The Life of Marie Antoinette

CHAPTER XXVI. Feelings of Marie Antoinette on coming to the Tuileries.-Her Tact in winning the Hearts of the Common People.-Mirabeau changes his Views.- Quarrel between La Fayette and the Duc d'Orleans.-Mirabeau desires to offer his Services to the Queen.-Riots in Paris.-Murder of Francois.- The Assembly pass a Vote prohibiting any Member from taking Office.-The Emigration.-Death of the Emperor Joseph II.-Investigation into the Riots of October.-The Queen refuses to give Evidence.-Violent Proceedings in the Assembly.-Execution of the Marquis de Favras.

The comment made by Marie Antoinette on quitting Versailles was that "they were undone; they were being dragged off, perhaps to death, which was never far removed from captive sovereigns;[1]" and such henceforward was her prevailing feeling. She may occasionally, prompted by her own innate courage and sanguineness of disposition, have cherished a short-lived hope, founded on a consciousness of the king's and her own purity of intention, or on a belief, which she never wholly discarded, in the natural goodness of heart of the French people when not led astray by demagogues; and of their impulsive levity of disposition, which seemed to make no change of temper on their part impossible; but her general feeling was one of humiliation for the past and despair for the future. Not only did the example of Charles I., whose fate was ever before her eyes, fill her with dread for her husband's life (to her own danger she never gave a thought), but she felt also that the cause and principle of royalty had been degraded by the shameful scenes through which she had lately passed; and we shall fail to do justice to the patience, fortitude, and energy of her conduct during the remainder of her life, if we allow ourselves to forget that these high qualities were maintained and exerted in spite of the most depressing circumstances and the most discouraging convictions; that she was struggling because it was her duty to struggle for her husband's honor and her child's inheritance; but that she was never long sustained by that incentive which, with so many, is absolutely indispensable to steady and useful exertion-the anticipation of eventual success.

A letter which the very next morning she wrote to Mercy, who fortunately still retained his old post as embassador, shows the courage with which she still caught at every circumstance which seemed in the least hopeful; and with what unfaltering tact she sought every opportunity of acting on the impulsiveness which she regarded as one chief characteristic of the French people.

"October 7th, 1789.

"I am quite well. You may be easy about me. If we could only forget where we are and how we came here, we ought to be satisfied with the feelings of the people, especially this morning. I hope, if bread does not fall short, that many things will return to their proper order. I speak to the people, militia, fish-women, and all: all offer me their hands; I give them mine. In the Hotel de Ville I was personally well received. The people this morning begged us to remain here. I answered them, speaking for the king, who was by my side, that it depended on themselves whether we remained; that we desired nothing better; that all animosities must be laid aside; that the slightest renewal of bloodshed would make us flee, with horror. Those who were nearest to me swore that all that was over. I told the fish-women to go and tell others all that we had just said to one another.[2]"

And a day or two later, on the 10th, even while giving fuller expression to her feelings of unhappiness, and of disgust at the events of the past week, as to which she assures Mercy that "no description could be exaggerated; on the contrary, that any account must fall far short of what the king and she had seen and experienced," she yet repeats that "she hopes to bring back to a right feeling the honest and sound portion of the citizens and people. Unhappily, however," as she adds, "they are not the most numerous body. Still, with gentleness and unwearied patience, she may hope that at least she shall succeed in doing away with the horrible distrust which occupies every mind, and which has dragged the king and herself into the gulf in which they are at present." So keen at this time was her feeling that one principal cause of their miseries was the unjust distrust which the citizens in general conceived of the views and designs of the court, that she desires Mercy not to try to see her; and, while she describes the scantiness of the accommodation which her attendants had as yet been able to provide for her, so that Madame Royale had a bed in her dressing-room, and the little dauphin was in her own room, she finds advantage in these arrangements, inconvenient as they were, since they prevented any suspicion from arising that she was giving audiences which she desired to keep secret.

She did not overrate the impression which she had made on the people; and her faithful attendant, Madame Campan, has preserved more minute details of the events of the 7th than she herself reported to the embassador. She was hardly dressed when a huge crowd collected on the terrace under her window, shouting for her to show herself; and, when she came forward, they began to accost her in a mingled tone of expostulation and menace. "She must drive away the courtiers who were the ruin of kings. She must love the inhabitants of her good city." She replied "that she had always felt so toward them; she had loved them while at Versailles; she should continue to love them at Paris." "Ah," interrupted a virago, hardier than her companions, "but on the 14th of July you would have besieged and bombarded the city; and on the 6th of October you wanted to flee to the frontier." She answered, in the gentlest tone, that "these were idle stories, which they were wrong to believe; tales like these were what caused at once the misery of the people and that of the best of kings." Another woman addressed her in German. Marie Antoinette declared that "she did not understand what she said; that she had become so completely French that she had forgotten her native language;" and the compliment to their country fairly vanquished them. They received it with shouts of "Bravo," and with loud clapping of their hands. They begged the ribbons and flowers of her bonnet. She took them off with her own hand and distributed them among them; and they divided the spoils with thankful exultation, smiling, waving their hands, and crying out, "Long live Marie Antoinette! Long live our good queen![3]"

For a time it seemed as if the fortunes of the king and country were being weighed in an uncertain balance. One day some circumstances seemed to hold out a prospect of the re-establishment of tranquillity, and of the return of the masses to a better feeling. The next day these favorable appearances were more than counterbalanced by fresh evidences of the increasing power of the factious and unscrupulous demagogues. It was greatly in favor of the crown that the triumph of the mob on the 6th of October had led to violent quarrels between the Duc d'Orleans, La Fayette, and Mirabeau. La Fayette had charged the duke with having entered into a plot to assassinate him, and threatened to impeach him formally if he did not at once quit the kingdom.[4] The duke trembled and consented, easily procuring from the ministers, who were glad to get rid of him, a diplomatic mission to England as a pretext for his departure; and Mirabeau, who despised both the duke and the marquis, full of contempt for the pusillanimity which the former had shown in the quarrel, abandoned all idea of placing him on his cousin's throne. "Make him my king!" he exclaimed; "I would not have him for my valet."

Emboldened by his success with the duke, La Fayette, who had great confidence in his own address, next tried to win over or to get rid of Mirabeau himself. He proposed to obtain an embassy for him also. The suggestion of what was clearly an honorable exile in disguise was at once declined.[5] He then offered him a large sum of money, for at that moment he had the entire disposal of the civil list; but he found that the great orator was disinclined to connect himself with him in any way, much more to lay himself under any obligation to him. In fact, Mirabeau was at this moment hoping to obtain a post in the home administration, where, if he could once succeed in procuring a footing, he had no doubt of soon obtaining the entire mastery; and the royal family was hardly settled at the Tuileries before he applied to his friend, the Count de la Marck, whom he rightly believed to enjoy the queen's good opinion, begging him to express to her his ardent wish to serve her. He even drew up a long memorial on the existing state of affairs, indicating the line of conduct which, in his opinion, the king ought to pursue; the leading feature of which was an early departure from Paris to some city at no great distance, that he might be safe and free; while in the capital it was evident that he was neither. And the step which he thus recommended at the outset deserves attention as being also that on which a year later he still insisted as the indispensable preliminary to whatever line of conduct might be decided on.

But at this moment his advice never reached those for whom it was intended. La Marck, with all his good-will both to his friend and to the court, could not venture to bring before the queen's notice the name of one who, only a few days before, had denounced her in the foulest manner in the Assembly for having appeared at the soldiers' banquet, and whom she with her own eyes had beheld uniting with the assailants of the palace. He thought it more politic, even for the eventual attainment of his friend's objects, to content himself for the time with giving the memorial and stating the views of the writer to the Count de Provence; and that prince declared that it would be useless to bring it to the knowledge of either king or queen: "that the queen had not sufficient influence over her husband to induce him to adopt such a plan;" and he even hinted that at times Louis was disposed to be jealous of her appearing to influence him.

But if these circumstances-the quarrel between the enemies of the court, and the conversion of one more able and formidable than either-were in the king's favor, other events which took place in the same few weeks were full of mischief and danger. Before the end of the month fresh riots broke out in Paris. Bread, the supply of which Marie Antoinette, as we have seen, rightly regarded as a matter of the first importance to the tranquillity of the city, continued scarce and dear; and the mob broke open the bakers' shops, and murdered one baker, a man named Francois, with a ferocity more terrible than they had even shown toward De Launay, or the guards at Versailles. They tore his body to pieces, and, having cut off his head, compelled his wife to kiss the scarcely cold lips, and then left her fainting on the pavement still covered with his blood. Even La Fayette was horror-stricken at such brutality. It was the only occasion on which he did his duty during the whole progress of the Revolution. He came down with a company of the National Guard, dispersed the rioters, seized the ruffian who was bearing aloft, the head of the murdered man on a pole, and caused him to be hanged the next day. And during the next few weeks he more than once brought his soldiers to the support of the civil power, and inflicted summary punishment on gangs of miscreants, whose idea of reform was a state of things which should afford impunity to crime.

But in the next month the Assembly dealt a heavier blow on the king's authority than could be inflicted by the worst excesses of an informal mob-they passed a resolution prohibiting any of its members from accepting any office in the administration: it was an imitation of the self-denying ordinance into which Cromwell had tricked the English Parliament; and, though bearing an appearance of disinterestedness in closing the access to official emoluments and honors against themselves, was in reality an injury to the king, as depriving him of his right to select his ministers from the entire body of the nation; and to the nation itself, as preventing it from obtaining the services of those who might be presumed to be its ablest citizens, as having been already selected as its representatives.

But a far more irreparable injury than any that could be inflicted on the court by either populace or Assembly came from its friends. We have seen that the Count d'Artois, with some nobles who had especial reason to fear the enmity of the Parisians, had fled from the country in July; and now their example was followed by a vast number of the higher classes, several of them having hitherto been prominent as the leaders of the Moderate or Constitutional section of the Assembly-men who had no grounds for complaining that, except in one or two instances, at moments of extraordinary excitement, their influence had been overborne, but who now yielded to an infectious panic. Before the end of the year more than three hundred deputies had resigned their seats and quit the country; salving over to themselves the dereliction of the duties which a few months before they had voluntarily sought, and their performance of which was now a more imperative duty than ever, by denunciations of the crimes which had been committed, and which they had found themselves unable to prevent. They did not see that their pusillanimous flight must lead to a continuance of such atrocities, leaving, as it did, the undisputed sway in the Assembly to those very men who had been the authors of the outrages of which they complained. They were, in fact, insuring the ruin of all that they most wished to preserve; for, in the progress of the debates in the Assembly during the winter, many questions of the most vital importance were decided by very small majorities, which their presence would have turned into minorities. The greater the danger was, the more irresistible they ought to have felt the obligation to stand to the last by the cause of which they were the legitimate champions; and the final triumph of the Jacobin party owed hardly more to the energy of its leaders than to the cowardly and inglorious flight of the princes and nobles who left the field open without resistance to their wickedness and audacity.

It was a melancholy winter that the queen now passed. So far as she was able, she diverted her mind from political anxieties by devoting much of her time to the education of her children. A little plot of ground was railed off in the garden of the Tuileries for the dauphin's[6] amusement; and one of her favorite relaxations was to watch him working at the flower-beds himself with his little hoe and rake; though, as if to mark that they were in fact prisoners, both she and he were followed wherever they went by grenadiers of the city-guard, and were not allowed to dispense with their attendance for a single moment. Marie Antoinette had reason to complain that she was watched as a criminal[7]. Sad as she was at heart, she was not allowed the comfort of privacy and retirement. She was forced to hold receptions for the nobles and chief citizens, and as the court was now formally established at the Tuileries, she dined every week in public with the king; but she steadily resisted the entreaties of some of the ministers and courtiers to visit the theatres, thinking, with great justice, that an attendance at public spectacles of that character would have had an appearance of gayety, as unbecoming at such a period of anxiety, as it was inconsistent with her feelings; and before the end of the winter she sustained a fresh affliction in the loss of her brother the emperor[8]; whose death bore with it the additional aggravation of depriving her of a counselor whose advice she valued, and of an ally on whose active aid she believed that she could rely far more than she could on that of their brother Leopold, who now succeeded to the imperial throne.

Not that Leopold can be charged with indifference to his sister's welfare. In the very week of his accession to the throne he wrote to her with great affection, assuring her of his devotion to her interests, and expressing his desire to correspond with her in the most unreserved confidence. But the same letter shows that as yet he knew but very little of her;[9] and that he regarded the difficulties in which some of Joseph's recent measures had involved the Imperial Government as sufficiently serious to engross his attention. A few extracts from her reply are worth preserving, as proving how steadily in her conduct and language to every one she adhered to her rule of concealing her husband's defects, and putting him forward as the first person on whose wishes and directions her own conduct most depend. It also shows what advances she was herself making in the perception of the true character of the crisis, so far as the objects of the few honest members who still remained in the Assembly were concerned, and the extent to which she was trying to reconcile herself to some curtailment of her husband's former authority.

Thanking him for the assurance of his friendship, she says: "Believe me, my dear brother, we shall always be worthy of it. I say we, because I do not separate the king from myself. He was touched by your letter, as I was myself, and bids me assure you of this. His heart is loyalty and honesty itself; and if ever again we become, I do not say what we have been, but at least what we ought to be, you may then depend on the entire fidelity of a good ally.

"I do not say any thing to you of our actual position: it is too heart- rending. It ought to afflict every sovereign in the universe, and still more an affectionate relation like you. It is only time and patience that can bring back men's minds to a healthy state. It is a war of opinions, and one which is still far from being terminated. It is only the justice of our cause and the feeling of a good conscience that can support us ... My most sincere wish is that you may never meet with ingratitude. My own melancholy experience proves to me that, of all evils, that is the most terrible."

Yet no indignation at the thanklessness of the Parisians could chill her constant benevolence toward them; and amidst all the anxieties which filled her mind for herself, her husband, and her child, she founded an asylum for the education of a number of orphan daughters of old soldiers, and found time to give her careful attention to a code of regulations for its management.[10]

Meanwhile circumstances were gradually paving the way for her accepting the help of him who, during the earliest discussions of the Assembly, had been, not so much through his own malice as through Necker's folly, her worst enemy. We have seen how, immediately after the attack on Versailles, Mirabeau had once more endeavored to find an opening through which to place himself at her service. He alone, perhaps, of all men in the kingdom, perceived the reality and greatness of the danger which threatened even the lives of the sovereigns;[11] and, as amidst all the errors into which his regard for his own interests, his vindictiveness, or his caprice impelled him, he always preserved the perceptions and instincts of a genuine statesman, many of the transactions of the winter increased his conviction of the peril in which every interest in the whole kingdom was placed, if the headlong folly of the Assembly could not be restrained, and if even, proverbially difficult as such a course is, some of its acts could not be rescinded; while one transaction, which, more than any other that had yet taken place, showed the greatness of the queen's heart, much sharpened his eagerness to prove himself a worthy servant of so noble-minded a mistress.

Some of the magistrates who still desired to discharge their duty had instituted an investigation into the conspiracy which had originated the attack on Versailles, and all its multiplied horrors. They had examined a great body of witnesses, whose evidence left no doubt of the active part taken in it by the Duc d'Orleans and his partisans, and by Mirabeau, whether he were to be included among that prince's adherents or not; but they conceived it specially important to procure the testimony of the queen herself. However, it was in vain that they applied to her for the slightest information. Appeals to her indignation, to her pride, and to her danger, were equally disregarded by her. No denunciation of those who, whatever had been their crimes, were still the subjects of her husband, could, in her eyes, be becoming to her as queen; and when those who hoped to make a tool of her to crush their political rivals urged that no evidence would be accepted as equally conclusive with hers, since no one had seen so much of what had taken place, or had in so great a degree preserved that coolness which was indispensable to a clear account of it, and to the identification of the guilty, her reply was a dignified and magnanimous pardon of the outrages beneath which she had so nearly perished. "I have seen every thing; I have known every thing; I have forgotten every thing;" and Mirabeau, not unthankful for the protection which her magnanimity thus throw around him, was eager to make atonement for his past insults and injuries.

And many of the recent events had convinced him that there was no time to lose. The vote of November, debarring him, in common with all other members of the Assembly, from office, was a severe blow to the most important of his projects, so far as his own interests were concerned. Within a month it had been followed by another, proposed by the Abbe Sieyes, a busy priest who boasted that he had made himself master of the whole science of politics, but who was in fact a mere slave of abstract theories, the safety or even the practicability of which he was utterly unable to estimate. On his motion, the Assembly, in a single evening, abolished all the ancient territorial divisions of the kingdom, and the very names of the provinces; dividing the country anew into eighty-three departments, and coupling with this new arrangement a number of details which were evidently calculated to wrest the whole executive authority of the kingdom from the crown and to vest it in the populace. At another sitting, the whole property of the Church was confiscated. On another night, the Parliaments were abolished; and on a fourth, the party which had carried these measures made a still more direct and audacious attack on the royal prerogative, by passing a resolution which deprived the crown of all power of revising the sentences of the judicial tribunals, and of pardoning or mitigating the punishment of those who might have been condemned. And, if to bring home to the tender-hearted monarch the full effect of this last inroad upon his legitimate power, they at the same time created a new crime to which they gave the name of treason against the nation,[12] without either defining it, or specifying the kind of evidence which should he required to prove it; and they proceeded at once to put it in force to procure the condemnation of a nobleman of decayed fortune, but of the highest character, the Marquis de Favras, in a manner which showed that their real object was to strike terror into the whole Royalist party. The charges on which he was brought to trial were not merely unfounded, but ridiculous. He was charged with designing to raise an army of thirty thousand men, with the object of carrying off the king from Paris, of dissolving the Assembly by force, and putting La Fayette and Bailly to death. The evidence with which it was pretended to support these charges broke down on every point, and its failure of itself established the prisoner's innocence, even without the aid of his own defense, which was lucid and eloquent. But the marquis was known to be a Royalist in feeling, and, though very poor, to stand high in the confidence of the princes. The demagogues collected mobs round the courthouse to intimidate the judges, and the judges proved as base as the accusers themselves. They professed, indeed, to fear not so much for their own lives as for the public tranquillity, but they pronounced him guilty. One of them had even the effrontery to acknowledge his innocence to Favras himself, and to affirm that his life was a necessary sacrifice to the public peace.

No event since the attack on Versailles had caused Marie Antoinette equal anguish. It showed that attachment to the king and herself was in itself regarded as an inexpiable crime, and her distress was greatly augmented when, on the Sunday following the execution of the marquis, some of his friends brought to the table where, as usual, she was dining in public with the king, the widowed marchioness and her orphaned son in deep mourning, and presented them to their majesties. Their introducers evidently expected that the king, or at least the queen, by the distinguished reception which she would accord to them, would mark their sense of the merits of their late husband and father, and of the indignity of the sentence under which he had suffered.

Marie Antoinette was sadly embarrassed and distressed: she was taken wholly by surprise; and it happened by a cruel perverseness of fortune that Santerre, the brewer, whose ruffianly and ferocious enmity to the whole royal family, and especially to herself, had been conspicuous throughout the worst outrages of the past summer and autumn, was on the same day on duty at the palace as commander of one of the battalions of the Parisian Guard, and was standing behind her chair when the marchioness and her son were introduced. Her embarrassment and all her feelings on the occasion were described by herself in the course of the afternoon to Madame Campan.

After the dinner was over, she went up to her attendant's room, saying that it was a relief to find herself where she could weep at her ease; for weep she must at the folly of the ultra-Royalists. "We can not but be destroyed," she continued, "when we are attacked by people who unite every kind of talent to every kind of wickedness; and when we are defended by folks who are indeed very estimable, but who have no just notion of our position. They have now compromised me with both parties, in their presenting to me the widow and son of Favras. If I had been free to do as I would, I should have taken the child of a man who had just been sacrificed for us, and have placed him at table between the king and myself; but surrounded as I was by the very murderers who had caused his father's death, I could not venture even to bestow a glance upon him. Yet the Royalists will blame me for not having seemed to be interested in the poor child; while the Revolutionists will be furious, thinking that those who presented him to me knew that it would please me." And all that she could venture to do she did. She knew that the marchioness was very poor, and she sent her by a trusty agent a few hundred louis, and with it a kind message, assuring the unhappy widow that she would always watch over her and her son's interests.