The Life of Marie Antoinette

CHAPTER XXVII. The King accepts the Constitution so far as it has been settled.-The Queen makes a Speech to the Deputies.-She is well received at the Theatre.-Negotiations with Mirabeau.-The Queen's Views of the Position of Affairs.-The Jacobin Club denounces Mirabeau.-Deputation of Anacharsis Clootz.-Demolition of the Statue of Louis XIV.-Abolition of Titles of Honor.-The Queen admits Mirabeau to an Audience.-His Admiration of her Courage and Talents.-Anniversary of the Capture of the Bastile.-Fete of the Champ de Mars.-Presence of Mind of the Queen.

What was probably as painful to Marie Antoinette as these occurrences themselves was the apathy with which the king regarded them. The English traveler to whose journal we have more than once referred, and who, in the first week of the year, saw the royal pair waiting in the gardens of the Tuileries, remarked that though the queen did not appear in good health, but showed melancholy and anxiety in her face, the king, on the other hand, "was as plump as ease could render him.[1]" And in the course of February, in spite of all her remonstrances, Necker succeeded in persuading him to go down to the Assembly, and to address the members in a long speech, in which, though some of his expressions were clearly intended as a reproof of the Assembly itself for the precipitation and violence of some of its measures, he nevertheless declared his cordial assent to the new Constitution, so far as they had yet settled it, and promised to co-operate in a spirit of affection and confidence in the labors which still remained to be achieved.

The greater part of the speech is believed to have been his own composition; and it is characteristic of the fidelity with which, on every occasion, Marie Antoinette adhered to her rule of strengthening her husband's position by her own cordial and conspicuous support, that, strongly as she had objected to the step before it was taken, now that it was decided on, she professed a decided approval of it; and when a deputation of the Assembly, which had been appointed to escort the king with honor back to the palace, solicited an audience of herself to pay their respects, she assured the deputies that "she partook of all the sentiments of the king; that she united with all her heart and mind in the measure which his love for his people had just dictated to him." And then, bringing the dauphin forward, she added: "Behold my son. I shall unceasingly speak to him of the virtues of his most excellent father. I shall teach him from the earliest age to cherish public liberty, and I hope that he will be its firmest bulwark."

For a moment the step seemed to have succeeded, though the proofs of its success were still more strongly proofs of the utter want of sense that marked all the proceedings of the Assembly. As Louis had expressed his assent to the Constitution so far as it was settled, it was proposed, as a fitting compliment to him, that the Assembly and the whole body of the citizens of Paris should take an oath of fidelity to the Constitution without any such reservation. But in the course of the next few weeks the Assembly showed how little his reproof of its former precipitation and violence had been heeded, since, among the first measures with which it proceeded to the completion of the Constitution, one deprived him of the right of deciding on peace and war, a power which all wise statesmen regard as inseparable from the executive government; another extinguished the right of primogeniture; and a third confiscated all the property of the monastic establishments.

However, those who took the lead in the management of affairs (for Necker and the ministers had long ceased to exert the slightest authority) were blinded by their own fury to the absurdity and inconsistency of their conduct. Their exultation was unbounded, and, adhering to the line of conduct which she had marked out for herself, Marie Antoinette now yielded to their entreaties that she would show herself to the citizens at the theatre. Even in the days of her earliest popularity she had never met a more enthusiastic reception. The greater part of the house rose at her entrance, clapping their hands and cheering, and the disloyalty of a few malcontents only made her triumph more conspicuous, so roughly were they treated by the rest of the audience. Marie Antoinette was herself touched at the cordiality with which she was greeted, and saw in it another proof that "the people and citizens were good at heart if left to themselves; but," she added to the Princess de Lamballe, to whom she described the scene, "all this enthusiasm is but a gleam of light, a cry of conscience which weakness will soon stifle.[2]"

It is probably doing no injustice to Mirabeau to believe that the crimes which had made the greatest impression on the queen were not the events which affected him the most strongly. But he was not only a statesman in intellect, but an aristocrat in every feeling of his heart. No man was fonder of referring to his illustrious ancestors; or of claiming kindred with men of old renown, such as the Admiral de Coligny, of whom he more than once boasted in the Assembly as his cousin; and each blow dealt at the consideration of the Nobles was an additional incentive to him to seek to arrest the progress of a revolution which had already gone far beyond his wishes or his expectations. And as he was always energetic in the pursuit of his plans, he had, by some means or other, in spite of the discouragement derived from the language and conduct of the Count de Provence, contrived to get information of his willingness to enlist in the Royalist party conveyed to the queen. The Count de la Marck, who was still his chief confidant, was at Brussels at the beginning of the spring, when he received a letter from Mercy, begging him to return without delay to Paris. He lost no time in obeying the summons, when he learned, to his great delight, though his pleasure was alloyed by some misgiving, that the king and queen had resolved to avail themselves of Mirabeau's services, and that he himself was selected as the intermediate agent in the negotiation. La Marck's misgiving,[3] as he frankly told the embassador at the outset, was caused by the fear that Mirabeau had done more harm than he could repair; but he gladly undertook the commission, though its difficulty was increased by a stipulation which showed at once the weakness of the king, and the extraordinary difficulties which it placed in the way of his friends. The count was especially warned to keep all that was passing a secret from Necker. He was startled, as he well might be, at such an injunction. But he did not think it became his position to start a difficulty; and, as he was fully impressed with the importance of not losing time, the negotiation proceeded rapidly. He introduced Mirabeau to Mercy, and he himself was admitted to an interview with the queen, when he learned that her greatest objections to accepting Mirabeau's services were of a personal nature, founded partly on the general badness of his character, partly on the share he had borne in the events of the 5th and 6th of October. By the count's own account, he went rather beyond the truth in his endeavors to exculpate his friend on this point; and he probably deceived himself when he believed that he had convinced the queen of his innocence. But both she and Louis, who was present at a part of the interview, had evidently made up their minds to forget the past, if they could trust his promises for the future. And the interview ended in the further conduct of the necessary arrangements being left by Louis to the queen.

In a subsequent conversation with the count, she explained her own views of the existing situation of affairs, describing them, indeed, according to her custom, as the ideas of the king, in a manner which shows how much she was willing that the king should abate of his old prerogatives, provided only that the concessions were made voluntarily by himself, and not imposed by violent and illegal resolutions of the Assembly. Mirabeau had drawn up an elaborate memorial for the consideration of the king, in which he pointed out in general terms his sense of the state of "utter anarchy" into which France had fallen, his shame and indignation at feeling "that he himself had contributed to bring affairs into such a bad state." and his "profound conviction of the necessity, in the interests of the whole nation, of re-establishing the legitimate authority of the king.[4]" And Marie Antoinette, commenting on this expression, assured La Marck that "the king had no desire to recover the full extent of the authority which he had formerly possessed; and that he was far from thinking it necessary for his own personal happiness any more than for the welfare of his people.[5]" And it seemed to the count that she placed unlimited confidence in Mirabeau's ability to re-establish her husband's power on a sufficient and satisfactory basis; so full was her conversation, during the latter part of the interview, of the good which she expected to be again able to do, and of the warm affection with which she regarded the people.

The benefits of this new alliance were not to be all on one side. Mirabeau was overwhelmed with debt; and though his father had died in the preceding summer, he had not yet entered into his inheritance, but was in a state little short of absolute destitution. From this condition he was to be relieved, and the arrangements for the discharge of his debts, and the securing to him the enjoyment of a sufficient though by no means excessive income, were intrusted to Marie Antoinette by the king, and by her to her almoner, M. de Fontanges, who, when Lomenie de Brienne was promoted to the archbishopric of Sens, had succeeded him at Toulouse. The archbishop, who was sincerely devoted to his royal mistress, carried out the necessary arrangements with great skill, but they could not be managed with such secrecy as entirely to escape notice. Among the clubs which had been set on foot at the beginning of the previous year the most violent had been that known as the Breton Club, from being founded by some of the deputies from the great province of Brittany; but, when the court removed to Paris, and the Assembly was established in a large building close to the garden of the Tuileries, the Bretons obtained the use of an apartment in an old convent of Dominican or Jacobin friars (as they were called), the same which two centuries before had been the council-room of the League, and they changed their own designation also, and called themselves the Jacobins; and, canceling the rule which limited the right of membership to deputies, they now admitted every one who, by application for election, avowed his adherence to their principles. Their leaders at this time were Barnave; a young noble named Alexander Lameth, whose mother, having been left in necessitous circumstances, owed to the bounty of the king and queen the means of educating her children, a benefit which they repaid with the most unremitting hostility to the whole royal family; and a lawyer named Duport. Mirabeau was in the habit of ridiculing them as the triumvirate; but they were crafty and unscrupulous men, skillful in procuring information; and, having obtained intelligence of his negotiations with the court, they retaliated on him by hiring pamphleteers and journalists to attack him, and narratives of the treason of the Count de Mirabeau were hawked about the streets.

To apply such language to the adherence of a French noble to the crown was the most open avowal of disloyalty on which the revolutionary party had yet ventured; and in the next four weeks it received a practical development in a series of measures, some of which were so ridiculous as only to deserve notice from the additional evidence which they furnished of the extreme folly of those who now had the lead in the Assembly, and of the strange excitement in which the whole nation, or at least the whole population of Paris, must have been wrought up before they could mistake their acts for those of sagacity or patriotism; but others of which, though not less unwise, were of greater importance as being irrevocable steps in the downward course of destruction along which the whole country was being dragged.

The leaders of the revolutionary party had already selected two days in the past year as especially memorable for the triumphs won over the crown: one was the 20th of June, on which, in the Tennis Court at Versailles, the members of the Assembly had bound themselves to effect the regeneration of the kingdom; the other the 14th of July, on which, as they boasted, they had forever established freedom by the destruction of the Bastile; and they determined this year to celebrate both these anniversaries in a becoming manner. Accordingly, on the 20th of June, a crack-brained member of the Jacobin Club, a Prussian of noble birth, named Clootz, who, to show his affinity with the philosophers of old, had assumed the name of Anacharsis, hired a band of vagrants and idlers, and, dressing them up in a variety of costumes to represent Arabs, red Indians, Turks, Chinese, Laplanders, and other tribes, savage and civilized, led them into the Assembly as a deputation from all the nations of the earth to announce the resurrection of the whole world from slavery; and demanded permission for them to attend the festival of the ensuing month, that each, on behalf of his country, might give in his adhesion to the principles of liberty as expounded by the Assembly. The president of the day replied with an oration thanking M. Clootz for the honor done to France by such an embassy; and Alexander Lameth followed up the president's harangue by fresh praises of the deputation as holy pilgrims who had thrown off the shackles of superstition. Nor was he content with a barren panegyric. He had devised an appropriate sacrifice with which to commemorate such exalted virtue. In the finest square of the city, the Place des Victoires, the Duke de la Feuillade had erected a statue of Louis XIV. to celebrate his royal master's triumphs, the pedestal of which was decorated with allegorical representations of the nations which had been conquered by the French marshals. It was generally regarded as the finest work of art in the city, and as such it had long been an object of admiration and pride to the citizens. But M. Lameth, in his new-born enthusiasm, regarded it with other eyes, and closed his speech by proposing that, as monuments of despotism and flattery could not fail to be shocking to so enlightened a body, the Assembly should order its instant demolition. His proposal was received with enthusiastic cheers, and the noble monument was instantly overthrown in a fit of blind fury more resembling the orgies of drunken Bacchanals, or the thirst for desolation which had animated the Goths and Huns, than the conduct of the chosen legislators of a polite and accomplished people.

But even this was not all. The insult to the memory of a king who, little as he deserved it, had a century before been the object of the unanimous admiration of his subjects, was but a prelude to other resolutions of far greater moment, as giving an indelible character to the future of the nation. A deputy, M. Lambel, whose very name was previously unknown to the majority of his colleagues, rose and made a speech of three lines, as if the proposal which it contained only required to be mentioned to command instant and universal assent "This day," said he, "is the tomb of vanity. I demand the suppression of the titles of duke, count, marquis, viscount, baron, and knight." La Fayette and Alexander Lameth's brother, Charles, supported the demand with almost equal brevity; a representative of one of the most ancient families in the kingdom, the Viscount Matthieu de Montmorency moved a prohibition of the use of armorial bearings; another noble, M. de St. Targeau, proposed that the use of names derived from the estates of the owners should be abolished. Every proposal was carried by acclamation. Louder and louder cheers followed each suggestion of a new abolition; a member who ventured to propose an amendment to one proposal was hooted down; and in little more than an hour the whole series of resolutions, which struck at once at the recollections and glories of the past and at the dignity of the future, was made the law of the land.

Every one of these attacks on the nobles was a fresh provocation to Mirabeau, and increased his eagerness to complete his reconciliation with the crown. He pronounced the abolition of titles a torch to kindle civil war, and pressed more earnestly than ever for an interview with the queen, in which he might both learn her views and explain his own. Marie Antoinette had foreseen that she should be forced to admit him to her presence, but there was nothing to which she felt a stronger repugnance. His profligate character excited a feeling of perfect disgust in her mind; but for the public good she overcame it, and, having in the course of June removed to St. Cloud for change of air, on the 3d of July she, accompanied by the king, received him in the garden of that palace. The account which she sent her brother of the interview shows with what a mixture of feelings she had been agitated. She speaks of herself as "shivering with horror" as the moment drew near, and can not bring herself to describe him except as a "monster," though, she admits that his language speedily removed her agitation, which, when he was first presented to her, had nearly made her ill. "He seemed to be actuated by entire good faith, and to be altogether devoted to the king; and Louis was highly pleased with him, so that they now thought every thing was safe.[6]"

She, on her part, had made an equally favorable impression on him. She had adroitly flattered his high opinion of himself by saying that "if she had been speaking to persons of a different class and character she should have felt the necessity of being guarded in her language, but that in dealing with a Mirabeau there could be no need of such caution;" and he told his confidant, La Marck, that till he knew "the soul and thoughts of the daughter of Maria Teresa, and learned how fully he could reckon on that august ally, he had seen nothing of the court but its weakness; but now confidence had raised his courage, and gratitude had made the prosecution of his principles a duty;[7]" and in some subsequent letters he speaks of every thing as depending on the queen, and describes in brief but forcible language his appreciation of the dangers which surrounded her, and of the magnanimous courage with which he sees that she is prepared to confront them. "The-king," he says, "has but one man about him, and that is his wife. There is no safety for her but in the reestablishment of the royal authority. I love to believe that she would not desire to preserve life without the crown. What I am quite certain of is, that she will not preserve her life unless she preserves her crown."

In his interview with her, as she reported it to the emperor, he had recommended, as the first step to be adopted by the king and herself, a departure from Paris; and, in reference to that plan, which he at all times regarded as the foundation of every other, he tells La Marck: "The moment will soon come when it will be necessary to try what can be done by a woman and a child on horseback. For her it is but the adoption of an hereditary mode of action.[8] But she must be prepared for it, and must not suppose that one can extricate one's self from an extraordinary crisis by mere chance or by the combinations of an ordinary man."

The hopes with which the acquisition of such an ally inspired the queen at this time nerved her to bear her part in the festival with which the Assembly had decided on celebrating the demolition of the Bastile. The arrangements for it were of a gigantic character. Round the sides of the Champ de Mars a vast embankment was raised, so as to give the plain the appearance of an amphitheatre, and to afford accommodation to three hundred thousand spectators. At the entrance a magnificent arch of triumph was erected. The centre was occupied by a grand altar; and on one side a gorgeous pavilion was appropriated to the king, his family, and retinue, the members of the Assembly, and the municipal magistrates. They were all to be performers in the grand ceremony which was to be the distinguishing feature of the day. The Constitution was scarcely more complete than it had been when Louis signified his acceptance of it five months before; but now, not only were he, the deputies, and municipal authorities of Paris to swear to its maintenance, but the same oath was to be taken by the National Guard, and by a deputation from every regiment in the army; and it was to bind the soldiers throughout the kingdom to the new order of things that the ceremony was originally designed.[9]

As a spectacle few have been more successful, and perhaps none has ever been so imposing. Before midnight on the 13th of July, the whole of the vast amphitheatre was filled with a dense crowd, in its gayest holiday attire-a marvelous and magnificent sight from its mere numbers; and early the next morning the heads of the procession began to defile under the arch at the entrance of the plain-La Fayette, at the head of the National Guard, leading the way. It was a curious proof of the king's weakness, and of the tenacity with which he clung to his policy of conciliation, that, in spite of his knowledge of the general's bitter animosity to his authority and to himself, and of his recent vote for the suppression of all titles of honor, Louis had offered him the sword of the Constable of France, a dignity which had been disused for many years; and it was an equally striking evidence of La Fayette's inveterate disloyalty that, gratifying as the succession to Duguesclin and Montmorency would have been to his vanity, he nevertheless refused the honor, and contented himself with the dignity which the enrollment of the detachments from the different departments under his banner conferred on him, by giving him the appearance of being the commander-in-chief of the National Guard throughout the kingdom. The National Guard was followed by regiment after regiment, and deputation after deputation, of the regular army; and, to show the subordination to the law which they were expected to acknowledge for the future, their swords were all sheathed, while the deputies, the municipal magistrates, and other peaceful citizens who bore a part in the procession had their swords drawn. Sailors from the fleet, magistrates and deputations from every department, and from every city or town of importance in the kingdom, followed; and after them came two hundred priests, with Talleyrand, Bishop of Autun, in his episcopal vestments at their head, their white robes somewhat uncanonically decorated with tricolor ribbons, who passed on into the centre of the plain and ranged themselves on the steps of the altar. So vast was the procession that it was half-past three in the afternoon before the detachment of Royal Guards which closed it took up their position.

When at last all were in their places, Louis, accompanied by the queen and other members of his family, entered the royal pavilion. He was known by sight to the deputations from the most distant provinces, for he had reviewed them in a body the day before, when several of them had been separately presented to him, toward whom he had for once laid aside his habitual reserve, assuring them of his fatherly regard for all his subjects with warmth and manifest sincerity. The queen, too, as she always did, had made a most favorable impression on those members whom she had seen by her judicious and cordial affability. Louis wore no robes, but only the ordinary dress of a French noble. Marie Antoinette was in full evening costume, and her hair was dressed with a plume of tricolor feathers. Yet even on this day, which was intended to be one of universal joy and friendliness, evil signs were not wanting to show how powerful were the enemies of both king and queen; for no seat whatever had been provided for her, while by the aide of that constructed for the king another on very nearly the same level had been placed for the President of the Assembly.

But these refinements of discourtesy were lost on the spectators. They cheered the royal pair joyously the moment that they appeared. Before the shouts had died away, Bishop Talleyrand began the service of the mass; and, on its termination, administered the oath "of fidelity to the nation, the law, the king, and the Constitution as decreed by the Assembly and accepted by the king." La Fayette took the oath first in the name of the army. Talleyrand followed on behalf of the clergy. Bailly came next, as the representative of the citizens of Paris. It was a stormy day; and when the moment arrived for the king to set the seal to the universal acceptance of the constitution by swearing to exert all his own power for its maintenance, the rain came down so heavily as to render it impossible for him to leave the shelter of his own pavilion. As it happened, the momentary disappointment gave a greater effect to his act. With more than usual presence of mind, he advanced to the front of the pavilion, so as to be seen by the whole of the assembled multitude, and took the oath with a loud voice and perfect dignity of manner. As he resumed his seat, the rain cleared away, the sun burst through the clouds; and the queen, as if by a sudden inspiration, brought forward the little dauphin, and, lifting him up in her arms, showed him to the people. Those whom the king's voice could not reach saw the graceful action; and from every side of the plain one universal acclamation burst forth, which seemed to bear out Marie Antoinette's favorite assertion that the people were good at heart, and that it was not without great perseverance in artifice and malignity that they could be excited to disloyalty and treason.