphs and changes, thou wilt swing
- well, “fast-anchored to the Washington Formula;” and be the Hero
- and Perfect-character, were it only of one idea. The Sedan
- Municipals repent and protest; the Soldiers shout _Vive la
- Nation_. Dumouriez Polymetis, from his Camp at Maulde, sees
- himself made Commander in Chief.
-
- And, O Brunswick! what sort of “military execution” will Paris
- merit now? Forward, ye well-drilled exterminatory men; with your
- artillery-waggons, and camp kettles jingling. Forward, tall
- chivalrous King of Prussia; fanfaronading Emigrants and war-god
- Broglie, “for some consolation to mankind,” which verily is not
- without need of some.
-
- END OF THE SECOND VOLUME.
-
-
- VOLUME III.
- THE GUILLOTINE
-
-Alle Freiheits-Apostel, sie waren mir immer zuwider;
- Willkür suchte doch nur Jeder am Ende für sich.
-Willst du Viele befrein, so wag’ es Vielen zu dienen.
- Wie gefährlich das sey, willst du es wissen? Versuch’s!
-
- GOETHE.
-
-
- BOOK 3.I.
- SEPTEMBER
-
-
- Chapter 3.1.I.
- The Improvised Commune.
-
- Ye have roused her, then, ye Emigrants and Despots of the world;
- France is roused; long have ye been lecturing and tutoring this
- poor Nation, like cruel uncalled-for pedagogues, shaking over her
- your ferulas of fire and steel: it is long that ye have pricked
- and fillipped and affrighted her, there as she sat helpless in
- her dead cerements of a Constitution, you gathering in on her
- from all lands, with your armaments and plots, your invadings and
- truculent bullyings;—and lo now, ye have pricked her to the
- quick, and she is up, and her blood is up. The dead cerements are
- rent into cobwebs, and she fronts you in that terrible strength
- of Nature, which no man has measured, which goes down to Madness
- and Tophet: see now how ye will deal with her!
-
- This month of September, 1792, which has become one of the
- memorable months of History, presents itself under two most
- diverse aspects; all of black on the one side, all of bright on
- the other. Whatsoever is cruel in the panic frenzy of Twenty-five
- million men, whatsoever is great in the simultaneous
- death-defiance of Twenty-five million men, stand here in abrupt
- contrast, near by one another. As indeed is usual when a man, how
- much more when a Nation of men, is hurled suddenly beyond the
- limits. For Nature, as green as she looks, rests everywhere on
- dread foundations, were we farther down; and Pan, to whose music
- the Nymphs dance, has a cry in him that can drive all men
- distracted.
-
- Very frightful it is when a Nation, rending asunder its
- Constitutions and Regulations which were grown dead cerements for
- it, becomes _trans_cendental; and must now seek its wild way
- through the New, Chaotic,—where Force is not yet distinguished
- into Bidden and Forbidden, but Crime and Virtue welter
- unseparated,—in that domain of what is called the Passions; of
- what we call the Miracles and the Portents! It is thus that, for
- some three years to come, we are to contemplate France, in this
- final Third Volume of our History. Sansculottism reigning in all
- its grandeur and in all its hideousness: the Gospel (God’s
- Message) of Man’s Rights, Man’s _mights_ or strengths, once more
- preached irrefragably abroad; along with this, and still louder
- for the time, and fearfullest Devil’s-Message of Man’s weaknesses
- and sins;—and all on such a scale, and under such aspect: cloudy
- “death-birth of a world;” huge smoke-cloud, streaked with rays as
- of heaven on one side; girt on the other as with hell-fire!
- History tells us many things: but for the last thousand years and
- more, what thing has she told us of a sort like this? Which
- therefore let us two, O Reader, dwell on willingly, for a little;
- and from its endless significance endeavour to extract what may,
- in present circumstances, be adapted for us.
-
- It is unfortunate, though very natural, that the history of this
- Period has so generally been written in hysterics. Exaggeration
- abounds, execration, wailing; and, on the whole, darkness. But
- thus too, when foul old Rome had to be swept from the Earth, and
- those Northmen, and other horrid sons of Nature, came in,
- “swallowing formulas” as the French now do, foul old Rome
- screamed execratively her loudest; so that, the true shape of
- many things is lost for us. Attila’s Huns had arms of such length
- that they could lift a stone without stooping. Into the body of
- the poor Tatars execrative Roman History intercalated an
- alphabetic letter; and so they continue Ta-r-tars, of fell
- Tartarean nature, to this day. Here, in like manner, search as we
- will in these multi-form innumerable French Records, darkness too
- frequently covers, or sheer distraction bewilders. One finds it
- difficult to imagine that the Sun shone in this September month,
- as he does in others. Nevertheless it is an indisputable fact
- that the Sun did shine; and there was weather and work,—nay, as
- to that, very bad weather for harvest work! An unlucky Editor may
- do his utmost; and after all, require allowances.
-
- He had been a wise Frenchman, who, looking, close at hand, on
- this waste aspect of a France all stirring and whirling, in ways
- new, untried, had been able to discern where the cardinal
- movement lay; which tendency it was that had the rule and primary
- direction of it then! But at forty-four years’ distance, it is
- different. To all men now, two cardinal movements or grand
- tendencies, in the September whirl, have become discernible
- enough: that stormful effluence towards the Frontiers; that
- frantic crowding towards Townhouses and Council-halls in the
- interior. Wild France dashes, in desperate death-defiance,
- towards the Frontiers, to defend itself from foreign Despots;
- crowds towards Townhalls and Election Committee-rooms, to defend
- itself from domestic Aristocrats. Let the Reader conceive well
- these two cardinal movements; and what side-currents and endless
- vortexes might depend on these. He shall judge too, whether, in
- such sudden wreckage of all old Authorities, such a pair of
- cardinal movements, half-frantic in themselves, could be of soft
- nature? As in dry Sahara, when the winds waken, and lift and
- winnow the immensity of sand! The air itself (Travellers say) is
- a dim sand-air; and dim looming through it, the wonderfullest
- uncertain colonnades of Sand-Pillars rush whirling from this side
- and from that, like so many mad Spinning-Dervishes, of a hundred
- feet in stature; and dance their huge Desert-waltz there!—
-
- Nevertheless in all human movements, were they but a day old,
- there is order, or the beginning of order. Consider two things in
- this Sahara-waltz of the French Twenty-five millions; or rather
- one thing, and one hope of a thing: the _Commune_ (Municipality)
- of Paris, which is already here; the National Convention, which
- shall in few weeks be here. The Insurrectionary Commune, which
- improvising itself on the eve of the Tenth of August, worked this
- ever-memorable Deliverance by explosion, must needs rule over
- it,—till the Convention meet. This Commune, which they may well
- call a spontaneous or “improvised” Commune, is, for the present,
- sovereign of France. The Legislative, deriving its authority from
- the Old, how can _it_ now have authority when the Old is exploded
- by insurrection? As a floating piece of wreck, certain things,
- persons and interests may still cleave to it: volunteer
- defenders, riflemen or pikemen in green uniform, or red nightcap
- (of _bonnet rouge_), defile before it daily, just on the wing
- towards Brunswick; with the brandishing of arms; always with some
- touch of Leonidas-eloquence, often with a fire of daring that
- threatens to outherod Herod,—the Galleries, “especially the
- Ladies, never done with applauding.”[512] Addresses of this or
- the like sort can be received and answered, in the hearing of all
- France: the Salle de Manége is still useful as a place of
- proclamation. For which use, indeed, it now chiefly serves.
- Vergniaud delivers spirit-stirring orations; but always with a
- prophetic sense only, looking towards the coming Convention. ‘Let
- our memory perish,’ cries Vergniaud, ‘but let France be
- free!’—whereupon they all start to their feet, shouting
- responsive: ‘Yes, yes, _périsse notre mémoire, pourvu que la
- France soit libre!_’[513] Disfrocked Chabot abjures Heaven that
- at least we may ‘have done with Kings;’ and fast as powder under
- spark, we all blaze up once more, and with waved hats shout and
- swear: ‘Yes, _nous le jurons; plus de roi!_’[514] All which, as a
- method of proclamation, is very convenient.
-
- For the rest, that our busy Brissots, rigorous Rolands, men who
- once had authority and now have less and less; men who love law,
- and will have even an Explosion explode itself, as far as
- possible, according to rule, do find this state of matters most
- unofficial unsatisfactory,—is not to be denied. Complaints are
- made; attempts are made: but without effect. The attempts even
- recoil; and must be desisted from, for fear of worse: the sceptre
- is departed from this Legislative once and always. A poor
- Legislative, so hard was fate, had let itself be hand-gyved,
- nailed to the rock like an Andromeda, and could only wail there
- to the Earth and Heavens; miraculously a winged Perseus (or
- Improvised Commune) has dawned out of the void Blue, and cut her
- loose: but whether now is it she, with her softness and musical
- speech, or is it he, with his hardness and sharp falchion and
- aegis, that shall have casting vote? Melodious _agreement_ of
- vote; this were the rule! But if otherwise, and votes diverge,
- then surely Andromeda’s part is to weep,—if possible, tears of
- gratitude alone.
-
- Be content, O France, with this Improvised Commune, such as it
- is! It has the implements, and has the hands: the time is not
- long. On Sunday the twenty-sixth of August, our Primary
- Assemblies shall meet, begin electing of Electors; on Sunday the
- second of September (may the day prove lucky!) the Electors shall
- begin electing Deputies; and so an all-healing National
- Convention will come together. No _marc d’argent_, or distinction
- of Active and Passive, now insults the French Patriot: but there
- is universal suffrage, unlimited liberty to choose.
- Old-constituents, Present-Legislators, all France is eligible.
- Nay, it may be said, the flower of all the Universe (_de
- l’Univers_) is eligible; for in these very days we, by act of
- Assembly, “naturalise” the chief Foreign Friends of humanity:
- Priestley, burnt out for us in Birmingham; Klopstock, a genius of
- all countries; Jeremy Bentham, useful Jurisconsult; distinguished
- Paine, the rebellious Needleman;—some of whom may be chosen. As
- is most fit; for a Convention of this kind. In a word, Seven
- Hundred and Forty-five unshackled sovereigns, admired of the
- universe, shall replace this hapless impotency of a
- Legislative,—out of which, it is likely, the best members, and
- the Mountain in mass, may be re-elected. Roland is getting ready
- the _Salles des Cent Suisses_, as preliminary rendezvous for
- them; in that void Palace of the Tuileries, now void and
- National, and not a Palace, but a Caravansera.
-
- As for the Spontaneous Commune, one may say that there never was
- on Earth a stranger Town-Council. Administration, not of a great
- City, but of a great Kingdom in a state of revolt and frenzy,
- this is the task that has fallen to it. Enrolling, provisioning,
- judging; devising, deciding, doing, endeavouring to do: one
- wonders the human brain did not give way under all this, and
- reel. But happily human brains have such a talent of taking up
- simply what they can carry, and ignoring all the rest; leaving
- all the rest, as if it were not there! Whereby somewhat is verily
- shifted for; and much shifts for itself. This Improvised Commune
- walks along, nothing doubting; promptly making front, without
- fear or flurry, at what moment soever, to the wants of the
- moment. Were the world on fire, one improvised tricolor Municipal
- has but one life to lose. They are the elixir and chosen-men of
- Sansculottic Patriotism; promoted to the forlorn-hope;
- unspeakable victory or a high gallows, this is their meed. They
- sit there, in the Townhall, these astonishing tricolor
- Municipals; in Council General; in Committee of Watchfulness (_de
- Surveillance_, which will even become _de Salut Public_, of
- Public Salvation), or what other Committees and Sub-committees
- are needful;—managing infinite Correspondence; passing infinite
- Decrees: one hears of a Decree being “the ninety-eighth of the
- day.” Ready! is the word. They carry loaded pistols in their
- pocket; also some improvised luncheon by way of meal. Or indeed,
- by and by, _traiteurs_ contract for the supply of repasts, to be
- eaten on the spot,—too lavishly, as it was afterwards grumbled.
- Thus they: girt in their tricolor sashes; Municipal note-paper in
- the one hand, fire-arms in other. They have their Agents out all
- over France; speaking in townhouses, market-places, highways and
- byways; agitating, urging to arm; all hearts tingling to hear.
- Great is the fire of Anti-Aristocrat eloquence: nay some, as
- Bibliopolic Momoro, seem to hint afar off at something which
- smells of Agrarian Law, and a surgery of the overswoln dropsical
- strong-box itself;—whereat indeed the bold Bookseller runs risk
- of being hanged, and Ex-Constituent Buzot has to smuggle him
- off.[515]
-
- Governing Persons, were they never so insignificant
- intrinsically, have for most part plenty of Memoir-writers; and
- the curious, in after-times, can learn minutely their goings out
- and comings in: which, as men always love to know their
- fellow-men in singular situations, is a comfort, of its kind. Not
- so, with these Governing Persons, now in the Townhall! And yet
- what most original fellow-man, of the Governing sort,
- high-chancellor, king, kaiser, secretary of the home or the
- foreign department, ever shewed such a phasis as Clerk Tallien,
- Procureur Manuel, future Procureur Chaumette, here in this
- Sand-waltz of the Twenty-five millions, now do? O brother
- mortals,—thou Advocate Panis, friend of Danton, kinsman of
- Santerre; Engraver Sergent, since called _Agate_ Sergent; thou
- Huguenin, with the tocsin in thy heart! But, as Horace says, they
- wanted the sacred memoir-writer (_sacro vate_); and we know them
- not. Men bragged of August and its doings, publishing them in
- high places; but of this September none now or afterwards would
- brag. The September world remains dark, fuliginous, as Lapland
- witch-midnight;—from which, indeed, very strange shapes will
- evolve themselves.
-
- Understand this, however: that incorruptible Robespierre is not
- wanting, now when the brunt of battle is past; in a stealthy way
- the seagreen man sits there, his feline eyes excellent in the
- twilight. Also understand this other, a single fact worth many:
- that Marat is not only there, but has a seat of honour assigned
- him, a _tribune particulière_. How changed for Marat; lifted from
- his dark cellar into this luminous “peculiar tribune!” All dogs
- have their day; even rabid dogs. Sorrowful, incurable Philoctetes
- Marat; without whom Troy cannot be taken! Hither, as a main
- element of the Governing Power, has Marat been raised. Royalist
- types, for we have “suppressed” innumerable Durosoys, Royous, and
- even clapt them in prison,—Royalist types replace the worn types
- often snatched from a People’s-Friend in old ill days. In our
- “peculiar tribune” we write and redact: Placards, of due monitory
- terror; _Amis-du-Peuple_ (now under the name of _Journal de la
- République_); and sit obeyed of men. “Marat,” says one, “is the
- conscience of the Hôtel-de-Ville.” _Keeper_, as some call it, of
- the Sovereign’s Conscience;—which surely, in such hands, will not
- lie hid in a napkin!
-
- Two great movements, as we said, agitate this distracted National
- mind: a rushing against domestic Traitors, a rushing against
- foreign Despots. Mad movements both, restrainable by no known
- rule; strongest passions of human nature driving them on: love,
- hatred; vengeful sorrow, braggart Nationality also vengeful,—and
- pale Panic over all! Twelve Hundred slain Patriots, do they not,
- from their dark catacombs there, in Death’s dumb-shew, plead (O
- ye Legislators) for vengeance? Such was the destructive rage of
- these Aristocrats on the ever-memorable Tenth. Nay, apart from
- vengeance, and with an eye to Public Salvation only, are there
- not still, in this Paris (in round numbers) “thirty thousand
- Aristocrats,” of the most malignant humour; driven now to their
- last trump-card?—Be patient, ye Patriots: our New High Court,
- “Tribunal of the Seventeenth,” sits; each Section has sent Four
- Jurymen; and Danton, extinguishing improper judges, improper
- practices wheresoever found, is “the same man you have known at
- the Cordeliers.” With such a Minister of Justice shall not
- Justice be done?—Let it be swift then, answers universal
- Patriotism; swift and sure!—
-
- One would hope, this Tribunal of the Seventeenth is swifter than
- most. Already on the 21st, while our Court is but four days old,
- Collenot d’Angremont, “the Royal enlister” (crimp, _embaucheur_)
- dies by torch-light. For, lo, the great _Guillotine_, wondrous to
- behold, now stands there; the Doctor’s _Idea_ has become Oak and
- Iron; the huge cyclopean axe “falls in its grooves like the ram
- of the Pile-engine,” swiftly snuffing out the light of men?”
- “_Mais vous, Gualches_, what have you invented?” _This?_—Poor old
- Laporte, Intendant of the Civil List, follows next; quietly, the
- mild old man. Then Durosoy, Royalist Placarder, “cashier of all
- the Anti-Revolutionists of the interior:” he went rejoicing; said
- that a Royalist like him ought to die, of all days on this day,
- the 25th or Saint Louis’s Day. All these have been tried,
- cast,—the Galleries shouting approval; and handed over to the
- Realised Idea, within a week. Besides those whom we have
- acquitted, the Galleries murmuring, and have dismissed; or even
- have personally guarded back to Prison, as the Galleries took to
- howling, and even to menacing and elbowing.[516] Languid this
- Tribunal is not.
-
- Nor does the other movement slacken; the rushing against foreign
- Despots. Strong forces shall meet in death-grip; drilled Europe
- against mad undrilled France; and singular conclusions will be
- tried.—Conceive therefore, in some faint degree, the tumult that
- whirls in this France, in this Paris! Placards from Section, from
- Commune, from Legislative, from the individual Patriot, flame
- monitory on all walls. Flags of Danger to Fatherland wave at the
- Hôtel-de-Ville; on the Pont Neuf—over the prostrate Statues of
- Kings. There is universal enlisting, urging to enlist; there is
- tearful-boastful leave-taking; irregular marching on the Great
- North-Eastern Road. Marseillese sing their wild _To Arms_, in
- chorus; which now all men, all women and children have learnt,
- and sing chorally, in Theatres, Boulevards, Streets; and the
- heart burns in every bosom: _Aux Armes! Marchons!_—Or think how
- your Aristocrats are skulking into covert; how Bertrand-Moleville
- lies hidden in some garret “in Aubry-le-boucher Street, with a
- poor surgeon who had known me;” Dame de Staël has secreted her
- Narbonne, not knowing what in the world to make of him. The
- Barriers are sometimes open, oftenest shut; no passports to be
- had; Townhall Emissaries, with the eyes and claws of falcons,
- flitting watchful on all points of your horizon! In two words:
- Tribunal of the Seventeenth, busy under howling Galleries;
- Prussian Brunswick, “over a space of forty miles,” with his
- war-tumbrils, and sleeping thunders, and Briarean “sixty-six
- thousand”[517] right-hands,—coming, coming!
-
- O Heavens, in these latter days of August, he is come! Durosoy
- was not yet guillotined when news had come that the Prussians
- were harrying and ravaging about Metz; in some four days more,
- one hears that Longwi, our first strong-place on the borders, is
- fallen “in fifteen hours.” Quick, therefore, O ye improvised
- Municipals; quick, and ever quicker!—The improvised Municipals
- make front to this also. Enrolment urges itself; and clothing,
- and arming. Our very officers have now “wool epaulettes;” for it
- is the reign of Equality, and also of Necessity. Neither do men
- now _monsieur_ and _sir_ one another; _citoyen_ (citizen) were
- suitabler; we even say _thou_, as “the free peoples of Antiquity
- did:” so have Journals and the Improvised Commune suggested;
- which shall be well.
-
- Infinitely better, meantime, could we suggest, where arms are to
- be found. For the present, our _Citoyens_ chant chorally _To
- arms;_ and have no arms! Arms are searched for; passionately;
- there is joy over any musket. Moreover, entrenchments shall be
- made round Paris: on the slopes of Montmartre men dig and shovel;
- though even the simple suspect this to be desperate. They dig;
- Tricolour sashes speak encouragement and _well-speed-ye_. Nay
- finally “twelve Members of the Legislative go daily,” not to
- encourage only, but to bear a hand, and delve: it was decreed
- with acclamation. Arms shall either be provided; or else the
- ingenuity of man crack itself, and become fatuity. Lean
- Beaumarchais, thinking to serve the Fatherland, and do a stroke
- of trade, in the old way, has commissioned sixty thousand stand
- of good arms out of Holland: would to Heaven, for Fatherland’s
- sake and his, they were come! Meanwhile railings are torn up;
- hammered into pikes: chains themselves shall be welded together,
- into pikes. The very coffins of the dead are raised; for melting
- into balls. All Church-bells must down into the furnace to make
- cannon; all Church-plate into the mint to make money. Also behold
- the fair swan-bevies of _Citoyennes_ that have alighted in
- Churches, and sit there with swan-neck,—sewing tents and
- regimentals! Nor are Patriotic Gifts wanting, from those that
- have aught left; nor stingily given: the fair Villaumes, mother
- and daughter, Milliners in the Rue St.-Martin, give “a silver
- thimble, and a coin of fifteen _sous_ (sevenpence halfpenny),”
- with other similar effects; and offer, at least the mother does,
- to mount guard. Men who have not even a thimble, give a
- thimbleful,—were it but of invention. One Citoyen has wrought out
- the scheme of a wooden cannon; which France shall exclusively
- profit by, in the first instance. It is to be made of _staves_,
- by the coopers;—of almost boundless calibre, but uncertain as to
- strength! Thus they: hammering, scheming, stitching, founding,
- with all their heart and with all their soul. Two bells only are
- to remain in each Parish,—for tocsin and other purposes.
-
- But mark also, precisely while the Prussian batteries were
- playing their briskest at Longwi in the North-East, and our
- dastardly Lavergne saw nothing for it but
- surrender,—south-westward, in remote, patriarchal La Vendée, that
- sour ferment about Nonjuring Priests, after long working, is
- ripe, and explodes: at the wrong moment for us! And so we have
- “eight thousand Peasants at Châtillon-sur-Sèvre,” who will not be
- ballotted for soldiers; will not have their Curates molested. To
- whom Bonchamps, Laroche-jaquelins, and Seigneurs enough, of a
- Royalist turn, will join themselves; with Stofflets and
- Charettes; with Heroes and Chouan Smugglers; and the loyal warmth
- of a simple people, blown into flame and fury by theological and
- seignorial bellows! So that there shall be fighting from behind
- ditches, death-volleys bursting out of thickets and ravines of
- rivers; huts burning, feet of the pitiful women hurrying to
- refuge with their children on their back; seedfields fallow,
- whitened with human bones;—“eighty thousand, of all ages, ranks,
- sexes, flying at once across the Loire,” with wail borne far on
- the winds: and, in brief, for years coming, such a suite of
- scenes as glorious war has not offered in these late ages, not
- since our Albigenses and Crusadings were over,—save indeed some
- chance Palatinate, or so, we might have to “burn,” by way of
- exception. The “eight thousand at Chatillon” will be got
- dispelled for the moment; the fire scattered, not extinguished.
- To the dints and bruises of outward battle there is to be added
- henceforth a deadlier internal gangrene.
-
- This rising in La Vendée reports itself at Paris on Wednesday the
- 29th of August;—just as we had got our Electors elected; and, in
- spite of Brunswick’s and Longwi’s teeth, were hoping still to
- have a National Convention, if it pleased Heaven. But indeed,
- otherwise, this Wednesday is to be regarded as one of the
- notablest Paris had yet seen: gloomy tidings come successively,
- like Job’s messengers; are met by gloomy answers. Of Sardinia
- rising to invade the South-East, and Spain threatening the South,
- we do not speak. But are not the Prussians masters of Longwi
- (treacherously yielded, one would say); and preparing to besiege
- Verdun? Clairfait and his Austrians are encompassing Thionville;
- darkening the North. Not Metz-land now, but the Clermontais is
- getting harried; flying hulans and huzzars have been seen on the
- Chalons Road, almost as far as Sainte-Menehould. Heart, ye
- Patriots, if ye lose heart, ye lose all!
-
- It is not without a dramatic emotion that one reads in the
- Parliamentary Debates of this Wednesday evening “past seven
- o’clock,” the scene with the military fugitives from Longwi.
- Wayworn, dusty, disheartened, these poor men enter the
- Legislative, about sunset or after; give the most pathetic detail
- of the frightful pass they were in:—Prussians billowing round by
- the myriad, volcanically spouting fire for fifteen hours: we,
- scattered sparse on the ramparts, hardly a cannoneer to two guns;
- our dastard Commandant Lavergne no where shewing face; the
- priming would not catch; there was no powder in the bombs,—what
- could we do? ‘_Mourir!_ Die!’ answer prompt voices;[518] and the
- dusty fugitives must shrink elsewhither for comfort.—Yes,
- _Mourir_, that is now the word. Be Longwi a proverb and a hissing
- among French strong-places: let it (says the Legislative) be
- obliterated rather, from the shamed face of the Earth;—and so
- there has gone forth Decree, that Longwi shall, were the
- Prussians once out of it, “be rased,” and exist only as ploughed
- ground.
-
- Nor are the Jacobins milder; as how could they, the flower of
- Patriotism? Poor Dame Lavergne, wife of the poor Commandant, took
- her parasol one evening, and escorted by her Father came over to
- the Hall of the mighty Mother; and “reads a memoir tending to
- justify the Commandant of Longwi.” _Lafarge, President_, makes
- answer: ‘Citoyenne, the Nation will judge Lavergne; the Jacobins
- are bound to tell him the truth. He would have ended his course
- there (_termine sa carrière_), if he had loved the honour of his
- country.’[519]
-
-
- Chapter 3.1.II.
- Danton.
-
- But better than rasing of Longwi, or rebuking poor dusty soldiers
- or soldiers’ wives, Danton had come over, last night, and
- demanded a Decree to _search_ for arms, since they were not
- yielded voluntarily. Let “Domiciliary visits,” with rigour of
- authority, be made to this end. To search for arms; for
- horses,—Aristocratism rolls in its carriage, while Patriotism
- cannot trail its cannon. To search generally for munitions of
- war, “in the houses of persons suspect,”—and even, if it seem
- proper, to seize and imprison the suspect persons themselves! In
- the Prisons, their plots will be harmless; in the Prisons, they
- will be as hostages for us, and not without use. This Decree the
- energetic Minister of Justice demanded, last night, and got; and
- this same night it is to be executed; it is being executed, at
- the moment when these dusty soldiers get saluted with _Mourir_.
- Two thousand stand of arms, as they count, are foraged in this
- way; and some four hundred head of new Prisoners; and, on the
- whole, such a terror and damp is struck through the Aristocrat
- heart, as all but Patriotism, and even Patriotism were it out of
- this agony, might pity. Yes, Messieurs! if Brunswick blast Paris
- to ashes, he probably will blast the Prisons of Paris too: pale
- Terror, if we have got it, we will also give it, and the depth of
- horrors that lie in it; the same leaky bottom, in these wild
- waters, bears us all.
-
- One can judge what stir there was now among the “thirty thousand
- Royalists:” how the Plotters, or the accused of Plotting, shrank
- each closer into his lurking-place,—like Bertrand Moleville,
- looking eager towards Longwi, hoping the weather would keep fair.
- Or how they dressed themselves in valet’s clothes, like Narbonne,
- and “got to England as Dr. Bollman’s famulus:” how Dame de Staël
- bestirred herself, pleading with Manuel as a Sister in
- Literature, pleading even with Clerk Tallien; a pray to nameless
- chagrins![520] Royalist Peltier, the Pamphleteer, gives a
- touching Narrative (not deficient in height of colouring) of the
- terrors of that night. From five in the afternoon, a great City
- is struck suddenly silent; except for the beating of drums, for
- the tramp of marching feet; and ever and anon the dread thunder
- of the knocker at some door, a Tricolor Commissioner with his
- blue Guards (_black_-guards!) arriving. All Streets are vacant,
- says Peltier; beset by Guards at each end: all Citizens are
- ordered to be within doors. On the River float sentinal barges,
- lest we escape by water: the Barriers hermetically closed.
- Frightful! The sun shines; serenely westering, in smokeless
- mackerel-sky: Paris is as if sleeping, as if dead:—Paris is
- holding its breath, to see what stroke will fall on it. Poor
- Peltier! _Acts of Apostles_, and all jocundity of
- Leading-Articles, are gone out, and it is become bitter earnest
- instead; polished satire changed now into coarse pike-points
- (hammered out of railing); all logic reduced to this one
- primitive thesis, An eye for an eye, a tooth for a
- tooth!—Peltier, dolefully aware of it, ducks low; escapes
- unscathed to England; to urge there the inky war anew; to have
- Trial by Jury, in due season, and deliverance by young Whig
- eloquence, world-celebrated for a day.
-
- Of “thirty thousand,” naturally, great multitudes were left
- unmolested: but, as we said, some four hundred, designated as
- “persons suspect,” were seized; and an unspeakable terror fell on
- all. Wo to him who is guilty of Plotting, of Anticivism,
- Royalism, Feuillantism; who, guilty or not guilty, has an enemy
- in his Section to call him guilty! Poor old M. de Cazotte is
- seized, his young loved Daughter with him, refusing to quit him.
- Why, O Cazotte, wouldst thou quit romancing, and _Diable
- Amoureux_, for such reality as this? Poor old M. de Sombreuil, he
- of the _Invalides_, is seized: a man seen askance, by Patriotism
- ever since the Bastille days: whom also a fond Daughter will not
- quit. With young tears hardly suppressed, and old wavering
- weakness rousing itself once more—O my brothers, O my sisters!
-
- The famed and named go; the nameless, if they have an accuser.
- Necklace Lamotte’s Husband is in these Prisons (_she_ long since
- squelched on the London Pavements); but gets delivered. Gross de
- Morande, of the _Courier de l’Europe_, hobbles distractedly to
- and fro there: but they let him hobble out; on right nimble
- crutches;—his hour not being yet come. Advocate Maton de la
- Varenne, very weak in health, is snatched off from mother and
- kin; Tricolor Rossignol (journeyman goldsmith and scoundrel
- lately, a risen man now) remembers an old Pleading of Maton’s!
- Jourgniac de Saint-Méard goes; the brisk frank soldier: he was in
- the Mutiny of Nancy, in that “effervescent Regiment du Roi,”—on
- the wrong side. Saddest of all: Abbé Sicard goes; a Priest who
- could not take the Oath, but who could teach the Deaf and Dumb:
- in his Section one man, he says, had a grudge at him; one man, at
- the fit hour, launches an arrest against him; which hits. In the
- Arsenal quarter, there are dumb hearts making wail, with signs,
- with wild gestures; he their miraculous healer and speech-bringer
- is rapt away.
-
- What with the arrestments on this night of the Twenty-ninth, what
- with those that have gone on more or less, day and night, ever
- since the Tenth, one may fancy what the Prisons now were.
- Crowding and Confusion; jostle, hurry, vehemence and terror! Of
- the poor Queen’s Friends, who had followed her to the Temple and
- been committed elsewhither to Prison, some, as Governess de
- Tourzelle, are to be let go: one, the poor Princess de Lamballe,
- is not let go; but waits in the strong-rooms of La Force there,
- what will betide further.
-
- Among so many hundreds whom the launched arrest hits, who are
- rolled off to Townhall or Section-hall, to preliminary Houses of
- detention, and hurled in thither, as into cattle-pens, we must
- mention one other: Caron de Beaumarchais, Author of _Figaro;_
- vanquisher of Maupeou Parlements and Goezman helldogs; once
- numbered among the demigods; and now—? We left him in his
- culminant state; what dreadful decline is this, when we again
- catch a glimpse of him! “At midnight” (it was but the 12th of
- August yet), “the servant, in his shirt,” with wide-staring eyes,
- enters your room:—Monsieur, rise; all the people are come to seek
- you; they are knocking, like to break in the door! “And they were
- in fact knocking in a terrible manner (_d’une façon terrible_). I
- fling on my coat, forgetting even the waistcoat, nothing on my
- feet but slippers; and say to him”—And _he_, alas, answers mere
- negatory incoherences, panic interjections. And through the
- shutters and crevices, in front or rearward, the dull
- street-lamps disclose only streetfuls of haggard countenances;
- clamorous, bristling with pikes: and you rush distracted for an
- outlet, finding none;—and have to take refuge in the
- crockery-press, down stairs; and stand there, palpitating in that
- imperfect costume, lights dancing past your key-hole, tramp of
- feet overhead, and the tumult of Satan, “for four hours and
- more!” And old ladies, of the quarter, started up (as we hear
- next morning); rang for their _bonnes_ and cordial-drops, with
- shrill interjections: and old gentlemen, in their shirts, “leapt
- garden-walls;” flying, while none pursued; one of whom
- unfortunately broke his leg.[521] Those sixty thousand stand of
- Dutch arms (which never arrive), and the bold stroke of trade,
- have turned out so ill!—
-
- Beaumarchais escaped for this time; but not for the next time,
- ten days after. On the evening of the Twenty-ninth he is still in
- that chaos of the Prisons, in saddest, wrestling condition;
- unable to get justice, even to get audience; “Panis scratching
- his head” when you speak to him, and making off. Nevertheless let
- the lover of Figaro know that Procureur Manuel, a Brother in
- Literature, found him, and delivered him once more. But how the
- lean demigod, now shorn of his splendour, had to lurk in barns,
- to roam over harrowed fields, panting for life; and to wait under
- eavesdrops, and sit in darkness “on the Boulevard amid
- paving-stones and boulders,” longing for one word of any
- Minister, or Minister’s Clerk, about those accursed Dutch
- muskets, and getting none,—with heart fuming in spleen, and
- terror, and suppressed canine-madness: alas, how the swift sharp
- hound, once fit to be Diana’s, breaks his old teeth now, gnawing
- mere whinstones; and must “fly to England;” and, returning from
- England, must creep into the corner, and lie quiet, toothless
- (moneyless),—all this let the lover of Figaro fancy, and weep
- for. We here, without weeping, not without sadness, wave the
- withered tough fellow-mortal our farewell. His Figaro has
- returned to the French stage; nay is, at this day, sometimes
- named the best piece there. And indeed, so long as Man’s Life can
- ground itself only on artificiality and aridity; each new Revolt
- and Change of Dynasty turning up only a new stratum of
- _dry-rubbish_, and no _soil_ yet coming to view,—may it not be
- good to protest against such a Life, in many ways, and even in
- the Figaro way?
-
-
- Chapter 3.1.III.
- Dumouriez.
-
- Such are the last days of August, 1792; days gloomy, disastrous,
- and of evil omen. What will become of this poor France? Dumouriez
- rode from the Camp of Maulde, eastward to Sedan, on Tuesday last,
- the 28th of the month; reviewed that so-called Army left forlorn
- there by Lafayette: the forlorn soldiers gloomed on him; were
- heard growling on him, ‘This is one of them, _ce b—e là_, that
- made War be declared.’[522] Unpromising Army! Recruits flow in,
- filtering through Dépôt after Dépôt; but recruits merely: in want
- of all; happy if they have so much as arms. And Longwi has fallen
- basely; and Brunswick, and the Prussian King, with his sixty
- thousand, will beleaguer Verdun; and Clairfait and Austrians
- press deeper in, over the Northern marches: “a hundred and fifty
- thousand” as fear counts, “eighty thousand” as the returns shew,
- do hem us in; Cimmerian Europe behind them. There is
- Castries-and-Broglie chivalry; Royalist foot “in red facing and
- nankeen trousers;” breathing death and the gallows.
-
- And lo, finally! at Verdun on Sunday the 2d of September 1792,
- Brunswick is here. With his King and sixty thousand, glittering
- over the heights, from beyond the winding Meuse River, he looks
- down on us, on our “high citadel” and all our confectionery-ovens
- (for we are celebrated for confectionery) has sent courteous
- summons, in order to spare the effusion of blood!—Resist him to
- the death? Every day of retardation precious? How, O General
- Beaurepaire (asks the amazed Municipality) shall we resist him?
- We, the Verdun Municipals, see no resistance possible. Has he not
- sixty thousand, and artillery without end? Retardation,
- Patriotism is good; but so likewise is peaceable baking of
- pastry, and sleeping in whole skin.—Hapless Beaurepaire stretches
- out his hands, and pleads passionately, in the name of country,
- honour, of Heaven and of Earth: to no purpose. The Municipals
- have, by law, the power of ordering it;—with an Army officered by
- Royalism or Crypto-Royalism, such a Law seemed needful: and they
- order it, as pacific Pastrycooks, not as heroic Patriots
- would,—To surrender! Beaurepaire strides home, with long steps:
- his valet, entering the room, sees him “writing eagerly,” and
- withdraws. His valet hears then, in a few minutes, the report of
- a pistol: Beaurepaire is lying dead; his eager writing had been a
- brief suicidal farewell. In this manner died Beaurepaire, wept of
- France; buried in the Pantheon, with honourable pension to his
- Widow, and for Epitaph these words, _He chose Death rather than
- yield to Despots_. The Prussians, descending from the heights,
- are peaceable masters of Verdun.
-
- And so Brunswick advances, from stage to stage: who shall now
- stay him,—covering forty miles of country? Foragers fly far; the
- villages of the North-East are harried; your Hessian forager has
- only “three sous a day:” the very Emigrants, it is said, will
- take silver-plate,—by way of revenge. Clermont, Sainte-Menehould,
- Varennes especially, ye Towns of the _Night of Spurs;_ tremble
- ye! Procureur Sausse and the Magistracy of Varennes have fled;
- brave Boniface Le Blanc of the _Bras d’Or_ is to the woods: Mrs.
- Le Blanc, a young woman fair to look upon, with her young infant,
- has to live in greenwood, like a beautiful Bessy Bell of Song,
- her bower thatched with rushes;—catching premature
- rheumatism.[523] Clermont may ring the tocsin now, and illuminate
- itself! Clermont lies at the foot of its _Cow_ (or _Vache_, so
- they name that Mountain), a prey to the Hessian spoiler: its fair
- women, fairer than most, are robbed: not of life, or what is
- dearer, yet of all that is cheaper and portable; for Necessity,
- on three half-pence a-day, has no law. At Saint-Menehould, the
- enemy has been expected more than once,—our Nationals all turning
- out in arms; but was not yet seen. Post-master Drouet, he is not
- in the woods, but minding his Election; and will sit in the
- Convention, notable King-taker, and bold Old-Dragoon as he is.
-
- Thus on the North-East all roams and runs; and on a set day, the
- _date_ of which is irrecoverable by History, Brunswick “has
- engaged to dine in Paris,”—the Powers willing. And at Paris, in
- the centre, it is as we saw; and in La Vendée, South-West, it is
- as we saw; and Sardinia is in the South-East, and Spain is in the
- South, and Clairfait with Austria and sieged Thionville is in the
- North;—and all France leaps distracted, like the winnowed Sahara
- waltzing in sand-colonnades! More desperate posture no country
- ever stood in. A country, one would say, which the Majesty of
- Prussia (if it so pleased him) might partition, and clip in
- pieces, like a Poland; flinging the remainder to poor Brother
- Louis,—with directions to keep it quiet, or else _we_ will keep
- it for him!
-
- Or perhaps the Upper Powers, minded that a new Chapter in
- Universal History shall begin here and not further on, may have
- ordered it all otherwise? In that case, Brunswick will not dine
- in Paris on the set day; nor, indeed, one knows not when!—Verily,
- amid this wreckage, where poor France seems grinding itself down
- to dust and bottomless ruin, who knows what miraculous
- salient-point of Deliverance and New-life may have already come
- into existence there; and be already working there, though as yet
- human eye discern it not! On the night of that same twenty-eighth
- of August, the unpromising Review-day in Sedan, Dumouriez
- assembles a Council of War at his lodgings there. He spreads out
- the map of this forlorn war-district: Prussians here, Austrians
- there; triumphant both, with broad highway, and little
- hinderance, all the way to Paris; we, scattered helpless, here
- and here: what to advise? The Generals, strangers to Dumouriez,
- look blank enough; know not well what to advise,—if it be not
- retreating, and retreating till our recruits accumulate; till
- perhaps the chapter of chances turn up some leaf for us; or
- Paris, at all events, be sacked at the latest day possible. The
- Many-counselled, who “has not closed an eye for three nights,”
- listens with little speech to these long cheerless speeches;
- merely watching the speaker that he may know him; then wishes
- them all good-night;—but beckons a certain young Thouvenot, the
- fire of whose looks had pleased him, to wait a moment. Thouvenot
- waits: _Voilà_, says Polymetis, pointing to the map! That is the
- Forest of Argonne, that long stripe of rocky Mountain and wild
- Wood; forty miles long; with but five, or say even three
- practicable Passes through it: this, for they have forgotten it,
- might one not still seize, though Clairfait sits so nigh? Once
- seized;—the Champagne called the Hungry (or worse, Champagne
- _Pouilleuse_) on their side of it; the fat Three Bishoprics, and
- willing France, on ours; and the Equinox-rains not far;—this
- Argonne “might be the Thermopylae of France!”[524]
-
- O brisk Dumouriez Polymetis with thy teeming head, may the gods
- grant it!—Polymetis, at any rate, folds his map together, and
- flings himself on bed; resolved to try, on the morrow morning.
- With astucity, with swiftness, with audacity! One had need to be
- a lion-fox, and have luck on one’s side.
-
-
- Chapter 3.1.IV.
- September in Paris.
-
- At Paris, by lying Rumour which proved prophetic and veridical,
- the fall of Verdun was known some hours _before_ it happened. It
- is Sunday the second of September; handiwork hinders not the
- speculations of the mind. Verdun gone (though some still deny
- it); the Prussians in full march, with gallows-ropes, with fire
- and faggot! Thirty thousand Aristocrats within our own walls; and
- but the merest quarter-tithe of them yet put in Prison! Nay there
- goes a word that even these will revolt. Sieur Jean Julien,
- wagoner of Vaugirard,[525] being set in the Pillory last Friday,
- took all at once to crying, That he would be well revenged ere
- long; that the King’s Friends in Prison would burst out; force
- the Temple, set the King on horseback; and, joined by the
- unimprisoned, ride roughshod over us all. This the unfortunate
- wagoner of Vaugirard did bawl, at the top of his lungs: when
- snatched off to the Townhall, he persisted in it, still bawling;
- yesternight, when they guillotined him, he died with the froth of
- it on his lips.[526] For a man’s mind, padlocked to the Pillory,
- may go mad; and all men’s minds may go mad; and “believe him,” as
- the frenetic will do, “_because_ it is impossible.”
-
- So that apparently the knot of the crisis, and last agony of
- France is come? Make front to this, thou Improvised Commune,
- strong Danton, whatsoever man is strong! Readers can judge
- whether the Flag of Country in Danger flapped soothing or
- distractively on the souls of men, that day.
-
- But the Improvised Commune, but strong Danton is not wanting,
- each after his kind. Huge Placards are getting plastered to the
- walls; at two o’clock the stormbell shall be sounded, the
- alarm-cannon fired; all Paris shall rush to the Champ-de-Mars,
- and have itself enrolled. Unarmed, truly, and undrilled; but
- desperate, in the strength of frenzy. Haste, ye men; ye very
- women, offer to mount guard and shoulder the brown musket: weak
- clucking-hens, in a state of desperation, will fly at the muzzle
- of the mastiff, and even conquer him,—by vehemence of character!
- Terror itself, when once grown transcendental, becomes a kind of
- courage; as frost sufficiently intense, according to Poet Milton,
- will _burn_.—Danton, the other night, in the Legislative
- Committee of General Defence, when the other Ministers and
- Legislators had all opined, said, It would not do to quit Paris,
- and fly to Saumur; that they must abide by Paris; and take such
- attitude as would put their enemies in fear,—_faire peur;_ a word
- of his which has been often repeated, and reprinted—in
- italics.[527]
-
- At two of the clock, Beaurepaire, as we saw, has shot himself at
- Verdun; and over Europe, mortals are going in for afternoon
- sermon. But at Paris, all steeples are clangouring not for
- sermon; the alarm-gun booming from minute to minute;
- Champ-de-Mars and Fatherland’s Altar boiling with desperate
- terror-courage: what a _miserere_ going up to Heaven from this
- once Capital of the Most Christian King! The Legislative sits in
- alternate awe and effervescence; Vergniaud proposing that Twelve
- shall go and dig personally on Montmartre; which is decreed by
- acclaim.
-
- But better than digging personally with acclaim, see Danton
- enter;—the black brows clouded, the colossus-figure tramping
- heavy; grim energy looking from all features of the rugged man!
- Strong is that grim Son of France, and Son of Earth; a Reality
- and not a Formula he too; and surely now if ever, being hurled
- _low_ enough, it is on the Earth and on Realities that he rests.
- ‘Legislators!’ so speaks the stentor-voice, as the Newspapers yet
- preserve it for us, ‘it is not the alarm-cannon that you hear: it
- is the _pas-de-charge_ against our enemies. To conquer them, to
- hurl them back, what do we require? _Il nous faut de l’audace, et
- encore de l’audace, et toujours de l’audace_, To dare, and again
- to dare, and without end to dare!’[528]—Right so, thou brawny
- Titan; there is nothing left for thee but that. Old men, who
- heard it, will still tell you how the reverberating voice made
- all hearts swell, in that moment; and braced them to the
- sticking-place; and thrilled abroad over France, like electric
- virtue, as a word spoken in season.
-
- But the Commune, enrolling in the Champ-de-Mars? But the
- Committee of Watchfulness, become now Committee of Public
- Salvation; whose conscience is Marat? The Commune enrolling
- enrolls many; provides Tents for them in that Mars’-Field, that
- they may march with dawn on the morrow: praise to this part of
- the Commune! To Marat and the Committee of Watchfulness not
- praise;—not even blame, such as could be meted out in these
- insufficient dialects of ours; expressive silence rather! Lone
- Marat, the man forbid, meditating long in his Cellars of refuge,
- on his Stylites Pillar, could see salvation in one thing only: in
- the fall of “two hundred and sixty thousand Aristocrat heads.”
- With so many score of Naples Bravoes, each a dirk in his
- right-hand, a muff on his left, he would traverse France, and do
- it. But the world laughed, mocking the severe-benevolence of a
- People’s-Friend; and his idea could not become an action, but
- only a fixed-idea. Lo, now, however, he has come down from his
- Stylites Pillar, to a _Tribune particulière;_ here now, without
- the dirks, without the muffs at least, were it not grown
- possible,—now in the knot of the crisis, when salvation or
- destruction hangs in the hour!
-
- The Ice-Tower of Avignon was noised of sufficiently, and lives in
- all memories; but the authors were not punished: nay we saw
- Jourdan Coupe-tete, borne on men’s shoulders, like a copper
- Portent, “traversing the cities of the South.”—What phantasms,
- squalid-horrid, shaking their dirk and muff, may dance through
- the brain of a Marat, in this dizzy pealing of tocsin-miserere,
- and universal frenzy, seek not to guess, O Reader! Nor what the
- cruel Billaud “in his short brown coat was thinking;” nor
- Sergent, not yet _Agate_-Sergent; nor Panis the confident of
- Danton;—nor, in a word, how gloomy Orcus does breed in her gloomy
- womb, and fashion her monsters, and prodigies of Events, which
- thou seest her visibly bear! Terror is on these streets of Paris;
- terror and rage, tears and frenzy: tocsin-miserere pealing
- through the air; fierce desperation rushing to battle; mothers,
- with streaming eyes and wild hearts, sending forth their sons to
- die. “Carriage-horses are seized by the bridle,” that they may
- draw cannon; “the traces cut, the carriages left standing.” In
- such tocsin-miserere, and murky bewilderment of Frenzy, are not
- Murder, Ate, and all Furies near at hand? On slight hint, who
- knows on how slight, may not Murder come; and, with _her_
- snaky-sparkling hand, illuminate this murk!
-
- How it was and went, what part might be premeditated, what was
- improvised and accidental, man will never know, till the great
- Day of Judgment make it known. But with a Marat for keeper of the
- Sovereign’s Conscience—And we know what the _ultima ratio_ of
- Sovereigns, when they are driven to it, is! In this Paris there
- are as many wicked men, say a hundred or more, as exist in all
- the Earth: to be hired, and set on; to set on, of their own
- accord, unhired.—And yet we will remark that premeditation itself
- is not performance, is not surety of performance; that it is
- perhaps, at most, surety of _letting_ whosoever wills perform.
- From the purpose of crime to the act of crime there is an abyss;
- wonderful to think of. The finger lies on the pistol; but the man
- is not yet a murderer: nay, his whole nature staggering at such
- consummation, is there not a confused pause rather,—one last
- instant of possibility for him? Not yet a murderer; it is at the
- mercy of light trifles whether the most fixed idea may not yet
- become unfixed. One slight twitch of a muscle, the death flash
- bursts; and he is it, and will for Eternity be it;—and Earth has
- become a penal Tartarus for him; his horizon girdled now not with
- golden hope, but with red flames of remorse; voices from the
- depths of Nature sounding, Wo, wo on him!
-
- Of such stuff are we all made; on such powder-mines of bottomless
- guilt and criminality, “if God restrained not; as is well
- said,—does the purest of us walk. There are depths in man that go
- the length of lowest Hell, as there are heights that reach
- highest Heaven;—for are not both Heaven and Hell made out of him,
- made by him, everlasting Miracle and Mystery as he is?—But
- looking on this Champ-de-Mars, with its tent-buildings, and
- frantic enrolments; on this murky-simmering Paris, with its
- crammed Prisons (supposed about to burst), with its
- tocsin-miserere, its mothers’ tears, and soldiers’ farewell
- shoutings,—the pious soul might have prayed, that day, that God’s
- grace would restrain, and greatly restrain; lest on slight hest
- or hint, Madness, Horror and Murder rose, and this Sabbath-day of
- September became a Day black in the Annals of Men.—
-
- The tocsin is pealing its loudest, the clocks inaudibly striking
- _Three_, when poor Abbé Sicard, with some thirty other Nonjurant
- Priests, in six carriages, fare along the streets, from their
- preliminary House of Detention at the Townhall, westward towards
- the Prison of the Abbaye. Carriages enough stand deserted on the
- streets; these six move on,—through angry multitudes, cursing as
- they move. Accursed Aristocrat Tartuffes, this is the pass ye
- have brought us to! And now ye will break the Prisons, and set
- Capet Veto on horseback to ride over us? Out upon you, Priests of
- Beelzebub and Moloch; of Tartuffery, Mammon, and the Prussian
- Gallows,—which ye name Mother-Church and God! Such reproaches
- have the poor Nonjurants to endure, and worse; spoken in on them
- by frantic Patriots, who mount even on the carriage-steps; the
- very Guards hardly refraining. Pull up your carriage-blinds!—No!
- answers Patriotism, clapping its horny paw on the carriage blind,
- and crushing it down again. Patience in oppression has limits: we
- are close on the Abbaye, it has lasted long: a poor Nonjurant, of
- quicker temper, smites the horny paw with his cane; nay, finding
- solacement in it, smites the unkempt head, sharply and again more
- sharply, twice over,—seen clearly of us and of the world. It is
- the last that we see clearly. Alas, next moment, the carriages
- are locked and blocked in endless raging tumults; in yells deaf
- to the cry for mercy, which answer the cry for mercy with
- sabre-thrusts through the heart.[529] The thirty Priests are torn
- out, are massacred about the Prison-Gate, one after one,—only the
- poor Abbé Sicard, whom one Moton a watchmaker, knowing him,
- heroically tried to save, and secrete in the Prison, escapes to
- tell;—and it is Night and Orcus, and Murder’s snaky-sparkling
- head _has_ risen in the murk!—
-
- From Sunday afternoon (exclusive of intervals, and pauses not
- final) till Thursday evening, there follow consecutively a
- Hundred Hours. Which hundred hours are to be reckoned with the
- hours of the Bartholomew Butchery, of the Armagnac Massacres,
- Sicilian Vespers, or whatsoever is savagest in the annals of this
- world. Horrible the hour when man’s soul, in its paroxysm, spurns
- asunder the barriers and rules; and shews what dens and depths
- are in it! For Night and Orcus, as we say, as was long
- prophesied, have burst forth, here in this Paris, from their
- subterranean imprisonment: hideous, dim, confused; which it is
- painful to look on; and yet which cannot, and indeed which should
- not, be forgotten.
-
- The Reader, who looks earnestly through this dim Phantasmagory of
- the Pit, will discern few fixed certain objects; and yet still a
- few. He will observe, in this Abbaye Prison, the sudden massacre
- of the Priests being once over, a strange Court of Justice, or
- call it Court of Revenge and Wild-Justice, swiftly fashion
- itself, and take seat round a table, with the Prison-Registers
- spread before it;—Stanislas Maillard, Bastille-hero, famed Leader
- of the Menads, presiding. O Stanislas, one hoped to meet thee
- elsewhere than here; thou shifty Riding-Usher, with an inkling of
- Law! This work also thou hadst to do; and then—to depart for ever
- from our eyes. At _La Force_, at the _Châtelet_, the
- _Conciergerie_, the like Court forms itself, with the like
- accompaniments: the thing that one man does other men can do.
- There are some Seven Prisons in Paris, full of Aristocrats with
- conspiracies;—nay not even _Bicêtre_ and _Salpêtrière_ shall
- escape, with their Forgers of Assignats: and there are seventy
- times seven hundred Patriot hearts in a state of frenzy.
- Scoundrel hearts also there are; as perfect, say, as the Earth
- holds,—if such are needed. To whom, in this mood, law is as
- no-law; and killing, by what name soever called, is but work to
- be done.
-
- So sit these sudden Courts of Wild-Justice, with the
- Prison-Registers before them; unwonted wild tumult howling all
- round: the Prisoners in dread expectancy within. Swift: a name is
- called; bolts jingle, a Prisoner is there. A few questions are
- put; swiftly this sudden Jury decides: Royalist Plotter or not?
- Clearly not; in that case, Let the Prisoner be enlarged With
- _Vive la Nation_. Probably yea; then still, Let the Prisoner be
- enlarged, but without _Vive la Nation;_ or else it may run, Let
- the prisoner be conducted to La Force. At La Force again their
- formula is, Let the Prisoner be conducted to the Abbaye.—‘To La
- Force then!’ Volunteer bailiffs seize the doomed man; he is at
- the outer gate; “enlarged,” or “conducted,”—not into La Force,
- but into a howling sea; forth, under an arch of wild sabres, axes
- and pikes; and sinks, hewn asunder. And another sinks, and
- another; and there forms itself a piled heap of corpses, and the
- kennels begin to run red. Fancy the yells of these men, their
- faces of sweat and blood; the crueller shrieks of these women,
- for there are women too; and a fellow-mortal hurled naked into it
- all! Jourgniac de Saint Méard has seen battle, has seen an
- effervescent Regiment du Roi in mutiny; but the bravest heart may
- quail at this. The Swiss Prisoners, remnants of the Tenth of
- August, “clasped each other spasmodically,” and hung back; grey
- veterans crying: ‘Mercy Messieurs; ah, mercy!’ But there was no
- mercy. Suddenly, however, one of these men steps forward. He had
- a blue frock coat; he seemed to be about thirty, his stature was
- above common, his look noble and martial. ‘I go first,’ said he,
- ‘since it must be so: adieu!’ Then dashing his hat sharply behind
- him: ‘Which way?’ cried he to the Brigands: ‘Shew it me, then.’
- They open the folding gate; he is announced to the multitude. He
- stands a moment motionless; then plunges forth among the pikes,
- and dies of a thousand wounds.”[530]
-
- Man after man is cut down; the sabres need sharpening, the
- killers refresh themselves from wine jugs. Onward and onward goes
- the butchery; the loud yells wearying down into bass growls. A
- sombre-faced, shifting multitude looks on; in dull approval, or
- dull disapproval; in dull recognition that it is Necessity. “An
- _Anglais_ in drab greatcoat” was seen, or seemed to be seen,
- serving liquor from his own dram-bottle;—for what purpose, “if
- not set on by Pitt,” Satan and himself know best! Witty Dr. Moore
- grew sick on approaching, and turned into another
- street.[531]—Quick enough goes this Jury-Court; and rigorous. The
- brave are not spared, nor the beautiful, nor the weak. Old M. de
- Montmorin, the Minister’s Brother, was acquitted by the Tribunal
- of the Seventeenth; and conducted back, elbowed by howling
- galleries; but is not acquitted here. Princess de Lamballe has
- lain down on bed: ‘Madame, you are to be removed to the Abbaye.’
- ‘I do not wish to remove; I am well enough here.’ There is a
- need-be for removing. She will arrange her dress a little, then;
- rude voices answer, ‘You have not far to go.’ She too is led to
- the hell-gate; a manifest Queen’s-Friend. She shivers back, at
- the sight of bloody sabres; but there is no return: Onwards! That
- fair hindhead is cleft with the axe; the neck is severed. That
- fair body is cut in fragments; with indignities, and obscene
- horrors of moustachio _grands-lèvres_, which human nature would
- fain find incredible,—which shall be read in the original
- language only. She was beautiful, she was good, she had known no
- happiness. Young hearts, generation after generation, will think
- with themselves: O worthy of worship, thou king-descended,
- god-descended and poor sister-woman! why was not I there; and
- some Sword Balmung, or Thor’s Hammer in my hand? Her head is
- fixed on a pike; paraded under the windows of the Temple; that a
- still more hated, a Marie-Antoinette, may see. One Municipal, in
- the Temple with the Royal Prisoners at the moment, said, ‘Look
- out.’ Another eagerly whispered, ‘Do not look.’ The circuit of
- the Temple is guarded, in these hours, by a long stretched
- tricolor riband: terror enters, and the clangour of infinite
- tumult: hitherto not regicide, though that too may come.
-
- But it is more edifying to note what thrillings of affection,
- what fragments of wild virtues turn up, in this shaking asunder
- of man’s existence, for of these too there is a proportion. Note
- old Marquis Cazotte: he is doomed to die; but his young Daughter
- clasps him in her arms, with an inspiration of eloquence, with a
- love which is stronger than very death; the heart of the killers
- themselves is touched by it; the old man is spared. Yet he was
- guilty, if plotting for his King is guilt: in ten days more, a
- Court of Law condemned him, and he had to die elsewhere;
- bequeathing his Daughter a lock of his old grey hair. Or note old
- M. de Sombreuil, who also had a Daughter:—My Father is not an
- Aristocrat; O good gentlemen, I will swear it, and testify it,
- and in all ways prove it; we are not; we hate Aristocrats! ‘Wilt
- thou drink Aristocrats’ blood?’ The man lifts blood (if universal
- Rumour can be credited);[532] the poor maiden does drink. ‘This
- Sombreuil is innocent then!’ Yes indeed,—and now note, most of
- all, how the bloody pikes, at this news, do rattle to the ground;
- and the tiger-yells become bursts of jubilee over a brother
- saved; and the old man and his daughter are clasped to bloody
- bosoms, with hot tears, and borne home in triumph of _Vive la
- Nation_, the killers refusing even money! Does it seem strange,
- this temper of theirs? It seems very certain, well proved by
- Royalist testimony in other instances;[533] and very significant.
-
-
- Chapter 3.1.V.
- A Trilogy.
-
- As all Delineation, in these ages, were it never so Epic,
- “speaking itself and not singing itself,” must either found on
- Belief and provable Fact, or have no foundation at all (nor
- except as floating cobweb any existence at all),—the Reader will
- perhaps prefer to take a glance with the very eyes of
- eye-witnesses; and see, in that way, for himself, how it was.
- Brave Jourgniac, innocent Abbé Sicard, judicious Advocate Maton,
- these, greatly compressing themselves, shall speak, each an
- instant. Jourgniac’s _Agony of Thirty-eight Hours_ went through
- “above a hundred editions,” though intrinsically a poor work.
- Some portion of it may here go through above the
- hundred-and-first, for want of a better.
-
- “_Towards seven o’clock_” (Sunday night, at the Abbaye; for
- Jourgniac goes by dates): “We saw two men enter, their hands
- bloody and armed with sabres; a turnkey, with a torch, lighted
- them; he pointed to the bed of the unfortunate Swiss, Reding.
- Reding spoke with a dying voice. One of them paused; but the
- other cried _Allons donc;_ lifted the unfortunate man; carried
- him out on his back to the street. He was massacred there.
-
- “We all looked at one another in silence, we clasped each other’s
- hands. Motionless, with fixed eyes, we gazed on the pavement of
- our prison; on which lay the moonlight, checkered with the triple
- stancheons of our windows.
-
- “_Three in the morning:_ They were breaking-in one of the
- prison-doors. We at first thought they were coming to kill us in
- our room; but heard, by voices on the staircase, that it was a
- room where some Prisoners had barricaded themselves. They were
- all butchered there, as we shortly gathered.
-
- “_Ten o’clock:_ The Abbé Lenfant and the Abbé de Chapt-Rastignac
- appeared in the pulpit of the Chapel, which was our prison; they
- had entered by a door from the stairs. They said to us that our
- end was at hand; that we must compose ourselves, and receive
- their last blessing. An electric movement, not to be defined,
- threw us all on our knees, and we received it. These two
- whitehaired old men, blessing us from their place above; death
- hovering over our heads, on all hands environing us; the moment
- is never to be forgotten. Half an hour after, they were both
- massacred, and we heard their cries.”[534]—Thus Jourgniac in his
- _Agony_ in the Abbaye.
-
- But now let the good Maton speak, what he, over in La Force, in
- the same hours, is suffering and witnessing. This _Résurrection_
- by him is greatly the best, the least theatrical of these
- Pamphlets; and stands testing by documents:
-
- “Towards seven o’clock,” on Sunday night, “prisoners were called
- frequently, and they did not reappear. Each of us reasoned in his
- own way, on this singularity: but our ideas became calm, as we
- persuaded ourselves that the Memorial I had drawn up for the
- National Assembly was producing effect.
-
- “At one in the morning, the grate which led to our quarter opened
- anew. Four men in uniform, each with a drawn sabre and blazing
- torch, came up to our corridor, preceded by a turnkey; and
- entered an apartment close to ours, to investigate a box there,
- which we heard them break up. This done, they stept into the
- gallery, and questioned the man Cuissa, to know where Lamotte
- (Necklace’s Widower) was. Lamotte, they said, had some months
- ago, under pretext of a treasure he knew of, swindled a sum of
- three-hundred livres from one of them, inviting him to dinner for
- that purpose. The wretched Cuissa, now in their hands, who indeed
- lost his life this night, answered trembling, That he remembered
- the fact well, but could not tell what was become of Lamotte.
- Determined to find Lamotte and confront him with Cuissa, they
- rummaged, along with this latter, through various other
- apartments; but without effect, for we heard them say: ‘Come
- search among the corpses then: for, _nom de Dieu!_ we must find
- where he is.’
-
- “At this time, I heard Louis Bardy, the Abbé Bardy’s name called:
- he was brought out; and directly massacred, as I learnt. He had
- been accused, along with his concubine, five or six years before,
- of having murdered and cut in pieces his own Brother, Auditor of
- the _Chambre des Comptes_ of Montpelier; but had by his subtlety,
- his dexterity, nay his eloquence, outwitted the judges, and
- escaped.
-
- “One may fancy what terror these words, ‘Come search among the
- corpses then,’ had thrown me into. I saw nothing for it now but
- resigning myself to die. I wrote my last-will; concluding it by a
- petition and adjuration, that the paper should be sent to its
- address. Scarcely had I quitted the pen, when there came two
- other men in uniform; one of them, whose arm and sleeve up to the
- very shoulder, as well as the sabre, were covered with blood,
- said, He was as weary as a hodman that had been beating plaster.
-
- “Baudin de la Chenaye was called; sixty years of virtues could
- not save him. They said, ‘_À l’Abbaye:_’ he passed the fatal
- outer-gate; gave a cry of terror, at sight of the heaped corpses;
- covered his eyes with his hands, and died of innumerable wounds.
- At every new opening of the grate, I thought I should hear my own
- name called, and see Rossignol enter.
-
- “I flung off my nightgown and cap; I put on a coarse unwashed
- shirt, a worn frock without waistcoat, an old round hat; these
- things I had sent for, some days ago, in the fear of what might
- happen.
-
- “The rooms of this corridor had been all emptied but ours. We
- were four together; whom they seemed to have forgotten: we
- addressed our prayers in common to the Eternal to be delivered
- from this peril.
-
- “Baptiste the turnkey came up by himself, to see us. I took him
- by the hands; I conjured him to save us; promised him a hundred
- louis, if he would conduct me home. A noise coming from the
- grates made him hastily withdraw.
-
- “It was the noise of some dozen or fifteen men, armed to the
- teeth; as we, lying flat to escape being seen, could see from our
- windows: ‘Up stairs!’ said they: ‘Let not one remain.’ I took out
- my penknife; I considered where I should strike myself,”—but
- reflected “that the blade was too short,” and also “on religion.”
-
- Finally, however, between seven and eight o’clock in the morning,
- enter four men with bludgeons and sabres!—“to one of whom Gerard
- my comrade whispered, earnestly, apart. During their colloquy I
- searched every where for shoes, that I might lay off the Advocate
- pumps (_pantoufles de Palais_) I had on,” but could find
- none.—“Constant, called le Sauvage, Gerard, and a third whose
- name escapes me, they let clear off: as for me, four sabres were
- crossed over my breast, and they led me down. I was brought to
- their bar; to the Personage with the scarf, who sat as judge
- there. He was a lame man, of tall lank stature. He recognised me
- on the streets, and spoke to me seven months after. I have been
- assured that he was son of a retired attorney, and named Chepy.
- Crossing the Court called _Des Nourrices_, I saw Manuel
- haranguing in tricolor scarf.” The trial, as we see, ends in
- acquittal and _resurrection_.[535]
-
- Poor Sicard, from the _violon_ of the Abbaye, shall say but a few
- words; true-looking, though tremulous. Towards three in the
- morning, the killers bethink them of this little _violon;_ and
- knock from the court. “I tapped gently, trembling lest the
- murderers might hear, on the opposite door, where the Section
- Committee was sitting: they answered gruffly that they had no
- key. There were three of us in this _violon;_ my companions
- thought they perceived a kind of loft overhead. But it was very
- high; only one of us could reach it, by mounting on the shoulders
- of both the others. One of them said to me, that my life was
- usefuller than theirs: I resisted, they insisted: no denial! I
- fling myself on the neck of these two deliverers; never was scene
- more touching. I mount on the shoulders of the first, then on
- those of the second, finally on the loft; and address to my two
- comrades the expression of a soul overwhelmed with natural
- emotions.[536]
-
- The two generous companions, we rejoice to find, did not perish.
- But it is time that Jourgniac de Saint-Méard should speak his
- last words, and end this singular trilogy. The night had become
- day; and the day has again become night. Jourgniac, worn down
- with uttermost agitation, has fallen asleep, and had a cheering
- dream: he has also contrived to make acquaintance with one of the
- volunteer bailiffs, and spoken in native Provençal with him. On
- Tuesday, about one in the morning, his _Agony_ is reaching its
- crisis.
-
- “By the glare of two torches, I now descried the terrible
- tribunal, where lay my life or my death. The President, in grey
- coats, with a sabre at his side, stood leaning with his hands
- against a table, on which were papers, an inkstand, tobacco-pipes
- and bottles. Some ten persons were around, seated or standing;
- two of whom had jackets and aprons: others were sleeping
- stretched on benches. Two men, in bloody shirts, guarded the door
- of the place; an old turnkey had his hand on the lock. In front
- of the President, three men held a Prisoner, who might be about
- sixty” (or seventy: he was old Marshal Maillé, of the Tuileries
- and August Tenth). “They stationed me in a corner; my guards
- crossed their sabres on my breast. I looked on all sides for my
- Provençal: two National Guards, one of them drunk, presented some
- appeal from the Section of Croix Rouge in favour of the Prisoner;
- the Man in Grey answered: ‘They are useless, these appeals for
- traitors.’ Then the Prisoner exclaimed: ‘It is frightful; your
- judgment is a murder.’ The President answered; ‘My hands are
- washed of it; take M. Maillé away.’ They drove him into the
- street; where, through the opening of the door, I saw him
- massacred.
-
- “The President sat down to write; registering, I suppose, the
- name of this one whom they had finished; then I heard him say:
- ‘Another, _À un autre!_’
-
- “Behold me then haled before this swift and bloody judgment-bar,
- where the best protection was to have no protection, and all
- resources of ingenuity became null if they were not founded on
- truth. Two of my guards held me each by a hand, the third by the
- collar of my coat. ‘Your name, your profession?’ said the
- President. ‘The smallest lie ruins you,’ added one of the
- judges,—‘My name is Jourgniac Saint-Méard; I have served, as an
- officer, twenty years: and I appear at your tribunal with the
- assurance of an innocent man, who therefore will not lie.’—‘We
- shall see that,’ said the President: ‘Do you know why you are
- arrested?’—‘Yes, Monsieur le President; I am accused of editing
- the Journal _De la Cour et de la Ville_. But I hope to prove the
- falsity’”—
-
- But no; Jourgniac’s proof of the falsity, and defence generally,
- though of excellent result as a defence, is not interesting to
- read. It is long-winded; there is a loose theatricality in the
- reporting of it, which does not amount to unveracity, yet which
- tends that way. We shall suppose him successful, beyond hope, in
- proving and disproving; and skip largely,—to the catastrophe,
- almost at two steps.
-
- “‘But after all,’ said one of the Judges, ‘there is no smoke
- without kindling; tell us why they accuse you of that.’—‘I was
- about to do so’”—Jourgniac does so; with more and more success.
-
- “‘Nay,’ continued I, ‘they accuse me even of recruiting for the
- Emigrants!’ At these words there arose a general murmur. ‘O
- Messieurs, Messieurs,’ I exclaimed, raising my voice, ‘it is my
- turn to speak; I beg M. le President to have the kindness to
- maintain it for me; I never needed it more.’—‘True enough, true
- enough,’ said almost all the judges with a laugh: ‘Silence!’
-
- “While they were examining the testimonials I had produced, a new
- Prisoner was brought in, and placed before the President. ‘It was
- one Priest more,’ they said, ‘whom they had ferreted out of the
- Chapelle.’ After very few questions: ‘_À la Force!_’ He flung his
- breviary on the table: was hurled forth, and massacred. I
- reappeared before the tribunal.
-
- “‘You tell us always,’ cried one of the judges, with a tone of
- impatience, ‘that you are not this, that you are not that: what
- are you then?’—‘I was an open Royalist.’—There arose a general
- murmur; which was miraculously appeased by another of the men,
- who had seemed to take an interest in me: ‘We are not here to
- judge opinions,’ said he, ‘but to judge the results of them.’
- Could Rousseau and Voltaire both in one, pleading for me, have
- said better?—‘Yes, Messieurs,’ cried I, ‘always till the Tenth of
- August, I was an open Royalist. Ever since the Tenth of August
- that cause has been finished. I am a Frenchman, true to my
- country. I was always a man of honour.’
-
- “‘My soldiers never distrusted me. Nay, two days before that
- business of Nanci, when their suspicion of their officers was at
- its height, they chose me for commander, to lead them to
- Lunéville, to get back the prisoners of the Regiment
- Mestre-de-Camp, and seize General Malseigne.’” Which fact there
- is, most luckily, an individual present who by a certain token
- can confirm.
-
- “The President, this cross-questioning being over, took off his
- hat and said: ‘I see nothing to suspect in this man; I am for
- granting him his liberty. Is that your vote?’ To which all the
- judges answered: ‘_Oui, oui;_ it is just!’”
-
- And there arose vivats within doors and without; “escort of
- three,” amid shoutings and embracings: thus Jourgniac escaped
- from jury-trial and the jaws of death.[537] Maton and Sicard did,
- either by trial, and no bill found, lank President Chepy finding
- “absolutely nothing;” or else by evasion, and new favour of Moton
- the brave watchmaker, likewise escape; and were embraced, and
- wept over; weeping in return, as they well might.
-
- Thus they three, in wondrous trilogy, or triple soliloquy;
- uttering simultaneously, through the dread night-watches, their
- Night-thoughts,—grown audible to us! They Three are become
- audible: but the other “Thousand and Eighty-nine, of whom Two
- Hundred and Two were Priests,” who also had Night-thoughts,
- remain inaudible; choked for ever in black Death. Heard only of
- President Chepy and the Man in Grey!—
-
-
- Chapter 3.1.VI.
- The Circular.
-
- But the Constituted Authorities, all this while? The Legislative
- Assembly; the Six Ministers; the Townhall; Santerre with the
- National Guard?—It is very curious to think what a City is.
- Theatres, to the number of some twenty-three, were open every
- night during these prodigies: while right-arms here grew weary
- with slaying, right-arms there are twiddledeeing on melodious
- catgut; at the very instant when Abbé Sicard was clambering up
- his second pair of shoulders, three-men high, five hundred
- thousand human individuals were lying horizontal, as if nothing
- were amiss.
-
- As for the poor Legislative, the sceptre had departed from it.
- The Legislative did send Deputation to the Prisons, to the
- Street-Courts; and poor M. Dusaulx did harangue there; but
- produced no conviction whatsoever: nay, at last, as he continued
- haranguing, the Street-Court interposed, not without threats; and
- he had to cease, and withdraw. This is the same poor worthy old
- M. Dusaulx who told, or indeed almost sang (though with cracked
- voice), the _Taking of the Bastille_,—to our satisfaction long
- since. He was wont to announce himself, on such and on all
- occasions, as _the Translator of Juvenal_. ‘Good Citizens, you
- see before you a man who loves his country, who is the Translator
- of Juvenal,’ said he once.—‘Juvenal?’ interrupts Sansculottism:
- ‘who the devil is Juvenal? One of your _sacrés Aristocrates?_ To
- the _Lanterne!_’ From an orator of this kind, conviction was not
- to be expected. The Legislative had much ado to save one of its
- own Members, or Ex-Members, Deputy Journeau, who chanced to be
- lying in arrest for mere Parliamentary delinquencies, in these
- Prisons. As for poor old Dusaulx and Company, they returned to
- the Salle de Manége, saying, ‘It was dark; and they could not see
- well what was going on.’[538]
-
- Roland writes indignant messages, in the name of Order, Humanity,
- and the Law; but there is no Force at his disposal. Santerre’s
- National Force seems lazy to rise; though he made requisitions,
- he says,—which always dispersed again. Nay did not we, with
- Advocate Maton’s eyes, see ‘men in uniform,’ too, with their
- ‘sleeves bloody to the shoulder?’ Pétion goes in tricolor scarf;
- speaks ‘the austere language of the law:’ the killers give up,
- while he is there; when his back is turned, recommence. Manuel
- too in scarf we, with Maton’s eyes, transiently saw haranguing,
- in the Court called of Nurses, _Cour des Nourrices_. On the other
- hand, cruel Billaud, likewise in scarf, “with that small puce
- coat and black wig we are used to on him,”[539] audibly delivers,
- “standing among corpses,” at the Abbaye, a short but
- ever-memorable harangue, reported in various phraseology, but
- always to this purpose: ‘Brave Citizens, you are extirpating the
- Enemies of Liberty; you are at your duty. A grateful Commune, and
- Country, would wish to recompense you adequately; but cannot, for
- you know its want of funds. Whoever shall have worked
- (_travaillé_) in a Prison shall receive a draft of one louis,
- payable by our cashier. Continue your work.’[540]—The Constituted
- Authorities are of yesterday; all pulling different ways: there
- is properly not Constituted Authority, but every man is his own
- King; and all are kinglets, belligerent, allied, or
- armed-neutral, without king over them.
-
- “O everlasting infamy,” exclaims Montgaillard, “that Paris stood
- looking on in stupor for four days, and did not interfere!” Very
- desirable indeed that Paris had interfered; yet not unnatural
- that it stood even so, looking on in stupor. Paris is in
- death-panic, the enemy and gibbets at its door: whosoever in
- Paris has the heart to front death finds it more pressing to do
- it fighting the Prussians, than fighting the killers of
- Aristocrats. Indignant abhorrence, as in Roland, may be here;
- gloomy sanction, premeditation or not, as in Marat and Committee
- of Salvation, may be there; dull disapproval, dull approval, and
- acquiescence in Necessity and Destiny, is the general temper. The
- Sons of Darkness, “two hundred or so,” risen from their
- lurking-places, have scope to do their work. Urged on by
- fever-frenzy of Patriotism, and the madness of Terror;—urged on
- by lucre, and the gold louis of wages? Nay, not lucre: for the
- gold watches, rings, money of the Massacred, are punctually
- brought to the Townhall, by Killers sans-indispensables, who
- higgle afterwards for their twenty shillings of wages; and
- Sergent sticking an uncommonly fine agate on his finger (“fully
- meaning to account for it”), becomes _Agate_-Sergent. But the
- temper, as we say, is dull acquiescence. Not till the Patriotic
- or Frenetic part of the work is finished for want of material;
- and Sons of Darkness, bent clearly on lucre alone, begin
- wrenching watches and purses, brooches from ladies’ necks “to
- equip volunteers,” in daylight, on the streets,—does the temper
- from dull grow vehement; does the Constable raise his truncheon,
- and striking heartily (like a cattle-driver in earnest) beat the
- “course of things” back into its old regulated drove-roads. The
- _Garde-Meuble_ itself was surreptitiously plundered, on the 17th
- of the Month, to Roland’s new horror; who anew bestirs himself,
- and is, as Sieyes says, “the veto of scoundrels,” Roland _veto
- des coquins_.[541]—
-
- This is the September Massacre, otherwise called “Severe Justice
- of the People.” These are the Septemberers (_Septembriseurs_); a
- name of some note and lucency,—but lucency of the Nether-fire
- sort; very different from that of our Bastille Heroes, who shone,
- disputable by no Friend of Freedom, as in heavenly
- light-radiance: to such phasis of the business have we advanced
- since then! The numbers massacred are, in Historical _fantasy_,
- “between two and three thousand;” or indeed they are “upwards of
- six thousand,” for Peltier (in vision) saw them massacring the
- very patients of the Bicêtre Madhouse “with grape-shot;” nay
- finally they are “twelve thousand” and odd hundreds,—not more
- than that.[542] In Arithmetical ciphers, and Lists drawn up by
- accurate Advocate Maton, the number, including two hundred and
- two priests, three “persons unknown,” and “one thief killed at
- the Bernardins,” is, as above hinted, a Thousand and
- Eighty-nine,—no less than that.
-
- A thousand and eighty-nine lie dead, “two hundred and sixty
- heaped carcasses on the Pont au Change” itself;—among which,
- Robespierre pleading afterwards will “nearly weep” to reflect
- that there was said to be one slain innocent.[543] One; not two,
- O thou seagreen Incorruptible? If so, Themis Sansculotte must be
- lucky; for she was brief!—In the dim Registers of the Townhall,
- which are preserved to this day, men read, with a certain
- sickness of heart, items and entries not usual in Town Books: “To
- workers employed in preserving the salubrity of the air in the
- Prisons, and persons “who presided over these dangerous
- operations,” so much,—in various items, nearly seven hundred
- pounds sterling. To carters employed to “the Burying-grounds of
- Clamart, Montrouge, and Vaugirard,” at so much a journey, per
- cart; this also is an entry. Then so many francs and odd sous
- “for the necessary quantity of quick-lime!”[544] Carts go along
- the streets; full of stript human corpses, thrown pellmell; limbs
- sticking up:—seest thou that cold Hand sticking up, through the
- heaped embrace of brother corpses, in its yellow paleness, in its
- cold rigour; the palm opened towards Heaven, as if in dumb
- prayer, in expostulation _de profundis_, Take pity on the Sons of
- Men!—Mercier saw it, as he walked down “the Rue Saint-Jacques
- from Montrouge, on the morrow of the Massacres:” but not a Hand;
- it was a Foot,—which he reckons still more significant, one
- understands not well why. Or was it as the Foot of one _spurning_
- Heaven? Rushing, like a wild diver, in disgust and despair,
- towards the depths of Annihilation? Even there shall His hand
- find thee, and His right-hand hold thee,—surely for right not for
- wrong, for good not evil! “I saw that Foot,” says Mercier; “I
- shall know it again at the great Day of Judgment, when the
- Eternal, throned on his thunders, shall judge both Kings and
- Septemberers.”[545]
-
- That a shriek of inarticulate horror rose over this thing, not
- only from French Aristocrats and Moderates, but from all Europe,
- and has prolonged itself to the present day, was most natural and
- right. The thing lay done, irrevocable; a thing to be counted
- besides some other things, which lie very black in our Earth’s
- Annals, yet which will not erase therefrom. For man, as was
- remarked, has transcendentalisms in him; standing, as he does,
- poor creature, every way “in the confluence of Infinitudes;” a
- mystery to himself and others: in the centre of two Eternities,
- of three Immensities,—in the intersection of primeval Light with
- the everlasting dark! Thus have there been, especially by
- vehement tempers reduced to a state of desperation, very
- miserable things done. Sicilian Vespers, and “eight thousand
- slaughtered in two hours,” are a known thing. Kings themselves,
- not in desperation, but only in difficulty, have sat hatching,
- for year and day (nay De Thou says, for seven years), their
- Bartholomew Business; and then, at the right moment, also on an
- Autumn Sunday, this very Bell (they say it is the identical
- metal) of St. Germain l’Auxerrois was set a-pealing—with
- effect.[546] Nay the same black boulder-stones of these Paris
- Prisons have seen Prison-massacres before now; men massacring
- countrymen, Burgundies massacring Armagnacs, whom they had
- suddenly imprisoned, till as now there are piled heaps of
- carcasses, and the streets ran red;—the Mayor Pétion of the time
- speaking the austere language of the law, and answered by the
- Killers, in old French (it is some four hundred years old):
- ‘_Maugré bieu, Sire_,—Sir, God’s malison on your justice, your
- pity, your right reason. Cursed be of God whoso shall have pity
- on these false traitorous Armagnacs, English; dogs they are; they
- have destroyed us, wasted this realm of France, and sold it to
- the English.’[547] And so they slay, and fling aside the slain,
- to the extent of “fifteen hundred and eighteen, among whom are
- found four Bishops of false and damnable counsel, and two
- Presidents of Parlement.” For though it is not Satan’s world this
- that we live in, Satan always has his place in it (underground
- properly); and from time to time bursts up. Well may mankind
- shriek, inarticulately anathematising as they can. There are
- actions of such emphasis that no shrieking can be too emphatic
- for them. Shriek ye; acted have they.
-
- Shriek who might in this France, in this Paris Legislative or
- Paris Townhall, there are Ten Men who do not shriek. A Circular
- goes out from the Committee of _Salut Public_, dated 3rd of
- September 1792; directed to all Townhalls: a State-paper too
- remarkable to be overlooked. “A part of the ferocious
- conspirators detained in the Prisons,” it says, “have been put to
- death by the People; and it,” the Circular, “cannot doubt but the
- whole Nation, driven to the edge of ruin by such endless series
- of treasons, will make haste to adopt _this_ means of public
- salvation; and all Frenchmen will cry as the men of Paris: We go
- to fight the enemy, but we will not leave robbers behind us, to
- butcher our wives and children.” To which are legibly appended
- these signatures: Panis, Sergent; Marat, Friend of the
- People;[548] with Seven others;—carried down thereby, in a
- strange way, to the late remembrance of Antiquarians. We remark,
- however, that their Circular rather recoiled on themselves. The
- Townhalls made no use of it; even the distracted Sansculottes
- made little; they only howled and bellowed, but did not bite. At
- Rheims “about eight persons” were killed; and two afterwards were
- hanged for doing it. At Lyons, and a few other places, some
- attempt was made; but with hardly any effect, being quickly put
- down.
-
- Less fortunate were the Prisoners of Orléans; was the good Duke
- de la Rochefoucault. He journeying, by quick stages, with his
- Mother and Wife, towards the Waters of Forges, or some quieter
- country, was arrested at Gisors; conducted along the streets,
- amid effervescing multitudes, and killed dead “by the stroke of a
- paving-stone hurled through the coach-window.” Killed as a once
- Liberal now Aristocrat; Protector of Priests, Suspender of
- virtuous Pétions, and his unfortunate Hot-grown-cold, detestable
- to Patriotism. He dies lamented of Europe; his blood spattering
- the cheeks of his old Mother, ninety-three years old.
-
- As for the Orléans Prisoners, they are State Criminals: Royalist
- Ministers, Delessarts, Montmorins; who have been accumulating on
- the High Court of Orléans, ever since that Tribunal was set up.
- Whom now it seems good that we should get transferred to our new
- Paris Court of the Seventeenth; which proceeds far quicker.
- Accordingly hot Fournier from Martinique, Fournier _l’Americain_,
- is off, missioned by Constituted Authority; with stanch National
- Guards, with Lazouski the Pole; sparingly provided with
- road-money. These, through bad quarters, through difficulties,
- perils, for Authorities cross each other in this time,—do
- triumphantly bring off the Fifty or Fifty-three Orléans
- Prisoners, towards Paris; where a swifter Court of the
- Seventeenth will do justice on them.[549] But lo, at Paris, in
- the interim, a still swifter and swiftest Court of the _Second_,
- and of _September_, has instituted itself: enter not Paris, or
- that will judge you!—What shall hot Fournier do? It was his duty,
- as volunteer Constable, had he been a perfect character, to guard
- those men’s lives never so Aristocratic, at the expense of his
- own valuable life never so Sansculottic, till some Constituted
- Court had disposed of them. But he was an imperfect character and
- Constable; perhaps one of the more imperfect.
-
- Hot Fournier, ordered to turn thither by one Authority, to turn
- thither by another Authority, is in a perplexing multiplicity of
- orders; but finally he strikes off for Versailles. His Prisoners
- fare in tumbrils, or open carts, himself and Guards riding and
- marching around: and at the last village, the worthy Mayor of
- Versailles comes to meet him, anxious that the arrival and
- locking up were well over. It is Sunday, the ninth day of the
- month. Lo, on entering the Avenue of Versailles, what multitudes,
- stirring, swarming in the September sun, under the dull-green
- September foliage; the Four-rowed Avenue all humming and
- swarming, as if the Town had emptied itself! Our tumbrils roll
- heavily through the living sea; the Guards and Fournier making
- way with ever more difficulty; the Mayor speaking and gesturing
- his persuasivest; amid the inarticulate growling hum, which
- growls ever the deeper even by hearing itself growl, not without
- sharp yelpings here and there:—Would to God we were out of this
- strait place, and wind and separation had cooled the heat, which
- seems about igniting here!
-
- And yet if the wide Avenue is too strait, what will the Street
- _de Surintendance_ be, at leaving of the same? At the corner of
- Surintendance Street, the compressed yelpings became a continuous
- yell: savage figures spring on the tumbril-shafts; first spray of
- an endless coming tide! The Mayor pleads, pushes, half-desperate;
- is pushed, carried off in men’s arms: the savage tide has
- entrance, has mastery. Amid horrid noise, and tumult as of fierce
- wolves, the Prisoners sink massacred,—all but some eleven, who
- escaped into houses, and found mercy. The Prisons, and what other
- Prisoners they held, were with difficulty saved. The stript
- clothes are burnt in bonfire; the corpses lie heaped in the ditch
- on the morrow morning.[550] All France, except it be the Ten Men
- of the Circular and their people, moans and rages, inarticulately
- shrieking; all Europe rings.
-
- But neither did Danton shriek; though, as Minister of Justice, it
- was more his part to do so. Brawny Danton is in the breach, as of
- stormed Cities and Nations; amid the Sweep of Tenth-of-August
- cannon, the rustle of Prussian gallows-ropes, the smiting of
- September sabres; destruction all round him, and the rushing-down
- of worlds: Minister of Justice is his name; but Titan of the
- Forlorn Hope, and _Enfant Perdu_ of the Revolution, is his
- quality,—and the man acts according to that. ‘We must put our
- enemies in fear!’ Deep fear, is it not, as of its own accord,
- falling on our enemies? The Titan of the Forlorn Hope, he is not
- the man that would swiftest of all prevent its so falling.
- Forward, thou lost Titan of an _Enfant Perdu;_ thou must dare,
- and again dare, and without end dare; there is nothing left for
- thee but that! ‘_Que mon nom soit flétri_, Let my name be
- blighted:’ what am I? The Cause alone is great; and shall live,
- and not perish.—So, on the whole, here too is a swallower of
- Formulas; of still wider gulp than Mirabeau: this Danton,
- Mirabeau of the Sansculottes. In the September days, this
- Minister was not heard of as co-operating with strict Roland; his
- business might lie elsewhere,—with Brunswick and the
- Hôtel-de-Ville. When applied to by an official person, about the
- Orleans Prisoners, and the risks they ran, he answered gloomily,
- twice over, ‘Are not these men guilty?’—When pressed, he
- “answered in a terrible voice,” and turned his back.[551] Two
- Thousand slain in the Prisons; horrible if you will: but
- Brunswick is within a day’s journey of us; and there are Five-and
- twenty Millions yet, to slay or to save. Some men have
- tasks,—frightfuller than ours! It seems strange, but is not
- strange, that this Minister of Moloch-Justice, when any suppliant
- for a friend’s life got access to him, was found to have human
- compassion; and yielded and granted “always;” “neither did one
- personal enemy of Danton perish in these days.”[552]
-
- To shriek, we say, when certain things are acted, is proper and
- unavoidable. Nevertheless, articulate speech, not shrieking, is
- the faculty of man: when speech is not yet possible, let there
- be, with the shortest delay, at least—silence. Silence,
- accordingly, in this forty-fourth year of the business, and
- eighteen hundred and thirty-sixth of an “Era called Christian as
- _lucus à non_,” is the thing we recommend and practise. Nay,
- instead of shrieking more, it were perhaps edifying to remark, on
- the other side, what a singular thing Customs (in Latin, _Mores_)
- are; and how fitly the Virtue, _Vir-tus_, Manhood or Worth, that
- is in a man, is called his _Morality_, or _Customariness_. Fell
- Slaughter, one the most authentic products of the Pit you would
- say, once give it Customs, becomes War, with Laws of War; and is
- Customary and Moral enough; and red individuals carry the tools
- of it girt round their haunches, not without an air of
- pride,—which do thou nowise blame. While, see! so long as it is
- but dressed in hodden or russet; and Revolution, less frequent
- than War, has not yet got its Laws of Revolution, but the hodden
- or russet individuals are Uncustomary—O shrieking beloved brother
- blockheads of Mankind, let us close those wide mouths of ours;
- let us cease shrieking, and begin considering!
-
-
- Chapter 3.1.VII.
- September in Argonne.
-
- Plain, at any rate, is one thing: that the _fear_, whatever of
- fear those Aristocrat enemies might need, has been brought about.
- The matter is getting serious then! Sansculottism too has become
- a Fact, and seems minded to assert itself as such? This huge
- mooncalf of Sansculottism, staggering about, as young calves do,
- is not mockable only, and soft like another calf; but terrible
- too, if you prick it; and, through its hideous nostrils, blows
- fire!—Aristocrats, with pale panic in their hearts, fly towards
- covert; and a light rises to them over several things; or rather
- a confused transition towards light, whereby for the moment
- darkness is only darker than ever. But, What will become of this
- France? Here is a question! France is dancing its desert-waltz,
- as Sahara does when the winds waken; in whirlblasts twenty-five
- millions in number; waltzing towards Townhalls, Aristocrat
- Prisons, and Election Committee-rooms; towards Brunswick and the
- Frontiers;—towards a New Chapter of Universal History; if indeed
- it be not the _Finis_, and winding-up of that!
-
- In Election Committee-rooms there is now no dubiety; but the work
- goes bravely along. The Convention is getting chosen,—really in a
- decisive spirit; in the Townhall we already date _First year of
- the Republic_. Some Two hundred of our best Legislators may be
- re-elected, the Mountain bodily: Robespierre, with Mayor Pétion,
- Buzot, Curate Grégoire, Rabaut, some three score
- Old-Constituents; though we once had only “thirty voices.” All
- these; and along with them, friends long known to Revolutionary
- fame: Camille Desmoulins, though he stutters in speech; Manuel,
- Tallien and Company; Journalists Gorsas, Carra, Mercier, Louvet
- of _Faublas;_ Clootz Speaker of Mankind; Collot d’Herbois,
- tearing a passion to rags; Fabre d’Eglantine, speculative
- Pamphleteer; Legendre the solid Butcher; nay Marat, though rural
- France can hardly believe it, or even believe that there _is_ a
- Marat except in print. Of Minister Danton, who will lay down his
- Ministry for a Membership, we need not speak. Paris is fervent;
- nor is the Country wanting to itself. Barbaroux, Rebecqui, and
- fervid Patriots are coming from Marseilles. Seven hundred and
- forty-five men (or indeed forty-nine, for Avignon now sends Four)
- are gathering: so many are to meet; not so many are to part!
-
- Attorney Carrier from Aurillac, Ex-Priest Lebon from Arras, these
- shall both gain a _name_. Mountainous Auvergne re-elects her
- Romme: hardy tiller of the soil, once Mathematical Professor;
- who, unconscious, carries in petto a remarkable _New Calendar_,
- with Messidors, Pluvioses, and such like;—and having given it
- well forth, shall depart by the death they call Roman. Sieyes
- old-Constituent comes; to make new Constitutions as many as
- wanted: for the rest, peering out of his clear cautious eyes, he
- will cower low in many an emergency, and find silence safest.
- Young Saint-Just is coming, deputed by Aisne in the North; more
- like a Student than a Senator: not four-and-twenty yet; who has
- written Books; a youth of slight stature, with mild mellow voice,
- enthusiast olive-complexion, and long dark hair. Féraud, from the
- far valley D’Aure in the folds of the Pyrenees, is coming; an
- ardent Republican; doomed to fame, at least in death.
-
- All manner of Patriot men are coming: Teachers, Husbandmen,
- Priests and Ex-Priests, Traders, Doctors; above all, Talkers, or
- the Attorney-species. Man-midwives, as Levasseur of the Sarthe,
- are not wanting. Nor Artists: gross David, with the swoln cheek,
- has long painted, with genius in a state of convulsion; and will
- now legislate. The swoln cheek, choking his words in the birth,
- totally disqualifies him as orator; but his pencil, his head, his
- gross hot heart, with genius in a state of convulsion, will be
- there. A man bodily and mentally swoln-cheeked, disproportionate;
- flabby-large, instead of great; weak withal as in a state of
- convulsion, not strong in a state of composure: so let him play
- his part. Nor are naturalised Benefactors of the Species
- forgotten: Priestley, elected by the Orne Department, but
- declining: Paine the rebellious Needleman, by the Pas de Calais,
- who accepts.
-
- Few Nobles come, and yet not none. Paul François Barras, “noble
- as the Barrases, old as the rocks of Provence;” he is one. The
- reckless, shipwrecked man: flung ashore on the coast of the
- Maldives long ago, while sailing and soldiering as Indian
- Fighter; flung ashore since then, as hungry Parisian
- Pleasure-hunter and Half-pay, on many a Circe Island, with
- temporary enchantment, temporary conversion into beasthood and
- hoghood;—the remote Var Department has now sent him hither. A man
- of heat and haste; defective in utterance; defective indeed in
- any thing to utter; yet not without a certain rapidity of glance,
- a certain swift transient courage; who, in these times, Fortune
- favouring, may go far. He is tall, handsome to the eye, “only the
- complexion a little yellow;” but “with a robe of purple with a
- scarlet cloak and plume of tricolor, on occasions of solemnity,”
- the man will look well.[553] Lepelletier Saint-Fargeau,
- Old-Constituent, is a kind of noble, and of enormous wealth; he
- too has come hither:—to have the Pain of Death _abolished?_
- Hapless Ex-Parlementeer! Nay, among our Sixty Old-Constituents,
- see Philippe d’Orléans a Prince of the Blood! Not now
- _D’Orléans:_ for, Feudalism being swept from the world, he
- demands of his worthy friends the Electors of Paris, to have a
- new name of their choosing; whereupon Procureur Manuel, like an
- antithetic literary man, recommends _Equality_, Egalité. A
- Philippe Egalité therefore will sit; seen of the Earth and
- Heaven.
-
- Such a Convention is gathering itself together. Mere angry
- poultry in moulting season; whom Brunswick’s grenadiers and
- cannoneers will give short account of. Would the weather only
- mend a little![554]
-
- In vain, O Bertrand! The weather will not mend a whit:—nay even
- if it did? Dumouriez Polymetis, though Bertrand knows it not,
- started from brief slumber at Sedan, on that morning of the 29th
- of August; with stealthiness, with promptitude, audacity. Some
- three mornings after that, Brunswick, opening wide eyes,
- perceives the Passes of the Argonne all seized; blocked with
- felled trees, fortified with camps; and that it is a most shifty
- swift Dumouriez this, who has outwitted him!
-
- The manœuvre may cost Brunswick “a loss of three weeks,” very
- fatal in these circumstances. A Mountain-wall of forty miles
- lying between him and Paris: which he should have
- preoccupied;—which how now to get possession of? Also the rain it
- raineth every day; and we are in a hungry Champagne Pouilleuse, a
- land flowing only with ditch-water. How to cross this
- Mountain-wall of the Argonne; or what in the world to do with
- it?—there are marchings and wet splashings by steep paths, with
- _sackerments_ and guttural interjections; forcings of Argonne
- Passes,—which unhappily will not force. Through the woods,
- volleying War reverberates, like huge gong-music, or Moloch’s
- kettledrum, borne by the echoes; swoln torrents boil angrily
- round the foot of rocks, floating pale carcasses of men. In vain!
- Islettes Village, with its church-steeple, rises intact in the
- Mountain-pass, between the embosoming heights; your forced
- marchings and climbings have become forced slidings, and
- tumblings back. From the hill-tops thou seest nothing but dumb
- crags, and endless wet moaning woods; the Clermont _Vache_ (huge
- Cow that she is) disclosing herself[555] at intervals; flinging
- off her cloud-blanket, and soon taking it on again, drowned in
- the pouring Heaven. The Argonne Passes will not force: you must
- _skirt_ the Argonne; go round by the end of it.
-
- But fancy whether the Emigrant Seigneurs have not got their
- brilliancy dulled a little; whether that “Foot Regiment in
- red-facings with nankeen trousers” could be in field-day order!
- In place of gasconading, a sort of desperation, and hydrophobia
- from _excess_ of water, is threatening to supervene. Young Prince
- de Ligne, son of that brave literary De Ligne the Thundergod of
- Dandies, fell backwards; shot dead in Grand-Pré, the Northmost of
- the Passes: Brunswick is skirting and rounding, laboriously, by
- the extremity of the South. Four days; days of a rain as of
- Noah,—without fire, without food! For fire you cut down green
- trees, and produce smoke; for food you eat green grapes, and
- produce colic, pestilential dysentery, ὀλέκοντο δὲ λαοί. And the
- Peasants assassinate us, they do not join us; shrill women cry
- shame on us, threaten to draw their very scissors on us! O ye
- hapless dulled-bright Seigneurs, and hydrophobic splashed
- Nankeens;—but O, ten times more, ye poor _sackerment_ing
- ghastly-visaged Hessians and Hulans, fallen on your backs; who
- had no call to die there, except compulsion and three-halfpence
- a-day! Nor has Mrs. Le Blanc of the Golden Arm a good time of it,
- in her bower of dripping rushes. Assassinating Peasants are
- hanged; Old-Constituent Honourable members, though of venerable
- age, ride in carts with their hands tied; these are the woes of
- war.
-
- Thus they; sprawling and wriggling, far and wide, on the slopes
- and passes of the Argonne;—a loss to Brunswick of five-and-twenty
- disastrous days. There is wriggling and struggling; facing,
- backing, and right-about facing; as the positions shift, and the
- Argonne gets partly rounded, partly forced:—but still Dumouriez,
- force him, round him as you will, sticks like a rooted fixture on
- the ground; fixture with many _hinges;_ wheeling now this way,
- now that; shewing always new front, in the most unexpected
- manner: nowise consenting to take himself away. Recruits stream
- up on him: full of heart; yet rather difficult to deal with.
- Behind Grand-Pré, for example, Grand-Pré which is on the
- wrong-side of the Argonne, for we are now forced and rounded,—the
- full heart, in one of those wheelings and shewings of new front,
- did as it were overset itself, as full hearts are liable to do;
- and there rose a shriek of _sauve qui peut_, and a death-panic
- which had nigh ruined all! So that the General had to come
- galloping; and, with thunder-words, with gesture, stroke of drawn
- sword even, check and rally, and bring back the sense of
- shame;[556]—nay to seize the first shriekers and ringleaders;
- “shave their heads and eyebrows,” and pack them forth into the
- world as a sign. Thus too (for really the rations are short, and
- wet camping with hungry stomach brings bad humour) there is like
- to be mutiny. Whereupon again Dumouriez “arrives at the head of
- their line, with his staff, and an escort of a hundred huzzars.
- He had placed some squadrons behind them, the artillery in front;
- he said to them: ‘As for you, for I will neither call you
- citizens, nor soldiers, nor my men (_ni mes enfans_), you see
- before you this artillery, behind you this cavalry. You have
- dishonoured yourselves by crimes. If you amend, and grow to
- behave like this brave Army which you have the honour of
- belonging to, you will find in me a good father. But plunderers
- and assassins I do not suffer here. At the smallest mutiny I will
- have you shivered in pieces (_hacher en pièces_). Seek out the
- scoundrels that are among you, and dismiss them yourselves; I
- hold you responsible for them.’”[557]
-
- Patience, O Dumouriez! This uncertain heap of shriekers,
- mutineers, were they once drilled and inured, will become a
- phalanxed mass of Fighters; and wheel and whirl, to order,
- swiftly like the wind or the whirlwind: tanned mustachio-figures;
- often barefoot, even bare-backed; with sinews of iron; who
- require only bread and gunpowder: very Sons of Fire, the
- adroitest, hastiest, hottest ever seen perhaps since Attila’s
- time. They may conquer and overrun amazingly, much as that same
- Attila did;—whose Attila’s-Camp and Battlefield thou now seest,
- on this very ground;[558] who, after sweeping bare the world,
- was, with difficulty, and days of tough fighting, checked _here_
- by Roman Ætius and Fortune; and his dust-cloud made to vanish in
- the East again!—
-
- Strangely enough, in this shrieking Confusion of a Soldiery,
- which we saw long since fallen all suicidally out of square in
- suicidal collision,—at Nanci, or on the streets of Metz, where
- brave Bouillé stood with drawn sword; and which has collided and
- ground itself to pieces worse and worse ever since, down now to
- such a state: in this shrieking Confusion, and not elsewhere,
- lies the first germ of returning Order for France! Round which,
- we say, poor France nearly all ground down suicidally likewise
- into rubbish and Chaos, will be glad to rally; to begin growing,
- and new-shaping her inorganic dust: very slowly, through
- centuries, through Napoleons, Louis Philippes, and other the like
- media and phases,—into a new, infinitely preferable France, we
- can hope!—
-
- These wheelings and movements in the region of the Argonne, which
- are all faithfully described by Dumouriez himself, and more
- interesting to us than Hoyle’s or Philidor’s best Game of Chess,
- let us, nevertheless, O Reader, entirely omit;—and hasten to
- remark two things: the first a minute private, the second a large
- public thing. Our minute private thing is: the presence, in the
- Prussian host, in that war-game of the Argonne, of a certain Man,
- belonging to the sort called Immortal; who, in days since then,
- is becoming visible more and more, in that character, as the
- Transitory more and more vanishes; for from of old it was
- remarked that when the Gods appear among men, it is seldom in
- recognisable shape; thus Admetus“ neatherds give Apollo a draught
- of their goatskin whey-bottle (well if they do not give him
- strokes with their ox-rungs), not dreaming that he is the Sungod!
- This man’s name is _Johann Wolfgang von Goethe_. He is Herzog
- Weimar’s Minister, come with the small contingent of Weimar; to
- do insignificant unmilitary duty here; very irrecognizable to
- nearly all! He stands at present, with drawn bridle, on the
- height near Saint-Menehould, making an experiment on the
- “cannon-fever;” having ridden thither against persuasion, into
- the dance and firing of the cannon-balls, with a scientific
- desire to understand what that same cannon-fever may be: “The
- sound of them,” says he, “is curious enough; as if it were
- compounded of the humming of tops, the gurgling of water and the
- whistle of birds. By degrees you get a very uncommon sensation;
- which can only be described by similitude. It seems as if you
- were in some place extremely hot, and at the same time were
- completely penetrated by the heat of it; so that you feel as if
- you and this element you are in were perfectly on a par. The
- eyesight loses nothing of its strength or distinctness; and yet
- it is as if all things had got a kind of brown-red colour, which
- makes the situation and the objects still more impressive on
- you.”[559]
-
- This is the cannon-fever, as a World-Poet feels it.—A man
- entirely irrecognisable! In whose irrecognisable head, meanwhile,
- there verily is the spiritual counterpart (and call it
- complement) of this same huge Death-Birth of the World; which now
- effectuates itself, outwardly in the Argonne, in such
- cannon-thunder; inwardly, in the irrecognisable head, quite
- otherwise than by thunder! Mark that man, O Reader, as the
- memorablest of all the memorable in this Argonne Campaign. What
- we say of him is not dream, nor flourish of rhetoric; but
- scientific historic fact; as many men, now at this distance, see
- or begin to see.
-
- But the large public thing we had to remark is this: That the
- Twentieth of September, 1792, was a raw morning covered with
- mist; that from three in the morning Sainte-Menehould, and those
- Villages and homesteads we know of old were stirred by the rumble
- of artillery-wagons, by the clatter of hoofs, and many footed
- tramp of men: all manner of military, Patriot and Prussian,
- taking up positions, on the Heights of La Lune and other Heights;
- shifting and shoving,—seemingly in some dread chess-game; which
- may the Heavens turn to good! The Miller of Valmy has fled dusty
- under ground; his Mill, were it never so windy, will have rest
- today. At seven in the morning the mist clears off: see
- Kellermann, Dumouriez’ second in command, with “eighteen pieces
- of cannon,” and deep-serried ranks, drawn up round that same
- silent Windmill, on his knoll of strength; Brunswick, also, with
- serried ranks and cannon, glooming over to him from the height of
- La Lune; only the little brook and its little dell now parting
- them.
-
- So that the much-longed-for has come at last! Instead of hunger
- and dysentery, we shall have sharp shot; and then!—Dumouriez,
- with force and firm front, looks on from a neighbouring height;
- can help only with his wishes, in silence. Lo, the eighteen
- pieces do bluster and bark, responsive to the bluster of La Lune;
- and thunder-clouds mount into the air; and echoes roar through
- all dells, far into the depths of Argonne Wood (deserted now);
- and limbs and lives of men fly dissipated, this way and that. Can
- Brunswick make an impression on them? The dull-bright Seigneurs
- stand biting their thumbs: these Sansculottes seem not to fly
- like poultry! Towards noontide a cannon-shot blows Kellermann’s
- horse from under him; there bursts a powder-cart high into the
- air, with knell heard over all: some swagging and swaying
- observable;—Brunswick will try! ‘_Camarades_,’ cries Kellermann,
- ‘_Vive la Patrie! Allons vaincre pour elle_, Let us conquer.’
- ‘Live the Fatherland!’ rings responsive, to the welkin, like
- rolling-fire from side to side: our ranks are as firm as rocks;
- and Brunswick may _re_cross the dell, ineffectual; regain his old
- position on La Lune; not unbattered by the way. And so, for the
- length of a September day,—with bluster and bark; with bellow far
- echoing! The cannonade lasts till sunset; and no impression made.
- Till an hour after sunset, the few remaining Clocks of the
- District striking Seven; at this late time of day Brunswick tries
- again. With not a whit better fortune! He is met by rock-ranks,
- by shouts of _Vive la Patrie;_ and driven back, not unbattered.
- Whereupon he ceases; retires “to the Tavern of La Lune;” and sets
- to raising a redoute lest _he_ be attacked!
-
- Verily so: ye dulled-bright Seigneurs, make of it what ye may.
- Ah, and France does not rise round us in mass; and the Peasants
- do not join us, but assassinate us: neither hanging nor any
- persuasion will induce them! They have lost their old
- distinguishing love of King, and King’s-cloak,—I fear,
- altogether; and will even fight to be rid of it: that seems now
- their humour. Nor does Austria prosper, nor the siege of
- Thionville. The Thionvillers, carrying their insolence to the
- epigrammatic pitch, have put a Wooden Horse on their walls, with
- a bundle of hay hung from him, and this Inscription: “When I
- finish my hay, you will take Thionville.”[560] To such height has
- the frenzy of mankind risen.
-
- The trenches of Thionville may shut: and what though those of
- Lille open? The Earth smiles not on us, nor the Heaven; but weeps
- and blears itself, in sour rain, and worse. Our very friends
- insult us; we are wounded in the house of our friends: ‘His
- Majesty of Prussia had a greatcoat, when the rain came; and
- (contrary to all known laws) he put it on, though our two French
- Princes, the hope of their country, had none!’ To which indeed,
- as Goethe admits, what answer could be made?[561]—Cold and Hunger
- and Affront, Colic and Dysentery and Death; and we here, cowering
- _redouted_, most unredoubtable, amid the “tattered corn-shocks
- and deformed stubble,” on the splashy Height of La Lune, round
- the mean Tavern de La Lune!—
-
- This is the Cannonade of Valmy; wherein the World-Poet
- experimented on the cannon-fever; wherein the French Sansculottes
- did not fly like poultry. Precious to France! Every soldier did
- his duty, and Alsatian Kellermann (how preferable to old Lückner
- the dismissed!) began to become greater; and _Égalité Fils_,
- Equality Junior, a light gallant Field-Officer, distinguished
- himself by intrepidity:—it is the same intrepid individual who
- now, as Louis-Philippe, without the Equality, struggles, under
- sad circumstances, to be called King of the French for a season.
-
-
- Chapter 3.1.VIII.
- Exeunt.
-
- But this Twentieth of September is otherwise a great day. For,
- observe, while Kellermann’s horse was flying blown from under him
- at the Mill of Valmy, our new National Deputies, that shall be a
- NATIONAL CONVENTION, are hovering and gathering about the Hall of
- the Hundred Swiss; with intent to constitute themselves!
-
- On the morrow, about noontide, Camus the Archivist is busy
- “verifying their powers;” several hundreds of them already here.
- Whereupon the Old Legislative comes solemnly over, to merge its
- old ashes phœnix-like in the body of the new;—and so forthwith,
- returning all solemnly back to the Salle de Manége, there sits a
- National Convention, Seven Hundred and Forty-nine complete, or
- complete enough; presided by Pétion;—which proceeds directly to
- do business. Read that reported afternoon’s-debate, O Reader;
- there are few debates like it: dull reporting _Moniteur_ itself
- becomes more dramatic than a very Shakespeare. For epigrammatic
- Manuel rises, speaks strange things; how the President shall have
- a guard of honour, and lodge in the Tuileries:—_rejected_. And
- Danton rises and speaks; and Collot d’Herbois rises, and Curate
- Gregoire, and lame Couthon of the Mountain rises; and in rapid
- Melibœan stanzas, only a few lines each, they propose motions not
- a few: That the corner-stone of our new Constitution is
- Sovereignty of the People; that our Constitution shall be
- accepted by the People or be null; further that the People ought
- to be avenged, and have right Judges; that the Imposts must
- continue till new order; that Landed and other Property be sacred
- forever; finally that “Royalty from this day is abolished in
- France:”—_Decreed_ all, before four o’clock strike, with
- acclamation of the world![562] The tree was all so ripe; only
- shake it and there fall such yellow cart-loads.
-
- And so over in the Valmy Region, as soon as the news come, what
- stir is this, audible, visible from our muddy heights of La
- Lune?[563] Universal shouting of the French on their opposite
- hillside; caps raised on bayonets; and a sound as of _République;
- Vive la République_ borne dubious on the winds!—On the morrow
- morning, so to speak, Brunswick slings his knapsacks before day,
- lights any fires he has; and marches without tap of drum.
- Dumouriez finds ghastly symptoms in that camp; “_latrines_ full
- of blood!”[564] The chivalrous King of Prussia, for he as we saw
- is here in person, may long rue the day; may look colder than
- ever on these dulled-bright Seigneurs, and French Princes their
- Country’s hope;—and, on the whole, put on his great-coat without
- ceremony, happy that he has one. They retire, all retire with
- convenient despatch, through a Champagne trodden into a quagmire,
- the wild weather pouring on them; Dumouriez through his
- Kellermanns and Dillons pricking them a little in the hinder
- parts. A little, not much; now pricking, now negotiating: for
- Brunswick has his eyes opened; and the Majesty of Prussia is a
- repentant Majesty.
-
- Nor has Austria prospered, nor the Wooden Horse of Thionville
- bitten his hay; nor Lille City surrendered itself. The Lille
- trenches opened, on the 29th of the month; with balls and shells,
- and redhot balls; as if not trenches but Vesuvius and the Pit had
- opened. It was frightful, say all eye-witnesses; but it is
- ineffectual. The Lillers have risen to such temper; especially
- after these news from Argonne and the East. Not a
- Sans-indispensables in Lille that would surrender for a King’s
- ransom. Redhot balls rain, day and night; “six-thousand,” or so,
- and bombs “filled internally with oil of turpentine which
- splashes up in flame;”—mainly on the dwellings of the
- Sansculottes and Poor; the streets of the Rich being spared. But
- the Sansculottes get water-pails; form quenching-regulations,
- ‘The ball is in Peter’s house!’ ‘The ball is in John’s!’ They
- divide their lodging and substance with each other; shout _Vive
- la République_; and faint not in heart. A ball thunders through
- the main chamber of the Hôtel-de-Ville, while the Commune is
- there assembled: ‘We are in permanence,’ says one, coldly,
- proceeding with his business; and the ball remains permanent too,
- sticking in the wall, probably to this day.[565]
-
- The Austrian Archduchess (Queen’s Sister) will herself see red
- artillery fired; in their over-haste to satisfy an Archduchess
- “two mortars explode and kill thirty persons.” It is in vain;
- Lille, often burning, is always quenched again; Lille will not
- yield. The very boys deftly wrench the matches out of fallen
- bombs: “a man clutches a rolling ball with his hat, which takes
- fire; when cool, they crown it with a _bonnet rouge_.” Memorable
- also be that nimble Barber, who when the bomb burst beside him,
- snatched up a shred of it, introduced soap and lather into it,
- crying, ‘_Voilà mon plat à barbe_, My new shaving-dish!’ and
- shaved “fourteen people” on the spot. Bravo, thou nimble Shaver;
- worthy to shave old spectral Redcloak, and find treasures!—On the
- eighth day of this desperate siege, the sixth day of October,
- Austria finding it fruitless, draws off, with no pleasurable
- consciousness; rapidly, Dumouriez tending thitherward; and Lille
- too, black with ashes and smoulder, but jubilant skyhigh, flings
- its gates open. The _Plat à barbe_ became fashionable; “no
- Patriot of an elegant turn,” says Mercier several years
- afterwards, “but shaves himself out of the splinter of a Lille
- bomb.”
-
- _Quid multa_, Why many words? The Invaders are in flight;
- Brunswick’s Host, the third part of it gone to death, staggers
- disastrous along the deep highways of Champagne; spreading out
- also into “the fields, of a tough spongy red-coloured clay;—like
- Pharaoh through a Red Sea of mud,” says Goethe; “for he also lay
- broken chariots, and riders and foot seemed sinking around.”[566]
- On the eleventh morning of October, the World-Poet, struggling
- Northwards out of Verdun, which he had entered Southwards, some
- five weeks ago, in quite other order, discerned the following
- Phenomenon and formed part of it:
-
- “Towards three in the morning, without having had any sleep, we
- were about mounting our carriage, drawn up at the door; when an
- insuperable obstacle disclosed itself: for there rolled on
- already, between the pavement-stones which were crushed up into a
- ridge on each side, an uninterrupted column of sick-wagons
- through the Town, and all was trodden as into a morass. While we
- stood waiting what could be made of it, our Landlord the Knight
- of Saint-Louis pressed past us, without salutation.” He had been
- a Calonne’s Notable in 1787, an Emigrant since; had returned to
- his home, jubilant, with the Prussians; but must now forth again
- into the wide world, “followed by a servant carrying a little
- bundle on his stick.
-
- “The activity of our alert Lisieux shone eminent; and, on this
- occasion too, brought us on: for he struck into a small gap of
- the wagon-row; and held the advancing team back till we, with our
- six and our four horses, got intercalated; after which, in my
- light little coachlet, I could breathe freer. We were now under
- way; at a funeral pace, but still under way. The day broke; we
- found ourselves at the outlet of the Town, in a tumult and
- turmoil without measure. All sorts of vehicles, few horsemen,
- innumerable foot-people, were crossing each other on the great
- esplanade before the Gate. We turned to the right, with our
- Column, towards Estain, on a limited highway, with ditches at
- each side. Self-preservation, in so monstrous a press, knew now
- no pity, no respect of aught. Not far before us there fell down a
- horse of an ammunition-wagon: they cut the traces, and let it
- lie. And now as the three others could not bring their load
- along, they cut them also loose, tumbled the heavy-packed vehicle
- into the ditch; and, with the smallest retardation, we had to
- drive on, right over the horse, which was just about to rise; and
- I saw too clearly how its legs, under the wheels, went crashing
- and quivering.
-
- “Horse and foot endeavoured to escape from the narrow laborious
- highway into the meadows: but these too were rained to ruin;
- overflowed by full ditches, the connexion of the footpaths every
- where interrupted. Four gentlemanlike, handsome, well-dressed
- French soldiers waded for a time beside our carriage; wonderfully
- clean and neat: and had such art of picking their steps, that
- their foot-gear testified no higher than the ancle to the muddy
- pilgrimage these good people found themselves engaged in.
-
- “That under such circumstances one saw, in ditches, in meadows,
- in fields and crofts, dead horses enough, was natural to the
- case: by and by, however, you found them also flayed, the fleshy
- parts even cut away; sad token of the universal distress.
-
- “Thus we fared on; every moment in danger, at the smallest
- stoppage on our own part, of being ourselves tumbled overboard;
- under which circumstances, truly, the careful dexterity of our
- Lisieux could not be sufficiently praised. The same talent shewed
- itself at Estain; where we arrived towards noon; and descried,
- over the beautiful well-built little Town, through streets and on
- squares, around and beside us, one sense-confusing tumult: the
- mass rolled this way and that; and, all struggling forward, each
- hindered the other. Unexpectedly our carriage drew up before a
- stately house in the market-place; master and mistress of the
- mansion saluted us in reverent distance.” Dexterous Lisieux,
- though we knew it not, had said we were the King of Prussia’s
- Brother!
-
- “But now, from the ground-floor windows, looking over the whole
- market-place, we had the endless tumult lying, as it were,
- palpable. All sorts of walkers, soldiers in uniform, marauders,
- stout but sorrowing citizens and peasants, women and children,
- crushed and jostled each other, amid vehicles of all forms:
- ammunition-wagons, baggage-wagons; carriages, single, double, and
- multiplex; such hundredfold miscellany of teams, requisitioned or
- lawfully owned, making way, hitting together, hindering each
- other, rolled here to right and to left. Horned-cattle too were
- struggling on; probably herds that had been put in requisition.
- Riders you saw few; but the elegant carriages of the Emigrants,
- many-coloured, lackered, gilt and silvered, evidently by the best
- builders, caught your eye.[567]
-
- “The crisis of the strait however arose further on a little;
- where the crowded market-place had to introduce itself into a
- street,—straight indeed and good, but proportionably far too
- narrow. I have, in my life, seen nothing like it: the aspect of
- it might perhaps be compared to that of a swoln river which has
- been raging over meadows and fields, and is now again obliged to
- press itself through a narrow bridge, and flow on in its bounded
- channel. Down the long street, all visible from our windows,
- there swelled continually the strangest tide: a high
- double-seated travelling-coach towered visible over the flood of
- things. We thought of the fair Frenchwomen we had seen in the
- morning. It was not they, however, it was Count Haugwitz; him you
- could look at, with a kind of sardonic malice, rocking onwards,
- step by step, there.”[568]
-
- In such untriumphant Procession has the Brunswick Manifesto
- issued! Nay in worse, “in Negotiation with these miscreants,”—the
- first news of which produced such a revulsion in the Emigrant
- nature, as put our scientific World-Poet “in fear for the wits of
- several.”[569] There is no help: they must fare on, these poor
- Emigrants, angry with all persons and things, and making all
- persons angry, in the hapless course they struck into. Landlord
- and landlady testify to you, at _tables-d’hôte_, how
- insupportable these Frenchmen are: how, in spite of such
- humiliation, of poverty and probable beggary, there is ever the
- same struggle for precedence, the same forwardness, and want of
- discretion. High in honour, at the head of the table, you with
- your own eyes observe not a Seigneur but the automaton of a
- Seigneur, fallen into dotage; still worshipped, reverently waited
- on, and fed. In miscellaneous seats, is a miscellany of soldiers,
- commissaries, adventurers; consuming silently their barbarian
- victuals. “On all brows is to be read a hard destiny; all are
- silent, for each has his own sufferings to bear, and looks forth
- into misery without bounds.” One hasty wanderer, coming in, and
- eating without ungraciousness what is set before him, the
- landlord lets off almost scot-free. ‘He is,’ whispered the
- landlord to me, ‘the first of these cursed people I have seen
- condescend to taste our German black bread.’[570]
-
- And Dumouriez is in Paris; lauded and feasted; paraded in
- glittering saloons, floods of beautifullest blond-dresses and
- broadcloth-coats flowing past him, endless, in admiring joy. One
- night, nevertheless, in the splendour of one such scene, he sees
- himself suddenly apostrophised by a squalid unjoyful Figure, who
- has come in _un_invited, nay despite of all lackeys; an unjoyful
- Figure! The Figure is come ‘in express mission from the
- Jacobins,’ to inquire sharply, better then than later, touching
- certain things: ‘Shaven eyebrows of Volunteer Patriots, for
- instance?’ Also ‘your threats of shivering in pieces?’ Also, ‘why
- you have not chased Brunswick hotly enough?’ Thus, with sharp
- croak, inquires the Figure.—‘_Ah, c’est vous qu’on appelle
- Marat_, You are he they call Marat!’ answers the General, and
- turns coldly on his heel.[571]—‘Marat!’ The blonde-gowns quiver
- like aspens; the dress-coats gather round; Actor Talma (for it is
- his house), and almost the very chandelier-lights, are blue: till
- this obscene Spectrum, or visual Appearance, vanish back into
- native Night.
-
- General Dumouriez, in few brief days, is gone again, towards the
- Netherlands; will attack the Netherlands, winter though it be.
- And General Montesquiou, on the South-East, has driven in the
- Sardinian Majesty; nay, almost without a shot fired, has taken
- Savoy from him, which longs to become a piece of the Republic.
- And General Custine, on the North-East, has dashed forth on
- Spires and its Arsenal; and then on Electoral Mentz, not
- uninvited, wherein are German Democrats and no shadow of an
- Elector now:—so that in the last days of October, Frau Forster, a
- daughter of Heyne’s, somewhat democratic, walking out of the Gate
- of Mentz with her Husband, finds French Soldiers playing at bowls
- with cannon-balls there. Forster trips cheerfully over one iron
- bomb, with ‘Live the Republic!’ A black-bearded National Guard
- answers: ‘_Elle vivra bien sans vous_, It will probably live
- independently of you!’[572]
-
-
- BOOK 3.II.
- REGICIDE
-
-
- Chapter 3.2.I.
- The Deliberative.
-
- France therefore has done two things very completely: she has
- hurled back her Cimmerian Invaders far over the marches; and
- likewise she has shattered her own internal Social Constitution,
- even to the minutest fibre of it, into wreck and dissolution.
- Utterly it is all altered: from King down to Parish Constable,
- all Authorities, Magistrates, Judges, persons that bore rule,
- have had, on the sudden, to alter themselves, so far as needful;
- or else, on the sudden, and not without violence, to be altered:
- a Patriot “Executive Council of Ministers,” with a Patriot Danton
- in it, and then a whole Nation and National Convention, have
- taken care of that. Not a Parish Constable, in the furthest
- hamlet, who has said _De Par le Roi_, and shewn loyalty, but must
- retire, making way for a new improved Parish Constable who can
- say _De par la République._
-
- It is a change such as History must beg her readers to imagine,
- _un_described. An instantaneous change of the whole body-politic,
- the soul-politic being all changed; such a change as few bodies,
- politic or other, can experience in this world. Say perhaps, such
- as poor Nymph Semele’s body did experience, when she would needs,
- with woman’s humour, see her Olympian Jove as very Jove;—and so
- stood, poor Nymph, this moment Semele, next moment not Semele,
- but Flame and a Statue of red-hot Ashes! France has looked upon
- Democracy; seen it face to face.—The Cimmerian Invaders will
- rally, in humbler temper, with better or worse luck: the wreck
- and dissolution must reshape itself into a social Arrangement as
- it can and may. But as for this National Convention, which is to
- settle every thing, if it do, as Deputy Paine and France
- generally expects, get all finished “in a few months,” we shall
- call it a most deft Convention.
-
- In truth, it is very singular to see how this mercurial French
- People plunges suddenly from _Vive le Roi_ to _Vive la
- République;_ and goes simmering and dancing; shaking off daily
- (so to speak), and trampling into the dust, its old social
- garnitures, ways of thinking, rules of existing; and cheerfully
- dances towards the Ruleless, Unknown, with such hope in its
- heart, and nothing but _Freedom, Equality and Brotherhood_ in its
- mouth. Is it two centuries, or is it only two years, since all
- France roared simultaneously to the welkin, bursting forth into
- sound and smoke at its _Feast of Pikes_, ‘Live the Restorer of
- French Liberty?’ Three short years ago there was still Versailles
- and an Œil-de-Bœuf: now there is that watched Circuit of the
- Temple, girt with dragon-eyed Municipals, where, as in its final
- limbo, Royalty lies extinct. In the year 1789, Constituent Deputy
- Barrère “wept,” in his _Break-of-Day_ Newspaper, at sight of a
- reconciled King Louis; and now in 1792, Convention Deputy
- Barrère, perfectly tearless, may be considering, whether the
- reconciled King Louis shall be guillotined or not.
-
- Old garnitures and social vestures drop off (we say) so fast,
- being indeed quite decayed, and are trodden under the National
- dance. And the new vestures, where are they; the new modes and
- rules? Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: not vestures but the wish
- for vestures! The Nation is for the present, figuratively
- speaking, _naked!_ It has no rule or vesture; but is naked,—a
- Sansculottic Nation.
-
- So far, therefore, in such manner have our Patriot Brissots,
- Guadets triumphed. Vergniaud’s Ezekiel-visions of the fall of
- thrones and crowns, which he spake hypothetically and
- prophetically in the Spring of the year, have suddenly come to
- fulfilment in the Autumn. Our eloquent Patriots of the
- Legislative, like strong Conjurors, by the word of their mouth,
- have swept Royalism with its old modes and formulas to the winds;
- and shall now govern a France free of formulas. Free of formulas!
- And yet man lives not except with formulas; with customs, _ways_
- of doing and living: no text truer than this; which will hold
- true from the Tea-table and Tailor’s shopboard up to the High
- Senate-houses, Solemn Temples; nay through all provinces of Mind
- and Imagination, onwards to the outmost confines of articulate
- Being,—_Ubi homines sunt modi sunt._ There are modes wherever
- there are men. It is the deepest law of man’s nature; whereby man
- is a craftsman and “tool-using animal;” not the slave of Impulse,
- Chance, and Brute Nature, but in some measure their lord.
- Twenty-five millions of men, suddenly stript bare of their
- _modi_, and dancing them down in that manner, are a terrible
- thing to govern!
-
- Eloquent Patriots of the Legislative, meanwhile, have precisely
- this problem to solve. Under the name and nickname of “statesmen,
- _hommes d’état_,” of “moderate-men, _modérantins_,” of
- Brissotins, Rolandins, finally of _Girondins_, they shall become
- world-famous in solving it. For the Twenty-five millions are
- Gallic effervescent too;—filled both with hope of the
- unutterable, of universal Fraternity and Golden Age; and with
- terror of the unutterable, Cimmerian Europe all rallying on us.
- It is a problem like few. Truly, if man, as the Philosophers
- brag, did to any extent look before and after, what, one may ask,
- in many cases would become of him? What, in this case, would
- become of these Seven Hundred and Forty-nine men? The Convention,
- seeing clearly before and after, were a paralysed Convention.
- Seeing clearly to the length of its own nose, it is not
- paralysed.
-
- To the Convention itself neither the work nor the method of doing
- it is doubtful: To make the Constitution; to defend the Republic
- till that be made. Speedily enough, accordingly, there has been a
- “Committee of the Constitution” got together. Sieyes,
- Old-Constituent, Constitution-builder by trade; Condorcet, fit
- for better things; Deputy Paine, foreign Benefactor of the
- Species, with that “red carbuncled face, and the black beaming
- eyes;” Hérault de Séchelles, Ex-Parlementeer, one of the
- handsomest men in France: these, with inferior guild-brethren,
- are girt cheerfully to the work; will once more “make the
- Constitution;” let us hope, more effectually than last time. For
- that the Constitution can be made, who doubts,—unless the Gospel
- of Jean Jacques came into the world in vain? True, our last
- Constitution did tumble within the year, so lamentably. But what
- then, except sort the rubbish and boulders, and build them up
- again better? “Widen your basis,” for one thing,—to Universal
- Suffrage, if need be; exclude rotten materials, Royalism and such
- like, for another thing. And in brief, _build_, O unspeakable
- Sieyes and Company, unwearied! Frequent perilous downrushing of
- scaffolding and rubble-work, be that an irritation, no
- discouragement. Start ye always again, clearing aside the wreck;
- if with broken limbs, yet with whole hearts; and build, we say,
- in the name of Heaven,—till either the work do stand; or else
- mankind abandon it, and the Constitution-builders be paid off,
- with laughter and tears! One good time, in the course of
- Eternity, it was appointed that this of Social Contract too
- should try itself out. And so the Committee of Constitution shall
- toil: with hope and faith;—with no disturbance from any reader of
- these pages.
-
- To make the Constitution, then, and return home joyfully in a few
- months: this is the prophecy our National Convention gives of
- itself; by this scientific program shall its operations and
- events go on. But from the best scientific program, in such a
- case, to the actual fulfilment, what a difference! Every reunion
- of men, is it not, as we often say, a reunion of incalculable
- Influences; every unit of it a microcosm of Influences;—of which
- how shall Science calculate or prophesy! Science, which cannot,
- with all its calculuses, differential, integral, and of
- variations, calculate the Problem of Three gravitating Bodies,
- ought to hold her peace here, and say only: In this National
- Convention there are Seven Hundred and Forty-nine very singular
- Bodies, that gravitate and do much else;—who, probably in an
- amazing manner, will work the appointment of Heaven.
-
- Of National Assemblages, Parliaments, Congresses, which have long
- sat; which are of saturnine temperament; above all, which are not
- “dreadfully in earnest,” something may be computed or
- conjectured: yet even these are a kind of Mystery in
- progress,—whereby we see the Journalist Reporter find livelihood:
- even these jolt madly out of the ruts, from time to time. How
- much more a poor National Convention, of French vehemence; urged
- on at such velocity; without routine, without rut, track or
- landmark; and dreadfully in earnest every man of them! It is a
- Parliament literally such as there was never elsewhere in the
- world. Themselves are new, unarranged; they are the Heart and
- presiding centre of a France fallen wholly into maddest
- disarrangement. From all cities, hamlets, from the utmost ends of
- this France with its Twenty-five million vehement souls,
- thick-streaming influences storm in on that same Heart, in the
- Salle de Manége, and storm out again: such fiery venous-arterial
- circulation is the function of that Heart. Seven Hundred and
- Forty-nine human individuals, we say, never sat together on
- Earth, under more original circumstances. Common individuals most
- of them, or not far from common; yet in virtue of the position
- they occupied, so notable. How, in this wild piping of the
- whirlwind of human passions, with death, victory, terror, valour,
- and all height and all depth pealing and piping, these men, left
- to their own guidance, will speak and act?
-
- Readers know well that this French National Convention (quite
- contrary to its own Program) became the astonishment and horror
- of mankind; a kind of Apocalyptic Convention, or black _Dream
- become real;_ concerning which History seldom speaks except in
- the way of interjection: how it covered France with woe,
- delusion, and delirium; and from its bosom there went forth Death
- on the pale Horse. To hate this poor National Convention is easy;
- to praise and love it has not been found impossible. It is, as we
- say, a Parliament in the most original circumstances. To us, in
- these pages, be it as a fuliginous fiery mystery, where Upper has
- met Nether, and in such alternate glare and blackness of darkness
- poor bedazzled mortals know not which is Upper, which is Nether;
- but rage and plunge distractedly, as mortals, in that case, will
- do. A Convention which has to consume itself, suicidally; and
- become dead ashes—with its World! Behoves us, not to enter
- exploratively its dim embroiled deeps; yet to stand with
- unwavering eyes, looking how it welters; what notable phases and
- occurrences it will successively throw up.
-
- One general superficial circumstance we remark with praise: the
- force of Politeness. To such depth has the sense of civilisation
- penetrated man’s life; no Drouet, no Legendre, in the maddest tug
- of war, can altogether shake it off. Debates of Senates
- dreadfully in earnest are seldom given frankly to the world; else
- perhaps they would surprise it. Did not the Grand Monarque
- himself once chase his Louvois with a pair of brandished tongs?
- But reading long volumes of these Convention Debates, all in a
- foam with furious earnestness, earnest many times to the extent
- of life and death, one is struck rather with the degree of
- continence they manifest in speech; and how in such wild
- ebullition, there is still a kind of polite rule struggling for
- mastery, and the forms of social life never altogether disappear.
- These men, though they menace with clenched right-hands, do not
- clench one another by the collar; they draw no daggers, except
- for oratorical purposes, and this not often: profane swearing is
- almost unknown, though the Reports are frank enough; we find only
- one or two oaths, oaths by Marat, reported in all.
-
- For the rest, that there is “effervescence” who doubts?
- Effervescence enough; Decrees passed by acclamation today,
- repealed by vociferation tomorrow; temper fitful, most rotatory
- changeful, always headlong! The “voice of the orator is covered
- with rumours;” a hundred “honourable Members rush with menaces
- towards the Left side of the Hall;” President has “broken three
- bells in succession,”—claps on his hat, as signal that the
- country is near ruined. A fiercely effervescent Old-Gallic
- Assemblage!—Ah, how the loud sick sounds of Debate, and of Life,
- which is a _debate_, sink silent one after another: so loud now,
- and in a little while so low! Brennus, and those antique Gael
- Captains, in their way to Rome, to Galatia, and such places,
- whither they were in the habit of marching in the most fiery
- manner, had Debates as effervescent, doubt it not; though no
- _Moniteur_ has reported them. They scolded in Celtic Welsh, those
- Brennuses; neither were they Sansculotte; nay rather breeches
- (_braccæ_, say of felt or rough-leather) were the only thing they
- had; being, as Livy testifies, naked down _to_ the haunches:—and,
- see, it is the same sort of work and of men still, now when they
- have got coats, and speak nasally a kind of broken Latin! But on
- the whole does not TIME envelop this present National Convention;
- as it did those Brennuses, and ancient August Senates in felt
- breeches? Time surely; and also Eternity. Dim dusk of Time,—or
- noon which will be dusk; and then there is night, and silence;
- and Time with all its sick noises is swallowed in the still sea.
- Pity thy brother, O Son of Adam! The angriest frothy jargon that
- he utters, is it not properly the whimpering of an infant which
- cannot _speak_ what ails it, but is in distress clearly, in the
- inwards of it; and so must squall and whimper continually, till
- its Mother take it, and it get—to sleep!
-
- This Convention is not four days old, and the melodious Melibœan
- stanzas that shook down Royalty are still fresh in our ear, when
- there bursts out a new diapason,—unhappily, of Discord, this
- time. For speech has been made of a thing difficult to speak of
- well: the September Massacres. How deal with these September
- Massacres; with the Paris Commune that presided over them? A
- Paris Commune hateful-terrible; before which the poor effete
- Legislative had to quail, and sit quiet. And now if a young
- omnipotent Convention will not so quail and sit, what steps shall
- it take? Have a Departmental Guard in its pay, answer the
- Girondins, and Friends of Order! A Guard of National Volunteers,
- missioned from all the Eighty-three or Eighty-five Departments,
- for that express end; these will keep Septemberers, tumultuous
- Communes in a due state of submissiveness, the Convention in a
- due state of sovereignty. So have the Friends of Order answered,
- sitting in Committee, and reporting; and even a Decree has been
- passed of the required tenour. Nay certain Departments, as the
- Var or Marseilles, in mere expectation and assurance of a Decree,
- have their contingent of Volunteers already on march: brave
- Marseillese, foremost on the Tenth of August, will not be
- hindmost here; “fathers gave their sons a musket and twenty-five
- louis,” says Barbaroux, “and bade them march.”
-
- Can any thing be properer? A Republic that will found itself on
- justice must needs investigate September Massacres; a Convention
- calling itself National, ought it not to be guarded by a National
- force?—Alas, Reader, it seems so to the eye: and yet there is
- much to be said and argued. Thou beholdest here the small
- beginning of a Controversy, which mere logic will not settle. Two
- small well-springs, September, Departmental Guard, or rather at
- bottom they are but one and the same small well-spring; which
- will swell and widen into waters of bitterness; all manner of
- subsidiary streams and brooks of bitterness flowing in, from this
- side and that; till it become a wide river of bitterness, of rage
- and separation,—which can subside only into the Catacombs. This
- Departmental Guard, decreed by overwhelming majorities, and then
- repealed for peace’s sake, and not to insult Paris, is again
- decreed more than once; nay it is partially executed, and the
- very men that are to be of it are seen visibly parading the Paris
- streets,—shouting once, being overtaken with liquor: ‘_À bas
- Marat_, Down with Marat!’[573] Nevertheless, decreed never so
- often, it is repealed just as often; and continues, for some
- seven months, an angry noisy Hypothesis only: a fair Possibility
- struggling to become a Reality, but which shall never be one;
- which, after endless struggling, shall, in February next, sink
- into sad rest,—dragging much along with it. So singular are the
- ways of men and honourable Members.
-
- But on this fourth day of the Convention’s existence, as we said,
- which is the 25th of September 1792, there comes Committee Report
- on that Decree of the Departmental Guard, and speech of repealing
- it; there come denunciations of anarchy, of a Dictatorship,—which
- let the incorruptible Robespierre consider: there come
- denunciations of a certain _Journal de la République_, once
- called _Ami du Peuple;_ and so thereupon there comes, visibly
- stepping up, visibly standing aloft on the Tribune, ready to
- speak, the Bodily Spectrum of People’s-Friend Marat! Shriek, ye
- Seven Hundred and Forty-nine; it is verily Marat, he and not
- another. Marat is no phantasm of the brain, or mere lying impress
- of Printer’s Types; but a thing material, of joint and sinew, and
- a certain small stature: ye behold him there, in his blackness in
- his dingy squalor, a living fraction of Chaos and Old Night;
- visibly incarnate, desirous to speak. ‘It appears,’ says Marat to
- the shrieking Assembly, ‘that a great many persons here are
- enemies of mine.’ ‘All! All!’ shriek hundreds of voices: enough
- to drown any People’s-Friend. But Marat will not drown: he speaks
- and croaks explanation; croaks with such reasonableness, air of
- sincerity, that repentant pity smothers anger, and the shrieks
- subside or even become applauses. For this Convention is
- unfortunately the crankest of machines: it shall be pointing
- eastward, with stiff violence, this moment; and then do but touch
- some spring dexterously, the whole machine, clattering and
- jerking seven-hundred-fold, will whirl with huge crash, and, next
- moment, is pointing westward! Thus Marat, absolved and applauded,
- victorious in this turn of fence, is, as the Debate goes on,
- prickt at again by some dexterous Girondin; and then the shrieks
- rise anew, and Decree of Accusation is on the point of passing;
- till the dingy People’s-Friend bobs aloft once more; croaks once
- more persuasive stillness, and the Decree of Accusation sinks,
- Whereupon he draws forth—a Pistol; and setting it to his Head,
- the seat of such thought and prophecy, says: ‘If they had passed
- their Accusation Decree, he, the People’s-Friend, would have
- blown his brains out.’ A People’s Friend has that faculty in him.
- For the rest, as to this of the two hundred and sixty thousand
- Aristocrat Heads, Marat candidly says, ‘_C’est là mon avis_, such
- is my opinion.’ Also it is not indisputable: ‘No power on Earth
- can prevent me from seeing into traitors, and unmasking them,’—by
- my superior originality of mind?[574] An honourable member like
- this Friend of the People few terrestrial Parliaments have had.
-
- We observe, however, that this first onslaught by the Friends of
- Order, as sharp and prompt as it was, has failed. For neither can
- Robespierre, summoned out by talk of Dictatorship, and greeted
- with the like rumour on shewing himself, be thrown into Prison,
- into Accusation;—not though Barbaroux openly bear testimony
- against him, and sign it on paper. With such sanctified meekness
- does the Incorruptible lift his seagreen cheek to the smiter;
- lift his thin voice, and with jesuitic dexterity plead, and
- prosper: asking at last, in a prosperous manner: ‘But what
- witnesses has the Citoyen Barbaroux to support his testimony?’
- ‘_Moi!_’ cries hot Rebecqui, standing up, striking his breast
- with both hands, and answering, ‘Me!’[575] Nevertheless the
- Seagreen pleads again, and makes it good: the long hurlyburly,
- “personal merely,” while so much public matter lies fallow, has
- ended in the order of the day. O Friends of the Gironde, why will
- you occupy our august sessions with mere paltry Personalities,
- while the grand Nationality lies in such a state?—The Gironde has
- touched, this day, on the foul black-spot of its fair Convention
- Domain; has trodden on it, and yet _not_ trodden it down. Alas,
- it is a _well-spring_, as we said, this black-spot; and will not
- tread down!
-
-
- Chapter 3.2.II.
- The Executive.
-
- May we not conjecture therefore that round this grand enterprise
- of Making the Constitution there will, as heretofore, very
- strange embroilments gather, and questions and interests
- complicate themselves; so that after a few or even several
- months, the Convention will not have settled every thing? Alas, a
- whole tide of questions comes rolling, boiling; growing ever
- wider, without end! Among which, apart from this question of
- September and Anarchy, let us notice those, which emerge oftener
- than the others, and promise to become Leading Questions: of the
- Armies; of the Subsistences; thirdly, of the Dethroned King.
-
- As to the Armies, Public Defence must evidently be put on a
- proper footing; for Europe seems coalising itself again; one is
- apprehensive even England will join it. Happily Dumouriez
- prospers in the North;—nay what if he should prove too
- prosperous, and become _Liberticide_, Murderer of
- Freedom!—Dumouriez prospers, through this winter season; yet not
- without lamentable complaints. Sleek Pache, the Swiss
- Schoolmaster, he that sat frugal in his Alley, the wonder of
- neighbours, has got lately—whither thinks the Reader? To be
- Minister of war! Madame Roland, struck with his sleek ways,
- recommended him to her Husband as Clerk: the sleek Clerk had no
- need of salary, being of true Patriotic temper; he would come
- with a bit of bread in his pocket, to save dinner and time; and,
- munching incidentally, do three men’s work in a day, punctual,
- silent, frugal,—the sleek Tartuffe that he was. Wherefore Roland,
- in the late Overturn, recommended him to be War-Minister. And
- now, it would seem, he is secretly undermining Roland; playing
- into the hands of your hotter Jacobins and September Commune; and
- cannot, like strict Roland, be the _Veto des Coquins!_[576]
-
- How the sleek Pache might mine and undermine, one knows not well;
- this however one does know: that his War-Office has become a den
- of thieves and confusion, such as all men shudder to behold. That
- the Citizen Hassenfratz, as Head-Clerk, sits there in _bonnet
- rouge_, in rapine, in violence, and some Mathematical
- calculation; a most insolent, red-nightcapped man. That Pache
- munches his pocket-loaf, amid head-clerks and sub-clerks, and has
- spent all the War-Estimates: that Furnishers scour in gigs, over
- all districts of France, and drive bargains;—and lastly that the
- Army gets next to no furniture. No shoes, though it is winter; no
- clothes; some have not even arms: “In the Army of the South,”
- complains an honourable Member, “there are thirty thousand pairs
- of breeches wanting,”—a most scandalous want.
-
- Roland’s strict soul is sick to see the course things take: but
- what can he do? Keep his own Department strict; rebuke, and
- repress wheresoever possible; at lowest, complain. He can
- complain in Letter after Letter, to a National Convention, to
- France, to Posterity, the Universe; grow ever more querulous
- indignant;—till at last may he not grow wearisome? For is not
- this continual text of his, at bottom a rather barren one: How
- astonishing that in a time of Revolt and abrogation of all Law
- but Cannon Law, there should be such Unlawfulness? Intrepid
- Veto-of-Scoundrels, narrow-faithful, respectable, methodic man,
- work thou in that manner, since happily it is thy manner, and
- wear thyself away; though ineffectual, not profitless in it—then
- nor _now!_—The brave Dame Roland, bravest of all French women,
- begins to have misgivings: the figure of Danton has too much of
- the “Sardanapalus character,” at a Republican Rolandin
- Dinner-table: Clootz, Speaker of Mankind, proses sad stuff about
- a Universal Republic, or union of all Peoples and Kindreds in one
- and the same Fraternal Bond; of which Bond, how it is to be
- _tied_, one unhappily sees not.
-
- It is also an indisputable, unaccountable or accountable fact
- that Grains are becoming scarcer and scarcer. Riots for grain,
- tumultuous Assemblages demanding to have the price of grain fixed
- abound far and near. The Mayor of Paris and other poor Mayors are
- like to have their difficulties. Pétion was re-elected Mayor of
- Paris; but has declined; being now a Convention Legislator. Wise
- surely to decline: for, besides this of Grains and all the rest,
- there is in these times an Improvised insurrectionary Commune
- passing into an Elected legal one; getting their accounts
- settled,—not without irritancy! Pétion has declined: nevertheless
- many do covet and canvass. After months of scrutinising,
- balloting, arguing and jargoning, one Doctor Chambon gets the
- post of honour: who will not long keep it; but be, as we shall
- see, literally _crushed_ out of it.[577]
-
- Think also if the private Sansculotte has not his difficulties,
- in a time of dearth! Bread, according to the People’s-Friend, may
- be some “six sous per pound, a day’s wages some fifteen;” and
- grim winter here. How the Poor Man continues living, and so
- seldom starves, by miracle! Happily, in these days, he can
- enlist, and have himself shot by the Austrians, in an unusually
- satisfactory manner: for the Rights of Man.—But Commandant
- Santerre, in this so straitened condition of the flour-market,
- and state of Equality and Liberty, proposes, through the
- Newspapers, two remedies, or at least palliatives: _First_, that
- all classes of men should live, two days of the week, on
- potatoes; then _second_, that every man should hang his dog.
- Hereby, as the Commandant thinks, the saving, which indeed he
- computes to so many sacks, would be very considerable. A
- cheerfuller form of inventive-stupidity than Commandant
- Santerre’s dwells in no human soul. Inventive-stupidity, imbedded
- in health, courage and good-nature: much to be commended. ‘My
- whole strength,’ he tells the Convention once, ‘is, day and
- night, at the service of my fellow-Citizens: if they find me
- worthless, they will dismiss me; I will return and brew
- beer.’[578]
-
- Or figure what correspondences a poor Roland, Minister of the
- Interior, must have, on this of Grains alone! Free-trade in
- Grain, impossibility to fix the Prices of Grain; on the other
- hand, clamour and necessity to fix them: Political Economy
- lecturing from the Home Office, with demonstration clear as
- Scripture;—ineffectual for the empty National Stomach. The Mayor
- of Chartres, like to be eaten himself, cries to the Convention:
- the Convention sends honourable Members in Deputation; who
- endeavour to feed the multitude by miraculous spiritual methods;
- but cannot. The multitude, in spite of all Eloquence, come
- bellowing round; will have the Grain-Prices fixed, and at a
- moderate elevation; or else—the honourable Deputies hanged on the
- spot! The honourable Deputies, reporting this business, admit
- that, on the edge of horrid death, they did fix, or affect to fix
- the Price of Grain: for which, be it also noted, the Convention,
- a Convention that will not be trifled with, sees good to
- reprimand them.[579]
-
- But as to the origin of these Grain Riots, is it not most
- probably your secret Royalists again? Glimpses of Priests were
- discernible in this of Chartres,—to the eye of Patriotism. Or
- indeed may not “the root of it all lie in the Temple Prison, in
- the heart of a perjured King,” well as we guard him?[580] Unhappy
- perjured King!—And so there shall be Baker’s Queues, by and by,
- more sharp-tempered than ever: on every Baker’s door-rabbet an
- iron ring, and coil of rope; whereon, with firm grip, on this
- side and that, we form our Queue: but mischievous deceitful
- persons cut the rope, and our Queue becomes a ravelment;
- wherefore the coil must be made of iron chain.[581] Also there
- shall be Prices of Grain well fixed; but then no grain
- purchasable by them: bread not to be had except by Ticket from
- the Mayor, few ounces per mouth daily; after long swaying, with
- firm grip, on the chain of the Queue. And Hunger shall stalk
- direful; and Wrath and Suspicion, whetted to the Preternatural
- pitch, shall stalk;—as those other preternatural “shapes of Gods
- in their wrathfulness” were discerned stalking, “in glare and
- gloom of that fire-ocean,” when Troy Town fell!—
-
-
- Chapter 3.2.III.
- Discrowned.
-
- But the question more pressing than all on the Legislator, as
- yet, is this third: What shall be done with King Louis?
-
- King Louis, now King and Majesty to his own family alone, in
- their own Prison Apartment alone, has been Louis Capet and the
- Traitor Veto with the rest of France. Shut in his Circuit of the
- Temple, he has heard and seen the loud whirl of things; yells of
- September Massacres, Brunswick war-thunders dying off in disaster
- and discomfiture; he passive, a spectator merely;—waiting whither
- it would please to whirl with him. From the neighbouring windows,
- the curious, not without pity, might see him walk daily, at a
- certain hour, in the Temple Garden, with his Queen, Sister and
- two Children, all that now belongs to him in this Earth.[582]
- Quietly he walks and waits; for he is not of lively feelings, and
- is of a devout heart. The wearied Irresolute has, at least, no
- need of resolving now. His daily meals, lessons to his Son, daily
- walk in the Garden, daily game at ombre or drafts, fill up the
- day: the morrow will provide for itself.
-
- The morrow indeed; and yet How? Louis asks, How? France, with
- perhaps still more solicitude, asks, How? A King dethroned by
- insurrection is verily not easy to dispose of. Keep him prisoner,
- he is a secret centre for the Disaffected, for endless plots,
- attempts and hopes of theirs. Banish him, he is an open centre
- for them; his royal war-standard, with what of divinity it has,
- unrolls itself, summoning the world. Put him to death? A cruel
- questionable extremity that too: and yet the likeliest in these
- extreme circumstances, of insurrectionary men, whose own life and
- death lies staked: accordingly it is said, from the last step of
- the throne to the first of the scaffold there is short distance.
-
- But, on the whole, we will remark here that this business of
- Louis looks altogether different now, as seen over Seas and at
- the distance of forty-four years, than it looked then, in France,
- and struggling, confused all round one! For indeed it is a most
- lying thing that same Past Tense always: so beautiful, sad,
- almost Elysian-sacred, “in the moonlight of Memory,” it seems;
- and _seems_ only. For observe: always, one most important element
- is surreptitiously (we not noticing it) withdrawn from the Past
- Time: the haggard element of Fear! Not _there_ does Fear dwell,
- nor Uncertainty, nor Anxiety; but it dwells _here;_ haunting us,
- tracking us; running like an accursed ground-discord through all
- the music-tones of our Existence;—making the Tense a mere Present
- one! Just so is it with this of Louis. Why smite the fallen? asks
- Magnanimity, out of danger now. He is fallen so low this
- once-high man; no criminal nor traitor, how far from it; but the
- unhappiest of Human Solecisms: whom if abstract Justice had to
- pronounce upon, she might well become concrete Pity, and
- pronounce only sobs and dismissal!
-
- So argues retrospective Magnanimity: but Pusillanimity, present,
- prospective? Reader, thou hast never lived, for months, under the
- rustle of Prussian gallows-ropes; never wert thou portion of a
- National Sahara-waltz, Twenty-five millions running distracted to
- fight Brunswick! Knights Errant themselves, when they conquered
- Giants, usually slew the Giants: quarter was only for other
- Knights Errant, who knew courtesy and the laws of battle. The
- French Nation, in simultaneous, desperate dead-pull, and as if by
- miracle of madness, has pulled down the most dread Goliath, huge
- with the growth of ten centuries; and cannot believe, though his
- giant bulk, covering acres, lies prostrate, bound with peg and
- packthread, that he will not rise again, man-devouring; that the
- victory is not partly a dream. Terror has its scepticism;
- miraculous victory its rage of vengeance. Then as to criminalty,
- is the prostrated Giant, who will devour us if he rise, an
- innocent Giant? Curate Gregoire, who indeed is now Constitutional
- Bishop Gregoire, asserts, in the heat of eloquence, that Kingship
- by the very nature of it is a crime capital; that Kings’ Houses
- are as wild-beasts’ dens.[583] Lastly consider this: that there
- is on record a Trial of Charles First! This printed _Trial of
- Charles First_ is sold and read every where at
- present:[584]—_Quelle spectacle!_ Thus did the English People
- judge their Tyrant, and become the first of Free Peoples: which
- feat, by the grace of Destiny, may not France now rival?
- Scepticism of terror, rage of miraculous victory, sublime
- spectacle to the universe,—all things point one fatal way.
-
- Such leading questions, and their endless incidental ones: of
- September Anarchists and Departmental Guard; of Grain Riots,
- plaintiff Interior Ministers; of Armies, Hassenfratz
- dilapidations; and what is to be done with Louis,—beleaguer and
- embroil this Convention; which would so gladly make the
- Constitution rather. All which questions too, as we often urge of
- such things, are in _growth;_ they grow in every French head; and
- can be _seen_ growing also, very curiously, in this mighty welter
- of Parliamentary Debate, of Public Business which the Convention
- has to do. A question emerges, so small at first; is put off,
- submerged; but always re-emerges bigger than before. It is a
- curious, indeed an indescribable sort of growth which such things
- have.
-
- We perceive, however, both by its frequent re-emergence and by
- its rapid enlargement of bulk, that this Question of King Louis
- will take the lead of all the rest. And truly, in that case, it
- will take the _lead_ in a much deeper sense. For as Aaron’s Rod
- swallowed all the other Serpents; so will the Foremost Question,
- whichever may get foremost, absorb all other questions and
- interests; and from it and the decision of it will they all, so
- to speak, be _born_, or new-born, and have shape, physiognomy and
- destiny corresponding. It was appointed of Fate that, in this
- wide-weltering, strangely growing, monstrous stupendous imbroglio
- of Convention Business, the grand First-Parent of all the
- questions, controversies, measures and enterprises which were to
- be evolved there to the world’s astonishment, should be this
- Question of King Louis.
-
-
- Chapter 3.2.IV.
- The Loser Pays.
-
- The Sixth of November, 1792, was a great day for the Republic:
- outwardly, over the Frontiers; inwardly, in the _Salle de
- Manége_.
-
- Outwardly: for Dumouriez, overrunning the Netherlands, did, on
- that day, come in contact with Saxe-Teschen and the Austrians;
- Dumouriez wide-winged, they wide-winged; at and around the
- village of Jemappes, near Mons. And fire-hail is whistling far
- and wide there, the great guns playing, and the small; so many
- green Heights getting fringed and maned with red Fire. And
- Dumouriez is swept back on this wing, and swept back on that, and
- is like to be swept back utterly; when he rushes up in person,
- the prompt Polymetis; speaks a prompt word or two; and then, with
- clear tenor-pipe, “uplifts the Hymn of the Marseillese, _entonna
- la Marseillaise_,”[585] ten thousand tenor or bass pipes joining;
- or say, some Forty Thousand in all; for every heart leaps at the
- sound: and so with rhythmic march-melody, waxing ever quicker, to
- double and to treble quick, they rally, they advance, they rush,
- death-defying, man-devouring; carry batteries, redoutes,
- whatsoever is to be carried; and, like the fire-whirlwind, sweep
- all manner of Austrians from the scene of action. Thus, through
- the hands of Dumouriez, may Rouget de Lille, in figurative
- speech, be said to have gained, miraculously, like another
- Orpheus, by his Marseillese fiddle-strings (_fidibus canoris_) a
- Victory of Jemappes; and conquered the Low Countries.
-
- Young General Egalité, it would seem, shone brave among the
- bravest on this occasion. Doubtless a brave Egalité;—whom however
- does not Dumouriez rather talk of oftener than need were? The
- Mother Society has her own thoughts. As for the Elder Egalité he
- flies low at this time; appears in the Convention for some
- half-hour daily, with rubicund, pre-occupied, or impressive
- quasi-contemptuous countenance; and then takes himself away.[586]
- The Netherlands are conquered, at least overrun. Jacobin
- missionaries, your Prolys, Pereiras, follow in the train of the
- Armies; also Convention Commissioners, melting church-plate,
- revolutionising and remodelling—among whom Danton, in brief
- space, does immensities of business; not neglecting his own wages
- and trade-profits, it is thought. Hassenfratz dilapidates at
- home; Dumouriez grumbles and they dilapidate abroad: within the
- walls there is sinning, and without the walls there is sinning.
-
- But in the Hall of the Convention, at the same hour with this
- victory of Jemappes, there went another thing forward: Report, of
- great length, from the proper appointed Committee, on the Crimes
- of Louis. The Galleries listen breathless; take comfort, ye
- Galleries: Deputy Valazé, Reporter on this occasion, thinks Louis
- very criminal; and that, if convenient, he should be tried;—poor
- Girondin Valazé, who may be tried himself, one day! Comfortable
- so far. Nay here comes a second Committee-reporter, Deputy
- Mailhe, with a Legal Argument, very prosy to read now, very
- refreshing to hear then, That, by the Law of the Country, Louis
- Capet was only called Inviolable by a figure of rhetoric; but at
- bottom was perfectly violable, triable; that he can, and even
- should be tried. This Question of Louis, emerging so often as an
- angry confused possibility, and submerging again, has emerged now
- in an articulate shape.
-
- Patriotism growls indignant joy. The so-called reign of Equality
- is not to be a mere name, then, but a thing! Try Louis Capet?
- scornfully ejaculates Patriotism: Mean criminals go to the
- gallows for a purse cut; and this chief criminal, guilty of a
- France cut; of a France slashed asunder with Clotho-scissors and
- Civil war; with his victims “twelve hundred on the Tenth of
- August alone” lying low in the Catacombs, fattening the passes of
- Argonne Wood, of Valmy and far Fields; _he_, such chief criminal,
- shall not even come to the bar?—For, alas, O Patriotism! add we,
- it was from of old said, _The loser pays!_ It is he who has to
- pay _all_ scores, run up by whomsoever; on him must all breakages
- and charges fall; and the twelve hundred on the Tenth of August
- are not rebel traitors, but victims and martyrs: such is the law
- of quarrel.
-
- Patriotism, nothing doubting, watches over this Question of the
- Trial, now happily emerged in an articulate shape; and will see
- it to maturity, if the gods permit. With a keen solicitude
- Patriotism watches; getting ever keener, at every new difficulty,
- as Girondins and false brothers interpose delays; till it get a
- keenness as of fixed-idea, and will have this Trial and no
- earthly thing instead of it,—if Equality be not a name. Love of
- Equality; then scepticism of terror, rage of victory, sublime
- spectacle of the universe: all these things are strong.
-
- But indeed this Question of the Trial, is it not to all persons a
- most grave one; filling with dubiety many a Legislative head!
- Regicide? asks the Gironde Respectability: To kill a king, and
- become the horror of respectable nations and persons? But then
- also, to save a king; to lose one’s footing with the decided
- Patriot; and undecided Patriot, though never so respectable,
- being mere hypothetic froth and no footing?—The dilemma presses
- sore; and between the horns of it you wriggle round and round.
- Decision is nowhere, save in the Mother Society and her Sons.
- These have decided, and go forward: the others wriggle round
- uneasily within their dilemma-horns, and make way nowhither.
-
-
- Chapter 3.2.V.
- Stretching of Formulas.
-
- But how this Question of the Trial grew laboriously, through the
- weeks of gestation, now that it has been articulated or
- conceived, were superfluous to trace here. It emerged and
- submerged among the infinite of questions and embroilments. The
- Veto of Scoundrels writes plaintive Letters as to Anarchy;
- “concealed Royalists,” aided by Hunger, produce Riots about
- Grain. Alas, it is but a week ago, these Girondins made a new
- fierce onslaught on the September Massacres!
-
- For, one day, among the last of October, Robespierre, being
- summoned to the tribune by some new hint of that old calumny of
- the Dictatorship, was speaking and pleading there, with more and
- more comfort to himself; till, rising high in heart, he cried out
- valiantly: Is there any man here that dare specifically accuse
- me? ‘_Moi!_’ exclaimed one. Pause of deep silence: a lean angry
- little Figure, with broad bald brow, strode swiftly towards the
- tribune, taking papers from its pocket: ‘I accuse thee,
- Robespierre,’—I, Jean Baptiste Louvet! The Seagreen became
- tallow-green; shrinking to a corner of the tribune: Danton cried,
- ‘Speak, Robespierre, there are many good citizens that listen;’
- but the tongue refused its office. And so Louvet, with a shrill
- tone, read and recited crime after crime: dictatorial temper,
- exclusive popularity, bullying at elections, mob-retinue,
- September Massacres;—till all the Convention shrieked again, and
- had almost indicted the Incorruptible there on the spot. Never
- did the Incorruptible run such a risk. Louvet, to his dying day,
- will regret that the Gironde did not take a bolder attitude, and
- extinguish him there and then.
-
- Not so, however: the Incorruptible, about to be indicted in this
- sudden manner, could not be refused a week of delay. That week,
- he is not idle; nor is the Mother Society idle,—fierce-tremulous
- for her chosen son. He is ready at the day with his written
- Speech; smooth as a Jesuit Doctor’s; and convinces some. And now?
- Why, now lazy Vergniaud does not rise with Demosthenic thunder;
- poor Louvet, unprepared, can do little or nothing: Barrère
- proposes that these comparatively despicable “personalities” be
- dismissed by order of the day! Order of the day it accordingly
- is. Barbaroux cannot even get a hearing; not though he rush down
- to the Bar, and demand to be heard there as a petitioner.[587]
- The convention, eager for public business (with that first
- articulate emergence of the Trial just coming on), dismisses
- these comparative _misères_ and despicabilities: splenetic Louvet
- must digest his spleen, regretfully for ever: Robespierre, dear
- to Patriotism, is dearer for the dangers he has run.
-
- This is the second grand attempt by our Girondin Friends of
- Order, to extinguish that black-spot in their domain; and we see
- they have made it far blacker and wider than before! Anarchy,
- September Massacre: it is a thing that lies hideous in the
- general imagination; very detestable to the undecided Patriot, of
- Respectability: a thing to be harped on as often as need is. Harp
- on it, denounce it, trample it, ye Girondin Patriots:—and yet
- behold, the black-spot will not trample down; it will only, as we
- say, trample blacker and wider: fools, it is no black-spot of the
- surface, but a well-spring of the deep! Consider rightly, it is
- the apex of the everlasting Abyss, this black-spot, looking up as
- water through thin ice;—say, as the region of Nether Darkness
- through your thin film of Gironde Regulation and Respectability;
- trample it _not_, lest the film break, and then—!
-
- The truth is, if our Gironde Friends had an understanding of it,
- where were French Patriotism, with all its eloquence, at this
- moment, had _not_ that same great Nether Deep, of Bedlam,
- Fanaticism and Popular wrath and madness, risen unfathomable on
- the Tenth of August? French Patriotism were an eloquent
- Reminiscence; swinging on Prussian gibbets. Nay, where, in few
- months, were it still, should the same great Nether Deep
- subside?—Nay, as readers of Newspapers pretend to recollect, this
- hatefulness of the September Massacre is itself partly an
- after-thought: readers of Newspapers can quote Gorsas and various
- Brissotins approving of the September Massacre, at the time it
- happened; and calling it a salutary vengeance![588] So that the
- real grief, after all, were not so much righteous horror, as
- grief that one’s own power was departing? Unhappy Girondins!
-
- In the Jacobin Society, therefore, the decided Patriot complains
- that here are men who with their private ambitions and
- animosities, will ruin Liberty, Equality, and Brotherhood, all
- three: they check the spirit of Patriotism, throw
- stumbling-blocks in its way; and instead of pushing on, all
- shoulders at the wheel, will stand idle there, spitefully
- clamouring what foul ruts there are, what rude jolts we give! To
- which the Jacobin Society answers with angry roar;—with angry
- shriek, for there are Citoyennes too, thick crowded in the
- galleries here. Citoyennes who bring their seam with them, or
- their knitting-needles; and shriek or knit as the case needs;
- famed _Tricoteuses_, Patriot Knitters;—_Mère Duchesse_, or the
- like Deborah and Mother of the Faubourgs, giving the keynote. It
- is a changed Jacobin Society; and a still changing. Where Mother
- Duchess now sits, authentic Duchesses have sat. High-rouged dames
- went once in jewels and spangles; now, instead of jewels, you may
- take the knitting-needles and leave the rouge: the rouge will
- gradually give place to natural brown, clean washed or even
- unwashed; and Demoiselle Théroigne herself get scandalously
- fustigated. Strange enough: it is the same tribune raised in
- mid-air, where a high Mirabeau, a high Barnave and Aristocrat
- Lameths once thundered: whom gradually your Brissots, Guadets,
- Vergniauds, a hotter style of Patriots in _bonnet rouge_, did
- displace; red heat, as one may say, superseding light. And now
- your Brissots in turn, and Brissotins, Rolandins, Girondins, are
- becoming supernumerary; must desert the sittings, or be expelled:
- the light of the Mighty Mother is burning not red but
- blue!—Provincial Daughter-Societies loudly disapprove these
- things; loudly demand the swift reinstatement of such eloquent
- Girondins, the swift “erasure of Marat, _radiation de Marat_.”
- The Mother Society, so far as natural reason can predict, seems
- ruining herself. Nevertheless she has, at all crises, seemed so;
- she has a _preter_natural life in her, and will not ruin.
-
- But, in a fortnight more, this great Question of the Trial, while
- the fit Committee is assiduously but silently working on it,
- receives an unexpected stimulus. Our readers remember poor
- Louis’s turn for smithwork: how, in old happier days, a certain
- Sieur Gamain of Versailles was wont to come over, and instruct
- him in lock-making;—often scolding him, they say for his
- numbness. By whom, nevertheless, the royal Apprentice had learned
- something of that craft. Hapless Apprentice; perfidious
- Master-Smith! For now, on this 20th of November 1792, dingy Smith
- Gamain comes over to the Paris Municipality, over to Minister
- Roland, with hints that he, Smith Gamain, knows a thing; that, in
- May last, when traitorous Correspondence was so brisk, he and the
- royal Apprentice fabricated an “Iron Press, _Armoire de Fer_,”
- cunningly inserting the same in a wall of the royal chamber in
- the Tuileries; invisible under the wainscot; where doubtless it
- still sticks! Perfidious Gamain, attended by the proper
- Authorities, finds the wainscot panel which none else can find;
- wrenches it up; discloses the Iron Press,—full of Letters and
- Papers! Roland clutches them out; conveys them over in towels to
- the fit assiduous Committee, which sits hard by. In towels, we
- say, and without notarial inventory; an oversight on the part of
- Roland.
-
- Here, however, are Letters enough: which disclose to a
- demonstration the Correspondence of a traitorous self-preserving
- Court; and this not with Traitors only, but even with Patriots,
- so-called! Barnave’s treason, of Correspondence with the Queen,
- and friendly advice to her, ever since that Varennes Business, is
- hereby manifest: how happy that we have him, this Barnave, lying
- safe in the Prison of Grenoble, since September last, for he had
- long been suspect! Talleyrand’s treason, many a man’s treason, if
- not manifest hereby, is next to it. Mirabeau’s treason: wherefore
- his Bust in the Hall of the Convention “is veiled with gauze,”
- till we ascertain. Alas, it is too ascertainable! His Bust in the
- Hall of the Jacobins, denounced by Robespierre from the tribune
- in mid-air, is not veiled, it is instantly broken to sherds; a
- Patriot mounting swiftly with a ladder, and shivering it down on
- the floor;—it and others: amid shouts.[589] Such is _their_
- recompense and amount of wages, at this date: on the principle of
- supply and demand! Smith Gamain, inadequately recompensed for the
- present, comes, some fifteen months after, with a humble
- Petition; setting forth that no sooner was that important Iron
- Press finished off by him, than (as he now bethinks himself)
- Louis gave him a large glass of wine. Which large glass of wine
- did produce in the stomach of Sieur Gamain the terriblest
- effects, evidently tending towards death, and was then brought up
- by an emetic; but has, notwithstanding, entirely ruined the
- constitution of Sieur Gamain; so that he cannot work for his
- family (as he now bethinks himself). The recompense of _which_ is
- “Pension of Twelve Hundred Francs,” and “honourable mention.” So
- different is the ratio of demand and supply at different times.
-
- Thus, amid obstructions and stimulating furtherances, has the
- Question of the Trial to grow; emerging and submerging; fostered
- by solicitous Patriotism. Of the Orations that were spoken on it,
- of the painfully devised Forms of Process for managing it, the
- Law Arguments to prove it lawful, and all the infinite floods of
- Juridical and other ingenuity and oratory, be no syllable
- reported in this History. Lawyer ingenuity is good: but what can
- it profit here? If the truth must be spoken, O august Senators,
- the only Law in this case is: _Væ victis_, the loser pays! Seldom
- did Robespierre say a wiser word than the hint he gave to that
- effect, in his oration, that it was needless to speak of Law,
- that here, if never elsewhere, our Right was Might. An oration
- admired almost to ecstasy by the Jacobin Patriot: who shall say
- that Robespierre is not a thorough-going man; bold in Logic at
- least? To the like effect, or still more plainly, spake young
- Saint-Just, the black-haired, mild-toned youth. Danton is on
- mission, in the Netherlands, during this preliminary work. The
- rest, far as one reads, welter amid Law of Nations, Social
- Contract, Juristics, Syllogistics; to us barren as the East wind.
- In fact, what can be more unprofitable than the sight of Seven
- Hundred and Forty-nine ingenious men, struggling with their whole
- force and industry, for a long course of weeks, to do at bottom
- this: To stretch out the old Formula and Law Phraseology, so that
- it may cover the new, contradictory, entirely _un_coverable
- Thing? Whereby the poor Formula does but _crack_, and one’s
- honesty along with it! The thing that is palpably _hot_, burning,
- wilt thou prove it, by syllogism, to be a freezing-mixture? This
- of stretching out Formulas till they crack is, especially in
- times of swift change, one of the sorrowfullest tasks poor
- Humanity has.
-
-
- Chapter 3.2.VI.
- At the Bar.
-
- Meanwhile, in a space of some five weeks, we have got to another
- emerging of the Trial, and a more practical one than ever.
-
- On Tuesday, eleventh of December, the King’s Trial has _emerged_,
- very decidedly: into the streets of Paris; in the shape of that
- green Carriage of Mayor Chambon, within which sits the King
- himself, with attendants, on his way to the Convention Hall!
- Attended, in that green Carriage, by Mayors Chambon, Procureurs
- Chaumette; and outside of it by Commandants Santerre, with
- cannon, cavalry and double row of infantry; all Sections under
- arms, strong Patrols scouring all streets; so fares he, slowly
- through the dull drizzling weather: and about two o’clock we
- behold him, “in walnut-coloured great-coat, _redingote
- noisette_,” descending through the Place Vendôme, towards that
- Salle de Manége; to be indicted, and judicially interrogated. The
- mysterious Temple Circuit has given up its secret; which now, in
- this walnut-coloured coat, men behold with eyes. The same bodily
- Louis who was once Louis the Desired, fares there: hapless King,
- he is getting now towards port; his deplorable farings and
- voyagings draw to a close. What duty remains to him henceforth,
- that of placidly enduring, he is fit to do.
-
- The singular Procession fares on; in silence, says Prudhomme, or
- amid growlings of the Marseillese Hymn; in silence, ushers itself
- into the Hall of the Convention, Santerre holding Louis’s arm
- with his hand. Louis looks round him, with composed air, to see
- what kind of Convention and Parliament it is. Much changed
- indeed:—since February gone two years, when our Constituent, then
- busy, spread fleur-de-lys velvet for us; and we came over to say
- a kind word here, and they all started up swearing Fidelity; and
- all France started up swearing, and made it a Feast of Pikes;
- which has ended in this! Barrère, who once “wept” looking up from
- his Editor’s-Desk, looks down now from his President’s-Chair,
- with a list of Fifty-seven Questions; and says, dry-eyed: ‘Louis,
- you may sit down.’ Louis sits down: it is the very seat, they
- say, same timber and stuffing, from which he accepted the
- Constitution, amid dancing and illumination, autumn gone a year.
- So much woodwork remains identical; so much else is not
- identical. Louis sits and listens, with a composed look and mind.
-
- Of the Fifty-seven Questions we shall not give so much as one.
- They are questions captiously embracing all the main Documents
- seized on the Tenth of August, or found lately in the Iron Press;
- embracing all the main incidents of the Revolution History; and
- they ask, in substance, this: Louis, who wert King, art thou not
- guilty to a certain extent, by act and written document, of
- trying to continue King? Neither in the Answers is there much
- notable. Mere quiet negations, for most part; an accused man
- standing on the simple basis of _No:_ I do not recognise that
- document; I did not do that act; or did it according to the law
- that then was. Whereupon the Fifty-seven Questions, and Documents
- to the number of a Hundred and Sixty-two, being exhausted in this
- manner, Barrère finishes, after some three hours, with his:
- ‘Louis, I invite you to withdraw.’
-
- Louis withdraws, under Municipal escort, into a neighbouring
- Committee-room; having first, in leaving the bar, demanded to
- have Legal Counsel. He declines refreshment, in this
- Committee-room, then, seeing Chaumette busy with a small loaf
- which a grenadier had divided with him, says, he will take a bit
- of bread. It is five o’clock; and he had breakfasted but slightly
- in a morning of such drumming and alarm. Chaumette breaks his
- half-loaf: the King eats of the crust; mounts the green Carriage,
- eating; asks now what he shall do with the crumb? Chaumette’s
- clerk takes it from him; flings it out into the street. Louis
- says, It is pity to fling out bread, in a time of dearth. ‘My
- grandmother,’ remarks Chaumette, ‘used to say to me, Little boy,
- never waste a crumb of bread, you cannot make one.’ ‘Monsieur
- Chaumette,’ answers Louis, ‘your grandmother seems to have been a
- sensible woman.’[590] Poor innocent mortal: so quietly he waits
- the drawing of the lot;—fit to do this at least well; Passivity
- alone, without Activity, sufficing for it! He talks once of
- travelling over France by and by, to have a geographical and
- topographical view of it; being from of old fond of
- geography.—The Temple Circuit again receives him, closes on him;
- gazing Paris may retire to its hearths and coffee-houses, to its
- clubs and theatres: the damp Darkness has sunk, and with it the
- drumming and patrolling of this strange Day.
-
- Louis is now separated from his Queen and Family; given up to his
- simple reflections and resources. Dull lie these stone walls
- round him; of his loved ones none with him. In this state of
- “uncertainty,” providing for the worst, he writes his Will: a
- Paper which can still be read; full of placidity, simplicity,
- pious sweetness. The Convention, after debate, has granted him
- Legal Counsel, of his own choosing. Advocate Target feels himself
- “too old,” being turned of fifty-four; and declines. He had
- gained great honour once, defending Rohan the Necklace-Cardinal;
- but will gain none here. Advocate Tronchet, some ten years older,
- does not decline. Nay behold, good old Malesherbes steps forward
- voluntarily; to the last of his fields, the good old hero! He is
- grey with seventy years: he says, “I was twice called to the
- Council of him who was my Master, when all the world coveted that
- honour; and I owe him the same service now, when it has become
- one which many reckon dangerous.” These two, with a younger
- Desèze, whom they will select for pleading, are busy over that
- Fifty-and-sevenfold Indictment, over the Hundred and Sixty-two
- Documents; Louis aiding them as he can.
-
- A great Thing is now therefore in open progress; all men, in all
- lands, watching it. By what Forms and Methods shall the
- Convention acquit itself, in such manner that there rest not on
- it even the suspicion of blame? Difficult that will be! The
- Convention, really much at a loss, discusses and deliberates. All
- day from morning to night, day after day, the Tribune drones with
- oratory on this matter; one must stretch the old Formula to cover
- the new Thing. The Patriots of the Mountain, whetted ever keener,
- clamour for despatch above all; the only good Form will be a
- swift one. Nevertheless the Convention deliberates; the Tribune
- drones,—drowned indeed in tenor, and even in treble, from time to
- time; the whole Hall shrilling up round it into pretty frequent
- wrath and provocation. It has droned and shrilled wellnigh a
- fortnight, before we can decide, this shrillness getting ever
- shriller, That on Wednesday 26th of December, Louis shall appear,
- and plead. His Advocates complain that it is fatally soon; which
- they well might as Advocates: but without remedy; to Patriotism
- it seems endlessly late.
-
- On Wednesday, therefore, at the cold dark hour of eight in the
- morning, all Senators are at their post. Indeed they warm the
- cold hour, as we find, by a violent effervescence, such as is too
- common now; some Louvet or Buzot attacking some Tallien, Chabot;
- and so the whole Mountain effervescing against the whole Gironde.
- Scarcely is this done, at nine, when Louis and his three
- Advocates, escorted by the clang of arms and Santerre’s National
- force, enter the Hall.
-
- Desèze unfolds his papers; honourably fulfilling his perilous
- office, pleads for the space of three hours. An honourable
- Pleading, “composed almost overnight;” courageous yet discreet;
- not without ingenuity, and soft pathetic eloquence: Louis fell on
- his neck, when they had withdrawn, and said with tears, _Mon
- pauvre Desèze_. Louis himself, before withdrawing, had added a
- few words, ‘perhaps the last he would utter to them:’ how it
- pained his heart, above all things, to be held guilty of that
- bloodshed on the Tenth of August; or of ever shedding or wishing
- to shed French blood. So saying, he withdrew from that
- Hall;—having indeed finished his work there. Many are the strange
- errands he has had thither; but this strange one is the last.
-
- And now, why will the Convention loiter? Here is the Indictment
- and Evidence; here is the Pleading: does not the rest follow of
- itself? The Mountain, and Patriotism in general, clamours still
- louder for despatch; for Permanent-session, till the task be
- done. Nevertheless a doubting, apprehensive Convention decides
- that it will still deliberate first; that all Members, who desire
- it, shall have leave to speak.—To your desks, therefore, ye
- eloquent Members! Down with your thoughts, your echoes and
- hearsays of thoughts: now is the time to shew oneself; France and
- the Universe listens! Members are not wanting: Oration spoken
- Pamphlet follows spoken Pamphlet, with what eloquence it can:
- President’s List swells ever higher with names claiming to speak;
- from day to day, all days and all hours, the constant Tribune
- drones;—shrill Galleries supplying, very variably, the tenor and
- treble. It were a dull tune otherwise.
-
- The Patriots, in Mountain and Galleries, or taking counsel
- nightly in Section-house, in Mother Society, amid their shrill
- _Tricoteuses_, have to watch lynx-eyed; to give voice when
- needful; occasionally very loud. Deputy Thuriot, he who was
- Advocate Thuriot, who was Elector Thuriot, and from the top of
- the Bastille, saw Saint-Antoine rising like the ocean; this
- Thuriot can stretch a Formula as heartily as most men. Cruel
- Billaud is not silent, if you incite him. Nor is cruel Jean-Bon
- silent; a kind of Jesuit he too;—write him not, as the
- Dictionaries too often do, _Jambon_, which signifies mere _Ham_.
-
- But, on the whole, let no man conceive it possible that Louis is
- not guilty. The only question for a reasonable man is, or was:
- Can the Convention judge Louis? Or must it be the whole People:
- in Primary Assembly, and with delay? Always delay, ye Girondins,
- false _hommes d’état!_ so bellows Patriotism, its patience almost
- failing.—But indeed, if we consider it, what shall these poor
- Girondins do? Speak their convictions that Louis is a Prisoner of
- War; and cannot be put to death without injustice, solecism,
- peril? Speak such conviction; and lose utterly your footing with
- the decided Patriot? Nay properly it is not even a conviction,
- but a conjecture and dim puzzle. How many poor Girondins are sure
- of but one thing: That a man and Girondin ought to _have_ footing
- somewhere, and to stand firmly on it; keeping well with the
- Respectable Classes! _This_ is what conviction and assurance of
- faith they have. They must wriggle painfully between their
- dilemma-horns.[591]
-
- Nor is France idle, nor Europe. It is a Heart this Convention, as
- we said, which sends out influences, and receives them. A King’s
- Execution, call it Martyrdom, call it Punishment, were an
- influence! Two notable influences this Convention has already
- sent forth, over all Nations; much to its own detriment. On the
- 19th of November, it emitted a Decree, and has since confirmed
- and unfolded the details of it. That any Nation which might see
- good to shake off the fetters of Despotism was thereby, so to
- speak, the Sister of France, and should have help and
- countenance. A Decree much noised of by Diplomatists, Editors,
- International Lawyers; such a Decree as no living Fetter of
- Despotism, nor Person in Authority anywhere, can approve of! It
- was Deputy Chambon the Girondin who propounded this Decree;—at
- bottom perhaps as a flourish of rhetoric.
-
- The second influence we speak of had a still poorer origin: in
- the restless loud-rattling slightly-furnished head of one Jacob
- Dupont from the Loire country. The Convention is speculating on a
- plan of National Education: Deputy Dupont in his speech says, ‘I
- am free to avow, M. le Président, that I for my part am an
- Atheist,’[592]—thinking the world might like to know that. The
- French world received it without commentary; or with no audible
- commentary, so _loud_ was France otherwise. The Foreign world
- received it with confutation, with horror and astonishment;[593]
- a most miserable influence this! And now if to these two were
- added a third influence, and sent pulsing abroad over all the
- Earth: that of Regicide?
-
- Foreign Courts interfere in this Trial of Louis; Spain, England:
- not to be listened to; though they come, as it were, at least
- Spain comes, with the olive-branch in one hand, and the sword
- without scabbard in the other. But at home too, from out of this
- circumambient Paris and France, what influences come
- thick-pulsing! Petitions flow in; pleading for equal justice, in
- a reign of so-called Equality. The living Patriot pleads;—O ye
- National Deputies, do not the dead Patriots plead? The Twelve
- Hundred that lie in cold obstruction, do not they plead; and
- petition, in Death’s dumb-show, from their narrow house there,
- more eloquently than speech? Crippled Patriots hop on crutches
- round the Salle de Manége, demanding justice. The Wounded of the
- Tenth of August, the Widows and Orphans of the Killed petition in
- a body; and hop and defile, eloquently mute, through the Hall:
- one wounded Patriot, unable to hop, is borne on his bed thither,
- and passes shoulder-high, in the horizontal posture.[594] The
- Convention Tribune, which has paused at such sight, commences
- again,—droning mere Juristic Oratory. But out of doors Paris is
- piping ever higher. Bull-voiced St. Huruge is heard; and the
- hysteric eloquence of Mother Duchesse: “Varlet, Apostle of
- Liberty,” with pike and red cap, flies hastily, carrying his
- oratorical folding-stool. Justice on the Traitor! cries all the
- Patriot world. Consider also this other cry, heard loud on the
- streets: ‘Give us Bread, or else kill us!’ Bread and Equality;
- Justice on the Traitor, that we may have Bread!
-
- The Limited or undecided Patriot is set against the Decided.
- Mayor Chambon heard of dreadful rioting at the _Théâtre de la
- Nation:_ it had come to rioting, and even to fist-work, between
- the Decided and the Undecided, touching a new Drama called _Ami
- des Lois_ (Friend of the Laws). One of the poorest Dramas ever
- written; but which had didactic applications in it; wherefore
- powdered wigs of Friends of Order and black hair of Jacobin heads
- are flying there; and Mayor Chambon hastens with Santerre, in
- hopes to quell it. Far from quelling it, our poor Mayor gets so
- “squeezed,” says the Report, and likewise so blamed and bullied,
- say we,—that he, with regret, quits the brief Mayoralty
- altogether, “his lungs being affected.” This miserable _Amis des
- Lois_ is debated of in the Convention itself; so violent,
- mutually-enraged, are the Limited Patriots and the
- Unlimited.[595]
-
- Between which two classes, are not Aristocrats enough, and
- Crypto-Aristocrats, busy? Spies running over from London with
- important Packets; spies pretending to run! One of these latter,
- Viard was the name of him, pretended to accuse Roland, and even
- the Wife of Roland; to the joy of Chabot and the Mountain. But
- the Wife of Roland came, being summoned, on the instant, to the
- Convention Hall; came, in her high clearness; and, with few clear
- words, dissipated this Viard into despicability and air; all
- Friends of Order applauding.[596] So, with Theatre-riots, and
- “Bread, or else kill us;” with Rage, Hunger, preternatural
- Suspicion, does this wild Paris pipe. Roland grows ever more
- querulous, in his Messages and Letters; rising almost to the
- hysterical pitch. Marat, whom no power on Earth can prevent
- seeing into traitors and Rolands, takes to bed for three days;
- almost dead, the invaluable People’s-Friend, with heartbreak,
- with fever and headache: “_O, Peuple babillard, si tu savais
- agir_, People of Babblers, if thou couldst but _act!_”
-
- To crown all, victorious Dumouriez, in these New-year’s days, is
- arrived in Paris;—one fears, for no good. He pretends to be
- complaining of Minister Pache, and Hassenfratz dilapidations; to
- be concerting measures for the spring campaign: one finds him
- much in the company of the Girondins. Plotting with them against
- Jacobinism, against Equality, and the Punishment of Louis! We
- have Letters of his to the Convention itself. Will he act the old
- Lafayette part, this new victorious General? Let him withdraw
- again; not undenounced.[597]
-
- And still, in the Convention Tribune, it drones continually, mere
- Juristic Eloquence, and Hypothesis without Action; and there are
- still fifties on the President’s List. Nay these Gironde
- Presidents give their own party preference: we suspect they play
- foul with the List; men of the Mountain cannot be heard. And
- still it drones, all through December into January and a New
- year; and there is no end! Paris pipes round it; multitudinous;
- ever higher, to the note of the whirlwind. Paris will “bring
- cannon from Saint-Denis;” there is talk of “shutting the
- Barriers,”—to Roland’s horror.
-
- Whereupon, behold, the Convention Tribune suddenly ceases
- droning: we cut short, be on the List who likes; and make end. On
- Tuesday next, the Fifteenth of January 1793, it shall go to the
- Vote, name by name; and, one way or other, this great game play
- itself out!
-
-
- Chapter 3.2.VII.
- The Three Votings.
-
- Is Louis Capet guilty of conspiring against Liberty? Shall our
- Sentence be itself final, or need ratifying by Appeal to the
- People? If guilty, what Punishment? This is the form agreed to,
- after uproar and “several hours of tumultuous indecision:” these
- are the Three successive Questions, whereon the Convention shall
- now pronounce. Paris floods round their Hall; multitudinous, many
- sounding. Europe and all Nations listen for their answer. Deputy
- after Deputy shall answer to his name: Guilty or Not guilty?
-
- As to the Guilt, there is, as above hinted, no doubt in the mind
- of Patriot man. Overwhelming majority pronounces Guilt; the
- unanimous Convention votes for Guilt, only some feeble
- twenty-eight voting not Innocence, but refusing to vote at all.
- Neither does the Second Question prove doubtful, whatever the
- Girondins might calculate. Would not Appeal to the People be
- another name for civil war? Majority of two to one answers that
- there shall be no Appeal: this also is settled. Loud Patriotism,
- now at ten o’clock, may hush itself for the night; and retire to
- its bed not without hope. Tuesday has gone well. On the morrow
- comes, What Punishment? On the morrow is the tug of war.
-
- Consider therefore if, on this Wednesday morning, there is an
- affluence of Patriotism; if Paris stands a-tiptoe, and all
- Deputies are at their post! Seven Hundred and Forty-nine
- honourable Deputies; only some twenty absent on mission, Duchâtel
- and some seven others absent by sickness. Meanwhile expectant
- Patriotism and Paris standing a-tiptoe, have need of patience.
- For this Wednesday again passes in debate and effervescence;
- Girondins proposing that a “majority of three-fourths” shall be
- required; Patriots fiercely resisting them. Danton, who has just
- got back from mission in the Netherlands, does obtain “order of
- the day” on this Girondin proposal; nay he obtains further that
- we decide _sans désemparer_, in Permanent-session, till we have
- done.
-
- And so, finally, at eight in the evening this Third stupendous
- Voting, by roll-call or _appel nominal_, does begin. What
- Punishment? Girondins undecided, Patriots decided, men afraid of
- Royalty, men afraid of Anarchy, must answer here and now.
- Infinite Patriotism, dusky in the lamp-light, floods all
- corridors, crowds all galleries, sternly waiting to hear.
- Shrill-sounding Ushers summon you by Name and Department; you
- must rise to the Tribune and say.
-
- Eye-witnesses have represented this scene of the Third Voting,
- and of the votings that grew out of it; a scene protracted, like
- to be endless, lasting, with few brief intervals, from Wednesday
- till Sunday morning,—as one of the strangest seen in the
- Revolution. Long night wears itself into day, morning’s paleness
- is spread over all faces; and again the wintry shadows sink, and
- the dim lamps are lit: but through day and night and the
- vicissitude of hours, Member after Member is mounting continually
- those Tribune-steps; pausing aloft there, in the clearer upper
- light, to speak his Fate-word; then diving down into the dusk and
- throng again. Like Phantoms in the hour of midnight; most
- spectral, pandemonial! Never did President Vergniaud, or any
- terrestrial President, superintend the like. A King’s Life, and
- so much else that depends thereon, hangs trembling in the
- balance. Man after man mounts; the buzz hushes itself till he
- have spoken: Death; Banishment: Imprisonment till the Peace. Many
- say, Death; with what cautious well-studied phrases and
- paragraphs they could devise, of explanation, of enforcement, of
- faint recommendation to mercy. Many too say, Banishment;
- something short of Death. The balance trembles, none can yet
- guess whitherward. Whereat anxious Patriotism bellows;
- irrepressible by Ushers.
-
- The poor Girondins, many of them, under such fierce bellowing of
- Patriotism, say Death; justifying, _motivant_, that most
- miserable word of theirs by some brief casuistry and jesuitry.
- Vergniaud himself says, Death; justifying by jesuitry. Rich
- Lepelletier Saint-Fargeau had been of the Noblesse, and then of
- the Patriot Left Side, in the Constituent; and had argued and
- reported, there and elsewhere, not a little, _against_ Capital
- Punishment: nevertheless he now says, Death; a word which may
- cost him dear. Manuel did surely rank with the Decided in August
- last; but he has been sinking and backsliding ever since
- September, and the scenes of September. In this Convention, above
- all, no word he could speak would find favour; he says now,
- Banishment; and in mute wrath quits the place for ever,—much
- hustled in the corridors. Philippe Egalité votes in his soul and
- conscience, Death, at the sound of which, and of whom, even
- Patriotism shakes its head; and there runs a groan and shudder
- through this Hall of Doom. Robespierre’s vote cannot be doubtful;
- his speech is long. Men see the figure of shrill Sieyes ascend;
- hardly pausing, passing merely, this figure says, ‘_La Mort sans
- phrase_, Death without phrases;’ and fares onward and downward.
- Most spectral, pandemonial!
-
- And yet if the Reader fancy it of a funereal, sorrowful or even
- grave character, he is far mistaken. “The Ushers in the Mountain
- quarter,” says Mercier, “had become as Box-openers at the Opera;”
- opening and shutting of Galleries for privileged persons, for
- “d’Orléans Egalité’s mistresses,” or other high-dizened women of
- condition, rustling with laces and tricolor. Gallant Deputies
- pass and repass thitherward, treating them with ices,
- refreshments and small-talk; the high-dizened heads beck
- responsive; some have their card and pin, pricking down the Ayes
- and Noes, as at a game of _Rouge-et-Noir_. Further aloft reigns
- Mère Duchesse with her unrouged Amazons; she cannot be prevented
- making long _Hahas_, when the vote is not _La Mort_. In these
- Galleries there is refection, drinking of wine and brandy “as in
- open tavern, _en pleine tabagie_.” Betting goes on in all
- coffeehouses of the neighbourhood. But within doors, fatigue,
- impatience, uttermost weariness sits now on all visages; lighted
- up only from time to time, by turns of the game. Members have
- fallen asleep; Ushers come and awaken them to vote: other Members
- calculate whether they shall not have time to run and dine.
- Figures rise, like phantoms, pale in the dusky lamp-light; utter
- from this Tribune, only one word: Death. “_Tout est optique_,”
- says Mercier, “the world is all an optical shadow.”[598] Deep in
- the Thursday night, when the Voting is done, and Secretaries are
- summing it up, sick Duchâtel, more spectral than another, comes
- borne on a chair, wrapt in blankets, “in nightgown and nightcap,”
- to vote for Mercy: one vote it is thought may turn the scale.
-
- Ah no! In profoundest silence, President Vergniaud, with a voice
- full of sorrow, has to say: ‘I declare, in the name of the
- Convention, that the Punishment it pronounces on Louis Capet is
- that of Death.’ Death by a small majority of Fifty-three. Nay, if
- we deduct from the one side, and add to the other, a certain
- Twenty-six, who said Death but coupled some faintest ineffectual
- surmise of mercy with it, the majority will be but _One_.
-
- Death is the sentence: but its execution? It is not executed yet!
- Scarcely is the vote declared when Louis’s Three Advocates enter;
- with Protest in his name, with demand for Delay, for Appeal to
- the People. For this do Desèze and Tronchet plead, with brief
- eloquence: brave old Malesherbes pleads for it with eloquent want
- of eloquence, in broken sentences, in embarrassment and sobs;
- that brave time-honoured face, with its grey strength, its broad
- sagacity and honesty, is mastered with emotion, melts into dumb
- tears.[599]—They reject the Appeal to the People; that having
- been already settled. But as to the Delay, what they call
- _Sursis_, it _shall_ be considered; shall be voted for tomorrow:
- at present we adjourn. Whereupon Patriotism “hisses” from the
- Mountain: but a “tyrannical majority” has so decided, and
- adjourns.
-
- There is still this _fourth_ Vote then, growls indignant
- Patriotism:—this vote, and who knows what other votes, and
- adjournments of voting; and the whole matter still hovering
- hypothetical! And at every new vote those Jesuit Girondins, even
- they who voted for Death, would so fain find a loophole!
- Patriotism must watch and rage. Tyrannical adjournments there
- have been; one, and now another at midnight on plea of
- fatigue,—all Friday wasted in hesitation and higgling; in
- _re_-counting of the votes, which are found correct as they
- stood! Patriotism bays fiercer than ever; Patriotism, by
- long-watching, has become red-eyed, almost rabid.
-
- ‘Delay: yes or no?’ men do vote it finally, all Saturday, all day
- and night. Men’s nerves are worn out, men’s hearts are desperate;
- now it shall end. Vergniaud, spite of the baying, ventures to say
- Yes, Delay; though he had voted Death. Philippe Egalité says, in
- his soul and conscience, No. The next Member mounting: ‘Since
- Philippe says No, I for my part say Yes, _Moi je dis Oui_.’ The
- balance still trembles. Till finally, at three o’clock on Sunday
- morning, we have: _No Delay_, by a majority of Seventy; _Death
- within four-and-twenty hours!_
-
- Garat Minister of Justice has to go to the Temple, with this
- stern message: he ejaculates repeatedly, ‘_Quelle commission
- affreuse_, What a frightful function!’[600] Louis begs for a
- Confessor; for yet three days of life, to prepare himself to die.
- The Confessor is granted; the three days and all respite are
- refused.
-
- There is no deliverance, then? Thick stone walls answer, None—Has
- King Louis no friends? Men of action, of courage grown desperate,
- in this his extreme need? King Louis’s friends are feeble and
- far. Not even a voice in the coffeehouses rises for him. At Méot
- the Restaurateur’s no Captain Dampmartin now dines; or sees
- death-doing whiskerandoes on furlough exhibit daggers of improved
- structure! Méot’s gallant Royalists on furlough are far across
- the Marches; they are wandering distracted over the world: or
- their bones lie whitening Argonne Wood. Only some weak Priests
- “leave Pamphlets on all the bournestones,” this night, calling
- for a rescue; calling for the pious women to rise; or are taken
- distributing Pamphlets, and sent to prison.[601]
-
- Nay there is one death-doer, of the ancient Méot sort, who, with
- effort, has done even less and worse: slain a Deputy, and set all
- the Patriotism of Paris on edge! It was five on Saturday evening
- when Lepelletier St. Fargeau, having given his vote, _No Delay_,
- ran over to Février’s in the Palais Royal to snatch a morsel of
- dinner. He had dined, and was paying. A thickset man “with black
- hair and blue beard,” in a loose kind of frock, stept up to him;
- it was, as Février and the bystanders bethought them, one Pâris
- of the old King’s-Guard. ‘Are you Lepelletier?’ asks
- he.—‘Yes.’—‘You voted in the King’s Business?’—‘I voted
- Death.’—‘_Scélérat_, take that!’ cries Pâris, flashing out a
- sabre from under his frock, and plunging it deep in Lepelletier’s
- side. Février clutches him; but he breaks off; is gone.
-
- The voter Lepelletier lies dead; he has expired in great pain, at
- one in the morning;—two hours before that Vote of _No Delay_ was
- fully summed up! Guardsman Pâris is flying over France; cannot be
- taken; will be found some months after, self-shot in a remote
- inn.[602]—Robespierre sees reason to think that Prince d’Artois
- himself is privately in Town; that the Convention will be
- butchered in the lump. Patriotism sounds mere wail and vengeance:
- Santerre doubles and trebles all his patrols. Pity is lost in
- rage and fear; the Convention has refused the three days of life
- and all respite.
-
-
- Chapter 3.2.VIII.
- Place de la Révolution.
-
- To this conclusion, then, hast thou come, O hapless Louis! The
- Son of Sixty Kings is to die on the Scaffold by form of law.
- Under Sixty Kings this same form of Law, form of Society, has
- been fashioning itself together, these thousand years; and has
- become, one way and other, a most strange Machine. Surely, if
- needful, it is also frightful this Machine; dead, blind; not what
- it should be; which, with swift stroke, or by cold slow torture,
- has wasted the lives and souls of innumerable men. And behold now
- a King himself, or say rather Kinghood in his person, is to
- expire here in cruel tortures;—like a Phalaris shut in the belly
- of his own red-heated Brazen Bull! It is ever so; and thou
- shouldst know it, O haughty tyrannous man: injustice breeds
- injustice; curses and falsehoods do verily “return always home,”
- wide as they may wander. Innocent Louis bears the sins of many
- generations: he too experiences that man’s tribunal is not in
- this Earth; that if he had no Higher one, it were not well with
- him.
-
- A King dying by such violence appeals impressively to the
- imagination; as the like must do, and ought to do. And yet at
- bottom it is not the King dying, but the Man! Kingship is a coat;
- the grand loss is of the skin. The man from whom you take his
- Life, to him can the whole combined world do _more?_ Lally went
- on his hurdle, his mouth filled with a gag. Miserablest mortals,
- doomed for picking pockets, have a whole five-act Tragedy in
- them, in that dumb pain, as they go to the gallows, unregarded;
- they consume the cup of trembling down to the lees. For Kings and
- for Beggars, for the justly doomed and the unjustly, it is a hard
- thing to die. Pity them all: thy utmost pity with all aids and
- appliances and throne-and-scaffold contrasts, how far short is it
- of the thing pitied!
-
- A Confessor has come; Abbé Edgeworth, of Irish extraction, whom
- the King knew by good report, has come promptly on this solemn
- mission. Leave the Earth alone, then, thou hapless King; it with
- its malice will go its way, thou also canst go thine. A hard
- scene yet remains: the parting with our loved ones. Kind hearts,
- environed in the same grim peril with us; to be left _here!_ Let
- the Reader look with the eyes of Valet Cléry, through these
- glass-doors, where also the Municipality watches; and see the
- cruellest of scenes:
-
- “At half-past eight, the door of the ante-room opened: the Queen
- appeared first, leading her Son by the hand; then Madame Royale
- and Madame Elizabeth: they all flung themselves into the arms of
- the King. Silence reigned for some minutes; interrupted only by
- sobs. The Queen made a movement to lead his Majesty towards the
- inner room, where M. Edgeworth was waiting unknown to them: ‘No,’
- said the King, ‘let us go into the dining-room, it is there only
- that I can see you.’ They entered there; I shut the door of it,
- which was of glass. The King sat down, the Queen on his left
- hand, Madame Elizabeth on his right, Madame Royale almost in
- front; the young Prince remained standing between his Father’s
- legs. They all leaned towards him, and often held him embraced.
- This scene of woe lasted an hour and three-quarters; during which
- we could hear nothing; we could see only that always when the
- King spoke, the sobbings of the Princesses redoubled, continued
- for some minutes; and that then the King began again to
- speak.”[603]—And so our meetings and our partings do now end! The
- sorrows we gave each other; the poor joys we faithfully shared,
- and all our lovings and our sufferings, and confused toilings
- under the earthly Sun, are over. Thou good soul, I shall never,
- never through all ages of Time, see thee any more!—NEVER! O
- Reader, knowest thou that hard word?
-
- For nearly two hours this agony lasts; then they tear themselves
- asunder. ‘Promise that you will see us on the morrow.’ He
- promises:—Ah yes, yes; yet once; and go now, ye loved ones; cry
- to God for yourselves and me!—It was a hard scene, but it is
- over. He will not see them on the morrow. The Queen in passing
- through the ante-room glanced at the Cerberus Municipals; and
- with woman’s vehemence, said through her tears, ‘_Vous êtes tous
- des scélérats_.’
-
- King Louis slept sound, till five in the morning, when Cléry, as
- he had been ordered, awoke him. Cléry dressed his hair. While
- this went forward, Louis took a ring from his watch, and kept
- trying it on his finger; it was his wedding-ring, which he is now
- to return to the Queen as a mute farewell. At half-past six, he
- took the Sacrament; and continued in devotion, and conference
- with Abbé Edgeworth. He will not see his Family: it were too hard
- to bear.
-
- At eight, the Municipals enter: the King gives them his Will and
- messages and effects; which they, at first, brutally refuse to
- take charge of: he gives them a roll of gold pieces, a hundred
- and twenty-five louis; these are to be returned to Malesherbes,
- who had lent them. At nine, Santerre says the hour is come. The
- King begs yet to retire for three minutes. At the end of three
- minutes, Santerre again says the hour is come. “Stamping on the
- ground with his right foot, Louis answers: ‘_Partons_, let us
- go.’”—How the rolling of those drums comes in, through the Temple
- bastions and bulwarks, on the heart of a queenly wife; soon to be
- a widow! He is gone, then, and has not seen us? A Queen weeps
- bitterly; a King’s Sister and Children. Over all these Four does
- Death also hover: all shall perish miserably save one; she, as
- Duchesse d’Angouleme, will live,—not happily.
-
- At the Temple Gate were some faint cries, perhaps from voices of
- pitiful women: ‘_Grâce! Grâce!_’ Through the rest of the streets
- there is silence as of the grave. No man not armed is allowed to
- be there: the armed, did any even pity, dare not express it, each
- man overawed by all his neighbours. All windows are down, none
- seen looking through them. All shops are shut. No wheel-carriage
- rolls this morning, in these streets but one only. Eighty
- thousand armed men stand ranked, like armed statues of men;
- cannons bristle, cannoneers with match burning, but no word or
- movement: it is as a city enchanted into silence and stone; one
- carriage with its escort, slowly rumbling, is the only sound.
- Louis reads, in his Book of Devotion, the Prayers of the Dying:
- clatter of this death-march falls sharp on the ear, in the great
- silence; but the thought would fain struggle heavenward, and
- forget the Earth.
-
- As the clocks strike ten, behold the Place de la Révolution, once
- Place de Louis Quinze: the Guillotine, mounted near the old
- Pedestal where once stood the Statue of that Louis! Far round,
- all bristles with cannons and armed men: spectators crowding in
- the rear; d’Orléans Egalité there in cabriolet. Swift messengers,
- _hoquetons_, speed to the Townhall, every three minutes: near by
- is the Convention sitting,—vengeful for Lepelletier. Heedless of
- all, Louis reads his Prayers of the Dying; not till five minutes
- yet has he finished; then the Carriage opens. What temper he is
- in? Ten different witnesses will give ten different accounts of
- it. He is in the collision of all tempers; arrived now at the
- black Mahlstrom and descent of Death: in sorrow, in indignation,
- in resignation struggling to be resigned. ‘Take care of M.
- Edgeworth,’ he straitly charges the Lieutenant who is sitting
- with them: then they two descend.
-
- The drums are beating: ‘_Taisez-vous_, Silence!’ he cries “in a
- terrible voice, _d’une voix terrible_.” He mounts the scaffold,
- not without delay; he is in puce coat, breeches of grey, white
- stockings. He strips off the coat; stands disclosed in a
- sleeve-waistcoat of white flannel. The Executioners approach to
- bind him: he spurns, resists; Abbé Edgeworth has to remind him
- how the Saviour, in whom men trust, submitted to be bound. His
- hands are tied, his head bare; the fatal moment is come. He
- advances to the edge of the Scaffold, “his face very red,” and
- says: ‘Frenchmen, I die innocent: it is from the Scaffold and
- near appearing before God that I tell you so. I pardon my
- enemies; I desire that France—’ A General on horseback, Santerre
- or another, prances out with uplifted hand: ‘_Tambours!_’ The
- drums drown the voice. ‘Executioners do your duty!’ The
- Executioners, desperate lest themselves be murdered (for Santerre
- and his Armed Ranks will strike, if they do not), seize the
- hapless Louis: six of them desperate, him singly desperate,
- struggling there; and bind him to their plank. Abbé Edgeworth,
- stooping, bespeaks him: ‘Son of Saint Louis, ascend to Heaven.’
- The Axe clanks down; a King’s Life is shorn away. It is Monday
- the 21st of January 1793. He was aged Thirty-eight years four
- months and twenty-eight days.[604]
-
- Executioner Samson shews the Head: fierce shout of _Vive la
- République_ rises, and swells; caps raised on bayonets, hats
- waving: students of the College of Four Nations take it up, on
- the far Quais; fling it over Paris. Orleans drives off in his
- cabriolet; the Townhall Councillors rub their hands, saying, ‘It
- is done, It is done.’ There is dipping of handkerchiefs, of
- pike-points in the blood. Headsman Samson, though he afterwards
- denied it,[605] sells locks of the hair: fractions of the puce
- coat are long after worn in rings.[606]—And so, in some half-hour
- it is done; and the multitude has all departed. Pastrycooks,
- coffee-sellers, milkmen sing out their trivial quotidian cries:
- the world wags on, as if this were a common day. In the
- coffeehouses that evening, says Prudhomme, Patriot shook hands
- with Patriot in a more cordial manner than usual. Not till some
- days after, according to Mercier, did public men see what a grave
- thing it was.
-
- A grave thing it indisputably is; and will have consequences. On
- the morrow morning, Roland, so long steeped to the lips in
- disgust and chagrin, sends in his demission. His accounts lie all
- ready, correct in black-on-white to the uttermost farthing: these
- he wants but to have audited, that he might retire to remote
- obscurity to the country and his books. They will never be
- audited those accounts; he will never get retired thither.
-
- It was on Tuesday that Roland demitted. On Thursday comes
- Lepelletier St. Fargeau’s Funeral, and passage to the Pantheon of
- Great Men. Notable as the wild pageant of a winter day. The Body
- is borne aloft, half-bare; the winding sheet disclosing the
- death-wound: sabre and bloody clothes parade themselves; a
- “lugubrious music” wailing harsh _næniæ_. Oak-crowns shower down
- from windows; President Vergniaud walks there, with Convention,
- with Jacobin Society, and all Patriots of every colour, all
- mourning brotherlike.
-
- Notable also for another thing, this Burial of Lepelletier: it
- was the last act these men ever did with concert! All Parties and
- figures of Opinion, that agitate this distracted France and its
- Convention, now stand, as it were, face to face, and dagger to
- dagger; the King’s Life, round which they all struck and battled,
- being hurled down. Dumouriez, conquering Holland, growls ominous
- discontent, at the head of Armies. Men say Dumouriez will have a
- King; that young d’Orléans Egalité shall be his King. Deputy
- Fauchet, in the _Journal des Amis_, curses his day, more bitterly
- than Job did; invokes the poniards of Regicides, of “Arras
- Vipers” or Robespierres, of Pluto Dantons, of horrid Butchers
- Legendre and Simulacra d’Herbois, to send him swiftly to another
- world than _theirs_.[607] This is _Te-Deum_ Fauchet, of the
- Bastille Victory, of the _Cercle Social_. Sharp was the
- death-hail rattling round one’s Flag-of-truce, on that Bastille
- day: but it was soft to such wreckage of high Hope as this; one’s
- New Golden Era going down in leaden dross, and sulphurous black
- of the Everlasting Darkness!
-
- At home this Killing of a King has divided all friends; and
- abroad it has united all enemies. Fraternity of Peoples,
- Revolutionary Propagandism; Atheism, Regicide; total destruction
- of social order in this world! All Kings, and lovers of Kings,
- and haters of Anarchy, rank in coalition; as in a war for life.
- England signifies to Citizen Chauvelin, the Ambassador or rather
- Ambassador’s-Cloak, that he must quit the country in eight days.
- Ambassador’s-Cloak and Ambassador, Chauvelin and Talleyrand,
- depart accordingly.[608] Talleyrand, implicated in that Iron
- Press of the Tuileries, thinks it safest to make for America.
-
- England has cast out the Embassy: England declares war,—being
- shocked principally, it would seem, at the condition of the River
- Scheldt. Spain declares war; being shocked principally at some
- other thing; which doubtless the Manifesto indicates.[609] Nay we
- find it was not England that declared war first, or Spain first;
- but that France herself declared war first on both of
- them;[610]—a point of immense Parliamentary and Journalistic
- interest in those days, but which has become of no interest
- whatever in these. They all declare war. The sword is drawn, the
- scabbard thrown away. It is even as Danton said, in one of his
- all-too gigantic figures: ‘The coalised Kings threaten us; we
- hurl at their feet, as gage of battle, the Head of a King.’
-
-
- BOOK 3.III.
- THE GIRONDINS
-
-
- Chapter 3.3.I.
- Cause and Effect.
-
- This huge Insurrectionary Movement, which we liken to a breaking
- out of Tophet and the Abyss, has swept away Royalty, Aristocracy,
- and a King’s life. The question is, What will it next do; how
- will it henceforth shape itself? Settle down into a reign of Law
- and Liberty; according as the habits, persuasions and endeavours
- of the educated, monied, respectable class prescribe? That is to
- say: the volcanic lava-flood, bursting up in the manner
- described, will explode and flow according to Girondin Formula
- and pre-established rule of Philosophy? If so, for our Girondin
- friends it will be well.
-
- Meanwhile were not the prophecy rather that as no external force,
- Royal or other, now remains which could control this Movement,
- the Movement will follow a course of its own; probably a very
- original one? Further, that whatsoever man or men can best
- interpret the inward tendencies it has, and give them voice and
- activity, will obtain the lead of it? For the rest, that as a
- thing _without_ order, a thing proceeding from beyond and beneath
- the region of order, it must work and welter, not as a Regularity
- but as a Chaos; destructive and self-destructive; always till
- something that _has_ order arise, strong enough to bind it into
- subjection again? Which something, we may further conjecture,
- will not be a Formula, with philosophical propositions and
- forensic eloquence; but a Reality, probably with a sword in its
- hand!
-
- As for the Girondin Formula, of a respectable Republic for the
- Middle Classes, all manner of Aristocracies being now
- sufficiently demolished, there seems little reason to expect that
- the business will stop there. _Liberty, Equality, Fraternity_,
- these are the words; enunciative and prophetic. Republic for the
- respectable washed Middle Classes, how can that be the fulfilment
- thereof? Hunger and nakedness, and nightmare oppression lying
- heavy on Twenty-five million hearts; this, not the wounded
- vanities or contradicted philosophies of philosophical Advocates,
- rich Shopkeepers, rural Noblesse, was the prime mover in the
- French Revolution; as the like will be in all such Revolutions,
- in all countries. Feudal Fleur-de-lys had become an insupportably
- bad marching banner, and needed to be torn and trampled: but
- Moneybag of Mammon (for that, in these times, is what the
- respectable Republic for the Middle Classes will signify) is a
- still worse, while it lasts. Properly, indeed, it is the worst
- and basest of all banners, and symbols of dominion among men; and
- indeed is possible only in a time of general Atheism, and
- Unbelief in any thing save in brute Force and Sensualism; pride
- of birth, pride of office, any known kind of pride being a degree
- better than purse-pride. Freedom, Equality, Brotherhood: not in
- the Moneybag, but far elsewhere, will Sansculottism seek these
- things.
-
- We say therefore that an Insurrectionary France, loose of control
- from without, destitute of supreme order from within, will form
- one of the most tumultuous Activities ever seen on this Earth;
- such as no Girondin Formula can regulate. An immeasurable force,
- made up of forces manifold, heterogeneous, compatible and
- incompatible. In plainer words, this France must needs split into
- Parties; each of which seeking to make itself good,
- contradiction, exasperation will arise; and Parties on Parties
- find that they cannot work together, cannot exist together.
-
- As for the number of Parties, there will, strictly counting, be
- as many Parties as there are Opinions. According to which rule,
- in this National Convention itself, to say nothing of France
- generally, the number of Parties ought to be Seven Hundred and
- Forty-Nine; for every unit entertains his opinion. But now as
- every unit has at once an individual nature, or necessity to
- follow his own road, and a gregarious nature or necessity to see
- himself travelling by the side of others,—what can there be but
- dissolutions, precipitations, endless turbulence of attracting
- and repelling; till once the master-element get evolved, and this
- wild alchemy arrange itself again?
-
- To the length of Seven Hundred and Forty-nine Parties, however,
- no Nation was ever yet seen to go. Nor indeed much beyond the
- length of Two Parties; two at a time;—so invincible is man’s
- tendency to unite, with all the invincible divisiveness he has!
- Two Parties, we say, are the usual number at one time: let these
- two fight it out, all minor shades of party rallying under the
- shade likest them; when the one has fought down the other, then
- it, in its turn, may divide, self-destructive; and so the process
- continue, as far as needful. This is the way of Revolutions,
- which spring up as the French one has done; when the so-called
- Bonds of Society snap asunder; and all Laws that are not Laws of
- Nature become naught and Formulas merely.
-
- But quitting these somewhat abstract considerations, let History
- note this concrete reality which the streets of Paris exhibit, on
- Monday the 25th of February 1793. Long before daylight that
- morning, these streets are noisy and angry. Petitioning enough
- there has been; a Convention often solicited. It was but
- yesterday there came a Deputation of Washerwomen with Petition;
- complaining that not so much as soap could be had; to say nothing
- of bread, and condiments of bread. The cry of women, round the
- Salle de Manége, was heard plaintive: ‘_Du pain et du savon_,
- Bread and Soap.’[611]
-
- And now from six o’clock, this Monday morning, one perceives the
- Baker’s Queues unusually expanded, angrily agitating themselves.
- Not the Baker alone, but two Section Commissioners to help him,
- manage with difficulty the daily distribution of loaves.
- Soft-spoken assiduous, in the early candle-light, are Baker and
- Commissioners: and yet the pale chill February sunrise discloses
- an unpromising scene. Indignant Female Patriots, partly supplied
- with bread, rush now to the shops, declaring that they will have
- groceries. Groceries enough: sugar-barrels rolled forth into the
- street, Patriot Citoyennes weighing it out at a just rate of
- eleven-pence a pound; likewise coffee-chests, soap-chests, nay
- cinnamon and cloves-chests, with _aquavitæ_ and other forms of
- alcohol,—at a just rate, which some do not pay; the pale-faced
- Grocer silently wringing his hands! What help? The distributive
- Citoyennes are of violent speech and gesture, their long
- Eumenides’ hair hanging out of curl; nay in their girdles pistols
- are seen sticking: some, it is even said, have _beards_,—male
- Patriots in petticoats and mob-cap. Thus, in the streets of
- Lombards, in the street of Five-Diamonds, street of Pullies, in
- most streets of Paris does it effervesce, the livelong day; no
- Municipality, no Mayor Pache, though he was War-Minister lately,
- sends military against it, or aught against it but
- persuasive-eloquence, till seven at night, or later.
-
- On Monday gone five weeks, which was the twenty-first of January,
- we saw Paris, beheading its King, stand silent, like a petrified
- City of Enchantment: and now on this Monday it is so noisy,
- selling sugar! Cities, especially Cities in Revolution, are
- subject to these alternations; the secret courses of civic
- business and existence effervescing and efflorescing, in this
- manner, as a concrete Phenomenon to the eye. Of which Phenomenon,
- when secret existence becoming public effloresces on the street,
- the philosophical cause-and-effect is not so easy to find. What,
- for example, may be the accurate philosophical meaning, and
- meanings, of this sale of sugar? These things that have become
- visible in the street of Pullies and over Paris, whence are they,
- we say; and whither?—
-
- That Pitt has a hand in it, the gold of Pitt: so much, to all
- reasonable Patriot men, may seem clear. But then, through what
- agents of Pitt? Varlet, Apostle of Liberty, was discerned again
- of late, with his pike and his red nightcap. Deputy Marat
- published in his journal, this very day, complaining of the
- bitter scarcity, and sufferings of the people, till he seemed to
- get wroth: “If your Rights of Man were anything but a piece of
- written paper, the plunder of a few shops, and a forestaller or
- two hung up at the door-lintels, would put an end to such
- things.”[612] Are not these, say the Girondins, pregnant
- indications? Pitt has bribed the Anarchists; Marat is the agent
- of Pitt: hence this sale of sugar. To the Mother Society, again,
- it is clear that the scarcity is factitious; is the work of
- Girondins, and such like; a set of men sold partly to Pitt; sold
- wholly to their own ambitions, and hard-hearted pedantries; who
- will not fix the grain-prices, but prate pedantically of
- free-trade; wishing to starve Paris into violence, and embroil it
- with the Departments: _hence_ this sale of sugar.
-
- And, alas, if to these two notabilities, of a Phenomenon and such
- Theories of a Phenomenon, we add this third notability, That the
- French Nation has believed, for several years now, in the
- possibility, nay certainty and near advent, of a universal
- Millennium, or reign of Freedom, Equality, Fraternity, wherein
- man should be the brother of man, and sorrow and sin flee away?
- Not bread to eat, nor soap to wash with; and the reign of perfect
- Felicity ready to arrive, due always since the Bastille fell! How
- did our hearts burn within us, at that Feast of Pikes, when
- brother flung himself on brother’s bosom; and in sunny jubilee,
- Twenty-five millions burst forth into sound and cannon-smoke!
- Bright was our Hope then, as sunlight; red-angry is our Hope
- grown now, as consuming fire. But, O Heavens, what enchantment is
- it, or devilish legerdemain, of such effect, that Perfect
- Felicity, always within arm’s length, could never be laid hold
- of, but only in her stead Controversy and Scarcity? This set of
- traitors after that set! Tremble, ye traitors; dread a People
- which calls itself patient, long-suffering; but which cannot
- always submit to have its pocket picked, in this way,—of a
- Millennium!
-
- Yes, Reader, here is a miracle. Out of that putrescent rubbish of
- Scepticism, Sensualism, Sentimentalism, hollow Machiavelism, such
- a Faith has verily risen; flaming in the heart of a People. A
- whole People, awakening as it were to consciousness in deep
- misery, believes that it is within reach of a Fraternal
- Heaven-on-Earth. With longing arms, it struggles to embrace the
- Unspeakable; cannot embrace it, owing to certain causes.—Seldom
- do we find that a whole People can be said to have any Faith at
- all; except in things which it can eat and handle. Whensoever it
- gets any Faith, its history becomes spirit-stirring, note-worthy.
- But since the time when steel Europe shook itself simultaneously,
- at the word of Hermit Peter, and rushed towards the Sepulchre
- where God had lain, there was no universal impulse of Faith that
- one could note. Since Protestantism went silent, no Luther’s
- voice, no Zisca’s drum any longer proclaiming that God’s Truth
- was _not_ the Devil’s Lie; and the last of the Cameronians
- (Renwick was the name of him; honour to the name of the brave!)
- sank, shot, on the Castle Hill of Edinburgh, there was no partial
- impulse of Faith among Nations. Till now, behold, once more this
- French Nation believes! Herein, we say, in that astonishing Faith
- of theirs, lies the miracle. It is a Faith undoubtedly of the
- more prodigious sort, even among Faiths; and will embody itself
- in prodigies. It is the soul of that world-prodigy named French
- Revolution; whereat the world still gazes and shudders.
-
- But, for the rest, let no man ask History to explain by
- cause-and-effect how the business proceeded henceforth. This
- battle of Mountain and Gironde, and what follows, is the battle
- of Fanaticisms and Miracles; unsuitable for cause-and-effect. The
- sound of it, to the mind, is as a hubbub of voices in
- distraction; little of articulate is to be gathered by long
- listening and studying; only battle-tumult, shouts of triumph,
- shrieks of despair. The Mountain has left no Memoirs; the
- Girondins have left Memoirs, which are too often little other
- than long-drawn Interjections, of _Woe is me and Cursed be ye_.
- So soon as History can philosophically delineate the
- conflagration of a kindled Fireship, she may try this other task.
- Here lay the bitumen-stratum, there the brimstone one; so ran the
- vein of gunpowder, of nitre, terebinth and foul grease: this,
- were she inquisitive enough, History might partly know. But how
- they acted and reacted below decks, one fire-stratum playing into
- the other, by its nature and the art of man, now when all hands
- ran raging, and the flames lashed high over shrouds and topmast:
- this let not History attempt.
-
- The Fireship is old France, the old French Form of Life; her
- creed a Generation of men. Wild are their cries and their ragings
- there, like spirits tormented in that flame. But, on the whole,
- are they not _gone_, O Reader? Their Fireship and they,
- frightening the world, have sailed away; its flames and its
- thunders quite away, into the Deep of Time. One thing therefore
- History will do: pity them all; for it went hard with them all.
- Not even the seagreen Incorruptible but shall have some pity,
- some human love, though it takes an effort. And now, so much once
- thoroughly attained, the rest will become easier. To the eye of
- equal brotherly pity, innumerable perversions dissipate
- themselves; exaggerations and execrations fall off, of their own
- accord. Standing wistfully on the safe shore, we will look, and
- see, what is of interest to us, what is adapted to us.
-
-
- Chapter 3.3.II.
- Culottic and Sansculottic.
-
- Gironde and Mountain are now in full quarrel; their mutual rage,
- says Toulongeon, is growing a “pale” rage. Curious, lamentable:
- all these men have the word Republic on their lips; in the heart
- of every one of them is a passionate wish for something which he
- calls Republic: yet see their death-quarrel! So, however, are men
- made. Creatures who live in confusion; who, once thrown together,
- can readily fall into that confusion of confusions which quarrel
- is, simply because their confusions differ from one another;
- still more because they seem to differ! Men’s words are a poor
- exponent of their thought; nay their thought itself is a poor
- exponent of the inward unnamed Mystery, wherefrom both thought
- and action have their birth. No man can explain himself, can get
- himself explained; men see not one another but distorted
- phantasms which they call one another; which they hate and go to
- battle with: for all battle is well said to be
- _misunderstanding_.
-
- But indeed that similitude of the Fireship; of our poor French
- brethren, so fiery themselves, working also in an _element_ of
- fire, was not insignificant. Consider it well, there is a shade
- of the truth in it. For a man, once committed headlong to
- republican or any other Transcendentalism, and fighting and
- fanaticising amid a Nation of his like, becomes as it were
- enveloped in an ambient atmosphere of Transcendentalism and
- Delirium: his individual self is lost in something that is not
- himself, but foreign though inseparable from him. Strange to
- think of, the man’s cloak still seems to hold the same man: and
- yet the man is not there, his volition is not there; nor the
- source of what he will do and devise; instead of the man and his
- volition there is a piece of Fanaticism and Fatalism incarnated
- in the shape of him. He, the hapless incarnated Fanaticism, goes
- his road; no man can help him, he himself least of all. It is a
- wonderful tragical predicament;—such as human language, unused to
- deal with these things, being contrived for the uses of common
- life, struggles to shadow out in figures. The ambient element of
- material fire is not wilder than this of Fanaticism; nor, though
- visible to the eye, is it more real. Volition bursts forth
- involuntary; rapt along; the movement of free human minds becomes
- a raging tornado of fatalism, blind as the winds; and Mountain
- and Gironde, when they recover themselves, are alike astounded to
- see _where_ it has flung and dropt them. To such height of
- miracle can men work on men; the Conscious and the Unconscious
- blended inscrutably in this our inscrutable Life; endless
- Necessity environing Freewill!
-
- The weapons of the Girondins are Political Philosophy,
- Respectability and Eloquence. Eloquence, or call it rhetoric,
- really of a superior order; Vergniaud, for instance, turns a
- period as sweetly as any man of that generation. The weapons of
- the Mountain are those of mere nature: Audacity and Impetuosity
- which may become Ferocity, as of men complete in their
- determination, in their conviction; nay of men, in some cases,
- who as Septemberers must either prevail or perish. The ground to
- be fought for is Popularity: further you may either seek
- Popularity with the friends of Freedom and Order, or with the
- friends of Freedom Simple; to seek it with both has unhappily
- become impossible. With the former sort, and generally with the
- Authorities of the Departments, and such as read Parliamentary
- Debates, and are of Respectability, and of a peace-loving monied
- nature, the Girondins carry it. With the extreme Patriot again,
- with the indigent millions, especially with the Population of
- Paris who do not read so much as hear and see, the Girondins
- altogether lose it, and the Mountain carries it.
-
- Egoism, nor meanness of mind, is not wanting on either side.
- Surely not on the Girondin side; where in fact the instinct of
- self-preservation, too prominently unfolded by circumstances,
- cuts almost a sorry figure; where also a certain finesse, to the
- length even of shuffling and shamming, now and then shews itself.
- They are men skilful in Advocate-fence. They have been called the
- Jesuits of the Revolution;[613] but that is too hard a name. It
- must be owned likewise that this rude blustering Mountain has a
- sense in it of what the Revolution means; which these eloquent
- Girondins are totally void of. Was the Revolution made, and
- fought for, against the world, these four weary years, that a
- Formula might be substantiated; that Society might become
- _methodic_, demonstrable by logic; and the old Noblesse with
- their pretensions vanish? Or ought it not withal to bring some
- glimmering of light and alleviation to the Twenty-five Millions,
- who sat in darkness, heavy-laden, till they rose with pikes in
- their hands? At least and lowest, one would think, it should
- bring them a proportion of bread to live on? There is in the
- Mountain here and there; in Marat People’s-friend; in the
- incorruptible Seagreen himself, though otherwise so lean and
- formularly, a heartfelt knowledge of this latter fact;—without
- which knowledge all other knowledge here is naught, and the
- choicest forensic eloquence is as sounding brass and a tinkling
- cymbal. Most cold, on the other hand, most patronising,
- unsubstantial is the tone of the Girondins towards “our poorer
- brethren;”—those brethren whom one often hears of under the
- collective name of “the masses,” as if they were not persons at
- all, but mounds of combustible explosive material, for blowing
- down Bastilles with! In very truth, a Revolutionist of this kind,
- is he not a Solecism? Disowned by Nature and Art; deserving only
- to be erased, and disappear! Surely, to our poorer brethren of
- Paris, all this Girondin patronage sounds deadening and killing:
- if fine-spoken and incontrovertible in logic, then all the
- falser, all the hatefuller in fact.
-
- Nay doubtless, pleading for Popularity, here among our poorer
- brethren of Paris, the Girondin has a hard game to play. If he
- gain the ear of the Respectable at a distance, it is by insisting
- on September and such like; it is at the expense of this Paris
- where he dwells and perorates. Hard to perorate in such an
- auditory! Wherefore the question arises: Could we not get
- ourselves out of this Paris? Twice or oftener such an attempt is
- made. If not we ourselves, thinks Guadet, then at least our
- _Suppléans_ might do it. For every Deputy has his _Suppléant_, or
- Substitute, who will take his place if need be: might not these
- assemble, say at Bourges, which is a quiet episcopal Town, in
- quiet Berri, forty good leagues off? In that case, what profit
- were it for the Paris Sansculottery to insult us; our _Suppléans_
- sitting quiet in Bourges, to whom we could run? Nay even the
- Primary electoral Assemblies, thinks Guadet, might be reconvoked,
- and a New Convention got, with new orders from the Sovereign
- people; and right glad were Lyons, were Bourdeaux, Rouen,
- Marseilles, as yet Provincial Towns, to welcome us in their turn,
- and become a sort of Capital Towns; and teach these Parisians
- reason.
-
- Fond schemes; which all misgo! If decreed, in heat of eloquent
- logic, today, they are repealed, by clamour, and passionate wider
- considerations, on the morrow.[614] Will you, O Girondins, parcel
- us into separate Republics, then; like the Swiss, like your
- Americans; so that there be no Metropolis or indivisible French
- Nation any more? Your Departmental Guard seemed to point that
- way! Federal Republic? Federalist? Men and Knitting-women repeat
- _Fédéraliste_, with or without much Dictionary-meaning; but go on
- repeating it, as is usual in such cases, till the meaning of it
- becomes almost magical, fit to designate all mystery of Iniquity;
- and _Fédéraliste_ has grown a word of Exorcism and
- _Apage-Satanas_. But furthermore, consider what “poisoning of
- public opinion” in the Departments, by these Brissot, Gorsas,
- Caritat-Condorcet Newspapers! And then also what
- counter-poisoning, still feller in quality, by a _Père Duchesne_
- of Hébert, brutallest Newspaper yet published on Earth; by a
- _Rougiff_ of Guffroy; by the “incendiary leaves of Marat!” More
- than once, on complaint given and effervescence rising, it is
- decreed that a man cannot both be Legislator and Editor; that he
- shall choose between the one function and the other.[615] But
- this too, which indeed could help little, is revoked or eluded;
- remains a pious wish mainly.
-
- Meanwhile, as the sad fruit of such strife, behold, O ye National
- Representatives, how between the friends of Law and the friends
- of Freedom everywhere, mere heats and jealousies have arisen;
- fevering the whole Republic! Department, Provincial Town is set
- against Metropolis, Rich against Poor, Culottic against
- Sansculottic, man against man. From the Southern Cities come
- Addresses of an almost inculpatory character; for Paris has long
- suffered Newspaper calumny. Bourdeaux demands a reign of Law and
- Respectability, meaning Girondism, with emphasis. With emphasis
- Marseilles demands the like. Nay from Marseilles there come _two_
- Addresses: one Girondin; one Jacobin Sansculottic. Hot Rebecqui,
- sick of this Convention-work, has given place to his Substitute,
- and gone home; where also, with such jarrings, there is work to
- be sick of.
-
- Lyons, a place of Capitalists and Aristocrats, is in still worse
- state; almost in revolt. Chalier the Jacobin Town-Councillor has
- got, too literally, to daggers-drawn with Nièvre-Chol the
- _Modératin_ Mayor; one of your Moderate, perhaps Aristocrat,
- Royalist or Federalist Mayors! Chalier, who pilgrimed to Paris
- “to behold Marat and the Mountain,” has verily kindled himself at
- their sacred urn: for on the 6th of February last, History or
- Rumour has seen him haranguing his Lyons Jacobins in a quite
- transcendental manner, with a drawn dagger in his hand;
- recommending (they say) sheer September-methods, patience being
- worn out; and that the Jacobin Brethren should, impromptu, work
- the Guillotine themselves! One sees him still, in Engravings:
- mounted on a table; foot advanced, body contorted; a bald, rude,
- slope-browed, infuriated visage of the canine species, the eyes
- starting from their sockets; in his puissant right-hand the
- brandished dagger, or horse-pistol, as some give it; other
- dog-visages kindling under him:—a man not likely to end well!
- However, the Guillotine was _not_ got together impromptu, that
- day, “on the Pont Saint-Clair,” or elsewhere; but indeed
- continued lying rusty in its loft:[616] Nièvre-Chol with military
- went about, rumbling cannon, in the most confused manner; and the
- “nine hundred prisoners” received no hurt. So distracted is Lyons
- grown, with its cannon rumbling. Convention Commissioners must be
- sent thither forthwith: if even they can appease it, and keep the
- Guillotine in its loft?
-
- Consider finally if, on all these mad jarrings of the Southern
- Cities, and of France generally, a traitorous Crypto-Royalist
- class is not looking and watching; ready to strike in, at the
- right season! Neither is there bread; neither is there soap: see
- the Patriot women selling out sugar, at a just rate of twenty-two
- sous per pound! Citizen Representatives, it were verily well that
- your quarrels finished, and the reign of Perfect Felicity began.
-
-
- Chapter 3.3.III.
- Growing Shrill.
-
- On the whole, one cannot say that the Girondins are wanting to
- themselves, so far as good-will might go. They prick assiduously
- into the sore-places of the Mountain; from principle, and also
- from jesuitism.
-
- Besides September, of which there is now little to be made except
- effervescence, we discern two sore-places where the Mountain
- often suffers: Marat and Orléans Egalité. Squalid Marat, for his
- own sake and for the Mountain’s, is assaulted ever and anon; held
- up to France, as a squalid bloodthirsty Portent, inciting to the
- pillage of shops; of whom let the Mountain have the credit! The
- Mountain murmurs, ill at ease: this “Maximum of Patriotism,” how
- shall they either own him or disown him? As for Marat personally,
- he, with his fixed-idea, remains invulnerable to such things: nay
- the People’s-friend is very evidently rising in importance, as
- his befriended People rises. No shrieks now, when he goes to
- speak; occasional applauses rather, furtherance which breeds
- confidence. The day when the Girondins proposed to “decree him
- accused” (_décréter d’accusation_, as they phrase it) for that
- February Paragraph, of “hanging up a Forestaller or two at the
- door-lintels,” Marat proposes to have _them_ “decreed insane;”
- and, descending the Tribune-steps, is heard to articulate these
- most unsenatorial ejaculations: ‘_Les Cochons, les imbecilles_,
- Pigs, idiots!’ Oftentimes he croaks harsh sarcasm, having really
- a rough rasping tongue, and a very deep fund of contempt for fine
- outsides; and once or twice, he even laughs, nay “explodes into
- laughter, _rit aux éclats_,” at the gentilities and superfine
- airs of these Girondin ‘men of statesmanship,’ with their
- pedantries, plausibilities, pusillanimities: ‘these two years,’
- says he, ‘you have been whining about attacks, and plots, and
- danger from Paris; and you have not a scratch to shew for
- yourselves.’[617]—Danton gruffly rebukes him, from time to time:
- a Maximum of Patriotism, whom one can neither own nor disown!
-
- But the second sore-place of the Mountain is this anomalous
- Monseigneur Equality Prince d’Orléans. Behold these men, says the
- Gironde; with a whilom Bourbon Prince among them: they are
- creatures of the D’Orléans Faction; they will have Philippe made
- King; one King no sooner guillotined than another made in his
- stead! Girondins have moved, Buzot moved long ago, from principle
- and also from jesuitism, that the whole race of Bourbons should
- be marched forth from the soil of France; this Prince Egalité to
- bring up the rear. Motions which might produce some effect on the
- public;—which the Mountain, ill at ease, knows not what to do
- with.
-
- And poor Orléans Egalité himself, for one begins to pity even
- him, what does he do with them? The disowned of all parties, the
- rejected and foolishly be-drifted hither and hither, to what
- corner of Nature can he now drift with advantage? Feasible hope
- remains not for him: unfeasible hope, in pallid doubtful
- glimmers, there may still come, bewildering, not cheering or
- illuminating,—from the Dumouriez quarter; and how, if not the
- timewasted Orléans Egalité, then perhaps the young unworn
- Chartres Egalité might rise to be a kind of King? Sheltered, if
- shelter it be, in the clefts of the Mountain, poor Egalité will
- wait: one refuge in Jacobinism, one in Dumouriez and
- Counter-Revolution, are there not two chances? However, the look
- of him, Dame Genlis says, is grown gloomy; sad to see. Sillery
- also, the Genlis’s Husband, who hovers about the Mountain, not on
- it, is in a bad way. Dame Genlis has come to Raincy, out of
- England and Bury St. Edmunds, in these days; being summoned by
- Egalité, with her young charge, Mademoiselle Egalité, that so
- Mademoiselle might not be counted among Emigrants and hardly
- dealt with. But it proves a ravelled business: Genlis and charge
- find that they must retire to the Netherlands; must wait on the
- Frontiers for a week or two; till Monseigneur, by Jacobin help,
- get it wound up. “Next morning,” says Dame Genlis, “Monseigneur,
- gloomier than ever, gave me his arm, to lead me to the carriage.
- I was greatly troubled; Mademoiselle burst into tears; her Father
- was pale and trembling. After I had got seated, he stood
- immovable at the carriage-door, with his eyes fixed on me; his
- mournful and painful look seemed to implore pity;—‘_Adieu,
- Madame!_’ said he. The altered sound of his voice completely
- overcame me; not able to utter a word, I held out my hand; he
- grasped it close; then turning, and advancing sharply towards the
- postillions, he gave them a sign, and we rolled away.”[618]
-
- Nor are Peace-makers wanting; of whom likewise we mention two;
- one fast on the crown of the Mountain, the other not yet alighted
- anywhere: Danton and Barrère. Ingenious Barrère, Old-Constituent
- and Editor from the slopes of the Pyrenees, is one of the
- usefullest men of this Convention, in his way. Truth may lie on
- both sides, on either side, or on neither side; my friends, ye
- must give and take: for the rest, success to the winning side!
- This is the motto of Barrère. Ingenious, almost genial;
- quick-sighted, supple, graceful; a man that will prosper.
- Scarcely Belial in the assembled Pandemonium was plausibler to
- ear and eye. An indispensable man: in the great _Art of Varnish_
- he may be said to seek his fellow. Has there an explosion arisen,
- as many do arise, a confusion, unsightliness, which no tongue can
- speak of, nor eye look on; give it to Barrère; Barrère shall be
- Committee-Reporter of it; you shall see it transmute itself into
- a regularity, into the very beauty and improvement that was
- needed. Without one such man, we say, how were this Convention
- bested? Call him not, as exaggerative Mercier does, “the greatest
- liar in France:” nay it may be argued there is not truth enough
- in him to make a real lie of. Call him, with Burke, Anacreon of
- the Guillotine, and a man serviceable to this Convention.
-
- The other Peace-maker whom we name is Danton. Peace, O peace with
- one another! cries Danton often enough: Are we not alone against
- the world; a little band of brothers? Broad Danton is loved by
- all the Mountain; but they think him too easy-tempered, deficient
- in suspicion: he has stood between Dumouriez and much censure,
- anxious not to exasperate our only General: in the shrill tumult
- Danton’s strong voice reverberates, for union and pacification.
- Meetings there are; dinings with the Girondins: it is so
- pressingly essential that there be union. But the Girondins are
- haughty and respectable; this Titan Danton is not a man of
- Formulas, and there rests on him a shadow of September. ‘Your
- Girondins have no confidence in me:’ this is the answer a
- conciliatory Meillan gets from him; to all the arguments and
- pleadings this conciliatory Meillan can bring, the repeated
- answer is, ‘_Ils n’ont point de confiance_.’[619]—The tumult will
- get ever shriller; rage is growing pale.
-
- In fact, what a pang is it to the heart of a Girondin, this first
- withering probability that the despicable unphilosophic anarchic
- Mountain, after all, may triumph! Brutal Septemberers, a
- fifth-floor Tallien, “a Robespierre without an idea in his head,”
- as Condorcet says, “or a feeling in his heart:” and yet we, the
- flower of France, cannot stand against them; behold the sceptre
- departs from us; from us and goes to them! Eloquence,
- Philosophism, Respectability avail not: “against Stupidity the
- very gods fight to no purpose,
-
- “Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens!”
-
-
- Shrill are the plaints of Louvet; his thin existence all
- acidified into rage, and preternatural insight of suspicion.
- Wroth is young Barbaroux; wroth and scornful. Silent, like a
- Queen with the aspic on her bosom, sits the wife of Roland;
- Roland’s Accounts never yet got audited, his name become a
- byword. Such is the fortune of war, especially of revolution. The
- great gulf of Tophet, and Tenth of August, opened itself at the
- magic of your eloquent voice; and lo now, it will not close at
- your voice! It is a dangerous thing such magic. The Magician’s
- Famulus got hold of the forbidden Book, and summoned a goblin:
- _Plait-il_, What is your will? said the Goblin. The Famulus,
- somewhat struck, bade him fetch water: the swift goblin fetched
- it, pail in each hand; but lo, would not cease fetching it!
- Desperate, the Famulus shrieks at him, smites at him, cuts him in
- two; lo, _two_ goblin water-carriers ply; and the house will be
- swum away in Deucalion Deluges.
-
-
- Chapter 3.3.IV.
- Fatherland in Danger.
-
- Or rather we will say, this Senatorial war might have lasted
- long; and Party tugging and throttling with Party might have
- suppressed and smothered one another, in the ordinary bloodless
- Parliamentary way; on one condition: that France had been at
- least able to exist, all the while. But this Sovereign People has
- a digestive faculty, and cannot do without bread. Also we are at
- war, and must have victory; at war with Europe, with Fate and
- Famine: and behold, in the spring of the year, all victory
- deserts us.
-
- Dumouriez had his outposts stretched as far as Aix-la-Chapelle,
- and the beautifullest plan for pouncing on Holland, by stratagem,
- flat-bottomed boats and rapid intrepidity; wherein too he had
- prospered so far; but unhappily could prosper no further.
- Aix-la-Chapelle is lost; Maestricht will not surrender to mere
- smoke and noise: the flat-bottomed boats must launch themselves
- again, and return the way they came. Steady now, ye rapidly
- intrepid men; retreat with firmness, Parthian-like! Alas, were it
- General Miranda’s fault; were it the War-minister’s fault; or
- were it Dumouriez’s own fault and that of Fortune: enough, there
- is nothing for it but retreat,—well if it be not even flight; for
- already terror-stricken cohorts and stragglers pour off, not
- waiting for order; flow disastrous, as many as ten thousand of
- them, without halt till they see France again.[620] Nay worse:
- Dumouriez himself is perhaps secretly turning traitor? Very sharp
- is the tone in which he writes to our Committees. Commissioners
- and Jacobin Pillagers have done such incalculable mischief;
- Hassenfratz sends neither cartridges nor clothing; shoes we have,
- deceptively “soled with wood and pasteboard.” Nothing in short is
- right. Danton and Lacroix, when it was they that were
- Commissioners, would needs join Belgium to France;—of which
- Dumouriez might have made the prettiest little Duchy for his own
- secret behoof! With all these things the General is wroth; and
- writes to us in a sharp tone. Who knows what this hot little
- General is meditating? Dumouriez Duke of Belgium or Brabant; and
- say, Egalité the Younger King of France: there were an end for
- our Revolution!—Committee of Defence gazes, and shakes its head:
- who except Danton, defective in suspicion, could still struggle
- to be of hope?
-
- And General Custine is rolling back from the Rhine Country;
- conquered Mentz will be reconquered, the Prussians gathering
- round to bombard it with shot and shell. Mentz may resist,
- Commissioner Merlin, the Thionviller, “making sallies, at the
- head of the besieged;”—resist to the death; but not longer than
- that. How sad a reverse for Mentz! Brave Foster, brave Lux
- planted Liberty-trees, amid _ça-ira_-ing music, in the snow-slush
- of last winter, there: and made Jacobin Societies; and got the
- Territory incorporated with France: they came hither to Paris, as
- Deputies or Delegates, and have their eighteen francs a-day: but
- see, before once the Liberty-Tree is got rightly in leaf, Mentz
- is changing into an explosive crater; vomiting fire, bevomited
- with fire!
-
- Neither of these men shall again see Mentz; they have come hither
- only to die. Foster has been round the Globe; he saw Cook perish
- under Owyhee clubs; but like this Paris he has yet seen or
- suffered nothing. Poverty escorts him: from home there can
- nothing come, except Job’s-news; the eighteen daily francs, which
- we here as Deputy or Delegate with difficulty “touch,” are in
- paper _assignats_, and sink fast in value. Poverty,
- disappointment, inaction, obloquy; the brave heart slowly
- breaking! Such is Foster’s lot. For the rest, Demoiselle
- Théroigne smiles on you in the Soirees; “a beautiful brownlocked
- face,” of an exalted temper; and contrives to keep her carriage.
- Prussian Trenck, the poor subterranean Baron, jargons and jangles
- in an unmelodious manner. Thomas Paine’s face is red-pustuled,
- “but the eyes uncommonly bright.” Convention Deputies ask you to
- dinner: very courteous; and “we all play at _plumsack_.”[621] “It
- is the Explosion and New-creation of a World,” says Foster; “and
- the actors in it, such small mean objects, buzzing round one like
- a handful of flies.”—
-
- Likewise there is war with Spain. Spain will advance through the
- gorges of the Pyrenees; rustling with Bourbon banners; jingling
- with artillery and menace. And England has donned the red coat;
- and marches, with Royal Highness of York,—whom some once spake of
- inviting to be our King. Changed that humour now: and ever more
- changing; till no hatefuller thing walk this Earth than a denizen
- of that tyrannous Island; and Pitt be declared and decreed, with
- effervescence, “_L’ennemi du genre humain_, The enemy of
- mankind;” and, very singular to say, you make an order that no
- Soldier of Liberty give quarter to an Englishman. Which order
- however, the Soldier of Liberty does but partially obey. We will
- take no Prisoners then, say the Soldiers of Liberty; they shall
- all be “Deserters” that we take.[622] It is a frantic order; and
- attended with inconvenience. For surely, if you give no quarter,
- the plain issue is that you will get none; and so the business
- become as broad as it was long.—Our “recruitment of Three Hundred
- Thousand men,” which was the decreed force for this year, is like
- to have work enough laid to its hand.
-
- So many enemies come wending on; penetrating through throats of
- Mountains, steering over the salt sea; towards all points of our
- territory; rattling chains at us. Nay worst of all: there is an
- enemy within our own territory itself. In the early days of
- March, the Nantes Postbags do not arrive; there arrive only
- instead of them Conjecture, Apprehension, bodeful wind of Rumour.
- The bodefullest proves true! Those fanatic Peoples of La Vendée
- will no longer keep under: their fire of insurrection, heretofore
- dissipated with difficulty, blazes out anew, after the King’s
- Death, as a wide conflagration; not riot, but civil war. Your
- Cathelineaus, your Stofflets, Charettes, are other men than was
- thought: behold how their Peasants, in mere russet and hodden,
- with their rude arms, rude array, with their fanatic Gaelic
- frenzy and wild-yelling battle-cry of _God and the King_, dash at
- us like a dark whirlwind; and blow the best-disciplined Nationals
- we can get into panic and _sauve-qui-peut!_ Field after field is
- theirs; one sees not where it will end. Commandant Santerre may
- be sent thither; but with non-effect; he might as well have
- returned and brewed beer.
-
- It has become peremptorily necessary that a National Convention
- cease arguing, and begin acting. Yield one party of you to the
- other, and do it swiftly. No theoretic outlook is here, but the
- close certainty of ruin; the very day that is passing over must
- be provided for.
-
- It was Friday the eighth of March when this Job’s-post from
- Dumouriez, thickly preceded and escorted by so many other
- Job’s-posts, reached the National Convention. Blank enough are
- most faces. Little will it avail whether our Septemberers be
- punished or go unpunished; if Pitt and Cobourg are coming in,
- with one punishment for us all; nothing now between Paris itself
- and the Tyrants but a doubtful Dumouriez, and hosts in
- loose-flowing loud retreat!—Danton the Titan rises in this hour,
- as always in the hour of need. Great is his voice, reverberating
- from the domes:—Citizen-Representatives, shall we not, in such
- crisis of Fate, lay aside discords? Reputation: O what is the
- reputation of this man or of that? _Que mon nom soit flétri, que
- la France soit libre_, Let my name be blighted; let France be
- free! It is necessary now again that France rise, in swift
- vengeance, with her million right-hands, with her heart as of one
- man. Instantaneous recruitment in Paris; let every Section of
- Paris furnish its thousands; every section of France! Ninety-six
- Commissioners of us, two for each Section of the Forty-eight,
- they must go forthwith, and tell Paris what the Country needs of
- her. Let Eighty more of us be sent, post-haste, over France; to
- spread the fire-cross, to call forth the might of men. Let the
- Eighty also be on the road, before this sitting rise. Let them
- go, and think what their errand is. Speedy Camp of Fifty thousand
- between Paris and the North Frontier; for Paris will pour forth
- her volunteers! Shoulder to shoulder; one strong universal
- death-defiant rising and rushing; we shall hurl back these Sons
- of Night yet again; and France, in spite of the world, be
- free![623]—So sounds the Titan’s voice: into all Section-houses;
- into all French hearts. Sections sit in Permanence, for
- recruitment, enrolment, that very night. Convention
- Commissioners, on swift wheels, are carrying the fire-cross from
- Town to Town, till all France blaze.
-
- And so there is Flag of _Fatherland in Danger_ waving from the
- Townhall, Black Flag from the top of Notre-Dame Cathedral; there
- is Proclamation, hot eloquence; Paris rushing out once again to
- strike its enemies down. That, in such circumstances, Paris was
- in no mild humour can be conjectured. Agitated streets; still
- more agitated round the Salle de Manége! Feuillans-Terrace crowds
- itself with angry Citizens, angrier Citizenesses; Varlet
- perambulates with portable-chair: ejaculations of no measured
- kind, as to perfidious fine-spoken _Hommes d’état_, friends of
- Dumouriez, secret-friends of Pitt and Cobourg, burst from the
- hearts and lips of men. To fight the enemy? Yes, and even to
- ‘freeze him with terror, _glacer d’effroi;_’ but first to have
- domestic Traitors punished! Who are they that, carping and
- quarrelling, in their jesuitic most _moderate_ way, seek to
- shackle the Patriotic movement? That divide France against Paris,
- and poison public opinion in the Departments? That when we ask
- for bread, and a Maximum fixed-price, treat us with lectures on
- Free-trade in grains? Can the human stomach satisfy itself with
- lectures on Free-trade; and are we to fight the Austrians in a
- moderate manner, or in an immoderate? This Convention must be
- _purged_.
-
- ‘Set up a swift Tribunal for Traitors, a Maximum for Grains:’
- thus speak with energy the Patriot Volunteers, as they defile
- through the Convention Hall, just on the wing to the
- Frontiers;—perorating in that heroical Cambyses’ vein of theirs:
- beshouted by the Galleries and Mountain; bemurmured by the
- Right-side and Plain. Nor are prodigies wanting: lo, while a
- Captain of the Section Poissonnière perorates with vehemence
- about Dumouriez, Maximum, and Crypto-Royalist Traitors, and his
- troop beat chorus with him, waving their Banner overhead, the eye
- of a Deputy discerns, in this same Banner, that the _cravates_ or
- streamers of it have Royal fleurs-de-lys! The Section-Captain
- shrieks; his troop shriek, horror-struck, and “trample the Banner
- under foot:” seemingly the work of some Crypto-Royalist Plotter?
- Most probable;[62]—or perhaps at bottom, only the _old_ Banner of
- the Section, manufactured prior to the Tenth of August, when such
- streamers were according to rule![625]
-
- History, looking over the Girondin Memoirs, anxious to
- disentangle the truth of them from the hysterics, finds these
- days of March, especially this Sunday the Tenth of March, play a
- great part. Plots, plots: a plot for murdering the Girondin
- Deputies; Anarchists and Secret-Royalists plotting, in hellish
- concert, for that end! The far greater part of which is
- hysterics. What we do find indisputable is that Louvet and
- certain Girondins were apprehensive they might be murdered on
- Saturday, and did not go to the evening sitting: but held council
- with one another, each inciting his fellow to do something
- resolute, and end these Anarchists: to which, however, Pétion,
- opening the window, and finding the night very wet, answered
- only, ‘_Ils ne feront rien_,’ and “composedly resumed his
- violin,” says Louvet:[626] thereby, with soft Lydian
- tweedledeeing, to wrap himself against eating cares. Also that
- Louvet felt especially liable to being killed; that several
- Girondins went abroad to seek beds: liable to being killed; but
- were not. Further that, in very truth, Journalist Deputy Gorsas,
- poisoner of the Departments, he and his Printer had their houses
- broken into (by a tumult of Patriots, among whom red-capped
- Varlet, American Fournier loom forth, in the darkness of the rain
- and riot); had their wives put in fear; their presses, types and
- circumjacent equipments beaten to ruin; no Mayor interfering in
- time; Gorsas himself escaping, pistol in hand, “along the coping
- of the back wall.” Further that Sunday, the morrow, was not a
- workday; and the streets were more agitated than ever: Is it a
- new September, then, that these Anarchists intend? Finally, that
- no September came;—and also that hysterics, not unnaturally, had
- reached almost their acme.[627]
-
- Vergniaud denounces and deplores; in sweetly turned periods.
- Section Bonconseil, _Good-counsel_ so-named, not Mauconseil or
- _Ill-counsel_ as it once was,—does a far notabler thing: demands
- that Vergniaud, Brissot, Guadet, and other denunciatory
- fine-spoken Girondins, to the number of Twenty-two, be put under
- arrest! Section Good-counsel, so named ever since the Tenth of
- August, is sharply rebuked, like a Section of Ill-counsel;[628]
- but its word is spoken, and will not fall to the ground.
-
- In fact, one thing strikes us in these poor Girondins; their
- fatal shortness of vision; nay fatal poorness of character, for
- that is the root of it. They are as strangers to the People they
- would govern; to the thing they have come to work in. Formulas,
- Philosophies, Respectabilities, what has been written in Books,
- and admitted by the Cultivated Classes; _this_ inadequate
- _Scheme_ of Nature’s working is all that Nature, let her work as
- she will, can reveal to these men. So they perorate and
- speculate; and call on the Friends of Law, when the question is
- not Law or No-Law, but Life or No-Life. Pedants of the
- Revolution, if not Jesuits of it! Their Formalism is great; great
- also is their Egoism. France rising to fight Austria has been
- raised only by Plot of the Tenth of March, to kill Twenty-two of
- _them!_ This Revolution Prodigy, unfolding itself into terrific
- stature and articulation, by its own laws and Nature’s, not by
- the laws of Formula, has become unintelligible, incredible as an
- impossibility, the waste chaos of a Dream.” A Republic founded on
- what they call the Virtues; on what we call the Decencies and
- Respectabilities: this they will have, and nothing but this.
- Whatsoever other Republic Nature and Reality send, shall be
- considered as not sent; as a kind of Nightmare Vision, and thing
- non-extant; disowned by the Laws of Nature, and of Formula. Alas!
- Dim for the best eyes is this Reality; and as for these men, they
- will not look at it with eyes at all, but only through “facetted
- spectacles” of Pedantry, wounded Vanity; which yield the most
- portentous fallacious spectrum. Carping and complaining forever
- of Plots and Anarchy, they will do one thing: prove, to
- demonstration, that the Reality will not translate into their
- Formula; that they and their Formula are incompatible with the
- Reality: and, in its dark wrath, the Reality will extinguish it
- and them! What a man _kens_ he _cans_. But the beginning of a
- man’s doom is that vision be withdrawn from him; that he see not
- the reality, but a false spectrum of the reality; and, following
- that, step darkly, with more or less velocity, downwards to the
- utter Dark; to Ruin, which is the great Sea of Darkness, whither
- all falsehoods, winding or direct, continually flow!
-
- This Tenth of March we may mark as an epoch in the Girondin
- destinies; the rage so exasperated itself, the misconception so
- darkened itself. Many desert the sittings; many come to them
- armed.[629] An honourable Deputy, setting out after breakfast,
- must now, besides taking his Notes, see whether his Priming is in
- order.
-
- Meanwhile with Dumouriez in Belgium it fares ever worse. Were it
- again General Miranda’s fault, or some other’s fault, there is no
- doubt whatever but the “Battle of Nerwinden,” on the 18th of
- March, is lost; and our rapid retreat has become a far too rapid
- one. Victorious Cobourg, with his Austrian prickers, hangs like a
- dark cloud on the rear of us: Dumouriez never off horseback night
- or day; engagement every three hours; our whole discomfited Host
- rolling rapidly inwards, full of rage, suspicion, and
- _sauve-qui-peut!_ And then Dumouriez himself, what his intents
- may be? Wicked seemingly and not charitable! His despatches to
- Committee openly denounce a factious Convention, for the woes it
- has brought on France and him. And his speeches—for the General
- has no reticence! The Execution of the Tyrant this Dumouriez
- calls the Murder of the King. Danton and Lacroix, flying thither
- as Commissioners once more, return very doubtful; even Danton now
- doubts.
-
- Three Jacobin Missionaries, Proly, Dubuisson, Pereyra, have flown
- forth; sped by a wakeful Mother Society: they are struck dumb to
- hear the General speak. The Convention, according to this
- General, consists of three hundred scoundrels and four hundred
- imbeciles: France cannot do without a King. ‘But we have executed
- our King.’ ‘And what is it to me,’ hastily cries Dumouriez, a
- General of no reticence, ‘whether the King’s name be _Ludovicus_
- or _Jacobus?_’ ‘Or _Philippus!_’ rejoins Proly;—and hastens to
- report progress. Over the Frontiers such hope is there.
-
-
- Chapter 3.3.V.
- Sansculottism Accoutred.
-
- Let us look, however, at the grand internal Sansculottism and
- Revolution Prodigy, whether it stirs and waxes: there and not
- elsewhere hope may still be for France. The Revolution Prodigy,
- as Decree after Decree issues from the Mountain, like creative
- _fiats_, accordant with the nature of the Thing,—is shaping
- itself rapidly, in these days, into terrific stature and
- articulation, limb after limb. Last March, 1792, we saw all
- France flowing in blind terror; shutting town-barriers, boiling
- pitch for Brigands: happier, this March, that it is a seeing
- terror; that a creative Mountain exists, which can say _fiat!_
- Recruitment proceeds with fierce celerity: nevertheless our
- Volunteers hesitate to set out, till Treason be punished at home;
- they do not fly to the frontiers; but only fly hither and
- thither, demanding and denouncing. The Mountain must speak new
- _fiat_, and new _fiats_.
-
- And does it not speak such? Take, as first example, those
- _Comités Révolutionnaires_ for the arrestment of Persons Suspect.
- Revolutionary Committee, of Twelve chosen Patriots, sits in every
- Township of France; examining the Suspect, seeking arms, making
- domiciliary visits and arrestments;—caring, generally, that the
- Republic suffer no detriment. Chosen by universal suffrage, each
- in its Section, they are a kind of elixir of Jacobinism; some
- Forty-four Thousand of them awake and alive over France! In Paris
- and all Towns, every house-door must have the names of the
- inmates legibly printed on it, “at a height not exceeding five
- feet from the ground;” every Citizen must produce his
- certificatory _Carte de Civisme_, signed by Section-President;
- every man be ready to give account of the faith that is in him.
- Persons Suspect had as well depart this soil of Liberty! And yet
- departure too is bad: all Emigrants are declared Traitors, their
- property become National; they are “dead in Law,”—save indeed
- that for _our_ behoof they shall “live yet fifty years in Law,”
- and what heritages may fall to them in that time become National
- too! A mad vitality of Jacobinism, with Forty-four Thousand
- centres of activity, circulates through all fibres of France.
-
- Very notable also is the _Tribunal Extraordinaire:_[630] decreed
- by the Mountain; some Girondins dissenting, for surely such a
- Court contradicts every formula;—other Girondins assenting, nay
- co-operating, for do not we all hate Traitors, O ye people of
- Paris?—Tribunal of the Seventeenth in Autumn last was swift; but
- this shall be swifter. Five Judges; a standing Jury, which is
- named from Paris and the Neighbourhood, that there be not delay
- in naming it: they are subject to no Appeal; to hardly any
- Law-forms, but must “get themselves convinced” in all readiest
- ways; and for security are bound “to vote audibly;” audibly, in
- the hearing of a Paris Public. This is the _Tribunal
- Extraordinaire;_ which, in few months, getting into most lively
- action, shall be entitled _Tribunal Revolutionnaire;_ as indeed
- it from the very first has entitled itself: with a Herman or a
- Dumas for Judge President, with a Fouquier-Tinville for
- Attorney-General, and a Jury of such as Citizen Leroi, who has
- surnamed himself _Dix-Août_, “Leroi _August-Tenth_,” it will
- become the wonder of the world. Herein has Sansculottism
- fashioned for itself a Sword of Sharpness: a weapon magical;
- tempered in the Stygian hell-waters; to the edge of it all
- armour, and defence of strength or of cunning shall be soft; it
- shall mow down Lives and Brazen-gates; and the waving of it shed
- terror through the souls of men.
-
- But speaking of an amorphous Sansculottism taking form, ought we
- not above all things to specify how the Amorphous gets itself a
- Head? Without metaphor, this Revolution Government continues
- hitherto in a very anarchic state. Executive Council of
- Ministers, Six in number, there is; but they, especially since
- Roland’s retreat, have hardly known whether they were Ministers
- or not. Convention Committees sit supreme over them; but then
- each Committee as supreme as the others: Committee of Twenty-one,
- of Defence, of General Surety; simultaneous or successive, for
- specific purposes. The Convention alone is
- all-powerful,—especially if the Commune go with it; but is too
- numerous for an administrative body. Wherefore, in this perilous
- quick-whirling condition of the Republic, before the end of
- March, we obtain our small _Comité de Salut Public;_[631] as it
- were, for miscellaneous accidental purposes, requiring
- despatch;—as it proves, for a sort of universal supervision, and
- universal subjection. They are to report weekly, these new
- Committee-men; but to deliberate in secret. Their number is Nine,
- firm Patriots all, Danton one of them: Renewable every month;—yet
- why not reelect them if they turn out well? The flower of the
- matter is that they are but nine; that they sit in secret. An
- insignificant-looking thing at first, this Committee; but with a
- principle of growth in it! Forwarded by fortune, by internal
- Jacobin energy, it will reduce all Committees and the Convention
- itself to mute obedience, the Six Ministers to Six assiduous
- Clerks; and work its will on the Earth and under Heaven, for a
- season. “A Committee of Public Salvation,” whereat the world
- still shrieks and shudders.
-
- If we call that Revolutionary Tribunal a Sword, which
- Sansculottism has provided for itself, then let us call the “Law
- of the Maximum,” a Provender-scrip, or Haversack, wherein better
- or worse some ration of bread may be found. It is true, Political
- Economy, Girondin free-trade, and all law of supply and demand,
- are hereby hurled topsyturvy: but what help? Patriotism must
- live; the “cupidity of farmers” seems to have no bowels.
- Wherefore this Law of the Maximum, fixing the highest price of
- grains, is, with infinite effort, got passed;[632] and shall
- gradually extend itself into a Maximum for all manner of
- _comestibles_ and commodities: with such scrambling and
- topsyturvying as may be fancied! For now, if, for example, the
- farmer will not sell? The farmer shall be forced to sell. An
- accurate Account of what grain he has shall be delivered in to
- the Constituted Authorities: let him see that he say not too
- much; for in that case, his rents, taxes and contributions will
- rise proportionally: let him see that he say not too little; for,
- on or before a set day, we shall suppose in April, _less_ than
- one-third of this declared quantity, must remain in his barns,
- more than two-thirds of it must have been thrashed and sold. One
- can denounce him, and raise penalties.
-
- By such inextricable overturning of all Commercial relation will
- Sansculottism keep life in; since not otherwise. On the whole, as
- Camille Desmoulins says once, ‘while the Sansculottes fight, the
- Monsieurs must pay.’ So there come _Impôts Progressifs_,
- Ascending Taxes; which consume, with fast-increasing voracity,
- and “superfluous-revenue’ of men: beyond fifty-pounds a-year you
- are not exempt; rising into the hundreds you bleed freely; into
- the thousands and tens of thousands, you bleed gushing. Also
- there come Requisitions; there comes “Forced-Loan of a Milliard,”
- some Fifty-Millions Sterling; which of course they that _have_
- must lend. Unexampled enough: it has grown to be no country for
- the Rich, this; but a country for the Poor! And then if one fly,
- what steads it? Dead in Law; nay kept alive fifty years yet, for
- _their_ accursed behoof! In this manner, therefore, it goes;
- topsyturvying, _ça-ira_-ing;—and withal there is endless sale of
- Emigrant National-Property, there is Cambon with endless
- cornucopia of Assignats. The Trade and Finance of Sansculottism;
- and how, with Maximum and Bakers’-queues, with Cupidity, Hunger,
- Denunciation and Paper-money, it led its galvanic-life, and began
- and ended,—remains the most interesting of all Chapters in
- Political Economy: still to be written.
-
- All which things are they not clean against Formula? O Girondin
- Friends, it is not a Republic of the Virtues we are getting; but
- only a Republic of the Strengths, virtuous and other!
-
-
- Chapter 3.3.VI.
- The Traitor.
-
- But Dumouriez, with his fugitive Host, with his King _Ludovicus_
- or King _Philippus?_ There lies the crisis; there hangs the
- question: Revolution Prodigy, or Counter-Revolution?—One wide
- shriek covers that North-East region. Soldiers, full of rage,
- suspicion and terror, flock hither and thither; Dumouriez the
- many-counselled, never off horseback, knows now no counsel that
- were not worse than none: the counsel, namely, of joining himself
- with Cobourg; marching to Paris, extinguishing Jacobinism, and,
- with some new King Ludovicus or King Philippus, resting the
- Constitution of 1791![633]
-
- Is Wisdom quitting Dumouriez; the herald of Fortune quitting him?
- Principle, faith political or other, beyond a certain faith of
- mess-rooms, and honour of an officer, had him not to quit. At any
- rate, his quarters in the Burgh of Saint-Amand; his headquarters
- in the Village of Saint-Amand des Boues, a short way off,—have
- become a Bedlam. National Representatives, Jacobin Missionaries
- are riding and running: of the “three Towns,” Lille, Valenciennes
- or even Condé, which Dumouriez wanted to snatch for himself, not
- one can be snatched: your Captain is admitted, but the Town-gate
- is closed on him, and then the Prison gate, and “his men wander
- about the ramparts.” Couriers gallop breathless; men wait, or
- seem waiting, to assassinate, to be assassinated; Battalions nigh
- frantic with such suspicion and uncertainty, with
- _Vive-la-République_ and _Sauve-qui-peut_, rush this way and
- that;—Ruin and Desperation in the shape of Cobourg lying
- entrenched close by.
-
- Dame Genlis and her fair Princess d’Orléans find this Burgh of
- Saint-Amand no fit place for them; Dumouriez’s protection is
- grown worse than none. Tough Genlis one of the toughest women; a
- woman, as it were, with nine lives in her; whom nothing will
- beat: she packs her bandboxes; clear for flight in a private
- manner. Her beloved Princess she will—leave here, with the Prince
- Chartres Egalité her Brother. In the cold grey of the April
- morning, we find her accordingly established in her hired
- vehicle, on the street of Saint-Amand; postilions just cracking
- their whips to go,—when behold the young Princely Brother,
- struggling hitherward, hastily calling; bearing the Princess in
- his arms! Hastily he has clutched the poor young lady up, in her
- very night-gown, nothing saved of her goods except the watch from
- the pillow: with brotherly despair he flings her in, among the
- bandboxes, into Genlis’s chaise, into Genlis’s arms: Leave her
- not, in the name of Mercy and Heaven! A shrill scene, but a brief
- one:—the postilions crack and go. Ah, whither? Through by-roads
- and broken hill-passes: seeking their way with lanterns after
- nightfall; through perils, and Cobourg Austrians, and suspicious
- French Nationals; finally, into Switzerland; safe though nigh
- moneyless.[634] The brave young Egalité has a most wild Morrow to
- look for; but now only himself to carry through it.
-
- For indeed over at that Village named _of the Mudbaths_,
- Saint-Amand des Boues, matters are still worse. About four
- o’clock on Tuesday afternoon, the 2d of April 1793, two Couriers
- come galloping as if for life: _Mon Général!_ Four National
- Representatives, War-Minister at their head, are posting
- hitherward, from Valenciennes: are close at hand,—with what
- intents one may guess! While the Couriers are yet speaking,
- War-Minister and National Representatives, old Camus the
- Archivist for chief speaker of them, arrive. Hardly has _Mon
- Général_ had time to order out the Huzzar Regiment de Berchigny;
- that it take rank and wait near by, in case of accident. And so,
- enter War-Minister Beurnonville, with an embrace of friendship,
- for he is an old friend; enter Archivist Camus and the other
- three, following him.
-
- They produce Papers, invite the General to the bar of the
- Convention: merely to give an explanation or two. The General
- finds it unsuitable, not to say impossible, and that ‘the service
- will suffer.’ Then comes reasoning; the voice of the old
- Archivist getting loud. Vain to reason loud with this Dumouriez;
- he answers mere angry irreverences. And so, amid plumed
- staff-officers, very gloomy-looking; in jeopardy and uncertainty,
- these poor National messengers debate and consult, retire and
- re-enter, for the space of some two hours: without effect.
- Whereupon Archivist Camus, getting quite loud, proclaims, in the
- name of the National Convention, for he has the power to do it,
- That General Dumouriez is _arrested:_ ‘Will you obey the National
- Mandate, General!’ ‘_Pas dans ce moment-ci_, Not at this
- particular moment,’ answers the General also aloud; then glancing
- the other way, utters certain unknown vocables, in a mandatory
- manner; seemingly a German word-of-command.[635] Hussars clutch
- the Four National Representatives, and Beurnonville the
- War-minister; pack them out of the apartment; out of the Village,
- over the lines to Cobourg, in two chaises that very night,—as
- hostages, prisoners; to lie long in Maestricht and Austrian
- strongholds![636] J_acta est alea_.
-
- This night Dumouriez prints his “Proclamation;” this night and
- the morrow the Dumouriez Army, in such darkness visible, and rage
- of semi-desperation as there is, shall meditate what the General
- is doing, what they themselves will do in it. Judge whether this
- Wednesday was of halcyon nature, for any one! But, on the
- Thursday morning, we discern Dumouriez with small escort, with
- Chartres Egalité and a few staff-officers, ambling along the
- Condé Highway: perhaps they are for Condé, and trying to persuade
- the Garrison there; at all events, they are for an interview with
- Cobourg, who waits in the woods by appointment, in that quarter.
- Nigh the Village of Doumet, three National Battalions, a set of
- men always full of Jacobinism, sweep past us; marching rather
- swiftly,—seemingly in mistake, by a way we had not ordered. The
- General dismounts, steps into a cottage, a little from the
- wayside; will give them right order in writing. Hark! what
- strange growling is heard: what barkings are heard, loud yells of
- ‘_Traitors_,’ of ‘_Arrest:_’ the National Battalions have wheeled
- round, are emitting shot! Mount, Dumouriez, and spring for life!
- Dumouriez and Staff strike the spurs in, deep; vault over
- ditches, into the fields, which prove to be morasses; sprawl and
- plunge for life; bewhistled with curses and lead. Sunk to the
- middle, with or without horses, several servants killed, they
- escape out of shot-range, to General Mack the Austrian’s
- quarters. Nay they return on the morrow, to Saint-Amand and
- faithful foreign Berchigny; but what boots it? The Artillery has
- all revolted, is jingling off to Valenciennes: all have revolted,
- are revolting; except only foreign Berchigny, to the extent of
- some poor fifteen hundred, none will follow Dumouriez against
- France and Indivisible Republic: Dumouriez’s occupation’s
- gone.[637]
-
- Such an instinct of Frenehhood and Sansculottism dwells in these
- men: they will follow no Dumouriez nor Lafayette, nor any mortal
- on such errand. Shriek may be of _Sauve-qui-peut_, but will also
- be of _Vive-la-République_. New National Representatives arrive;
- new General Dampierre, soon killed in battle; new General
- Custine; the agitated Hosts draw back to some Camp of Famars;
- make head against Cobourg as they can.
-
- And so Dumouriez is in the Austrian quarters; his drama ended, in
- this rather sorry manner. A most shifty, wiry man; one of
- Heaven’s Swiss that wanted only work. Fifty years of unnoticed
- toil and valour; one year of toil and valour, not unnoticed, but
- seen of all countries and centuries; then thirty other years
- again unnoticed, of Memoir-writing, English Pension, scheming and
- projecting to no purpose: Adieu thou Swiss of Heaven, worthy to
- have been something else!
-
- His Staff go different ways. Brave young Egalité reaches
- Switzerland and the Genlis Cottage; with a strong crabstick in
- his hand, a strong heart in his body: his Princedom in now
- reduced to that. Egalité the Father sat playing whist, in his
- Palais Egalité, at Paris, on the 6th day of this same month of
- April, when a catchpole entered: Citoyen Egalité is wanted at the
- Convention Committee![638] Examination, requiring Arrestment;
- finally requiring Imprisonment, transference to Marseilles and
- the Castle of If! Orléansdom has sunk in the black waters; Palais
- Egalité, which was Palais Royal, is like to become Palais
- National.
-
-
- Chapter 3.3.VII.
- In Fight.
-
- Our Republic, by paper Decree, may be “One and Indivisible;” but
- what profits it while these things are? Federalists in the
- Senate, renegadoes in the Army, traitors everywhere! France, all
- in desperate recruitment since the Tenth of March, does not fly
- to the frontier, but only flies hither and thither. This
- defection of contemptuous diplomatic Dumouriez falls heavy on the
- fine-spoken high-sniffing _Hommes d’état_, whom he consorted
- with; forms a second epoch in their destinies.
-
- Or perhaps more strictly we might say, the second Girondin epoch,
- though little noticed then, began on the day when, in reference
- to this defection, the Girondins broke with Danton. It was the
- first day of April; Dumouriez had not yet plunged across the
- morasses to Cobourg, but was evidently meaning to do it, and our
- Commissioners were off to arrest him; when what does the Girondin
- Lasource see good to do, but rise, and jesuitically question and
- insinuate at great length, whether a main accomplice of Dumouriez
- had not probably been—Danton? Gironde grins sardonic assent;
- Mountain holds its breath. The figure of Danton, Levasseur says,
- while this speech went on, was noteworthy. He sat erect, with a
- kind of internal convulsion struggling to keep itself motionless;
- his eye from time to time flashing wilder, his lip curling in
- Titanic scorn.[639] Lasource, in a fine-spoken attorney-manner,
- proceeds: there is this probability to his mind, and there is
- that; probabilities which press painfully on him, which cast the
- Patriotism of Danton under a painful shade; which painful shade
- he, Lasource, will hope that Danton may find it not impossible to
- dispel.
-
- ‘_Les Scélérats!_’ cries Danton, starting up, with clenched
- right-hand, Lasource having done: and descends from the Mountain,
- like a lava-flood; his answer not unready. Lasource’s
- probabilities fly like idle dust; but leave a result behind them.
- ‘Ye were right, friends of the Mountain,’ begins Danton, ‘and I
- was wrong: there is no peace possible with these men. Let it be
- war then! They will not save the Republic with us: it shall be
- saved without them; saved in spite of them.’ Really a burst of
- rude Parliamentary eloquence this; which is still worth reading,
- in the old _Moniteur!_ With fire-words the exasperated rude Titan
- rives and smites these Girondins; at every hit the glad Mountain
- utters chorus: Marat, like a musical _bis_, repeating the last
- phrase.[640] Lasource’s probabilities are gone: but Danton’s
- pledge of battle remains lying.
-
- A third epoch, or scene in the Girondin Drama, or rather it is
- but the completion of this second epoch, we reckon from the day
- when the patience of virtuous Pétion finally boiled over; and the
- Girondins, so to speak, took up this battle-pledge of Danton’s
- and decreed Marat accused. It was the eleventh of the same month
- of April, on some effervescence rising, such as often rose; and
- President had covered himself, mere Bedlam now ruling; and
- Mountain and Gironde were rushing on one another with clenched
- right-hands, and even with pistols in them; when, behold, the
- Girondin Duperret drew a sword! Shriek of horror rose, instantly
- quenching all other effervescence, at sight of the clear
- murderous steel; whereupon Duperret returned it to the leather
- again;—confessing that he did indeed draw it, being instigated by
- a kind of sacred madness, ‘_sainte fureur_,’ and pistols held at
- him; but that if he parricidally had chanced to scratch the
- outmost skin of National Representation with it, he too carried
- pistols, and would have blown his brains out on the spot.[641]
-
- But now in such posture of affairs, virtuous Pétion rose, next
- morning, to lament these effervescences, this endless Anarchy
- invading the Legislative Sanctuary itself; and here, being
- growled at and howled at by the Mountain, his patience, long
- tried, did, as we say, boil over; and he spake vehemently, in
- high key, with foam on his lips; “whence,” says Marat, “I
- concluded he had got “_la rage_,” the rabidity, or dog-madness.
- Rabidity smites others rabid: so there rises new foam-lipped
- demand to have Anarchists extinguished; and specially to have
- Marat put under Accusation. Send a Representative to the
- Revolutionary Tribunal? Violate the inviolability of a
- Representative? Have a care, O Friends! This poor Marat has
- faults enough; but against Liberty or Equality, what fault? That
- he has loved and fought for it, not wisely but too well. In
- dungeons and cellars, in pinching poverty, under anathema of men;
- even so, in such fight, has he grown so dingy, bleared; even so
- has his head become a Stylites one! Him you will fling to your
- Sword of Sharpness; while Cobourg and Pitt advance on us,
- fire-spitting?
-
- The Mountain is loud, the Gironde is loud and deaf; all lips are
- foamy. With “Permanent-Session of twenty-four hours,” with vote
- by rollcall, and a dead-lift effort, the Gironde carries it:
- Marat is ordered to the Revolutionary Tribunal, to answer for
- that February Paragraph of Forestallers at the door-lintel, with
- other offences; and, after a little hesitation, he obeys.[642]
-
- Thus is Danton’s battle-pledge taken up: there is, as he said
- there would be, “war without truce or treaty, _ni trève ni
- composition_.” Wherefore, close now with one another, Formula and
- Reality, in death-grips, and wrestle it out; both of you cannot
- live, but only one!
-
-
- Chapter 3.3.VIII.
- In Death-Grips.
-
- It proves what strength, were it only of inertia, there is in
- established Formulas, what weakness in nascent Realities, and
- illustrates several things, that this death-wrestle should still
- have lasted some six weeks or more. National business, discussion
- of the Constitutional Act, for our Constitution should decidedly
- be got ready, proceeds along with it. We even change our
- Locality; we shift, on the Tenth of May, from the old Salle de
- Manége, into our new Hall, in the Palace, once a King’s but now
- the Republic’s, of the Tuileries. Hope and ruth, flickering
- against despair and rage, still struggles in the minds of men.
-
- It is a most dark confused death-wrestle, this of the six weeks.
- Formalist frenzy against Realist frenzy; Patriotism, Egoism,
- Pride, Anger, Vanity, Hope and Despair, all raised to the
- frenetic pitch: Frenzy meets Frenzy, like dark clashing
- whirlwinds; neither understands the other; the weaker, one day,
- will understand that _it_ is verily swept down! Girondism is
- strong as established Formula and Respectability: do not as many
- as Seventy-two of the Departments, or say respectable Heads of
- Departments, declare for us? Calvados, which loves its Buzot,
- will even rise in revolt, so hint the Addresses; Marseilles,
- cradle of Patriotism, will rise; Bourdeaux will rise, and the
- Gironde Department, as one man; in a word, who will _not_ rise,
- were our _Représentation Nationale_ to be insulted, or one hair
- of a Deputy’s head harmed! The Mountain, again, is strong as
- Reality and Audacity. To the Reality of the Mountain are not all
- furthersome things possible? A new Tenth of August, if needful;
- nay a new Second of September!—
-
- But, on Wednesday afternoon, twenty-fourth day of April, year
- 1793, what tumult as of fierce jubilee is this? It is Marat
- returning from Revolutionary Tribunal! A week or more of
- death-peril: and now there is triumphant acquittal; Revolutionary
- Tribunal can find no accusation against this man. And so the eye
- of History beholds Patriotism, which had gloomed unutterable
- things all week, break into loud jubilee, embrace its Marat; lift
- him into a chair of triumph, bear him shoulder-high through the
- streets. Shoulder-high is the injured People’s-friend, crowned
- with an oak-garland; amid the wavy sea of red nightcaps,
- carmagnole jackets, grenadier bonnets and female mob-caps;
- far-sounding like a sea! The injured People’s-friend has here
- reached his culminating-point; he too strikes the stars with his
- sublime head.
-
- But the Reader can judge with what face President Lasource, he of
- the “painful probabilities,” who presides in this Convention
- Hall, might welcome such jubilee-tide, when it got thither, and
- the Decreed of Accusation floating on the top of it! A National
- Sapper, spokesman on the occasion, says, the People know their
- Friend, and love his life as their own; ‘whosoever wants Marat’s
- head must get the Sapper’s first.’[643] Lasource answered with
- some vague painful mumblement,—which, says Levasseur, one could
- not help tittering at.[644] Patriot Sections, Volunteers not yet
- gone to the Frontiers, come demanding the ‘purgation of traitors
- from your own bosom;’ the expulsion, or even the trial and
- sentence, of a factious Twenty-two.
-
- Nevertheless the Gironde has got its Commission of Twelve; a
- Commission specially appointed for investigating these troubles
- of the Legislative Sanctuary: let Sansculottism say what it will,
- Law shall triumph. Old-Constituent Rabaut Saint-Etienne presides
- over this Commission: ‘it is the last plank whereon a wrecked
- Republic may perhaps still save herself.’ Rabaut and they
- therefore sit, intent; examining witnesses; launching
- arrestments; looking out into a waste dim sea of troubles.—the
- womb of _Formula_, or perhaps her grave! Enter not that sea, O
- Reader! There are dim desolation and confusion; raging women and
- raging men. Sections come demanding Twenty-two; for the _number_
- first given by Section Bonconseil still holds, though the names
- should even vary. Other Sections, of the wealthier kind, come
- denouncing such demand; nay the same Section will demand today,
- and denounce the demand tomorrow, according as the wealthier sit,
- or the poorer. Wherefore, indeed, the Girondins decree that all
- Sections shall close “at ten in the evening;” before the working
- people come: which Decree remains without effect. And nightly the
- Mother of Patriotism wails doleful; doleful, but her eye
- kindling! And Fournier l’Americain is busy, and the two Banker
- Freys, and Varlet Apostle of Liberty; the bull-voice of Marquis
- Saint-Huruge is heard. And shrill women vociferate from all
- Galleries, the Convention ones and downwards. Nay a “Central
- Committee” of all the Forty-eight Sections, looms forth huge and
- dubious; sitting dim in the _Archevêché_, sending Resolutions,
- receiving them: a Centre of the Sections; in dread deliberation
- as to a New Tenth of August!
-
- One thing we will specify to throw light on many: the aspect
- under which, seen through the eyes of these Girondin Twelve, or
- even seen through one’s own eyes, the Patriotism of the softer
- sex presents itself. There are Female Patriots, whom the
- Girondins call Megaeras, and count to the extent of eight
- thousand; with serpent-hair, all out of curl; who have changed
- the distaff for the dagger. They are of “the Society called
- Brotherly,” _Fraternelle_, say _Sisterly_, which meets under the
- roof of the Jacobins. “Two thousand daggers,” or so, have been
- ordered,—doubtless, for them. They rush to Versailles, to raise
- more women; but the Versailles women will not rise.[645]
-
- Nay, behold, in National Garden of Tuileries,—Demoiselle
- Théroigne herself is become as a brownlocked Diana (were that
- possible) attacked by her own dogs, or she-dogs! The Demoiselle,
- keeping her carriage, is for Liberty indeed, as she has full well
- shewn; but then for Liberty with Respectability: whereupon these
- serpent-haired Extreme She-Patriots now do fasten on her, tatter
- her, shamefully fustigate her, in their shameful way; almost
- fling her into the Garden-ponds, had not help intervened. Help,
- alas, to small purpose. The poor Demoiselle’s head and
- nervous-system, none of the soundest, is so tattered and
- fluttered that it will never recover; but flutter worse and
- worse, till it crack; and within year and day we hear of her in
- madhouse, and straitwaistcoat, which proves permanent!—Such
- brownlocked Figure did flutter, and inarticulately jabber and
- gesticulate, little able to _speak_ the obscure meaning it had,
- through some segment of that Eighteenth Century of Time. She
- disappears here from the Revolution and Public History, for
- evermore.[646]
-
- Another thing we will not again specify, yet again beseech the
- Reader to imagine: the reign of Fraternity and Perfection.
- Imagine, we say, O Reader, that the Millennium were struggling on
- the threshold, and yet not so much as groceries could be
- had,—owing to traitors. With what impetus would a man strike
- traitors, in that case? Ah, thou canst not imagine it: thou hast
- thy groceries safe in the shops, and little or no hope of a
- Millennium ever coming!—But, indeed, as to the temper there was
- in men and women, does not this one fact say enough: the height
- SUSPICION had risen to? Preternatural we often called it;
- seemingly in the language of exaggeration: but listen to the cold
- deposition of witnesses. Not a musical Patriot can blow himself a
- snatch of melody from the French Horn, sitting mildly pensive on
- the housetop, but Mercier will recognise it to be a signal which
- one Plotting Committee is making to another. Distraction has
- possessed Harmony herself; lurks in the sound of _Marseillese_
- and _ça-ira_.[647] Louvet, who can see as deep into a millstone
- as the most, discerns that we shall be invited back to our old
- Hall of the Manege, by a Deputation; and then the Anarchists will
- massacre Twenty-two of us, as we walk over. It is Pitt and
- Cobourg; the gold of Pitt.—Poor Pitt! They little know what work
- he has with his own Friends of the People; getting them bespied,
- beheaded, their habeas-corpuses suspended, and his own Social
- Order and strong-boxes kept tight,—to fancy him raising mobs
- among his neighbours!
-
- But the strangest fact connected with French or indeed with human
- Suspicion, is perhaps this of Camille Desmoulins. Camille’s head,
- one of the clearest in France, has got itself so saturated
- through every fibre with Preternaturalism of Suspicion, that
- looking back on that Twelfth of July 1789, when the thousands
- rose round him, yelling responsive at his word in the Palais
- Royal Garden, and took cockades, he finds it explicable only on
- this hypothesis, That they were all hired to do it, and set on by
- the Foreign and other Plotters. “It was not for nothing,” says
- Camille with insight, “that this multitude burst up round me when
- I spoke!” No, not for nothing. Behind, around, before, it is one
- huge Preternatural Puppet-play of Plots; Pitt pulling the
- wires.[648] Almost I conjecture that I Camille myself am a Plot,
- and wooden with wires.—The force of insight could no further go.
-
- Be this as it will, History remarks that the Commission of
- Twelve, now clear enough as to the Plots; and luckily having “got
- the threads of them all by the end,” as they say,—are launching
- Mandates of Arrest rapidly in these May days; and carrying
- matters with a high hand; resolute that the sea of troubles shall
- be restrained. What chief Patriot, Section-President even, is
- safe? They can arrest him; tear him from his warm bed, because he
- has made irregular Section Arrestments! They arrest Varlet
- Apostle of Liberty. They arrest Procureur-Substitute Hébert,
- _Père Duchesne;_ a Magistrate of the People, sitting in Townhall;
- who, with high solemnity of martyrdom, takes leave of his
- colleagues; prompt he, to obey the Law; and solemnly acquiescent,
- disappears into prison.
-
- The swifter fly the Sections, energetically demanding him back;
- demanding not arrestment of Popular Magistrates, but of a
- traitorous Twenty-two. Section comes flying after
- Section;—defiling energetic, with their Cambyses’ vein of
- oratory: nay the Commune itself comes, with Mayor Pache at its
- head; and with question not of Hébert and the Twenty-two alone,
- but with this ominous old question made new, ‘Can you save the
- Republic, or must we do it?’ To whom President Max Isnard makes
- fiery answer: If by fatal chance, in any of those tumults which
- since the Tenth of March are ever returning, Paris were to lift a
- sacrilegious finger against the National Representation, France
- would rise as one man, in never-imagined vengeance, and shortly
- ‘the traveller would ask, on which side of the Seine Paris had
- stood!’[649] Whereat the Mountain bellows only louder, and every
- Gallery; Patriot Paris boiling round.
-
- And Girondin Valazé has nightly conclaves at his house; sends
- billets; “Come punctually, and well armed, for there is to be
- business.” And Megaera women perambulate the streets, with flags,
- with lamentable _alleleu_.[650] And the Convention-doors are
- obstructed by roaring multitudes: find-spoken _Hommes d’état_ are
- hustled, maltreated, as they pass; Marat will apostrophise you,
- in such death-peril, and say, Thou too art of them. If Roland ask
- leave to quit Paris, there is order of the day. What help?
- Substitute Hébert, Apostle Varlet, must be given back; to be
- crowned with oak-garlands. The Commission of Twelve, in a
- Convention overwhelmed with roaring Sections, is broken; then on
- the morrow, in a Convention of rallied Girondins, is reinstated.
- Dim Chaos, or the sea of troubles, is struggling through all its
- elements; writhing and chafing towards some creation.
-
-
- Chapter 3.3.IX.
- Extinct.
-
- Accordingly, on Friday, the Thirty-first of May 1793, there comes
- forth into the summer sunlight one of the strangest scenes. Mayor
- Pache with Municipality arrives at the Tuileries Hall of
- Convention; sent for, Paris being in visible ferment; and gives
- the strangest news.
-
- How, in the grey of this morning, while we sat Permanent in
- Townhall, watchful for the commonweal, there entered, precisely
- as on a Tenth of August, some Ninety-six extraneous persons; who
- declared themselves to be in a state of Insurrection; to be
- plenipotentiary Commissioners from the Forty-eight Sections,
- sections or members of the Sovereign People, all in a state of
- Insurrection; and further that we, in the name of said Sovereign
- in Insurrection, were dismissed from office. How we thereupon
- laid off our sashes, and withdrew into the adjacent Saloon of
- Liberty. How in a moment or two, we were called back; and
- reinstated; the Sovereign pleasing to think us still worthy of
- confidence. Whereby, having taken new oath of office, we on a
- sudden find ourselves Insurrectionary Magistrates, with
- extraneous Committee of Ninety-six sitting by us; and a Citoyen
- Henriot, one whom some accuse of Septemberism, is made
- Generalissimo of the National Guard; and, since six o’clock, the
- tocsins ring and the drums beat:—Under which peculiar
- circumstances, what would an august National Convention please to
- direct us to do?[651]
-
- Yes, there is the question! ‘Break the Insurrectionary
- Authorities,’ answers some with vehemence. Vergniaud at least
- will have ‘the National Representatives all die at their post;’
- this is sworn to, with ready loud acclaim. But as to breaking the
- Insurrectionary Authorities,—alas, while we yet debate, what
- sound is that? Sound of the Alarm-Cannon on the Pont Neuf; which
- it is death by the Law to fire without order from us!
-
- It does boom off there, nevertheless; sending a sound through all
- hearts. And the tocsins discourse stern music; and Henriot with
- his Armed Force has enveloped us! And Section succeeds Section,
- the livelong day; demanding with Cambyses’-oratory, with the
- rattle of muskets, That traitors, Twenty-two or more, be
- punished; that the Commission of Twelve be irrecoverably broken.
- The heart of the Gironde dies within it; distant are the
- Seventy-two respectable Departments, this fiery Municipality is
- near! Barrère is for a middle course; granting something. The
- Commission of Twelve declares that, not waiting to be broken, it
- hereby breaks itself, and is no more. Fain would Reporter Rabaut
- speak his and its last-words; but he is bellowed off. Too happy
- that the Twenty-two are still left unviolated!—Vergniaud,
- carrying the laws of refinement to a great length, moves, to the
- amazement of some, that “the Sections of Paris have deserved well
- of their country.” Whereupon, at a late hour of the evening, the
- deserving Sections retire to their respective places of abode.
- Barrère shall report on it. With busy quill and brain he sits,
- secluded; for him no sleep tonight. Friday the last of May has
- ended in this manner.
-
- The Sections have deserved well: but ought they not to deserve
- better? Faction and Girondism is struck down for the moment, and
- consents to be a nullity; but will it not, at another favourabler
- moment rise, still feller; and the Republic have to be saved in
- spite of it? So reasons Patriotism, still Permanent; so reasons
- the Figure of Marat, visible in the dim Section-world, on the
- morrow. To the conviction of men!—And so at eventide of Saturday,
- when Barrère had just got it all varnished in the course of the
- day, and his Report was setting off in the evening mail-bags,
- tocsin peals out _again! Générale_ is beating; armed men taking
- station in the Place Vendôme and elsewhere for the night;
- supplied with provisions and liquor. There under the summer stars
- will they wait, this night, what is to be seen and to be done,
- Henriot and Townhall giving due signal.
-
- The Convention, at sound of _générale_, hastens back to its Hall;
- but to the number only of a Hundred; and does little business,
- puts off business till the morrow. The Girondins do not stir out
- thither, the Girondins are abroad seeking beds. Poor Rabaut, on
- the morrow morning, returning to his post, with Louvet and some
- others, through streets all in ferment, wrings his hands,
- ejaculating, ‘_Illa suprema dies!_’[652] It has become Sunday,
- the second day of June, year 1793, by the old style; by the new
- style, year One of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. We have got to
- the last scene of all, that ends this history of the Girondin
- Senatorship.
-
- It seems doubtful whether any terrestrial Convention had ever met
- in such circumstances as this National one now does. Tocsin is
- pealing; Barriers shut; all Paris is on the gaze, or under arms.
- As many as a Hundred Thousand under arms they count: National
- Force; and the Armed Volunteers, who should have flown to the
- Frontiers and La Vendée; but would not, treason being unpunished;
- and only flew hither and thither! So many, steady under arms,
- environ the National Tuileries and Garden. There are horse, foot,
- artillery, sappers with beards: the artillery one can see with
- their camp-furnaces in this National Garden, heating bullets red,
- and their match is lighted. Henriot in plumes rides, amid a
- plumed Staff: all posts and issues are safe; reserves lie out, as
- far as the Wood of Boulogne; the choicest Patriots nearest the
- scene. One other circumstance we will note: that a careful
- Municipality, liberal of camp-furnaces, has not forgotten
- provision-carts. No member of the Sovereign need now go home to
- dinner; but can keep rank,—plentiful victual circulating
- unsought. Does not this People understand Insurrection? Ye, _not_
- uninventive, _Gualches!_—
-
- Therefore let a National Representation, “mandatories of the
- Sovereign,” take thought of it. Expulsion of your Twenty-two, and
- your Commission of Twelve: we stand here till it be done!
- Deputation after Deputation, in ever stronger language, comes
- with that message. Barrère proposes a middle course:—Will not
- perhaps the inculpated Deputies consent to withdraw voluntarily;
- to make a generous demission, and self-sacrifice for the sake of
- one’s country? Isnard, repentant of that search on which
- river-bank Paris stood, declares himself ready to demit. Ready
- also is _Te-Deum_ Fauchet; old Dusaulx of the Bastille, “_vieux
- radoteur_, old dotard,” as Marat calls him, is still readier. On
- the contrary, Lanjuinais the Breton declares that there is one
- man who never will demit voluntarily; but will protest to the
- uttermost, while a voice is left him. And he accordingly goes on
- protesting; amid rage and clangor; Legendre crying at last:
- ‘Lanjuinais, come down from the Tribune, or I will fling thee
- down, _ou je te jette en bas!_’ For matters are come to
- extremity. Nay they do clutch hold of Lanjuinais, certain zealous
- Mountain-men; but cannot fling him down, for he “cramps himself
- on the railing;” and “his clothes get torn.” Brave Senator,
- worthy of pity! Neither will Barbaroux demit; he ‘has sworn to
- die at his post, and will keep that oath.’ Whereupon the
- Galleries all rise with explosion; brandishing weapons, some of
- them; and rush out saying: ‘_Allons_, then; we must save our
- country!’ Such a Session is this of Sunday the second of June.
-
- Churches fill, over Christian Europe, and then empty themselves;
- but this Convention empties not, the while: a day of shrieking
- contention, of agony, humiliation and tearing of coatskirts;
- _illa suprema dies!_ Round stand Henriot and his Hundred
- Thousand, copiously refreshed from tray and basket: nay he is
- “distributing five francs a-piece;” we Girondins saw it with our
- eyes; five francs to keep them in heart! And distraction of armed
- riot encumbers our borders, jangles at our Bar; we are prisoners
- in our own Hall: Bishop Grégoire could not get out for a _besoin
- actuel_ without four gendarmes to wait on him! What is the
- character of a National Representative become? And now the
- sunlight falls yellower on western windows, and the chimney-tops
- are flinging longer shadows; the refreshed Hundred Thousand, nor
- their shadows, stir not! What to resolve on? Motion rises,
- superfluous one would think, That the Convention go forth in a
- body; ascertain with its own eyes whether it is free or not. Lo,
- therefore, from the Eastern Gate of the Tuileries, a distressed
- Convention issuing; handsome Hérault Séchelles at their head; he
- with hat on, in sign of public calamity, the rest
- bareheaded,—towards the Gate of the Carrousel; wondrous to see:
- towards Henriot and his plumed staff. ‘In the name of the
- National Convention, make way!’ Not an inch of the way does
- Henriot make: ‘I receive no orders, till the Sovereign, yours and
- mine, has been obeyed.’ The Convention presses on; Henriot
- prances back, with his staff, some fifteen paces, ‘To arms!
- Cannoneers to your guns!’—flashes out his puissant sword, as the
- Staff all do, and the Hussars all do. Cannoneers brandish the lit
- match; Infantry present arms,—alas, in the level way, as if for
- firing! Hatted Herault leads his distressed flock, through their
- pinfold of a Tuileries again; across the Garden, to the Gate on
- the opposite side. Here is Feuillans Terrace, alas, there is our
- old Salle de Manége; but neither at this Gate of the Pont
- Tournant is there egress. Try the other; and the other: no
- egress! We wander disconsolate through armed ranks; who indeed
- salute with _Live the Republic_, but also with _Die the Gironde_.
- Other such sight, in the year One of Liberty, the westering sun
- never saw.
-
- And now behold Marat meets us; for he lagged in this Suppliant
- Procession of ours: he has got some hundred elect Patriots at his
- heels: he orders us in the Sovereign’s name to return to our
- place, and do as we are bidden and bound. The Convention returns.
- ‘Does not the Convention,’ says Couthon with a singular power of
- face, ‘see that it is free?’—none but friends round it? The
- Convention, overflowing with friends and armed Sectioners,
- proceeds to vote as bidden. Many will not vote, but remain
- silent; some one or two protest, in words: the Mountain has a
- clear unanimity. Commission of Twelve, and the denounced
- Twenty-two, to whom we add Ex-Ministers Clavière and Lebrun:
- these, with some slight extempore alterations (this or that
- orator proposing, but Marat disposing), are voted to be under
- “Arrestment in their own houses.” Brissot, Buzot, Vergniaud,
- Guadet, Louvet, Gensonné, Barbaroux, Lasource, Lanjuinais,
- Rabaut,—Thirty-two, by the tale; all that we have known as
- Girondins, and more than we have known. They, “under the
- safeguard of the French People;” by and by, under the safeguard
- of two Gendarmes each, shall dwell peaceably in their own houses;
- as Non-Senators; till further order. Herewith ends _Séance_ of
- Sunday the second of June 1793.
-
- At ten o’clock, under mild stars, the Hundred Thousand, their
- work well finished, turn homewards. This same day, Central
- Insurrection Committee has arrested Madame Roland; imprisoned her
- in the Abbaye. Roland has fled, no one knows whither.
-
- Thus fell the Girondins, by Insurrection; and became extinct as a
- Party: not without a sigh from most Historians. The men were men
- of parts, of Philosophic culture, decent behaviour; not
- condemnable in that they were Pedants and had not better parts;
- not condemnable, but most unfortunate. They wanted a Republic of
- the Virtues, wherein themselves should be head; and they could
- only get a Republic of the Strengths, wherein others than they
- were head.
-
- For the rest, Barrère shall make Report of it. The night
- concludes with a “civic promenade by torchlight:”[653] surely the
- true reign of Fraternity is now not far?
-
-
- BOOK 3.IV.
- TERROR
-
-
- Chapter 3.4.I.
- Charlotte Corday.
-
- In the leafy months of June and July, several French Departments
- germinate a set of rebellious _paper_-leaves, named
- Proclamations, Resolutions, Journals, or Diurnals “of the Union
- for Resistance to Oppression.” In particular, the Town of Caen,
- in Calvados, sees its paper-leaf of _Bulletin de Caen_ suddenly
- bud, suddenly establish itself as Newspaper there; under the
- Editorship of Girondin National Representatives!
-
- For among the proscribed Girondins are certain of a more
- desperate humour. Some, as Vergniaud, Valazé, Gensonné, “arrested
- in their own houses” will await with stoical resignation what the
- issue may be. Some, as Brissot, Rabaut, will take to flight, to
- concealment; which, as the Paris Barriers are opened again in a
- day or two, is not yet difficult. But others there are who will
- rush, with Buzot, to Calvados; or far over France, to Lyons,
- Toulon, Nantes and elsewhither, and then rendezvous at Caen: to
- awaken as with war-trumpet the respectable Departments; and
- strike down an anarchic Mountain Faction; at least not yield
- without a stroke at it. Of this latter temper we count some score
- or more, of the Arrested, and of the Not-yet-arrested; a Buzot, a
- Barbaroux, Louvet, Guadet, Pétion, who have escaped from
- Arrestment in their own homes; a Salles, a Pythagorean Valady, a
- Duchâtel, the Duchâtel that came in blanket and nightcap to vote
- for the life of Louis, who have escaped from danger and
- likelihood of Arrestment. These, to the number at one time of
- Twenty-seven, do accordingly lodge here, at the “_Intendance_, or
- Departmental Mansion,” of the Town of Caen; welcomed by Persons
- in Authority; welcomed and defrayed, having no money of their
- own. And the _Bulletin de Caen_ comes forth, with the most
- animating paragraphs: How the Bourdeaux Department, the Lyons
- Department, this Department after the other is declaring itself;
- sixty, or say sixty-nine, or seventy-two[654] respectable
- Departments either declaring, or ready to declare. Nay
- Marseilles, it seems, will march on Paris by itself, if need be.
- So has Marseilles Town said, That she will march. But on the
- other hand, that Montélimart Town has said, No thoroughfare; and
- means even to “bury herself” under her own stone and mortar
- first—of this be no mention in _Bulletin of Caen_.
-
- Such animating paragraphs we read in this Newspaper; and
- fervours, and eloquent sarcasm: tirades against the Mountain,
- frame pen of Deputy Salles; which resemble, say friends, Pascal’s
- _Provincials_. What is more to the purpose, these Girondins have
- got a General in chief, one Wimpfen, formerly under Dumouriez;
- also a secondary questionable General Puisaye, and others; and
- are doing their best to raise a force for war. National
- Volunteers, whosoever is of right heart: gather in, ye National
- Volunteers, friends of Liberty; from our Calvados Townships, from
- the Eure, from Brittany, from far and near; forward to Paris, and
- extinguish Anarchy! Thus at Caen, in the early July days, there
- is a drumming and parading, a perorating and consulting: Staff
- and Army; Council; Club of _Carabots_, Anti-jacobin friends of
- Freedom, to denounce atrocious Marat. With all which, and the
- editing of _Bulletins_, a National Representative has his hands
- full.
-
- At Caen it is most animated; and, as one hopes, more or less
- animated in the “Seventy-two Departments that adhere to us.” And
- in a France begirt with Cimmerian invading Coalitions, and torn
- with an internal La Vendée, _this_ is the conclusion we have
- arrived at: to put down Anarchy by Civil War! _Durum et durum_,
- the Proverb says, _non faciunt murum_. La Vendée burns: Santerre
- can do nothing there; he may return home and brew beer. Cimmerian
- bombshells fly all along the North. That Siege of Mentz is become
- famed;—lovers of the Picturesque (as Goethe will testify), washed
- country-people of both sexes, stroll thither on Sundays, to see
- the artillery work and counterwork; “you only duck a little while
- the shot whizzes past.”[655] Condé is capitulating to the
- Austrians; Royal Highness of York, these several weeks, fiercely
- batters Valenciennes. For, alas, our fortified Camp of Famars was
- stormed; General Dampierre was killed; General Custine was
- blamed,—and indeed is now come to Paris to give “explanations.”
-
- Against all which the Mountain and atrocious Marat must even make
- head as they can. They, anarchic Convention as they are, publish
- Decrees, expostulatory, explanatory, yet not without severity;
- they ray forth Commissioners, singly or in pairs, the
- olive-branch in one hand, yet the sword in the other.
- Commissioners come even to Caen; but without effect. Mathematical
- Romme, and Prieur named of the Côte d’Or, venturing thither, with
- their olive and sword, are packed into prison: there may Romme
- lie, under lock and key, “for fifty days;” and meditate his New
- Calendar, if he please. Cimmeria and Civil War! Never was
- Republic One and Indivisible at a lower ebb.—
-
- Amid which dim ferment of Caen and the World, History specially
- notices one thing: in the lobby of the Mansion _de l’Intendance_,
- where busy Deputies are coming and going, a young Lady with an
- aged valet, taking grave graceful leave of Deputy Barbaroux.[656]
- She is of stately Norman figure; in her twenty-fifth year; of
- beautiful still countenance: her name is Charlotte Corday,
- heretofore styled d’Armans, while Nobility still was. Barbaroux
- has given her a Note to Deputy Duperret,—him who once drew his
- sword in the effervescence. Apparently she will to Paris on some
- errand? “She was a Republican before the Revolution, and never
- wanted energy.” A completeness, a decision is in this fair female
- Figure: “by energy she means the spirit that will prompt one to
- sacrifice himself for his country.” What if she, this fair young
- Charlotte, had emerged from her secluded stillness, suddenly like
- a Star; cruel-lovely, with half-angelic, half-demonic splendour;
- to gleam for a moment, and in a moment be extinguished: to be
- held in memory, so bright complete was she, through long
- centuries!—Quitting Cimmerian Coalitions without, and the
- dim-simmering Twenty-five millions within, History will look
- fixedly at this one fair Apparition of a Charlotte Corday; will
- note whither Charlotte moves, how the little Life burns forth so
- radiant, then vanishes swallowed of the Night.
-
- With Barbaroux’s Note of Introduction, and slight stock of
- luggage, we see Charlotte, on Tuesday the ninth of July, seated
- in the Caen Diligence, with a place for Paris. None takes
- farewell of her, wishes her Good-journey: her Father will find a
- line left, signifying that she is gone to England, that he must
- pardon her and forget her. The drowsy Diligence lumbers along;
- amid drowsy talk of Politics, and praise of the Mountain; in
- which she mingles not; all night, all day, and again all night.
- On Thursday, not long before none, we are at the Bridge of
- Neuilly; here is Paris with her thousand black domes,—the goal
- and purpose of thy journey! Arrived at the Inn de la Providence
- in the Rue des Vieux Augustins, Charlotte demands a room; hastens
- to bed; sleeps all afternoon and night, till the morrow morning.
-
- On the morrow morning, she delivers her Note to Duperret. It
- relates to certain Family Papers which are in the Minister of the
- Interior’s hand; which a Nun at Caen, an old Convent-friend of
- Charlotte’s, has need of; which Duperret shall assist her in
- getting: this then was Charlotte’s errand to Paris? She has
- finished this, in the course of Friday;—yet says nothing of
- returning. She has seen and silently investigated several things.
- The Convention, in bodily reality, she has seen; what the
- Mountain is like. The living physiognomy of Marat she could not
- see; he is sick at present, and confined to home.
-
- About eight on the Saturday morning, she purchases a large
- sheath-knife in the Palais Royal; then straightway, in the Place
- des Victoires, takes a hackney-coach: ‘To the Rue de l’Ecole de
- Médecine, No. 44.’ It is the residence of the Citoyen Marat!—The
- Citoyen Marat is ill, and cannot be seen; which seems to
- disappoint her much. Her business is with Marat, then? Hapless
- beautiful Charlotte; hapless squalid Marat! From Caen in the
- utmost West, from Neuchâtel in the utmost East, they two are
- drawing nigh each other; they two have, very strangely, business
- together.—Charlotte, returning to her Inn, despatches a short
- Note to Marat; signifying that she is from Caen, the seat of
- rebellion; that she desires earnestly to see him, and “will put
- it in his power to do France a great service.” No answer.
- Charlotte writes another Note, still more pressing; sets out with
- it by coach, about seven in the evening, herself. Tired
- day-labourers have again finished their Week; huge Paris is
- circling and simmering, manifold, according to its vague wont:
- this one fair Figure has decision in it; drives straight,—towards
- a purpose.
-
- It is yellow July evening, we say, the thirteenth of the month;
- eve of the Bastille day,—when “M. Marat,” four years ago, in the
- crowd of the Pont Neuf, shrewdly required of that Besenval
- Hussar-party, which had such friendly dispositions, ‘to dismount,
- and give up their arms, then;’ and became notable among Patriot
- men! Four years: what a road he has travelled;—and sits now,
- about half-past seven of the clock, stewing in slipper-bath; sore
- afflicted; ill of Revolution Fever,—of what other malady this
- History had rather not name. Excessively sick and worn, poor man:
- with precisely elevenpence-halfpenny of ready money, in paper;
- with slipper-bath; strong three-footed stool for writing on, the
- while; and a squalid—Washerwoman, one may call her: that is his
- civic establishment in Medical-School Street; thither and not
- elsewhither has his road led him. Not to the reign of Brotherhood
- and Perfect Felicity; yet surely on the way towards that?—Hark, a
- rap again! A musical woman’s-voice, refusing to be rejected: it
- is the Citoyenne who would do France a service. Marat,
- recognising from within, cries, Admit her. Charlotte Corday is
- admitted.
-
- Citoyen Marat, I am from Caen the seat of rebellion, and wished
- to speak with you.—Be seated, _mon enfant_. Now what are the
- Traitors doing at Caen? What Deputies are at Caen?—Charlotte
- names some Deputies. ‘Their heads shall fall within a fortnight,’
- croaks the eager People’s-Friend, clutching his tablets to write:
- _Barbaroux, Pétion_, writes he with bare shrunk arm, turning
- aside in the bath: _Pétion_, and _Louvet_, and—Charlotte has
- drawn her knife from the sheath; plunges it, with one sure
- stroke, into the writer’s heart. ‘_À moi, chère amie_, Help,
- dear!’ No more could the Death-choked say or shriek. The helpful
- Washerwoman running in, there is no Friend of the People, or
- Friend of the Washerwoman, left; but his life with a groan gushes
- out, indignant, to the shades below.[657]
-
- And so Marat People’s-Friend is ended; the lone Stylites has got
- hurled down suddenly from his Pillar,—_whitherward_ He that made
- him does know. Patriot Paris may sound triple and tenfold, in
- dole and wail; re-echoed by Patriot France; and the Convention,
- “Chabot pale with terror declaring that they are to be all
- assassinated,” may decree him Pantheon Honours, Public Funeral,
- Mirabeau’s dust making way for him; and Jacobin Societies, in
- lamentable oratory, summing up his character, parallel him to
- One, whom they think it honour to call “the good
- Sansculotte,”—whom we name not here.[658] Also a Chapel may be
- made, for the urn that holds his Heart, in the Place du
- Carrousel; and new-born children be named Marat; and Lago-de-Como
- Hawkers bake mountains of stucco into unbeautiful Busts; and
- David paint his Picture, or Death-scene; and such other
- Apotheosis take place as the human genius, in these
- circumstances, can devise: but Marat returns no more to the light
- of this Sun. One sole circumstance we have read with clear
- sympathy, in the old _Moniteur_ Newspaper: how Marat’s brother
- comes from Neuchâtel to ask of the Convention “that the deceased
- Jean-Paul Marat’s musket be given him.”[659] For Marat too had a
- brother, and natural affections; and was wrapt once in
- swaddling-clothes, and slept safe in a cradle like the rest of
- us. Ye children of men!—A sister of his, they say, lives still to
- this day in Paris.
-
- As for Charlotte Corday her work is accomplished; the recompense
- of it is near and sure. The _chère amie_, and neighbours of the
- house, flying at her, she “overturns some movables,” entrenches
- herself till the gendarmes arrive; then quietly surrenders; goes
- quietly to the Abbaye Prison: she alone quiet, all Paris sounding
- in wonder, in rage or admiration, round her. Duperret is put in
- arrest, on account of her; his Papers sealed,—which may lead to
- consequences. Fauchet, in like manner; though Fauchet had not so
- much as heard of her. Charlotte, confronted with these two
- Deputies, praises the grave firmness of Duperret, censures the
- dejection of Fauchet.
-
- On Wednesday morning, the thronged Palais de Justice and
- Revolutionary Tribunal can see her face; beautiful and calm: she
- dates it “fourth day of the Preparation of Peace.” A strange
- murmur ran through the Hall, at sight of her; you could not say
- of what character.[660] Tinville has his indictments and
- tape-papers the cutler of the Palais Royal will testify that he
- sold her the sheath-knife; ‘all these details are needless,’
- interrupted Charlotte; ‘it is I that killed Marat.’ By whose
- instigation?—‘By no one’s.’ What tempted you, then? His crimes.
- ‘I killed one man,’ added she, raising her voice extremely
- (_extrêmement_), as they went on with their questions, ‘I killed
- one man to save a hundred thousand; a villain to save innocents;
- a savage wild-beast to give repose to my country. I was a
- Republican before the Revolution; I never wanted energy.’ There
- is therefore nothing to be said. The public gazes astonished: the
- hasty limners sketch her features, Charlotte not disapproving;
- the men of law proceed with their formalities. The doom is Death
- as a murderess. To her Advocate she gives thanks; in gentle
- phrase, in high-flown classical spirit. To the Priest they send
- her she gives thanks; but needs not any shriving, or ghostly or
- other aid from him.
-
- On this same evening, therefore, about half-past seven o’clock,
- from the gate of the Conciergerie, to a City all on tiptoe, the
- fatal Cart issues: seated on it a fair young creature, sheeted in
- red smock of Murderess; so beautiful, serene, so full of life;
- journeying towards death,—alone amid the world. Many take off
- their hats, saluting reverently; for what heart but must be
- touched?[661] Others growl and howl. Adam Lux, of Mentz, declares
- that she is greater than Brutus; that it were beautiful to die
- with her: the head of this young man seems turned. At the Place
- de la Révolution, the countenance of Charlotte wears the same
- still smile. The executioners proceed to bind her feet; she
- resists, thinking it meant as an insult; on a word of
- explanation, she submits with cheerful apology. As the last act,
- all being now ready, they take the neckerchief from her neck: a
- blush of maidenly shame overspreads that fair face and neck; the
- cheeks were still tinged with it, when the executioner lifted the
- severed head, to shew it to the people. “It is most true,” says
- Foster, “that he struck the cheek insultingly; for I saw it with
- my eyes: the Police imprisoned him for it.”[662]
-
- In this manner have the Beautifullest and the Squalidest come in
- collision, and extinguished one another. Jean-Paul Marat and
- Marie-Anne Charlotte Corday both, suddenly, are no more. “Day of
- the Preparation of Peace?” Alas, how were peace possible or
- preparable, while, for example, the hearts of lovely Maidens, in
- their convent-stillness, are dreaming not of Love-paradises, and
- the light of Life; but of Codrus’-sacrifices, and death well
- earned? That Twenty-five million hearts have got to such temper,
- this _is_ the Anarchy; the soul of it lies in this: whereof not
- peace can be the embodyment! The death of Marat, whetting old
- animosities tenfold, will be worse than any life. O ye hapless
- Two, mutually extinctive, the Beautiful and the Squalid, sleep ye
- well,—in the Mother’s bosom that bore you both!
-
- This was the History of Charlotte Corday; most definite, most
- complete; angelic-demonic: like a Star! Adam Lux goes home,
- half-delirious; to pour forth his Apotheosis of her, in paper and
- print; to propose that she have a statue with this inscription,
- _Greater than Brutus_. Friends represent his danger; Lux is
- reckless; thinks it were beautiful to die with her.
-
-
- Chapter 3.4.II.
- In Civil War.
-
- But during these same hours, another guillotine is at work, on
- another: Charlotte, for the Girondins, dies at Paris today;
- Chalier, by the Girondins, dies at Lyons tomorrow.
-
- From rumbling of cannon along the streets of that City, it has
- come to firing of them, to rabid fighting: Nièvre-Chol and the
- Girondins triumph;—behind whom there is, as everywhere, a
- Royalist Faction waiting to strike in. Trouble enough at Lyons;
- and the dominant party carrying it with a high hand! For indeed,
- the whole South is astir; incarcerating Jacobins; arming for
- Girondins: wherefore we have got a “Congress of Lyons;” also a
- “Revolutionary Tribunal of Lyons,” and Anarchists shall tremble.
- So Chalier was soon found guilty, of Jacobinism, of murderous
- Plot, “address with drawn dagger on the sixth of February last;”
- and, on the morrow, he also travels his final road, along the
- streets of Lyons, “by the side of an ecclesiastic, with whom he
- seems to speak earnestly,”—the axe now glittering high. He could
- weep, in old years, this man, and “fall on his knees on the
- pavement,” blessing Heaven at sight of Federation Programs or
- like; then he pilgrimed to Paris, to worship Marat and the
- Mountain: now Marat and he are both gone;—we said he could not
- end well. Jacobinism groans inwardly, at Lyons; but dare not
- outwardly. Chalier, when the Tribunal sentenced him, made answer:
- ‘My death will cost this City dear.’
-
- Montélimart Town is not buried under its ruins; yet Marseilles is
- actually marching, under order of a “Lyons Congress;” is
- incarcerating Patriots; the very Royalists now shewing face.
- Against which a General Cartaux fights, though in small force;
- and with him an Artillery Major, of the name of—Napoleon
- Buonaparte. This Napoleon, to prove that the Marseillese have no
- chance ultimately, not only fights but writes; publishes his
- _Supper of Beaucaire_, a Dialogue which has become curious.[663]
- Unfortunate Cities, with their actions and their reactions!
- Violence to be paid with violence in geometrical ratio; Royalism
- and Anarchism both striking in;—the final net-amount of which
- geometrical series, what man shall sum?
-
- The Bar of Iron has never yet floated in Marseilles Harbour; but
- the Body of Rebecqui was found floating, self-drowned there. Hot
- Rebecqui seeing how confusion deepened, and Respectability grew
- poisoned with Royalism, felt that there was no refuge for a
- Republican but death. Rebecqui disappeared: no one knew whither;
- till, one morning, they found the empty case or body of him risen
- to the top, tumbling on the salt waves;[664] and perceived that
- Rebecqui had withdrawn forever.—Toulon likewise is incarcerating
- Patriots; sending delegates to Congress; intriguing, in case of
- necessity, with the Royalists and English. Montpellier,
- Bourdeaux, Nantes: all France, that is not under the swoop of
- Austria and Cimmeria, seems rushing into madness, and suicidal
- ruin. The Mountain labours; like a volcano in a burning volcanic
- Land. Convention Committees, of Surety, of Salvation, are busy
- night and day: Convention Commissioners whirl on all highways;
- bearing olive-branch and sword, or now perhaps sword only.
- Chaumette and Municipals come daily to the Tuileries demanding a
- Constitution: it is some weeks now since he resolved, in
- Townhall, that a Deputation “should go every day” and demand a
- Constitution, till one were got;[665] whereby suicidal France
- might rally and pacify itself; a thing inexpressibly desirable.
-
- This then is the fruit your Anti-anarchic Girondins have got from
- that Levying of War in Calvados? This fruit, we may say; and no
- other whatsoever. For indeed, before either Charlotte’s or
- Chalier’s head had fallen, the Calvados War itself had, as it
- were, vanished, dreamlike, in a shriek! With “seventy-two
- Departments” on one’s side, one might have hoped better things.
- But it turns out that Respectabilities, though they will vote,
- will not fight. Possession is always nine points in Law; but in
- Lawsuits of _this_ kind, one may say, it is ninety-and-nine
- points. Men do what they were wont to do; and have immense
- irresolution and inertia: they obey him who has the symbols that
- claim obedience. Consider what, in modern society, this one fact
- means: the Metropolis is with our enemies! Metropolis,
- _Mother-city;_ rightly so named: all the rest are but as her
- children, her nurselings. Why, there is not a leathern Diligence,
- with its post-bags and luggage-boots, that lumbers out from her,
- but is as a huge life-pulse; she is the heart of all. Cut short
- that one leathern Diligence, how much is cut short!—General
- Wimpfen, looking practically into the matter, can see nothing for
- it but that one should fall back on Royalism; get into
- communication with Pitt! Dark innuendoes he flings out, to that
- effect: whereat we Girondins start, horrorstruck. He produces as
- his Second in command a certain “_Ci-devant_,” one Comte Puisaye;
- entirely unknown to Louvet; greatly suspected by him.
-
- Few wars, accordingly, were ever levied of a more insufficient
- character than this of Calvados. He that is curious in such
- things may read the details of it in the Memoirs of that same
- _Ci-devant_ Puisaye, the much-enduring man and Royalist: How our
- Girondin National Forces, marching off with plenty of wind-music,
- were drawn out about the old Château of Brecourt, in the
- wood-country near Vernon, to meet the Mountain National forces
- advancing from Paris. How on the fifteenth afternoon of July,
- they did meet,—and, as it were, shrieked mutually, and took
- mutually to flight without loss. How Puisaye thereafter, for the
- Mountain Nationals fled first, and we thought ourselves the
- victors,—was roused from his warm bed in the Castle of Brecourt;
- and had to gallop without boots; our Nationals, in the
- night-watches, having fallen unexpectedly into _sauve qui
- peut:_—and in brief the Calvados War had burnt priming; and the
- only question now was, Whitherward to vanish, in what hole to
- hide oneself![666]
-
- The National Volunteers rush homewards, faster than they came.
- The Seventy-two Respectable Departments, says Meillan, “all
- turned round, and forsook us, in the space of four-and-twenty
- hours.” Unhappy those who, as at Lyons for instance, have gone
- too far for turning! “One morning,” we find placarded on our
- Intendance Mansion, the Decree of Convention which casts us _Hors
- la loi_, into Outlawry: placarded by our Caen Magistrates;—clear
- hint that we also are to vanish. Vanish, indeed: but whitherward?
- Gorsas has friends in Rennes; he will hide there,—unhappily will
- not lie hid. Guadet, Lanjuinais are on cross roads; making for
- Bourdeaux. To Bourdeaux! cries the general voice, of Valour alike
- and of Despair. Some flag of Respectability still floats there,
- or is thought to float.
-
- Thitherward therefore; each as he can! Eleven of these ill-fated
- Deputies, among whom we may count, as twelfth, Friend Riouffe the
- Man of Letters, do an original thing. Take the uniform of
- National Volunteers, and retreat southward with the Breton
- Battalion, as private soldiers of that corps. These brave Bretons
- had stood truer by us than any other. Nevertheless, at the end of
- a day or two, they also do now get dubious, self-divided; we must
- part from them; and, with some half-dozen as convoy or guide,
- retreat by ourselves,—a solitary marching detachment, through
- waste regions of the West.[667]
-
-
- Chapter 3.4.III.
- Retreat of the Eleven.
-
- It is one of the notablest Retreats, this of the Eleven, that
- History presents: The handful of forlorn Legislators retreating
- there, continually, with shouldered firelock and well-filled
- cartridge-box, in the yellow autumn; long hundreds of miles
- between them and Bourdeaux; the country all getting hostile,
- suspicious of the truth; simmering and buzzing on all sides, more
- and more. Louvet has preserved the Itinerary of it; a piece worth
- all the rest he ever wrote.
-
- O virtuous Pétion, with thy early-white head, O brave young
- Barbaroux, has it come to this? Weary ways, worn shoes, light
- purse;—encompassed with perils as with a sea! Revolutionary
- Committees are in every Township; of Jacobin temper; our friends
- all cowed, our cause the losing one. In the Borough of
- Moncontour, by ill chance, it is market-day: to the gaping public
- such transit of a solitary Marching Detachment is suspicious; we
- have need of energy, of promptitude and luck, to be allowed to
- march through. Hasten, ye weary pilgrims! The country is getting
- up; noise of you is bruited day after day, a solitary Twelve
- retreating in this mysterious manner: with every new day, a wider
- wave of inquisitive pursuing tumult is stirred up till the whole
- West will be in motion. “Cussy is tormented with gout, Buzot is
- too fat for marching.” Riouffe, blistered, bleeding, marching
- only on tiptoe; Barbaroux limps with sprained ancle, yet ever
- cheery, full of hope and valour. Light Louvet glances hare-eyed,
- not hare-hearted: only virtuous Pétion’s serenity “was but once
- seen ruffled.”[668] They lie in straw-lofts, in woody brakes;
- rudest paillasse on the floor of a secret friend is luxury. They
- are seized in the dead of night by Jacobin mayors and tap of
- drum; get off by firm countenance, rattle of muskets, and ready
- wit.
-
- Of Bourdeaux, through fiery La Vendée and the long geographical
- spaces that remain, it were madness to think: well, if you can
- get to Quimper on the sea-coast, and take shipping there. Faster,
- ever faster! Before the end of the march, so hot has the country
- grown, it is found advisable to march all night. They do it;
- under the still night-canopy they plod along;—and yet behold,
- Rumour has outplodded them. In the paltry Village of Carhaix (be
- its thatched huts, and bottomless peat-bogs, long notable to the
- Traveller), one is astonished to find light still glimmering:
- citizens are awake, with rush-lights burning, in that nook of the
- terrestrial Planet; as we traverse swiftly the one poor street, a
- voice is heard saying, ‘There they are, _Les voilà qui
- passent!_’[669] Swifter, ye doomed lame Twelve: speed ere they
- can arm; gain the Woods of Quimper before day, and lie squatted
- there!
-
- The doomed Twelve do it; though with difficulty, with loss of
- road, with peril, and the mistakes of a night. In Quimper are
- Girondin friends, who perhaps will harbour the homeless, till a
- Bourdeaux ship weigh. Wayworn, heartworn, in agony of suspense,
- till Quimper friendship get warning, they lie there, squatted
- under the thick wet boscage; suspicious of the face of man. Some
- pity to the brave; to the unhappy! Unhappiest of all Legislators,
- O when ye packed your luggage, some score, or two-score months
- ago; and mounted this or the other leathern vehicle, to be
- Conscript Fathers of a regenerated France, and reap deathless
- laurels,—did ye think your journey was to lead _hither?_ The
- Quimper Samaritans find them squatted; lift them up to help and
- comfort; will hide them in sure places. Thence let them dissipate
- gradually; or there they can lie quiet, and write _Memoirs_, till
- a Bourdeaux ship sail.
-
- And thus, in Calvados all is dissipated; Romme is out of prison,
- meditating his Calendar; ringleaders are locked in his room. At
- Caen the Corday family mourns in silence; Buzot’s House is a heap
- of dust and demolition; and amid the rubbish sticks a Gallows,
- with this inscription, _Here dwelt the Traitor Buzot who
- conspired against the Republic_. Buzot and the other vanished
- Deputies are _hors la loi_, as we saw; their lives free to take
- where they can be found. The worse fares it with the poor
- Arrested visible Deputies at Paris. “Arrestment at home”
- threatens to become “Confinement in the Luxembourg;” to end:
- _where?_ For example, what pale-visaged thin man is this,
- journeying towards Switzerland as a Merchant of Neuchâtel, whom
- they arrest in the town of Moulins? To Revolutionary Committee he
- is suspect. To Revolutionary Committee, on probing the matter, he
- is evidently: Deputy Brissot! Back to thy Arrestment, poor
- Brissot; or indeed to strait confinement,—whither others are
- fared to follow. Rabaut has built himself a false-partition, in a
- friend’s house; lives, in invisible darkness, between two walls.
- It will end, this same Arrestment business, in Prison, and the
- Revolutionary Tribunal.
-
- Nor must we forget Duperret, and the seal put on his papers by
- reason of Charlotte. One Paper is there, fit to breed woe enough:
- A secret solemn Protest against that _suprema dies_ of the Second
- of June! This Secret Protest our poor Duperret had drawn up, the
- same week, in all plainness of speech; waiting the time for
- publishing it: to which Secret Protest his signature, and that of
- other honourable Deputies not a few, stands legibly appended. And
- now, if the seals were once broken, the Mountain still
- victorious? Such Protestors, your Merciers, Bailleuls,
- Seventy-three by the tale, what yet remains of Respectable
- Girondism in the Convention, may tremble to think!—These are the
- fruits of levying civil war.
-
- Also we find, that, in these last days of July, the famed Siege
- of Mentz is _finished;_ the Garrison to march out with honours of
- war; not to serve against the Coalition for a year! Lovers of the
- Picturesque, and Goethe standing on the Chaussée of Mentz, saw,
- with due interest, the Procession issuing forth, in all
- solemnity:
-
- “Escorted by Prussian horse came first the French Garrison.
- Nothing could look stranger than this latter: a column of
- Marseillese, slight, swarthy, party-coloured, in patched clothes,
- came tripping on;—as if King Edwin had opened the Dwarf Hill, and
- sent out his nimble Host of Dwarfs. Next followed regular troops;
- serious, sullen; not as if downcast or ashamed. But the
- remarkablest appearance, which struck every one, was that of the
- Chasers (_Chasseurs_) coming out mounted: they had advanced quite
- silent to where we stood, when their Band struck up the
- _Marseillaise_. This Revolutionary _Te-Deum_ has in itself
- something mournful and bodeful, however briskly played; but at
- present they gave it in altogether slow time, proportionate to
- the creeping step they rode at. It was piercing and fearful, and
- a most serious-looking thing, as these cavaliers, long, lean men,
- of a certain age, with mien suitable to the music, came pacing
- on: singly you might have likened them to Don Quixote; in mass,
- they were highly dignified.
-
- “But now a single troop became notable: that of the Commissioners
- or _Représentans_. Merlin of Thionville, in hussar uniform,
- distinguishing himself by wild beard and look, had another person
- in similar costume on his left; the crowd shouted out, with rage,
- at sight of this latter, the name of a Jacobin Townsman and
- Clubbist; and shook itself to seize him. Merlin drew bridle;
- referred to his dignity as French Representative, to the
- vengeance that should follow any injury done; he would advise
- every one to compose himself, for this was not the _last time_
- they would see him here.[670] Thus rode Merlin; threatening in
- defeat. But what now shall stem that tide of Prussians setting in
- through the open North-East?” Lucky, if fortified Lines of
- Weissembourg, and impassibilities of Vosges Mountains, confine it
- to French Alsace, keep it from submerging the very heart of the
- country!
-
- Furthermore, precisely in the same days, Valenciennes Siege is
- finished, in the North-West:—fallen, under the red hail of York!
- Condé fell some fortnight since. Cimmerian Coalition presses on.
- What seems very notable too, on all these captured French Towns
- there flies not the Royalist fleur-de-lys, in the name of a new
- Louis the Pretender; but the Austrian flag flies; as if Austria
- meant to keep them for herself! Perhaps General Custines, still
- in Paris, can give some explanation of the fall of these
- strong-places? Mother Society, from tribune and gallery, growls
- loud that he ought to do it;—remarks, however, in a splenetic
- manner that “the _Monsieurs_ of the Palais Royal” are calling,
- Long-life to this General.
-
- The Mother Society, purged now, by successive “scrutinies or
- _épurations_,” from all taint of Girondism, has become a great
- Authority: what we can call shield-bearer, or bottle-holder, nay
- call it fugleman, to the purged National Convention itself. The
- Jacobins Debates are reported in the _Moniteur_, like
- Parliamentary ones.
-
-
- Chapter 3.4.IV.
- O Nature.
-
- But looking more specially into Paris City, what is this that
- History, on the 10th of August, Year One of Liberty, “by
- old-style, year 1793,” discerns there? Praised be the Heavens, a
- new Feast of Pikes!
-
- For Chaumette’s “Deputation every day” has worked out its result:
- a Constitution. It was one of the rapidest Constitutions ever put
- together; made, some say in eight days, by Hérault Séchelles and
- others: probably a workmanlike, roadworthy Constitution
- enough;—on which point, however, we are, for some reasons, little
- called to form a judgment. Workmanlike or not, the Forty-four
- Thousand Communes of France, by overwhelming majorities, did
- hasten to accept it; glad of any Constitution whatsoever. Nay
- Departmental Deputies have come, the venerablest Republicans of
- each Department, with solemn message of Acceptance; and now what
- remains but that our new Final Constitution be proclaimed, and
- sworn to, in Feast of Pikes? The Departmental Deputies, we say,
- are come some time ago;—Chaumette very anxious about them, lest
- Girondin _Monsieurs_, Agio-jobbers, or were it even _Filles de
- joie_ of a Girondin temper, corrupt their morals.[671] Tenth of
- August, immortal Anniversary, greater almost than Bastille July,
- is the Day.
-
- Painter David has not been idle. Thanks to David and the French
- genius, there steps forth into the sunlight, this day, a Scenic
- Phantasmagory unexampled:—whereof History, so occupied with
- Real-Phantasmagories, will say but little.
-
- For one thing, History can notice with satisfaction, on the ruins
- of the Bastille, a _Statue of Nature;_ gigantic, spouting water
- from her two _mammelles_. Not a Dream this; but a Fact, palpable
- visible. There she spouts, great Nature; dim, before daybreak.
- But as the coming Sun ruddies the East, come countless
- Multitudes, regulated and unregulated; come Departmental
- Deputies, come Mother Society and Daughters; comes National
- Convention, led on by handsome Herault; soft wind-music breathing
- note of expectation. Lo, as great Sol scatters his first
- fire-handful, tipping the hills and chimney-heads with gold,
- Herault is at great Nature’s feet (she is Plaster of Paris
- merely); Herault lifts, in an iron saucer, water spouted from the
- sacred breasts; drinks of it, with an eloquent Pagan Prayer,
- beginning, ‘O Nature!’ and all the Departmental Deputies drink,
- each with what best suitable ejaculation or prophetic-utterance
- is in him;—amid breathings, which become blasts, of wind-music;
- and the roar of artillery and human throats: finishing well the
- first act of this solemnity.
-
- Next are processionings along the Boulevards: Deputies or
- Officials bound together by long indivisible tricolor riband;
- general “members of the Sovereign” walking pellmell, with pikes,
- with hammers, with the tools and emblems of their crafts; among
- which we notice a Plough, and ancient Baucis and Philemon seated
- on it, drawn by their children. Many-voiced harmony and
- dissonance filling the air. Through Triumphal Arches enough: at
- the basis of the first of which, we descry—whom thinkest
- thou?—the Heroines of the Insurrection of Women. Strong Dames of
- the Market, they sit there (Théroigne too ill to attend, one
- fears), with oak-branches, tricolor bedizenment; firm-seated on
- their Cannons. To whom handsome Herault, making pause of
- admiration, addresses soothing eloquence; whereupon they rise and
- fall into the march.
-
- And now mark, in the Place de la Révolution, what other August
- Statue may this be; veiled in canvas,—which swiftly we shear off
- by pulley and cord? The _Statue of Liberty!_ She too is of
- plaster, hoping to become of metal; stands where a Tyrant Louis
- Quinze once stood. “Three thousand birds” are let loose, into the
- whole world, with labels round their neck, _We are free; imitate
- us._ Holocaust of Royalist and _ci-devant_ trumpery, such as one
- could still gather, is burnt; pontifical eloquence must be
- uttered, by handsome Herault, and Pagan orisons offered up.
-
- And then forward across the River; where is new enormous
- Statuary; enormous plaster Mountain; Hercules-_Peuple_, with
- uplifted all-conquering club; “many-headed Dragon of Girondin
- Federalism rising from fetid marsh;”—needing new eloquence from
- Herault. To say nothing of Champ-de-Mars, and Fatherland’s Altar
- there; with urn of slain Defenders, Carpenter’s-level of the Law;
- and such exploding, gesticulating and perorating, that Herault’s
- lips must be growing white, and his tongue cleaving to the roof
- of his mouth.[672]
-
- Towards six-o’clock let the wearied President, let Paris
- Patriotism generally sit down to what repast, and social repasts,
- can be had; and with flowing tankard or light-mantling glass,
- usher in this New and Newest Era. In fact, is not Romme’s New
- Calendar getting ready? On all housetops flicker little tricolor
- Flags, their flagstaff a Pike and Liberty-Cap. On all
- house-walls, for no Patriot, not suspect, will be behind another,
- there stand printed these words: _Republic one and indivisible,
- Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death._
-
- As to the New Calendar, we may say here rather than elsewhere
- that speculative men have long been struck with the inequalities
- and incongruities of the Old Calendar; that a New one has long
- been as good as determined on. Maréchal the Atheist, almost ten
- years ago, proposed a New Calendar, free at least from
- superstition: this the Paris Municipality would now adopt, in
- defect of a better; at all events, let us have either this of
- Maréchal’s or a better,—the New Era being come. Petitions, more
- than once, have been sent to that effect; and indeed, for a year
- past, all Public Bodies, Journalists, and Patriots in general,
- have dated _First Year of the Republic_. It is a subject not
- without difficulties. But the Convention has taken it up; and
- Romme, as we say, has been meditating it; not Maréchal’s New
- Calendar, but a better New one of Romme’s and our own. Romme,
- aided by a Monge, a Lagrange and others, furnishes mathematics;
- Fabre d’Eglantine furnishes poetic nomenclature: and so, on the
- 5th of October 1793, after trouble enough, they bring forth this
- New Republican Calendar of theirs, in a complete state; and by
- Law, get it put in action.
-
- Four equal Seasons, Twelve equal Months of thirty days each: this
- makes three hundred and sixty days; and five odd days remain to
- be disposed of. The five odd days we will make Festivals, and
- name the five _Sansculottides_, or Days without Breeches.
- Festival of Genius; Festival of Labour; of Actions; of Rewards;
- of Opinion: these are the five Sansculottides. Whereby the great
- Circle, or Year, is made complete: solely every fourth year,
- whilom called Leap-year, we introduce a sixth Sansculottide; and
- name it Festival of the Revolution. Now as to the day of
- commencement, which offers difficulties, is it not one of the
- luckiest coincidences that the Republic herself commenced on the
- 21st of September; close on the Vernal Equinox? Vernal Equinox,
- at midnight for the meridian of Paris, in the year whilom
- Christian 1792, from that moment shall the New Era reckon itself
- to begin. _Vendémiaire, Brumaire, Frimaire;_ or as one might say,
- in mixed English, _Vintagearious, Fogarious, Frostarious:_ these
- are our three Autumn months. _Nivose, Pluviose, Ventose_, or say
- _Snowous, Rainous, Windous_, make our Winter season. _Germinal,
- Floréal, Prairial_, or _Buddal, Floweral, Meadowal_, are our
- Spring season. _Messidor, Thermidor, Fructidor_, that is to say
- (_dor_ being Greek for _gift_), _Reapidor, Heatidor, Fruitidor_,
- are Republican Summer. These Twelve, in a singular manner, divide
- the Republican Year. Then as to minuter subdivisions, let us
- venture at once on a bold stroke: adopt your decimal subdivision;
- and instead of world-old Week, or _Se’ennight_, make it a
- _Tennight_ or _Décade;_—not without results. There are three
- Decades, then, in each of the months; which is very regular; and
- the _Decadi_, or Tenth-day, shall always be “the Day of Rest.”
- And the Christian Sabbath, in that case? Shall shift for itself!
-
- This, in brief, in this New Calendar of Romme and the Convention;
- calculated for the meridian of Paris, and Gospel of Jean-Jacques:
- not one of the least afflicting occurrences for the actual
- British reader of French History;—confusing the soul with
- _Messidors, Meadowals;_ till at last, in self-defence, one is
- forced to construct some ground-scheme, or rule of Commutation
- from New-style to Old-style, and have it lying by him. Such
- ground-scheme, almost worn out in our service, but still legible
- and printable, we shall now, in a Note, present to the reader.
- For the Romme Calendar, in so many Newspapers, Memoirs, Public
- Acts, has stamped itself deep into that section of Time: a New
- Era that lasts some Twelve years and odd is not to be
- despised.[673] Let the reader, therefore, with such
- ground-scheme, help himself, where needful, out of New-style into
- Old-style, called also “slave-style, _stile-esclave;_”—whereof
- we, in these pages, shall as much as possible use the latter
- only.
-
- Thus with new Feast of Pikes, and New Era or New Calendar, did
- France accept her New Constitution: the most Democratic
- Constitution ever committed to paper. How it will work in
- practice? Patriot Deputations from time to time solicit fruition
- of it; that it be set a-going. Always, however, this seems
- questionable; for the moment, unsuitable. Till, in some weeks,
- _Salut Public_, through the organ of Saint-Just, makes report,
- that, in the present alarming circumstances, the state of France
- is Revolutionary; that her “Government must be Revolutionary till
- the Peace!” Solely as Paper, then, and as a Hope, must this poor
- New Constitution exist;—in which shape we may conceive it lying;
- even now, with an infinity of other things, in that Limbo near
- the Moon. Further than paper it never got, nor ever will get.
-
-
- Chapter 3.4.V.
- Sword of Sharpness.
-
- In fact it is something quite other than paper theorems, it is
- iron and audacity that France now needs.
-
- Is not La Vendée still blazing;—alas too literally; rogue
- Rossignol burning the very corn-mills? General Santerre could do
- nothing there; General Rossignol, in blind fury, often in liquor,
- can do less than nothing. Rebellion spreads, grows ever madder.
- Happily those lean Quixote-figures, whom we saw retreating out of
- Mentz, “bound not to serve against the Coalition for a year,”
- have got to Paris. National Convention packs them into
- post-vehicles and conveyances; sends them swiftly, by post, into
- La Vendée! There valiantly struggling, in obscure battle and
- skirmish, under rogue Rossignol, let them, unlaurelled, save the
- Republic, and “be cut down gradually to the last man.”[674]
-
- Does not the Coalition, like a fire-tide, pour in; Prussia
- through the opened North-East; Austria, England through the
- North-West? General Houchard prospers no better there than
- General Custine did: let him look to it! Through the Eastern and
- the Western Pyrenees Spain has deployed itself; spreads, rustling
- with Bourbon banners, over the face of the South. Ashes and
- embers of confused Girondin civil war covered that region
- already. Marseilles is damped down, not quenched; to be quenched
- in blood. Toulon, terrorstruck, too far gone for turning, has
- flung itself, ye righteous Powers,—into the hands of the English!
- On Toulon Arsenal there flies a Flag,—nay not even the
- Fleur-de-lys of a Louis Pretender; there flies that accursed St.
- George’s Cross of the English and Admiral Hood! What remnants of
- sea-craft, arsenals, roperies, war-navy France had, has given
- itself to these enemies of human nature, “_ennemis du genre
- humain_.” Beleaguer it, bombard it, ye Commissioners Barras,
- Fréron, Robespierre Junior; thou General Cartaux, General
- Dugommier; above all, thou remarkable Artillery-Major, Napoleon
- Buonaparte! Hood is fortifying himself, victualling himself;
- means, apparently, to make a new Gibraltar of it.
-
- But lo, in the Autumn night, late night, among the last of
- August, what sudden red sunblaze is this that has risen over
- Lyons City; with a noise to deafen the world? It is the
- Powder-tower of Lyons, nay the Arsenal with four Powder-towers,
- which has caught fire in the Bombardment; and sprung into the
- air, carrying “a hundred and seventeen houses” after it. With a
- light, one fancies, as of the noon sun; with a roar second only
- to the Last Trumpet! All living sleepers far and wide it has
- awakened. What a sight was that, which the eye of History saw, in
- the sudden nocturnal sunblaze! The roofs of hapless Lyons, and
- all its domes and steeples made momentarily clear; Rhone and
- Saone streams flashing suddenly visible; and height and hollow,
- hamlet and smooth stubblefield, and all the region
- round;—heights, alas, all scarped and counterscarped, into
- trenches, curtains, redouts; blue Artillery-men, little
- Powder-devilkins, plying their hell-trade there, through the
- _not_ ambrosial night! Let the darkness cover it again; for it
- pains the eye. Of a truth, Chalier’s death is costing this City
- dear. Convention Commissioners, Lyons Congresses have come and
- gone; and action there was and reaction; bad ever growing worse;
- till it has come to this: Commissioner Dubois-Crancé, “with
- seventy thousand men, and all the Artillery of several
- Provinces,” bombarding Lyons day and night.
-
- Worse things still are in store. Famine is in Lyons, and ruin,
- and fire. Desperate are the sallies of the besieged; brave Précy,
- their National Colonel and Commandant, doing what is in man:
- desperate but ineffectual. Provisions cut off; nothing entering
- our city but shot and shells! The Arsenal has roared aloft; the
- very Hospital will be battered down, and the sick buried alive. A
- Black Flag hung on this latter noble Edifice, appealing to the
- pity of the beseigers; for though maddened, were they not still
- our brethren? In their blind wrath, they took it for a flag of
- defiance, and aimed thitherward the more. Bad is growing ever
- worse here: and how will the worse stop, till it have grown worst
- of all? Commissioner Dubois will listen to no pleading, to no
- speech, save this only, “We surrender at discretion.” Lyons
- contains in it subdued Jacobins; dominant Girondins; secret
- Royalists. And now, mere deaf madness and cannon-shot enveloping
- them, will not the desperate Municipality fly, at last, into the
- arms of Royalism itself? Majesty of Sardinia was to bring help,
- but it failed. Emigrant Autichamp, in name of the Two Pretender
- Royal Highnesses, is coming through Switzerland with help;
- coming, not yet come: Précy hoists the Fleur-de-lys!
-
- At sight of which, all true Girondins sorrowfully fling down
- their arms:—Let our Tricolor brethren storm us, then, and slay us
- in their wrath: with _you_ we conquer not. The famishing women
- and children are sent forth: deaf Dubois sends them back;—rains
- in mere fire and madness. Our “redouts of cotton-bags” are taken,
- retaken; Précy under his Fleur-de-lys is valiant as Despair. What
- will become of Lyons? It is a siege of seventy days.[675]
-
- Or see, in these same weeks, far in the Western waters: breasting
- through the Bay of Biscay, a greasy dingy little Merchantship,
- with Scotch skipper; under hatches whereof sit, disconsolate,—the
- last forlorn nucleus of Girondism, the Deputies from Quimper!
- Several have dissipated themselves, whithersoever they could.
- Poor Riouffe fell into the talons of Revolutionary Committee, and
- Paris Prison. The rest sit here under hatches; reverend Pétion
- with his grey hair, angry Buzot, suspicious Louvet, brave young
- Barbaroux, and others. They have escaped from Quimper, in this
- sad craft; are now tacking and struggling; in danger from the
- waves, in danger from the English, in still worse danger from the
- French;—banished by Heaven and Earth to the greasy belly of this
- Scotch skipper’s Merchant-vessel, unfruitful Atlantic raving
- round. They are for Bourdeaux, if peradventure hope yet linger
- there. Enter not Bourdeaux, O Friends! Bloody Convention
- Representatives, Tallien and such like, with their Edicts, with
- their Guillotine, have arrived there; Respectability is driven
- under ground; Jacobinism lords it on high. From that Réole
- landingplace, or _Beak of Ambès_, as it were, Pale Death, waving
- his Revolutionary Sword of sharpness, waves you elsewhither!
-
- On one side or the other of that Bec d’Ambès, the Scotch Skipper
- with difficulty moors, a dexterous greasy man; with difficulty
- lands his Girondins;—who, after reconnoitring, must rapidly
- burrow in the Earth; and so, in subterranean ways, in friends’
- back-closets, in cellars, barn-lofts, in Caves of Saint-Emilion
- and Libourne, stave off cruel Death.[676] Unhappiest of all
- Senators!
-
-
- Chapter 3.4.VI.
- Risen against Tyrants.
-
- Against all which incalculable impediments, horrors and
- disasters, what can a Jacobin Convention oppose? The
- uncalculating Spirit of Jacobinism, and Sansculottic
- sans-formulistic Frenzy! Our Enemies press in on us, says Danton,
- but they shall not conquer us, ‘we will burn France to ashes
- rather, _nous brûlerons la France_.’
-
- Committees, of _Sureté_ or _Salut_, have raised themselves “_à la
- hauteur_, to the height of circumstances.” Let all mortals raise
- themselves _à la hauteur_. Let the Forty-four thousand Sections
- and their Revolutionary Committees stir every fibre of the
- Republic; and every Frenchman feel that he is to do or die. They
- are the life-circulation of Jacobinism, these Sections and
- Committees: Danton, through the organ of Barrère and _Salut
- Public_, gets decreed, That there be in Paris, by law, two
- meetings of Section weekly; also, that the Poorer Citizen be
- _paid_ for attending, and have his day’s-wages of Forty
- Sous.[677] This is the celebrated “Law of the Forty Sous;”
- fiercely stimulant to Sansculottism, to the life-circulation of
- Jacobinism.
-
- On the twenty-third of August, Committee of Public Salvation, as
- usual through Barrère, had promulgated, in words not unworthy of
- remembering, their Report, which is soon made into a Law, of
- _Levy in Mass_. “All France, and whatsoever it contains of men or
- resources, is put under requisition,” says Barrère; really in
- Tyrtæan words, the best we know of his. “The Republic is one vast
- besieged city.” Two hundred and fifty Forges shall, in these
- days, be set up in the Luxembourg Garden, and round the outer
- wall of the Tuileries; to make gun-barrels; in sight of Earth and
- Heaven! From all hamlets, towards their Departmental Town; from
- all their Departmental Towns, towards the appointed Camp and seat
- of war, the Sons of Freedom shall march; their banner is to bear:
- “_Le Peuple Français debout contres les Tyrans_, The French
- People risen against Tyrants.” “The young men shall go to the
- battle; it is their task to conquer: the married men shall forge
- arms, transport baggage and artillery; provide subsistence: the
- women shall work at soldiers’ clothes, make tents; serve in the
- hospitals. The children shall scrape old-linen into
- surgeon’s-lint: the aged men shall have themselves carried into
- public places; and there, by their words, excite the courage of
- the young; preach hatred to Kings and unity to the
- Republic.”[678] Tyrtæan words, which tingle through all French
- hearts.
-
- In this humour, then, since no other serves, will France rush
- against its enemies. Headlong, reckoning no cost or consequence;
- heeding no law or rule but that supreme law, Salvation of the
- People! The weapons are all the iron that is in France; the
- strength is that of all the men, women and children that are in
- France. There, in their two hundred and fifty shed-smithies, in
- Garden of Luxembourg or Tuileries, let them forge gun-barrels, in
- sight of Heaven and Earth.
-
- Nor with heroic daring against the Foreign foe, can black
- vengeance against the Domestic be wanting. Life-circulation of
- the Revolutionary Committees being quickened by that _Law of the
- Forty Sous_, Deputy Merlin, not the Thionviller, whom we saw ride
- out of Mentz, but Merlin of Douai, named subsequently Merlin
- _Suspect_,—comes, about a week after, with his world-famous _Law
- of the Suspect:_ ordering all Sections, by their Committees,
- instantly to arrest all Persons Suspect; and explaining withal
- who the Arrestable and Suspect specially are. ‘Are Suspect,’ says
- he, ‘all who by their actions, by their connexions, speakings,
- writings have’—in short become Suspect.[679] Nay Chaumette,
- illuminating the matter still further, in his Municipal Placards
- and Proclamations, will bring it about that you may almost
- recognise a Suspect on the streets, and clutch him there,—off to
- Committee, and Prison. Watch well your words, watch well your
- looks: if Suspect of nothing else, you may grow, as came to be a
- saying, “Suspect of being Suspect!” For are we not in a State of
- Revolution?
-
- No frightfuller Law ever ruled in a Nation of men. All Prisons
- and Houses of Arrest in French land are getting crowded to the
- ridge-tile: Forty-four thousand Committees, like as many
- companies of reapers or gleaners, gleaning France, are gathering
- their harvest, and storing it in these Houses. Harvest of
- Aristocrat tares! Nay, lest the Forty-four thousand, each on its
- own harvest-field, prove insufficient, we are to have an ambulant
- “Revolutionary Army:” six thousand strong, under right captains,
- this shall perambulate the country at large, and strike in
- wherever it finds such harvest-work slack. So have Municipality
- and Mother Society petitioned; so has Convention decreed.[680]
- Let Aristocrats, Federalists, Monsieurs vanish, and all men
- tremble: “The Soil of Liberty shall be purged,”—with a vengeance!
-
- Neither hitherto has the Revolutionary Tribunal been keeping
- holyday. Blanchelande, for losing Saint-Domingo; “Conspirators of
- Orleans,” for “assassinating,” for assaulting the sacred Deputy
- Leonard-Bourdon: these with many Nameless, to whom life was
- sweet, have died. Daily the great Guillotine has its due. Like a
- black Spectre, daily at eventide, glides the Death-tumbril
- through the variegated throng of things. The variegated street
- shudders at it, for the moment; next moment forgets it: The
- Aristocrats! They were guilty against the Republic; their death,
- were it only that their goods are confiscated, will be useful to
- the Republic; _Vive la République!_
-
- In the last days of August, fell a notabler head: General
- Custine’s. Custine was accused of harshness, of unskilfulness,
- perfidiousness; accused of many things: found guilty, we may say,
- of one thing, unsuccessfulness. Hearing his unexpected Sentence,
- “Custine fell down before the Crucifix,” silent for the space of
- two hours: he fared, with moist eyes and a book of prayer,
- towards the Place de la Révolution; glanced upwards at the clear
- suspended axe; then mounted swiftly aloft,[681] swiftly was
- struck away from the lists of the Living. He had fought in
- America; he was a proud, brave man; and his fortune led him
- _hither_.
-
- On the 2nd of this same month, at three in the morning, a vehicle
- rolled off, with closed blinds, from the Temple to the
- Conciergerie. Within it were two Municipals; and
- Marie-Antoinette, once Queen of France! There in that
- Conciergerie, in ignominious dreary cell, she, cut off from
- children, kindred, friend and hope, sits long weeks; expecting
- when the end will be.[682]
-
- The Guillotine, we find, gets always a quicker motion, as other
- things are quickening. The Guillotine, by its speed of going,
- will give index of the general velocity of the Republic. The
- clanking of its huge axe, rising and falling there, in horrid
- systole-diastole, is portion of the whole enormous Life-movement
- and pulsation of the Sansculottic System!—“Orléans Conspirators”
- and Assaulters had to die, in spite of much weeping and
- entreating; so sacred is the person of a Deputy. Yet the sacred
- can become desecrated: your very Deputy is not greater than the
- Guillotine. Poor Deputy Journalist Gorsas: we saw him hide at
- Rennes, when the Calvados War burnt priming. He stole afterwards,
- in August, to Paris; lurked several weeks about the Palais
- _ci-devant_ Royal; was seen there, one day; was clutched,
- identified, and without ceremony, being already “out of the Law,”
- was sent to the Place de la Révolution. He died, recommending his
- wife and children to the pity of the Republic. It is the ninth
- day of October 1793. Gorsas is the first Deputy that dies on the
- scaffold; he will not be the last.
-
- Ex-Mayor Bailly is in prison; Ex-Procureur Manuel. Brissot and
- our poor Arrested Girondins have become Incarcerated Indicted
- Girondins; universal Jacobinism clamouring for their punishment.
- Duperret’s Seals are _broken!_ Those Seventy-three Secret
- Protesters, suddenly one day, are reported upon, are decreed
- accused; the Convention-doors being “previously shut,” that none
- implicated might escape. They were marched, in a very rough
- manner, to Prison that evening. Happy those of them who chanced
- to be absent! Condorcet has vanished into darkness; perhaps, like
- Rabaut, sits between two walls, in the house of a friend.
-
-
- Chapter 3.4.VII.
- Marie-Antoinette.
-
- On Monday the Fourteenth of October, 1793, a Cause is pending in
- the Palais de Justice, in the new Revolutionary Court, such as
- these old stone-walls never witnessed: the Trial of
- Marie-Antoinette. The once brightest of Queens, now tarnished,
- defaced, forsaken, stands here at Fouquier Tinville’s
- Judgment-bar; answering for her life! The Indictment was
- delivered her last night.[683] To such changes of human fortune
- what words are adequate? Silence alone is adequate.
-
- There are few Printed things one meets with, of such tragic
- almost ghastly significance as those bald Pages of the _Bulletin
- du Tribunal Révolutionnaire_, which bear title, _Trial of the
- Widow Capet_. Dim, dim, as if in disastrous eclipse; like the
- pale kingdoms of Dis! Plutonic Judges, Plutonic Tinville;
- encircled, nine times, with Styx and Lethe, with Fire-Phlegethon
- and Cocytus named of Lamentation! The very witnesses summoned are
- like Ghosts: exculpatory, inculpatory, they themselves are all
- hovering over death and doom; they are known, in our imagination,
- as the prey of the Guillotine. Tall _ci-devant_ Count d’Estaing,
- anxious to shew himself Patriot, cannot escape; nor Bailly, who,
- when asked If he knows the Accused, answers with a reverent
- inclination towards her, ‘Ah, yes, I know Madame.’ Ex-Patriots
- are here, sharply dealt with, as Procureur Manuel; Ex-Ministers,
- shorn of their splendour. We have cold Aristocratic impassivity,
- faithful to itself even in Tartarus; rabid stupidity, of Patriot
- Corporals, Patriot Washerwomen, who have much to say of Plots,
- Treasons, August Tenth, old Insurrection of Women. For all now
- has become a crime, in her who has _lost_.
-
- Marie-Antoinette, in this her utter abandonment and hour of
- extreme need, is not wanting to herself, the imperial woman. Her
- look, they say, as that hideous Indictment was reading, continued
- calm; “she was sometimes observed moving her fingers, as when one
- plays on the Piano.” You discern, not without interest, across
- that dim Revolutionary Bulletin itself, how she bears herself
- queenlike. Her answers are prompt, clear, often of Laconic
- brevity; resolution, which has grown contemptuous without ceasing
- to be dignified, veils itself in calm words. ‘You persist then in
- denial?’—‘My plan is not denial: it is the truth I have said, and
- I persist in that.’ Scandalous Hébert has borne his testimony as
- to many things: as to one thing, concerning Marie-Antoinette and
- her little Son,—wherewith Human Speech had better not further be
- soiled. She has answered Hébert; a Juryman begs to observe that
- she has not answered as to this. ‘I have not answered,’ she
- exclaims with noble emotion, ‘because Nature refuses to answer
- such a charge brought against a Mother. I appeal to all the
- Mothers that are here.’ Robespierre, when he heard of it, broke
- out into something almost like swearing at the brutish
- blockheadism of this Hébert;[684] on whose foul head his foul lie
- has recoiled. At four o’clock on Wednesday morning, after two
- days and two nights of interrogating, jury-charging, and other
- darkening of counsel, the result comes out: Sentence of Death.
- ‘Have you anything to say?’ The Accused shook her head, without
- speech. Night’s candles are burning out; and with her too Time is
- finishing, and it will be Eternity and Day. This Hall of
- Tinville’s is dark, ill-lighted except where she stands. Silently
- she withdraws from it, to die.
-
- Two Processions, or Royal Progresses, three-and-twenty years
- apart, have often struck us with a strange feeling of contrast.
- The first is of a beautiful Archduchess and Dauphiness, quitting
- her Mother’s City, at the age of Fifteen; towards hopes such as
- no other Daughter of Eve then had: “On the morrow,” says Weber an
- eye witness, “the Dauphiness left Vienna. The whole City crowded
- out; at first with a sorrow which was silent. She appeared: you
- saw her sunk back into her carriage; her face bathed in tears;
- hiding her eyes now with her handkerchief, now with her hands;
- several times putting out her head to see yet again this Palace
- of her Fathers, whither she was to return no more. She motioned
- her regret, her gratitude to the good Nation, which was crowding
- here to bid her farewell. Then arose not only tears; but piercing
- cries, on all sides. Men and women alike abandoned themselves to
- such expression of their sorrow. It was an audible sound of wail,
- in the streets and avenues of Vienna. The last Courier that
- followed her disappeared, and the crowd melted away.”[685]
-
- The young imperial Maiden of Fifteen has now become a worn
- discrowned Widow of Thirty-eight; grey before her time: this is
- the last Procession: “Few minutes after the Trial ended, the
- drums were beating to arms in all Sections; at sunrise the armed
- force was on foot, cannons getting placed at the extremities of
- the Bridges, in the Squares, Crossways, all along from the Palais
- de Justice to the Place de la Révolution. By ten o’clock,
- numerous patrols were circulating in the Streets; thirty thousand
- foot and horse drawn up under arms. At eleven, Marie-Antoinette
- was brought out. She had on an undress of _piqué blanc:_ she was
- led to the place of execution, in the same manner as an ordinary
- criminal; bound, on a Cart; accompanied by a Constitutional
- Priest in Lay dress; escorted by numerous detachments of infantry
- and cavalry. These, and the double row of troops all along her
- road, she appeared to regard with indifference. On her
- countenance there was visible neither abashment nor pride. To the
- cries of _Vive la République_ and _Down with Tyranny_, which
- attended her all the way, she seemed to pay no heed. She spoke
- little to her Confessor. The tricolor Streamers on the housetops
- occupied her attention, in the Streets du Roule and Saint-Honoré;
- she also noticed the Inscriptions on the house-fronts. On
- reaching the Place de la Révolution, her looks turned towards the
- _Jardin National_, whilom Tuileries; her face at that moment gave
- signs of lively emotion. She mounted the Scaffold with courage
- enough; at a quarter past Twelve, her head fell; the Executioner
- shewed it to the people, amid universal long-continued cries of
- “_Vive la République_.”[686]
-
-
- Chapter 3.4.VIII.
- The Twenty-two.
-
- Whom next, O Tinville? The next are of a different colour: our
- poor Arrested Girondin Deputies. What of them could still be laid
- hold of; our Vergniaud, Brissot, Fauchet, Valazé, Gensonné; the
- once flower of French Patriotism, Twenty-two by the tale:
- _hither_, at Tinville’s Bar, onward from “safeguard of the French
- People,” from confinement in the Luxembourg, imprisonment in the
- Conciergerie, have they now, by the course of things, arrived.
- Fouquier Tinville must give what account of them he can.
-
- Undoubtedly this Trial of the Girondins is the greatest that
- Fouquier has yet had to do. Twenty-two, all chief Republicans,
- ranged in a line there; the most eloquent in France; Lawyers too;
- not without friends in the auditory. How will Tinville prove
- these men guilty of Royalism, Federalism, Conspiracy against the
- Republic? Vergniaud’s eloquence awakes once more; “draws tears,”
- they say. And Journalists report, and the Trial lengthens itself
- out day after day; “threatens to become eternal,” murmur many.
- Jacobinism and Municipality rise to the aid of Fouquier. On the
- 28th of the month, Hébert and others come in deputation to inform
- a Patriot Convention that the Revolutionary Tribunal is quite
- “shackled by forms of Law;” that a Patriot Jury ought to have
- “the power of cutting short, of _terminer les débats_, when they
- feel themselves convinced.” Which pregnant suggestion, of cutting
- short, passes itself, with all despatch, into a Decree.
-
- Accordingly, at ten o’clock on the night of the 30th of October,
- the Twenty-two, summoned back once more, receive this
- information, That the Jury feeling themselves convinced have cut
- short, have brought in their verdict; that the Accused are found
- guilty, and the Sentence on one and all of them is Death with
- confiscation of goods.
-
- Loud natural clamour rises among the poor Girondins; tumult;
- which can only be repressed by the gendarmes. Valazé stabs
- himself; falls down dead on the spot. The rest, amid loud clamour
- and confusion, are driven back to their Conciergerie; Lasource
- exclaiming, ‘I die on the day when the People have lost their
- reason; ye will die when they recover it.’[687] No help! Yielding
- to violence, the Doomed uplift the Hymn of the Marseillese;
- return singing to their dungeon.
-
- Riouffe, who was their Prison-mate in these last days, has
- lovingly recorded what death they made. To our notions, it is not
- an edifying death. Gay satirical _Pot-pourri_ by Ducos; rhymed
- Scenes of Tragedy, wherein Barrère and Robespierre discourse with
- Satan; death’s eve spent in “singing” and “sallies of gaiety,”
- with “discourses on the happiness of peoples:” these things, and
- the like of these, we have to accept for what they are worth. It
- is the manner in which the Girondins make _their_ Last Supper.
- Valazé, with bloody breast, sleeps cold in death; hears not their
- singing. Vergniaud has his dose of poison; but it is not enough
- for his friends, it is enough only for himself; wherefore he
- flings it from him; presides at this Last Supper of the
- Girondins, with wild coruscations of eloquence, with song and
- mirth. Poor human Will struggles to assert itself; if not in this
- way, then in that.[688]
-
- But on the morrow morning all Paris is out; such a crowd as no
- man had seen. The Death-carts, Valazé’s cold corpse stretched
- among the yet living Twenty-one, roll along. Bareheaded, hands
- bound; in their shirt-sleeves, coat flung loosely round the neck:
- so fare the eloquent of France; bemurmured, beshouted. To the
- shouts of _Vive la République_, some of them keep answering with
- counter-shouts of _Vive la République_. Others, as Brissot, sit
- sunk in silence. At the foot of the scaffold they again strike
- up, with appropriate variations, the Hymn of the Marseillese.
- Such an act of music; conceive it well! The yet Living chant
- there; the chorus so rapidly wearing weak! Samson’s axe is rapid;
- one head per minute, or little less. The chorus is worn out;
- farewell for evermore ye Girondins. Te-Deum Fauchet has become
- silent; Valazé’s dead head is lopped: the sickle of the
- Guillotine has reaped the Girondins all away. “The eloquent, the
- young, the beautiful and brave!” exclaims Riouffe. O Death, what
- feast is toward in thy ghastly Halls?
-
- Nor alas, in the far Bourdeaux region, will Girondism fare
- better. In caves of Saint-Emilion, in loft and cellar, the
- weariest months, roll on; apparel worn, purse empty; wintry
- November come; under Tallien and his Guillotine, all hope now
- gone. Danger drawing ever nigher, difficulty pressing ever
- straiter, they determine to separate. Not unpathetic the
- farewell; tall Barbaroux, cheeriest of brave men, stoops to clasp
- his Louvet: ‘In what place soever thou findest my mother,’ cries
- he, ‘try to be instead of a son to her: no resource of mine but I
- will share with thy Wife, should chance ever lead me where she
- is.’[689]
-
- Louvet went with Guadet, with Salles and Valady; Barbaroux with
- Buzot and Pétion. Valady soon went southward, on a way of his
- own. The two friends and Louvet had a miserable day and night;
- the 14th of November month, 1793. Sunk in wet, weariness and
- hunger, they knock, on the morrow, for help, at a friend’s
- country-house; the fainthearted friend refuses to admit them.
- They stood therefore under trees, in the pouring rain. Flying
- desperate, Louvet thereupon will to Paris. He sets forth, there
- and then, splashing the mud on each side of him, with a fresh
- strength gathered from fury or frenzy. He passes villages,
- finding “the sentry asleep in his box in the thick rain;” he is
- gone, before the man can call after him. He bilks Revolutionary
- Committees; rides in carriers’ carts, covered carts and open;
- lies hidden in one, under knapsacks and cloaks of soldiers’ wives
- on the Street of Orléans, while men search for him: has
- hairbreadth escapes that would fill three romances: finally he
- gets to Paris to his fair Helpmate; gets to Switzerland, and
- waits better days.
-
- Poor Guadet and Salles were both taken, ere long; they died by
- the Guillotine in Bourdeaux; drums beating to drown their voice.
- Valady also is caught, and guillotined. Barbaroux and his two
- comrades weathered it longer, into the summer of 1794; but not
- long enough. One July morning, changing their hiding place, as
- they have often to do, “about a league from Saint-Emilion, they
- observe a great crowd of country-people;” doubtless Jacobins come
- to take them? Barbaroux draws a pistol, shoots himself dead.
- Alas, and it was not Jacobins; it was harmless villagers going to
- a village wake. Two days afterwards, Buzot and Pétion were found
- in a Cornfield, their bodies half-eaten with dogs.[690]
-
- Such was the end of Girondism. They arose to regenerate France,
- these men; and have accomplished _this_. Alas, whatever quarrel
- we had with them, has not their cruel fate abolished it? Pity
- only survives. So many excellent souls of heroes sent down to
- Hades; they themselves given as a prey of dogs and all manner of
- birds! But, here too, the will of the Supreme Power was
- accomplished. As Vergniaud said: “The Revolution, like Saturn, is
- devouring its own children.”
-
-
- BOOK 3.V.
- TERROR THE ORDER OF THE DAY
-
-
- Chapter 3.5.I.
- Rushing down.
-
- We are now, therefore, got to that black precipitous Abyss;
- whither all things have long been tending; where, having now
- arrived on the giddy verge, they hurl down, in confused ruin;
- headlong, pellmell, down, down;—till Sansculottism have
- consummated itself; and in this wondrous French Revolution, as in
- a Doomsday, a World have been rapidly, if not born again, yet
- destroyed and engulphed. Terror has long been terrible: but to
- the actors themselves it has now become manifest that their
- appointed course is one of Terror; and they say, Be it so. ‘_Que
- la Terreur soit a l’ordre du jour_.’
-
- So many centuries, say only from Hugh Capet downwards, had been
- adding together, century transmitting it with increase to
- century, the sum of Wickedness, of Falsehood, Oppression of man
- by man. Kings were sinners, and Priests were, and People.
- Open-Scoundrels rode triumphant, bediademed, becoronetted,
- bemitred; or the still fataller species of Secret-Scoundrels, in
- their fair-sounding formulas, speciosities, respectabilities,
- hollow within: the race of Quacks was grown many as the sands of
- the sea. Till at length such a sum of Quackery had accumulated
- itself as, in brief, the Earth and the Heavens were weary of.
- Slow seemed the Day of Settlement: coming on, all imperceptible,
- across the bluster and fanfaronade of Courtierisms,
- Conquering-Heroisms, Most-Christian _Grand Monarque_-isms.
- Well-beloved Pompadourisms: yet behold it was always coming;
- behold it has come, suddenly, unlooked for by any man! The
- harvest of long centuries was ripening and whitening so rapidly
- of late; and now it is grown _white_, and is reaped rapidly, as
- it were, in one day. Reaped, in this Reign of Terror; and carried
- home, to Hades and the Pit!—Unhappy Sons of Adam: it is ever so;
- and never do they know it, nor will they know it. With cheerfully
- smoothed countenances, day after day, and generation after
- generation, they, calling cheerfully to one another,
- ‘Well-speed-ye,’ are at work, _sowing the wind_. And yet, as God
- lives, they _shall reap the whirlwind:_ no other thing, we say,
- is possible,—since God is a Truth and His World is a Truth.
-
- History, however, in dealing with this Reign of Terror, has had
- her own difficulties. While the Phenomenon continued in its
- primary state, as mere “Horrors of the French Revolution,” there
- was abundance to be said and shrieked. With and also without
- profit. Heaven knows there were terrors and horrors enough: yet
- that was not all the Phenomenon; nay, more properly, that was not
- the Phenomenon at all, but rather was the _shadow_ of it, the
- negative part of it. And now, in a new stage of the business,
- when History, ceasing to shriek, would try rather to include
- under her old Forms of speech or speculation this new amazing
- Thing; that so some accredited scientific Law of Nature might
- suffice for the unexpected Product of Nature, and History might
- get to speak of it articulately, and draw inferences and profit
- from it; in this new stage, History, we must say, babbles and
- flounders perhaps in a still painfuller manner. Take, for
- example, the latest Form of speech we have seen propounded on the
- subject as adequate to it, almost in these months, by our worthy
- M. Roux, in his _Histoire Parlementaire_. The latest and the
- strangest: that the French Revolution was a dead-lift effort,
- after eighteen hundred years of preparation, to realise—the
- Christian Religion![691] _Unity, Indivisibility, Brotherhood or
- Death_ did indeed stand printed on all Houses of the Living;
- also, on Cemeteries, or Houses of the Dead, stood printed, by
- order of Procureur Chaumette, Here is eternal Sleep:[692] but a
- Christian Religion realised by the Guillotine and Death-Eternal,
- “is suspect to me,” as Robespierre was wont to say, “_m’est
- suspecte._”
-
- Alas, no, M. Roux! A Gospel of Brotherhood, not according to any
- of the Four old Evangelists, and calling on men to repent, and
- amend _each his own_ wicked existence, that they might be saved;
- but a Gospel rather, as we often hint, according to a new Fifth
- Evangelist Jean-Jacques, calling on men to amend _each the whole
- world’s_ wicked existence, and be saved by making the
- Constitution. A thing different and distant _toto cœlo_, as they
- say: the whole breadth of the sky, and further if possible!—It is
- thus, however, that History, and indeed all human Speech and
- Reason does yet, what Father Adam began life by doing: strive to
- _name_ the new Things it sees of Nature’s producing,—often
- helplessly enough.
-
- But what if History were to admit, for once, that all the Names
- and Theorems yet known to her fall short? That this grand Product
- of Nature was even grand, and new, in that it came not to range
- itself under old recorded Laws-of-Nature at all; but to disclose
- new ones? In that case, History renouncing the pretention to
- _name_ it at present, will _look_ honestly at it, and name what
- she can of it! Any approximation to the right Name has value:
- were the right name itself once here, the Thing is known
- thenceforth; the Thing is then ours, and can be dealt with.
-
- Now surely not realization, of Christianity, or of aught earthly,
- do we discern in this Reign of Terror, in this French Revolution
- of which it is the consummating. Destruction rather we discern—of
- all that was destructible. It is as if Twenty-five millions,
- risen at length into the Pythian mood, had stood up
- simultaneously to say, with a sound which goes through far lands
- and times, that this Untruth of an Existence had become
- insupportable. O ye Hypocrisies and Speciosities, Royal mantles,
- Cardinal plushcloaks, ye Credos, Formulas, Respectabilities,
- fair-painted Sepulchres full of dead men’s bones,—behold, ye
- appear to us to be altogether a Lie. Yet our Life is not a Lie;
- yet our Hunger and Misery is not a Lie! Behold we lift up, one
- and all, our Twenty-five million right-hands; and take the
- Heavens, and the Earth and also the Pit of Tophet to witness,
- that either ye shall be abolished, or else we shall be abolished!
-
- No inconsiderable Oath, truly; forming, as has been often said,
- the most remarkable transaction in these last thousand years.
- Wherefrom likewise there follow, and will follow, results. The
- fulfilment of this Oath; that is to say, the black desperate
- battle of Men against their whole Condition and Environment,—a
- battle, alas, withal, against the Sin and Darkness that was in
- themselves as in others: this is the Reign of Terror.
- Transcendental despair was the purport of it, though not
- consciously so. False hopes, of Fraternity, Political Millennium,
- and what not, we have always seen: but the unseen heart of the
- whole, the transcendental despair, was not false; neither has it
- been of no effect. Despair, pushed far enough, completes the
- circle, so to speak; and becomes a kind of genuine productive
- hope again.
-
- Doctrine of Fraternity, out of old Catholicism, does, it is true,
- very strangely in the vehicle of a Jean-Jacques Evangel, suddenly
- plump down out of its cloud-firmament; and from a theorem
- determine to make itself a practice. But just so do all creeds,
- intentions, customs, knowledges, thoughts and things, which the
- French have, suddenly plump down; Catholicism, Classicism,
- Sentimentalism, Cannibalism: all _isms_ that make up Man in
- France, are rushing and roaring in that gulf; and the theorem has
- become a practice, and whatsoever cannot swim sinks. Not
- Evangelist Jean-Jacques alone; there is not a Village
- Schoolmaster but has contributed his quota: do we not _thou_ one
- another, according to the Free Peoples of Antiquity? The French
- Patriot, in red phrygian nightcap of Liberty, christens his poor
- little red infant Cato,—Censor, or else of Utica. Gracchus has
- become Baboeuf and edits Newspapers; Mutius Scaevola, Cordwainer
- of that ilk, presides in the Section Mutius-Scaevola: and in
- brief, there is a world wholly jumbling itself, to try what will
- swim!
-
- Wherefore we will, at all events, call this Reign of Terror a
- very strange one. Dominant Sansculottism makes, as it were, free
- arena; one of the strangest temporary states Humanity was ever
- seen in. A nation of men, full of wants and void of habits! The
- old habits are gone to wreck because they were old: men, driven
- forward by Necessity and fierce Pythian Madness, have, on the
- spur of the instant, to devise for the want the _way_ of
- satisfying it. The wonted tumbles down; by imitation, by
- invention, the Unwonted hastily builds itself up. What the French
- National head has in it comes out: if not a great result, surely
- one of the strangest.
-
- Neither shall the reader fancy that it was all blank, this Reign
- of Terror: far from it. How many hammermen and squaremen, bakers
- and brewers, washers and wringers, over this France, must ply
- their old daily work, let the Government be one of Terror or one
- of Joy! In this Paris there are Twenty-three Theatres nightly;
- some count as many as Sixty Places of Dancing.[693] The
- Playwright manufactures: pieces of a strictly Republican
- character. Ever fresh Novelgarbage, as of old, fodders the
- Circulating Libraries.[694] The “Cesspool of _Agio_,” now in the
- time of Paper Money, works with a vivacity unexampled,
- unimagined; exhales from itself “sudden fortunes,” like
- Alladin-Palaces: really a kind of miraculous Fata-Morganas, since
- you _can_ live in them, for a time. Terror is as a sable ground,
- on which the most variegated of scenes paints itself. In
- startling transitions, in colours all intensated, the sublime,
- the ludicrous, the horrible succeed one another; or rather, in
- crowding tumult, accompany one another.
-
- Here, accordingly, if anywhere, the “hundred tongues,” which the
- old Poets often clamour for, were of supreme service! In defect
- of any such organ on our part, let the Reader stir up his own
- imaginative organ: let us snatch for him this or the other
- significant glimpse of things, in the fittest sequence we can.
-
-
- Chapter 3.5.II.
- Death.
-
- In the early days of November, there is one transient glimpse of
- things that is to be noted: the last transit to his long home of
- Philippe d’Orléans Egalité. Philippe was “decreed accused,” along
- with the Girondins, much to his and their surprise; but not tried
- along with them. They are doomed and dead, some three days, when
- Philippe, after his long half-year of durance at Marseilles,
- arrives in Paris. It is, as we calculate, the third of November
- 1793.
-
- On which same day, two notable Female Prisoners are also put in
- ward there: Dame Dubarry and Josephine Beauharnais! Dame whilom
- Countess Dubarry, Unfortunate-female, had returned from London;
- they snatched her, not only as Ex-harlot of a whilom Majesty, and
- therefore suspect; but as having “furnished the Emigrants with
- money.” Contemporaneously with whom, there comes the wife of
- Beauharnais, soon to be the widow: she that is Josephine Tascher
- Beauharnais; that shall be Josephine Empress Buonaparte, for a
- black Divineress of the Tropics prophesied long since that she
- should be a Queen and more. Likewise, in the same hours, poor
- Adam Lux, nigh turned in the head, who, according to Foster, “has
- taken no food these three weeks,” marches to the Guillotine for
- his Pamphlet on Charlotte Corday: he “sprang to the scaffold;”
- said he “died for her with great joy.” Amid such
- fellow-travellers does Philippe arrive. For, be the month named
- Brumaire year 2 of Liberty, or November year 1793 of Slavery, the
- Guillotine goes always, _Guillotine va toujours_.
-
- Enough, Philippe’s indictment is soon drawn, his jury soon
- convinced. He finds himself made guilty of Royalism, Conspiracy
- and much else; nay, it is a guilt in him that he voted Louis’s
- Death, though he answers, ‘I voted in my soul and conscience.’
- The doom he finds is death forthwith; this present sixth dim day
- of November is the last day that Philippe is to see. Philippe,
- says Montgaillard, thereupon called for breakfast: sufficiency of
- “oysters, two cutlets, best part of an excellent bottle of
- claret;” and consumed the same with apparent relish. A
- Revolutionary Judge, or some official Convention Emissary, then
- arrived, to signify that he might still do the State some service
- by revealing the truth about a plot or two. Philippe answered
- that, on him, in the pass things had come to, the State had, he
- thought, small claim; that nevertheless, in the interest of
- Liberty, he, having still some leisure on his hands, was willing,
- were a reasonable question asked him, to give reasonable answer.
- And so, says Montgaillard, he lent his elbow on the mantel-piece,
- and conversed in an under-tone, with great seeming composure;
- till the leisure was done, or the Emissary went his ways.
-
- At the door of the Conciergerie, Philippe’s attitude was erect
- and easy, almost commanding. It is five years, all but a few
- days, since Philippe, within these same stone walls, stood up
- with an air of graciosity, and asked King Louis, ‘Whether it was
- a Royal Session, then, or a Bed of Justice?’ O Heaven!—Three poor
- blackguards were to ride and die with him: some say, they
- objected to such company, and had to be flung in, neck and
- heels;[695] but it seems not true. Objecting or not objecting,
- the gallows-vehicle gets under way. Philippe’s dress is remarked
- for its elegance; greenfrock, waistcoat of white _piqué_, yellow
- buckskins, boots clear as Warren: his air, as before, entirely
- composed, impassive, not to say easy and Brummellean-polite.
- Through street after street; slowly, amid execrations;—past the
- Palais Egalité whilom Palais-Royal! The cruel Populace stopped
- him there, some minutes: Dame de Buffon, it is said, looked out
- on him, in Jezebel head-tire; along the ashlar Wall, there ran
- these words in huge tricolor print, REPUBLIC ONE AND INDIVISIBLE;
- LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY OR DEATH: _National Property_.
- Philippe’s eyes flashed hellfire, one instant; but the next
- instant it was gone, and he sat impassive, Brummellean-polite. On
- the scaffold, Samson was for drawing of his boots: ‘tush,’ said
- Philippe, ‘they will come better off _after;_ let us have done,
- _dépêchons-nous!_’
-
- So Philippe was not without virtue, then? God forbid that there
- should be any living man without it! He had the virtue to keep
- living for five-and-forty years;—other virtues perhaps more than
- we know of. Probably no mortal ever had such things recorded of
- him: such facts, and also such lies. For he was a _Jacobin Prince
- of the Blood;_ consider what a combination! Also, unlike any
- Nero, any Borgia, he lived in the Age of Pamphlets. Enough for
- us: Chaos _has_ reabsorbed him; may it late or never bear his
- like again!—Brave young Orleans Egalité, deprived of all, only
- not deprived of himself, is gone to Coire in the Grisons, under
- the name of Corby, to teach Mathematics. The Egalité Family is at
- the darkest depths of the Nadir.
-
- A far nobler Victim follows; one who will claim remembrance from
- several centuries: Jeanne-Marie Phlipon, the Wife of Roland.
- Queenly, sublime in her uncomplaining sorrow, seemed she to
- Riouffe in her Prison. “Something more than is usually found in
- the looks of women painted itself,” says Riouffe,[696] “in those
- large black eyes of hers, full of expression and sweetness. She
- spoke to me often, at the Grate: we were all attentive round her,
- in a sort of admiration and astonishment; she expressed herself
- with a purity, with a harmony and prosody that made her language
- like music, of which the ear could never have enough. Her
- conversation was serious, not cold; coming from the mouth of a
- beautiful woman, it was frank and courageous as that of a great
- men.” “And yet her maid said: ‘Before you, she collects her
- strength; but in her own room, she will sit three hours
- sometimes, leaning on the window, and weeping.’” She had been in
- Prison, liberated once, but recaptured the same hour, ever since
- the first of June: in agitation and uncertainty; which has
- gradually settled down into the last stern certainty, that of
- death. In the Abbaye Prison, she occupied Charlotte Corday’s
- apartment. Here in the Conciergerie, she speaks with Riouffe,
- with Ex-Minister Clavière; calls the beheaded Twenty-two ‘_Nos
- amis_, our Friends,’—whom we are soon to follow. During these
- five months, those _Memoirs_ of hers were written, which all the
- world still reads.
-
- But now, on the 8th of November, “clad in white,” says Riouffe,
- “with her long black hair hanging down to her girdle,” she is
- gone to the Judgment Bar. She returned with a quick step; lifted
- her finger, to signify to us that she was doomed: her eyes seemed
- to have been wet. Fouquier-Tinville’s questions had been
- “brutal;” offended female honour flung them back on him, with
- scorn, not without tears. And now, short preparation soon done,
- she shall go her last road. There went with her a certain
- Lamarche, “Director of Assignat printing;” whose dejection she
- endeavoured to cheer. Arrived at the foot of the scaffold, she
- asked for pen and paper, ‘to write the strange thoughts that were
- rising in her;’[697] a remarkable request; which was refused.
- Looking at the Statue of Liberty which stands there, she says
- bitterly: ‘O Liberty, what things are done in thy name!’ For
- Lamarche’s sake, she will die first; shew him how easy it is to
- die: ‘Contrary to the order’ said Samson.—‘Pshaw, you cannot
- refuse the last request of a Lady;’ and Samson yielded.
-
- Noble white Vision, with its high queenly face, its soft proud
- eyes, long black hair flowing down to the girdle; and as brave a
- heart as ever beat in woman’s bosom! Like a white Grecian Statue,
- serenely complete, she shines in that black wreck of things;—long
- memorable. Honour to great Nature who, in Paris City, in the Era
- of Noble-Sentiment and Pompadourism, can make a Jeanne Phlipon,
- and nourish her to clear perennial Womanhood, though but on
- Logics, _Encyclopédies_, and the Gospel according to
- Jean-Jacques! Biography will long remember that trait of asking
- for a pen ‘to write the strange thoughts that were rising in
- her.’ It is as a little light-beam, shedding softness, and a kind
- of sacredness, over all that preceded: so in her too there was an
- Unnameable; she too was a Daughter of the Infinite; there were
- mysteries which Philosophism had not dreamt of!—She left long
- written counsels to her little Girl; she said her Husband would
- not survive her.
-
- Still crueller was the fate of poor Bailly, First National
- President, First Mayor of Paris: doomed now for Royalism,
- Fayettism; for that Red-Flag Business of the Champ-de-Mars;—one
- may say in general, for leaving his Astronomy to meddle with
- Revolution. It is the 10th of November 1793, a cold bitter
- drizzling rain, as poor Bailly is led through the streets;
- howling Populace covering him with curses, with mud; waving over
- his face a burning or smoking mockery of a Red Flag. Silent,
- unpitied, sits the innocent old man. Slow faring through the
- sleety drizzle, they have got to the Champ-de-Mars: Not there!
- vociferates the cursing Populace; Such blood ought not to stain
- an Altar of the Fatherland; not there; but on that dungheap by
- the River-side! So vociferates the cursing Populace; Officiality
- gives ear to them. The Guillotine is taken down, though with
- hands numbed by the sleety drizzle; is carried to the River-side,
- is there set up again, with slow numbness; pulse after pulse
- still counting itself out in the old man’s weary heart. For hours
- long; amid curses and bitter frost-rain! ‘Bailly, thou
- tremblest,’ said one. ‘_Mon ami_, it is for cold,’ said Bailly,
- ‘_c’est de froid_.’ Crueller end had no mortal.[698]
-
- Some days afterwards, Roland hearing the news of what happened on
- the 8th, embraces his kind Friends at Rouen, leaves their kind
- house which had given him refuge; goes forth, with farewell too
- sad for tears. On the morrow morning, 16th of the month, “some
- four leagues from Rouen, Paris-ward, near Bourg-Baudoin, in M.
- Normand’s Avenue,” there is seen sitting leant against a tree,
- the figure of rigorous wrinkled man; stiff now in the rigour of
- death; a cane-sword run through his heart; and at his feet this
- writing: “Whoever thou art that findest me lying, respect my
- remains: they are those of a man who consecrated all his life to
- being useful; and who has died as he lived, virtuous and honest.”
- “Not fear, but indignation, made me quit my retreat, on learning
- that my Wife had been murdered. I wished not to remain longer on
- an Earth polluted with crimes.”[699]
-
- Barnave’s appearance at the Revolutionary Tribunal was of the
- bravest; but it could not stead him. They have sent for him from
- Grenoble; to pay the common smart, Vain is eloquence, forensic or
- other, against the dumb Clotho-shears of Tinville. He is still
- but two-and-thirty, this Barnave, and has known such changes.
- Short while ago, we saw him at the top of Fortune’s Wheel, his
- word a law to all Patriots: and now surely he is at the _bottom_
- of the Wheel; in stormful altercation with a Tinville Tribunal,
- which is dooming him to die![700] And Pétion, once also of the
- Extreme Left, and named _Pétion Virtue_, where is he? Civilly
- dead; in the Caves of Saint-Emilion; to be devoured of dogs. And
- Robespierre, who rode along with him on the shoulders of the
- people, is in Committee of _Salut;_ civilly alive: not to live
- always. So giddy-swift whirls and spins this immeasurable
- _tormentum_ of a Revolution; wild-booming; not to be followed by
- the eye. Barnave, on the Scaffold, stamped his foot; and looking
- upwards was heard to ejaculate, ‘This then is my reward?’
-
- Deputy Ex-Procureur Manuel is already gone; and Deputy Osselin,
- famed also in August and September, is about to go: and Rabaut,
- discovered treacherously between his two walls, and the Brother
- of Rabaut. National Deputies not a few! And Generals: the memory
- of General Custine cannot be defended by his Son; his Son is
- already guillotined. Custine the Ex-Noble was replaced by
- Houchard the Plebeian: he too could not prosper in the North; for
- him too there was no mercy; he has perished in the Place de la
- Revolution, after attempting suicide in Prison. And Generals
- Biron, Beauharnais, Brunet, whatsoever General prospers not;
- tough old Lückner, with his eyes grown rheumy; Alsatian
- Westermann, valiant and diligent in La Vendée: _none of them
- can_, as the Psalmist sings, _his soul from death deliver_.
-
- How busy are the Revolutionary Committees; Sections with their
- Forty Halfpence a-day! Arrestment on arrestment falls quick,
- continual; followed by death. Ex-Minister Clavière has killed
- himself in Prison. Ex-Minister Lebrun, seized in a hayloft, under
- the disguise of a working man, is instantly conducted to
- death.[701] Nay, withal, is it not what Barrère calls “coining
- money on the Place de la Révolution?” For always the “property of
- the guilty, if property he have,” is confiscated. To avoid
- accidents, we even make a Law that suicide shall not defraud us;
- that a criminal who kills himself does not the less incur
- forfeiture of goods. Let the guilty tremble, therefore, and the
- suspect, and the rich, and in a word all manner of culottic men!
- Luxembourg Palace, once Monsieur’s, has become a huge loathsome
- Prison; Chantilly Palace too, once Condé’s:—and their Landlords
- are at Blankenberg, on the wrong side of the Rhine. In Paris are
- now some Twelve Prisons; in France some Forty-four Thousand:
- thitherward, thick as brown leaves in Autumn, rustle and travel
- the suspect; shaken down by Revolutionary Committees, they are
- swept thitherward, as into their storehouse,—to be consumed by
- Samson and Tinville. “The Guillotine goes not ill, _ La
- Guillotine ne va pas mal_.”
-
-
- Chapter 3.5.III.
- Destruction.
-
- The suspect may well tremble; but how much more the open
- rebels;—the Girondin Cities of the South! Revolutionary Army is
- gone forth, under Ronsin the Playwright; six thousand strong; in
- “red nightcap, in tricolor waistcoat, in black-shag trousers,
- black-shag spencer, with enormous moustachioes, enormous
- sabre,—in _carmagnole complète;_”[702] and has portable
- guillotines. Representative Carrier has got to Nantes, by the
- edge of blazing La Vendée, which Rossignol has literally set on
- fire: Carrier will try what captives you make, what accomplices
- they have, Royalist or Girondin: his guillotine goes always, _va
- toujours;_ and his wool-capped “Company of Marat.” Little
- children are guillotined, and aged men. Swift as the machine is,
- it will not serve; the Headsman and all his valets sink, worn
- down with work; declare that the human muscles can no more.[703]
- Whereupon you must try fusillading; to which perhaps still
- frightfuller methods may succeed.
-
- In Brest, to like purpose, rules Jean-Bon Saint-André; with an
- Army of Red Nightcaps. In Bourdeaux rules Tallien, with his
- Isabeau and henchmen: Guadets, Cussys, Salleses, may fall; the
- bloody Pike and Nightcap bearing supreme sway; the Guillotine
- coining money. Bristly fox-haired Tallien, once Able Editor,
- still young in years, is now become most gloomy, potent; a Pluto
- on Earth, and has the keys of Tartarus. One remarks, however,
- that a certain Senhorina Cabarus, or call her rather _Senhora_
- and wedded not yet widowed _Dame de Fontenai_, brown beautiful
- woman, daughter of Cabarus the Spanish merchant,—has softened the
- red bristly countenance; pleading for herself and friends; and
- prevailing. The keys of Tartarus, or any kind of power, are
- something to a woman; gloomy Pluto himself is not insensible to
- love. Like a new Proserpine, she, by this red gloomy Dis, is
- gathered; and, they say, softens his stone heart a little.
-
- Maignet, at Orange in the South; Lebon, at Arras in the North,
- become world’s wonders. Jacobin Popular Tribunal, with its
- National Representative, perhaps where Girondin Popular Tribunal
- had lately been, rises here and rises there; wheresoever needed.
- Fouchés, Maignets, Barrases, Frérons scour the Southern
- Departments; like reapers, with their guillotine-sickle. Many are
- the labourers, great is the harvest. By the hundred and the
- thousand, men’s lives are cropt; cast like brands into the
- burning.
-
- Marseilles is taken, and put under martial law: lo, at
- Marseilles, what one besmutted red-bearded corn-ear is this which
- they cut;—one gross Man, we mean, with copper-studded face;
- plenteous beard, or beard-stubble, of a tile-colour? By Nemesis
- and the Fatal Sisters, it is Jourdan Coupe-tête! Him they have
- clutched, in these martial-law districts; him too, with their
- “national razor,” their _rasoir national_, they sternly shave
- away. Low now is Jourdan the Headsman’s own head;—low as
- Deshuttes’s and Varigny’s, which he sent on pikes, in the
- Insurrection of Women! No more shall he, as a copper Portent, be
- seen gyrating through the Cities of the South; no more sit
- judging, with pipes and brandy, in the Ice-tower of Avignon. The
- all-hiding Earth has received him, the bloated Tilebeard: may we
- never look upon his like again!—Jourdan one names; the other
- Hundreds are not named. Alas, they, like confused faggots, lie
- massed together for us; counted by the cartload: and yet not an
- individual faggot-twig of them but had a Life and History; and
- was cut, not without pangs as when a Kaiser dies!
-
- Least of all cities can Lyons escape. Lyons, which we saw in
- dread sunblaze, that Autumn night when the Powder-tower sprang
- aloft, was clearly verging towards a sad end. Inevitable: what
- could desperate valour and Précy do; Dubois-Crancé, deaf as
- Destiny, stern as Doom, capturing their “redouts of cotton-bags;”
- hemming them in, ever closer, with his Artillery-lava? Never
- would that _ci-devant_ d’Autichamp arrive; never any help from
- Blankenberg. The Lyons Jacobins were hidden in cellars; the
- Girondin Municipality waxed pale, in famine, treason and red
- fire. Précy drew his sword, and some Fifteen Hundred with him;
- sprang to saddle, to cut their way to Switzerland. They cut
- fiercely; and were fiercely cut, and cut down; not hundreds,
- hardly units of them ever saw Switzerland.[704] Lyons, on the 9th
- of October, surrenders at discretion; it is become a devoted
- Town. Abbé Lamourette, now Bishop Lamourette, whilom Legislator,
- he of the old _Baiser-l’Amourette_ or Delilah-Kiss, is seized
- here, is sent to Paris to be guillotined: “he made the sign of
- the cross,” they say when Tinville intimated his death-sentence
- to him; and died as an eloquent Constitutional Bishop. But wo now
- to all Bishops, Priests, Aristocrats and Federalists that are in
- Lyons! The _manes_ of Chalier are to be appeased; the Republic,
- maddened to the Sibylline pitch, has bared her right arm. Behold!
- Representative Fouché, it is Fouché of Nantes, a name to become
- well known; he with a Patriot company goes duly, in wondrous
- Procession, to raise the corpse of Chalier. An Ass, housed in
- Priest’s cloak, with a mitre on its head, and trailing the
- Mass-Books, some say the very Bible, at its tail, paces through
- Lyons streets; escorted by multitudinous Patriotism, by clangour
- as of the Pit; towards the grave of Martyr Chalier. The body is
- dug up and burnt: the ashes are collected in an Urn; to be
- worshipped of Paris Patriotism. The Holy Books were part of the
- funeral pile; their ashes are scattered to the wind. Amid cries
- of ‘Vengeance! Vengeance!’—which, writes Fouché, shall be
- satisfied.[705]
-
- Lyons in fact is a Town to be abolished; not Lyons henceforth but
- “_Commune Affranchie_, Township Freed;” the very name of it shall
- perish. It is to be razed, this once great City, if Jacobinism
- prophesy right; and a Pillar to be erected on the ruins, with
- this Inscription, _Lyons rebelled against the Republic; Lyons is
- no more_. Fouché, Couthon, Collot, Convention Representatives
- succeed one another: there is work for the hangman; work for the
- hammerman, _not_ in building. The very Houses of Aristocrats, we
- say, are doomed. Paralytic Couthon, borne in a chair, taps on the
- wall, with emblematic mallet, saying, ‘_La Loi te frappe_, The
- Law strikes thee;’ masons, with wedge and crowbar, begin
- demolition. Crash of downfall, dim ruin and dust-clouds fly in
- the winter wind. Had Lyons been of soft stuff, it had all
- vanished in those weeks, and the Jacobin prophecy had been
- fulfilled. But Towns are not built of soap-froth; Lyons Town is
- built of stone. Lyons, though it rebelled against the Republic,
- _is_ to this day.
-
- Neither have the Lyons Girondins all one neck, that you could
- despatch it at one swoop. Revolutionary Tribunal here, and
- Military Commission, guillotining, fusillading, do what they can:
- the kennels of the Place des Terreaux run red; mangled corpses
- roll down the Rhone. Collot d’Herbois, they say, was once hissed
- on the Lyons stage: but with what sibilation, of world-catcall or
- hoarse Tartarean Trumpet, will ye hiss him now, in this his new
- character of Convention Representative,—not to be repeated! Two
- hundred and nine men are marched forth over the River, to be shot
- in mass, by musket and cannon, in the Promenade of the Brotteaux.
- It is the second of such scenes; the first was of some Seventy.
- The corpses of the first were flung into the Rhone, but the Rhone
- stranded some; so these now, of the second lot, are to be buried
- on land. Their one long grave is dug; they stand ranked, by the
- loose mould-ridge; the younger of them singing the Marseillaise.
- Jacobin National Guards give fire; but have again to give fire,
- and again; and to take the bayonet and the spade, for though the
- doomed all fall, they do not all die;—and it becomes a butchery
- too horrible for speech. So that the very Nationals, as they
- fire, turn away their faces. Collot, snatching the musket from
- one such National, and levelling it with unmoved countenance,
- says ‘It is thus a Republican ought to fire.’
-
- This is the second Fusillade, and happily the last: it is found
- too hideous; even inconvenient. They were Two hundred and nine
- marched out; one escaped at the end of the Bridge: yet behold,
- when you count the corpses, they are Two hundred and _ten_. Rede
- us this riddle, O Collot? After long guessing, it is called to
- mind that two individuals, here in the Brotteaux ground, did
- attempt to leave the rank, protesting with agony that they were
- not condemned men, that they were Police Commissaries: which two
- we repulsed, and disbelieved, and shot with the rest![706] Such
- is the vengeance of an enraged Republic. Surely this, according
- to Barrère’s phrase, is Justice “under rough forms, _sous des
- formes acerbes_.” But the Republic, as Fouché says, must ‘march
- to Liberty over corpses.’ Or again as Barrère has it: ‘None but
- the dead do not come back, _Il n’y a que les morts qui ne
- reviennent pas_.’ Terror hovers far and wide: “The Guillotine
- goes not ill.”
-
- But before quitting those Southern regions, over which History
- can cast only glances from aloft, she will alight for a moment,
- and look fixedly at one point: the Siege of Toulon. Much
- battering and bombarding, heating of balls in furnaces or
- farm-houses, serving of artillery well and ill, attacking of
- Ollioules Passes, Forts Malbosquet, there has been: as yet to
- small purpose. We have had General Cartaux here, a whilom Painter
- elevated in the troubles of Marseilles; General Doppet, a whilom
- Medical man elevated in the troubles of Piemont, who, under
- Crancé, took Lyons, but cannot take Toulon. Finally we have
- General Dugommier, a pupil of Washington. Convention
- _Représentans_ also we have had; Barrases, Salicettis,
- Robespierres the Younger:—also an Artillery _Chef de brigade_, of
- extreme diligence, who often takes his nap of sleep among the
- guns; a short taciturn, olive-complexioned young man, not unknown
- to us, by name Buonaparte: one of the best Artillery-officers yet
- met with. And still Toulon is not taken. It is the fourth month
- now; December, in slave-style; _Frostarious_ or _Frimaire_, in
- new-style: and still their cursed Red-Blue Flag flies there. They
- are provisioned from the Sea; they have seized all heights,
- felling wood, and fortifying themselves; like the coney, they
- have built their nest in the rocks.
-
- Meanwhile, _Frostarious_ is not yet become _Snowous_ or _Nivose_,
- when a Council of War is called; Instructions have just arrived
- from Government and _Salut Public_. Carnot, in _Salut Public_,
- has sent us a plan of siege: on which plan General Dugommier has
- this criticism to make, Commissioner Salicetti has that; and
- criticisms and plans are very various; when that young Artillery
- Officer ventures to speak; the same whom we saw snatching sleep
- among the guns, who has emerged several times in this
- History,—the name of him Napoleon Buonaparte. It is his humble
- opinion, for he has been gliding about with spy-glasses, with
- thoughts, That a certain Fort l’Eguillette can be clutched, as
- with lion-spring, on the sudden; wherefrom, were it once ours,
- the very heart of Toulon might be battered, the English Lines
- were, so to speak, turned inside out, and Hood and our Natural
- Enemies must next day either put to sea, or be burnt to ashes.
- Commissioners arch their eyebrows, with negatory sniff: who is
- this young gentleman with more wit than we all? Brave veteran
- Dugommier, however, thinks the idea worth a word; questions the
- young gentleman; becomes convinced; and there is for issue, Try
- it.
-
- On the taciturn bronze-countenance, therefore, things being now
- all ready, there sits a grimmer gravity than ever, compressing a
- hotter central-fire than ever. Yonder, thou seest, is Fort
- l’Eguillette; a desperate lion-spring, yet a possible one; this
- day to be tried!—Tried it is; and found _good_. By stratagem and
- valour, stealing through ravines, plunging fiery through the
- fire-tempest, Fort l’Eguillette is clutched at, is carried; the
- smoke having cleared, wiser the Tricolor fly on it: the
- bronze-complexioned young man was right. Next morning, Hood,
- finding the interior of his lines exposed, his defences turned
- inside out, makes for his shipping. Taking such Royalists as
- wished it on board with him, he weighs anchor: on this 19th of
- December 1793, Toulon is once more the Republic’s!
-
- Cannonading has ceased at Toulon; and now the guillotining and
- fusillading may begin. Civil horrors, truly: but at least that
- infamy of an English domination is purged away. Let there be
- Civic Feast universally over France: so reports Barrère, or
- Painter David; and the Convention assist in a body.[707] Nay, it
- is said, these infamous English (with an attention rather to
- their own interests than to ours) set fire to our store-houses,
- arsenals, warships in Toulon Harbour, before weighing; some score
- of brave warships, the only ones we now had! However, it did not
- prosper, though the flame spread far and high; some two ships
- were burnt, not more; the very galley-slaves ran with buckets to
- quench. These same proud Ships, Ships _l’Orient_ and the rest,
- have to carry this same young Man to Egypt first: not yet can
- they be changed to ashes, or to Sea-Nymphs; not yet to
- sky-rockets, O Ship _l’Orient_, nor became the prey of
- England,—before their time!
-
- And so, over France universally, there is Civic Feast and
- high-tide: and Toulon sees fusillading, grape-shotting in mass,
- as Lyons saw; and “death is poured out in great floods, _vomie à
- grands flots_” and Twelve thousand Masons are requisitioned from
- the neighbouring country, to raze Toulon from the face of the
- Earth. For it is to be razed, so reports Barrère; all but the
- National Shipping Establishments; and to be called henceforth not
- Toulon, but _Port of the Mountain_. There in black death-cloud we
- must leave it;—hoping only that Toulon too is built of stone;
- that perhaps even Twelve thousand Masons cannot pull it down,
- till the fit pass.
-
- One begins to be sick of “death vomited in great floods.”
- Nevertheless hearest thou not, O reader (for the sound reaches
- through centuries), in the dead December and January nights, over
- Nantes Town,—confused noises, as of musketry and tumult, as of
- rage and lamentation; mingling with the everlasting moan of the
- Loire waters there? Nantes Town is sunk in sleep; but
- _Représentant_ Carrier is not sleeping, the wool-capped Company
- of Marat is not sleeping. Why unmoors that flatbottomed craft,
- that _gabarre;_ about eleven at night; with Ninety Priests under
- hatches? They are going to Belle Isle? In the middle of the Loire
- stream, on signal given, the gabarre is scuttled; she sinks with
- all her cargo. “Sentence of Deportation,” writes Carrier, “was
- executed _vertically_.” The Ninety Priests, with their
- gabarre-coffin, lie deep! It is the first of the _Noyades_, what
- we may call _Drownages_, of Carrier; which have become famous
- forever.
-
- Guillotining there was at Nantes, till the Headsman sank worn
- out: then fusillading “in the Plain of Saint-Mauve;” little
- children fusilladed, and women with children at the breast;
- children and women, by the hundred and twenty; and by the five
- hundred, so hot is La Vendée: till the very Jacobins grew sick,
- and all but the Company of Marat cried, Hold! Wherefore now we
- have got Noyading; and on the 24th night of _Frostarious_ year 2,
- which is 14th of December 1793, we have a second Noyade:
- consisting of “a Hundred and Thirty-eight persons.”[708]
-
- Or why waste a gabarre, sinking it with them? Fling them out;
- fling them out, with their hands tied: pour a continual hail of
- lead over all the space, till the last struggler of them be sunk!
- Unsound sleepers of Nantes, and the Sea-Villages thereabouts,
- hear the musketry amid the night-winds; wonder what the meaning
- of it is. And women were in that gabarre; whom the Red Nightcaps
- were stripping naked; who begged, in their agony, that their
- smocks might not be stript from them. And young children were
- thrown in, their mothers vainly pleading: ‘Wolflings,’ answered
- the Company of Marat, ‘who would grow to be wolves.’
-
- By degrees, daylight itself witnesses Noyades: women and men are
- tied together, feet and feet, hands and hands: and flung in: this
- they call _Mariage Républicain_, Republican Marriage. Cruel is
- the panther of the woods, the she-bear bereaved of her whelps:
- but there is in man a hatred crueller than that. Dumb, out of
- suffering now, as pale swoln corpses, the victims tumble
- confusedly seaward along the Loire stream; the tide rolling them
- back: clouds of ravens darken the River; wolves prowl on the
- shoal-places: Carrier writes, “_Quel torrent révolutionnaire_,
- What a torrent of Revolution!” For the man is rabid; and the Time
- is rabid. These are the Noyades of Carrier; twenty-five by the
- tale, for what is done in darkness comes to be investigated in
- sunlight:[709] not to be forgotten for centuries,—We will turn to
- another aspect of the Consummation of Sansculottism; leaving this
- as the blackest.
-
- But indeed men are all rabid; as the Time is. Representative
- Lebon, at Arras, dashes his sword into the blood flowing from the
- Guillotine; exclaims, ‘How I like it!’ Mothers, they say, by his
- order, have to stand by while the Guillotine devours their
- children: a band of music is stationed near; and, at the fall of
- every head, strikes up its _ça-ira_.[710] In the Burgh of
- Bedouin, in the Orange region, the Liberty-tree has been cut down
- over night. Representative Maignet, at Orange, hears of it; burns
- Bedouin Burgh to the last dog-hutch; guillotines the inhabitants,
- or drives them into the caves and hills.[711] Republic One and
- Indivisible! She is the newest Birth of Nature’s waste inorganic
- Deep, which men name Orcus, Chaos, primeval Night; and knows one
- law, that of self-preservation. _Tigresse Nationale:_ meddle not
- with a whisker of her! Swift-crushing is her stroke; look what a
- paw she spreads;—pity has not entered her heart.
-
- Prudhomme, the dull-blustering Printer and Able Editor, as yet a
- Jacobin Editor, will become a renegade one, and publish large
- volumes on these matters, _Crimes of the Revolution;_ adding
- innumerable lies withal, as if the truth were not sufficient. We,
- for our part, find it more edifying to know, one good time, that
- this Republic and National Tigress _is_ a New Birth; a Fact of
- Nature among Formulas, in an Age of Formulas; and to look,
- oftenest in silence, how the so genuine Nature-Fact will demean
- itself among these. For the Formulas are partly genuine, partly
- delusive, supposititious: we call them, in the language of
- metaphor, regulated modelled _shapes;_ some of which have bodies
- and life still in them; most of which, according to a German
- Writer, have only emptiness, “glass-eyes glaring on you with a
- ghastly affectation of life, and in their interior unclean
- accumulation of beetles and spiders!” But the Fact, let all men
- observe, is a genuine and sincere one; the sincerest of Facts:
- terrible in its sincerity, as very Death. Whatsoever is equally
- sincere may front it, and beard it; but whatsoever is _not?_—
-
-
- Chapter 3.5.IV.
- Carmagnole complete.
-
- Simultaneously with this Tophet-black aspect, there unfolds
- itself another aspect, which one may call a Tophet-red aspect:
- the Destruction of the Catholic Religion; and indeed, for the
- time being of Religion itself. We saw Romme’s New Calendar
- establish its _Tenth_ Day of Rest; and asked, what would become
- of the Christian Sabbath? The Calendar is hardly a month old,
- till all this is set at rest. Very singular, as Mercier observes:
- last _Corpus-Christi_ Day 1792, the whole world, and Sovereign
- Authority itself, walked in religious gala, with a quite devout
- air;—Butcher Legendre, supposed to be irreverent, was like to be
- massacred in his Gig, as the thing went by. A Gallican Hierarchy,
- and Church, and Church Formulas seemed to flourish, a little
- brown-leaved or so, but not browner than of late years or
- decades; to flourish, far and wide, in the sympathies of an
- unsophisticated People; defying Philosophism, Legislature and the
- Encyclopédie. Far and wide, alas, like a brown-leaved
- Vallombrosa; which waits but one whirlblast of the November wind,
- and in an hour stands bare! Since that _Corpus-Christi_ Day,
- Brunswick has come, and the Emigrants, and La Vendée, and
- eighteen months of Time: to all flourishing, especially to
- brown-leaved flourishing, there comes, were it never so slowly,
- an end.
-
- On the 7th of November, a certain Citoyen Parens, Curate of
- Boissise-le-Bertrand, writes to the Convention that he has all
- his life been preaching a lie, and is grown weary of doing it;
- wherefore he will now lay down his Curacy and stipend, and begs
- that an august Convention would give him something else to live
- upon. “_Mention honorable_,” shall we give him? Or “reference to
- Committee of Finances?” Hardly is this got decided, when goose
- Gobel, Constitutional Bishop of Paris, with his Chapter, with
- Municipal and Departmental escort in red nightcaps, makes his
- appearance, to do as Parens has done. Goose Gobel will now
- acknowledge “no Religion but Liberty;” therefore he doffs his
- Priest-gear, and receives the Fraternal embrace. To the joy of
- Departmental Momoro, of Municipal Chaumettes and Héberts, of
- Vincent and the Revolutionary Army! Chaumette asks, Ought there
- not, in these circumstances, to be among our intercalary Days
- Sans-breeches, a Feast of Reason?[712] Proper surely! Let Atheist
- Maréchal, Lalande, and little Atheist Naigeon rejoice; let
- Clootz, Speaker of Mankind, present to the Convention his
- _Evidences of the Mahometan Religion_, “a work evincing the
- nullity of all Religions,”—with thanks. There shall be Universal
- Republic now, thinks Clootz; and “one God only, _Le Peuple_.”
-
- The French Nation is of gregarious imitative nature; it needed
- but a fugle-motion in this matter; and goose Gobel, driven by
- Municipality and force of circumstances, has given one. What Curé
- will be behind him of Boissise; what Bishop behind him of Paris?
- Bishop Grégoire, indeed, courageously declines; to the sound of
- ‘We force no one; let Grégoire consult his conscience;’ but
- Protestant and Romish by the hundred volunteer and assent. From
- far and near, all through November into December, till the work
- is accomplished, come Letters of renegation, come Curates who are
- “learning to be Carpenters,” Curates with their new-wedded Nuns:
- has not the Day of Reason dawned, very swiftly, and become noon?
- From sequestered Townships comes Addresses, stating plainly,
- though in Patois dialect, That “they will have no more to do with
- the black animal called Curay, _animal noir, appellé
- Curay_.”[713]
-
- Above all things there come Patriotic Gifts, of Church-furniture.
- The remnant of bells, except for tocsin, descend from their
- belfries, into the National meltingpot, to make cannon. Censers
- and all sacred vessels are beaten broad; of silver, they are fit
- for the poverty-stricken Mint; of pewter, let them become bullets
- to shoot the “enemies of _du genre humain_.” Dalmatics of plush
- make breeches for him who has none; linen stoles will clip into
- shirts for the Defenders of the Country: old-clothesmen, Jew or
- Heathen, drive the briskest trade. Chalier’s Ass Procession, at
- Lyons, was but a type of what went on, in those same days, in all
- Towns. In all Towns and Townships as quick as the guillotine may
- go, so quick goes the axe and the wrench: sacristies, lutrins,
- altar-rails are pulled down; the Mass Books torn into cartridge
- papers: men dance the Carmagnole all night about the bonfire. All
- highways jingle with metallic Priest-tackle, beaten broad; sent
- to the Convention, to the poverty-stricken Mint. Good Sainte
- Geneviève’s _Chasse_ is let down: alas, to be burst open, this
- time, and burnt on the Place de Grève. Saint Louis’s shirt is
- burnt;—might not a Defender of the Country have had it? At
- Saint-Denis Town, no longer Saint-Denis but _Franciade_,
- Patriotism has been down among the Tombs, rummaging; the
- Revolutionary Army has taken spoil. This, accordingly, is what
- the streets of Paris saw:
-
- “Most of these persons were still drunk, with the brandy they had
- swallowed out of chalices;—eating mackerel on the patenas!
- Mounted on Asses, which were housed with Priests’ cloaks, they
- reined them with Priests’ stoles: they held clutched with the
- same hand communion-cup and sacred wafer. They stopped at the
- doors of Dramshops; held out ciboriums: and the landlord, stoop
- in hand, had to fill them thrice. Next came Mules high-laden with
- crosses, chandeliers, censers, holy-water vessels,
- hyssops;—recalling to mind the Priests of Cybele, whose panniers,
- filled with the instruments of their worship, served at once as
- storehouse, sacristy and temple. In such equipage did these
- profaners advance towards the Convention. They enter there, in an
- immense train, ranged in two rows; all masked like mummers in
- fantastic sacerdotal vestments; bearing on hand-barrows their
- heaped plunder,—ciboriums, suns, candelabras, plates of gold and
- silver.”[714]
-
- The Address we do not give; for indeed it was in strophes, sung
- _vivâ voce_, with all the parts;—Danton glooming considerably, in
- his place; and demanding that there be prose and decency in
- future.[715] Nevertheless the captors of such _spolia opima_
- crave, not untouched with liquor, permission to dance the
- Carmagnole also on the spot: whereto an exhilarated Convention
- cannot but accede. Nay, “several Members,” continues the
- exaggerative Mercier, who was not there to witness, being in
- Limbo now, as one of Duperret’s _Seventy-three_, “several
- Members, quitting their curule chairs, took the hand of girls
- flaunting in Priest’s vestures, and danced the Carmagnole along
- with them.” Such Old-Hallow-tide have they, in this year, once
- named of Grace, 1793.
-
- Out of which strange fall of Formulas, tumbling there in confused
- welter, betrampled by the Patriotic dance, is it not passing
- strange to see a _new_ Formula arise? For the human tongue is not
- adequate to speak what “triviality run distracted” there is in
- human nature. Black Mumbo-Jumbo of the woods, and most Indian
- Wau-waus, one can understand: but this of Procureur _Anaxagoras_
- whilom John-Peter Chaumette? We will say only: Man is a born
- idol-worshipper, _sight_-worshipper, so sensuous-imaginative is
- he; and also partakes much of the nature of the ape.
-
- For the same day, while this brave Carmagnole dance has hardly
- jigged itself out, there arrive Procureur Chaumette and
- Municipals and Departmentals, and with them the strangest
- freightage: a New Religion! Demoiselle Candeille, of the Opera; a
- woman fair to look upon, when well rouged: she, borne on
- palanquin shoulder-high; with red woolen nightcap; in azure
- mantle; garlanded with oak; holding in her hand the Pike of the
- Jupiter-_Peuple_, sails in; heralded by white young women girt in
- tricolor. Let the world consider it! This, O National Convention
- wonder of the universe, is our New Divinity; _Goddess of Reason_,
- worthy, and alone worthy of revering. Nay, were it too much to
- ask of an august National Representation that it also went with
- us to the _ci-devant_ Cathedral called of Notre-Dame, and
- executed a few strophes in worship of her?
-
- President and Secretaries give Goddess Candeille, borne at due
- height round their platform, successively the fraternal kiss;
- whereupon she, by decree, sails to the right-hand of the
- President and there alights. And now, after due pause and
- flourishes of oratory, the Convention, gathering its limbs, does
- get under way in the required procession towards
- Notre-Dame;—Reason, again in her litter, sitting in the van of
- them, borne, as one judges, by men in the Roman costume; escorted
- by wind-music, red nightcaps, and the madness of the world. And
- so straightway, Reason taking seat on the high-altar of
- Notre-Dame, the requisite worship or quasi-worship is, say the
- Newspapers, _executed;_ National Convention chanting “the _Hymn
- to Liberty_, words by Chénier, music by Gossec.” It is the first
- of the _Feasts of Reason;_ first communion-service of the New
- Religion of Chaumette.
-
- “The corresponding Festival in the Church of Saint-Eustache,”
- says Mercier, “offered the spectacle of a great tavern. The
- interior of the choir represented a landscape decorated with
- cottages and boskets of trees. Round the choir stood tables
- over-loaded with bottles, with sausages, pork-puddings, pastries
- and other meats. The guests flowed in and out through all doors:
- whosoever presented himself took part of the good things:
- children of eight, girls as well as boys, put hand to plate, in
- sign of Liberty; they drank also of the bottles, and their prompt
- intoxication created laughter. Reason sat in azure mantle aloft,
- in a serene manner; Cannoneers, pipe in mouth, serving her as
- acolytes. And out of doors,” continues the exaggerative man,
- “were mad multitudes dancing round the bonfire of
- Chapel-balustrades, of Priests’ and Canons’ stalls; and the
- dancers, I exaggerate nothing, the dancers nigh bare of breeches,
- neck and breast naked, stockings down, went whirling and
- spinning, like those Dust-vortexes, forerunners of Tempest and
- Destruction.”[716] At Saint-Gervais Church again there was a
- terrible “smell of herrings;” Section or Municipality having
- provided no food, no condiment, but left it to chance. Other
- mysteries, seemingly of a Cabiric or even Paphian character, we
- heave under the Veil, which appropriately stretches itself “along
- the pillars of the aisles,”—not to be lifted aside by the hand of
- History.
-
- But there is one thing we should like almost better to understand
- than any other: what Reason herself thought of it, all the while.
- What articulate words poor Mrs. Momoro, for example, uttered;
- when she had become ungoddessed again, and the Bibliopolist and
- she sat quiet at home, at supper? For he was an earnest man,
- Bookseller Momoro; and had notions of Agrarian Law. Mrs. Momoro,
- it is admitted, made one of the best Goddesses of Reason; though
- her teeth were a little defective. And now if the reader will
- represent to himself that such visible Adoration of Reason went
- on “all over the Republic,” through these November and December
- weeks, till the Church woodwork was burnt out, and the business
- otherwise completed, he will feel sufficiently what an adoring
- Republic it was, and without reluctance quit this part of the
- subject.
-
- Such gifts of Church-spoil are chiefly the work of the _Armée
- Révolutionnaire;_ raised, as we said, some time ago. It is an
- Army with portable guillotine: commanded by Playwright Ronsin in
- terrible moustachioes; and even by some uncertain shadow of Usher
- Maillard, the old Bastille Hero, Leader of the Menads, September
- Man in Grey! Clerk Vincent of the War-Office, one of Pache’s old
- Clerks, “with a head heated by the ancient orators,” had a main
- hand in the appointments, at least in the staff-appointments.
-
- But of the marchings and retreatings of these Six Thousand no
- Xenophon exists. Nothing, but an inarticulate hum, of cursing and
- sooty frenzy, surviving dubious in the memory of ages! They scour
- the country round Paris; seeking Prisoners; raising Requisitions;
- seeing that Edicts are executed, that the Farmers have thrashed
- sufficiently; lowering Church-bells or metallic Virgins.
- Detachments shoot forth dim, towards remote parts of France; nay
- new Provincial Revolutionary Armies rise dim, here and there, as
- Carrier’s Company of Marat, as Tallien’s Bourdeaux Troop; like
- sympathetic clouds in an atmosphere all electric. Ronsin, they
- say, admitted, in candid moments, that his troops were the elixir
- of the Rascality of the Earth. One sees them drawn up in
- market-places; travel-plashed, rough-bearded, in _carmagnole
- complète:_ the first exploit is to prostrate what Royal or
- Ecclesiastical monument, crucifix or the like, there may be; to
- plant a cannon at the steeple, fetch down the bell without
- climbing for it, bell and belfry together. This, however, it is
- said, depends somewhat on the size of the town: if the town
- contains much population, and these perhaps of a dubious choleric
- aspect, the Revolutionary Army will do its work gently, by ladder
- and wrench; nay perhaps will take its billet without work at all;
- and, refreshing itself with a little liquor and sleep, pass on to
- the next stage.[717] Pipe in cheek, sabre on thigh; in carmagnole
- complete!
-
- Such things have been; and may again be. Charles Second sent out
- his Highland Host over the Western Scotch Whigs; Jamaica Planters
- got Dogs from the Spanish Main to hunt their Maroons with: France
- too is bescoured with a Devil’s Pack, the baying of which, at
- this distance of half a century, still sounds in the mind’s ear.
-
-
- Chapter 3.5.V.
- Like a Thunder-Cloud.
-
- But the grand, and indeed substantially primary and generic
- aspect of the Consummation of Terror remains still to be looked
- at; nay blinkard History has for most part all but _over_looked
- this aspect, the soul of the whole: that which makes it terrible
- to the Enemies of France. Let Despotism and Cimmerian Coalitions
- consider. All French men and French things are in a State of
- Requisition; Fourteen Armies are got on foot; Patriotism, with
- all that it has of faculty in heart or in head, in soul or body
- or breeches-pocket, is rushing to the frontiers, to prevail or
- die! Busy sits Carnot, in _Salut Public;_ busy for his share, in
- “organising victory.” Not swifter pulses that Guillotine, in
- dread systole-diastole in the Place de la Révolution, than smites
- the Sword of Patriotism, smiting Cimmeria back to its own
- borders, from the sacred soil.
-
- In fact the Government is what we can call Revolutionary; and
- some men are “_à la hauteur_,” on a level with the circumstances;
- and others are not _à la hauteur_,—so much the worse for them.
- But the Anarchy, we may say, has _organised_ itself: Society is
- literally overset; its old forces working with mad activity, but
- in the inverse order; destructive and self-destructive.
-
- Curious to see how all still refers itself to some head and
- fountain; not even an Anarchy but must have a centre to revolve
- round. It is now some six months since the Committee of _Salut
- Public_ came into existence: some three months since Danton
- proposed that all power should be given it and “a sum of fifty
- millions,” and the “Government be declared Revolutionary.” He
- himself, since that day, would take no hand in it, though again
- and again solicited; but sits private in his place on the
- Mountain. Since that day, the Nine, or if they should even rise
- to Twelve have become permanent, always re-elected when their
- term runs out; _Salut Public, Sûreté Générale_ have assumed their
- ulterior form and mode of operating.
-
- Committee of Public Salvation, as supreme; of General Surety, as
- subaltern: these like a Lesser and Greater Council, most
- harmonious hitherto, have become the centre of all things. They
- ride this Whirlwind; they, raised by force of circumstances,
- insensibly, very strangely, thither to that dread height;—and
- guide it, and seem to guide it. Stranger set of Cloud-Compellers
- the Earth never saw. A Robespierre, a Billaud, a Collot, Couthon,
- Saint-Just; not to mention still meaner Amars, Vadiers, in
- _Sûreté Générale:_ these are your Cloud-Compellers. Small
- intellectual talent is necessary: indeed where among them, except
- in the head of Carnot, busied organising victory, would you find
- any? The talent is one of instinct rather. It is that of divining
- aright what this great dumb Whirlwind wishes and wills; that of
- willing, with more frenzy than any one, what all the world wills.
- To stand at no obstacles; to heed no considerations human or
- divine; to know well that, of divine or human, there is one thing
- needful, Triumph of the Republic, Destruction of the Enemies of
- the Republic! With this one spiritual endowment, and so few
- others, it is strange to see how a dumb inarticulately storming
- Whirlwind of things puts, as it were, its reins into your hand,
- and invites and compels you to be leader of it.
-
- Hard by, sits a Municipality of Paris; all in red nightcaps since
- the fourth of November last: a set of men fully “on a level with
- circumstances,” or even beyond it. Sleek Mayor Pache, studious to
- be safe in the middle; Chaumettes, Héberts, Varlets, and Henriot
- their great Commandant; not to speak of Vincent the War-clerk, of
- Momoros, Dobsents, and such like: all intent to have Churches
- plundered, to have Reason adored, Suspects cut down, and the
- Revolution triumph. Perhaps carrying the matter _too_ far? Danton
- was heard to grumble at the civic strophes; and to recommend
- prose and decency. Robespierre also grumbles that in overturning
- Superstition we did not mean to make a religion of Atheism. In
- fact, your Chaumette and Company constitute a kind of
- Hyper-Jacobinism, or rabid “Faction _des Enragés;_” which has
- given orthodox Patriotism some umbrage, of late months. To “know
- a Suspect on the streets:” what is this but bringing the _Law of
- the Suspect_ itself into ill odour? Men half-frantic, men zealous
- overmuch,—they toil there, in their red nightcaps, restlessly,
- rapidly, accomplishing what of Life is allotted them.
-
- And the Forty-four Thousand other Townships, each with
- revolutionary Committee, based on Jacobin Daughter Society;
- enlightened by the spirit of Jacobinism; quickened by the Forty
- Sous a-day!—The French Constitution spurned always at any thing
- like Two Chambers; and yet behold, has it not verily got Two
- Chambers? National Convention, elected for one; Mother of
- Patriotism, self-elected, for another! Mother of Patriotism has
- her Debates reported in the _Moniteur_, as important
- state-procedures; which indisputably they are. A Second Chamber
- of Legislature we call this Mother Society;—if perhaps it were
- not rather comparable to that old Scotch Body named _Lords of the
- Articles_, without whose origination, and signal given, the
- so-called Parliament could introduce no bill, could do no work?
- Robespierre himself, whose words are a law, opens his
- incorruptible lips copiously in the Jacobins Hall. Smaller
- Council of _Salut Public_, Greater Council of _Sûreté Générale_,
- all active Parties, come here to plead; to shape beforehand what
- decision they must arrive at, what destiny they have to expect.
- Now if a question arose, Which of those Two Chambers, Convention,
- or Lords of the Articles, was the _stronger?_ Happily they as yet
- go hand in hand.
-
- As for the National Convention, truly it has become a most
- composed Body. Quenched now the old effervescence; the
- Seventy-three locked in ward; once noisy Friends of the Girondins
- sunk all into silent men of the Plain, called even “Frogs of the
- Marsh,” _Crapauds du Marais!_ Addresses come, Revolutionary
- Church-plunder comes; Deputations, with prose, or strophes: these
- the Convention receives. But beyond this, the Convention has one
- thing mainly to do: to listen what _Salut Public_ proposes, and
- say, Yea.
-
- Bazire followed by Chabot, with some impetuosity, declared, one
- morning, that this was not the way of a Free Assembly. ‘There
- ought to be an Opposition side, a _Côté Droit_,’ cried Chabot;
- ‘if none else will form it, I will: people say to me, You will
- all get guillotined in your turn, first you and Bazire, then
- Danton, then Robespierre himself.’[718] So spake the Disfrocked,
- with a loud voice: next week, Bazire and he lie in the Abbaye;
- wending, one may fear, towards Tinville and the Axe; and “people
- say to me”—what seems to be proving true! Bazire’s blood was all
- inflamed with Revolution fever; with coffee and spasmodic
- dreams.[719] Chabot, again, how happy with his rich Jew-Austrian
- wife, late Fraulein Frey! But he lies in Prison; and his two
- Jew-Austrian Brothers-in-Law, the Bankers Frey, lie with him;
- waiting the urn of doom. Let a National Convention, therefore,
- take warning, and know its function. Let the Convention, all as
- one man, set its shoulder to the work; not with bursts of
- Parliamentary eloquence, but in quite other and serviceable ways!
-
- Convention Commissioners, what we ought to call Representatives,
- “_Représentans_ on mission,” fly, like the Herald Mercury, to all
- points of the Territory; carrying your behests far and wide. In
- their “round hat plumed with tricolor feathers, girt with flowing
- tricolor taffeta; in close frock, tricolor sash, sword and
- jack-boots,” these men are powerfuller than King or Kaiser. They
- say to whomso they meet, Do; and he must do it: all men’s goods
- are at their disposal; for France is as one huge City in Siege.
- They smite with Requisitions, and Forced-loan; they have the
- power of life and death. Saint-Just and Lebas order the rich
- classes of Strasburg to “strip off their shoes,” and send them to
- the Armies where as many as “ten thousand pairs” are needed.
- Also, that within four and twenty hours, “a thousand beds” are to
- be got ready;[720] wrapt in matting, and sent under way. For the
- time presses!—Like swift bolts, issuing from the fuliginous
- Olympus of _Salut Public_ rush these men, oftenest in pairs;
- scatter your thunder-orders over France; make France one enormous
- Revolutionary thunder-cloud.
-
-
- Chapter 3.5.VI.
- Do thy Duty.
-
- Accordingly alongside of these bonfires of Church balustrades,
- and sounds of fusillading and noyading, there rise quite another
- sort of fires and sounds: Smithy-fires and Proof-volleys for the
- manufacture of arms.
-
- Cut off from Sweden and the world, the Republic must learn to
- make steel for itself; and, by aid of Chemists, she has learnt
- it. Towns that knew only iron, now know steel: from their new
- dungeons at Chantilly, Aristocrats may hear the rustle of our new
- steel furnace there. Do not bells transmute themselves into
- cannon; iron stancheons into the white-weapon (_arme blanche_),
- by sword-cutlery? The wheels of Langres scream, amid their
- sputtering fire halo; grinding mere swords. The stithies of
- Charleville ring with gun-making. What say we, Charleville? Two
- hundred and fifty-eight Forges stand in the open spaces of Paris
- itself; a hundred and forty of them in the Esplanade of the
- Invalides, fifty-four in the Luxembourg Garden: so many Forges
- stand; grim Smiths beating and forging at lock and barrel there.
- The Clockmakers have come, requisitioned, to do the touch-holes,
- the hard-solder and filework. Five great Barges swing at anchor
- on the Seine Stream, loud with boring; the great press-drills
- grating harsh thunder to the general ear and heart. And deft
- Stock-makers do gouge and rasp; and all men bestir themselves,
- according to their cunning:—in the language of hope, it is
- reckoned that a “thousand finished muskets can be delivered
- daily.”[721] Chemists of the Republic have taught us miracles of
- swift tanning;[722] the cordwainer bores and stitches;—_not_ of
- “wood and pasteboard,” or he shall answer it to Tinville! The
- women sew tents and coats, the children scrape surgeon’s-lint,
- the old men sit in the market-places; able men are on march; all
- men in requisition: from Town to Town flutters, on the Heaven’s
- winds, this Banner, THE FRENCH PEOPLE RISEN AGAINST TYRANTS.
-
- All which is well. But now arises the question: What is to be
- done for saltpetre? Interrupted Commerce and the English Navy
- shut us out from saltpetre; and without saltpetre there is no
- gunpowder. Republican Science again sits meditative; discovers
- that saltpetre exists here and there, though in attenuated
- quantity: that old plaster of walls holds a sprinkling of
- it;—that the earth of the Paris Cellars holds a sprinkling of it,
- diffused through the common rubbish; that were these dug up and
- washed, saltpetre might be had. Whereupon swiftly, see! the
- Citoyens, with upshoved _bonnet rouge_, or with doffed bonnet,
- and hair toil-wetted; digging fiercely, each in his own cellar,
- for saltpetre. The Earth-heap rises at every door; the Citoyennes
- with hod and bucket carrying it up; the Citoyens, pith in every
- muscle, shovelling and digging: for life and saltpetre. Dig my
- _braves;_ and right well speed ye. What of saltpetre is essential
- the Republic shall not want.
-
- Consummation of Sansculottism has many aspects and tints: but the
- brightest tint, really of a solar or stellar brightness, is this
- which the Armies give it. That same fervour of Jacobinism which
- internally fills France with hatred, suspicions, scaffolds and
- Reason-worship, does, on the Frontiers, shew itself as a glorious
- _Pro patria mori_. Ever since Dumouriez’s defection, three
- Convention Representatives attend every General. Committee of
- _Salut_ has sent them, often with this Laconic order only: ‘Do
- thy duty, _Fais ton devoir_.’ It is strange, under what
- impediments the fire of Jacobinism, like other such fires, will
- burn. These Soldiers have shoes of wood and pasteboard, or go
- booted in hayropes, in dead of winter; they skewer a bass mat
- round their shoulders, and are destitute of most things. What
- then? It is for Rights of Frenchhood, of Manhood, that they
- fight: the unquenchable spirit, here as elsewhere, works
- miracles. ‘With steel and bread,’ says the Convention
- Representative, ‘one may get to China.’ The Generals go fast to
- the guillotine; justly and unjustly. From which what inference?
- This among others: That ill-success is death; that in victory
- alone is life! To conquer or die is no theatrical palabra, in
- these circumstances: but a practical truth and necessity. All
- Girondism, Halfness, Compromise is swept away. Forward, ye
- Soldiers of the Republic, captain and man! Dash with your Gaelic
- impetuosity, on Austria, England, Prussia, Spain, Sardinia; Pitt,
- Cobourg, York, and the Devil and the World! Behind us is but the
- Guillotine; before us is Victory, Apotheosis and Millennium
- without end!
-
- See accordingly, on all Frontiers, how the Sons of Night,
- astonished after short triumph, do recoil;—the Sons of the
- Republic flying at them, with wild _Ça-ira_ or Marseillese _Aux
- armes_, with the temper of cat-o’-mountain, or demon incarnate;
- which no Son of Night can stand! Spain, which came bursting
- through the Pyrenees, rustling with Bourbon banners, and went
- conquering here and there for a season, falters at such
- cat-o’-mountain welcome; draws itself in again; too happy now
- were the Pyrenees impassable. Not only does Dugommier, conqueror
- of Toulon, drive Spain back; he invades Spain. General Dugommier
- invades it by the Eastern Pyrenees; General Muller shall invade
- it by the Western. _Shall_, that is the word: Committee of _Salut
- Public_ has said it; Representative Cavaignac, on mission there,
- must see it done. Impossible! cries Muller,—Infallible! answers
- Cavaignac. Difficulty, impossibility, is to no purpose. ‘The
- Committee is deaf on that side of its head,’ answers Cavaignac,
- ‘_n’entend pas de cette oreille là_. How many wantest thou, of
- men, of horses, cannons? Thou shalt have them. Conquerors,
- conquered or hanged, forward we must.’[723] Which things also,
- even as the Representative spake them, were _done_. The Spring of
- the new Year sees Spain invaded: and redoubts are carried, and
- Passes and Heights of the most scarped description; Spanish
- Field-officerism struck mute at such cat-o’-mountain spirit, the
- cannon forgetting to fire.[724] Swept are the Pyrenees; Town
- after Town flies up, burst by terror or the petard. In the course
- of another year, Spain will crave Peace; acknowledge its sins and
- the Republic; nay, in Madrid, there will be joy as for a victory,
- that even Peace is got.
-
- Few things, we repeat, can be notabler than these Convention
- Representatives, with their power more than kingly. Nay at bottom
- are they not Kings, _Able-men_, of a sort; chosen from the Seven
- Hundred and Forty-nine French Kings; with this order, Do thy
- duty? Representative Levasseur, of small stature, by trade a mere
- pacific Surgeon-Accoucheur, has mutinies to quell; mad hosts (mad
- at the Doom of Custine) bellowing far and wide; he alone amid
- them, the one small Representative,—small, but as hard as flint,
- which also carries _fire_ in it! So too, at Hondschooten, far in
- the afternoon, he declares that the battle is not lost; that it
- must be gained; and fights, himself, with his own obstetric
- hand;—horse shot under him, or say on foot, “up to the haunches
- in tide-water;” cutting stoccado and passado there, in defiance
- of Water, Earth, Air and Fire, the choleric little Representative
- that he was! Whereby, as natural, Royal Highness of York had to
- withdraw,—occasionally at full gallop; like to be swallowed by
- the tide: and his Siege of Dunkirk became a dream, realising only
- much loss of beautiful siege-artillery and of brave lives.[725]
-
- General Houchard, it would appear, stood behind a hedge, on this
- Hondschooten occasion; wherefore they have since guillotined him.
- A new General Jourdan, late Serjeant Jourdan, commands in his
- stead: he, in long-winded Battles of Watigny, “murderous
- artillery-fire mingling itself with sound of Revolutionary
- battle-hymns,” forces Austria behind the Sambre again; has hopes
- of purging the soil of Liberty. With hard wrestling, with
- artillerying and _ça-ira_-ing, it shall be done. In the course of
- a new Summer, Valenciennes will see itself beleaguered; Condé
- beleaguered; whatsoever is yet in the hands of Austria
- beleaguered and bombarded: nay, by Convention Decree, we even
- summon them _all_ “either to surrender in twenty-four hours, or
- else be put to the sword;”—a high saying, which, though it
- remains unfulfilled, may shew what spirit one is of.
-
- Representative Drouet, as an Old-Dragoon, could fight by a kind
- of second nature; but he was unlucky. Him, in a night-foray at
- Maubeuge, the Austrians took alive, in October last. They stript
- him almost naked, he says; making a shew of him, as King-taker of
- Varennes. They flung him into carts; sent him far into the
- interior of Cimmeria, to “a Fortress called Spitzberg” on the
- Danube River; and left him there, at an elevation of perhaps a
- hundred and fifty feet, to his own bitter reflections.
- Reflections; and also devices! For the indomitable Old-dragoon
- constructs wing-machinery, of Paperkite; saws window-bars:
- determines to fly down. He will seize a boat, will follow the
- River’s course: land somewhere in Crim Tartary, in the Black Sea
- or Constantinople region: _à la_ Sindbad! Authentic History,
- accordingly, looking far into Cimmeria, discerns dimly a
- phenomenon. In the dead night-watches, the Spitzberg sentry is
- near fainting with terror: Is it a huge vague Portent descending
- through the night air? It is a huge National Representative
- Old-dragoon, descending by Paperkite; too rapidly, alas! For
- Drouet had taken with him “a small provision-store, twenty pounds
- weight or thereby;” which proved accelerative: so he fell,
- fracturing his leg; and lay there, moaning, till day dawned, till
- you could discern clearly that he was not a Portent but a
- Representative![726]
-
- Or see Saint-Just, in the Lines of Weissembourg, though
- physically of a timid apprehensive nature, how he charges with
- his “Alsatian Peasants armed hastily” for the nonce; the solemn
- face of him blazing into flame; his black hair and tricolor
- hat-taffeta flowing in the breeze; These our Lines of
- Weissembourg were indeed forced, and Prussia and the Emigrants
- rolled through: but we _re_-force the Lines of Weissembourg; and
- Prussia and the Emigrants roll back again still faster,—hurled
- with bayonet charges and fiery _ça-ira_-ing.
-
- _Ci-devant_ Sergeant Pichegru, _ci-devant_ Sergeant Hoche, risen
- now to be Generals, have done wonders here. Tall Pichegru was
- meant for the Church; was Teacher of Mathematics once, in Brienne
- School,—his remarkablest Pupil there was the Boy Napoleon
- Buonaparte. He then, not in the sweetest humour, enlisted
- exchanging ferula for musket; and had got the length of the
- halberd, beyond which nothing could be hoped; when the Bastille
- barriers falling made passage for him, and he is here. Hoche bore
- a hand at the literal overturn of the Bastille; he was, as we
- saw, a Serjeant of the _Gardes Françaises_, spending his pay in
- rushlights and cheap editions of books. How the Mountains are
- burst, and many an Enceladus is disemprisoned: and Captains
- founding on Four parchments of Nobility, are blown with their
- parchments across the Rhine, into Lunar Limbo!
-
- What high feats of arms, therefore, were done in these Fourteen
- Armies; and how, for love of Liberty and hope of Promotion,
- low-born valour cut its desperate way to Generalship; and, from
- the central Carnot in _Salut Public_ to the outmost drummer on
- the Frontiers, men strove for their Republic, let readers fancy.
- The snows of Winter, the flowers of Summer continue to be stained
- with warlike blood. Gaelic impetuosity mounts ever higher with
- victory; spirit of Jacobinism weds itself to national vanity: the
- Soldiers of the Republic are becoming, as we prophesied, very
- Sons of Fire. Barefooted, barebacked: but with bread and iron you
- can get to China! It is one Nation against the whole world; but
- the Nation has that within her which the whole world will not
- conquer. Cimmeria, astonished, recoils faster or slower; all
- round the Republic there rises fiery, as it were, a magic ring of
- musket-volleying and _ça-ira_-ing. Majesty of Prussia, as Majesty
- of Spain, will by and by acknowledge his sins and the Republic:
- and make a Peace of Bâle.
-
- Foreign Commerce, Colonies, Factories in the East and in the
- West, are fallen or falling into the hands of sea-ruling Pitt,
- enemy of human nature. Nevertheless what sound is this that we
- hear, on the first of June, 1794; sound of as war-thunder borne
- from the Ocean too; of tone most piercing? War-thunder from off
- the Brest waters: Villaret-Joyeuse and English Howe, after long
- manœuvring have ranked themselves there; and are belching fire.
- The enemies of human nature are on their own element; cannot be
- conquered; cannot be kept from conquering. Twelve hours of raging
- cannonade; sun now sinking westward through the battle-smoke: six
- French Ships taken, the Battle lost; what Ship soever can still
- sail, making off! But how is it, then, with that _Vengeur_ Ship,
- she neither strikes nor makes off? She is lamed, she cannot make
- off; strike she will not. Fire rakes her fore and aft, from
- victorious enemies; the _Vengeur_ is sinking. Strong are ye,
- Tyrants of the Sea; yet we also, are we weak? Lo! all flags,
- streamers, jacks, every rag of tricolor that will yet run on
- rope, fly rustling aloft: the whole crew crowds to the upper
- deck; and, with universal soul-maddening yell, shouts _Vive la
- République_,—sinking, sinking. She staggers, she lurches, her
- last drunk whirl; Ocean yawns abysmal: down rushes the _Vengeur_,
- carrying _Vive la République_ along with her, unconquerable, into
- Eternity![727] Let foreign Despots think of that. There is an
- Unconquerable in man, when he stands on his Rights of Man: let
- Despots and Slaves and all people know this, and only them that
- stand on the Wrongs of Man tremble to know it.—So has History
- written, nothing doubting, of the sunk _Vengeur_.
-
- —Reader! Mendez Pinto, Münchausen, Cagliostro, Psalmanazar have
- been great; but they are not the greatest. O Barrère, Barrère,
- Anacreon of the Guillotine! must inquisitive pictorial History,
- in a new edition, ask again, “How _is_ it with the _Vengeur_,” in
- this its glorious suicidal sinking; and, with resentful brush,
- dash a bend-sinister of contumelious lamp-black through thee and
- it? Alas, alas! The _Vengeur_, after fighting bravely, did sink
- altogether as other ships do, her captain and above two-hundred
- of her crew escaping gladly in British boats; and this same
- enormous inspiring Feat, and rumour “of sound most piercing,”
- turns out to be an enormous inspiring Non-entity, extant nowhere
- save, as falsehood, in the brain of Barrère! Actually so.[728]
- Founded, like the World itself, on _Nothing;_ proved by
- Convention Report, by solemn Convention Decree and Decrees, and
- wooden “_Model of the Vengeur;_” believed, bewept, besung by the
- whole French People to this hour, it may be regarded as Barrère’s
- masterpiece; the largest, most inspiring piece of _blague_
- manufactured, for some centuries, by any man or nation. As such,
- and not otherwise, be it henceforth memorable.
-
-
- Chapter 3.5.VII.
- Flame-Picture.
-
- In this manner, mad-blazing with flame of all imaginable tints,
- from the red of Tophet to the stellar-bright, blazes off this
- Consummation of Sansculottism.
-
- But the hundredth part of the things that were done, and the
- thousandth part of the things that were projected and decreed to
- be done, would tire the tongue of History. Statue of the _Peuple
- Souverain_, high as Strasburg Steeple; which shall fling its
- shadow from the Pont Neuf over Jardin National and Convention
- Hall;—enormous, in Painter David’s head! With other the like
- enormous Statues not a few: realised in paper Decree. For,
- indeed, the Statue of Liberty herself is still but Plaster in the
- Place de la Révolution! Then Equalisation of Weights and
- Measures, with decimal division; Institutions, of Music and of
- much else; Institute in general; School of Arts, School of Mars,
- _Elèves de la Patrie_, Normal Schools: amid such Gun-boring,
- Altar-burning, Saltpetre-digging, and miraculous improvements in
- Tannery!
-
- What, for example, is this that Engineer Chappe is doing, in the
- Park of Vincennes? In the Park of Vincennes; and onwards, they
- say, in the Park of Lepelletier Saint-Fargeau the assassinated
- Deputy; and still onwards to the Heights of Ecouen and further,
- he has scaffolding set up, has posts driven in; wooden arms with
- elbow joints are jerking and fugling in the air, in the most
- rapid mysterious manner! Citoyens ran up suspicious. Yes, O
- Citoyens, we are signaling: it is a device this, worthy of the
- Republic; a thing for what we will call _Far-writing_ without the
- aid of postbags; in Greek, it shall be named
- Telegraph.—_Télégraphe sacré!_ answers Citoyenism: For writing to
- Traitors, to Austria?—and tears it down. Chappe had to escape,
- and get a new Legislative Decree. Nevertheless he has
- accomplished it, the indefatigable Chappe: this his _Far-writer_,
- with its wooden arms and elbow-joints, can intelligibly signal;
- and lines of them are set up, to the North Frontiers and
- elsewhither. On an Autumn evening of the Year Two, Far-writer
- having just written that Condé Town has surrendered to us, we
- send from Tuileries Convention Hall this response in the shape of
- Decree: “The name of Condé is changed to _Nord-Libre_,
- North-Free. The Army of the North ceases not to merit well of the
- country.”—To the admiration of men! For lo, in some half hour,
- while the Convention yet debates, there arrives this new answer:
- “I inform thee, _je t’annonce_, Citizen President, that the
- decree of Convention, ordering change of the name Condé into
- _North-Free;_ and the other declaring that the Army of the North
- ceases not to merit well of the country, are transmitted and
- acknowledged by Telegraph. I have instructed my Officer at Lille
- to forward them to North-Free by express. _Signed_, CHAPPE.”[729]
-
- Or see, over Fleurus in the Netherlands, where General Jourdan,
- having now swept the soil of Liberty, and advanced thus far, is
- just about to fight, and sweep or be swept, things there not in
- the Heaven’s Vault, some Prodigy, seen by Austrian eyes and
- spyglasses: in the similitude of an enormous Windbag, with
- netting and enormous Saucer depending from it? A Jove’s Balance,
- O ye Austrian spyglasses? One saucer-hole of a Jove’s Balance;
- _your_ poor Austrian scale having kicked itself quite aloft, out
- of sight? By Heaven, answer the spyglasses, it is a Montgolfier,
- a Balloon, and they are making signals! Austrian cannon-battery
- barks at this Montgolfier; harmless as dog at the Moon: the
- Montgolfier makes its signals; detects what Austrian ambuscade
- there may be, and descends at its ease.[730] What will not these
- devils incarnate contrive?
-
- On the whole, is it not, O Reader, one of the strangest
- Flame-Pictures that ever painted itself; flaming off there, on
- its ground of Guillotine-black? And the nightly Theatres are
- Twenty-three; and the _Salons de danse_ are sixty: full of mere
- _Egalité, Fraternite_ and _Carmagnole_. And Section
- Committee-rooms are Forty-eight; redolent of tobacco and brandy:
- vigorous with twenty-pence a-day, coercing the suspect. And the
- Houses of Arrest are Twelve for Paris alone; crowded and even
- crammed. And at all turns, you need your “Certificate of Civism;”
- be it for going out, or for coming in; nay without it you cannot,
- for money, get your daily ounces of bread. Dusky red-capped
- Baker’s-queues; wagging themselves; not in silence! For we still
- live by Maximum, in all things; waited on by these two, Scarcity
- and Confusion. The faces of men are darkened with suspicion; with
- suspecting, or being suspect. The streets lie unswept; the ways
- unmended. Law has shut her Books; speaks little, save impromptu,
- through the throat of Tinville. Crimes go unpunished: not crimes
- against the Revolution.[731] “The number of foundling children,”
- as some compute, “is doubled.”
-
- How silent now sits Royalism; sits all Aristocratism;
- Respectability that kept its Gig! The honour now, and the safety,
- is to Poverty, not to Wealth. Your Citizen, who would be
- fashionable, walks abroad, with his Wife on his arm, in red wool
- nightcap, black shag spencer, and carmagnole complete.
- Aristocratism crouches low, in what shelter is still left;
- submitting to all requisitions, vexations; too happy to escape
- with life. Ghastly châteaus stare on you by the wayside;
- disroofed, diswindowed; which the National House-broker is
- peeling for the lead and ashlar. The old tenants hover
- disconsolate, over the Rhine with Condé; a spectacle to men.
- _Ci-devant_ Seigneur, exquisite in palate, will become an
- exquisite Restaurateur Cook in Hamburg; Ci-devant Madame,
- exquisite in dress, a successful _Marchande des Modes_ in London.
- In Newgate-Street, you meet M. le Marquis, with a rough deal on
- his shoulder, adze and jack-plane under arm; he has taken to the
- joiner trade; it being necessary to live (_faut
- vivre_).[732]—Higher than all Frenchmen the domestic Stock-jobber
- flourishes,—in a day of Paper-money. The Farmer also flourishes:
- “Farmers’ houses,” says Mercier, “have become like Pawn-brokers’
- shops;” all manner of furniture, apparel, vessels of gold and
- silver accumulate themselves there: bread is precious. The
- Farmer’s rent is Paper-money, and he alone of men has bread:
- Farmer is better than Landlord, and will himself become Landlord.
-
- And daily, we say, like a black Spectre, silently through that
- Life-tumult, passes the Revolution Cart; writing on the walls its
- MENE, MENE, _Thou art weighed, and found wanting!_ A Spectre with
- which one has grown familiar. Men have adjusted themselves:
- complaint issues not from that Death-tumbril. Weak women and
- _ci-devants_, their plumage and finery all tarnished, sit there;
- with a silent gaze, as if looking into the Infinite Black. The
- once light lip wears a curl of irony, uttering no word; and the
- Tumbril fares along. They may be guilty before Heaven, or not;
- they are guilty, we suppose, before the Revolution. Then, does
- not the Republic “coin money” of them, with its great axe? Red
- Nightcaps howl dire approval: the rest of Paris looks on; if with
- a sigh, that is much; Fellow-creatures whom sighing cannot help;
- whom black Necessity and Tinville have clutched.
-
- One other thing, or rather two other things, we will still
- mention; and no more: The Blond Perukes; the Tannery at Meudon.
- Great talk is of these _Perruques blondes:_ O Reader, they are
- made from the Heads of Guillotined women! The locks of a Duchess,
- in this way, may come to cover the scalp of a Cordwainer: her
- blond German Frankism his black Gaelic poll, if it be bald. Or
- they may be worn affectionately, as relics; rendering one
- suspect?[733] Citizens use them, not without mockery; of a rather
- cannibal sort.
-
- Still deeper into one’s heart goes that Tannery at Meudon; not
- mentioned among the other miracles of tanning! “At Meudon,” says
- Montgaillard with considerable calmness, “there was a Tannery of
- Human Skins; such of the Guillotined as seemed worth flaying: of
- which perfectly good wash-leather was made:” for breeches, and
- other uses. The skin of the men, he remarks, was superior in
- toughness (_consistance_) and quality to shamoy; that of women
- was good for almost nothing, being so soft in
- texture![734]—History looking back over Cannibalism, through
- _Purchas’s Pilgrims_ and all early and late Records, will perhaps
- find no terrestrial Cannibalism of a sort on the whole so
- detestable. It is a manufactured, soft-feeling, quietly elegant
- sort; a sort _perfide!_ Alas then, is man’s civilisation only a
- wrappage, through which the savage nature of him can still burst,
- infernal as ever? Nature still makes him; and has an Infernal in
- her as well as a Celestial.
-
-
- BOOK 3.VI.
- THERMIDOR
-
-
- Chapter 3.6.I.
- The Gods are athirst.
-
- What then is this Thing, called _La Révolution_, which, like an
- Angel of Death, hangs over France, noyading, fusillading,
- fighting, gun-boring, tanning human skins? _La Révolution_ is but
- so many Alphabetic Letters; a thing nowhere to be laid hands on,
- to be clapt under lock and key: where is it? what is it? It is
- the Madness that dwells in the hearts of men. In this man it is,
- and in that man; as a rage or as a terror, it is in all men.
- Invisible, impalpable; and yet no black Azrael, with wings spread
- over half a continent, with sword sweeping from sea to sea, could
- be a truer Reality.
-
- To explain, what is called explaining, the march of this
- Revolutionary Government, be no task of ours. Men cannot explain
- it. A paralytic Couthon, asking in the Jacobins, “what hast thou
- done to be hanged if the Counter-Revolution should arrive;” a
- sombre Saint-Just, not yet six-and-twenty, declaring that “for
- Revolutionists there is no rest but in the tomb;” a seagreen
- Robespierre converted into vinegar and gall; much more an Amar
- and Vadier, a Collot and Billaud: to inquire what thoughts,
- predetermination or prevision, might be in the head of these men!
- Record of their thought remains not; Death and Darkness have
- swept it out utterly. Nay if we even had their thought, all they
- could have articulately spoken to us, how insignificant a
- fraction were that of the Thing which realised itself, which
- decreed itself, on signal given by them! As has been said more
- than once, this Revolutionary Government is not a self-conscious
- but a blind fatal one. Each man, enveloped in his
- ambient-atmosphere of revolutionary fanatic Madness, rushes on,
- impelled and impelling; and has become a blind brute Force; no
- rest for him but in the grave! Darkness and the mystery of horrid
- cruelty cover it for us, in History; as they did in Nature. The
- chaotic Thunder-cloud, with its pitchy black, and its tumult of
- dazzling jagged fire, in a world all electric: thou wilt not
- undertake to shew how that comported itself,—what the secrets of
- its dark womb were; from what sources, with what specialities,
- the lightning it held did, in confused brightness of terror,
- strike forth, destructive and self-destructive, till it ended?
- Like a Blackness naturally of Erebus, which by will of Providence
- had for once mounted itself into dominion and the Azure: is not
- this properly the nature of Sansculottism consummating itself? Of
- which Erebus Blackness be it enough to discern that this and the
- other dazzling fire-bolt, dazzling fire-torrent, does by small
- Volition and great Necessity, verily issue,—in such and such
- succession; destructive so and so, self-destructive so and so:
- till it end.
-
- Royalism is extinct, “sunk,” as they say, “in the mud of the
- Loire;” Republicanism dominates without and within: what,
- therefore, on the 15th day of March, 1794, is this? Arrestment,
- sudden really as a bolt out of the Blue, has hit strange victims:
- Hébert _Père Duchene_, Bibliopolist Momoro, Clerk Vincent,
- General Ronsin; high Cordelier Patriots, redcapped Magistrates of
- Paris, Worshippers of Reason, Commanders of Revolutionary Army!
- Eight short days ago, their Cordelier Club was loud, and louder
- than ever, with Patriot denunciations. Hébert _Père Duchene_ had
- ‘held his tongue and his heart these two months, at sight of
- Moderates, Crypto-Aristocrats, Camilles, _Scélérats_ in the
- Convention itself: but could not do it any longer; would, if
- other remedy were not, invoke the Sacred right of Insurrection.’
- So spake Hébert in Cordelier Session; with vivats, till the roofs
- rang again.[735] Eight short days ago; and now already! They rub
- their eyes: it is no dream; they find themselves in the
- Luxembourg. Goose Gobel too; and they that burnt Churches!
- Chaumette himself, potent Procureur, _Agent National_ as they now
- call it, who could “recognise the Suspect by the very face of
- them,” he lingers but three days; on the third day he too is
- hurled in. Most chopfallen, blue, enters the National Agent this
- Limbo whither he has sent so many. Prisoners crowd round, jibing
- and jeering: ‘Sublime National Agent,’ says one, ‘in virtue of
- thy immortal Proclamation, lo there! I am suspect, thou art
- suspect, he is suspect, we are suspect, ye are suspect, they are
- suspect!’
-
- The meaning of these things? Meaning! It is a Plot; Plot of the
- most extensive ramifications; which, however, Barrère holds the
- threads of. Such Church-burning and scandalous masquerades of
- Atheism, fit to make the Revolution odious: where indeed could
- they originate but in the gold of Pitt? Pitt indubitably, as
- Preternatural Insight will teach one, did hire this Faction of
- _Enragés_, to play their fantastic tricks; to roar in their
- Cordeliers Club about Moderatism; to print their _Père Duchene;_
- worship skyblue Reason in red nightcap; rob all Altars,—and bring
- the spoil to _us!_
-
- Still more indubitable, visible to the mere bodily sight, is
- this: that the Cordeliers Club sits pale, with anger and terror;
- and has “veiled the Rights of Man,”—without effect. Likewise that
- the Jacobins are in considerable confusion; busy “purging
- themselves, “_s’épurant_,” as, in times of Plot and public
- Calamity, they have repeatedly had to do. Not even Camille
- Desmoulins but has given offence: nay there have risen murmurs
- against Danton himself; though he bellowed them down, and
- Robespierre finished the matter by “embracing him in the
- Tribune.”
-
- Whom shall the Republic and a jealous Mother Society trust? In
- these times of temptation, of Preternatural Insight! For there
- are Factions of the Stranger, “de _l”étranger_,” Factions of
- Moderates, of Enraged; all manner of Factions: we walk in a world
- of Plots; strings, universally spread, of deadly gins and
- falltraps, baited by the gold of Pitt! Clootz, Speaker of Mankind
- so-called, with his _Evidences of Mahometan Religion_, and babble
- of Universal Republic, him an incorruptible Robespierre has
- purged away. Baron Clootz, and Paine rebellious Needleman lie,
- these two months, in the Luxembourg; limbs of the Faction _de
- l’étranger_. Representative Phélippeaux is purged out: he came
- back from La Vendée with an ill report in his mouth against rogue
- Rossignol, and our method of warfare there. Recant it, O
- Phélippeaux, we entreat thee! Phélippeaux will not recant; and is
- purged out. Representative Fabre d’Eglantine, famed Nomenclator
- of Romme’s Calendar, is purged out; nay, is cast into the
- Luxembourg: accused of Legislative Swindling “in regard to monies
- of the India Company.” There with his Chabots, Bazires, guilty of
- the like, let Fabre wait his destiny. And Westermann friend of
- Danton, he who led the Marseillese on the Tenth of August, and
- fought well in La Vendée, but spoke not well of rogue Rossignol,
- is purged out. Lucky, if he too go not to the Luxembourg. And
- your Prolys, Guzmans, of the Faction of the Stranger, they have
- gone; Peyreyra, though he fled is gone, “taken in the disguise of
- a Tavern Cook.” I am suspect, thou art suspect, he is suspect!—
-
- The great heart of Danton is weary of it. Danton is gone to
- native Arcis, for a little breathing time of peace: Away, black
- Arachne-webs, thou world of Fury, Terror, and Suspicion; welcome,
- thou everlasting Mother, with thy spring greenness, thy kind
- household loves and memories; true art thou, were all else
- untrue! The great Titan walks silent, by the banks of the
- murmuring Aube, in young native haunts that knew him when a boy;
- wonders what the end of these things may be.
-
- But strangest of all, Camille Desmoulins is purged out. Couthon
- gave as a test in regard to Jacobin purgation the question, “What
- hast thou done to be hanged if Counter-Revolution should arrive?”
- Yet Camille, who could so well answer this question, is purged
- out! The truth is, Camille, early in December last, began
- publishing a new Journal, or Series of Pamphlets, entitled the
- _Vieux Cordelier_, Old Cordelier. Camille, not afraid at one time
- to “embrace Liberty on a heap of dead bodies,” begins to ask now,
- Whether among so many arresting and punishing Committees there
- ought not to be a “Committee of Mercy?” Saint-Just, he observes,
- is an extremely solemn young Republican, who “carries his head as
- if it were a _Saint-Sacrement;_ adorable Hostie, or divine
- Real-Presence! Sharply enough, this _old_ Cordelier, Danton and
- he were of the earliest primary Cordeliers,—shoots his glittering
- war-shafts into your _new_ Cordeliers, your Héberts, Momoros,
- with their brawling brutalities and despicabilities: say, as the
- Sun-god (for poor Camille is a Poet) shot into that Python
- Serpent sprung of mud.
-
- Whereat, as was natural, the Hébertist Python did hiss and writhe
- amazingly; and threaten “sacred right of Insurrection;”—and, as
- we saw, get cast into Prison. Nay, with all the old wit,
- dexterity, and light graceful poignancy, Camille, translating
- “out of _Tacitus_, from the Reign of Tiberius,” pricks into the
- _Law of the Suspect_ itself; making it odious! Twice, in the
- Decade, his wild Leaves issue; full of wit, nay of humour, of
- harmonious ingenuity and insight,—one of the strangest phenomenon
- of that dark time; and smite, in their wild-sparkling way, at
- various monstrosities, Saint-Sacrament heads, and Juggernaut
- idols, in a rather reckless manner. To the great joy of Josephine
- Beauharnais, and the other Five Thousand and odd Suspect, who
- fill the Twelve Houses of Arrest; on whom a ray of hope dawns!
- Robespierre, at first approbatory, knew not at last what to
- think; then thought, with his Jacobins, that Camille must be
- expelled. A man of true Revolutionary spirit, this Camille; but
- with the unwisest sallies; whom Aristocrats and Moderates have
- the art to corrupt! Jacobinism is in uttermost crisis and
- struggle: enmeshed wholly in plots, corruptibilities, neck-gins
- and baited falltraps of Pitt _Ennemi du Genre Humain_. Camille’s
- First Number begins with “O Pitt!”—his last is dated 15 Pluviose
- Year 2, 3d February 1794; and ends with these words of
- Montezuma’s, “_Les dieux ont soif_, The gods are athirst.”
-
- Be this as it may, the Hébertists lie in Prison only some nine
- days. On the 24th of March, therefore, the Revolution Tumbrils
- carry through that Life-tumult a new cargo: Hébert, Vincent,
- Momoro, Ronsin, Nineteen of them in all; with whom, curious
- enough, sits Clootz Speaker of Mankind. They have been massed
- swiftly into a lump, this miscellany of Nondescripts; and travel
- now their last road. No help. They too must “look through the
- little window;” they too “must sneeze into the sack,” _éternuer
- dans le sac;_ as they have done to others so is it done to them.
- _Sainte-Guillotine_, meseems, is worse than the old Saints of
- Superstition; a man-devouring Saint? Clootz, still with an air of
- polished sarcasm, endeavours to jest, to offer cheering
- “arguments of Materialism;” he requested to be executed last, “in
- order to establish certain principles,”—which Philosophy has not
- retained. General Ronsin too, he still looks forth with some air
- of defiance, eye of command: the rest are sunk in a stony
- paleness of despair. Momoro, poor Bibliopolist, no Agrarian Law
- yet realised,—they might as well have hanged thee at Evreux,
- twenty months ago, when Girondin Buzot hindered them. Hébert
- _Père Duchesne_ shall never in this world rise in sacred right of
- insurrection; he sits there low enough, head sunk on breast; Red
- Nightcaps shouting round him, in frightful parody of his
- Newspaper Articles, ‘Grand choler of the Père Duchesne!’ Thus
- perish they; the sack receives all their heads. Through some
- section of History, Nineteen spectre-chimeras shall flit,
- speaking and gibbering; till Oblivion swallow them.
-
- In the course of a week, the Revolutionary Army itself is
- disbanded; the General having become spectral. This Faction of
- Rabids, therefore, is also purged from the Republican soil; here
- also the baited falltraps of that Pitt have been wrenched up
- harmless; and anew there is joy over a Plot Discovered. The
- Revolution then is verily devouring its own children. All
- Anarchy, by the nature of it, is not only destructive but
- self-destructive.
-
-
- Chapter 3.6.II.
- Danton, No Weakness.
-
- Danton, meanwhile, has been pressingly sent for from Arcis: he
- must return instantly, cried Camille, cried Phélippeaux and
- Friends, who scented danger in the wind. Danger enough! A Danton,
- a Robespierre, chief-products of a victorious Revolution, are now
- arrived in immediate front of one another; must ascertain how
- they will live together, rule together. One conceives easily the
- deep mutual incompatibility that divided these two: with what
- terror of feminine hatred the poor seagreen Formula looked at the
- monstrous colossal Reality, and grew greener to behold him;—the
- Reality, again, struggling to think no ill of a chief-product of
- the Revolution; yet feeling at bottom that such chief-product was
- little other than a chief wind-bag, blown large by Popular air;
- not a man with the heart of a man, but a poor spasmodic
- incorruptible pedant, with a logic-formula instead of heart; of
- Jesuit or Methodist-Parson nature; full of sincere-cant,
- incorruptibility, of virulence, poltroonery; barren as the
- east-wind! Two such chief-products are too much for one
- Revolution.
-
- Friends, trembling at the results of a quarrel on their part,
- brought them to meet. ‘It is right,’ said Danton, swallowing much
- indignation, ‘to repress the Royalists: but we should not strike
- except where it is useful to the Republic; we should not confound
- the innocent and the guilty.’—‘And who told you,’ replied
- Robespierre with a poisonous look, ‘that one innocent person had
- perished?’—‘_Quoi_,’ said Danton, turning round to Friend Paris
- self-named Fabricius, Juryman in the Revolutionary Tribunal:
- ‘_Quoi_, not one innocent? What sayest thou of it,
- Fabricius!’[736]—Friends, Westermann, this Pâris and others urged
- him to shew himself, to ascend the Tribune and act. The man
- Danton was not prone to shew himself; to act, or uproar for his
- own safety. A man of careless, large, hoping nature; a large
- nature that could rest: he would sit whole hours, they say,
- hearing Camille talk, and liked nothing so well. Friends urged
- him to fly; his Wife urged him: ‘Whither fly?’ answered he: ‘If
- freed France cast me out, there are only dungeons for me
- elsewhere. One carries not his country with him at the sole of
- his shoe!’ The man Danton sat still. Not even the arrestment of
- Friend Herault, a member of _Salut_, yet arrested by _Salut_, can
- rouse Danton.—On the night of the 30th of March, Juryman Paris
- came rushing in; haste looking through his eyes: A clerk of the
- _Salut_ Committee had told him Danton’s warrant was made out, he
- is to be arrested this very night! Entreaties there are and
- trepidation, of poor Wife, of Paris and Friends: Danton sat
- silent for a while; then answered, ‘_Ils n’oseraient_, They dare
- not;’ and would take no measures. Murmuring ‘They dare not,’ he
- goes to sleep as usual.
-
- And yet, on the morrow morning, strange rumour spreads over Paris
- City: Danton, Camille, Phélippeaux, Lacroix have been arrested
- overnight! It is verily so: the corridors of the Luxembourg were
- all crowded, Prisoners crowding forth to see this giant of the
- Revolution among them. ‘Messieurs,’ said Danton politely, ‘I
- hoped soon to have got you all out of this: but here I am myself;
- and one sees not where it will end.’—Rumour may spread over
- Paris: the Convention clusters itself into groups; wide-eyed,
- whispering, ‘Danton arrested!’ Who then is safe? Legendre,
- mounting the Tribune, utters, at his own peril, a feeble word for
- him; moving that he be heard at that Bar before indictment; but
- Robespierre frowns him down: ‘Did you hear Chabot, or Bazire?
- Would you have two weights and measures?’ Legendre cowers low;
- Danton, like the others, must take his doom.
-
- Danton’s Prison-thoughts were curious to have; but are not given
- in any quantity: indeed few such remarkable men have been left so
- obscure to us as this Titan of the Revolution. He was heard to
- ejaculate: ‘This time twelvemonth, I was moving the creation of
- that same Revolutionary Tribunal. I crave pardon for it of God
- and man. They are all Brothers Cain: Brissot would have had me
- guillotined as Robespierre now will. I leave the whole business
- in a frightful welter (_gâchis épouvantable_): not one of them
- understands anything of government. Robespierre will follow me; I
- drag down Robespierre. O, it were better to be a poor fisherman
- than to meddle with governing of men.’—Camille’s young beautiful
- Wife, who had made him rich not in money alone, hovers round the
- Luxembourg, like a disembodied spirit, day and night. Camille’s
- stolen letters to her still exist; stained with the mark of his
- tears.[737] ‘I carry my head like a Saint-Sacrament?’ so
- Saint-Just was heard to mutter: ‘Perhaps he will carry his like a
- Saint-Dennis.’
-
- Unhappy Danton, thou still unhappier light Camille, once light
- _Procureur de la Lanterne_, ye also have arrived, then, at the
- Bourne of Creation, where, like Ulysses Polytlas at the limit and
- utmost Gades of his voyage, gazing into that dim Waste beyond
- Creation, a man does see _the Shade of his Mother_, pale,
- ineffectual;—and days when his Mother nursed and wrapped him are
- all-too sternly contrasted with this day! Danton, Camille,
- Herault, Westermann, and the others, very strangely massed up
- with Bazires, Swindler Chabots, Fabre d’Eglantines, Banker Freys,
- a most motley Batch, “_Fournée_” as such things will be called,
- stand ranked at the Bar of Tinville. It is the 2d of April 1794.
- Danton has had but three days to lie in Prison; for the time
- presses.
-
- What is your name? place of abode? and the like, Fouquier asks;
- according to formality. ‘My name is Danton,’ answers he; ‘a name
- tolerably known in the Revolution: my abode will soon be
- Annihilation (_dans le Néant_); but I shall live in the Pantheon
- of History.’ A man will endeavour to say something forcible, be
- it by nature or not! Herault mentions epigrammatically that he
- ‘sat in this Hall, and was detested of Parlementeers.’ Camille
- makes answer, ‘My age is that of the _bon Sansculotte Jésus;_ an
- age fatal to Revolutionists.’ O Camille, Camille! And yet in that
- Divine Transaction, let us say, there did lie, among other
- things, the fatallest Reproof ever uttered here below to Worldly
- Right-honourableness; “the highest Fact,” so devout Novalis calls
- it, “in the Rights of Man.” Camille’s real age, it would seem, is
- thirty-four. Danton is one year older.
-
- Some five months ago, the Trial of the Twenty-two Girondins was
- the greatest that Fouquier had then done. But here is a still
- greater to do; a thing which tasks the whole faculty of Fouquier;
- which makes the very heart of him waver. For it is the voice of
- Danton that reverberates now from these domes; in passionate
- words, piercing with their wild sincerity, winged with wrath.
- Your best Witnesses he shivers into ruin at one stroke. He
- demands that the Committee-men themselves come as Witnesses, as
- Accusers; he ‘will cover them with ignominy.’ He raises his huge
- stature, he shakes his huge black head, fire flashes from the
- eyes of him,—piercing to all Republican hearts: so that the very
- Galleries, though we filled them by ticket, murmur sympathy; and
- are like to burst down, and raise the People, and deliver him! He
- complains loudly that he is classed with Chabots, with swindling
- Stockjobbers; that his Indictment is a list of platitudes and
- horrors. ‘Danton hidden on the Tenth of August?’ reverberates he,
- with the roar of a lion in the toils: ‘Where are the men that had
- to press Danton to shew himself, that day? Where are these
- high-gifted souls of whom he borrowed energy? Let them appear,
- these Accusers of mine: I have all the clearness of my
- self-possession when I demand them. I will unmask the three
- shallow scoundrels,’ _les trois plats coquins_, Saint-Just,
- Couthon, Lebas, ‘who fawn on Robespierre, and lead him towards
- his destruction. Let them produce themselves here; I will plunge
- them into Nothingness, out of which they ought never to have
- risen.’ The agitated President agitates his bell; enjoins
- calmness, in a vehement manner: ‘What is it to thee how I defend
- myself?’ cries the other: ‘the right of _dooming_ me is thine
- always. The voice of a man speaking for his honour and his life
- may well drown the jingling of thy bell!’ Thus Danton, higher and
- higher; till the lion voice of him “dies away in his throat:”
- speech will not utter what is in that man. The Galleries murmur
- ominously; the first day’s Session is over.
-
- O Tinville, President Herman, what will ye do? They have two days
- more of it, by strictest Revolutionary Law. The Galleries already
- murmur. If this Danton were to burst your mesh-work!—Very curious
- indeed to consider. It turns on a hair: and what a Hoitytoity
- were _there_, Justice and Culprit changing places; and the whole
- History of France running changed! For in France there is this
- Danton only that could still try to govern France. He only, the
- wild amorphous Titan;—and perhaps that other olive-complexioned
- individual, the Artillery Officer at Toulon, whom we left pushing
- his fortune in the South?
-
- On the evening of the second day, matters looking not better but
- worse and worse, Fouquier and Herman, distraction in their
- aspect, rush over to _Salut Public_. What is to be done? _Salut
- Public_ rapidly concocts a new Decree; whereby if men “insult
- Justice,” they may be “thrown out of the Debates.” For indeed,
- withal, is there not “a Plot in the Luxembourg Prison?”
- _Ci-devant_ General Dillon, and others of the Suspect, plotting
- with Camille’s Wife to distribute _assignats;_ to force the
- Prisons, overset the Republic? Citizen Laflotte, himself Suspect
- but desiring enfranchisement, has reported said Plot for us:—a
- report that may bear fruit! Enough, on the morrow morning, an
- obedient Convention passes this Decree. _Salut_ rushes off with
- it to the aid of Tinville, reduced now almost to extremities. And
- so, _Hors des Débats_, Out of the Debates, ye insolents!
- Policemen do your duty! In such manner, with a deadlift effort,
- _Salut_, Tinville Herman, Leroi _Dix-Août_, and all stanch
- jurymen setting heart and shoulder to it, the Jury becomes
- “sufficiently instructed;” Sentence is passed, is sent by an
- Official, and torn and trampled on: _Death this day_. It is the
- 5th of April, 1794. Camille’s poor Wife may cease hovering about
- this Prison. Nay let her kiss her poor children; and prepare to
- enter it, and to follow!—
-
- Danton carried a high look in the Death-cart. Not so Camille: it
- is but one week, and all is so topsy-turvied; angel Wife left
- weeping; love, riches, Revolutionary fame, left all at the
- Prison-gate; carnivorous Rabble now howling round. Palpable, and
- yet incredible; like a madman’s dream! Camille struggles and
- writhes; his shoulders shuffle the loose coat off them, which
- hangs knotted, the hands tied: ‘Calm my friend,’ said Danton;
- ‘heed not that vile canaille (_laissez là cette vile canaille_).’
- At the foot of the Scaffold, Danton was heard to ejaculate: ‘O my
- Wife, my well-beloved, I shall never see thee more then!’—but,
- interrupting himself: ‘Danton, no weakness!’ He said to
- Hérault-Séchelles stepping forward to embrace him: ‘Our heads
- will meet _there_,’ in the Headsman’s sack. His last words were
- to Samson the Headsman himself: ‘Thou wilt shew my head to the
- people; it is worth shewing.’
-
- So passes, like a gigantic mass, of valour, ostentation, fury,
- affection and wild revolutionary manhood, this Danton, to his
- unknown home. He was of Arcis-sur-Aube; born of “good
- farmer-people” there. He had many sins; but one worst sin he had
- not, that of Cant. No hollow Formalist, deceptive and
- self-deceptive, _ghastly_ to the natural sense, was this; but a
- very Man: with all his dross he was a Man; fiery-real, from the
- great fire-bosom of Nature herself. He saved France from
- Brunswick; he walked straight his own wild road, whither it led
- him. He may live for some generations in the memory of men.
-
-
- Chapter 3.6.III.
- The Tumbrils.
-
- Next week, it is still but the 10th of April, there comes a new
- Nineteen; Chaumette, Gobel, Hébert’s Widow, the Widow of Camille:
- these also roll their fated journey; black Death devours them.
- Mean Hébert’s Widow was weeping, Camille’s Widow tried to speak
- comfort to her. O ye kind Heavens, azure, beautiful, eternal
- behind your tempests and Time-clouds, is there not pity for all!
- Gobel, it seems, was repentant; he begged absolution of a Priest;
- did as a Gobel best could. For Anaxagoras Chaumette, the sleek
- head now stript of its _bonnet rouge_, what hope is there? Unless
- Death _were_ “an eternal sleep?” Wretched Anaxagoras, God shall
- judge thee, not I.
-
- Hébert, therefore, is gone, and the Hébertists; they that robbed
- Churches, and adored blue Reason in red nightcap. Great Danton,
- and the Dantonists; they also are gone. Down to the catacombs;
- they are become silent men! Let no Paris Municipality, no Sect or
- Party of this hue or that, resist the will of Robespierre and
- _Salut_. Mayor Pache, not prompt enough in denouncing these Pitts
- Plots, may congratulate about them now. Never so heartily; it
- skills not! His course likewise is to the Luxembourg. We appoint
- one Fleuriot-Lescot Interim-Mayor in his stead: an “architect
- from Belgium,” they say, this Fleuriot; he is a man one can
- depend on. Our new Agent-National is Payan, lately Juryman; whose
- cynosure also is Robespierre.
-
- Thus then, we perceive, this confusedly electric Erebus-cloud of
- Revolutionary Government has altered its shape somewhat. Two
- masses, or wings, belonging to it; an over-electric mass of
- Cordelier Rabids, and an under-electric of Dantonist Moderates
- and Clemency-men,—these two masses, shooting bolts at one
- another, so to speak, have annihilated one another. For the
- Erebus-cloud, as we often remark, is of suicidal nature; and, in
- jagged irregularity, darts its lightning withal into itself. But
- now these two discrepant masses being mutually annihilated, it is
- as if the Erebus-cloud had got to internal composure; and did
- only pour its hellfire lightning on the World that lay under it.
- In plain words, Terror of the Guillotine was never terrible till
- now. Systole, diastole, swift and ever swifter goes the Axe of
- Samson. Indictments cease by degrees to have so much as
- plausibility: Fouquier chooses from the Twelve houses of Arrest
- what he calls Batches, “_Fournées_,” a score or more at a time;
- his Jurymen are charged to make _feu de file_, fire-filing till
- the ground be _clear_. Citizen Laflotte’s report of Plot in the
- Luxembourg is verily bearing fruit! If no speakable charge exist
- against a man, or Batch of men, Fouquier has always this: a Plot
- in the Prison. Swift and ever swifter goes Samson; up, finally,
- to three score and more at a Batch! It is the highday of Death:
- none but the Dead return not.
-
- O dusky d’Espréménil, what a day is this, the 22d of April, thy
- last day! The Palais Hall here is the same stone Hall, where
- thou, five years ago, stoodest perorating, amid endless pathos of
- rebellious Parlement, in the grey of the morning; bound to march
- with d’Agoust to the Isles of Hieres. The stones are the same
- stones: but the rest, Men, Rebellion, Pathos, Peroration, see! it
- has all fled, like a gibbering troop of ghosts, like the
- phantasms of a dying brain! With d’Espréménil, in the same line
- of Tumbrils, goes the mournfullest medley. Chapelier goes,
- _ci-devant_ popular President of the Constituent; whom the Menads
- and Maillard met in his carriage, on the Versailles Road. Thouret
- likewise, _ci-devant_ President, father of Constitutional
- Law-acts; he whom we heard saying, long since, with a loud voice,
- ‘The Constituent Assembly has fulfilled its mission!’ And the
- noble old Malesherbes, who defended Louis and could not speak,
- like a grey old rock dissolving into sudden water: he journeys
- here now, with his kindred, daughters, sons and grandsons, his
- Lamoignons, Châteaubriands; silent, towards Death.—One young
- Châteaubriand alone is wandering amid the Natchez, by the roar of
- Niagara Falls, the moan of endless forests: Welcome thou great
- Nature, savage, but not false, not unkind, unmotherly; no Formula
- thou, or rapid jangle of Hypothesis, Parliamentary Eloquence,
- Constitution-building and the Guillotine; speak thou to me, O
- Mother, and sing my sick heart thy mystic everlasting
- lullaby-song, and let all the rest be far!—
-
- Another row of Tumbrils we must notice: that which holds
- Elizabeth, the Sister of Louis. Her Trial was like the rest; for
- Plots, for Plots. She was among the kindliest, most innocent of
- women. There sat with her, amid four-and-twenty others, a once
- timorous Marchioness de Crussol; courageous now; expressing
- towards her the liveliest loyalty. At the foot of the Scaffold,
- Elizabeth with tears in her eyes, thanked this Marchioness; said
- she was grieved she could not reward her. ‘Ah, Madame, would your
- Royal Highness deign to embrace me, my wishes were
- complete!’—‘Right willingly, Marquise de Crussol, and with my
- whole heart.’[738] Thus they: at the foot of the Scaffold. The
- Royal Family is now reduced to two: a girl and a little boy. The
- boy, once named Dauphin, was taken from his Mother while she yet
- lived; and given to one Simon, by trade a Cordwainer, on service
- then about the Temple-Prison, to bring him up in principles of
- Sansculottism. Simon taught him to drink, to swear, to sing the
- _carmagnole_. Simon is now gone to the Municipality: and the poor
- boy, hidden in a tower of the Temple, from which in his fright
- and bewilderment and early decrepitude he wishes not to stir out,
- lies perishing, “his shirt not changed for six months;” amid
- squalor and darkness, lamentably,[739]—so as none but poor
- Factory Children and the like are wont to perish, and _not_ be
- lamented!
-
- The Spring sends its green leaves and bright weather, bright May
- brighter than ever: Death pauses not. Lavoisier famed Chemist,
- shall die and not live: Chemist Lavoisier was Farmer-General
- Lavoisier too, and now “all the Farmers-General are arrested;”
- all, and shall give an account of their monies and incomings; and
- die for “putting water in the tobacco” they sold.[740] Lavoisier
- begged a fortnight more of life, to finish some experiments: but
- ‘the Republic does not need such;’ the axe must do its work.
- Cynic Chamfort, reading these Inscriptions of _Brotherhood or
- Death_, says ‘it is a Brotherhood of Cain:’ arrested, then
- liberated; then about to be arrested again, this Chamfort cuts
- and slashes himself with frantic uncertain hand; gains, not
- without difficulty, the refuge of death. Condorcet has lurked
- deep, these many months; Argus-eyes watching and searching for
- him. His concealment is become dangerous to others and himself;
- he has to fly again, to skulk, round Paris, in thickets and
- stone-quarries. And so at the Village of Clamars, one bleared May
- morning, there enters a Figure, ragged, rough-bearded,
- hunger-stricken; asks breakfast in the tavern there. Suspect, by
- the look of him! ‘Servant out of place, sayest thou?’
- Committee-President of Forty-Sous finds a Latin Horace on him:
- ‘Art thou not one of those _Ci-devants_ that were wont to keep
- servants? _Suspect!_’ He is haled forthwith, breakfast
- unfinished, towards Bourg-la-Reine, on foot: he faints with
- exhaustion; is set on a peasant’s horse; is flung into his damp
- prison-cell: on the morrow, recollecting him, you enter;
- Condorcet lies dead on the floor. They die fast, and disappear:
- the Notabilities of France disappear, one after one, like lights
- in a Theatre, which you are snuffing out.
-
- Under which circumstances, is it not singular, and almost
- touching, to see Paris City drawn out, in the meek May nights, in
- civic ceremony, which they call “_Souper Fraternel_,” Brotherly
- Supper? Spontaneous, or partially spontaneous, in the twelfth,
- thirteenth, fourteenth nights of this May month, it is seen.
- Along the Rue Saint-Honoré, and main Streets and Spaces, each
- Citoyen brings forth what of supper the stingy _Maximum_ has
- yielded him, to the open air; joins it to his neighbour’s supper;
- and with common table, cheerful light burning frequent, and what
- due modicum of cut-glasses and other garnish and relish is
- convenient, they eat frugally together, under the kind
- stars.[741] See it O Night! With cheerfully pledged wine-cup,
- hobnobbing to the Reign of Liberty, Equality, Brotherhood, with
- their wives in best ribands, with their little ones romping
- round, the Citoyens, in frugal Love-feast, sit there. Night in
- her wide empire sees nothing similar. O my brothers, why is the
- reign of Brotherhood _not_ come! It is come, it shall come, say
- the Citoyens frugally hobnobbing.—Ah me! these everlasting stars,
- do they not look down “like glistening eyes, bright with immortal
- pity, over the lot of man!”—
-
- One lamentable thing, however, is, that individuals will attempt
- assassination—of Representatives of the People. Representative
- Collot, Member even of _Salut_, returning home, “about one in the
- morning,” probably touched with liquor, as he is apt to be, meets
- on the stairs, the cry ‘_Scélérat!_’ and also the snap of a
- pistol: which latter flashes in the pan; disclosing to him,
- momentarily, a pair of truculent saucer-eyes, swart grim-clenched
- countenance; recognisable as that of our little fellow-lodger,
- Citoyen Amiral, formerly “a clerk in the Lotteries!; Collot
- shouts _Murder_, with lungs fit to awaken all the _Rue Favart;_
- Amiral snaps a second time; a second time flashes in the pan;
- then darts up into his apartment; and, after there firing, still
- with inadequate effect, one musket at himself and another at his
- captor, is clutched and locked in Prison.[742] An indignant
- little man this Amiral, of Southern temper and complexion, of
- “considerable muscular force.” He denies not that he meant to
- ‘purge France of a tyrant;’ nay avows that he had an eye to the
- Incorruptible himself, but took Collot as more convenient!
-
- Rumour enough hereupon; heaven-high congratulation of Collot,
- fraternal embracing, at the Jacobins, and elsewhere. And yet, it
- would seem the assassin-mood proves catching. Two days more, it
- is still but the 23d of May, and towards nine in the evening,
- Cecile Renault, Paper-dealer’s daughter, a young woman of soft
- blooming look, presents herself at the Cabinet-maker’s in the Rue
- Saint-Honoré; desires to see Robespierre. Robespierre cannot be
- seen: she grumbles irreverently. They lay hold of her. She has
- left a basket in a shop hard by: in the basket are female change
- of raiment and two knives! Poor Cecile, examined by Committee,
- declares she ‘wanted to see what a tyrant was like:’ the change
- of raiment was ‘for my own use in the place I am surely going
- to.’—‘What place?’—‘Prison; and then the Guillotine,’ answered
- she.—Such things come of Charlotte Corday; in a people prone to
- imitation, and monomania! Swart choleric men try Charlotte’s
- feat, and their pistols miss fire; soft blooming young women try
- it, and, only half-resolute, leave their knives in a shop.
-
- O Pitt, and ye Faction of the Stranger, shall the Republic never
- have rest; but be torn continually by baited springs, by wires of
- explosive spring-guns? Swart Amiral, fair young Cecile, and all
- that knew them, and many that did not know them, lie locked,
- waiting the scrutiny of Tinville.
-
-
- Chapter 3.6.IV.
- Mumbo-Jumbo.
-
- But on the day they call _Décadi_, New-Sabbath, 20 _Prairial_,
- 8th June by old style, what thing is this going forward, in the
- Jardin National, whilom Tuileries Garden?
-
- All the world is there, in holydays clothes:[743] foul linen went
- out with the Hébertists; nay Robespierre, for one, would never
- once countenance that; but went always elegant and frizzled, not
- without vanity even,—and had his room hung round with seagreen
- Portraits and Busts. In holyday clothes, we say, are the
- innumerable Citoyens and Citoyennes: the weather is of the
- brightest; cheerful expectation lights all countenances. Juryman
- Vilate gives breakfast to many a Deputy, in his official
- Apartment, in the Pavillon _ci-devant_ of Flora; rejoices in the
- bright-looking multitudes, in the brightness of leafy June, in
- the auspicious _Décadi_, or New-Sabbath. This day, if it please
- Heaven, we are to have, on improved Anti-Chaumette principles: a
- New Religion.
-
- Catholicism being burned out, and Reason-worship guillotined, was
- there not need of one? Incorruptible Robespierre, not unlike the
- Ancients, as Legislator of a free people will now also be Priest
- and Prophet. He has donned his sky-blue coat, made for the
- occasion; white silk waistcoat broidered with silver, black silk
- breeches, white stockings, shoe-buckles of gold. He is President
- of the Convention; he has made the Convention _decree_, so they
- name it, _décréter_ the “Existence of the Supreme Being,” and
- likewise “_ce principe consolateur_ of the Immortality of the
- Soul.” These consolatory principles, the basis of rational
- Republican Religion, are getting decreed; and here, on this
- blessed _Décadi_, by help of Heaven and Painter David, is to be
- our first act of worship.
-
- See, accordingly, how after Decree passed, and what has been
- called “the scraggiest Prophetic Discourse ever uttered by
- man,”—Mahomet Robespierre, in sky-blue coat and black breeches,
- frizzled and powdered to perfection, bearing in his hand a
- bouquet of flowers and wheat-ears, issues proudly from the
- Convention Hall; Convention following him, yet, as is remarked,
- with an interval. Amphitheatre has been raised, or at least
- _Monticule_ or Elevation; hideous Statues of Atheism, Anarchy and
- such like, thanks to Heaven and Painter David, strike abhorrence
- into the heart. Unluckily however, our Monticule is too small. On
- the top of it not half of us can stand; wherefore there arises
- indecent shoving, nay treasonous irreverent growling. Peace, thou
- Bourdon de l’Oise; peace, or it may be worse for thee!
-
- The seagreen Pontiff takes a torch, Painter David handing it;
- mouths some other froth-rant of vocables, which happily one
- cannot hear; strides resolutely forward, in sight of expectant
- France; sets his torch to Atheism and Company, which are but made
- of pasteboard steeped in turpentine. They burn up rapidly; and,
- from within, there rises “by machinery” an incombustible Statue
- of Wisdom, which, by ill hap, gets besmoked a little; but does
- stand there visible in as serene attitude as it can.
-
- And then? Why, then, there is other Processioning, scraggy
- Discoursing, and—this _is_ our Feast of the _Être Suprême;_ our
- new Religion, better or worse, is come!—Look at it one moment, O
- Reader, not two. The Shabbiest page of Human Annals: or is there,
- that thou wottest of, one shabbier? Mumbo-Jumbo of the African
- woods to me seems venerable beside this new Deity of Robespierre;
- for this is a _conscious_ Mumbo-Jumbo, and _knows_ that he is
- machinery. O seagreen Prophet, unhappiest of windbags blown nigh
- to bursting, what distracted Chimera among realities are thou
- growing to! This then, this common pitch-link for artificial
- fireworks of turpentine and pasteboard; _this_ is the miraculous
- Aaron’s Rod thou wilt stretch over a hag-ridden hell-ridden
- France, and bid her plagues cease? Vanish, thou and it!—‘_Avec
- ton Être Suprême_,’ said Billaud, ‘_tu commences à m’embêter:_
- With thy _Être Suprême_ thou beginnest to be a bore to me.’[744]
-
- Catherine Théot, on the other hand, “an ancient serving-maid
- seventy-nine years of age,” inured to Prophecy and the Bastille
- from of old, sits, in an upper room in the Rue-de-Contrescarpe,
- poring over the Book of Revelations, with an eye to Robespierre;
- finds that this astonishing thrice-potent Maximilien really is
- the Man spoken of by Prophets, who is to make the Earth young
- again. With her sit devout old Marchionesses, _ci-devant_
- honourable women; among whom Old-Constituent Dom Gerle, with his
- addle head, cannot be wanting. They sit there, in the
- Rue-de-Contrescarpe; in mysterious adoration: Mumbo is Mumbo, and
- Robespierre is his Prophet. A conspicuous man this Robespierre.
- He has his volunteer Bodyguard of _Tappe-durs_, let us say
- _Strike-sharps_, fierce Patriots with feruled sticks; and
- Jacobins kissing the hem of his garment. He enjoys the admiration
- of many, the worship of some; and is well worth the wonder of one
- and all.
-
- The grand question and hope, however, is: Will not this Feast of
- the Tuileries Mumbo-Jumbo be a sign perhaps that the Guillotine
- is to abate? Far enough from that! Precisely on the second day
- after it, Couthon, one of the “three shallow scoundrels,” gets
- himself lifted into the Tribune; produces a bundle of papers.
- Couthon proposes that, as Plots still abound, the _Law of the
- Suspect_ shall have extension, and Arrestment new vigour and
- facility. Further that, as in such case business is like to be
- heavy, our Revolutionary Tribunal too shall have extension; be
- divided, say, into Four Tribunals, each with its President, each
- with its Fouquier or Substitute of Fouquier, all labouring at
- once, and any remnant of shackle or dilatory formality be struck
- off: in this way it may perhaps still overtake the work. Such is
- Couthon’s _Decree of the Twenty-second Prairial_, famed in those
- times. At hearing of which Decree the very Mountain gasped,
- awestruck; and one Ruamps ventured to say that if it passed
- without adjournment and discussion, he, as one Representative,
- ‘would blow his brains out.’ Vain saying! The Incorruptible knit
- his brows; spoke a prophetic fateful word or two: the _Law of
- Prairial_ is Law; Ruamps glad to leave his rash brains where they
- are. Death, then, and always Death! Even so. Fouquier is
- enlarging his borders; making room for Batches of a Hundred and
- fifty at once;—getting a Guillotine set up, of improved velocity,
- and to work under cover, in the apartment close by. So that
- _Salut_ itself has to intervene, and forbid him: ‘Wilt thou
- _demoralise_ the Guillotine,’ asks Collot, reproachfully,
- ‘_démoraliser le supplice!_’
-
- There is indeed danger of that; were not the Republican faith
- great, it were already done. See, for example, on the 17th of
- June, what a _Batch_, Fifty-four at once! Swart Amiral is here,
- he of the pistol that missed fire; young Cecile Renault, with her
- father, family, entire kith and kin; the widow of d’Espréménil;
- old M. de Sombreuil of the Invalides, with his Son,—poor old
- Sombreuil, seventy-three years old, his Daughter saved him in
- September, and it was but for _this_. Faction of the Stranger,
- fifty-four of them! In red shirts and smocks, as Assassins and
- Faction of the Stranger, they flit along there; red baleful
- Phantasmagory, towards the land of Phantoms.
-
- Meanwhile will not the people of the Place de la Révolution, the
- inhabitants along the Rue Saint-Honoré, as these continual
- Tumbrils pass, begin to look gloomy? Republicans too have bowels.
- The Guillotine is shifted, then again shifted; finally set up at
- the remote extremity of the South-East:[745] Suburbs
- Saint-Antoine and Saint-Marceau it is to be hoped, if they have
- bowels, have very tough ones.
-
-
- Chapter 3.6.V.
- The Prisons.
-
- It is time now, however, to cast a glance into the Prisons. When
- Desmoulins moved for his Committee of Mercy, these Twelve Houses
- of Arrest held five thousand persons. Continually arriving since
- then, there have now accumulated twelve thousand. They are
- Ci-devants, Royalists; in far greater part, they are Republicans,
- of various Girondin, Fayettish, Un-Jacobin colour. Perhaps no
- human Habitation or Prison ever equalled in squalor, in noisome
- horror, these Twelve Houses of Arrest. There exist records of
- personal experience in them _Mémoires sur les Prisons;_ one of
- the strangest Chapters in the Biography of Man.
-
- Very singular to look into it: how a kind of order rises up in
- all conditions of human existence; and wherever two or three are
- gathered together, there are formed modes of existing together,
- habitudes, observances, nay gracefulnesses, joys! Citoyen Coitant
- will explain fully how our lean dinner, of herbs and carrion, was
- consumed not without politeness and _place-aux-dames:_ how
- Seigneur and Shoeblack, Duchess and Doll-Tearsheet, flung
- pellmell into a heap, ranked themselves according to method: at
- what hour “the Citoyennes took to their needlework;” and we,
- yielding the chairs to them, endeavoured to talk gallantly in a
- standing posture, or even to sing and harp more or less.
- Jealousies, enmities are not wanting; nor flirtations, of an
- effective character.
-
- Alas, by degrees, even needlework must cease: Plot in the Prison
- rises, by Citoyen Laflotte and Preternatural Suspicion.
- Suspicious Municipality snatches from us all implements; all
- money and possession, of means or metal, is ruthlessly searched
- for, in pocket, in pillow and paillasse, and snatched away;
- red-capped Commissaries entering every cell! Indignation,
- temporary desperation, at robbery of its very thimble, fills the
- gentle heart. Old Nuns shriek shrill discord; demand to be killed
- forthwith. No help from shrieking! Better was that of the two
- shifty male Citizens, who, eager to preserve an implement or two,
- were it but a pipe-picker, or needle to darn hose with,
- determined to defend themselves: by tobacco. Swift then, as your
- fell Red Caps are heard in the Corridor rummaging and slamming,
- the two Citoyens light their pipes and begin smoking. Thick
- darkness envelops them. The Red Nightcaps, opening the cell,
- breathe but one mouthful; burst forth into chorus of barking and
- coughing. ‘_Quoi, Messieurs_,’ cry the two Citoyens, ‘You don’t
- smoke? Is the pipe disagreeable! _Est-ce que vous ne fumez pas?_’
- But the Red Nightcaps have fled, with slight search: ‘_Vous
- n’aimez pas la pipe?_’ cry the Citoyens, as their door slams-to
- again.[746] My poor brother Citoyens, O surely, in a reign of
- Brotherhood, you are not the two I would guillotine!
-
- Rigour grows, stiffens into horrid tyranny; Plot in the Prison
- getting ever riper. This Plot in the Prison, as we said, is now
- the stereotype formula of Tinville: against whomsoever he knows
- no crime, this is a ready-made crime. His Judgment-bar has become
- unspeakable; a recognised mockery; known only as the wicket one
- passes through, towards Death. His Indictments are drawn out in
- blank; you insert the Names after. He has his _moutons_,
- detestable traitor jackalls, who report and bear witness; that
- they themselves may be allowed to live,—for a time. His
- _Fournées_, says the reproachful Collot, “shall in no case exceed
- three-score;” that is his _maximum_. Nightly come his Tumbrils to
- the Luxembourg, with the fatal Roll-call; list of the _Fournée_
- of tomorrow. Men rush towards the Grate; listen, if their name be
- in it? One deep-drawn breath, when the name is not in: we live
- still one day! And yet some score or scores of names were in.
- Quick these; they clasp their loved ones to their heart, one last
- time; with brief adieu, wet-eyed or dry-eyed, they mount, and are
- away. This night to the Conciergerie; through the Palais misnamed
- _of Justice_, to the Guillotine tomorrow.
-
- Recklessness, defiant levity, the Stoicism if not of strength yet
- of weakness, has possessed all hearts. Weak women and
- _Ci-devants_, their locks not yet made into blond perukes, their
- skins not yet tanned into breeches, are accustomed to “act the
- Guillotine” by way of pastime. In fantastic mummery, with
- towel-turbans, blanket-ermine, a mock Sanhedrim of Judges sits, a
- mock Tinville pleads; a culprit is doomed, is guillotined by the
- oversetting of two chairs. Sometimes we carry it farther:
- Tinville himself, in his turn, is doomed, and not to the
- Guillotine alone. With blackened face, hirsute, horned, a shaggy
- Satan snatches him not unshrieking; shews him, with outstretched
- arm and voice, the fire that is not quenched, the worm that dies
- not; the monotony of Hell-pain, and the _What hour?_ answered by,
- _It is Eternity!_[747]
-
- And still the Prisons fill fuller, and still the Guillotine goes
- faster. On all high roads march flights of Prisoners, wending
- towards Paris. Not _Ci-devants_ now; they, the noisy of them, are
- mown down; it is Republicans now. Chained two and two they march;
- in exasperated moments, singing their _Marseillaise_. A hundred
- and thirty-two men of Nantes for instance, march towards Paris,
- in these same days: Republicans, or say even Jacobins to the
- marrow of the bone; but Jacobins who had not approved
- Noyading.[748] _Vive la République_ rises from them in all
- streets of towns: they rest by night, in unutterable noisome
- dens, crowded to choking; one or two dead on the morrow. They are
- wayworn, weary of heart; can only shout: _Live the Republic;_ we,
- as under horrid enchantment, dying in this way for it!
-
- Some Four Hundred Priests, of whom also there is record, ride at
- anchor, “in the roads of the Isle of Aix,” long months; looking
- out on misery, vacuity, waste Sands of Oleron and the
- ever-moaning brine. Ragged, sordid, hungry; wasted to shadows:
- eating their unclean ration on deck, circularly, in parties of a
- dozen, with finger and thumb; beating their scandalous clothes
- between two stones; choked in horrible miasmata, closed under
- hatches, seventy of them in a berth, through night; so that the
- “aged Priest is found lying dead in the morning, in the attitude
- of prayer!”[749]—How long, O Lord!
-
- Not forever; no. All Anarchy, all Evil, Injustice, is, by the
- nature of it, _dragon’s-teeth;_ suicidal, and cannot endure.
-
-
- Chapter 3.6.VI.
- To Finish the Terror.
-
- It is very remarkable, indeed, that since the _Être-Suprême_
- Feast, and the sublime continued harangues on it, which Billaud
- feared would become a bore to him, Robespierre has gone little to
- Committee; but held himself apart, as if in a kind of pet. Nay
- they have made a Report on that old Catherine Théot, and her
- Regenerative Man spoken of by the Prophets; not in the best
- spirit. This Théot mystery they affect to regard as a Plot; but
- have evidently introduced a vein of satire, of irreverent banter,
- not against the Spinster alone, but obliquely against her
- Regenerative Man! Barrère’s light pen was perhaps at the bottom
- of it: read through the solemn snuffling organs of old Vadier of
- the _Sûreté Générale_, the Théot Report had its effect; wrinkling
- the general Republican visage into an iron grin. Ought these
- things to be?
-
- We note farther that among the Prisoners in the Twelve Houses of
- Arrest, there is one whom we have seen before. Senhora Fontenai,
- _born_ Cabarus, the fair Proserpine whom Representative Tallien
- Pluto-like did gather at Bourdeaux, not without effect on
- himself! Tallien is home, by recall, long since, from Bourdeaux;
- and in the most alarming position. Vain that he sounded, louder
- even than ever, the note of Jacobinism, to hide past
- shortcomings: the Jacobins purged him out; two times has
- Robespierre growled at him words of omen from the Convention
- Tribune. And now his fair Cabarus, hit by denunciation, lies
- Arrested, Suspect, in spite of all he could do!—Shut in horrid
- pinfold of death, the Senhora smuggles out to her red-gloomy
- Tallien the most pressing entreaties and conjurings: Save me;
- save thyself. Seest thou not that thy own head is doomed; thou
- with a too fiery audacity; a Dantonist withal; against whom lie
- grudges? Are ye not all doomed, as in the Polyphemus Cavern; the
- fawningest slave of you will be but eaten last!—Tallien feels
- with a shudder that it is true. Tallien has had words of omen,
- Bourdon has had words, Fréron is hated and Barras: each man
- “feels his head if it yet stick on his shoulders.”
-
- Meanwhile Robespierre, we still observe, goes little to
- Convention, not at all to Committee; speaks nothing except to his
- Jacobin House of Lords, amid his bodyguard of _Tappe-durs_. These
- “forty-days,” for we are now far in July, he has not shewed face
- in Committee; could only work there by his three shallow
- scoundrels, and the terror there was of him. The Incorruptible
- himself sits apart; or is seen stalking in solitary places in the
- fields, with an intensely meditative air; some say, “with eyes
- red-spotted,”[750] fruit of extreme bile: the lamentablest
- seagreen Chimera that walks the Earth that July! O hapless
- Chimera; for thou too hadst a life, and a heart of flesh,—what is
- this the stern gods, seeming to smile all the way, have led and
- let thee to! Art not thou he who, few years ago, was a young
- Advocate of promise; and gave up the Arras Judgeship rather than
- sentence one man to die?—
-
- What his thoughts might be? His plans for finishing the Terror?
- One knows not. Dim vestiges there flit of Agrarian Law; a
- victorious Sansculottism become Landed Proprietor; old Soldiers
- sitting in National Mansions, in Hospital Palaces of Chambord and
- Chantilly; peace bought by victory; breaches healed by Feast of
- _Être Suprême;_—and so, through seas of blood, to Equality,
- Frugality, worksome Blessedness, Fraternity, and Republic of the
- virtues! Blessed shore, of such a sea of Aristocrat blood: but
- how to land on it? Through one last wave: blood of corrupt
- Sansculottists; traitorous or semi-traitorous Conventionals,
- rebellious Talliens, Billauds, to whom with my _Être Suprême_ I
- have become a bore; with my Apocalyptic Old Woman a
- laughing-stock!—So stalks he, this poor Robespierre, like a
- seagreen ghost through the blooming July. Vestiges of schemes
- flit dim. But _what_ his schemes or his thoughts were will never
- be known to man.
-
- New Catacombs, some say, are digging for a huge simultaneous
- butchery. Convention to be butchered, down to the right pitch, by
- General Henriot and Company: Jacobin House of Lords made
- dominant; and Robespierre Dictator.[751] There is actually, or
- else there is not actually, a List made out; which the
- Hairdresser has got eye on, as he frizzled the Incorruptible
- locks. Each man asks himself, Is it I?
-
- Nay, as Tradition and rumour of Anecdote still convey it, there
- was a remarkable bachelor’s dinner one hot day at Barrère’s. For
- doubt not, O Reader, this Barrère and others of them gave
- dinners; had “country-house at Clichy,” with elegant enough
- sumptuosities, and pleasures high-rouged![752] But at this dinner
- we speak of, the day being so hot, it is said, the guests all
- stript their coats, and left them in the drawing-room: whereupon
- Carnot glided out; driven by a necessity, needing of all things
- _paper;_ groped in Robespierre’s pocket; found a list of Forty,
- his own name among them; and tarried not at the wine-cup that
- day!—Ye must bestir yourselves, O Friends; ye dull Frogs of the
- Marsh, mute ever since Girondism sank under, even ye now must
- croak or die! Councils are held, with word and beck; nocturnal,
- mysterious as death. Does not a feline Maximilien stalk there;
- voiceless as yet; his green eyes red-spotted; back bent, and hair
- up? Rash Tallien, with his rash temper and audacity of tongue; he
- shall _bell the cat_. Fix a day; and be it soon, lest never!
-
- Lo, before the fixed day, on the day which they call Eighth of
- Thermidor, 26th July 1794, Robespierre himself reappears in
- Convention; mounts to the Tribune! The biliary face seems clouded
- with new gloom; judge whether your Talliens, Bourdons listened
- with interest. It is a voice bodeful of death or of life.
- Long-winded, unmelodious as the screech-owl’s, sounds that
- prophetic voice: Degenerate condition of Republican spirit;
- corrupt moderatism; _Sûreté, Salut_ Committees themselves
- infected; back-sliding on this hand and on that; I, Maximilien,
- alone left incorruptible, ready to die at a moment’s warning. For
- all which what remedy is there? The Guillotine; new vigour to the
- all-healing Guillotine: death to traitors of every hue! So sings
- the prophetic voice; into its Convention sounding-board. The old
- song this: but today, O Heavens! has the sounding-board ceased to
- act? There is not resonance in this Convention; there is, so to
- speak, a gasp of silence; nay a certain grating of one knows not
- what!—Lecointre, our old Draper of Versailles, in these
- questionable circumstances, sees nothing he can do so safe as
- rise, “insidiously” or not insidiously, and move, according to
- established wont, that the Robespierre Speech be “printed and
- sent to the Departments.” Hark: gratings, even of dissonance!
- Honourable Members hint dissonance; Committee-Members, inculpated
- in the Speech, utter dissonance; demand “delay in printing.” Ever
- higher rises the note of dissonance; inquiry is even made by
- Editor Fréron: ‘What has become of the Liberty of Opinions in
- this Convention?’ The Order to print and transmit, which had got
- passed, is rescinded. Robespierre, greener than ever before, has
- to retire, foiled; discerning that it is mutiny, that evil is
- nigh.
-
- Mutiny is a thing of the fatallest nature in all enterprises
- whatsoever; a thing so incalculable, swift-frightful; not to be
- dealt with in _fright_. But mutiny in a Robespierre Convention,
- above all,—it is like fire seen sputtering in the ship’s
- powder-room! One death-defiant plunge at it, this moment, and you
- may still tread it out: hesitate till next moment,—ship and
- ship’s captain, crew and cargo are shivered far; the ship’s
- voyage has suddenly ended between sea and sky. If Robespierre
- can, tonight, produce his Henriot and Company, and get his work
- done by them, he and Sansculottism may still subsist some time;
- if not, probably not. Oliver Cromwell, when that Agitator
- Serjeant stept forth from the ranks, with plea of grievances, and
- began gesticulating and demonstrating, as the mouthpiece of
- Thousands expectant there,—discerned, with those truculent eyes
- of his, how the matter lay; plucked a pistol from his holsters;
- blew Agitator and Agitation instantly out. Noll was a man fit for
- such things.
-
- Robespierre, for his part, glides over at evening to his Jacobin
- House of Lords; unfolds there, instead of some adequate
- resolution, his woes, his uncommon virtues, incorruptibilities;
- then, secondly, his rejected screech-owl Oration;—reads this
- latter over again; and declares that he is ready to die at a
- moment’s warning. Thou shalt not die! shouts Jacobinism from its
- thousand throats. ‘Robespierre, I will drink the hemlock with
- thee,’ cries Painter David, ‘_Je boirai la cigue avec toi;_’—a
- thing not essential to _do_, but which, in the fire of the
- moment, can be said.
-
- Our Jacobin sounding-board, therefore, does act! Applauses
- heaven-high cover the rejected Oration; fire-eyed fury lights all
- Jacobin features: Insurrection a sacred duty; the Convention to
- be purged; Sovereign People under Henriot and Municipality; we
- will make a new June-Second of it: to your tents, O Israel! In
- this key pipes Jacobinism; in sheer tumult of revolt. Let Tallien
- and all Opposition men make off. Collot d’Herbois, though of the
- supreme _Salut_, and so lately near shot, is elbowed, bullied; is
- glad to escape alive. Entering Committee-room of _Salut_, all
- dishevelled, he finds sleek sombre Saint-Just there, among the
- rest; who in his sleek way asks, ‘What is passing at the
- Jacobins?’—‘What is passing?’ repeats Collot, in the unhistrionic
- Cambyses’ vein: ‘What is passing? Nothing but revolt and horrors
- are passing. Ye want our lives; ye shall not have them.’
- Saint-Just stutters at such Cambyses’-oratory; takes his hat to
- withdraw. That _Report_ he had been speaking of, Report on
- Republican Things in General we may say, which is to be read in
- Convention on the morrow, he cannot shew it them this moment: a
- friend has it; he, Saint-Just, will get it, and send it, were he
- once home. Once home, he sends not it, but an answer that he will
- not send it; that they will hear it from the Tribune tomorrow.
-
- Let every man, therefore, according to a well-known good-advice,
- “pray to Heaven, and keep his powder dry!” Paris, on the morrow,
- will see a thing. Swift scouts fly dim or invisible, all night,
- from _Sûreté_ and _Salut;_ from conclave to conclave; from Mother
- Society to Townhall. Sleep, can it fall on the eyes of Talliens,
- Frérons, Collots? Puissant Henriot, Mayor Fleuriot, Judge
- Coffinhal, Procureur Payan, Robespierre and all the Jacobins are
- getting ready.
-
-
- Chapter 3.6.VII.
- Go Down to.
-
- Tallien’s eyes beamed bright, on the morrow, Ninth of Thermidor
- “about nine o’clock,” to see that the Convention had actually
- met. Paris is in rumour: but at least we are met, in Legal
- Convention here; we have not been snatched seriatim; treated with
- a _Pride’s Purge_ at the door. ‘_Allons_, brave men of the
- Plain,’ late Frogs of the Marsh! cried Tallien with a squeeze of
- the hand, as he passed in; Saint-Just’s sonorous organ being now
- audible from the Tribune, and the game of games begun.
-
- Saint-Just is verily reading that Report of his; green Vengeance,
- in the shape of Robespierre, watching nigh. Behold, however,
- Saint-Just has read but few sentences, when interruption rises,
- rapid _crescendo;_ when Tallien starts to his feet, and Billaud,
- and this man starts and that,—and Tallien, a second time, with
- his: ‘Citoyens, at the Jacobins last night, I trembled for the
- Republic. I said to myself, if the Convention dare not strike the
- Tyrant, then I myself dare; and with this I will do it, if need
- be,’ said he, whisking out a clear-gleaming Dagger, and
- brandishing it there: the Steel of Brutus, as we call it. Whereat
- we all bellow, and brandish, impetuous acclaim. ‘Tyranny;
- Dictatorship! Triumvirat!’ And the _Salut_ Committee-men accuse,
- and all men accuse, and uproar, and impetuously acclaim. And
- Saint-Just is standing motionless, pale of face; Couthon
- ejaculating, ‘Triumvir?’ with a look at his paralytic legs. And
- Robespierre is struggling to speak, but President Thuriot is
- jingling the bell against him, but the Hall is sounding against
- him like an Æolus-Hall: and Robespierre is mounting the
- Tribune-steps and descending again; going and coming, like to
- choke with rage, terror, desperation:—and mutiny is the order of
- the day![753]
-
- O President Thuriot, thou that wert Elector Thuriot, and from the
- Bastille battlements sawest Saint-Antoine rising like the
- Ocean-tide, and hast seen much since, sawest thou ever the like
- of this? Jingle of bell, which thou jinglest against Robespierre,
- is hardly audible amid the Bedlam-storm; and men rage for life.
- ‘President of Assassins,’ shrieks Robespierre, ‘I demand speech
- of thee for the last time!’ It cannot be had. ‘To you, O virtuous
- men of the Plain,’ cries he, finding audience one moment, ‘I
- appeal to you!’ The virtuous men of the Plain sit silent as
- stones. And Thuriot’s bell jingles, and the Hall sounds like
- Aeolus’s Hall. Robespierre’s frothing lips are grown “blue;” his
- tongue dry, cleaving to the roof of his mouth. ‘The blood of
- Danton chokes him,’ cry they. ‘Accusation! Decree of Accusation!’
- Thuriot swiftly puts that question. Accusation passes; the
- incorruptible Maximilien is decreed Accused.
-
- ‘I demand to share my Brother’s fate, as I have striven to share
- his virtues,’ cries Augustin, the Younger Robespierre: Augustin
- also is decreed. And Couthon, and Saint-Just, and Lebas, they are
- all decreed; and packed forth,—not without difficulty, the Ushers
- almost trembling to obey. Triumvirat and Company are packed
- forth, into Salut Committee-room; their tongue cleaving to the
- roof of their mouth. You have but to summon the Municipality; to
- cashier Commandant Henriot, and launch Arrest at him; to regular
- formalities; hand Tinville his victims. It is noon: the
- Aeolus-Hall has delivered itself; blows now victorious,
- harmonious, as one irresistible wind.
-
- And so the work is finished? One thinks so; and yet it is not so.
- Alas, there is yet but the first-act finished; three or four
- other acts still to come; and an uncertain catastrophe! A huge
- City holds in it so many confusions: seven hundred thousand human
- heads; not one of which knows what its neighbour is doing, nay
- not what itself is doing.—See, accordingly, about three in the
- afternoon, Commandant Henriot, how instead of sitting cashiered,
- arrested, he gallops along the Quais, followed by Municipal
- Gendarmes, “trampling down several persons!” For the Townhall
- sits deliberating, openly insurgent: Barriers to be shut; no
- Gaoler to admit any Prisoner this day;—and Henriot is galloping
- towards the Tuileries, to deliver Robespierre. On the Quai de la
- Ferraillerie, a young Citoyen, walking with his wife, says aloud:
- ‘Gendarmes, that man is not your Commandant; he is under arrest.’
- The Gendarmes strike down the young Citoyen with the flat of
- their swords.[754]
-
- Representatives themselves (as Merlin the Thionviller) who accost
- him, this puissant Henriot flings into guardhouses. He bursts
- towards the Tuileries Committee-room, ‘to speak with
- Robespierre:’ with difficulty, the Ushers and Tuileries
- Gendarmes, earnestly pleading and drawing sabre, seize this
- Henriot; get the Henriot Gendarmes persuaded not to fight; get
- Robespierre and Company packed into hackney-coaches, sent off
- under escort, to the Luxembourg and other Prisons. This then is
- the end? May not an exhausted Convention adjourn now, for a
- little repose and sustenance, “at five o’clock?”
-
- An exhausted Convention did it; and repented it. The end was not
- come; only the end of the _second-act_. Hark, while exhausted
- Representatives sit at victuals,—tocsin bursting from all
- steeples, drums rolling, in the summer evening: Judge Coffinhal
- is galloping with new Gendarmes to deliver Henriot from Tuileries
- Committee-room; and does deliver him! Puissant Henriot vaults on
- horseback; sets to haranguing the Tuileries Gendarmes; corrupts
- the Tuileries Gendarmes too; trots off with them to Townhall.
- Alas, and Robespierre is not in Prison: the Gaoler shewed his
- Municipal order, durst not on pain of his life, admit any
- Prisoner; the Robespierre Hackney-coaches, in confused jangle and
- whirl of uncertain Gendarmes, have floated safe—into the
- Townhall! There sit Robespierre and Company, embraced by
- Municipals and Jacobins, in sacred right of Insurrection;
- redacting Proclamations; sounding tocsins; corresponding with
- Sections and Mother Society. Is not here a pretty enough
- third-act of a _natural_ Greek Drama; catastrophe more uncertain
- than ever?
-
- The hasty Convention rushes together again, in the ominous
- nightfall: President Collot, for the chair is his, enters with
- long strides, paleness on his face; claps on his hat; says with
- solemn tone: ‘Citoyens, armed Villains have beset the
- Committee-rooms, and got possession of them. The hour is come, to
- die at our post!’ ‘_Oui_,’ answer one and all: ‘We swear it!’ It
- is no rhodomontade, this time, but a sad fact and necessity;
- unless we _do_ at our posts, we must verily die! Swift therefore,
- Robespierre, Henriot, the Municipality, are declared Rebels; put
- _Hors la Loi_, Out of Law. Better still, we appoint Barras
- Commandant of what Armed-Force is to be had; send Missionary
- Representatives to all Sections and quarters, to preach, and
- raise force; will die at least with harness on our back.
-
- What a distracted City; men riding and running, reporting and
- hearsaying; the Hour clearly in travail,—child not to be _named_
- till born! The poor Prisoners in the Luxembourg hear the rumour;
- tremble for a new September. They see men making signals to them,
- on skylights and roofs, apparently signals of hope; cannot in the
- least make out what it is.[755] We observe however, in the
- eventide, as usual, the Death-tumbrils faring South-eastward,
- through Saint-Antoine, towards their Barrier du Trône.
- Saint-Antoine’s tough bowels melt; Saint-Antoine surrounds the
- Tumbrils; says, It shall not be. O Heavens, why should it!
- Henriot and Gendarmes, scouring the streets that way, bellow,
- with waved sabres, that it must. Quit hope, ye poor Doomed! The
- Tumbrils move on.
-
- But in this set of Tumbrils there are two other things notable:
- one notable person; and one want of a notable person. The notable
- person is Lieutenant-General Loiserolles, a nobleman by birth,
- and by nature; laying down his life here for his son. In the
- Prison of Saint-Lazare, the night before last, hurrying to the
- Grate to hear the Death-list read, he caught the name of his son.
- The son was asleep at the moment. ‘I am Loiserolles,’ cried the
- old man: at Tinville’s bar, an error in the Christian name is
- little; small objection was made. The want of the notable person,
- again, is that of Deputy Paine! Paine has sat in the Luxembourg
- since January; and seemed forgotten; but Fouquier had pricked him
- at last. The Turnkey, List in hand, is marking with chalk the
- outer doors of tomorrow’s _Fournée_. Paine’s outer door happened
- to be open, turned back on the wall; the Turnkey marked it on the
- side next him, and hurried on: another Turnkey came, and shut it;
- no chalk-mark now visible, the _Fournée_ went without Paine.
- Paine’s life lay not there.—
-
- Our fifth-act, of this natural Greek Drama, with its natural
- unities, can only be painted in gross; somewhat as that antique
- Painter, driven desperate, did the _foam._ For through this
- blessed July night, there is clangour, confusion very great, of
- marching troops; of Sections going this way, Sections going that;
- of Missionary Representatives reading Proclamations by
- torchlight; Missionary Legendre, who has raised force somewhere,
- emptying out the Jacobins, and flinging their key on the
- Convention table: ‘I have locked their door; it shall be Virtue
- that re-opens it.’ Paris, we say, is set against itself, rushing
- confused, as Ocean-currents do; a huge Mahlstrom, sounding there,
- under cloud of night. Convention sits permanent on this hand;
- Municipality most permanent on that. The poor Prisoners hear
- tocsin and rumour; strive to bethink them of the signals
- apparently of hope. Meek continual Twilight streaming up, which
- will be Dawn and a Tomorrow, silvers the Northern hem of Night;
- it wends and wends there, that meek brightness, like a silent
- prophecy, along the great Ring-Dial of the Heaven. So still,
- eternal! And on Earth all is confused shadow and conflict;
- dissidence, tumultuous gloom and glare; and Destiny as yet shakes
- her doubtful urn.
-
- About three in the morning, the dissident Armed-Forces have
- _met_. Henriot’s Armed Force stood ranked in the Place de Grève;
- and now Barras’s, which he has recruited, arrives there; and they
- front each other, cannon bristling against cannon. Citoyens!
- cries the voice of Discretion, loudly enough, Before coming to
- bloodshed, to endless civil-war, hear the Convention Decree read:
- “Robespierre and all rebels Out of Law!”—Out of Law? There is
- terror in the sound: unarmed Citoyens disperse rapidly home;
- Municipal Cannoneers range themselves on the Convention side,
- with shouting. At which shout, Henriot descends from his upper
- room, far gone in drink as some say; finds his Place de Grève
- empty; the cannons’ mouth turned _towards_ him; and, on the
- whole,—that it is now the catastrophe!
-
- Stumbling in again, the wretched drunk-sobered Henriot announces:
- ‘All is lost!’ ‘_Misérable!_ it is thou that hast lost it,’ cry
- they: and fling him, or else he flings himself, out of window:
- far enough down; into masonwork and horror of cesspool; not into
- death but worse. Augustin Robespierre follows him; with the like
- fate. Saint-Just called on Lebas to kill him: who would not.
- Couthon crept under a table; attempting to kill himself; not
- doing it.—On entering that Sanhedrim of Insurrection, we find all
- as good as extinct; undone, ready for seizure. Robespierre was
- sitting on a chair, with pistol shot blown through, not his head,
- but his under jaw; the suicidal hand had failed.[756] With prompt
- zeal, not without trouble, we gather these wretched Conspirators;
- fish up even Henriot and Augustin, bleeding and foul; pack them
- all, rudely enough, into carts; and shall, before sunrise, have
- them safe under lock and key. Amid shoutings and embracings.
-
- Robespierre lay in an anteroom of the Convention Hall, while his
- Prison-escort was getting ready; the mangled jaw bound up rudely
- with bloody linen: a spectacle to men. He lies stretched on a
- table, a deal-box his pillow; the sheath of the pistol is still
- clenched convulsively in his hand. Men bully him, insult him: his
- eyes still indicate intelligence; he speaks no word. “He had on
- the sky-blue coat he had got made for the Feast of the _Être
- Suprême_”—O reader, can thy hard heart hold out against that? His
- trousers were nankeen; the stockings had fallen down over the
- ankles. He spake no word more in this world.
-
- And so, at six in the morning, a victorious Convention adjourns.
- Report flies over Paris as on golden wings; penetrates the
- Prisons; irradiates the faces of those that were ready to perish:
- turnkeys and _moutons_, fallen from their high estate, look mute
- and blue. It is the 28th day of July, called 10th of Thermidor,
- year 1794.
-
- Fouquier had but to identify; his Prisoners being already Out of
- Law. At four in the afternoon, never before were the streets of
- Paris seen so crowded. From the Palais de Justice to the Place de
- la Révolution, for _thither_ again go the Tumbrils this time, it
- is one dense stirring mass; all windows crammed; the very roofs
- and ridge-tiles budding forth human Curiosity, in strange
- gladness. The Death-tumbrils, with their motley Batch of Outlaws,
- some Twenty-three or so, from Maximilien to Mayor Fleuriot and
- Simon the Cordwainer, roll on. All eyes are on Robespierre’s
- Tumbril, where he, his jaw bound in dirty linen, with his
- half-dead Brother, and half-dead Henriot, lie shattered; their
- “seventeen hours” of agony about to end. The Gendarmes point
- their swords at him, to shew the people which is he. A woman
- springs on the Tumbril; clutching the side of it with one hand;
- waving the other Sibyl-like; and exclaims: ‘The death of thee
- gladdens my very heart, _m’enivre de joie;_’ Robespierre opened
- his eyes; ‘_Scélérat_, go down to Hell, with the curses of all
- wives and mothers!’—At the foot of the scaffold, they stretched
- him on the ground till his turn came. Lifted aloft, his eyes
- again opened; caught the bloody axe. Samson wrenched the coat off
- him; wrenched the dirty linen from his jaw: the jaw fell
- powerless, there burst from him a cry;—hideous to hear and see.
- Samson, thou canst not be too quick!
-
- Samson’s work done, there burst forth shout on shout of applause.
- Shout, which prolongs itself not only over Paris, but over
- France, but over Europe, and down to this Generation. Deservedly,
- and also undeservedly. O unhappiest Advocate of Arras, wert thou
- worse than other Advocates? Stricter man, according to his
- Formula, to his Credo and his Cant, of probities, benevolences,
- pleasures-of-virtue, and such like, lived not in that age. A man
- fitted, in some luckier settled age, to have become one of those
- incorruptible barren Pattern-Figures, and have had marble-tablets
- and funeral-sermons! His poor landlord, the Cabinetmaker in the
- Rue Saint-Honoré, loved him; his Brother died for him. May God be
- merciful to him, and to us.
-
- This is end of the Reign of Terror; new glorious _Revolution_
- named _of Thermidor;_ of Thermidor 9th, year 2; which being
- interpreted into old slave-style means 27th of July, 1794. Terror
- is ended; and death in the Place de la Révolution, were the
- “_Tail_ of Robespierre” once executed; which service Fouquier in
- large Batches is swiftly managing.
-
-
- BOOK 3.VII.
- VENDÉMIAIRE
-
-
- Chapter 3.7.I.
- Decadent.
-
- How little did any one suppose that here was the end not of
- Robespierre only, but of the Revolution System itself! Least of
- all did the mutinying Committee-men suppose it; who had mutinied
- with no view whatever except to continue the National
- Regeneration with their own heads on their shoulders. And yet so
- it verily was. The insignificant stone they had struck out, so
- insignificant anywhere else, proved to be the Keystone: the whole
- arch-work and edifice of Sansculottism began to loosen, to crack,
- to yawn; and tumbled, piecemeal, with considerable rapidity,
- plunge after plunge; till the Abyss had swallowed it all, and in
- this upper world Sansculottism was no more.
-
- For despicable as Robespierre himself might be, the death of
- Robespierre was a signal at which great multitudes of men, struck
- dumb with terror heretofore, rose out of their hiding places:
- and, as it were, saw one another, how multitudinous they were;
- and began speaking and complaining. They are countable by the
- thousand and the million; who have suffered cruel wrong. Ever
- louder rises the plaint of such a multitude; into a universal
- sound, into a universal continuous peal, of what they call Public
- Opinion. Camille had demanded a “Committee of Mercy,” and could
- not get it; but now the whole nation resolves itself into a
- Committee of Mercy: the Nation has tried Sansculottism, and is
- weary of it. Force of Public Opinion! What King or Convention can
- withstand it? You in vain struggle: the thing that is rejected as
- “calumnious” today must pass as veracious with triumph another
- day: gods and men have declared that Sansculottism cannot be.
- Sansculottism, on that Ninth night of Thermidor suicidally
- “fractured its under jaw;” and lies writhing, never to rise more.
-
- Through the next fifteenth months, it is what we may call the
- death-agony of Sansculottism. Sansculottism, Anarchy of the
- Jean-Jacques Evangel, having now got deep enough, is to perish in
- a new singular system of Culottism and Arrangement. For
- Arrangement is indispensable to man; Arrangement, were it
- grounded only on that old primary Evangel of Force, with Sceptre
- in the shape of Hammer. Be there method, be there order, cry all
- men; were it that of the Drill-serjeant! More tolerable is the
- drilled Bayonet-rank, than that undrilled Guillotine,
- incalculable as the wind.—How Sansculottism, writhing in
- death-throes, strove some twice, or even three times, to get on
- its feet again; but fell always, and was flung resupine, the next
- instant; and finally breathed out the life of it, and stirred no
- more: this we are now, from a due distance, with due brevity, to
- glance at; and then—O Reader!—Courage, I see land!
-
- Two of the first acts of the Convention, very natural for it
- after this Thermidor, are to be specified here: the first is
- renewal of the Governing Committees. Both _Sûreté Générale_ and
- _Salut Public_, thinned by the Guillotine, need filling up: we
- naturally fill them up with Talliens, Frérons, victorious
- Thermidorian men. Still more to the purpose, we appoint that they
- shall, as Law directs, not in name only but in deed, be renewed
- and changed from period to period; a fourth part of them going
- out monthly. The Convention will no more lie under bondage of
- Committees, under terror of death; but be a free Convention; free
- to follow its own judgment, and the Force of Public Opinion. Not
- less natural is it to enact that Prisoners and Persons under
- Accusation shall have right to demand some “Writ of Accusation,”
- and see clearly what they are accused of. Very natural acts: the
- harbingers of hundreds not less so.
-
- For now Fouquier’s trade, shackled by Writ of Accusation, and
- legal proof, is as good as gone; effectual only against
- Robespierre’s Tail. The Prisons give up their Suspects; emit them
- faster and faster. The Committees see themselves besieged with
- Prisoners’ friends; complain that they are hindered in their
- work: it is as with men rushing out of a crowded place; and
- obstructing one another. Turned are the tables: Prisoners pouring
- out in floods; Jailors, _Moutons_ and the Tail of Robespierre
- going now whither they were wont to send!—The Hundred and
- thirty-two Nantese Republicans, whom we saw marching in irons,
- have arrived; shrunk to Ninety-four, the fifth man of them choked
- by the road. They arrive: and suddenly find themselves not
- pleaders for life, but denouncers to death. Their Trial is for
- acquittal, and more. As the voice of a trumpet, their testimony
- sounds far and wide, mere atrocities of a Reign of Terror. For a
- space of nineteen days; with all solemnity and publicity.
- Representative Carrier, Company of Marat; Noyadings, Loire
- Marriages, things done in darkness, come forth into light: clear
- is the voice of these poor resuscitated Nantese; and Journals and
- Speech and universal Committee of Mercy reverberate it loud
- enough, into all ears and hearts. Deputation arrives from Arras;
- denouncing the atrocities of Representative Lebon. A tamed
- Convention loves its own life: yet what help? Representative
- Lebon, Representative Carrier must wend towards the Revolutionary
- Tribunal; struggle and delay as we will, the cry of a Nation
- pursues them louder and louder. Them also Tinville must
- abolish;—if indeed Tinville himself be not abolished.
-
- We must note moreover the decrepit condition into which a once
- omnipotent Mother Society has fallen. Legendre flung her keys on
- the Convention table, that Thermidor night; her President was
- guillotined with Robespierre. The once mighty Mother came, some
- time after, with a subdued countenance, begging back her keys:
- the keys were restored her; but the strength could not be
- restored her; the strength had departed forever. Alas, one’s day
- is done. Vain that the Tribune in mid air sounds as of old: to
- the general ear it has become a horror, and even a weariness. By
- and by, Affiliation is prohibited: the mighty Mother sees herself
- suddenly childless; mourns, as so hoarse a Rachel may.
-
- The Revolutionary Committees, without Suspects to prey upon,
- perish fast; as it were of famine. In Paris the whole Forty-eight
- of them are reduced to Twelve, their _Forty sous_ are abolished:
- yet a little while, and Revolutionary Committees are no more.
- _Maximum_ will be abolished; let Sansculottism find food where it
- can.[757] Neither is there now any Municipality; any centre at
- the Townhall. Mayor Fleuriot and Company perished; whom we shall
- not be in haste to replace. The Townhall remains in a broken
- submissive state; knows not well what it is growing to; knows
- only that it is grown weak, and must obey. What if we should
- split Paris into, say, a Dozen separate Municipalities; incapable
- of concert! The Sections were thus rendered safe to act with:—or
- indeed might not the Sections themselves be abolished? You had
- then merely your Twelve manageable pacific Townships, without
- centre or subdivision;[758] and sacred right of Insurrection fell
- into abeyance!
-
- So much is getting abolished; fleeting swiftly into the Inane.
- For the Press speaks, and the human tongue; Journals, heavy and
- light, in Philippic and Burlesque: a renegade Fréron, a renegade
- Prudhomme, loud they as ever, only the contrary way. And
- _Ci-devants_ show themselves, almost parade themselves;
- resuscitated as from death-sleep; publish what death-pains they
- have had. The very Frogs of the Marsh croak with emphasis. Your
- protesting Seventy-three shall, with a struggle, be emitted out
- of Prison, back to their seats; your Louvets, Isnards,
- Lanjuinais, and wrecks of Girondism, recalled from their
- haylofts, and caves in Switzerland, will resume their place in
- the Convention:[759] natural foes of Terror!
-
- Thermidorian Talliens, and mere foes of Terror, rule in this
- Convention, and out of it. The compressed Mountain shrinks silent
- more and more. Moderatism rises louder and louder: not as a
- tempest, with threatenings; say rather, as the rushing of a
- mighty organ-blast, and melodious deafening Force of Public
- Opinion, from the Twenty-five million windpipes of a Nation all
- in Committee of Mercy: which how shall any detached body of
- individuals withstand?
-
-
- Chapter 3.7.II.
- La Cabarus.
-
- How, above all, shall a poor National Convention, withstand it?
- In this poor National Convention, broken, bewildered by long
- terror, perturbations, and guillotinement, there is no Pilot,
- there is not now even a Danton, who could undertake to steer you
- anywhither, in such press of weather. The utmost a bewildered
- Convention can do, is to veer, and trim, and try to keep itself
- steady: and rush, undrowned, before the wind. Needless to
- struggle; to fling helm a-lee, and make ’_bout ship!_ A
- bewildered Convention sails not in the teeth of the wind; but is
- rapidly blown round again. So strong is the wind, we say; and so
- changed; blowing fresher and fresher, as from the sweet
- South-West; your devastating North-Easters, and wild
- tornado-gusts of Terror, blown utterly out! All Sansculottic
- things are passing away; all things are becoming Culottic.
-
- Do but look at the cut of clothes; that light visible Result,
- significant of a thousand things which are not so visible. In
- winter 1793, men went in red nightcaps; Municipals themselves in
- _sabots;_ the very Citoyennes had to petition against such
- headgear. But now in this winter 1794, where is the red nightcap?
- With the thing beyond the Flood. Your monied Citoyen ponders in
- what elegantest style he shall dress himself: whether he shall
- not even dress himself as the Free Peoples of Antiquity. The more
- adventurous Citoyenne has already done it. Behold her, that
- beautiful adventurous Citoyenne: in costume of the Ancient
- Greeks, such Greek as Painter David could teach; her sweeping
- tresses snooded by glittering antique fillet; bright-eyed tunic
- of the Greek women; her little feet naked, as in Antique Statues,
- with mere sandals, and winding-strings of riband,—defying the
- frost!
-
- There is such an effervescence of Luxury. For your Emigrant
- _Ci-devants_ carried not their mansions and furnitures out of the
- country with them; but left them standing here: and in the swift
- changes of property, what with money coined on the Place de la
- Révolution, what with Army-furnishings, sales of Emigrant Domain
- and Church Lands and King’s Lands, and then with the
- Aladdin’s-lamp of Agio in a time of Paper-money, such mansions
- have found new occupants. Old wine, drawn from _Ci-devant_
- bottles, descends new throats. Paris has swept herself, relighted
- herself; Salons, Soupers not Fraternal, beam once more with
- suitable effulgence, very singular in colour. The fair Cabarus is
- come out of Prison; wedded to her red-gloomy Dis, whom they say
- she treats too loftily: fair Cabarus gives the most brilliant
- soirées. Round her is gathered a new Republican Army, of
- Citoyennes in sandals; _Ci-devants_ or other: what remnants
- soever of the old grace survive, are rallied there. At her
- right-hand, in this cause, labours fair Josephine the Widow
- Beauharnais, though in straitened circumstances: intent, both of
- them, to blandish down the grimness of Republican austerity, and
- recivilise mankind.
-
- Recivilise, as of old they were civilised: by witchery of the
- Orphic fiddle-bow, and Euterpean rhythm; by the Graces, by the
- Smiles! Thermidorian Deputies are there in those soirées; Editor
- Fréron, _Orateur du Peuple;_ Barras, who has known other dances
- than the Carmagnole. Grim Generals of the Republic are there; in
- enormous horse-collar neckcloth, good against sabre-cuts; the
- hair gathered all into one knot, “flowing down behind, fixed with
- a comb.” Among which latter do we not recognise, once more, the
- little bronzed-complexioned Artillery-Officer of Toulon, home
- from the Italian Wars! Grim enough; of lean, almost cruel aspect:
- for he has been in trouble, in ill health; also in ill favour, as
- a man promoted, deservingly or not, by the Terrorists and
- Robespierre Junior. But does not Barras know him? Will not Barras
- speak a word for him? Yes,—if at any time it will serve Barras so
- to do. Somewhat forlorn of fortune, for the present, stands that
- Artillery-Officer; looks, with those deep earnest eyes of his,
- into a future as waste as the most. Taciturn; yet with the
- strangest utterances in him, if you awaken him, which smite home,
- like light or lightning:—on the whole, rather dangerous? A
- “dissociable” man? Dissociable enough; a natural terror and
- horror to all Phantasms, being himself of the genus Reality! He
- stands here, without work or outlook, in this forsaken
- manner;—glances nevertheless, it would seem, at the kind glance
- of Josephine Beauharnais; and, for the rest, with severe
- countenance, with open eyes and closed lips, waits what will
- betide.
-
- That the Balls, therefore, have a new figure this winter, we can
- see. Not Carmagnoles, rude “whirlblasts of rags,” as Mercier
- called them “precursors of storm and destruction:” no, soft Ionic
- motions; fit for the light sandal, and antique Grecian tunic!
- Efflorescence of Luxury has come out: for men have wealth; nay
- new-got wealth; and under the Terror you durst not dance except
- in rags. Among the innumerable kinds of Balls, let the hasty
- reader mark only this single one: the kind they call Victim
- Balls, _Bals à Victime_. The dancers, in choice costume, have all
- crape round the left arm: to be admitted, it needs that you be a
- _Victime;_ that you have lost a relative under the Terror. Peace
- to the Dead; let us _dance_ to their memory! For in all ways one
- must dance.
-
- It is very remarkable, according to Mercier, under what varieties
- of figure this great business of dancing goes on. “The women,”
- says he, “are Nymphs, Sultanas; sometimes Minervas, Junos, even
- Dianas. In light-unerring gyrations they swim there; with such
- earnestness of purpose; with perfect silence, so absorbed are
- they. What is singular,” continues he, “the onlookers are as it
- were mingled with the dancers; form as it were a circumambient
- element round the different contre-dances, yet without deranging
- them. It is rare, in fact, that a Sultana in such circumstances
- experience the smallest collision. Her pretty foot darts down, an
- inch from mine; she is off again; she is as a flash of light: but
- soon the measure recalls her to the point she set out from. Like
- a glittering comet she travels her eclipse, revolving on herself,
- as by a double effect of gravitation and attraction.”[760]
- Looking forward a little way, into Time, the same Mercier
- discerns _Merveilleuses_ in “flesh-coloured drawers” with gold
- circlets; mere dancing Houris of an artificial
- Mahomet’s-Paradise: much too Mahometan. Montgaillard, with his
- splenetic eye, notes a no less strange thing; that every
- fashionable Citoyenne you meet is in an interesting situation.
- Good Heavens, _every?_ Mere pillows and stuffing! adds the acrid
- man;—such, in a time of depopulation by war and guillotine, being
- the fashion.[761] No further seek its merits to disclose.
-
- Behold also instead of the old grim _Tappe-durs_ of Robespierre,
- what new street-groups are these? Young men habited not in
- black-shag Carmagnole spencer, but in superfine _habit carré_ or
- spencer with rectangular tail appended to it; “square-tailed
- coat,” with elegant antiguillotinish specialty of collar; “the
- hair plaited at the temples,” and knotted back, long-flowing, in
- military wise: young men of what they call the _Muscadin_ or
- Dandy species! Fréron, in his fondness names them _Jeunesse
- Dorée_, Golden, or Gilt Youth. They have come out, these Gilt
- Youths, in a kind of resuscitated state; they wear crape round
- the left arm, such of them as were _Victims_. More they carry
- clubs loaded with lead; in an angry manner: any _Tappe-dur_ or
- remnant of Jacobinism they may fall in with, shall fare the
- worse. They have suffered much: their friends guillotined; their
- pleasures, frolics, superfine collars ruthlessly repressed: “ware
- now the base Red Nightcaps who did it! Fair Cabarus and the Army
- of Greek sandals smile approval. In the Théâtre Feydeau, young
- Valour in square-tailed coat eyes Beauty in Greek sandals, and
- kindles by her glances: Down with Jacobinism! No Jacobin hymn or
- demonstration, only Thermidorian ones, shall be permitted here:
- we beat down Jacobinism with clubs loaded with lead.
-
- But let any one who has examined the Dandy nature, how petulant
- it is, especially in the gregarious state, think what an element,
- in sacred right of insurrection, this Gilt Youth was! Broils and
- battery; war without truce or measure! Hateful is Sansculottism,
- as Death and Night. For indeed is not the Dandy _culottic_,
- habilatory, by law of existence; “a cloth-animal: one that lives,
- moves, and has his being in cloth?”—
-
- So goes it, waltzing, bickering; fair Cabarus, by Orphic
- witchery, struggling to recivilise mankind. Not unsuccessfully,
- we hear. What utmost Republican grimness can resist Greek
- sandals, in Ionic motion, the very toes covered with gold
- rings?[762] By degrees the indisputablest new-politeness rises;
- grows, with vigour. And yet, whether, even to this day, that
- inexpressible tone of society known under the old Kings, when Sin
- had “lost all its deformity” (with or without advantage to us),
- and airy Nothing had obtained such a local habitation and
- establishment as she never had,—be recovered? Or even, whether it
- be not lost beyond recovery?[763]—Either way, the world must
- contrive to struggle on.
-
-
- Chapter 3.7.III.
- Quiberon.
-
- But indeed do not these long-flowing hair-queues of a _Jeunesse
- Dorée_ in semi-military costume betoken, unconsciously, another
- still more important tendency? The Republic, abhorrent of her
- Guillotine, loves her Army.
-
- And with cause. For, surely, if good fighting be a kind of
- honour, as it is, in its season; and be with the vulgar of men,
- even the chief kind of honour, then here is good fighting, in
- good season, if there ever was. These Sons of the Republic, they
- rose, in mad wrath, to deliver her from Slavery and Cimmeria. And
- have they not done it? Through Maritime Alps, through gorges of
- Pyrenees, through Low Countries, Northward along the
- Rhine-valley, far is Cimmeria hurled back from the sacred
- Motherland. Fierce as fire, they have carried her Tricolor over
- the faces of all her enemies;—over scarped heights, over
- cannon-batteries; down, as with the Vengeur, into the dead deep
- sea. She has “Eleven hundred thousand fighters on foot,” this
- Republic: “At one particular moment she had,” or supposed she
- had, “seventeen hundred thousand.”[764] Like a ring of lightning,
- they, volleying and _ça-ira_-ing, begirdle her from shore to
- shore. Cimmerian Coalition of Despots recoils; smitten with
- astonishment, and strange pangs.
-
- Such a fire is in these Gaelic Republican men; high-blazing;
- which no Coalition can withstand! Not scutcheons, with four
- degrees of nobility; but _ci-devant_ Sergeants, who have had to
- clutch Generalship out of the cannon’s throat, a Pichegru, a
- Jourdan, a Hoche, lead them on. They have bread, they have iron;
- “with bread and iron you can get to China.”—See Pichegru’s
- soldiers, this hard winter, in their looped and windowed
- destitution, in their “straw-rope shoes and cloaks of bass-mat,”
- how they overrun Holland, like a demon-host, the ice having
- bridged all waters; and rush shouting from victory to victory!
- Ships in the Texel are taken by huzzars on horseback: fled is
- York; fled is the Stadtholder, glad to escape to England, and
- leave Holland to fraternise.[765] Such a Gaelic fire, we say,
- blazes in this People, like the conflagration of grass and
- dry-jungle; which no mortal can withstand—for the moment.
-
- And even so it will blaze and run, scorching all things; and,
- from Cadiz to Archangel, mad Sansculottism, drilled now into
- Soldiership, led on by some “armed Soldier of Democracy” (say,
- that Monosyllabic Artillery-Officer), will set its foot cruelly
- on the necks of its enemies; and its shouting and their shrieking
- shall fill the world!—Rash Coalised Kings, such a fire have ye
- kindled; yourselves fireless, _your_ fighters animated only by
- drill-serjeants, messroom moralities, and the drummer’s cat!
- However, it is begun, and will not end: not for a matter of
- twenty years. So long, this Gaelic fire, through its successive
- changes of colour and character, will blaze over the face of
- Europe, and afflict the scorch all men:—till it provoke all men;
- till it kindle another kind of fire, the Teutonic kind, namely;
- and be swallowed up, so to speak, in a day! For there is a fire
- comparable to the burning of dry-jungle and grass; most sudden,
- high-blazing: and another fire which we liken to the burning of
- coal, or even of anthracite coal; difficult to kindle, but then
- which nothing will put out. The ready Gaelic fire, we can remark
- further, and remark not in Pichegrus only, but in innumerable
- Voltaires, Racines, Laplaces, no less; for a man, whether he
- fight, or sing, or think, will remain the same unity of a man,—is
- admirable for roasting eggs, in every conceivable sense. The
- Teutonic anthracite again, as we see in Luthers, Leibnitzes,
- Shakespeares, is preferable for smelting metals. How happy is our
- Europe that has both kinds!—
-
- But be this as it may, the Republic is clearly triumphing. In the
- spring of the year Mentz Town again sees itself besieged; will
- again change master: did not Merlin the Thionviller, “with wild
- beard and look,” say it was not for the last time they saw him
- there? The Elector of Mentz circulates among his brother
- Potentates this pertinent query, Were it not advisable to treat
- of Peace? Yes! answers many an Elector from the bottom of his
- heart. But, on the other hand, Austria hesitates; finally
- refuses, being subsidied by Pitt. As to Pitt, whoever hesitate,
- he, suspending his Habeas-corpus, suspending his Cash-payments,
- stands inflexible,—spite of foreign reverses; spite of domestic
- obstacles, of Scotch National Conventions and English Friends of
- the People, whom he is obliged to arraign, to hang, or even to
- see acquitted with jubilee: a lean inflexible man. The Majesty of
- Spain, as we predicted, makes Peace; also the Majesty of Prussia:
- and there is a Treaty of Bâle.[766] Treaty with black Anarchists
- and Regicides! Alas, what help? You cannot hang this Anarchy; it
- is like to hang you: you must needs treat with it.
-
- Likewise, General Hoche has even succeeded in pacificating La
- Vendée. Rogue Rossignol and his “Infernal Columns” have vanished:
- by firmness and justice, by sagacity and industry, General Hoche
- has done it. Taking “Movable Columns,” not infernal; girdling-in
- the Country; pardoning the submissive, cutting down the
- resistive, limb after limb of the Revolt is brought under. La
- Rochejacquelin, last of our Nobles, fell in battle; Stofflet
- himself makes terms; Georges-Cadoudal is back to Brittany, among
- his Chouans: the frightful gangrene of La Vendée seems veritably
- extirpated. It has cost, as they reckon in round numbers, the
- lives of a Hundred Thousand fellow-mortals; with noyadings,
- conflagratings by infernal column, which defy arithmetic. This is
- the La Vendée War.[767]
-
- Nay in few months, it does burst up once more, but once
- only:—blown upon by Pitt, by our Ci-devant Puisaye of Calvados,
- and others. In the month of July 1795, English Ships will ride in
- Quiberon roads. There will be debarkation of chivalrous
- Ci-devants, of volunteer Prisoners-of-war—eager to desert; of
- fire-arms, Proclamations, clothes-chests, Royalists and specie.
- Whereupon also, on the Republican side, there will be rapid
- stand-to-arms; with ambuscade marchings by Quiberon beach, at
- midnight; storming of Fort Penthievre; war-thunder mingling with
- the roar of the nightly main; and such a morning light as has
- seldom dawned; debarkation hurled back into its boats, or into
- the devouring billows, with wreck and wail;—in one word, a
- Ci-devant Puisaye as totally ineffectual here as he was in
- Calvados, when he rode from Vernon Castle without boots.[768]
-
- Again, therefore, it has cost the lives of many a brave man.
- Among whom the whole world laments the brave Son of Sombreuil.
- Ill-fated family! The father and younger son went to the
- guillotine; the heroic daughter languishes, reduced to want,
- hides her woes from History: the elder son perishes here; shot by
- military tribunal as an Emigrant; Hoche himself cannot save him.
- If all wars, civil and other, are misunderstandings, what a thing
- must right-understanding be!
-
-
- Chapter 3.7.IV.
- Lion not Dead.
-
- The Convention, borne on the tide of Fortune towards foreign
- Victory, and driven by the strong wind of Public Opinion towards
- Clemency and Luxury, is rushing fast; all skill of pilotage is
- needed, and more than all, in such a velocity.
-
- Curious to see, how we veer and whirl, yet must ever whirl round
- again, and scud before the wind. If, on the one hand, we re-admit
- the Protesting Seventy-Three, we, on the other hand, agree to
- consummate the Apotheosis of Marat; lift his body from the
- Cordeliers Church, and transport it to the Pantheon of Great
- Men,—flinging out Mirabeau to make room for him. To no purpose:
- so strong blows Public Opinion! A Gilt Youthhood, in plaited
- hair-tresses, tears down his Busts from the Theatre Feydeau;
- tramples them under foot; scatters them, with vociferation into
- the Cesspool of Montmartre.[769] Swept is his Chapel from the
- Place du Carrousel; the Cesspool of Montmartre will receive his
- very dust. Shorter godhood had no divine man. Some four months in
- this Pantheon, Temple of All the Immortals; then to the Cesspool,
- grand _Cloaca_ of Paris and the World! “His Busts at one time
- amounted to four thousand.” Between Temple of All the Immortals
- and Cloaca of the World, how are poor human creatures whirled!
-
- Furthermore the question arises, When will the Constitution of
- _Ninety-three_, of 1793, come into action? Considerate heads
- surmise, in all privacy, that the Constitution of Ninety-three
- will never come into action. Let them busy themselves to get
- ready a better.
-
- Or, again, where now are the Jacobins? Childless, most decrepit,
- as we saw, sat the mighty Mother; gnashing not teeth, but empty
- gums, against a traitorous Thermidorian Convention and the
- current of things. Twice were Billaud, Collot and Company accused
- in Convention, by a Lecointre, by a Legendre; and the second
- time, it was not voted calumnious. Billaud from the Jacobin
- tribune says, ‘The lion is not dead, he is only sleeping.’ They
- ask him in Convention, What he means by the awakening of the
- lion? And bickerings, of an extensive sort, arose in the
- Palais-Egalité between _Tappe-durs_ and the Gilt Youthhood; cries
- of ‘Down with the Jacobins, the _Jacoquins_,’ _coquin_ meaning
- scoundrel! The Tribune in mid-air gave battle-sound; answered
- only by silence and uncertain gasps. Talk was, in Government
- Committees, of “suspending” the Jacobin Sessions. Hark, there!—it
- is in Allhallow-time, or on the Hallow-eve itself, month
- _ci-devant_ November, year once named of Grace 1794, sad eve for
- Jacobinism,—volley of stones dashing through our windows, with
- jingle and execration! The female Jacobins, famed _Tricoteuses_
- with knitting-needles, take flight; are met at the doors by a
- Gilt Youthhood and “mob of four thousand persons;” are hooted,
- flouted, hustled; fustigated, in a scandalous manner, _cotillons
- retroussés;_—and vanish in mere hysterics. Sally out ye male
- Jacobins! The male Jacobins sally out; but only to battle,
- disaster and confusion. So that armed Authority has to intervene:
- and again on the morrow to intervene; and suspend the Jacobin
- Sessions forever and a day.[770] Gone are the Jacobins; into
- invisibility; in a storm of laughter and howls. Their place is
- made a Normal School, the first of the kind seen; it then
- vanishes into a “Market of Thermidor Ninth;” into a Market of
- Saint-Honoré, where is now peaceable chaffering for poultry and
- greens. The solemn temples, the great globe itself; the baseless
- fabric! Are not we such stuff, we and this world of ours, as
- Dreams are made of?
-
- Maximum being abrogated, Trade was to take its own free course.
- Alas, Trade, shackled, topsyturvied in the way we saw, and now
- suddenly let go again, can for the present take no course at all;
- but only reel and stagger. There is, so to speak, no Trade
- whatever for the time being. Assignats, long sinking, emitted in
- such quantities, sink now with an alacrity beyond parallel.
- ‘_Combien?_’ said one, to a Hackney-coachman, ‘What fare?’ ‘Six
- thousand livres,’ answered he: some three hundred pounds
- sterling, in Paper-money.[771] Pressure of Maximum withdrawn, the
- things it compressed likewise withdraw. “Two ounces of bread per
- day” in the modicum allotted: wide-waving, doleful are the
- Bakers’ Queues; Farmers’ houses are become pawnbrokers’ shops.
-
- One can imagine, in these circumstances, with what humour
- Sansculottism growled in its throat, ‘_La Cabarus;_’ beheld
- Ci-devants return dancing, the Thermidor effulgence of
- recivilisation, and Balls in flesh-coloured drawers. Greek tunics
- and sandals; hosts of _Muscadins_ parading, with their clubs
- loaded with lead;—and we here, cast out, abhorred, “picking
- offals from the street;”[772] agitating in Baker’s Queue for our
- two ounces of bread! Will the Jacobin lion, which they say is
- meeting secretly “at the Archevêché, in _bonnet rouge_ with
- loaded pistols,” not awaken? Seemingly not. Our Collot, our
- Billaud, Barrère, Vadier, in these last days of March 1795, are
- found worthy of _Déportation_, of Banishment beyond seas; and
- shall, for the present, be trundled off to the Castle of Ham. The
- lion is dead;—or writhing in death-throes!
-
- Behold, accordingly, on the day they call Twelfth of Germinal
- (which is also called First of April, not a lucky day), how
- lively are these streets of Paris once more! Floods of hungry
- women, of squalid hungry men; ejaculating: ‘Bread, Bread and the
- Constitution of Ninety-three!’ Paris has risen, once again, like
- the Ocean-tide; is flowing towards the Tuileries, for Bread and a
- Constitution. Tuileries Sentries do their best; but it serves
- not: the Ocean-tide sweeps them away; inundates the Convention
- Hall itself; howling, ‘Bread, and the Constitution!’
-
- Unhappy Senators, unhappy People, there is yet, after all toils
- and broils, no Bread, no Constitution. ‘_Du pain, pas tant de
- longs discours_, Bread, not bursts of Parliamentary eloquence!’
- so wailed the Menads of Maillard, five years ago and more; so
- wail ye to this hour. The Convention, with unalterable
- countenance, with what thought one knows not, keeps its seat in
- this waste howling chaos; rings its stormbell from the Pavilion
- of Unity. Section Lepelletier, old _Filles Saint-Thomas_, who are
- of the money-changing species; these and Gilt Youthhood fly to
- the rescue; sweep chaos forth again, with levelled bayonets.
- Paris is declared “in a state of siege.” Pichegru, Conqueror of
- Holland, who happens to be here, is named Commandant, till the
- disturbance end. He, in one day, so to speak, ends it. He
- accomplishes the transfer of Billaud, Collot and Company;
- dissipating all opposition “by two cannon-shots,” blank
- cannon-shots, and the terror of his name; and thereupon
- announcing, with a Laconicism which should be imitated,
- ‘Representatives, your decrees are executed,’[773] lays down his
- Commandantship.
-
- This Revolt of Germinal, therefore, has passed, like a vain cry.
- The Prisoners rest safe in Ham, waiting for ships; some nine
- hundred “chief Terrorists of Paris” are disarmed. Sansculottism,
- swept forth with bayonets, has vanished, with its misery, to the
- bottom of Saint-Antoine and Saint-Marceau.—Time was when Usher
- Maillard with Menads could alter the course of Legislation; but
- that time is not. Legislation seems to have got bayonets; Section
- Lepelletier takes its firelock, not for us! We retire to our dark
- dens; our cry of hunger is called a Plot of Pitt; the Saloons
- glitter, the flesh-coloured Drawers gyrate as before. It was for
- ‘_The Cabarus_’ then, and her _Muscadins_ and Money-changers,
- that we fought? It was for Balls in flesh-coloured drawers that
- we took Feudalism by the beard, and did, and dared, shedding our
- blood like water? Expressive Silence, muse thou their praise!—
-
-
- Chapter 3.7.V.
- Lion Sprawling its Last.
-
- Representative Carrier went to the Guillotine, in December last;
- protesting that he acted by orders. The Revolutionary Tribunal,
- after all it has devoured, has now only, as Anarchic things do,
- to devour itself. In the early days of May, men see a remarkable
- thing: Fouquier-Tinville pleading at the Bar once his own. He and
- his chief Jurymen, Leroi _August-Tenth_, Juryman Vilate, a Batch
- of Sixteen; pleading hard, protesting that they acted by orders:
- but pleading in vain. Thus men break the axe with which they have
- done hateful things; the axe itself having grown hateful. For the
- rest, Fouquier died hard enough: ‘Where are thy Batches?’ howled
- the People.—‘Hungry _canaille_,’ asked Fouquier, ‘is thy Bread
- cheaper, wanting them?’
-
- Remarkable Fouquier; once but as other Attorneys and Law-beagles,
- which hunt ravenous on this Earth, a well-known phasis of human
- nature; and now thou art and remainest the most remarkable
- Attorney that ever lived and hunted in the Upper Air! For, in
- this terrestrial Course of Time, there was to be an _Avatar_ of
- Attorneyism; the Heavens had said, Let there be an Incarnation,
- not divine, of the venatory Attorney-spirit which keeps its eye
- on the bond only;—and lo, this was it; and they have attorneyed
- it in its turn. Vanish, then, thou rat-eyed Incarnation of
- Attorneyism; who at bottom wert but as other Attorneys, and too
- hungry Sons of Adam! Juryman Vilate had striven hard for life,
- and published, from his Prison, an ingenious Book, not unknown to
- us; but it would not stead: he also had to vanish; and this his
- Book of the _Secret Causes of Thermidor_, full of lies, with
- particles of truth in it undiscoverable otherwise, is all that
- remains of him.
-
- Revolutionary Tribunal has done; but vengeance has not done.
- Representative Lebon, after long struggling, is handed over to
- the ordinary Law Courts, and by them guillotined. Nay, at Lyons
- and elsewhere, resuscitated Moderatism, in its vengeance, will
- not wait the slow process of Law; but bursts into the Prisons,
- sets fire to the prisons; burns some three score imprisoned
- Jacobins to dire death, or chokes them “with the smoke of straw.”
- There go vengeful truculent “Companies of Jesus,” “Companies of
- the Sun;” slaying Jacobinism wherever they meet with it; flinging
- it into the Rhone-stream; which, once more, bears seaward a
- horrid cargo.[774] Whereupon, at Toulon, Jacobinism rises in
- revolt; and is like to hang the National Representatives.—With
- such action and reaction, is not a poor National Convention hard
- bested? It is like the settlement of winds and waters, of seas
- long tornado-beaten; and goes on with jumble and with jangle. Now
- flung aloft, now sunk in trough of the sea, your Vessel of the
- Republic has need of all pilotage and more.
-
- What Parliament that ever sat under the Moon had such a series of
- destinies, as this National Convention of France? It came
- together to make the Constitution; and instead of that, it has
- had to make nothing but destruction and confusion: to burn up
- Catholicisms, Aristocratisms, to worship Reason and dig
- Saltpetre, to fight Titanically with itself and with the whole
- world. A Convention decimated by the Guillotine; above the tenth
- man has bowed his neck to the axe. Which has seen Carmagnoles
- danced before it, and patriotic strophes sung amid Church-spoils;
- the wounded of the Tenth of August defile in handbarrows; and, in
- the Pandemonial Midnight, Egalité’s dames in tricolor drink
- lemonade, and spectrum of Sieyes mount, saying, _Death sans
- phrase_. A Convention which has effervesced, and which has
- congealed; which has been red with rage, and also pale with rage:
- sitting with pistols in its pocket, drawing sword (in a moment of
- effervescence): now storming to the four winds, through a
- Danton-voice, Awake, O France, and smite the tyrants; now frozen
- mute under its Robespierre, and answering his dirge-voice by a
- dubious gasp. Assassinated, decimated; stabbed at, shot at, in
- baths, on streets and staircases; which has been the nucleus of
- Chaos. Has it not heard the chimes at midnight? It has
- deliberated, beset by a Hundred thousand armed men with
- artillery-furnaces and provision-carts. It has been betocsined,
- bestormed; over-flooded by black deluges of Sansculottism; and
- has heard the shrill cry, _Bread and Soap_. For, as we say, its
- the nucleus of Chaos; it sat as the centre of Sansculottism; and
- had spread its pavilion on the waste Deep, where is neither path
- nor landmark, neither bottom nor shore. In intrinsic valour,
- ingenuity, fidelity, and general force and manhood, it has
- perhaps not far surpassed the average of Parliaments: but in
- frankness of purpose, in singularity of position, it seeks its
- fellow. One other Sansculottic submersion, or at most two, and
- this wearied vessel of a Convention reaches land.
-
- Revolt of Germinal Twelfth ended as a vain cry; moribund
- Sansculottism was swept back into invisibility. There it has lain
- moaning, these six weeks: moaning, and also scheming. Jacobins
- disarmed, flung forth from their Tribune in mid air, must needs
- try to help themselves, in secret conclave under ground. Lo,
- therefore, on the First day of the month _Prairial_, 20th of May
- 1795, sound of the _générale_ once more; beating sharp, ran-tan,
- To arms, To arms!
-
- Sansculottism has risen, yet again, from its death-lair; waste
- wild-flowing, as the unfruitful Sea. Saint-Antoine is a-foot:
- ‘Bread and the Constitution of Ninety-three,’ so sounds it; so
- stands it written with chalk on the hats of men. They have their
- pikes, their firelocks; Paper of Grievances; standards; printed
- Proclamation, drawn up in quite official manner,—considering
- this, and also considering that, they, a much-enduring Sovereign
- People, are in Insurrection; will have Bread and the Constitution
- of Ninety-three. And so the Barriers are seized, and the
- _générale_ beats, and tocsins discourse discord. Black deluges
- overflow the Tuileries; spite of sentries, the Sanctuary itself
- is invaded: enter, to our Order of the Day, a torrent of
- dishevelled women, wailing, ‘Bread! Bread!’ President may well
- cover himself; and have his own tocsin rung in “the Pavilion of
- Unity;” the ship of the State again labours and leaks;
- overwashed, near to swamping, with unfruitful brine.
-
- What a day, once more! Women are driven out: men storm
- irresistibly in; choke all corridors, thunder at all gates.
- Deputies, putting forth head, obtest, conjure; Saint-Antoine
- rages, ‘Bread and Constitution.’ Report has risen that the
- “Convention is assassinating the women:” crushing and rushing,
- clangor and furor! The oak doors have become as oak tambourines,
- sounding under the axe of Saint-Antoine; plaster-work crackles,
- woodwork booms and jingles; door starts up;—bursts-in
- Saint-Antoine with frenzy and vociferation, Rag-standards,
- printed Proclamation, drum-music: astonishment to eye and ear.
- Gendarmes, loyal Sectioners charge through the other door; they
- are recharged; musketry exploding: Saint-Antoine cannot be
- expelled. Obtesting Deputies obtest vainly; Respect the
- President; approach not the President! Deputy Féraud, stretching
- out his hands, baring his bosom scarred in the Spanish wars,
- obtests vainly: threatens and resists vainly. Rebellious Deputy
- of the Sovereign, if thou have fought, have not we too? We have
- no bread, no Constitution! They wrench poor Féraud; they tumble
- him, trample him, wrath waxing to see itself work: they drag him
- into the corridor, dead or near it; sever his head, and fix it on
- a pike. Ah, did an unexampled Convention want this variety of
- destiny too, then? Féraud’s bloody head goes on a pike. Such a
- game has begun; Paris and the Earth may wait how it will end.
-
- And so it billows free though all Corridors; within, and without,
- far as the eye reaches, nothing but Bedlam, and the great Deep
- broken loose! President Boissy d’Anglas sits like a rock: the
- rest of the Convention is floated “to the upper benches;”
- Sectioners and Gendarmes still ranking there to form a kind of
- wall for them. And Insurrection rages; rolls its drums; will read
- its Paper of Grievances, will have this decreed, will have that.
- Covered sits President Boissy, unyielding; like a rock in the
- beating of seas. They menace him, level muskets at him, he yields
- not; they hold up Féraud’s bloody head to him, with grave stern
- air he bows to it, and yields not.
-
- And the Paper of Grievances cannot get itself read for uproar;
- and the drums roll, and the throats bawl; and Insurrection, like
- sphere-music, is inaudible for very noise: Decree us this, Decree
- us that. One man we discern bawling “for the space of an hour at
- all intervals,” ‘_Je demande l’arrestation des coquins et des
- lâches_.’ Really one of the most comprehensive Petitions ever put
- up: which indeed, to this hour, includes all that you can
- reasonably ask Constitution of the Year One, Rotten-Borough,
- Ballot-Box, or other miraculous Political Ark of the Covenant to
- do for you to the end of the world! I also _demand arrestment of
- the Knaves and Dastards_, and nothing more whatever. National
- Representation, deluged with black Sansculottism glides out; for
- help elsewhere, for safety elsewhere: here is no help.
-
- About four in the afternoon, there remain hardly more than some
- Sixty Members: mere friends, or even secret-leaders; a remnant of
- the Mountain-crest, held in silence by Thermidorian thraldom. Now
- is the time for them; now or never let them descend, and speak!
- They descend, these Sixty, invited by Sansculottism: Romme of the
- New Calendar, Ruhl of the Sacred Phial, Goujon, Duquesnoy,
- Soubrany, and the rest. Glad Sansculottism forms a ring for them;
- Romme takes the President’s chair; they begin resolving and
- decreeing. Fast enough now comes Decree after Decree, in
- alternate brief strains, or strophe and antistrophe,—what will
- cheapen bread, what will awaken the dormant lion. And at every
- new Decree, Sansculottism shouts, Decreed, Decreed; and rolls its
- drums.
-
- Fast enough; the work of months in hours,—when see, a Figure
- enters, whom in the lamp-light we recognise to be Legendre; and
- utters words: fit to be hissed out! And then see, Section
- Lepelletier or other Muscadin Section enters, and Gilt Youth,
- with levelled bayonets, countenances screwed to the
- sticking-place! Tramp, tramp, with bayonets gleaming in the
- lamp-light: what can one do, worn down with long riot, grown
- heartless, dark, hungry, but roll back, but rush back, and escape
- who can? The very windows need to be thrown up, that
- Sansculottism may escape fast enough. Money-changer Sections and
- Gilt Youth sweep them forth, with steel besom, far into the
- depths of Saint-Antoine. Triumph once more! The Decrees of that
- Sixty are not so much as rescinded; they are declared null and
- non-extant. Romme, Ruhl, Goujon and the ringleaders, some
- thirteen in all, are decreed Accused. Permanent-session ends at
- three in the morning.[775] Sansculottism, once more flung
- resupine, lies sprawling; sprawling its _last_.
-
- Such was the First of Prairial, 20th May, 1795. Second and Third
- of Prairial, during which Sansculottism still sprawled, and
- unexpectedly rang its tocsin, and assembled in arms, availed
- Sansculottism nothing. What though with our Rommes and Ruhls,
- accused but not yet arrested, we make a new “True National
- Convention” of our own, over in the East; and put the others Out
- of Law? What though we rank in arms and march? Armed Force and
- Muscadin Sections, some thirty thousand men, environ that old
- False Convention: we can but bully one another: bandying
- nicknames, ‘_Muscadins_,’ against ‘Blooddrinkers, _Buveurs de
- Sang_.’ Féraud’s Assassin, taken with the red hand, and
- sentenced, and now near to Guillotine and Place de Grève, is
- retaken; is carried back into Saint-Antoine: to no purpose.
- Convention Sectionaries and Gilt Youth come, according to Decree,
- to seek him; nay to disarm Saint-Antoine! And they do disarm it:
- by rolling of cannon, by springing upon enemy’s cannon; by
- military audacity, and terror of the Law. Saint-Antoine
- surrenders its arms; Santerre even advising it, anxious for life
- and brewhouse. Féraud’s Assassin flings himself from a high roof:
- and all is lost.[776]
-
- Discerning which things, old Ruhl shot a pistol through his old
- white head; dashed his life in pieces, as he had done the Sacred
- Phial of Rheims. Romme, Goujon and the others stand ranked before
- a swiftly-appointed, swift Military Tribunal. Hearing the
- sentence, Goujon drew a knife, struck it into his breast, passed
- it to his neighbour Romme; and fell dead. Romme did the like; and
- another all but did it; Roman-death rushing on there, as in
- electric-chain, before your Bailiffs could intervene! The
- Guillotine had the rest.
-
- They were the _Ultimi Romanorum_. Billaud, Collot and Company are
- now ordered to be tried for life; but are found to be already
- off, shipped for Sinamarri, and the hot mud of Surinam. There let
- Billaud surround himself with flocks of tame parrots; Collot take
- the yellow fever, and drinking a whole bottle of brandy, burn up
- his entrails.[777] Sansculottism spraws no more. The dormant lion
- has become a dead one; and now, as we see, any hoof may smite
- him.
-
-
- Chapter 3.7.VI.
- Grilled Herrings.
-
- So dies Sansculottism, the _body_ of Sansculottism, or is
- changed. Its ragged Pythian Carmagnole-dance has transformed
- itself into a Pyrrhic, into a dance of Cabarus Balls.
- Sansculottism is dead; extinguished by new _isms_ of that kind,
- which were its own natural progeny; and is buried, we may say,
- with such deafening jubilation and disharmony of funeral-knell on
- their part, that only after some half century or so does one
- begin to learn clearly why it ever was alive.
-
- And yet a meaning lay in it: Sansculottism verily was alive, a
- New-Birth of TIME; nay it still lives, and is not dead, but
- changed. The _soul_ of it still lives; still works far and wide,
- through one bodily shape into another less amorphous, as is the
- way of cunning Time with his New-Births:—till, in some perfected
- shape, it embrace the whole circuit of the world! For the wise
- man may now everywhere discern that he must found on his manhood,
- not on the garnitures of his manhood. He who, in these Epochs of
- our Europe, founds on garnitures, formulas, culottisms of what
- sort soever, is founding on old cloth and sheep-skin, and cannot
- endure. But as for the body of Sansculottism, that is dead and
- buried,—and, one hopes, need not reappear, in primary amorphous
- shape, for another thousand years!
-
- It was the frightfullest thing ever borne of Time? One of the
- frightfullest. This Convention, now grown Anti-Jacobin, did, with
- an eye to justify and fortify itself, publish Lists of what the
- Reign of Terror had perpetrated: Lists of Persons Guillotined.
- The Lists, cries splenetic Abbé Montgaillard, were not complete.
- They contain the names of, How many persons thinks the
- reader?—Two Thousand all but a few. There were above Four
- Thousand, cries Montgaillard: so many were guillotined,
- fusilladed, noyaded, done to dire death; of whom Nine Hundred
- were women.[778] It is a horrible sum of human lives, M.
- l’Abbé:—some ten times as many shot rightly on a field of battle,
- and one might have had his Glorious-Victory with _Te-Deum_. It is
- not far from the two-hundredth part of what perished in the
- entire Seven Years War. By which Seven Years War, did not the
- great Fritz wrench Silesia from the great Theresa; and a
- Pompadour, stung by epigrams, satisfy herself that she could not
- be an Agnes Sorel? The head of man is a strange vacant
- sounding-shell, M. l’Abbé; and studies Cocker to small purpose.
-
- But what if History, somewhere on this Planet, were to hear of a
- Nation, the third soul of whom had not for thirty weeks each year
- as many third-rate potatoes as would sustain him?[779] History,
- in that case, feels bound to consider that starvation is
- starvation; that starvation from age to age presupposes much:
- History ventures to assert that the French Sansculotte of
- Ninety-three, who, roused from long death-sleep, could rush at
- once to the frontiers, and die fighting for an immortal Hope and
- Faith of Deliverance for him and his, was but the
- _second_-miserablest of men! The Irish Sans-potato, had he not
- senses then, nay a soul? In his frozen darkness, it was bitter
- for him to die famishing; bitter to see his children famish. It
- was bitter for him to be a beggar, a liar and a knave. Nay, if
- that dreary Greenland-wind of benighted Want, perennial from sire
- to son, had frozen him into a kind of torpor and numb callosity,
- so that he saw not, felt not, was this, for a creature with a
- soul in it, some assuagement; or the cruellest wretchedness of
- all?
-
- Such things were, such things are; and they go on in silence
- peaceably: and Sansculottisms follow them. History, looking back
- over this France through long times, back to Turgot’s time for
- instance, when dumb Drudgery staggered up to its King’s Palace,
- and in wide expanse of sallow faces, squalor and winged
- raggedness, presented hieroglyphically its Petition of
- Grievances; and for answer got hanged on a “new gallows forty
- feet high,”—confesses mournfully that there is no period to be
- met with, in which the general Twenty-five Millions of France
- suffered _less_ than in this period which they name Reign of
- Terror! But it was not the Dumb Millions that suffered here; it
- was the Speaking Thousands, and Hundreds, and Units; who shrieked
- and published, and made the world ring with their wail, as they
- could and should: that is the grand peculiarity. The
- frightfullest Births of Time are never the loud-speaking ones,
- for these soon die; they are the silent ones, which can live from
- century to century! Anarchy, hateful as Death, is abhorrent to
- the whole nature of man; and must itself soon die.
-
- Wherefore let all men know what of depth and of height is still
- revealed in man; and, with fear and wonder, with just sympathy
- and just antipathy, with clear eye and open heart, contemplate it
- and appropriate it; and draw innumerable inferences from it. This
- inference, for example, among the first: “That if the gods of
- this lower world will sit on their glittering thrones, indolent
- as Epicurus’ gods, with the living Chaos of Ignorance and Hunger
- weltering uncared for at their feet, and smooth Parasites
- preaching, Peace, peace, when there is no peace,” then the dark
- Chaos, it would seem, will rise; has risen, and O Heavens! has it
- not tanned their skins into breeches for itself? That there be no
- second Sansculottism in our Earth for a thousand years, let us
- understand well what the first was; and let Rich and Poor of us
- go and do _otherwise_.—But to our tale.
-
- The Muscadin Sections greatly rejoice; Cabarus Balls gyrate: the
- well-nigh insoluble problem _Republic without Anarchy_, have we
- not solved it?—Law of Fraternity or Death is gone: chimerical
- _Obtain-who-need_ has become practical _Hold-who-have_. To
- anarchic Republic of the Poverties there has succeeded orderly
- Republic of the Luxuries; which will continue as long as it can.
-
- On the Pont au Change, on the Place de Grève, in long sheds,
- Mercier, in these summer evenings, saw working men at their
- repast. One’s allotment of daily bread has sunk to an ounce and a
- half. “Plates containing each three grilled herrings, sprinkled
- with shorn onions, wetted with a little vinegar; to this add some
- morsel of boiled prunes, and lentils swimming in a clear sauce:
- at these frugal tables, the cook’s gridiron hissing near by, and
- the pot simmering on a fire between two stones, I have seen them
- ranged by the hundred; consuming, without bread, their scant
- messes, far too moderate for the keenness of their appetite, and
- the extent of their stomach.”[780] Seine water, rushing plenteous
- by, will supply the deficiency.
-
- O man of Toil, thy struggling and thy daring, these six long
- years of insurrection and tribulation, thou hast profited nothing
- by it, then? Thou consumest thy herring and water, in the blessed
- gold-red evening. O why was the Earth so beautiful, becrimsoned
- with dawn and twilight, if man’s dealings with man were to make
- it a vale of scarcity, of tears, not even soft tears? Destroying
- of Bastilles, discomfiting of Brunswicks, fronting of
- Principalities and Powers, of Earth and Tophet, all that thou
- hast dared and endured,—it was for a Republic of the Cabarus
- Saloons? Patience; thou must have patience: the end is not yet.
-
-
- Chapter 3.7.VII.
- The Whiff of Grapeshot.
-
- In fact, what can be more natural, one may say inevitable, as a
- Post-Sansculottic transitionary state, than even this? Confused
- wreck of a Republic of the Poverties, which ended in Reign of
- Terror, is arranging itself into such composure as it can.
- Evangel of Jean-Jacques, and most other Evangels, becoming
- incredible, what is there for it but return to the old Evangel of
- Mammon? _Contrat-Social_ is true or untrue, Brotherhood is
- Brotherhood or Death; but money always will buy money’s worth: in
- the wreck of human dubitations, this remains indubitable, that
- Pleasure is pleasant. Aristocracy of Feudal Parchment has passed
- away with a mighty rushing; and now, by a natural course, we
- arrive at Aristocracy of the Moneybag. It is the course through
- which all European Societies are at this hour travelling.
- Apparently a still baser sort of Aristocracy? An infinitely
- baser; the basest yet known!
-
- In which however there is this advantage, that, like Anarchy
- itself, it cannot continue. Hast thou considered how Thought is
- stronger than Artillery-parks, and (were it fifty years after
- death and martyrdom, or were it two thousand years) writes and
- unwrites Acts of Parliament, removes mountains; models the World
- like soft clay? Also how the beginning of all Thought, worth the
- name, is Love; and the wise head never yet was, without first the
- generous heart? The Heavens cease not their bounty: they send us
- generous hearts into every generation. And now what generous
- heart can pretend to itself, or be hoodwinked into believing,
- that Loyalty to the Moneybag is a noble Loyalty? Mammon, cries
- the generous heart out of all ages and countries, is the basest
- of known Gods, even of known Devils. In him what glory is there,
- that ye should worship him? No glory discernable; not even
- terror: at best, detestability, ill-matched with
- despicability!—Generous hearts, discerning, on this hand,
- widespread Wretchedness, dark without and within, moistening its
- ounce-and-half of bread with tears; and on that hand, mere Balls
- in fleshcoloured drawers, and inane or foul glitter of such
- sort,—cannot but ejaculate, cannot but announce: Too much, O
- divine Mammon; somewhat too much!—The voice of these, once
- announcing itself, carries _fiat_ and _pereat_ in it, for all
- things here below.
-
- Meanwhile, we will hate Anarchy as Death, which it is; and the
- things worse than Anarchy shall be hated _more._ Surely Peace
- alone is fruitful. Anarchy is destruction: a burning up, say, of
- Shams and Insupportabilities; but which leaves Vacancy behind.
- Know this also, that out of a world of Unwise nothing but an
- Unwisdom can be made. Arrange it, Constitution-build it, sift it
- through Ballot-Boxes as thou wilt, it is and remains an
- Unwisdom,—the new prey of new quacks and unclean things, the
- latter end of it slightly better than the beginning. Who can
- bring a wise thing out of men unwise? Not one. And so Vacancy and
- general Abolition having come for this France, what can Anarchy
- do more? Let there be Order, were it under the Soldier’s Sword;
- let there be Peace, that the bounty of the Heavens be not spilt;
- that what of Wisdom they do send us bring fruit in its season!—It
- remains to be seen how the quellers of Sansculottism were
- themselves quelled, and sacred right of Insurrection was blown
- away by gunpowder: wherewith this singular eventful History
- called _French Revolution_ ends.
-
- The Convention, driven such a course by wild wind, wild tide, and
- steerage and non-steerage, these three years, has become weary of
- its own existence, sees all men weary of it; and wishes heartily
- to finish. To the last, it has to strive with contradictions: it
- is now getting fast ready with a Constitution, yet knows no
- peace. Sieyes, we say, is making the Constitution once more; has
- as good as made it. Warned by experience, the great Architect
- alters much, admits much. Distinction of Active and Passive
- Citizen, that is, Money-qualification for Electors: nay Two
- Chambers, “Council of Ancients,” as well as “Council of Five
- Hundred;” to that conclusion have we come! In a like spirit,
- eschewing that fatal self-denying ordinance of your Old
- Constituents, we enact not only that actual Convention Members
- are re-eligible, but that Two-thirds of them must be re-elected.
- The Active Citizen Electors shall for this time have free choice
- of only One-third of their National Assembly. Such enactment, of
- Two-thirds to be re-elected, we append to our Constitution; we
- submit our Constitution to the Townships of France, and say,
- Accept _both_, or reject both. Unsavoury as this appendix may be,
- the Townships, by overwhelming majority, accept and ratify. With
- Directory of Five; with Two good Chambers, double-majority of
- them nominated by ourselves, one hopes this Constitution may
- prove final. _March_ it will; for the legs of it, the re-elected
- Two-thirds, are already there, able to march. Sieyes looks at his
- Paper Fabric with just pride.
-
- But now see how the contumacious Sections, Lepelletier foremost,
- kick against the pricks! Is it not manifest infraction of one’s
- Elective Franchise, Rights of Man, and Sovereignty of the People,
- this appendix of re-electing _your_ Two-thirds? Greedy tyrants
- who would perpetuate yourselves!—For the truth is, victory over
- Saint-Antoine, and long right of Insurrection, has spoiled these
- men. Nay spoiled all men. Consider too how each man was free to
- hope what he liked; and now there is to be no hope, there is to
- be fruition, fruition of _this_.
-
- In men spoiled by long right of Insurrection, what confused
- ferments will rise, tongues once begun wagging! Journalists
- declaim, your Lacretelles, Laharpes; Orators spout. There is
- Royalism traceable in it, and Jacobinism. On the West Frontier,
- in deep secrecy, Pichegru, durst he trust his Army, is treating
- with Condé: in these Sections, there spout wolves in sheep’s
- clothing, masked Emigrants and Royalists![781] All men, as we
- say, had hoped, each that the Election would do something for his
- own side: and now there is no Election, or only the third of one.
- Black is united with white against this clause of the Two-thirds;
- all the Unruly of France, who see their trade thereby near
- ending.
-
- Section Lepelletier, after Addresses enough, finds that such
- clause is a manifest infraction; that it, Lepelletier, for one,
- will simply not conform thereto; and invites all other free
- Sections to join it, “in central Committee,” in resistance to
- oppression.[782] The Sections join it, nearly all; strong with
- their Forty Thousand fighting men. The Convention therefore may
- look to itself! Lepelletier, on this 12th day of Vendémiaire, 4th
- of October 1795, is sitting in open contravention, in its Convent
- of Filles Saint-Thomas, Rue Vivienne, with guns primed. The
- Convention has some Five Thousand regular troops at hand;
- Generals in abundance; and a Fifteen Hundred of miscellaneous
- persecuted Ultra-Jacobins, whom in this crisis it has hastily got
- together and armed, under the title _Patriots of Eighty-nine_.
- Strong in Law, it sends its General Menou to disarm Lepelletier.
-
- General Menou marches accordingly, with due summons and
- demonstration; with no result. General Menou, about eight in the
- evening, finds that he is standing ranked in the Rue Vivienne,
- emitting vain summonses; with primed guns pointed out of every
- window at him; and that he cannot disarm Lepelletier. He has to
- return, with whole skin, but without success; and be thrown into
- arrest as “a traitor.” Whereupon the whole Forty Thousand join
- this Lepelletier which cannot be vanquished: to what hand shall a
- quaking Convention now turn? Our poor Convention, after such
- voyaging, just entering harbour, so to speak, has _struck on the
- bar;_—and labours there frightfully, with breakers roaring round
- it, Forty thousand of them, like to wash it, and its Sieyes Cargo
- and the whole future of France, into the deep! Yet one last time,
- it struggles, ready to perish.
-
- Some call for Barras to be made Commandant; he conquered in
- Thermidor. Some, what is more to the purpose, bethink them of the
- Citizen Buonaparte, unemployed Artillery Officer, who took
- Toulon. A man of head, a man of action: Barras is named
- Commandant’s-Cloak; this young Artillery Officer is named
- Commandant. He was in the Gallery at the moment, and heard it; he
- withdrew, some half hour, to consider with himself: after a half
- hour of grim compressed considering, to be or not to be, he
- answers _Yea_.
-
- And now, a man of head being at the centre of it, the whole
- matter gets vital. Swift, to Camp of Sablons; to secure the
- Artillery, there are not twenty men guarding it! A swift
- Adjutant, Murat is the name of him, gallops; gets thither some
- minutes within time, for Lepelletier was also on march that way:
- the Cannon are ours. And now beset this post, and beset that;
- rapid and firm: at Wicket of the Louvre, in Cul de Sac Dauphin,
- in Rue Saint-Honoré, from Pont Neuf all along the north Quays,
- southward to Pont _ci-devant_ Royal,—rank round the Sanctuary of
- the Tuileries, a ring of steel discipline; let every gunner have
- his match burning, and all men stand to their arms!
-
- Thus there is Permanent-session through night; and thus at
- sunrise of the morrow, there is seen sacred Insurrection once
- again: vessel of State labouring on the bar; and tumultuous sea
- all round her, beating _générale_, arming and sounding,—not
- ringing tocsin, for we have left no tocsin but our own in the
- Pavilion of Unity. It is an imminence of shipwreck, for the whole
- world to gaze at. Frightfully she labours, that poor ship, within
- cable-length of port; huge peril for her. However, she has a man
- at the helm. Insurgent messages, received, and not received;
- messenger admitted blindfolded; counsel and counter-counsel: the
- poor ship labours!—Vendémiaire 13th, year 4: curious enough, of
- all days, it is the Fifth day of October, anniversary of that
- Menad-march, six years ago; by sacred right of Insurrection we
- are got thus far.
-
- Lepelletier has seized the Church of Saint-Roch; has seized the
- Pont Neuf, our piquet there retreating without fire. Stray shots
- fall from Lepelletier; rattle down on the very Tuileries
- staircase. On the other hand, women advance dishevelled,
- shrieking, Peace; Lepelletier behind them waving its hat in sign
- that we shall fraternise. Steady! The Artillery Officer is steady
- as bronze; can be quick as lightning. He sends eight hundred
- muskets with ball-cartridges to the Convention itself; honourable
- Members shall act with these in case of extremity: whereat they
- look grave enough. Four of the afternoon is struck.[783]
- Lepelletier, making nothing by messengers, by fraternity or
- hat-waving, bursts out, along the Southern Quai Voltaire, along
- streets, and passages, treble-quick, in huge veritable onslaught!
- Whereupon, thou bronze Artillery Officer—? ‘Fire!’ say the bronze
- lips. Roar and again roar, continual, volcano-like, goes his
- great gun, in the Cul de Sac Dauphin against the Church of
- Saint-Roch; go his great guns on the Pont Royal; go all his great
- guns;—blow to air some two hundred men, mainly about the Church
- of Saint-Roch! Lepelletier cannot stand such horse-play; no
- Sectioner can stand it; the Forty-thousand yield on all sides,
- scour towards covert. “Some hundred or so of them gathered both
- Theatre de la République; but,” says he, “a few shells dislodged
- them. It was all finished at six.”
-
- The Ship is _over_ the bar, then; free she bounds shoreward,—amid
- shouting and vivats! Citoyen Buonaparte is “named General of the
- Interior, by acclamation;” quelled Sections have to disarm in
- such humour as they may; sacred right of Insurrection is gone for
- ever! The Sieyes Constitution can disembark itself, and begin
- marching. The miraculous Convention Ship has got to land;—and is
- there, shall we figuratively say, changed, as Epic Ships are
- wont, into a kind of _Sea Nymph_, never to sail more; to roam the
- waste Azure, a Miracle in History!
-
- “It is false,” says Napoleon, “that we fired first with blank
- charge; it had been a waste of life to do that.” Most false: the
- firing was with sharp and sharpest shot: to all men it was plain
- that here was no sport; the rabbets and plinths of Saint-Roch
- Church show splintered by it, to this hour.—Singular: in old
- Broglie’s time, six years ago, this Whiff of Grapeshot was
- promised; but it could not be given then, could not have profited
- then. Now, however, the time is come for it, and the man; and
- behold, you have it; and the thing we specifically call _French
- Revolution_ is blown into space by it, and become a thing that
- was!—
-
-
- Chapter 3.7.VIII.
- Finis.
-
- Homer’s Epos, it is remarked, is like a Bas-relief sculpture: it
- does not conclude, but merely ceases. Such, indeed, is the Epos
- of Universal History itself. Directorates, Consulates,
- Emperorships, Restorations, Citizen-Kingships succeed this
- Business in due series, in due genesis one out of the other.
- Nevertheless the First-parent of all these may be said to have
- gone to air in the way we see. A Baboeuf Insurrection, next year,
- will die in the birth; stifled by the Soldiery. A Senate, if
- tinged with Royalism, can be purged by the Soldiery; and an
- Eighteenth of Fructidor transacted by the mere shew of
- bayonets.[784] Nay Soldiers’ bayonets can be used _à posteriori_
- on a Senate, and make it leap out of window,—still bloodless; and
- produce an Eighteenth of Brumaire.[785] Such changes must happen:
- but they are managed by intriguings, caballings, and then by
- orderly word of command; almost like mere changes of Ministry.
- Not in general by sacred right of Insurrection, but by milder
- methods growing ever milder, shall the Events of French history
- be henceforth brought to pass.
-
- It is admitted that this Directorate, which owned, at its
- starting, these three things, an “old table, a sheet of paper,
- and an ink-bottle,” and no visible money or arrangement
- whatever,[786] did wonders: that France, since the Reign of
- Terror hushed itself, has been a new France, awakened like a
- giant out of torpor; and has gone on, in the Internal Life of it,
- with continual progress. As for the External form and forms of
- Life,—what can we say except that out of the Eater there comes
- Strength; out of the Unwise there comes _not_ Wisdom! Shams are
- burnt up; nay, what as yet is the peculiarity of France, the very
- Cant of them is burnt up. The new Realities are not yet come: ah
- no, only Phantasms, Paper models, tentative Prefigurements of
- such! In France there are now Four Million Landed Properties;
- that black portent of an Agrarian Law is as it were _realised._
- What is still stranger, we understand all Frenchmen have “the
- right of duel;” the Hackney-coachman with the Peer, if insult be
- given: such is the law of Public Opinion. Equality at least in
- death! The Form of Government is by Citizen King, frequently shot
- at, not yet shot.
-
- On the whole, therefore, has it not been fulfilled what was
- prophesied, _ex-postfacto_ indeed, by the Archquack Cagliostro,
- or another? He, as he looked in rapt vision and amazement into
- these things, thus spake:[787] “Ha! What is _this?_ Angels,
- Uriel, Anachiel, and the other Five; Pentagon of Rejuvenescence;
- Power that destroyed Original Sin; Earth, Heaven, and thou Outer
- Limbo, which men name Hell! Does the EMPIRE Of IMPOSTURE waver?
- Burst there, in starry sheen updarting, Light-rays from out _its_
- dark foundations; as it rocks and heaves, not in travail-throes,
- but in death-throes? Yea, Light-rays, piercing, clear, that
- salute the Heavens,—lo, they _kindle_ it; their starry clearness
- becomes as red Hellfire!
-
- “IMPOSTURE is in flames, Imposture is burnt up: one red sea of
- Fire, wild-billowing enwraps the World; with its fire-tongue,
- licks at the very Stars. Thrones are hurled into it, and Dubois
- mitres, and Prebendal Stalls that drop fatness, and—ha! what see
- I?—all the _Gigs_ of Creation; all, all! Wo is me! Never since
- Pharaoh’s Chariots, in the Red-sea of water, was there wreck of
- Wheel-vehicles like this in the Sea of Fire. Desolate, as ashes,
- as gases, shall they wander in the wind.
-
- Higher, higher yet flames the Fire-Sea; crackling with new
- dislocated timber; hissing with leather and prunella. The metal
- Images are molten; the marble Images become mortar-lime; the
- stone Mountains sulkily explode. RESPECTABILITY, with all her
- collected Gigs inflamed for funeral pyre, wailing, leaves the
- earth: not to return save under new Avatar. Imposture, how it
- burns, through generations: how it is burnt up; for a time. The
- World is black ashes; which, ah, when will they grow green? The
- Images all run into amorphous Corinthian brass; all Dwellings of
- men destroyed; the very mountains peeled and riven, the valleys
- black and dead: it is an empty World! Wo to them that shall be
- born then!—A King, a Queen (ah me!) were hurled in; did rustle
- once; flew aloft, crackling, like paper-scroll. Iscariot Egalité
- was hurled in; thou grim De Launay, with thy grim Bastille; whole
- kindreds and peoples; five millions of mutually destroying Men.
- For it is the End of the Dominion of IMPOSTURE (which is Darkness
- and opaque Firedamp); and the burning up, with unquenchable fire,
- of all the Gigs that are in the Earth.” This Prophecy, we say,
- has it not been fulfilled, is it not fulfilling?
-
- And so here, O Reader, has the time come for us two to part.
- Toilsome was our journeying together; not without offence; but it
- is done. To me thou wert as a beloved shade, the disembodied or
- not yet embodied spirit of a Brother. To thee I was but as a
- Voice. Yet was our relation a kind of sacred one; doubt not that!
- Whatsoever once sacred things become hollow jargons, yet while
- the Voice of Man speaks with Man, hast thou not there the living
- fountain out of which all sacrednesses sprang, and will yet
- spring? Man, by the nature of him, is definable as “an incarnated
- Word.” Ill stands it with me if I have spoken falsely: thine also
- it was to hear truly. Farewell.
-
-
- INDEX.
-
- ABBAYE, massacres, Jourgniac, Sicard, and Maton’s account of.
-
- ACCEPTATION, grande, by Louis XVI.
-
- AGOUST, Captain d’, seizes two Parlementeers.
-
- AIGUILLON, d’, at Quiberon, account of, in favour, at death of
- Louis XV.
-
- AINTRIGUES, Count d’.
-
- ALTAR of Fatherland in Champ-de-Mars, scene at, christening at.
-
- AMIRAL, assassin, guillotined.
-
- ANGLAS, Boissy d’, President, First of Prairial.
-
- ANGOULEME, Duchesse d’, parts from her father.
-
- ANGREMONT, Collenot d’, guillotined.
-
- ANTOINETTE, Marie, splendour of, applauded, compromised by
- Diamond Necklace, griefs of, weeps, unpopular, at Dinner of
- Guards, courage of, Fifth October, at Versailles, shows herself
- to people, and Louis at Tuileries, and the Lorrainer, and
- Mirabeau, previous to flight, flight from Tuileries, captured,
- and Barnave, Coblentz intrigues, and Lamotte’s Mémoires, during
- Twentieth June, during Tenth August, as captive, and Princess de
- Lamballe, in Temple Prison, parting scene with King, to the
- Conciergerie, trial of, guillotined.
-
- ARGONNE Forest, occupied by Dumouriez, Brunswick at.
-
- ARISTOCRATS, officers in French army, number in Paris, seized,
- condition in 1794.
-
- ARLES, state of.
-
- ARMS, smiths making, search for, at Charleville, manufacture, in
- 1794, scarcity in 1792, Danton’s search for.
-
- ARMY, French, after Bastille, officered by aristocrats, to be
- disbanded, demands arrears, general mutiny of, outbreak of, Nanci
- military executions, Royalists leave, state of, in want,
- recruited, Revolutionary, fourteen armies on foot.
-
- ARRAS, guillotine at.
-
- ARRESTS in August 1792.
-
- ARSENAL, attempted destruction of.
-
- ARTOIS, M. d’, ways of, unpopularity of, memorial by, flies, at
- Coblentz, refusal to return.
-
- ASSEMBLIES, Primary and Secondary.
-
- ASSEMBLY, National, Third Estate becomes, to be extruded, stands
- grouped in the rain, occupies Tennis-Court, scene there, joined
- by clergy, doings on King’s speech, ratified by King, cannon
- pointed at, regrets Necker, after Bastille.
-
- ASSEMBLY, Constituent, National, becomes, pedantic, Irregular
- Verbs, what it can do, Night of Pentecost, Left and Right side,
- raises money, on the Veto, Fifth October, women, in Paris
- Riding-Hall, on deficit, assignats, on clergy, and riot, prepares
- for Louis’s visit, on Federation, Anacharsis Clootz, eldest of
- men, on Franklin’s death, on state of army, thanks Bouillé, on
- Nanci affair, on Emigrants, on death of Mirabeau, on escape of
- King, after capture of King, completes Constitution, dissolves
- itself, what it has done.
-
- ASSEMBLY, Legislative, First French Parliament, book of law,
- dispute with King, Baiser de Lamourette, High Court, decrees
- vetoed, scenes in, reprimands King’s ministers, declares war,
- declares France in danger, reinstates Pétion, nonplused,
- Lafayette, King and Swiss, August Tenth, becoming defunct,
- September massacres, dissolved.
-
- ASSIGNATS, origin of, false Royalist, forgers of, coach-fare in.
-
- AUBRIOT, Sieur, after King’s capture.
-
- AUBRY, Colonel, at Jalès.
-
- AUCH, M. Martin d’, in Versailles Court.
-
- AUSTRIA quarrels with France.
-
- AUSTRIAN Committee, at Tuileries.
-
- AUSTRIAN Army, invades France, defeated at Jemappes, Dumouriez
- escapes to, repulsed, Watigny.
-
- AVIGNON, Union of, described, state of, riot in church at,
- occupied by Jourdan, massacre at.
-
- BACHAUMONT, his thirty volumes.
-
- BAILLE, involuntary epigram of.
-
- BAILLY, Astronomer, account of, President of National Assembly,
- Mayor of Paris, receives Louis in Paris, and Paris Parlement, on
- Petition for Deposition, decline of, in prison, at Queen’s trial,
- guillotined cruelly.
-
- BAKERS’, French in tail at.
-
- BARBAROUX and Marat, Marseilles Deputy, and the Rolands, on Map
- of France, demand of, to Marseilles, meets Marseillese, in
- National Convention, against Robespierre, cannot be heard, the
- Girondins declining, arrested, and Charlotte Corday, retreats to
- Bourdeaux, farewell of, shoots himself.
-
- BARDY, Abbé, massacred.
-
- BARENTIN, Keeper of Seals.
-
- BARNAVE, at Grenoble, member of Assembly, one of a trio, Jacobin,
- duel with Cazalès, escorts the King from Varennes, conciliates
- Queen, becomes Constitutional, retires to Grenoble, treason, in
- prison, guillotined.
-
- BARRAS, Paul-François, in National Convention, commands in
- Thermidor, appoints Napoleon in Vendémiaire.
-
- BARRERE, Editor, at King’s trial, peace-maker, levy in mass,
- plot, banished.
-
- BARTHOLOMEW massacre.
-
- BASTILLE, Linguet’s Book on, meaning of, shots fired at, summoned
- by insurgents, besieged, capitulates, treatment of captured,
- Queret-Demery, demolished, key sent to Washington, Heroes.
-
- BAZIRE, of Mountain, imprisoned.
-
- BEARN, riot at.
-
- BEAUHARNAIS in Champ-de-Mars, Josephine, imprisoned, and
- Napoleon, at La Cabarus’s.
-
- BEAUMARCHAIS, Caron, his lawsuit, his “Mariage de Figaro,”
- commissions arms from Holland, his distress.
-
- BEAUMONT, Archbishop, notice of.
-
- BEAUREPAIRE, Governor of Verdun, shoots himself.
-
- BENTHAM, Jeremy, naturalised.
-
- BERLINE, towards Varennes.
-
- BERTHIER, Intendant, fled, arrested and massacred.
-
- BERTHIER, Commandant, at Versailles.
-
- BESENVAL, Baron, Commandant of Paris, on French Finance, in riot
- of Rue St. Antoine, on corruption of Guards, at Champ-de-Mars,
- apparition to, decamps, and Louis XVI.
-
- BETHUNE, riot at.
-
- BEURNONVILLE, with Dumouriez, imprisoned.
-
- BILLAUD-VARENNES, Jacobin, cruel, at massacres, September 1792,
- in Salut Committee, and Robespierre’s Être Suprême, accuses
- Robespierre, accused, banished.
-
- BLANC, Le, landlord at Varennes, escape of family.
-
- BLOOD, baths of.
-
- BONCHAMPS, in La Vendée War.
-
- BONNEMERE, Aubin, at Siege of Bastille.
-
- BOUILLE, at Metz, account of, character of, troops mutinous, and
- Salm regiment, intrepidity of, marches on Nanci, quells Nanci
- mutineers, at Mirabeau’s funeral, expects fugitive King, would
- liberate King, emigrates.
-
- BOUILLE, Junior, asleep at Varennes, flies to father.
-
- BOURDEAUX, priests hanged at, for Girondism.
-
- BOYER, duellist.
-
- BREST, sailors revolt, state of, in 1791, Fédérés in Paris, in
- 1793.
-
- BRETEUIL, Home-Secretary.
-
- BRETON Club, germ of Jacobins.
-
- BRETONS, deputations of, Girondins.
-
- BREZE, Marquis de, his mode of ushering, and National Assembly,
- extraordinary etiquette.
-
- BRIENNE, Loménie, anti-protestant, in Notables, incapacity of,
- failure of, arrests Paris Parlement, secret scheme, scheme
- discovered, arrests two Parlementeers, bewildered, desperate
- shifts by, wishes for Necker, dismissed, and provided for, his
- effigy burnt.
-
- BRISSAC, Duke de, commands Constitutional Guard, disbanded.
-
- BRISSOT, edits “Moniteur,” friend of Blacks, in First Parliament,
- plans in 1792, active in Assembly, in Jacobins, at Roland’s,
- pelted in Assembly, arrested, trial of, guillotined.
-
- BRITTANY, disturbances in.
-
- BROGLIE, Marshal, against Plenary Court, in command, in office,
- dismissed.
-
- BRUNSWICK, Duke, marches on France, advances, Proclamation, at
- Verdun, at Argonne, retreats.
-
- BUFFON, Mme. de, and Duke d’Orléans, at d’Orléans execution.
-
- BUTTAFUOCO, Napoleon’s letter to.
-
- BUZOT, in National Convention, arrested, retreats to Bourdeaux,
- end of.
-
- CABANIS, Physician to Mirabeau.
-
- CABARUS, Mlle., and Tallien, imprisoned.
-
- CAEN, Girondins at.
-
- CALENDAR, Romme’s new, comparative ground-scheme of.
-
- CALONNE, M. de, Financier, character of, suavity and genius of,
- his difficulties, dismissed, marriage and after-course.
-
- CALVADOS, for Girondism.
-
- CAMUS, Archivist, in National Convention, with Dumouriez,
- imprisoned.
-
- CANNON, Siamese, wooden, fever, Goethe on.
-
- CARMAGNOLE, costume, what, dances in Convention.
-
- CARNOT, Hippolyte, notice of, plan for Toulon, discovery in
- Robespierre’s pocket.
-
- CARPENTRAS, against Avignon.
-
- CARRA, on plots for King’s flight, in National Convention.
-
- CARRIER, a Revolutionist, in National Assembly, Nantes noyades,
- guillotined.
-
- CARTAUX, General, fights Girondins, at Toulon.
-
- CASTRIES, Duke de, duel with Lameth.
-
- CATHELINEAU, of La Vendée.
-
- CAVAIGNAC, Convention Representative.
-
- CAZALES, Royalist, in Constituent Assembly.
-
- CAZOTTE, author of “Diable Amoureux,” seized, saved for a time by
- his daughter.
-
- CERCLE, Social, of Fauchet.
-
- CERUTTI, his funeral oration on Mirabeau.
-
- CEVENNES, revolt of.
-
- CHABOT, of Mountain, against Kings, imprisoned.
-
- CHABRAY, Louison, at Versailles, October Fifth.
-
- CHALIER, Jacobin, Lyons, executed, body raised.
-
- CHAMBON, Dr., Mayor of Paris, retires.
-
- CHAMFORT, Cynic, arrested, suicide.
-
- CHAMP-DE-MARS, Federation, preparations for, accelerated by
- patriots, anecdotes of, Federation-scene at, funeral-service,
- Nanci, riot, Patriot petition, 1791, new Federation, 1792.
-
- CHAMPS Elysées, Menads at, festivities in.
-
- CHANTILLY Palace, a prison.
-
- CHAPT-RASTIGNAC, Abbé de, massacred.
-
- CHARENTON, Marseillese at.
-
- CHARLES I., Trial of, sold in Paris.
-
- CHARLEVILLE Artillery.
-
- CHARTRES, grain-riot at.
-
- CHATEAUBRIANDS in French Revolution.
-
- CHATELET, Achille de, advises Republic.
-
- CHATILLON-SUR-SEVRE, insurrection at.
-
- CHAUMETTE, notice of, signs petition, in governing committee, at
- King’s trial, demands constitution, arrest and death of.
-
- CHAUVELIN, Marquis de, in London, dismissed.
-
- CHENAYE, Baudin de la, massacred.
-
- CHENIER, Poet, and Mlle. Théroigne.
-
- CHEPY, at La Force in September.
-
- CHOISEUL, Duke, why dismissed.
-
- CHOISEUL, Colonel Duke, assists Louis’s flight, too late at
- Varennes.
-
- CHOISI, General, at Avignon.
-
- CHURCH, spiritual guidance, of Rome, decay of.
-
- CITIZENS, French, demeanour of.
-
- CLAIRFAIT, Commander of Austrians.
-
- CLAVIERE, edits “Moniteur,” account of, Finance Minister,
- arrested, suicide of.
-
- CLERGY, French, in States-General, conciliators of orders, joins
- Third Estate, lands, national, power of, &c.
-
- CLERMONT, flight of King through, Prussians near.
-
- CLERY, on Louis’s last scene.
-
- CLOOTZ, Anacharsis, Baron de, account of, disparagement of, in
- National Convention, universal republic of, on nullity of
- religion, purged from the Jacobins, guillotined.
-
- CLOVIS, in the Champ-de-Mars.
-
- CLUB, Electoral, at Paris, becomes Provisional Municipality,
- permanent.
-
- CLUGNY, M., as Finance Minister.
-
- COBLENTZ, Emigrants at.
-
- COBOURG and Dumouriez.
-
- COCKADES, green, tricolor, black, national, trampled, white.
-
- COFFINHAL, Judge, delivers Henriot.
-
- COIGNY, Duke de, a sinecurist.
-
- COMMISSIONERS, Convention, like Kings.
-
- COMMITTEE of Defence, Central, of Watchfulness, of Public
- Salvation, Circular of, of the Constitution, Revolutionary.
-
- COMMUNE, Council-General of the, Sovereign of France, enlisting.
-
- CONDE, Prince de, attends Louis XV., departure of.
-
- CONDE, Town, surrender of.
-
- CONDORCET, Marquis, edits “Moniteur,” Girondist, prepares
- Address, on Robespierre, death of.
-
- CONSTITUTION, French, completed, will not march, burst in pieces,
- new, of 1793.
-
- CONVENTION, National, in what case to be summoned, demanded by
- some, determined on, Deputies elected, constituted, motions in,
- work to be done, hated, politeness, effervescence of, on
- September Massacres, guard for, try the King, debate on trial,
- invite to revolt, condemn Louis, armed Girondins in, power of,
- removes to Tuileries, besieged, June 2nd, 1793, extinction of
- Girondins, Jacobins and, on forfeited property, Carmagnole,
- Goddess of Reason, Representatives, at Feast of Être Suprême, end
- of Robespierre, retrospect of, Féraud, Germinal, Prairial,
- termination, its successor.
-
- CORDAY, Charlotte, account of, in Paris, assissinates Marat,
- examined, executed.
-
- CORDELIERS, Club, Hébert in.
-
- COURT, Chevalier de.
-
- COUTHON, of Mountain, in Legislative, in National Convention, at
- Lyons, in Salut Committee, his question in Jacobins, decree of,
- arrest and execution.
-
- COVENANT, Scotch, French.
-
- CRUSSOL, Marquise de, executed.
-
- CUISSA, massacre of, at La Force.
-
- CUSSY, Girondin, retreats to Bourdeaux.
-
- CUSTINE, General, takes Mentz, retreats, censured, guillotined,
- his son guillotined.
-
- CUSTOMS and morals.
-
- DAMAS, Colonel Comte de, at Clermont, at Varennes.
-
- DAMPIERRE, General, killed.
-
- DAMPMARTIN, Captain, at riot in Rue St. Antoine, on condition of
- army, on state of France, at Avignon, on Marseillese.
-
- DANDOINS, Captain, Flight to Varennes.
-
- DANTON, notice of, President of Cordeliers, and Marat, served
- with writs, in Cordeliers Club, elected Councillor, Mirabeau of
- Sansculottes, in Jacobins, for Deposition, of Committee, August
- Tenth, Minister of Justice, after September massacre, after
- Jemappes, and Robespierre, in Netherlands, at King’s trial, on
- war, rebukes Marat, peace-maker, and Dumouriez, in Salut
- Committee, breaks with Girondins, his law of Forty sous, and
- Revolutionary Government, and Paris Municipality, retires to
- Arcis, and Robespierre, arrested, tried, and guillotined.
-
- DAVID, Painter, in National Convention, works by, hemlock with
- Robespierre.
-
- DEMOCRACY, on Bunker Hill, spread of, in France.
-
- DEPARTMENTS, France divided into.
-
- DESEZE, Pleader for Louis.
-
- DESHUTTES massacred, Fifth October.
-
- DESILLES, Captain, in Nanci.
-
- DESLONS, Captain, at Varennes, would liberate the King.
-
- DESMOULINS, Camille, notice of, in arms at Café de Foy, on
- Insurrection of Women, in Cordeliers Club, and Brissot, in
- National Convention, on Sansculottism, on plots, suspect, for a
- committee of mercy, ridicules law of the suspect, his Journal,
- trial of, guillotined, widow guillotined.
-
- DIDEROT, prisoner in Vincennes.
-
- DINNERS, defined.
-
- DOPPET, General, at Lyons.
-
- DROUET, Jean B., notice of, discovers Royalty in flight, raises
- Varennes, blocks the bridge, defends his prize, rewarded, to be
- in Convention, captured by Austrians.
-
- DUBARRY, Dame, and Louis XV., flight of, imprisoned.
-
- DUBOIS Crancé bombards and captures Lyons.
-
- DUCHATEL votes, wrapped in blankets, at Caen.
-
- DUCOS, Girondin.
-
- DUGOMMIER, General, at Toulon.
-
- DUHAMEL, killed by Marseillese.
-
- DUMONT, on Mirabeau.
-
- DUMOURIEZ, notice by, account of him, in Brittany, at Nantes, in
- La Vendée, sent for to Paris, Foreign Minister, dismissed, to
- Army, disobeys Lückner, Commander-in-Chief, his army, Council of
- War, seizes Argonne Forest, Grand Pre, and mutineers, and Marat
- in Paris, to Netherlands, at Jemappes, in Paris, discontented,
- retreats, beaten, will join the enemy, arrests his arresters,
- escapes to Austrians.
-
- DUPONT, Deputy, Atheist.
-
- DUPORT, Adrien, in Paris Parlement, in Constituent Assembly, one
- of a trio, law-reformer.
-
- DUPORTAIL, in office.
-
- DUROSOY, Royalist, guillotined.
-
- DUSAULX, M., on taking of Bastille, notice of.
-
- DUTERTRE, in office.
-
- EDGEWORTH, Abbé, attends Louis, at execution of Louis.
-
- EGLANTINE, Fabre d’, in National Convention, assists in New
- Calendar, imprisoned.
-
- ELIE, Capt., at Siege of Bastille, after victory.
-
- ELIZABETH, Princess, flight to Varennes, August 10th, in Temple
- Prison, guillotined.
-
- ENGLAND declares war on France, captures Toulon.
-
- ENRAGED Club, the.
-
- EQUALITY, reign of.
-
- ESCUYER, Patriot l’, at Avignon.
-
- ESPREMENIL, Duval d’, notice of, patriot, speaker in Paris
- Parlement, with crucifix, discovers Brienne’s plot, arrest and
- speech of, turncoat, in Constituent Assembly, beaten by populace,
- guillotined, widow guillotined.
-
- ESTAING, Count d’, notice of, National Colonel, Royalist, at
- Queen’s Trial.
-
- ESTATE, Fourth, of Editors.
-
- ETOILE, beginning of Federation at.
-
- FAMINE, in France, in 1788-1792, Louis and Assembly try to
- relieve, in 1792, and remedy, remedy by maximum, &c.
-
- FAUCHET, Abbé, at siege of Bastille, his Te-Deums, his harangue
- on Franklin, his Cercle Social, in First Parliament, motion by,
- doffs his insignia, King’s death, lamentation, will demit, trial
- of.
-
- FAUSSIGNY, sword in hand.
-
- FAVRAS, Chevalier, execution of.
-
- FEDERATION, spread of, of Champ-de-Mars, deputies to, human
- species at, ceremonies of, a new, 1792.
-
- FERAUD, in National Convention, massacred there.
-
- FERSEN, Count, gets Berline built, acts coachman in King’s
- flight.
-
- FEUILLANS, Club, denounce Jacobins, decline, extinguished,
- Battalion, Justices and Patriotism.
-
- FINANCES, serious state of, how to be improved.
-
- FLANDERS, how Louis XV. conquers.
-
- FLANDRE, regiment de, at Versailles.
-
- FLESSELLES, Paris Provost, shot.
-
- FLEURIOT, Mayor, guillotined.
-
- FLEURY, Joly de, Controller of Finance.
-
- FONTENAI, Mme.
-
- FORSTER (FOSTER), and French soldier, account of.
-
- FOUCHE, at Lyons.
-
- FOULON, bad repute of, sobriquet, funeral of, alive, judged,
- massacred.
-
- FOURNIER, and Orleans Prisoners.
-
- FOY, Café de, revolutionary.
-
- FRANCE, abject, under Louis XV., Kings of, early history of,
- decay of Kingship in, on accession of Louis XVI., and Philosophy,
- famine in, 1775, state of, prior Revolution, aids America, in
- 1788, inflammable, July 1789, gibbets, general overturn, how to
- reform, riotousness of, Mirabeau and, after King’s flight,
- petitions against Royalty, warfare of towns in, European league
- against, terror of, in Spring 1792, decree of war, France in
- danger, general enlisting, rage of, Autumn 1792, Marat’s
- Circular, September, Sansculottic, declaration of war, Mountain
- and Girondins divide, communes of, coalition against, levy in
- mass.
-
- FRANKLIN, Ambassador to France, his death lamented, bust in
- Jacobins.
-
- FRENCH Anglomania, character of the, literature, in 1784,
- Parlements, nature of, Mirabeau, type of the, mob, character of.
-
- FRERON, notice of, renegade, Gilt Youth of.
-
- FRETEAU, at Royal Session, arrested, liberated.
-
- FREYS, the Jew brokers, imprisoned.
-
- GALLOIS, to La Vendée.
-
- GAMAIN, Sieur, informer.
-
- GARAT, Minister of Justice.
-
- GENLIS, Mme., account of, and D’Orléans, to Switzerland.
-
- GENSONNE, Girondist, to La Vendée, arrested, trial of.
-
- GEORGES-CADOUDAL, in La Vendée.
-
- GEORGET, at taking of Bastille.
-
- GERARD, Farmer, Rennes deputy.
-
- GERLE, Dom, at Theot’s.
-
- GERMINAL Twelfth, First of April 1795.
-
- GIRONDINS, origin of term, in National Convention, against
- Robespierre, on King’s trial, and Jacobins, formula of, favourers
- of, schemes of, to be seized? break with Danton, armed against
- Mountain, accuse Marat, departments, commission of twelve,
- commission broken, arrested, dispersed, war by, retreat of
- eleven, trial and death of.
-
- GOBEL, Archbishop to be, renounces religion, arrested,
- guillotined.
-
- GOETHE, at Argonne, in Prussian retreat, at Mentz.
-
- GOGUELAT, Engineer, assists Louis’s flight, intrigues.
-
- GONDRAN, captain of Guard.
-
- GORSAS, Journalist, pleads for Swiss, in National Convention, his
- house broken into, guillotined.
-
- GOUJON, Member of Convention, in riot of Prairial, suicide of.
-
- GOUPIL, on extreme left.
-
- GOUVION, Major-General, at Paris, flight to Varennes, death of.
-
- GOVERNMENT, Maurepas’s, bad state of French, French
- revolutionary, Danton on.
-
- GRAVE, Chev. de, War Minister, loses head.
-
- GREGOIRE, Curé, notice of, in National Convention, detained in
- Convention, and destruction of religion.
-
- GUADET, Girondin, cross-questions Ministers, arrested,
- guillotined.
-
- GUARDS, Swiss, and French, at Réveillon riot, French refuse to
- fire, come to Palais-Royal, fire on Royal-Allemand, to Bastille,
- name changed, National origin of, number of, Body at Versailles,
- October Fifth, fight, fly in Château, Body, and French, at
- Versailles, National, at Nanci, French, last appearance of,
- National, how commanded, 1791, Constitutional, dismissed,
- Filles-St.-Thomas, routed, Swiss, at Tuileries, ordered to cease,
- destroyed, eulogy of, Departmental, for National Convention.
-
- GUILLAUME, Clerk, pursues King.
-
- GUILLOTIN, Doctor, summoned by Paris Parlement, invents the
- guillotine, deputed to King.
-
- GUILLOTINE invented, described, in action, to be improved, number
- of sufferers by.
-
- HASSENFRATZ, in War-office.
-
- HÉBERT, Editor of “Père Duchene,” signs petition, arrested, at
- Queen’s trial, quickens Revolutionary Tribunal, arrested, and
- guillotined, widow guillotined.
-
- HENAULT, President, on Surnames.
-
- HENRIOT, General of National Guard, and the Convention, to
- deliver Robespierre, seized, rescued, end of.
-
- HERBOIS, Collot d’, notice of, in National Convention, at Lyons
- massacre, in Salut Committee, attempt to assassinate, bullied at
- Jacobins, President, night of Thermidor, accused, banished.
-
- HERITIER, Jerome l’, shot at Versailles.
-
- HOCHE, Sergeant Lazare, General against Prussia, pacifies La
- Vendée,
-
- HONDSCHOOTEN, Battle of.
-
- HOTEL des Invalides, plundered.
-
- HOTEL de Ville, after Bastille taken, harangues at.
-
- HOUCHARD, General, unsuccessful.
-
- HOWE, Lord, defeats French.
-
- HUGUENIN, Patriot, tocsin in heart, 20th June 1792.
-
- HULIN, half-pay, at siege of Bastille.
-
- INISDAL’S, Count d’, plot.
-
- INSURRECTION, most sacred of duties, of Women, of August Tenth,
- difficult, of Paris, against Girondins, sacred right of, last
- Sansculottic, of Baboeuf.
-
- ISNARD, Max, notice of, in First Parliament, on Ministers, to
- demolish Paris.
-
- JACOB, Jean Claude, father of men.
-
- JACOBINS, Society, beginning of, Hall, described, and members,
- Journal &c., of, daughters of, at Nanci, suppressed, Club
- increases, and Mirabeau, prospers, “Lords of the Articles,”
- extinguishes Feuillans, Hall enlarged, described, and
- Marseillese, and Lavergne, message to Dumouriez, missionaries in
- Army, on King’s trial, on accusation of Robespierre, against
- Girondins, National Convention and, Popular Tribunals of, purges
- members, to become dominant, locked out by Legendre, begs back
- its keys, decline of, mobbed, suspended, hunted down.
-
- JALES, Camp of, Royalists at, destroyed.
-
- JAUCOURT, Chevalier, and Liberty.
-
- JAY, Dame le.
-
- JONES, Paul, equipped for America, at Paris, account of, burial
- of.
-
- JOUNNEAU, Deputy, in danger in September.
-
- JOURDAN, General, repels Austria.
-
- JOURDAN, Coupe-tete, at Versailles, leader of Brigands, supreme
- in Avignon, massacre by, flight of, guillotined.
-
- JULIEN, Sieur Jean, guillotined.
-
- KAUNITZ, Prince, denounces Jacobins.
-
- KELLERMANN, at Valmy.
-
- KLOPSTOCK, naturalised.
-
- KNOX, John, and the Virgin.
-
- KORFF, Baroness de, in flight to Varennes.
-
- LAFARGE, President of Jacobins, Madame Lavergne and.
-
- LAFAYETTE, bust of, erected, against Calonne, demands by, in
- Notables, Cromwell-Grandison, Bastille time, Vice-President of
- National Assembly, General of National Guard, resigns and
- reaccepts, Scipio-Americanus, thanked, rewarded, French Guards
- and, to Versailles, Fifth October, at Versailles, swears the
- Guards, Feuillant, on abolition of Titles, at Champ-de-Mars
- Federation, at De Castries’ riot, character of, in Day of
- Poniards, difficult position of, at King’s going to St. Cloud,
- resigns and reaccepts, at flight from Tuileries, after escape of
- King, moves for amnesty, resigns, decline of, doubtful against
- Jacobins, journey to Paris, to be accused, flies to Holland.
-
- LAFLOTTE, poison-plot, informer.
-
- LAIS, Sieur, Jacobin, with Louis Philippe.
-
- LALLY, death of.
-
- LAMARCHE, guillotined.
-
- LAMARCK’S, illness of Mirabeau at.
-
- LAMBALLE, Princess de, to England, intrigues for Royalists, at La
- Force, massacred.
-
- LAMETH, in Constituent Assembly, one of a trio, brothers, notice
- of, Jacobins, Charles, Duke de Castries, brothers become
- constitutional, Theodore, in First Parliament.
-
- LAMOIGNON, Keeper of Seals, dismissed, effigy burned, and death
- of.
-
- LAMOTTE, Countess de, and Diamond Necklace, in the Salpêtrière,
- “Memoirs” burned, in London, M. de, in prison.
-
- LAMOURETTE, Abbé, kiss of, guillotined.
-
- LANJUINAIS, Girondin, clothes torn, arrested, recalled.
-
- LAPORTE, Intendant, guillotined.
-
- LARIVIERE, Justice, imprisoned.
-
- LA ROCHEJACQUELIN, in La Vendée, death of.
-
- LASOURCE, accuses Danton, president, and Marat, arrested,
- condemned.
-
- LATOUR-MAUBOURG, notice of.
-
- LAUNAY, Marquis de, Governor of Bastille, besieged, unassisted,
- to blow up Bastille, massacred.
-
- LAVERGNE, surrenders Longwi.
-
- LAVOISIER, Chemist, guillotined.
-
- LAW, Martial, in Paris, Book of the.
-
- LAWYERS, their influence on the Revolution, number of, in Tiers
- Etat, in Parliament First.
-
- LAZARE, Maison de St., plundered.
-
- LEBAS at Strasburg, arrested,
-
- LEBON, Priest, in National Convention, at Arras, guillotined.
-
- LECHAPELIER, Deputy, and Insurrection of Women.
-
- LECOINTRE, National Major, will not fight, active, in First
- Parliament.
-
- LEFEVRE, Abbé, distributes powder.
-
- LEGENDRE, in danger, at Tuileries riot, in National Convention,
- against Girondins, for Danton, locks out Jacobins, in First of
- Prairial.
-
- LENFANT, Abbé, on Protestant claims, massacred.
-
- LEPELLETIER, Section for Convention, revolt of, in Vendémiaire.
-
- LETTRES-DE-CACHET, and Parlement of Paris.
-
- LEVASSEUR, in National Convention, Convention Representative.
-
- LIANCOURT, Duke de, Liberal, not a revolt, but a revolution.
-
- LIES, Philosophism on, to be extinguished, how.
-
- LIGNE, Prince de, death of.
-
- LILLE, Colonel Rouget de, Marseillese Hymn.
-
- LILLE, besieged.
-
- LINGUET, his “Bastille Unveiled,” returns.
-
- LOISEROLLES, General, guillotined for his son.
-
- LONGWI, surrender of, fugitives at Paris.
-
- LORDS of the Articles, Jacobins as.
-
- LORRAINE Fédérés and the Queen, state of, in 1790.
-
- LOUIS XIV., l’etat c’est moi, booted in Parlement, pursues
- Louvois.
-
- LOUIS XV., origin of his surname, last illness of, dismisses Dame
- Dubarry, Choiseul, wounded, has small-pox, his mode of conquest,
- impoverishes France, his daughters, on death, on ministerial
- capacity, death and burial of.
-
- LOUIS XVI., at his accession, good measures of, temper and
- pursuits of, difficulties of, commences governing, and Notables,
- holds Royal Session, receives States-General Deputies, in
- States-General procession, speech to States-General, National
- Assembly, unwise policy of, dismisses Necker, apprised of the
- Revolution, conciliatory, visits Assembly, Bastille, visits
- Paris, deserted, will fly, languid, at Dinner of Guards,
- deposition of, proposed, October Fifth, women deputies, to fly or
- not? grants the acceptance, Paris propositions to, in the Château
- tumult, appears to mob, will go to Paris, his wisest course,
- procession to Paris, review of his position, lodged at Tuileries,
- Restorer of French Liberty, no hunting, locksmith, schemes,
- visits Assembly, Federation, Hereditary Representative, will fly,
- and D’Inisdal’s plot, Mirabeau, useless, indecision of, ill of
- catarrh, prepares for St. Cloud, hindered by populace, effect,
- should he escape, prepares for flight, his circular, flies,
- letter to Assembly, manner of flight, loiters by the way,
- detected by Drouet, captured at Varennes, indecision there,
- return to Paris, reception there, to be deposed? reinstated,
- reception of Legislative, position of, proposes war, with tears,
- vetoes, dissolves Roland Ministry, in riot of, June 20, and
- Pétion, at Federation, with cuirass, declared forfeited, last
- levee of, Tenth August, quits Tuileries for Assembly, in
- Assembly, sent to Temple prison, in Temple, to be tried, and the
- Locksmith Gamain, at the bar, his will, condemned, parting scene,
- and execution of, his son.
-
- LOUIS-PHILIPPE, King of the French, Jacobin door-keeper, at
- Valmy, bravery at Jemappes, and sister, with Dumouriez to
- Austrians, to Switzerland.
-
- LOUSTALOT, Editor.
-
- LOUVET, his “Chevalier de Faublas,” his “Sentinelles,” and
- Robespierre, in National Convention, Girondin accuses
- Robespierre, arrested, retreats to Bourdeaux, escape of,
- recalled.
-
- LUCKNER, Supreme General, and Dumouriez, guillotined.
-
- LUNEVILLE, Inspector Malseigne at.
-
- LUX, Adam, guillotined.
-
- LYONS, Federation at, disorders in, Chalier, Jacobin, executed
- at, capture of magazine, massacres at.
-
- MAILHE, Deputy, on trial of Louis.
-
- MAILLARD, Usher, at siege of Bastille, Insurrection of Women,
- drum, Champs Elysées, entering Versailles, addresses National
- Assembly there, signs Déchéance petition, in September Massacres.
-
- MAILLE, Camp-Marshal, at Tuileries, massacred at La Force.
-
- MAILLY, Marshal, one of Four Generals.
-
- MALESHERBES, M. de, in King’s Council, defends Louis.
-
- MALSEIGNE, Army Inspector, at Nanci, imprisoned, liberated.
-
- MANDAT, Commander of Guards, August, 1792.
-
- MANUEL, Jacobin, slow-sure, in August Tenth, in Governing
- Committee, haranguing at La Force, in National Convention,
- motions in, vote at King’s trial, in prison, guillotined.
-
- MARAT, Jean Paul, horseleech to D’Artois, notice of, against
- violence, at siege of Bastille, summoned by Constituent, not to
- be gagged, astir, how to regenerate France, police and, on
- abolition of titles, would gibbet Mirabeau, bust in Jacobins,
- concealed in cellars, in seat of honour, signs circular, elected
- to Convention, and Dumouriez, oaths by, in Convention, on
- sufferings of People, and Girondins, arrested, returns in
- triumph, fall of Girondins.
-
- MARECHAL, Atheist, Calendar by.
-
- MARECHALE, the Lady, on nobility.
-
- MARSEILLES, Brigands at, on Déchéance, the bar of iron, for
- Girondism.
-
- MARSEILLESE, March and Hymn of, at Charenton, at Paris,
- Filles-St.-Thomas and, barracks.
-
- MASSACRE, Avignon, September, number slain in, compared to
- Bartholomew.
-
- MATON, Advocate, his “Resurrection.”
-
- MAUPEOU, under Louis XV., and Dame Dubarry.
-
- MAUREPAS, Prime Minister, character of, government of, death of.
-
- MAURY, Abbé, character of, in Constituent Assembly, seized
- emigrating, dogmatic, efforts fruitless, made Cardinal.
-
- MEMMAY, M., of Quincey, explosion of rustics.
-
- MENOU, General, arrest of.
-
- MENTZ, occupied by French, siege of, surrender of.
-
- MERCIER, on Paris revolting, Editor, the September Massacre, in
- National Convention, King’s trial.
-
- MERLIN of Thionville in Mountain, irascible, at Mentz.
-
- MERLIN of Douai, Law of Suspect.
-
- METZ, Bouillé at, troops mutinous at.
-
- MEUDON tannery.
-
- MIOMANDRE de Ste. Marie, Bodyguard, October Fifth, left for dead,
- revives, rewarded.
-
- MIRABEAU, Marquis, on the state of France in 1775, and his son,
- his death.
-
- MIRABEAU, Count, his pamphlets, the Notables, Lettres-de-Cachet
- against, expelled by the Provence Noblesse, cloth-shop, is Deputy
- for Aix, king of Frenchmen, family of, wanderings of, his future
- course, groaned at, in Assembly, his newspaper suppressed,
- silences Usher de Brézé, at Bastille ruins, on Robespierre, fame
- of, on French deficit, populace, on veto, Mounier, October Fifth,
- insight of, defends veto, courage, revenue of, saleable? and
- Danton, on Constitution, at Jacobins, his courtship, on state of
- Army, Marat would gibbet, his power in France, on D’Orléans, on
- duelling, interview with Queen, speech on emigrants, the “trente
- voix,” in Council, his plans for France, probable career of, last
- appearance in Assembly, anxiety of populace for, last sayings of,
- death and funeral of, burial-place of, character of, last of
- Mirabeaus, bust in Jacobins, bust demolished.
-
- MIRABEAU the younger, nicknamed Tonneau, in Constituent Assembly,
- breaks his sword.
-
- MIRANDA, General, attempts Holland.
-
- MIROMENIL, Keeper of Seals.
-
- MOLEVILLE, Bertrand de, Historian, minister, his plan, frivolous
- policy of, and D’Orléans, Jesuitic, concealed.
-
- MOMORO, Bookseller, agrarian, arrested, guillotined, his Wife,
- “Goddess of Reason.”
-
- MONGE, Mathematician, in office, assists in new Calendar.
-
- MONSABERT, G. de, President of Paris Parlement, arrested.
-
- MONTELIMART, covenant sworn at.
-
- MONTESQUIOU, General, takes Savoy.
-
- MONTGAILLARD, on captive Queen, on September Massacres.
-
- MONTMARTRE, trenches at.
-
- MONTMORIN, War-Secretary.
-
- MOORE, Doctor, at attack of Tuileries, at La Force.
-
- MORANDE, De, newspaper by, will return, in prison.
-
- MORELLET, Philosophe.
-
- MOUCHETON, M. de, of King’s Bodyguard.
-
- MOUDON, Abbé, confessor to Louis XV.
-
- MOUNIER, at Grenoble, proposes Tennis-Court oath, October Fifth,
- President of Constituent Assembly, deputed to King, dilemma of.
-
- MOUNTAIN, members of the, re-elected in National Convention,
- Gironde and, favourers of the, vulnerable points of, prevails,
- Danton, Duperret, after Gironde dispersed, in labour.
-
- MULLER, General, expedition to Spain.
-
- MURAT, in Vendémiaire revolt.
-
- NANCI, revolt at, description of town, deputation imprisoned,
- deputation of mutineers, state of mutineers in, Bouillé’s fight,
- Paris thereupon, military executions at, Assembly Commissioners.
-
- NANTES, after King’s flight, massacres at.
-
- NAPOLEON Buonaparte (Buonaparte) studying mathematics, pamphlet
- by, democratic, in Corsica, August Tenth, under General Cartaux,
- at Toulon, Josephine and, at La Cabarus’s, Vendémiaire.
-
- NARBONNE, Louis de, assists flight of King’s Aunts, to be
- War-Minister, demands by, secreted, escapes.
-
- NAVY, Louis XV. on French.
-
- NECKER, and finance, account of, dismissed, refuses Brienne,
- recalled, difficulty as to States-General, reconvokes Notables,
- opinion of himself, popular, dismissed, recalled, returns in
- glory, his plans, becoming unpopular, departs, with difficulty.
-
- NECKLACE, Diamond.
-
- NERWINDEN, battle of.
-
- NIEVRE-CHOL, Mayor of Lyons.
-
- NOBLES, state of the, under Louis XV., new, join Third Estate.
-
- NOTABLES, Calonne’s convocation of, assembled 22nd February 1787,
- members of, effects of dismissal of, reconvoked, 6th November
- 1788, dismissed again.
-
- NOYADES, Nantes.
-
- OCTOBER Fifth, 1789
-
- OGE, condemned.
-
- ORLEANS, High Court at, prisoners massacred at Versailles.
-
- ORLEANS, a Duke d’, in Louis XV.”s sick-room.
-
- ORLEANS, Philippe (Egalité), Duc d’, Duke de Chartres (till
- 1785), waits on Dauphin, Father, with Louis XV., not Admiral,
- wealth, debauchery, Palais-Royal buildings, in Notables (Duke
- d’Orléans now), looks of, Bed-of-Justice, 1787, arrested,
- liberated, in States-General Procession, joins Third Estate, his
- party, in Constituent Assembly, Fifth October and, shunned in
- England, Mirabeau, cash deficiency, use of, in Revolution,
- accused by Royalists, at Court, insulted, in National Convention,
- decline of, in Convention, vote on King’s trial, at King’s
- execution, arrested, imprisoned, condemned, and executed.
-
- ORMESSON, d’, Controller of Finance.
-
- PACHE, Swiss, account of, Minister of War, Mayor, dismissed,
- reinstated, imprisoned.
-
- PAN, Mallet du, solicits for Louis.
-
- PANIS, Advocate, in Governing Committee, and Beaumarchais,
- confidant of Danton.
-
- PANTHEON, first occupant of.
-
- PARENS, Curate, renounces religion.
-
- PARIS, origin of city, police in 1750, ship Ville-de-Paris, riot
- at Palais-de-Justice, beautified, in 1788, election, 1789, troops
- called to, military preparations in, July Fourteenth, cry for
- arms, search for arms, Bailly, mayor of, trade-strikes in,
- Lafayette patrols, October Fifth, propositions to Louis, Louis
- in, Journals, bill-stickers, undermined, after Champ-de-Mars
- Federation, on Nanci affair, on death of Mirabeau, on flight to
- Varennes, on King’s return, Directory suspends Pétion, enlisting,
- 1792, on forfeiture of King, Sections, rising of, August Tenth,
- prepares for insurrection, Municipality supplanted, statues
- destroyed, King and Queen to prison, September, 1792, names
- printed on house-door, in insurrection, Girondins, May 1793,
- Municipality in red caps, brotherly supper, Sections to be
- abolished.
-
- PARIS, Guardsman, assassinates Lepelletier.
-
- PARIS, friend of Danton.
-
- PARLEMENT, patriotic, against Taxation, remonstrates, at
- Versailles, arrested, origin of, nature of, corrupt, at Troyes,
- yields, Royal Session in, how to be tamed, oath and declaration
- of, firmness of, scene in, and dismissal of, reinstated,
- unpopular, summons Dr. Guillotin, abolished.
-
- PARLEMENTS, Provincial, adhere to Paris, rebellious, exiled,
- grand deputations of, reinstated, abolished.
-
- PELTIER, Royalist Pamphleteer, “Père Duchene,” Editor of.
-
- PEREYRA (Peyreyra), Walloon, account of, imprisoned.
-
- PETION, account of, Dutch-built, and D’Espréménil, to be mayor,
- Varennes, meets King, and Royalty, at close of Assembly, in
- London, Mayor of Paris, in Twentieth June, suspended, reinstated,
- welcomes Marseillese, August Tenth, in Tuileries, rebukes
- Septemberers, in National Convention, declines mayorship, against
- Mountain, retreat to Bourdeaux, end of.
-
- PÉTION, National-Pique, christening of.
-
- PETITION of famishing French, at Fatherland’s altar, of the Eight
- Thousand.
-
- PETITIONS, on capture of King, for deposition, &c.
-
- PHELIPPEAUX, purged out of the Jacobins.
-
- PHILOSOPHISM, influence of, on Revolution, what it has done with
- Church, with Religion.
-
- PICHEGRU, General, account of, in Germinal.
-
- PILNITZ, Convention at.
-
- PIN, Latour du, War-Minister, dismissed.
-
- PITT, against France, and Girondins, inflexible.
-
- PLOTS, of King’s flight, various, of Aristocrats, October Fifth,
- Royalist, of Favras and others, cartels, Twelve bullies from
- Switzerland, D’Inisdal, will-o’-wisp, Mirabeau and Queen,
- poniards, Mallet du Pan, Narbonne’s, traces of, in
- Armoire-de-Fer, against Girondins, Desmoulins on, prison.
-
- POLIGNAC, Duke de, a sinecurist, dismissed, at Bale, younger, in
- Ham.
-
- POMPIGNAN, President of National Assembly.
-
- POPE PIUS VI., excommunicates Talleyrand, his effigy burned.
-
- PRAIRIAL First to Third, May 20-22, 1795.
-
- PRECY, siege of, Lyons.
-
- PRIESTHOOD, disrobing of, costumes in Carmagnole.
-
- PRIESTLEY, Dr., riot against, naturalised, elected to National
- Convention.
-
- PRIESTS, dissident, marry in France, Anti-national, hanged, many
- killed near the Abbaye, number slain in September Massacre, to
- rescue Louis, drowned at Nantes.
-
- PRISONS, Paris, in Bastille time, full, August 1792, number of,
- in France, state of, in Terror, thinned after Terror.
-
- PRISON, Abbaye, refractory Members sent to, Temple, Louis sent
- to, Abbaye, Priests killed near, massacres at La Force, Chatelet,
- and Conciergerie.
-
- PROCESSION, of States-General Deputies, of Necker and D’Orléans
- busts, of Louis to Paris, again, after Varennes, of Louis to
- trial, at Constitution of 1793.
-
- PROVENCE Noblesse, expel Mirabeau.
-
- PRUDHOMME, Editor, on assassins, on Cavaignac.
-
- PRUSSIA, Fritz of, against France, army of, ravages France, King
- of, and French Princes.
-
- PUISAYE, Girondin General, at Quiberon.
-
- QUERET-DEMERY, in Bastille.
-
- QUIBERON, debarkation at.
-
- RABAUT, St. Etienne, French Reformer, in National Convention, in
- Commission of Twelve, arrested, between two walls, guillotined.
-
- RAYNAL, Abbé, Philosophe, his letter to Constituent Assembly.
-
- REBECQUI, of Marseilles, in National Convention, against
- Robespierre, retires, drowns himself.
-
- REDING, Swiss, massacred.
-
- RELIGION, Christian, and French Revolution, abolished, Clootz on,
- a new.
-
- REMY, Cornet, at Clermont.
-
- RENAULT, Cecile, to assassinate Robespierre, guillotined.
-
- RENE, King, bequeathed Avignon to Pope.
-
- RENNES, riot in.
-
- RENWICK, last of Cameronians.
-
- REPAIRE, Tardivet du, Bodyguard, Fifth October, rewarded.
-
- REPRESENTATIVES, Paris, Town.
-
- REPUBLIC, French, first mention of, first year of, established,
- universal, Clootz’s, Girondin, one and indivisible, its triumphs.
-
- RESSON, Sieur, reports Lafayette to Jacobins.
-
- REVEILLON, house destroyed.
-
- REVOLT, Paris, in, of Gardes Françaises, becomes Revolution,
- military, what, of Lepelletier section.
-
- REVOLUTION, French, causes of the, Lord Chesterfield on the, not
- a revolt, meaning of the term, whence it grew, general
- commencement of, prosperous characters in, Philosophes and, state
- of army in, progress of, duelling in, Republic decided on,
- European powers and, Royalist opinion of, cardinal movements in,
- Danton and the, changes produced by the, effect of King’s death
- on, Girondin idea of, suspicion in, Terror and, and Christian
- religion, Revolutionary Committees, Government doings in,
- Robespierre essential to, end of.
-
- RHEIMS, in September massacre.
-
- RICHELIEU, at death of Louis XV., death of.
-
- RIOT, Paris, in May 1750, Cornlaw (in 1775), at Palais de Justice
- (1787), triumph, of Rue St. Antoine, of July Fourteenth (1789),
- and Bastille, at Strasburg, Paris, on the veto, Versailles
- Château, October Fifth (1789), uses of, to National Assembly,
- Paris, on Nanci affair, at De Castries’ Hotel, on flight of
- King’s Aunts, at Vincennes, on King’s proposed journey to St.
- Cloud, in Champ-de-Mars, with sharp shot, Paris, Twentieth June,
- 1792, August Tenth, 1792, Grain, Paris, at Theatre de la Nation,
- selling sugar, of Thermidor, 1794, of Germinal, 1795, of
- Prairial, final, of Vendémiaire.
-
- RIOUFFE, Girondin, to Bourdeaux, in prison, on death of
- Girondins, on Mme. Roland.
-
- ROBESPIERRE, Maximilien, account of, derided in Constituent
- Assembly, Jacobin, incorruptible, on tip of left, elected public
- accuser, after King’s flight, at close of Assembly, at Arras,
- position of, plans in 1792, chief priest of Jacobins, invisible
- on August Tenth, reappears, on September Massacre, in National
- Convention, accused by Girondins, accused by Louvet, acquitted,
- King’s trial, Condorcet on, at Queen’s trial, in Salut Committee,
- and Paris Municipality, embraces Danton, Desmoulins and, and
- Danton, Danton on, at trial, his three scoundrels, supreme, to be
- assassinated, at Feast of Être Suprême, apocalyptic, Theot, on
- Couthon’s plot-decree, reserved, his schemes, fails in
- Convention, applauded at Jacobins, accused, rescued, at Townhall,
- declared out of law, half-killed, guillotined, essential to
- Revolution.
-
- ROBESPIERRE, Augustin, decreed accused, guillotined.
-
- ROCHAMBEAU, one of Four Generals, retires.
-
- ROCHE-AYMON, Grand Almoner of Louis XV.
-
- ROCHEFOUCAULT, Duke de la, Liberal, President of Directory,
- killed.
-
- ROEDERER, Syndic, Feuillant, “Chronicle of Fifty Days,” on
- Fédérés Ammunition, dilemma at Tuileries, August 10th.
-
- ROHAN, Cardinal, Diamond Necklace.
-
- ROLAND, Madame, notice of, at Lyons, narrative by, in Paris,
- after King’s flight, and Barbaroux, public dinners and business,
- character of, misgivings of, accused, Girondin declining,
- arrested, condemned and guillotined.
-
- ROLAND, M., notice of, in Paris, Minister, letter, and dismissal
- of, recalled, decline of, on September Massacres, and Pache,
- doings of, resigns, flies, suicide of.
-
- ROMME, in National Convention, in Caen prison, his new Calendar,
- in riot of Prairial, 1795, suicide.
-
- ROMOEUF, pursues King.
-
- RONSIN, General of Revolutionary Army, arrested and guillotined.
-
- ROSIERE, Thuriot de la, summons Bastille, in First Parliament, in
- National Convention, President at Robespierre’s fall.
-
- ROSSIGNOL, in September Massacre, in La Vendée.
-
- ROUSSEAU, Jean-Jacques, Contrat Social of, Gospel according to,
- burial-place of, statue decreed to.
-
- ROUX, M., “Histoire Parlementaire.”
-
- ROYALTY, signs of demolished, abolition of.
-
- RUAMPS, Deputy, against Couthon.
-
- RUHL, notice of, in riot of Prairial, suicide.
-
- SABATIER de Cabre, at Royal Session, arrested, liberated.
-
- ST. ANTOINE to Versailles, Warhorse supper, Nanci affair, at
- Vincennes, at Jacobins, and Marseillese, August Tenth.
-
- ST. CLOUD, Louis prohibited from.
-
- ST. DENIS, Mayor of, hanged.
-
- ST. FARGEAU, Lepelletier, in National Convention, at King’s
- trial, assassinated, burial of.
-
- ST. HURUGE, Marquis, bull-voice, imprisoned, at Versailles, and
- Pope’s effigy, at Jacobins, on King’s trial.
-
- ST. JUST in National Convention, on King’s trial, in Salut
- Committee, at Strasburg, repels Prussians, on Revolution, in
- Committee-room, Thermidor, his report, arrested.
-
- ST. LOUIS Church, States-General procession from.
-
- ST. MEARD, Jourgniac de, in prison, his “Agony” at La Force.
-
- ST. MERY, Moreau de, prostrated.
-
- SALLES, Deputy, guillotined.
-
- SANSCULOTTISM, apparition of, effects of, growth of, at work,
- origin of term, and Royalty, above theft, a fact, French Nation
- and, Revolutionary Tribunal and, how it lives, consummated, fall
- of, last rising of, death of.
-
- SANTERRE, Brewer, notice of, at siege of Bastille, at Tuileries,
- June Twentieth, meets Marseillese, Commander of Guards, how to
- relieve famine, at King’s trial, at King’s execution, fails in La
- Vendée, St. Antoine disarmed.
-
- SAPPER, Fraternal.
-
- SAUSSE, M., Procureur of Varennes, scene at his house, flies from
- Prussians.
-
- SAVONNIERES, M., de, Bodyguard, October Fifth, loses temper.
-
- SAVOY, occupied by French.
-
- SECHELLES, Herault de, in National Convention, leads Convention
- out, arrested and guillotined.
-
- SECTIONS, of Paris, denounce Girondins, Committee of.
-
- SEIGNEURS, French, compelled to fly.
-
- SERGENT, Agate, Engraver, in Committee, nicknamed “Agate,” signs
- circular.
-
- SERVAN, War-Minister, proposals of.
-
- SEVRES, Potteries, Lamotte’s “Mémoires” burnt at.
-
- SICARD, Abbé, imprisoned, in danger near the Abbaye, account of
- massacre there.
-
- SIDE, Right and Left, of Constituent Assembly, Right and Left,
- tip of Left, popular, Right after King’s flight, Right quits
- Assembly, Right and Left in First Parliament.
-
- SIEYES, Abbé, account of, Constitution-builder, in Champ-de-Mars,
- in National Convention, of Constitution Committee, 1790, vote at
- King’s trial, making fresh Constitution.
-
- SILLERY, Marquis.
-
- SIMON, Cordwainer, Dauphin committed to, guillotined.
-
- SIMONEAU, Mayor of Etampes, death of, festival for.
-
- SOMBREUIL, Governor of Hôtel des Invalides, examined, seized,
- saved by his daughter, guillotined, his son shot.
-
- SPAIN, at war with France, invaded by France.
-
- STAAL, Dame de, on liberty.
-
- STAEL, Mme. de, at States-General procession, intrigue for
- Narbonne, secretes Narbonne.
-
- STANHOPE and Price, their club and Paris.
-
- STATES-GENERAL, first suggested, meeting announced, how
- constituted, orders in, Representatives to, Parlements against,
- Deputies to, in Paris, number of Deputies, place of Assembly,
- procession of, installed, union of orders.
-
- STRASBURG, riot at, in 1789.
-
- SUFFREN, Admiral, notice of.
-
- SULLEAU, Royalist, editor, massacred.
-
- SUSPECT, Law of the, Chaumette jeered on.
-
- SWEDEN, King of, to assist Marie Antoinette, shot by Ankarstrom.
-
- SWISS Guards at Brest, prisoners at La Force.
-
- TALLEYRAND-PERIGORD, Bishop, notice of, at fatherland’s altar,
- his blessing, excommunicated, in London, to America.
-
- TALLIEN, notice of, editor of “Ami des Citoyens,” in Committee of
- Townhall, August 1792, in National Convention, at Bourdeaux, and
- Madame Cabarus, recalled, suspect, accuses Robespierre,
- Thermidorian.
-
- TALMA, actor, his soirée.
-
- TANNERY of human skins, improvements in.
-
- TARGET, Advocate, declines King’s defence.
-
- TASSIN, M., and black cockade.
-
- TENNIS-COURT, National Assembly in, Club of, and procession to,
- master of, rewarded.
-
- TERROR, consummation of, reign of, designated, number guillotined
- in.
-
- THEATINS Church, granted to Dissidents.
-
- THEOT, Prophetess, on Robespierre.
-
- THERMIDOR, Ninth and Tenth, July 27 and 28, 1794.
-
- THEROIGNE, Mlle., notice of, in Insurrection of Women, at
- Versailles (October Fifth), in Austrian prison, in Jacobin
- tribune, armed for insurrection (August Tenth), keeps her
- carriage, fustigated, insane.
-
- THIONVILLE besieged, siege raised.
-
- THOURET, Law-reformer, dissolves Assembly, guillotined.
-
- THOUVENOT and Dumouriez.
-
- TINVILLE, Fouquier, revolutionist, Jacobin, Attorney-General in
- Tribunal Revolutionnaire, at Queen’s trial, at trial of
- Girondins, at trial of Mme. Roland, at trial of Danton, and Salut
- Public, his prison-plots, his batches, the prisons under, mock
- doom of, at trial of Robespierre, accused, guillotined.
-
- TOLLENDAL, Lally, pleads for father, in States-General, popular,
- crowned.
-
- TORNE, Bishop.
-
- TOULON, Girondin, occupied by English, besieged, surrenders.
-
- TOULONGEON, Marquis, notice of, on Barnave triumvirate, describes
- Jacobins Hall.
-
- TOURNAY, Louis, at siege of Bastille.
-
- TOURZELLE, Dame de, escape of.
-
- TRONCHET, Advocate, defends King.
-
- TUILERIES, Louis XVI. lodged at, a tile-field, Twentieth June at,
- tickets of entry, “Coblentz,” Marseillese chase
- Filles-Saint-Thomas to, August Tenth, King quits, attacked,
- captured, occupied by National Convention.
-
- TURGOT, Controller of France, on Corn-law, dismissed, death of.
-
- TYRANTS, French people rise against.
-
- UNITED STATES, declaration of Liberty, embassy to Louis XVI.,
- aided by France, of Congress in.
-
- USHANT, battle off.
-
- VALADI, Marquis, Gardes Françaises and, guillotined.
-
- VALAZE, Girondin, on trial of Louis, plots at his house, trial
- of, kills himself.
-
- VALENCIENNES, besieged, surrendered.
-
- VARENNE, Maton de la, his experiences in September.
-
- VARIGNY, Bodyguard, massacred.
-
- VARLET, “Apostle of Liberty,” arrested.
-
- VENDEE, La, Commissioners to, state of, in 1792, insurrection in,
- war, after King’s death, on fire, pacificated.
-
- VENDÉMIAIRE, Thirteenth, October 4, 1795.
-
- VERDUN, to be besieged, surrendered.
-
- VERGENNES, M. de, Prime Minister, death of.
-
- VERGNIAUD, notice of, August Tenth, orations of, President at
- King’s condemnation, in fall of Girondins, trial of, at last
- supper of Girondins.
-
- VERMOND, Abbé de.
-
- VERSAILLES, death of Louis XV. at, in Bastille time, National
- Assembly at, troops to, march of women on, of French Guards on,
- insurrection scene at, the Château forced, prisoners massacred
- at.
-
- VIARD, Spy.
-
- VILATE, Juryman, guillotined, book by.
-
- VILLARET-JOYEUSE, Admiral, defeated by Howe.
-
- VILLEQUIER, Duke de, emigrates.
-
- VINCENNES, riot at, saved by Lafayette.
-
- VINCENT, of War-Office, arrested, guillotined.
-
- VOLTAIRE, at Paris, described, burial-place of.
-
- WAR, civil, becomes general.
-
- WASHINGTON, key of Bastille sent to, formula for Lafayette.
-
- WATIGNY, Battle of.
-
- WEBER, in Insurrection of Women, Queen leaving Vienna.
-
- WESTERMANN, August Tenth, purged out of the Jacobins, tried and
- guillotined.
-
- WIMPFEN, Girondin General.
-
- YORK, Duke of, besieges Valenciennes and Dunkirk.
-
- YOUNG, Arthur, at French Revolution.
-
-
- FOOTNOTES.
-
-
-1 (return)
-_Abrégé Chronologique de l’Histoire de France_ (Paris, 1775), p. 701.
-
-2 (return)
-_Mémoires de M. le Baron Besenval_ (Paris, 1805), ii. 59-90.
-
-3 (return)
-Arthur Young, _Travels during the years_ 1787-88-89 (Bury St. Edmunds,
-1792), i. 44.
-
-4 (return)
-_La Vie et les Mémoires du Général Dumouriez_ (Paris, 1822), i. 141.
-
-5 (return)
-_Besenval, Mémoires_, ii. 21.
-
-6 (return)
-Dulaure, _Histoire de Paris_ (Paris, 1824), vii. 328.
-
-7 (return)
-_Mémoires sur la Vie privée de Marie Antoinette_, par Madame Campan
-(Paris, 1826), i. 12
-
-8 (return)
-_Histoire de la Révolution Française_, par Deux Amis de la Liberté
-(Paris, 1792), ii. 212.
-
-9 (return)
-Lacretelle, _Histoire de France pendant le 18me Siècle_ (Paris, 1819)
-i. 271.
-
-10 (return)
-Dulaure, vii. 261.
-
-11 (return)
-Lacretelle, iii. 175.
-
-12 (return)
-Chesterfield’s _Letters:_ December 25th, 1753.
-
-13 (return)
-Dulaure (viii. 217); Besenval, &c.)
-
-14 (return)
-Campan, i. 11-36.
-
-15 (return)
-Besenval, i. 199.
-
-16 (return)
-Campan, iii. 39.
-
-17 (return)
-_Journal de Madame de Hausset_, p. 293, &c.
-
-18 (return)
-Campan, i. 197.
-
-19 (return)
-Gregorius Turonensis, _Histor._ lib. iv. cap. 21.
-
-20 (return)
-Besenval, i. 159-172. Genlis; Duc de Levis, &c.
-
-21 (return)
-Weber, _Mémoires concernant Marie-Antoinette_ (London, 1809), i. 22.
-
-22 (return)
-One grudges to interfere with the beautiful theatrical “candle,” which
-Madame Campan (i. 79) has lit on this occasion, and blown out at the
-moment of death. What candles might be lit or blown out, in so large an
-Establishment as that of Versailles, no man at such distance would like
-to affirm: at the same time, as it was two o’clock in a May Afternoon,
-and these royal Stables must have been some five or six hundred yards
-from the royal sick-room, the “candle” does threaten to go out in spite
-of us. It remains burning indeed—in her fantasy; throwing light on much
-in those _Mémoires_ of hers.
-
-23 (return)
-Turgot’s Letter: Condorcet, _Vie de Turgot (Œuvres de Condorcet_, t.
-v.), p. 67. The date is 24th August, 1774.
-
-24 (return)
-Campan, i. 125.
-
-25 (return)
-Ib. i. 100-151. Weber, i. 11-50.
-
-26 (return)
-Besenval, ii. 282-330.
-
-27 (return)
-Mercier, _Nouveau Paris_, iii. 147.
-
-28 (return)
-A.D. 1834.
-
-29 (return)
-Lacretelle, _France pendant le 18me Siècle_, ii. 455. _Biographie
-Universelle_, § Turgot (by Durozoir).
-
-30 (return)
-_Mémoires de Mirabeau_, écrits par Lui-même, par son Père, son Oncle et
-son Fils Adoptif (Paris, 34-5), ii.186.
-
-31 (return)
-Boissy d’Anglas, _Vie de Malesherbes_, i. 15-22.
-
-32 (return)
-In May, 1776.
-
-33 (return)
-February, 1778.
-
-34 (return)
-1773-6. See _Œuvres de Beaumarchais;_ where they, and the history of
-them, are given.
-
-35 (return)
-1777; Deane somewhat earlier: Franklin remained till 1785.
-
-36 (return)
-27th July, 1778.
-
-37 (return)
-9th and 12th April, 1782.
-
-38 (return)
-August 1st, 1785.
-
-39 (return)
-_Annual Register_ (Dodsley’s), xxv. 258-267. September, October, 1782.
-
-40 (return)
-Gibbon’s _Letters:_ date, 16th June, 1777, &c.
-
-41 (return)
-Till May, 1781.
-
-42 (return)
-Mercier, _Tableau de Paris_, ii. 51. Louvet, _Roman de Faublas_, &c.
-
-43 (return)
-Adelung, _Geschichte der Menschlichen Narrheit_, § Dodd.
-
-44 (return)
-1781-82. (Dulaure, viii. 423.)
-
-45 (return)
-5th June, 1783.
-
-46 (return)
-October and November, 1783.
-
-47 (return)
-Lacretelle, 18me _Siècle_, iii. 258.
-
-48 (return)
-August, 1784.
-
-49 (return)
-Fils Adoptif, _Mémoires de Mirabeau_, iv. 325.
-
-50 (return)
-Besenval, iii. 255-58.
-
-51 (return)
-Besenval, iii. 216.
-
-52 (return)
-Fils Adoptif, _Mémoires de Mirabeau_, t. iv. livv. 4 et 5.
-
-53 (return)
-_Biographie Universelle_, § Calonne (by Guizot).
-
-54 (return)
-Lacretelle, iii. 286. Montgaillard, i. 347.
-
-55 (return)
-Dumont, _Souvenirs sur Mirabeau_ (Paris, 1832), p. 20.
-
-56 (return)
-Besenval, iii. 196.
-
-57 (return)
-Besenval, iii. 203.
-
-58 (return)
-Republished in the _Musée de la Caricature_ (Paris, 1834).
-
-59 (return)
-Besenval, iii. 209.
-
-60 (return)
-Ib. iii. 211.
-
-61 (return)
-Besenval, iii. 225.
-
-62 (return)
-Ib. iii. 224.
-
-63 (return)
-Montgaillard, _Histoire de France_, i. 410-17.
-
-64 (return)
-Besenval, iii. 220.
-
-65 (return)
-Montgaillard, i. 360.
-
-66 (return)
-Dumont, _Souvenirs sur Mirabeau_, p. 21.
-
-67 (return)
-Toulongeon, _Histoire de France depuis la Révolution de 1789_ (Paris,
-1803), i. app. 4.
-
-68 (return)
-A. Lameth, _Histoire de l’Assemblée Constituante_ (Int. 73).
-
-69 (return)
-_Abrégé Chronologique_, p. 975.
-
-70 (return)
-9th May, 1766: _Biographie Universelle_, § Lally.
-
-71 (return)
-Montgaillard, i. 369. Besenval, &c.
-
-72 (return)
-Montgaillard, i. 373.
-
-73 (return)
-Fils Adoptif, _Mirabeau_, iv. l. 5.
-
-74 (return)
-October, 1787. Montgaillard, i. 374. Besenval, iii. 283.
-
-75 (return)
-Dulaure, vi. 306.
-
-76 (return)
-Besenval, iii. 309.
-
-77 (return)
-Weber, i. 266.
-
-78 (return)
-Besenval, iii. 264.
-
-79 (return)
-_Mémoires justificatifs de la Comtesse de Lamotte_ (London, 1788). _Vie
-de Jeanne de St. Remi, Comtesse de Lamotte_, &c. &c. See _Diamond
-Necklace_ (ut suprà).
-
-80 (return)
-Lacretelle, iii. 343. Montgaillard, &c.
-
-81 (return)
-Besenval, iii. 317.
-
-82 (return)
-Montgaillard, i. 405.
-
-83 (return)
-Weber, i. 276.
-
-84 (return)
-Weber, i. 283.
-
-85 (return)
-Besenval, iii. 355.
-
-86 (return)
-Toulongeon, i. App. 20.
-
-87 (return)
-Montgaillard, i. 404.
-
-88 (return)
-Weber, i. 299-303.
-
-89 (return)
-A. F. de Bertrand-Moleville, _Mémoires Particuliers_ (Paris, 1816), I.
-ch. i. Marmontel, _Mémoires_, iv. 27.
-
-90 (return)
-Montgaillard, i. 308.
-
-91 (return)
-Besenval, iii. 348.
-
-92 (return)
-_La Cour Plénière_, heroï-tragi-comedie en trois actes et en prose;
-jouée le 14 Juillet 1788, par une societe d’amateurs dans un Château
-aux environs de Versailles; par M. l’Abbé de Vermond, Lecteur de la
-Reine: A Bâville (_Lamoignon’s Country-house_), et se trouve à Paris,
-chez la Veuve Liberté, à l’enseigne de la Révolution, 1788.—La Passion,
-_la Mort et la Résurrection du Peuple:_ Imprimé à Jerusalem, &c.
-&c.—See Montgaillard, i. 407.
-
-93 (return)
-Weber, i. 275.
-
-94 (return)
-Lameth, _Assemb. Const._ (Introd.) p. 87.
-
-95 (return)
-Montgaillard, i. 424.
-
-96 (return)
-See _Mémoires de Morellet._
-
-97 (return)
-Marmontel, iv. 30.
-
-98 (return)
-Campan, iii. 104, 111.
-
-99 (return)
-Besenval, iii. 360.
-
-100 (return)
-Weber, i. 339.
-
-101 (return)
-Weber, i. 341.
-
-102 (return)
-Besenval, iii. 366.
-
-103 (return)
-Weber, i. 342.
-
-104 (return)
-_Histoire Parlementaire de la Revolution Française; ou Journal des
-Assemblées Nationales depuis 1789_ (Paris, 1833 et seqq.), i. 253.
-Lameth, _Assemblée Constituante_, i. (Introd.) p. 89.
-
-105 (return)
-_Histoire de la Révolution_, par Deux Amis de la Liberté, i. 50.
-
-106 (return)
-_Histoire de la Révolution_, par Deux Amis de la Liberté, i. 58.
-
-107 (return)
-Montgaillard, i. 461.
-
-108 (return)
-Weber, i. 347.
-
-109 (return)
-Ibid. i. 360.
-
-110 (return)
-_Mémoire sur les Etats-Généraux._ See Montgaillard, i. 457-9.
-
-111 (return)
-_Délibérations à prendre pour les Assemblées des Bailliages._
-
-112 (return)
-_Mémoire présenté au Roi_, par Monseigneur Comte d’Artois, M. le Prince
-de Condé, M. le Duc de Bourbon, M. le Duc d’Enghien, et M. le Prince de
-Conti. (Given in _Hist. Parl._ i. 256.)
-
-113 (return)
-Marmontel, _Mémoires_ (London, 1805), iv. 33. _Hist. Parl._ &c.
-
-114 (return)
-_Rapport fait au Roi dans son Conseil, le 27 Décembre 1788._
-
-115 (return)
-5th July; 8th August; 23rd September, &c. &c.
-
-116 (return)
-_Réglement du Roi pour la Convocation des Etats-Généraux à Versailles._
-(Reprinted, wrong dated, in Histoire Parlementaire, i. 262.)
-
-117 (return)
-_Réglement du Roi_ (in _Histoire Parlementaire_, as above, i. 267-307.
-
-118 (return)
-Bailly, _Mémoires_, i. 336.
-
-119 (return)
-_Protestation et Arrêté des Jeunes Gens de la Ville de Nantes, du_ 28
-_Janvier_ 1789, _avant leur départ pour Rennes. Arrêté des Jeunes Gens
-de la Ville d’Angers, du_ 4 _Février_ 1789. _Arrêté des Mères, Sœurs,
-Epouses et Amantes des Jeunes Citoyens d’Angers, du_ 6 _Février_ 1789.
-(Reprinted in _Histoire Parlementaire_, i. 290-3.)
-
-120 (return)
-_Hist. Parl._ i. 287. _Deux Amis de la Liberté_, i. 105-128.
-
-121 (return)
-_Fils Adoptif_, v. 256.
-
-122 (return)
-_Mémoires de Mirabeau_, v. 307.
-
-123 (return)
-Marat, _Ami-du-Peuple_ Newspaper (in _Histoire Parlementaire_, ii.
-103), &c.
-
-124 (return)
-_Deux Amis de la Liberté_, i. 141.
-
-125 (return)
-Lacretelle, 18me _Siècle_, ii. 155.
-
-126 (return)
-Besenval, iii. 385, &c.
-
-127 (return)
-Besenval, iii. 385-8.
-
-128 (return)
-_Evènemens qui se sont passés sous mes yeux pendant la Révolution
-Française_, par A. H. Dampmartin (Berlin, 1799), i. 25-27.
-
-129 (return)
-Besenval, iii. 389.
-
-130 (return)
-Madame de Staël, _Considérations sur la Révolution Française_ (London,
-1818), i. 114-191.
-
-131 (return)
-_Founders of the French Republic_ (London, 1798), § Valadi.
-
-132 (return)
-See De Staël, _Considérations_ (ii. 142); Barbaroux, _Mémoires_, &c.
-
-133 (return)
-_Histoire Parlementaire_, i. 335.
-
-134 (return)
-_Actes des Apôtres_ (by Peltier and others); _Almanach du Père Gérard_
-(by Collot d’Herbois) &c. &c.
-
-135 (return)
-_Moniteur_ Newspaper, of December 1st, 1789 (in _Histoire
-Parlementaire_).
-
-136 (return)
-Bouillé, _Mémoires sur la Révolution Française_ (London, 1797), i. 68.
-
-137 (return)
-Dumont, _Souvenirs sur Mirabeau_, p. 64.
-
-138 (return)
-A.D. 1834.
-
-139 (return)
-_Hist. Parl._ i. 322-27.
-
-140 (return)
-Mercier, _Nouveau Paris._
-
-141 (return)
-_Histoire Parlementaire_ (i. 356). Mercier, _Nouveau Paris_, &c.
-
-142 (return)
-Reported Debates, 6th May to 1st June, 1789 in _Histoire
-Parlementaire_, i. 379-422.
-
-143 (return)
-_Moniteur_ (in _Histoire Parlementaire_, i. 405).
-
-144 (return)
-_Histoire Parlementaire_, i. 429.
-
-145 (return)
-Arthur Young, _Travels_, i. 104.
-
-146 (return)
-Bailly, _Mémoires_, i. 114.
-
-147 (return)
-_Histoire Parlementaire_, i. 413.
-
-148 (return)
-Debates, 1st to 17th June 1789 (in _Histoire Parlementaire_, i.
-422-478).
-
-149 (return)
-Bailly, _Mémoires_, i. 185-206.
-
-150 (return)
-See Arthur Young (_Travels_, i. 115-118); A. Lameth, &c.
-
-151 (return)
-Dumont, _Souvenirs sur Mirabeau_, c. 4.
-
-152 (return)
-_Histoire Parlementaire_, i. 13.
-
-153 (return)
-_Moniteur_ (_Hist. Parl._ ii. 22.).
-
-154 (return)
-Montgaillard, ii. 38.
-
-155 (return)
-_Histoire Parlementaire_, ii. 26.
-
-156 (return)
-Bailly, i. 217.
-
-157 (return)
-_Histoire Parlementaire_, ii. 23.
-
-158 (return)
-Montgaillard, ii. 47.
-
-159 (return)
-Arthur Young, i. 119.
-
-160 (return)
-A. Lameth, _Assemblée Constituante_, i. 41.
-
-161 (return)
-Besenval, iii. 398.
-
-162 (return)
-Mercier, _Tableau de Paris_, vi. 22.
-
-163 (return)
-_Histoire Parlementaire._
-
-164 (return)
-_Dictionnaire des Hommes Marquans_, Londres (Paris), 1800, ii. 198.
-
-165 (return)
-Besenval, iii. 394-6.
-
-166 (return)
-_Histoire Parlementaire_, ii. 32.
-
-167 (return)
-Dusaulx, _Prise de la Bastille_ (_Collection des Mémoires_, par
-Berville et Barrière, Paris, 1821), p. 269.
-
-168 (return)
-_Avis au Peuple, ou les Ministres dévoilés_, 1st July, 1789 in
-_Histoire Parlementaire_, ii. 37.
-
-169 (return)
-Besenval, iii. 411.
-
-170 (return)
-_Histoire Parlementaire_, ii. 81.
-
-171 (return)
-Ibid.
-
-172 (return)
-_Vieux Cordelier_, par Camille Desmoulins, No. 5 (reprinted in
-_Collection des Mémoires_, par Baudouin Frères, Paris, 1825), p. 81.
-
-173 (return)
-Weber, ii. 75-91.
-
-174 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, i. 267-306.
-
-175 (return)
-_Histoire Parlementaire_, ii. 96.
-
-176 (return)
-Dusaulx, _Prise de la Bastille_, p. 20.
-
-177 (return)
-See Lameth; Ferrieres, &c.
-
-178 (return)
-_Deux Amis de la Liberté_, i. 312.
-
-179 (return)
-Fils Adoptif, _Mirabeau_, vi. l. 1.
-
-180 (return)
-Besenval, iii. 414.
-
-181 (return)
-_Tableaux de la Révolution, Prise de la Bastille_ (a folio Collection
-of Pictures and Portraits, with letter-press, not always
-uninstructive,—part of it said to be by Chamfort).
-
-182 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, i. 302.
-
-183 (return)
-Besenval, iii. 416.
-
-184 (return)
-Fauchet’s _Narrative_ (_Deux Amis_, i. 324.).
-
-185 (return)
-_Deux Amis_ (i. 319); Dusaulx, &c.
-
-186 (return)
-_Histoire de la Révolution_, par Deux Amis de la Liberté, i. 267-306;
-Besenval, iii. 410-434; Dusaulx, _Prise de la Bastille_, 291-301.
-Bailly, _Mémoires_ (_Collection de Berville et Barrière_), i. 322 et
-seqq.
-
-187 (return)
-_Dated_, à la Bastille, 7 Octobre, 1752; _signed_ Queret-Demery.
-_Bastille Dévoilée_, in Linguet, _Mémoires sur la Bastille_ (Paris,
-1821), p. 199.
-
-188 (return)
-Dusaulx.
-
-189 (return)
-_Biographie Universelle_, § Moreau Saint-Méry (by Fournier-Pescay).
-
-190 (return)
-Weber, ii. 126.
-
-191 (return)
-Campan, ii. 46-64.
-
-192 (return)
-Toulongeon, (i. 95); Weber, &c. &c.
-
-193 (return)
-_Histoire Parlementaire_, ii. 146-9.
-
-194 (return)
-_Deux Amis de la Liberté,_ ii. 60-6.
-
-195 (return)
-“_Il a volé le Roi et la France_ (He robbed the King and France).” “He
-devoured the substance of the People.” “He was the slave of the rich,
-and the tyrant of the poor.” “He drank the blood of the widow and
-orphan.” “He betrayed his country.” See _Deux Amis_, ii. 67-73.
-
-196 (return)
-Dumont, _Souvenirs sur Mirabeau_, p. 305.
-
-197 (return)
-Dulaure: _Histoire de Paris_, viii. 434.
-
-198 (return)
-Moniteur: _Séance du Samedi_ 18 _Juillet_ 1789 in _Histoire
-Parlementaire_, ii. 137.
-
-199 (return)
-Dusaulx: _Prise de la Bastille_, p. 447, &c.
-
-200 (return)
-Arthur Young, i. 111.
-
-201 (return)
-_Biographie Universelle_, § D’Espréménil (by Beaulieu).
-
-202 (return)
-_Dictionnaire des Hommes Marquans_, ii. 519.
-
-203 (return)
-_Moniteur_, No. 67 (in _Hist.Parl._).
-
-204 (return)
-See Toulongeon, i. c. 3.
-
-205 (return)
-Dumont, _Souvenirs sur Mirabeau_, p. 255.
-
-206 (return)
-See Dumont (pp. 159-67); Arthur Young, &c.
-
-207 (return)
-Besenval, iii. 419.
-
-208 (return)
-Arthur Young, i. 165.
-
-209 (return)
-A.D. 1835.
-
-210 (return)
-Montgaillard, ii. 108.
-
-211 (return)
-Arthur Young, i. 129, &c.
-
-212 (return)
-Fils Adoptif: _Mémoires de Mirabeau_, i. 364-394.
-
-213 (return)
-See Arthur Young, i. 137, 150, &c.
-
-214 (return)
-Ibid. i. 134.
-
-215 (return)
-See _Hist. Parl._ ii. 243-6.
-
-216 (return)
-See Young, i. 149, &c.
-
-217 (return)
-Arthur Young, i. 12, 48, 84, &c.
-
-218 (return)
-_Hist. Parl._ ii. 161.
-
-219 (return)
-Arthur Young, i. 141.—Dampmartin: _Evénemens qui se sont passés sous
-mes yeux_, i. 105-127.
-
-220 (return)
-_Biographie Universelle_, § Necker (by Lally-Tollendal).
-
-221 (return)
-Gibbon’s _Letters._
-
-222 (return)
-Young, i. 176.
-
-223 (return)
-See _Hist. Parl._ iii. 20; Mercier, _Nouveau Paris_, &c.
-
-224 (return)
-See Bailly, _Mémoires_, ii. 137-409.
-
-225 (return)
-_Hist. Parl._ ii. 421.
-
-226 (return)
-_Histoire Parlementaire_, ii. 359, 417, 423.
-
-227 (return)
-_Histoire Parlementaire_, ii. 427.
-
-228 (return)
-_Souvenirs sur Mirabeau_, p. 156.
-
-229 (return)
-_Révolutions de Paris Newspaper_ (cited in _Histoire Parlementaire_,
-ii. 357).
-
-230 (return)
-_Brouillon de Lettre de M. d’Estaing à la Reine_ in _Histoire
-Parlementaire_, iii. 24.
-
-231 (return)
-_Moniteur_ (in _Histoire Parlementaire_, iii. 59); _Deux Amis_ (iii.
-128-141); Campan (ii. 70-85), &c. &c.
-
-232 (return)
-Camille’s Newspaper, _Révolutions de Paris et de Brabant_ in _Histoire
-Parlementaire_, iii. 108.
-
-233 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, iii. 141-166.
-
-234 (return)
-Dusaulx, _Prise de la Bastille_ (note, p. 281.).
-
-235 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, iii. 157.
-
-236 (return)
-_Hist. Parl._ iii. 310.
-
-237 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, iii. 159.
-
-238 (return)
-Ibid. iii. 177; _Dictionnaire des Hommes Marquans_, ii. 379.
-
-239 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, iii. 161.
-
-240 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, iii. 165.
-
-241 (return)
-See _Hist. Parl._ iii. 70-117; _Deux Amis_, iii. 166-177, &c.
-
-242 (return)
-Mounier, _Exposé Justificatif_ (cited in _Deux Amis_, iii. 185).
-
-243 (return)
-See Weber, ii. 185-231.
-
-244 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, iii. 192-201.
-
-245 (return)
-Weber, ubi supra.
-
-246 (return)
-Weber, _Deux Amis_, &c.
-
-247 (return)
-_Moniteur_ (in _Hist. Parl._ ii. 105).
-
-248 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, iii. 208.
-
-249 (return)
-_Courier de Provence_ (Mirabeau’s Newspaper), No. 50, p. 19.
-
-250 (return)
-_Mémoire de M. le Comte de Lally-Tollendal_ (Janvier 1790), p. 161-165.
-
-251 (return)
-_Déposition de Lecointre_ (in _Hist. Parl._ iii. 111-115.)
-
-252 (return)
-Campan, ii. 75-87.
-
-253 (return)
-Toulongeon, i. 144.
-
-254 (return)
-Toulongeon, 1 App. 120.
-
-255 (return)
-Calumnious rumour, current long since, in loose vehicles (_Edinburgh
-Review_ on _Mémoires de Bastille_, for example), concerning Friedrich
-Wilhelm and his ways, then so mysterious and miraculous to many;—not
-the least truth in it! (_Note of_ 1858.)
-
-256 (return)
-_Rapport de Chabroud_ (_Moniteur_, du 31 December, 1789).
-
-257 (return)
-Toulongeon, i. 150.
-
-258 (return)
-Mercier, _Nouveau Paris_, iii. 21.
-
-259 (return)
-Toulongeon, i. 134-161; _Deux Amis_ (iii. c. 9); &c. &c.
-
-260 (return)
-Arthur Young’s _Travels_, i. 264-280.
-
-261 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, iii. c. 10.
-
-262 (return)
-_Le Château des Tuileries, ou récit, &c._, par Roussel (in _Hist.
-Parl._ iv. 195-219).
-
-263 (return)
-_Moniteur_, Nos. 65, 86 (29th September, 7th November, 1789).
-
-264 (return)
-Dumont, _Souvenirs_, p. 278.
-
-265 (return)
-Dampmartin, _Evénemens_, i. 208.
-
-266 (return)
-See _Deux Amis_, iii. c. 14; iv. c. 2, 3, 4, 7, 9, 14. _Expédition des
-Volontaires de Brest sur Lannion; Les Lyonnais Sauveurs des Dauphinois;
-Massacre au Mans; Troubles du Maine_ (Pamphlets and Excerpts, in _Hist.
-Parl._ iii. 251; iv. 162-168), &c.
-
-267 (return)
-See _Deux Amis_, iv. c. 14, 7; _Hist. Parl._ vi. 384.
-
-268 (return)
-_Mémoires de Barbaroux_ (Paris, 1822), p. 57.
-
-269 (return)
-21st October, 1789 (_Moniteur_, No. 76).
-
-270 (return)
-Buzot, _Mémoires_ (Paris, 1823), p. 90.
-
-271 (return)
-Dumouriez, _Mémoires_, i. 28, &c.
-
-272 (return)
-Dumont, _Souvenirs sur Mirabeau_, p. 399.
-
-273 (return)
-A trustworthy gentleman writes to me, three years ago, with a feeling
-which I cannot but respect, that his Father, “the late Admiral Nesham”
-(not _Needham_, as the French Journalists give it) is the Englishman
-meant; and furthermore that the sword is “not rusted at all,” but still
-lies, with the due memory attached to it, in his (the son’s)
-possession, at Plymouth, in a clear state. (_Note of_ 1857.)
-
-274 (return)
-_Moniteur_, 10 Novembre, 7 Decembre, 1789.
-
-275 (return)
-De Pauw, _Recherches sur les Grecs_, &c.
-
-276 (return)
-Naigeon: _Addresse à l’Assemblée Nationale_ (Paris, 1790) _sur la
-liberté des opinions._
-
-277 (return)
-See Marmontel, _Mémoires_, passim; Morellet, _Mémoires_, &c.
-
-278 (return)
-Hannah More’s _Life and Correspondence_, ii. c. 5.
-
-279 (return)
-De Staal: _Mémoires_ (Paris, 1821), i. 169-280.
-
-280 (return)
-Dumont: _Souvenirs_, 6.
-
-281 (return)
-See Bertrand-Moleville: _Mémoires_, ii. 100, &c.
-
-282 (return)
-Dulaure, _Histoire de Paris_, viii. 483; Mercier, _Nouveau Paris_, &c.
-
-283 (return)
-_Hist. Parl._ vi. 334.
-
-284 (return)
-See Bertrand-Moleville, i. 241, &c.
-
-285 (return)
-Newspapers in _Hist. Parl._ iv. 445.
-
-286 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, v. c. 7.
-
-287 (return)
-See _Deux Amis_, v. 199.
-
-288 (return)
-_Hist. Parl._ vii. 4.
-
-289 (return)
-Reports, &c. (in _Hist. Parl._ ix. 122-147).
-
-290 (return)
-Madame Roland, _Mémoires_, i.(Discours Préliminaire, p. 23).
-
-291 (return)
-_Hist. Parl._ xii. 274.
-
-292 (return)
-See _Deux Amis_, v. 122; _Hist. Parl._ &c.
-
-293 (return)
-_Moniteur_, &c. (in _Hist. Parl._ xii. 283).
-
-294 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, iv. iii.
-
-295 (return)
-23rd December, 1789 (Newspapers in _Hist. Parl._ iv. 44).
-
-296 (return)
-See Newspapers, &c. (in _Hist. Parl._ vi. 381-406).
-
-297 (return)
-Mercier. ii. 76, &c.
-
-298 (return)
-Mercier, ii. 81.
-
-299 (return)
-Narrative by a Lorraine Federate (given in _Hist. Parl._ vi. 389-91).
-
-300 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, v. 168.
-
-301 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, v. 143-179.
-
-302 (return)
-See his _Lettre au Peuple Français_, London, 1786.
-
-303 (return)
-Dampmartin, Evénemens, i. 144-184.
-
-304 (return)
-Dulaure, _Histoire de Paris_, viii. 25.
-
-305 (return)
-Bouillé, _Mémoires_ (London, 1797), i. c. 8.
-
-306 (return)
-See Newspapers of July, 1789 (in _Hist. Parl._ ii. 35), &c.
-
-307 (return)
-Dampmartin, _Evénemens_, i. 89.
-
-308 (return)
-Dampmartin, _Evénemens_, i. 122-146.
-
-309 (return)
-Norvins, _Histoire de Napoléon_, i. 47; Las Cases, _Mémoires_
-translated into Hazlitt’s _Life of Napoleon_, i. 23-31.
-
-310 (return)
-_Moniteur_, 1790. No. 233.
-
-311 (return)
-Bouillé, _Mémoires_, i. 113.
-
-312 (return)
-Bouillé, i. 140-5.
-
-313 (return)
-_Moniteur_ (in _Hist. Parl._ vii. 29).
-
-314 (return)
-_Moniteur_, Séance du 9 Août 1790.
-
-315 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, v. 217.
-
-316 (return)
-Bouillé, i. c. 9.
-
-317 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, v. c. 8.
-
-318 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, v. 206-251; Newspapers and Documents in _Hist. Parl._ vii.
-59-162.
-
-319 (return)
-Compare Bouillé, _Mémoires_, i. 153-176; _Deux Amis_, v. 251-271;
-_Hist. Parl._ ubi supra.
-
-320 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, v. 268.
-
-321 (return)
-Bouillé, i. 175.
-
-322 (return)
-_Ami du Peuple_ in _Hist. Parl._, ubi supra.
-
-323 (return)
-Knox’s _History of the Reformation,_ b. i.
-
-324 (return)
-See Dampmartin, i. 249, &c. &c.
-
-325 (return)
-Dampmartin, _passim_.
-
-326 (return)
-Mercier, iii. 163.
-
-327 (return)
-See _Hist. Parl._ vii. 51.
-
-328 (return)
-_Ami du Peuple_, No. 306. See other Excerpts in _Hist. Parl._ viii.
-139-149, 428-433; ix. 85-93, &c.
-
-329 (return)
-Dampmartin, i. 184.
-
-330 (return)
-_De Bello Gallico_, lib. iv. 5.
-
-331 (return)
-See Brissot, _Patriote-Français_ Newspaper; Fauchet, _Bouche-de-Fer_,
-&c. (excerpted in _Hist. Parl._ viii., ix., et seqq.).
-
-332 (return)
-Camille’s Journal (in _Hist. Parl._ ix. 366-85).
-
-333 (return)
-_Moniteur_, Séance du 21 Août, 1790.
-
-334 (return)
-_Révolutions de Paris_ (in _Hist. Parl._ viii. 440).
-
-335 (return)
-See _Hist. Parl._ vii. 316; Bertrand-Moleville, &c.
-
-336 (return)
-Campan, ii. 105.
-
-337 (return)
-Campan, ii. 199-201.
-
-338 (return)
-Dampmartin, ii. 129.
-
-339 (return)
-Mercier, _Nouveau Paris_, iii. 204.
-
-340 (return)
-Campan, ii. c. 17.
-
-341 (return)
-Dumont, p. 211.
-
-342 (return)
-_Correspondence Secrète_ (in _Hist. Parl._ viii. 169-73).
-
-343 (return)
-Carra’s Newspaper, 1st Feb. 1791 (in _Hist. Parl._ ix. 39).
-
-344 (return)
-Campan, ii. 132.
-
-345 (return)
-Montgaillard, ii. 282; _Deux Amis_, vi. c. 1.
-
-346 (return)
-Montgaillard, ii. 285.
-
-347 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, vi. 11-15; Newspapers (in _Hist. Parl._ ix. 111-17).
-
-348 (return)
-Weber, ii. 286.
-
-349 (return)
-_Hist. Parl._ ix. 139-48.
-
-350 (return)
-Montgaillard, ii. 286.
-
-351 (return)
-See Mercier, ii. 40, 202.
-
-352 (return)
-Ordonnance du 17 Mars 1791 (_Hist. Parl._ ix. 257).
-
-353 (return)
-See _Fils Adoptif_, vii. 1. 6; Dumont, c. 11, 12, 14.
-
-354 (return)
-_Fils Adoptif_, ubi supra.
-
-355 (return)
-Dumont, p. 311.
-
-356 (return)
-Dumont, p. 267.
-
-357 (return)
-_Fils Adoptif_, viii. 420-79.
-
-358 (return)
-_Fils Adoptif_, viii. 450; _Journal de la maladie et de la mort de
-Mirabeau_, par P.J.G. Cabanis (Paris, 1803).
-
-359 (return)
-Hénault, _Abrégé Chronologique_, p. 429.
-
-360 (return)
-_Fils Adoptif_, viii. l. 10; Newspapers and Excerpts (in _Hist. Parl._
-ix. 366-402).
-
-361 (return)
-_Hist. Parl._ ix. 405.
-
-362 (return)
-_Moniteur_, du 13 Juillet 1791.
-
-363 (return)
-_Moniteur_, du 18 Septembre, 1794. See also du 30 Août, &c. 1791.
-
-364 (return)
-Dumont, p. 287.
-
-365 (return)
-Toulongeon, i. 262.
-
-366 (return)
-Newspapers of April and June, 1791 (in _Hist. Parl._ ix. 449; x, 217).
-
-367 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, vi. c. 1; _Hist. Parl._ ix. 407-14.
-
-368 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, v. 410-21; Dumouriez, ii. c. 5.
-
-369 (return)
-_Hist. Parl._ x. 99-102.
-
-370 (return)
-Campan, ii. c. 18.
-
-371 (return)
-Bouillé, _Mémoires_, ii. c. 10.
-
-372 (return)
-_Moniteur_, Séance du 23 Avril, 1791.
-
-373 (return)
-Choiseul, _Relation du Départ de Louis XVI._ (Paris, 1822), p. 39.
-
-374 (return)
-Campan, ii. 141.
-
-375 (return)
-Weber, ii. 340-2; Choiseul, p. 44-56.
-
-376 (return)
-Hénault, _Abrégé Chronologique_, p. 36.
-
-377 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, vi. 67-178; Toulongeon, ii. 1-38; Camille, Prudhomme and
-Editors in _Hist. Parl._ x. 240-4.
-
-378 (return)
-_Walpoliana._
-
-379 (return)
-Dumont, c. 16.
-
-380 (return)
-Dumouriez, _Mémoires_, ii. 109.
-
-381 (return)
-Madame Roland, ii. 70.
-
-382 (return)
-_Moniteur_, &c. in _Hist. Parl._ x. 244-253.
-
-383 (return)
-_Déclaration du Sieur La Gache du Régiment Royal-Dragoons_ in Choiseul,
-pp. 125-39.
-
-384 (return)
-_Rapport de M. Remy_ in Choiseul, p. 143.
-
-385 (return)
-_Déclaration de La Gache_ (in Choiseul, ubi supra).
-
-386 (return)
-_Déclaration de La Gache_ (in Choiseul, p. 134).
-
-387 (return)
-Campan, ii. 159.
-
-388 (return)
-_Procès-verbal du Directoire de Clermont_ (in Choiseul, p. 189-95).
-
-389 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, vi. 139-78.
-
-390 (return)
-_Rapport de M. Aubriot_ (in Choiseul, p. 150-7).
-
-391 (return)
-_Extrait d’un Rapport de M. Deslons_ (in Choiseul, p. 164-7).
-
-392 (return)
-Bouillé, ii. 74-6.
-
-393 (return)
-_Déclaration du Sieur Thomas_ (in Choiseul, p. 188).
-
-394 (return)
-Weber, ii. 386.
-
-395 (return)
-Aubriot, ut supra, p. 158.
-
-396 (return)
-_Nouveau Paris_, iii. 22.
-
-397 (return)
-Campan, ii. c. 18.
-
-398 (return)
-Ibid. ii. 149.
-
-399 (return)
-Bouillé, ii. 101.
-
-400 (return)
-Madame Roland, ii. 74.
-
-401 (return)
-_Hist. Parl._ xi. 104-7.
-
-402 (return)
-Ibid. xi. 113, &c.
-
-403 (return)
-Toulongeon, ii. 56, 59.
-
-404 (return)
-_Hist. Parl._ xiii. 73.
-
-405 (return)
-De Staël, _Considérations_, i. c. 23.
-
-406 (return)
-_Choix de Rapports_, &c. (Paris, 1825), vi. 239-317.
-
-407 (return)
-_Moniteur_ (in _Hist. Parl._ xi. 473).
-
-408 (return)
-Dumouriez, ii. 150, &c.
-
-409 (return)
-Dumouriez, ii. 370.
-
-410 (return)
-_Choix de Rapports_, xi. 25.
-
-411 (return)
-_Moniteur_, Séance du 4 Octobre 1791.
-
-412 (return)
-Montgaillard, iii. 1. 237.
-
-413 (return)
-_Moniteur_, Séance du 6 Juillet 1792.
-
-414 (return)
-Dampmartin, _Evénemens_, i. 267.
-
-415 (return)
-Barbaroux, Mémoires, p. 26.
-
-416 (return)
-Lescène Desmaisons, _Compte rendu à l’Assemblée Nationale_, 10
-Septembre 1791 (_Choix des Rapports_, vii. 273-93).
-
-417 (return)
-_Procès-verbal de la Commune d’Avignon_, &c. in _Hist. Parl._ xii.
-419-23.
-
-418 (return)
-Ugo Foscolo, _Essay on Petrarch_, p. 35.
-
-419 (return)
-Dampmartin, i. 251-94.
-
-420 (return)
-Dampmartin, ubi supra.
-
-421 (return)
-_Deux Amis_ vii. (Paris, 1797), pp. 59-71.
-
-422 (return)
-Barbaroux, p. 21; _Hist. Parl._ xiii. 421-4.
-
-423 (return)
-Dumont, _Souvenirs_, p. 374.
-
-424 (return)
-Dumouriez, ii. 129.
-
-425 (return)
-_Hist. Parl._ xii. 131, 141; xiii. 114, 417.
-
-426 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, x. 157.
-
-427 (return)
-_Débats des Jacobins_, &c. _Hist. Parl._ xiii. 171, 92-98.
-
-428 (return)
-Campan, ii. 177-202.
-
-429 (return)
-Bertrand-Moleville, i. c. 4.
-
-430 (return)
-Moleville, i. 370.
-
-431 (return)
-Ibid. i. c. 17.
-
-432 (return)
-Montgaillard, iii. 41.
-
-433 (return)
-Bertrand-Moleville, i. 177.
-
-434 (return)
-Toulongeon, i. 256.
-
-435 (return)
-30th March 1792 (_Annual Register_, p. 11).
-
-436 (return)
-Toulongeon, ii. 100-117.
-
-437 (return)
-Montgaillard, iii. 517; Toulongeon, (ubi supra).
-
-438 (return)
-See _Hist. Parl._ xiii. 11-38, 41-61, 358, &c.
-
-439 (return)
-_Moniteur_, Séance du 2 Novembre 1791 (_Hist. Parl._ xii. 212).
-
-440 (return)
-_Ami du Roi_ Newspaper in _Hist. Parl._ xiii. 175.
-
-441 (return)
-_Moniteur_, Séance du 23 Janvier, 1792; _Biographie des Ministres_ §
-Narbonne.
-
-442 (return)
-Dumouriez, ii. c. 6.
-
-443 (return)
-Dampmartin, i. 201.
-
-444 (return)
-_Moniteur_, Séance du 15 Juillet 1792.
-
-445 (return)
-Newspapers, &c. in _Hist. Parl._ xiii. 325.
-
-446 (return)
-December 1791 (_Hist. Parl._ xii. 257).
-
-447 (return)
-_Moniteur_, Séance du 28 Mai 1792; Campan, ii. 196.
-
-448 (return)
-Dumouriez, ii. 168.
-
-449 (return)
-Campan, ii. c. 19.
-
-450 (return)
-_Moniteur_, du 7 Avril 1792; _Deux Amis_, vii. 111.
-
-451 (return)
-See _Moniteur_, Séances in _Hist. Parl._ xiii. xiv.
-
-452 (return)
-Dumouriez, ii. 137.
-
-453 (return)
-16th February 1792 (_Choix des Rapports_, viii. 375-92).
-
-454 (return)
-_Courrier de Paris_, 14 Janvier, 1792 (Gorsas’s Newspaper), in _Hist.
-Parl._ xiii. 83.
-
-455 (return)
-_Discours de Bailly, Réponse de Pétion_ (_Moniteur_ du 20 Novembre
-1791).
-
-456 (return)
-Barbaroux, p. 94.
-
-457 (return)
-_Moniteur_, Séance du 29 Mars, 1792.
-
-458 (return)
-Toulongeon, ii. 124.
-
-459 (return)
-_Débats des Jacobins_ (_Hist. Parl._ xiii. 259, &c.).
-
-460 (return)
-Dumont, c. 20, 21.
-
-461 (return)
-Madame Roland, ii. 80-115.
-
-462 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, vii. 146-66.
-
-463 (return)
-Dumont, c. 19, 21.
-
-464 (return)
-Newspapers of February, March, April, 1792; Iambe d’André Chénier _sur
-la Fête des Suisses;_ &c., &c. in _Hist. Parl._ xiii, xiv.
-
-465 (return)
-_Patriote-Français_ (Brissot’s Newspaper), in _Hist. Parl._ xiii. 451.
-
-466 (return)
-Toulongeon, ii. 149.
-
-467 (return)
-_Moniteur_, Séance du 10 Juin 1792.
-
-468 (return)
-_Débats des Jacobins_ (in _Hist. Parl._ xiv. 429).
-
-469 (return)
-Madame Roland, ii. 115.
-
-470 (return)
-_Moniteur_, Séance du 18 Juin 1792.
-
-471 (return)
-Barbaroux, p. 40.
-
-472 (return)
-Rœderer, &c. &c. in _Hist. Parl._ xv. 98-194.
-
-473 (return)
-Toulongeon, ii. 173; Campan, ii. c. 20.
-
-474 (return)
-_Moniteur_, Séance du 28 Juin 1792.
-
-475 (return)
-_Débats des Jacobins_ (_Hist. Parl._ xv. 235).
-
-476 (return)
-Toulongeon, ii. 180. See also Dampmartin, ii. 161.
-
-477 (return)
-_Hist. Parl._ xvi. 259.
-
-478 (return)
-_Moniteur_, Séance du Juillet 1792.
-
-479 (return)
-Dumouriez, ii. 1, 5.
-
-480 (return)
-Dampmartin, ii. 183.
-
-481 (return)
-See Barbaroux, _Mémoires_ (Note in p. 40, 41).
-
-482 (return)
-Dampmartin, ubi supra.—As to Dampmartin himself and what became of him
-farther, see _Mémoires de la Comtesse de Lichtenau_, écrits par elle
-même; traduits de A’llemand (à Londres 1809), i. 200-7; ii. 78-91.
-
-483 (return)
-A.D. 1836.
-
-484 (return)
-Campan, ii. c. 20; De Staël, ii. c. 7.
-
-485 (return)
-_Moniteur_, Séance du 21 Juillet 1792.
-
-486 (return)
-_Hist. Parl._ xvi. 185.
-
-487 (return)
-_Tableau de la Révolution_, § Patrie en Danger.
-
-488 (return)
-_Moniteur_, Séance du 25 Juillet 1792.
-
-489 (return)
-_Annual Register_ (1792), p. 236.
-
-490 (return)
-Barbaroux, p. 60.
-
-491 (return)
-Newspapers, Narratives and Documents (_Hist. Parl._ xv. 240; xvi. 399).
-
-492 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, viii. 90-101.
-
-493 (return)
-_Hist. Parl._ xvi. 196. See Barbaroux, p. 51-5.
-
-494 (return)
-_Moniteur_, Séances du 30, du 31 Juillet 1792 (_Hist. Parl._ xvi.
-197-210).
-
-495 (return)
-_Hist. Parl._ xvi. 337-9.
-
-496 (return)
-Bertrand-Moleville, _Mémoires_, ii. 129.
-
-497 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, viii. 129-88.
-
-498 (return)
-Rœderer à la Barre, (Séance du 9 Août in _Hist. Parl._ xvi. 393).
-
-499 (return)
-Rœderer, _Chronique de Cinquante Jours: Récit de Pétion_. Townhall
-Records, &c. in _Hist. Parl._ xvi. 399-466.
-
-500 (return)
-Rœderer, ubi supra.
-
-501 (return)
-24th August, 1572.
-
-502 (return)
-Section Documents, Townhall Documents, (_Hist. Parl._ ubi supra).
-
-503 (return)
-Rœderer, ubi supra.
-
-504 (return)
-in Toulongeon, ii. 241.
-
-505 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, viii. 179-88.
-
-506 (return)
-See _Hist. Parl._ (xvii. 56); Las Cases, &c.
-
-507 (return)
-Moore, _Journal during a Residence in France_ (Dublin, 1793), i. 26.
-
-508 (return)
-_Hist. Parl._ ubi supra. _Rapport du Captaine des Canonniers, Rapport
-du Commandant_, &c. (Ibid. xvii. 300-18).
-
-509 (return)
-Campan, ii. c. 21.
-
-510 (return)
-_Moniteur_, Séance du 10 Août 1792.
-
-511 (return)
-Montgaillard. ii. 135-167.
-
-512 (return)
-Moore’s _Journal_, i. 85.
-
-513 (return)
-_Hist. Parl._ xvii. 467.
-
-514 (return)
-Ibid. xvii. 437.
-
-515 (return)
-_Mémoires de Buzot_ (Paris, 1823), p. 88.
-
-516 (return)
-Moore’s _Journal_, i. 159-168.
-
-517 (return)
-See Toulongeon, _Hist. de France._ ii. c. 5.
-
-518 (return)
-_Hist. Parl._ xvii. 148.
-
-519 (return)
-_Hist. Parl._ xix. 300.
-
-520 (return)
-De Staël, _Considérations sur la Révolution_, ii. 67-81.
-
-521 (return)
-Beaumarchais’ Narrative, _Mémoires sur les Prisons_ (Paris, 1823), i.
-179-90.
-
-522 (return)
-Dumouriez, _Mémoires_, ii. 383.
-
-523 (return)
-Helen Maria Williams, _Letters from France_ (London, 1791-93), iii. 96.
-
-524 (return)
-Dumouriez, ii. 391.
-
-525 (return)
-Moore, i. 178.
-
-526 (return)
-_Hist. Parl._ xvii. 409.
-
-527 (return)
-_Biographie des Ministres_ (Bruxelles, 1826), p. 96.
-
-528 (return)
-_Moniteur_ (in _Hist. Parl._ xvii. 347).
-
-529 (return)
-Félémhesi (anagram for Méhée Fils), _La Verité tout entière, sur les
-vrais auteurs de la journée du 2 Septembre_ 1792 (reprinted in _Hist.
-Parl._ xviii. 156-181), p. 167.
-
-530 (return)
-Félémhesi, _La Verité tout entière_ (ut supra), p. 173.
-
-531 (return)
-Moore’s _Journal_, i. 185-195.
-
-532 (return)
-Dulaure: _Esquisses Historiques des principaux événemens de la
-Révolution_, ii. 206 (cited in Montgaillard, iii. 205.
-
-533 (return)
-Bertrand-Moleville, _Mém. Particuliers_, ii.213, &c. &c.
-
-534 (return)
-Jourgniac Saint-Méard, _Mon Agonie de Trente-huit heures_ (reprinted in
-_Hist. Parl._ xviii. 103-135).
-
-535 (return)
-Maton de la Varenne, _Ma Résurrection_ (in _Hist. Parl._ xviii.
-135-156).
-
-536 (return)
-Abbé Sicard, _Relation adressée à un de ses amis_ (in _Hist. Parl._
-xviii. 98-103).
-
-537 (return)
-_Mon Agonie_ (ut supra, _Hist. Parl._ xviii. 128).
-
-538 (return)
-_Moniteur_, Debate of 2nd September, 1792.
-
-539 (return)
-Méhée Fils (ut supra, in _Hist. Parl._ xviii. p. 189).
-
-540 (return)
-Montgaillard, iii. 191.
-
-541 (return)
-Helen Maria Williams, iii. 27.
-
-542 (return)
-See _Hist. Parl._ xvii. 421, 422.
-
-543 (return)
-_Moniteur_ of 6th November, Debate of 5th November, 1793.
-
-544 (return)
-_Etat des sommes payées par la Commune de Paris_ (_Hist. Parl._ xviii.
-231).
-
-545 (return)
-Mercier, _Nouveau Paris_, vi. 21.
-
-546 (return)
-9th to 13th September, 1572 (Dulaure, _Hist. de Paris_, iv. 289).
-
-547 (return)
-Dulaure, iii. 494.
-
-548 (return)
-_Hist. Parl._ xvii. 433.
-
-549 (return)
-Ibid. xvii. 434.
-
-550 (return)
-_Pièces officielles relatives au massacre des Prisonniers à Versailles_
-(in _Hist. Parl._ xviii. 236-249).
-
-551 (return)
-_Biographie des Ministres_, p. 97.
-
-552 (return)
-Ibid. p. 103.
-
-553 (return)
-_Dictionnaire des Hommes Marquans_, § Barras.
-
-554 (return)
-Bertrand-Moleville, _Mémoires_, ii. 225.
-
-555 (return)
-See Helen Maria Williams. _Letters_, iii. 79-81.
-
-556 (return)
-Dumouriez, _Mémoires_, iii. 29.
-
-557 (return)
-Dumouriez, _Mémoires_, iii. 55.
-
-558 (return)
-Helen Maria Williams, iii. 32.
-
-559 (return)
-Goethe, _Campagne in Frankreich_ (_Werke_, xxx. 73.
-
-560 (return)
-_Hist. Parl._ xix. 177.
-
-561 (return)
-Goethe, xxx. 49.
-
-562 (return)
-_Hist. Parl._ xix. 19.
-
-563 (return)
-Williams, iii. 71.
-
-564 (return)
-1st October, 1792; Dumouriez, iii. 73.
-
-565 (return)
-_Bombardement de Lille_ (in _Hist. Parl._ xx. 63-71).
-
-566 (return)
-_Campagne in Frankreich_, p. 103.
-
-567 (return)
-See _Hermann und Dorothea_ (also by Goethe), Buch _Kalliope_.
-
-568 (return)
-_Campagne in Frankreich_, Goethe’s _Werke_ (Stuttgart, 1829), xxx.
-133-137.
-
-569 (return)
-_Campagne in Frankreich_, Goethe’s _Werke_, xxx. 152.
-
-570 (return)
-Ibid. 210-12.
-
-571 (return)
-Dumouriez, iii. 115.—Marat’s account, In the _Débats des Jacobins_ and
-_Journal de la République_ (_Hist. Parl._ xix. 317-21), agrees to the
-turning on the heel, but strives to interpret it differently.
-
-572 (return)
-Johann Georg Forster’s _Briefwechsel_ (Leipzig, 1829), i. 88.
-
-573 (return)
-_Hist. Parl._ xx. 184.
-
-574 (return)
-_Moniteur_ Newspaper, Nos. 271, 280, 294, Annee premiere; Moore’s
-_Journal_, ii. 21, 157, &c. (which, however, may perhaps, as in similar
-cases, be only a copy of the Newspaper).
-
-575 (return)
-_Moniteur_, ut supra; Séance du 25 Septembre.
-
-576 (return)
-Madame Roland, _Mémoires_, ii. 237, &c.
-
-577 (return)
-_Dictionnaire des Hommes Marquans_, § Chambon.
-
-578 (return)
-_Moniteur_ (in _Hist. Parl._ xx. 412).
-
-579 (return)
-_Hist. Parl._ xx. 431-440.
-
-580 (return)
-Ibid. 409.
-
-581 (return)
-Mercier, _Nouveau Paris_.
-
-582 (return)
-Moore, i. 123; ii. 224, &c.
-
-583 (return)
-_Moniteur_, Séance du 21 Septembre, An 1er (1792).
-
-584 (return)
-Moore’s _Journal_, ii. 165.
-
-585 (return)
-Dumouriez, _Mémoires_, iii. 174.
-
-586 (return)
-Moore, ii. 148.
-
-587 (return)
-Louvet, _Mémoires_ (Paris, 1823) p. 52; _Moniteur_ (Séances du 29
-Octobre, 5 Novembre, 1792); Moore (ii. 178), &c.
-
-588 (return)
-See _Hist. Parl._ xvii. 401; Newspapers by Gorsas and others (cited
-_ibid._ 428).
-
-589 (return)
-_Journal des Débats des Jacobins_ in _Hist. Parl._ xxii. 296.
-
-590 (return)
-Prudhomme’s Newspaper in _Hist. Parl._ xxi. 314.
-
-591 (return)
-See Extracts from their Newspapers, in _Hist. Parl._ xxi. 1-38, &c.
-
-592 (return)
-_Moniteur_, Séance du 14 Décembre 1792.
-
-593 (return)
-Mrs. Hannah More, _Letter to Jacob Dupont_ (London, 1793); &c. &c.
-
-594 (return)
-_Hist. Parl._ xxii. 131; Moore, &c.
-
-595 (return)
-_Hist. Parl._ xxiii. 31, 48, &c.
-
-596 (return)
-_Moniteur_, Séance du 7 Decembre 1792.
-
-597 (return)
-Dumouriez, _Mémoires_, iii. c. 4.
-
-598 (return)
-Mercier, _Nouveau Paris_, vi. 156-59; Montgaillard, iii. 348-87; Moore,
-&c.
-
-599 (return)
-_Moniteur_ in _Hist. Parl._ xxiii. 210. See Boissy d’Anglas, _Vie de
-Malesherbes_, ii. 139.
-
-600 (return)
-_Biographie des Ministres_, p. 157.
-
-601 (return)
-See Prudhomme’s Newspaper, _Révolutions de Paris_ in _Hist. Parl._
-xxiii. 318.
-
-602 (return)
-_Hist. Parl._ xxiii. 275, 318; Félix Lepelletier, _Vie de Michel
-Lepelletier son Frère_, p. 61. &c. Félix, with due love of the
-miraculous, will have it that the Suicide in the inn was not Paris, but
-some _double-ganger_ of his.
-
-603 (return)
-Cléry’s _Narrative_ (London, 1798), cited in Weber, iii. 312.
-
-604 (return)
-Newspapers, Municipal Records, &c. &c. in _Hist. Parl._ xxiii. 298-349;
-_Deux Amis_, ix. 369-373; Mercier, _Nouveau Paris_, iii. 3-8.
-
-605 (return)
-His Letter in the Newspapers (_Hist. Parl._ ubi supra).
-
-606 (return)
-Forster’s _Briefwechsel_, i. 473.
-
-607 (return)
-_Hist. Parl._ ubi supra.
-
-608 (return)
-_Annual Register_ of 1793, pp. 114-128.
-
-609 (return)
-23d March, _Annual Register_, p. 161.
-
-610 (return)
-1st February; 7th March, Moniteur of these dates.
-
-611 (return)
-_Moniteur_ &c. _Hist. Parl._ xxiv. 332-348.
-
-612 (return)
-_Hist. Parl._ xxiv. 353-356.
-
-613 (return)
-Dumouriez, _Mémoires_, iii. 314.
-
-614 (return)
-_Moniteur_, 1793, No. 140, &c.
-
-615 (return)
-_Hist. Parl._ xxv. 25, &c.
-
-616 (return)
-_Hist. Parl._ xxiv. 385-93; xxvi. 229, &c.
-
-617 (return)
-_Moniteur_, Séance du 20 Mai 1793.
-
-618 (return)
-Genlis, _Mémoires_ (London, 1825), iv. 118.
-
-619 (return)
-_Mémoires de Meillan, Représentant du Peuple_ (Paris, 1823), p. 51.
-
-620 (return)
-Dumouriez, iv. 16-73.
-
-621 (return)
-Forster’s _Briefwechsel_, ii. 514, 460, 631.
-
-622 (return)
-See Dampmartin, _Evénemens_, ii. 213-30.
-
-623 (return)
-_Moniteur_ in _Hist. Parl._ xxv. 6.
-
-624 (return)
-_Choix des Rapports_, xi. 277.
-
-625 (return)
-_Hist. Parl._ xxv. 72.
-
-626 (return)
-Louvet, _Mémoires_, p. 72.
-
-627 (return)
-Meillan, pp. 23, 24; Louvet, pp. 71-80.
-
-628 (return)
-_Moniteur_ (Séance du 12 Mars), 15 Mars.
-
-629 (return)
-Meillan, _Mémoires_, pp. 85, 24.
-
-630 (return)
-_Moniteur_, No. 70, (du 11 Mars), No. 76, &c.
-
-631 (return)
-_Moniteur_, No. 83 (du 24 Mars 1793), Nos. 86, 98, 99, 100.
-
-632 (return)
-_Moniteur_, du 20 Avril, &c. to 20 Mai, 1793.
-
-633 (return)
-Dumouriez, _Mémoires_, iv. c. 7-10.
-
-634 (return)
-Genlis, iv. 139.
-
-635 (return)
-Dumouriez, iv. 159, &c.
-
-636 (return)
-Their Narrative, written by Camus in Toulongeon, iii. app. 60-87.
-
-637 (return)
-_Mémoires_, iv. 162-180.
-
-638 (return)
-See Montgaillard, iv. 144.
-
-639 (return)
-_Mémoires de Réné Levasseur_ (Bruxelles, 1830), i. 164.
-
-640 (return)
-Séance du 1er Avril, 1793 in _Hist. Parl._ xxv. 24-35.
-
-641 (return)
-_Hist. Parl._ xv. 397.
-
-642 (return)
-_Moniteur_, du 16 Avril 1793, et seqq.
-
-643 (return)
-Séance du 26 Avril, An 1er (in _Moniteur_, No. 116).
-
-644 (return)
-Levasseur, _Mémoires_, i. c. 6.
-
-645 (return)
-Buzot, _Mémoires_, pp. 69, 84; Meillan, _Mémoires_, pp. 192, 195, 196.
-See _Commission des Douze_ in _Choix des Rapports_, xii. 69-131.
-
-646 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, vii. 77-80; Forster, i. 514; Moore, i. 70. She did not die
-till 1817; in the Salpêtrière, in the most abject state of insanity;
-see Esquirol, _Des Maladies Mentales_ (Paris, 1838), i. 445-50.
-
-647 (return)
-Mercier, _Nouveau Paris_, vi. 63.
-
-648 (return)
-See _Histoire des Brissotins_, par Camille Desmoulins, a Pamphlet of
-Camille’s, Paris, 1793.
-
-649 (return)
-_Moniteur_, Séance du 25 Mai, 1793.
-
-650 (return)
-Meillan, _Mémoires_, p. 195; Buzot, pp. 69, 84.
-
-651 (return)
-_Debats de la Convention_ (Paris, 1828), iv. 187-223; _Moniteur_, Nos.
-152, 3, 4, An 1er.
-
-652 (return)
-Louvet, _Mémoires_, p. 89.
-
-653 (return)
-Buzot, _Mémoires_, p. 310. See _Pièces Justificatives_, of Narratives,
-Commentaries, &c. in Buzot, Louvet, Meillan: _Documens
-Complémentaires_, in _Hist. Parl._ xxviii. 1-78.
-
-654 (return)
-Meillan, p. 72, 73; Louvet, p. 129.
-
-655 (return)
-_Belagerung von Mainz_, Goethe’s _Werke_, xxx. 278-334.
-
-656 (return)
-Meillan, p.75; Louvet, p. 114.
-
-657 (return)
-_Moniteur_, Nos. 197, 198, 199; _Hist. Parl._ xxviii. 301-5; _Deux
-Amis_, x. 368-374.
-
-658 (return)
-See _Eloge funèbre de Jean-Paul Marat_, prononcé à Strasbourg in
-Barbaroux, p. 125-131; Mercier, &c.
-
-659 (return)
-Séance du 16 Septembre 1793.
-
-660 (return)
-_Procès de Charlotte Corday_, &c. _Hist. Parl._ xxviii. 311-338.
-
-661 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, x. 374-384.
-
-662 (return)
-_Briefwechsel_, i. 508.
-
-663 (return)
-See Hazlitt, ii. 529-41.
-
-664 (return)
-Barbaroux, p. 29.
-
-665 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, x. 345.
-
-666 (return)
-_Mémoires de Puisaye_ (London, 1803), ii. 142-67.
-
-667 (return)
-Louvet, pp. 101-37; Meillan, pp. 81, 241-70.
-
-668 (return)
-Meillan, pp. 119-137.
-
-669 (return)
-Louvet, pp. 138-164.
-
-670 (return)
-_Belagerung von Maintz_, Goethe’s _Werke_, xxx. 315.
-
-671 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, xi. 73.
-
-672 (return)
-_Choix des Rapports_, xii. 432-42.
-
-673 (return)
- September 22nd of 1792 is Vendémiaire 1st of Year One, and the
- new months are all of 30 days each; therefore:
-
- To the number of the We have the number of the
- day in Add day in Days
-
- Vendémiaire 21 September 30
- Brumaire 21 October 31
- Frimaire 20 November 30
-
- Nivose 20 December 31
- Pluviose 19 January 31
- Ventose 18 February 28
-
- Germinal 20 March 31
- Floréal 19 April 30
- Prairial 19 May 31
-
- Messidor 18 June 30
- Thermidor 18 July 31
- Fructidor 17 August 31
-
- There are 5 Sansculottides, and in leap-year a sixth, to be added
- at the end of Fructidor. Romme’s first Leap-year is ‘_An_
- 4’(1795, not 1796), which is another troublesome circumstance,
- every fourth year, from “September 23d” round to “February 29”
- again.
-
- The New Calendar ceased on the 1st of January 1806. See _Choix
- des Rapports_, xiii. 83-99; xix. 199.
-
-674 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, xi. 147; xiii. 160-92, &c.
-
-675 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, xi. 80-143.
-
-676 (return)
-Louvet, p. 180-199.
-
-677 (return)
-_Moniteur_, Séance du 5 Septembre, 1793.
-
-678 (return)
-_Débats_, Séance du 23 Août 1793.
-
-679 (return)
-_Moniteur_, Séance du 17 Septembre 1793.
-
-680 (return)
-_Moniteur_, Séances du 5, 9, 11 Septembre.
-
-681 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, xi. 148-188.
-
-682 (return)
-See _Mémoires particuliers de la Captivité à la Tour du Temple_, by the
-Duchesse d’Angoulême, Paris, 21 Janvier 1817.
-
-683 (return)
-_Procès de la Reine_ (_Deux Amis_, xi. 251-381).
-
-684 (return)
-Vilate, _Causes secrètes de la Révolution de Thermidor_ (Paris, 1825),
-p. 179.
-
-685 (return)
-Weber, i. 6.
-
-686 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, xi. 301.
-
-687 (return)
-Δημοσθένους εἰπόντος, Ἀποκτενοῦδί σε Ἀθηναῖοι, φωκίων˙ Ἀν μανῶσιν, εῖτε
-σὲ δ’, ἐὰν σαφρονῶσι.—Plut. _Opp_. t. iv. p. 310. ed. Reiske, 1776.
-
-688 (return)
-_Mémoires de Riouffe_ in _Mémoires sur les Prisons_, Paris, 1823, p.
-48-55.
-
-689 (return)
-Louvet, p. 213.
-
-690 (return)
-_Recherches Historiques sur les Girondins_ in _Mémoires de Buzot_, p.
-107.
-
-691 (return)
-_Hist. Parl._ Introd., i. 1 et seqq.
-
-692 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, xii. 78.
-
-693 (return)
-Mercier. ii. 124.
-
-694 (return)
-_Moniteur_ of these months, passim.
-
-695 (return)
-Foster, ii. 628; Montgaillard, iv. 141-57.
-
-696 (return)
-_Mémoires_ (_Sur les Prisons_, i.), pp. 55-7.
-
-697 (return)
-_Mémoires de Madame Roland_ (Introd.), i. 68.
-
-698 (return)
-Vie de Bailly in _Mémoires_, i., p. 29.
-
-699 (return)
-_Mémoires de Madame Roland_ (Introd.), i. 88.
-
-700 (return)
-Foster, ii. 629.
-
-701 (return)
-_Moniteur_, 11 Decembre, 30 Decembre, 1793; Louvet, p. 287.
-
-702 (return)
-See Louvet, p. 301.
-
-703 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, xii. 249-51.
-
-704 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, xi. 145.
-
-705 (return)
-_Moniteur_ (du 17 Novembre 1793), &c.
-
-706 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, xii. 251-62.
-
-707 (return)
-_Moniteur_, 1793, Nos. 101 (31 Decembre), 95, 96, 98, &c.
-
-708 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, xii. 266-72; _Moniteur_, du 2 Janvier 1794.
-
-709 (return)
-_Procès de Carrier_, 4 tomes, Paris, 1795.
-
-710 (return)
-_Les Horreures des Prisons d’Arras_, Paris, 1823.
-
-711 (return)
-Montgaillard, iv. 200.
-
-712 (return)
-_Moniteur_, Séance du 17 Brumaire (7th November), 1793.
-
-713 (return)
-_Analyse du Moniteur_ (Paris, 1801), ii. 280.
-
-714 (return)
-Mercier, iv. 134. See _Moniteur_, Séance du 10 Novembre.
-
-715 (return)
-See also _Moniteur_, Séance du 26 Novembre.
-
-716 (return)
-Mercier, iv. 127-146.
-
-717 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, xii. 62-5.
-
-718 (return)
-_Débats_, du 10 Novembre, 1723.
-
-719 (return)
-_Dictionnaire des Hommes Marquans_, i. 115.
-
-720 (return)
-_Moniteur_, du 27 Novembre 1793.
-
-721 (return)
-_Choix des Rapports_, xiii. 189.
-
-722 (return)
-Ibid. xv. 360.
-
-723 (return)
-There is, in _Prudhomme_, an atrocity _à la_ Captain-Kirk reported of
-this Cavaignac; which has been copied into Dictionaries of _Hommes
-Marquans_, of _Biographie Universelle_, &c.; which not only has no
-truth in it, but, much more singular, is still capable of being proved
-to have none.
-
-724 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, xiii. 205-30; Toulongeon, &c.
-
-725 (return)
-Levasseur, _Mémoires_, ii. c. 2-7.
-
-726 (return)
-His narrative in _Deux Amis_, xiv. 177-86.
-
-727 (return)
-Compare Barrère (_Chois des Rapports_, xiv. 416-21); Lord Howe (_Annual
-Register_ of 1794, p. 86), &c.
-
-728 (return)
-Carlyle’s _Miscellanies_, § Sinking of the Vengeur.
-
-729 (return)
-_Chois des Rapports_, xv. 378, 384.
-
-730 (return)
-26th June, 1794, (see _Rapport de Guyton-Morveau sur les Aérostats_, in
-_Moniteur_ du 6 Vendémiaire, An 2).
-
-731 (return)
-Mercier, v. 25; _Deux Amis_, xii. 142-199.
-
-732 (return)
-See _Deux Amis_, xv. 189-192; _Mémoires de Genlis; Founders of the
-French Republic_, &c. &c.
-
-733 (return)
-Mercier, ii. 134.
-
-734 (return)
-Montgaillard, iv. 290.
-
-735 (return)
-_Moniteur_, du 17 Ventose (7th March) 1794.
-
-736 (return)
-_Biographie de Ministres_, § Danton.
-
-737 (return)
-_Aperçus sur Camille Desmoulins_ in _Vieux Cordelier_, Paris, 1825, pp.
-1-29.
-
-738 (return)
-Montgaillard, iv. 200.
-
-739 (return)
-Duchesse d’Angoulême, _Captivité à la Tour du Temple_, pp. 37-71.
-
-740 (return)
-_Tribunal Révolutionnaire_, du 8 Mai 1794, _Moniteur_, No. 231.
-
-741 (return)
-_Tableaux de la Révolution_, § Soupers Fraternels; Mercier, ii. 150.
-
-742 (return)
-Riouffe, p. 73; _Deux Amis_, xii. 298-302.
-
-743 (return)
-Vilate, _Causes Secrètes de la Révolution de_ 9 _Thermidor_.
-
-744 (return)
-See Vilate, _Causes Secrètes_. (Vilate’s Narrative is very curious; but
-is not to be taken as true, without sifting; being, at bottom, in spite
-of its title, not a Narrative but a Pleading).
-
-745 (return)
-Montgaillard, iv. 237.
-
-746 (return)
-_Maison d’Arrêt de Port-Libre_, par Coittant, &c. _Mémoires sur les
-Prisons_, ii.
-
-747 (return)
-Montgaillard, iv. 218; Riouffe, p. 273.
-
-748 (return)
-_Voyage de Cent Trente-deux Nantais_, (_Prisons_, ii. 288-335).
-
-749 (return)
-_Relation de ce qu’ont souffert pour la Religion les Prêtres déportés
-en 1794, dans la rade de l’île d’Aix_, (_Prisons_, ii. 387-485).
-
-750 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, xii. 347-73.
-
-751 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, xii. 350-8.
-
-752 (return)
-See Vilate.
-
-753 (return)
-_Moniteur_, Nos. 311, 312; _Débats_, iv. 421-42; _Deux Amis_, xii.
-390-411.
-
-754 (return)
-_Précis des Evénemens du Neuf Thermidor_, par C.A. Méda, ancien
-Gendarme, Paris, 1825.
-
-755 (return)
-Mémoires sur les Prisons, ii. 277.
-
-756 (return)
-Méda. p. 384. (Méda asserts that it was he who, with infinite courage,
-though in a lefthanded manner, shot Robespierre. Méda got promoted for
-his services of this night; and died General and Baron. Few credited
-Méda (in what was otherwise incredible).
-
-757 (return)
-24th December 1794, _Moniteur_, No. 97.
-
-758 (return)
-October 1795, Dulaure, viii. 454-6.
-
-759 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, xiii. 3-39.
-
-760 (return)
-Mercier, _Nouveau Paris_, iii. 138, 153.
-
-761 (return)
-Montgaillard, iv. 436-42.
-
-762 (return)
-Montgaillard, Mercier, (ubi supra).
-
-763 (return)
-De Staël, _Considérations_ iii. c. 10, &c.
-
-764 (return)
-Toulongeon, iii. c. 7; v. c. 10, p. 194.
-
-765 (return)
-19th January, 1795, Montgaillard, iv. 287-311.
-
-766 (return)
-5th April, 1795, Montgaillard, iv. 319.
-
-767 (return)
-_Histoire de la Guerre de la Vendée_, par M. le Comte de Vauban,
-_Mémoires de Madame de la Rochejacquelin_, &c.
-
-768 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, xiv. 94-106; Puisaye, _Mémoires_, iii-vii.
-
-769 (return)
-_Moniteur_, du 25 Septembre 1794, du 4 Février 1795.
-
-770 (return)
-_Moniteur_, Séances du 10-12 Novembre 1794: _Deux Amis_, xiii. 43-49.
-
-771 (return)
-Mercier, ii. 94. (“1st February, 1796: at the Bourse of Paris, the gold
-louis,” of 20 francs in silver, “costs 5,300 francs in assignats.”
-Montgaillard, iv. 419).
-
-772 (return)
-Fantin Desodoards, _Histoire de la Révolution_, vii. c. 4.
-
-773 (return)
-_Moniteur_, Séance du 13 Germinal (2d April) 1795.
-
-774 (return)
-_Moniteur_, du 27 Juin, du 31 Août, 1795; _Deux Amis_, xiii. 121-9.
-
-775 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, xiii. 129-46.
-
-776 (return)
-Toulongeon, v. 297; _Moniteur_, Nos. 244, 5, 6.
-
-777 (return)
-_Dictionnaire des Hommes Marquans_, §§ Billaud, Collot.
-
-778 (return)
-Montgaillard, iv. 241.
-
-779 (return)
-_Report of the Irish Poor-Law Commission_, 1836.
-
-780 (return)
-_Nouveau Paris_, iv. 118.
-
-781 (return)
-Napoleon, Las Cases, _Choix des Rapports_, xvii. 398-411.
-
-782 (return)
-_Deux Amis_, xiii. 375-406.
-
-783 (return)
-_Moniteur_, Séance du 5 Octobre 1795.
-
-784 (return)
-_Moniteur_, du 4 Septembre 1797.
-
-785 (return)
-9th November 1799, _Choix des Rapports_, xvii. 1-96.
-
-786 (return)
-Bailleul, _Examen critique des Considérations de Madame de Staël_, ii.
-275.
-
-787 (return)
-_Diamond Necklace_, (Carlyle’s _Miscellanies_).
-
-
-
-
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