The Life of Marie Antoinette

CHAPTER XXXIII. Composition of the New Assembly.-Rise of the Girondins,-Their Corruption and Eventual Fate.-Vergniaud's Motions against the King.-Favorable Reception of the King at the Assembly, and at the Opera.-Changes in the Ministry.-The King's and Queen's Language to M. Bertrand de Moleville.- The Count de Narbonne.-Petion is elected Mayor of Paris.-Scarcity of Money, and Great Hardships of the Royal Family.-Presents arrive from Tippoo Sahib.-The Dauphin.-The Assembly passes Decrees against the Priests and the Emigrants.-Misconduct of the Emigrants.-Louis refuses his Assent to the Decrees.-He issues a Circular condemning Emigration.

The new Assembly met on the 1st of October, and its composition afforded the Royalists, or even the Constitutionalists, the party that desired to stand by the Constitution which had just been ratified, very little prospect of a re-establishment of tranquillity. The mischievous effect of the vote which excluded members of the last Assembly from election was seen in the very lists of those who had been returned. In the whole number there were scarcely a dozen members of noble or gentle birth; the number of ecclesiastics was equally small; while property was as little represented as the nobility or the Church. It was reckoned that of the whole body scarcely fifty possessed two thousand francs a year. The general youth of the members was as conspicuous as their poverty; half of them had hardly attained middle age; a great many were little more than boys. The Jacobins themselves, who, before the elections, had reckoned on swaying their decisions by terror, could hardly have anticipated a result which would place the entire body so wholly at their mercy.

But what was still move ominous of evil was the rise of a new party, known as that of the Girondins, from the circumstance of some of its most influential members coming from the Gironde, one of the departments which the late Assembly had carved out of the old province of Gascony. It was not absolutely a new party, since the foundations of it had been laid, during the last two months of the old Assembly, by Petion and a low-born pamphleteer named Brissot, who, as editor of a newspaper to which he gave the name of Le Patriote Francais, rivaled the most blood-thirsty of the Jacobins in exciting the worst passions of the populace. But Petion and Brissot had only sown the seeds. The opening of the new Assembly at once gave it growth and vigor, when the deputies from the Gironde plunged into the arena of debate, and showed an undeniable superiority in eloquence to every other party. The chiefs, Vergniaud, Gensonne, and Gaudet, were lawyers who had never obtained any practice. Isnard, the first man to make an open profession of atheism in the Assembly, was the son of a perfumer in Provence. They were adventurers as utterly without principle as without resources. And their first thought appears to have been to make money of the king's difficulties, and to sell themselves to him. They applied to the Minister of the Interior, M. de Lessart, proposing to place the whole of their influence at the service of the Government, on condition of his securing each of them a pension of six thousand francs a month.[1] M. de Lessart would not have objected to buy them, but he thought the price which they set upon themselves too high; and as they adhered to their demand, the negotiation went off, and they resolved to revenge themselves on his royal master with all the malice of disappointed rapacity.

As none of them had any force of character, they fell under the influence of the wife of one of their number, a small manufacturer, named Roland, the same who, as we have already seen, was the first to raise the cry of blood in France, and to recommend the assassination of the king and queen while they were still in fancied security at Versailles. Under the direction of this fierce woman, whose ferocity was rendered more formidable by her undoubted talents, the Girondins began an internecine war with the king, who had refused them the wages which they had asked. They planned and carried out the sanguinary attacks on the palace in the summer of the next year. They brought Louis to the scaffold by the unanimity of their votes. Yet it would have been more fortunate for themselves as well as for him had they been less exorbitant in their demands, and had they connected themselves with the Government as they desired. For though they succeeded in their treason, though Madame Roland saw the accomplishment of her wish in the murder of the king and queen, their success was equally fatal to themselves. Almost all of them perished on the same scaffold to which they had consigned their virtuous sovereigns, meeting a fate in one respect worse even than theirs, from the infamy of the names which they have left behind them.

Yet for a few days it seemed as if their malignity would miss its aim. They did not wait a single day before displaying it; but, at the preliminary meeting of the Assembly, before it was opened for the dispatch of business, Vergniaud proposed to declare it illegal to speak of the king as his majesty, or to address him as "sire;" while another deputy, named Couthon, who at first belonged to the same party, though he afterward joined the Jacobins, carried a motion that, when Louis came to open the Assembly, the president should occupy the place of honor, and the second seat should be allotted to the sovereign.

Still, for a moment it seemed as if they had overshot their mark, and as if the more loyal party would be able to withstand and defeat them. The Assembly itself was compelled to repeal its recent votes, since Louis, whom indignation for once inspired with greater firmness than he usually displayed, refused to open the new Assembly in person unless he were to be received with the honors to which his rank entitled him. The offensive resolutions were canceled; and, when he had therefore opened the session in a dignified and conciliatory speech which was chiefly of his own composition, the president, M. Pastoret, a member of the Constitutional party, replied in a language which was not only respectful, but affectionate. The Constitution, he said, had given the king friends in those who were formerly only styled his subjects. The Assembly and the nation felt the need of his love. As the Constitution had rendered him the greatest monarch in the world, so his attachment to it would place him among the kings most beloved by their people.

And it seemed as if the Parisians in general shared to the full the loyal sentiments uttered by M. Pastoret. Writing the same week to her brother, Marie Antoinette, with a confidence which could only spring from a sincere attachment to the whole nation, reiterated her old opinion that "the good citizens and good people had always in their hearts been friendly to the king and herself;[2]" and expressed her belief that since the acceptance of the Constitution the people "had again learned to trust them." She was "far from giving herself up to a blind confidence. She knew that the disaffected had not abandoned their treasonable purposes; but, as the king and she herself were resolved to unite themselves in sincere good faith to the people, it was impossible but that, when their real feelings were known, the bulk of the people should return to them. The mischief was that the well-meaning knew not how to act in concert."

It did seem as if she were correct in her estimate of the feelings of the citizens, when, in the evening of the day on which Louis had opened the Assembly, the whole royal family, including the two children, went to the opera; and, as if with express design to ratify the loyal language of the president of the Assembly, the whole audience greeted them with a most enthusiastic reception. More than once they interrupted the performance with loud cheers for both king and queen; and as the pleasure of children is always an attractive sight, they sympathized especially with the delight of the little dauphin, their future king, as they all then thought him, who, being new to such a spectacle, only took his eyes off the stage to imitate the gestures of the actors to his mother, and draw her attention to them.

In more than one of her letters the queen had vehemently deplored the want of a stronger ministry than of late had been in the king's service. It was a natural complaint, though in fact the ability or want of ability displayed by the ministers was a matter of but slight practical importance, so completely had the Assembly engrossed the whole power of the State; but in the course of the autumn some changes were made, one of which for a time certainly added to the comfort of the sovereigns. M. Montmorin retired; M. de Lessart was transferred to his office; and M. Bertrand de Moleville, who was entirely new to official life, became the minister of marine. The whole kingdom did not contain a man more attached to the king and queen. But he combined statesman-like prudence with his loyalty; and his conduct before he took office elicited a very remarkable proof of the singleness of mind and purpose with which the king and queen had accepted the Constitution. M. Bertrand had previously refused office, and was very unwilling to take it now; and he frankly told Louis that he could not hope to be of any real service to him unless he knew the plans which the king might have formed with respect to the Constitution, and the line of conduct which he desired his ministers to observe on the subject; and Louis told him distinctly that though "he was far from regarding the Constitution as a masterpiece, and though he thought it easy to reform it advantageously in many particulars, yet he had sworn to observe it as it was, and that he was bound to be, and resolved to be, strictly faithful to his oath; the more so because it seemed to him that the most exact observance of the Constitution was the surest method to lead the nation to understand it in all its bearings; when the people themselves would perceive the character of the changes in it which it was desirable to make."

M. Bertrand expressed his warm approval of the wisdom of such a policy, but thought it so important to know how far the queen coincided in her husband's sentiments that he ventured to put the question to his majesty. The king assured him that he had been speaking her sentiments as well as his own, and that he should hear them from her own lips; and accordingly the queen immediately granted the new minister an audience, in which, after expressing, with her habitual grace and kindness, her feeling that, by accepting office at such a time, he was laying both the king and herself under a personal obligation, she added, "The king has explained to you his intentions with respect to the Constitution; do not you think that the only plan for him to follow is to be faithful to his oath?" "Undoubtedly, madame." "Well, you may depend upon it that nothing will make us change. Have courage, M. Bertrand; I hope that, with patience, firmness, and consistency, all is not yet lost.[3]"

Nor was M. Bertrand the only one of the ministers who received proofs of the resolution of the queen to adhere steadily to the Constitution. There was also a new minister of war, the Count de Narbonne, as firmly attached to the persons of the sovereigns as M. Bertrand himself, though in political principle more inclined to the views of the Constitutionalists than to those of the extreme Royalists. He was likewise a man of considerable capacity, eloquent and fertile in resources; but he was ambitious and somewhat vain; and he was so elated at the approval expressed by the Assembly of a report on the military resources of the kingdom which he laid before it soon after his appointment, that he obtained an audience of the queen, the object of which was to convince her that the only means of saving the State was to confer on a man of talent, energy, sagacity, and activity, who enjoyed the confidence of the Assembly and of the nation, the post of prime minister; and he admitted that he intended to designate himself by this description. Marie Antoinette, though folly aware of the desirableness of having a single man of ability and firmness at the head of the administration, was for a moment surprised out of her habitual courtesy. She could not forbear a smile, and in plain terms asked him "if he were crazy.[4]" But she proceeded with her usual kindness to explain to him the impracticability of the scheme which he had suggested, and the foundation of her argument was an explanation that such an appointment would be a violation of the Constitution, which forbade the king to create any new ministerial office. And the count deserves to have it mentioned to his honor that the rebuff which he had received in no degree cooled his attachment to the king and queen, or the zeal with which he labored for their service.

We have no information how far the new minister coincided in a step which the queen took in the course of November, and which is commonly ascribed to her judgment alone. Before its dissolution, the late Assembly had broken up the National Guard of Paris into separate legions, and had suppressed the appointment of commander-in-chief of the forces; and La Fayette, whom this measure had left without employment, feeling keenly the diminution of his importance, and instigated by the restlessness common to men of moderate capacity, conceived the hope of succeeding Bailly in the mayoralty of Paris, which that magistrate was on the point of resigning.

It had become a post of great consequence, since the extent to which the authority of the crown had been pared away tended to make the mayor the absolute dictator of the capital; and consequently the Jacobins were anxious to secure the office for one of the extreme Revolutionary party, and set up Petion as a rival candidate. The election belonged to the citizens, and, as in the city the two parties possessed almost equal strength, it was soon seen that the court, which had by no means lost its influence among the tradesmen and shop-keepers, had the power of deciding the contest in favor of the candidate for whom it should pronounce, Marie Antoinette declared for Petion. She knew him to be a Jacobin,[5] but he was so devoid of any reputation for ability that she did not fear him. Nor, except that he had behaved with boorish disrespect and ill-manners during their melancholy return from Varennes, had she any reason for suspecting him of any special enmity to the king.

But La Fayette, though always loud in his professions of loyalty, had never lost an opportunity of offering personal insults to both the king and herself. It was to his shameful neglect (to put his conduct in the most favorable light) that she justly attributed the danger to which she had been exposed at Versailles, and the compulsion which had been put upon the king to take up his residence in Paris; and, not to mention a constant series of petty insults which he had heaped on both Louis and herself, and on the Royalists as a body, he had given unmistakable proofs of his personal animosity toward the king by his conduct on the 21st of June, and by the indecent rigor with which he treated them both after their return from Varennes. Even when he was loudest in the profession of his desire and power to influence the Assembly in the king's favor, one of his own friends had told him to his face that he was insincere,[6] and that Louis could not and ought not to trust his promises; and every part of his conduct toward the royal pair was stamped with duplicity as well as with ill-will. It was not strange, therefore, indeed it was fully consistent with the honest openness of Marie Antoinette's own character, that she should prefer an open enemy to a pretended friend. She even believed what, from the very commencement of the Revolution, many had suspected, that La Fayette cherished views of personal ambition, and aimed at reviving the old authority of a Maire du Palais over a Roi Faineant[7]. She therefore directed her friends to throw their weight into the scale in favor of Petion, who was accordingly elected by a great majority, while the marquis, greatly chagrined, retired for a time to his estate in Auvergne.

The victory, however, was an unfortunate one for the court. It contributed to increase the confidence of its enemies; and, as their instinct showed them that it was from the resolution of the queen that they had the most formidable opposition to dread, it was against her that, from their first entrance into the Assembly, Vergniaud and his friends specially exerted themselves; Vergniaud openly contending that the inviolability of the sovereign, which was an article of the new Constitution, applied only to the king himself, and in no degree to his consort; while in the Jacobin and Cordelier Clubs the coarsest libels were poured forth against her with unremitting perseverance to stimulate and justify the most obscene and ferocious threats. The coarsest ruffians in a street quarrel never used fouler language of one another than these men of education applied to the pure-minded and magnanimous lady whose sole offense was that she was the wife of their kind-hearted king.

And, in addition to this daily increase of their danger which such denunciations could not fail to augment, the royal family were now suffering inconveniences which even those whose measures had caused them had never designed. They were in the most painful want of money. The agitation of the last two years had rendered the treasury bankrupt. The paper money, which now composed almost the whole circulation of the country, was valueless. While, as it was in this paper money (assignats, as the notes were called, as being professedly secured by assignments on the royal domains and on the ecclesiastical property which had been confiscated), that the king's civil list was paid, at the latter end of each month it was not uncommon for him and the queen to be absolutely destitute. It was with great reluctance that they accepted loans from their loyal adherents, because they saw no prospect of being able to repay them; but had they not availed themselves of this resource, they would at times have wanted absolute necessaries.[8]

The royal couple still kept their health, the king's apathy being in this respect as beneficial as the queen's courage: they still rode a great deal when the weather was favorable; and on one occasion, at the beginning of 1792, the queen, with her sister-in-law and her daughter, went again to the theatre. The opera was the same which had been performed at the visit in October; but this time the Jacobins had not been forewarned so as to pack the house, and Madame du Gazon's duet was received with enthusiasm. Again, as she sung "Ah, que j'aime ma maitresse!" she bowed to the royal box, and the audience cheered. As if in reply to one verse, "Il faut les rendre heureux," "Oui, oui!" with lively unanimity, came from all parts of the house, and the singers were compelled to repeat the duet four times. "It is a queer nation this of ours," says the Princess Elizabeth, in relating the scene to one of her correspondents, "but we must allow that it has very charming moments.[9]"

A somewhat curious episode to divert their minds from these domestic anxieties was presented by an embassy from the brave and intriguing Sultan of Mysore, the celebrated Tippoo Sahib, who sought to engage Louis to lend him six thousand French troops, with whose aid he trusted to break down the ascendency which England was rapidly establishing in India. Tippoo backed his request, in the Oriental fashion, by presents, though not such as, in the opinion of M. Bertrand, were quite worthy of the giver or of the receiver. To the king he sent some diamonds, but they were yellow, ill-cut, and ill-set; and the rest of the offering was composed of a few pieces of embroidered silk, striped cloth, and cambric: while the queen's present consisted of nothing more valuable than a few bottles of perfume of no very exquisite quality, and a few boxes of powdered scents, pastils, and matches. The king and queen gave nearly the whole present to M. Bertrand for his grandchildren, the queen only reserving a bottle of attar of rose and a couple of pieces of cambric; and that chiefly to afford a pretext for seeing M. Bertrand once or twice, without his reception being imputed to a desire to promote some Austrian intrigue; for the Jacobins had lately revived the clamor against Austrian influence with greater vehemence than ever.

As M. Bertrand had grandchildren, he could well appreciate the pleasure of the queen at an incident which closed one of his audiences. While he was thus receiving her commands, the little dauphin, "beautiful as an angel," as the minister describes him, was capering about the room in high delight, brandishing a wooden sword, a new toy which had just been given him. An attendant called him to go to supper; and he bounded toward the door. "How is this, my boy?" said Marie Antoinette, calling him back; "are you going off without making M. Bertrand a bow?" "Oh, mamma," said the little prince, still skipping about, and smiling, "that is because I know well that M. Bertrand is one of our friends.... Good-evening, M. Bertrand." "Is not he a nice child?[10]" said the queen, after he had left the room. "He is very happy to be so young. He does not feel what we suffer, and his gayety does us good." Alas! that which was now perhaps her only pleasure-the contemplation of her child's opening grace and amiability-before long became even an addition to her affliction, as the probabilities increased that the madness of the people and the wickedness of their leaders would deprive him of the inheritance, to preserve which to him was the principal object of all her cares and exertions.

But these moments of gratification were becoming fewer as time went on. Each month, each week brought fresh and increasing anxieties to engross all her thoughts. As the Girondin leaders began to feel their strength, the votes of the Assembly became more violent. One day it passed a fresh decree against the priests, depriving all who refused to take the oath to the new ecclesiastical constitution of the stipends for which their former preferments had been commuted, placing them under strict supervision, and declaring them liable to instant banishment if they should venture to exercise their functions in private. Another day it vented its wrath upon the emigrants, summoning the Count de Provence by name to return at once to France; and, with respect to the rest of the body, now very numerous, declaring their conduct in being assembled on the frontier of the kingdom in a state of readiness for war in itself an act of treason; and condemning to death and confiscation of their estates all who should fail to return to their native laud before a stated day.

But in these decrees the advocates of violence had for the moment gone too far-they had outrun the feelings of the nation. The emigrants, indeed, neither deserved nor found sympathy in any quarter. The main body of them was at this time settled at Coblentz, where their conduct was such that it is hard to say whether it were more offensive to their country, more injurious to their king, or more discreditable to themselves. They could not even act in harmony. The king's two brothers established rival courts, with a mistress at the head of each. Madame de Balbi still ruled the Count de Provence; Madame de Polastron was the presiding genius of the coterie of the Count d'Artois. The two ladies, regarding each other with bitter jealousy, agitated the whole town with their rivalries and wranglings, and agreed in nothing but in their endeavors to excite some foreign sovereign or other to make war upon their native land. It was in vain that Louis himself first entreated them, and, when he found his entreaties were disregarded, commanded his brothers to return. They positively refused obedience to his order, telling him, in language which can only be characterized as that of studied insult, that he was writing under coercion; that his letter did not express his real views, and that "their honor, their duty, even their affection for him, alike forbade them to obey him.[11]" The queen could not command, but she wrote to them more than one letter of most earnest entreaty, and, as the princes founded part of their hopes on the co-operation of the Northern sovereigns, she wrote also to the empress and to Gustavus, pressing both, and especially the King of Sweden,[12] to restrain them; but they were too headstrong and full of their own projects to listen to her entreaties any more than to the king's commands, and did not even take the trouble to conceal their negotiations with foreign powers, nor their object, which could be nothing but war.

It was impossible that such conduct steadily pursued by the king's own brothers could be any thing but most pernicious to his cause. It could not fail to excite suspicions of his own good faith. It supplied the Jacobins with pretexts for putting fresh restraints on his authority; and it frightened even the Constitutionalists, since it was plain that civil war must ensue, with, very probably, the addition of foreign war also, if these machinations of the emigrants were not suppressed.

Still, these sweeping proscriptions of entire classes were not yet to the taste of the nation. Petitions from the country, and even one from the department of the Seine, were presented to Louis, begging him to refuse his assent to the decree against the priests; and the feeling which they represented was so strong, and the reputation of some of the petitioners stood so high for ability and influence, that the ministers believed that he could safely refuse his sanction to both the votes. Even without their advice he would have rejected the decree against the priests, as one absolutely incompatible with his reverence for religion and its ministers; and his conduct on this subject supplies one more striking parallel to the history of the great English rebellion; since there can hardly be a more precise resemblance between events occurring in different ages and different countries than is afforded by the resistance made by Charles to the last vote of the London Parliament against the bishops, and this resistance of Louis to the will of the Assembly on behalf of the priests, and by the fatal effect which, in each case, their conscientious and courageous determination had upon the fortunes of the two sovereigns.

Louis therefore put his veto on both the decrees, with the exception of that clause in the act against the emigrants which summoned his brothers to return to the kingdom. But, that no one might pretend to fancy that he either approved of the conduct of the emigrants or sympathized with their principles or designs, he issued a circular letter to the governors of the different sea-ports, in which he remonstrated most earnestly with the sailors, numbers of whom, as it was reported in Paris, were preparing to follow their example. He pointed out in it that those who thus deserted their country mistook their duty to that country, to him as their king, and to themselves; that the present aspect of the nation, desirous to return to order and to submission to the law, removed every pretext for such conduct. He set before them his own example, and bid them remain at their posts, as he was remaining at his; and, in language more impressive than that of command, he exhorted them not to turn a deaf ear to his prayers; and at the same time he addressed letters to the electors of Treves and Mayence, and to the other petty German princes whose territories, bordering on the Rhine, were the principal resort of the emigrants, requiring them to cease to give them shelter, and announcing that if they should refuse to remove them from their dominions he should consider their refusal a sufficient ground for war; while, to show that he did not intend this menace to be a dead letter, he soon afterward announced to the Assembly that he had ordered a powerful army of a hundred and fifty thousand men to be moved toward the frontier, under the command of Marshal Luckner, Marshal Rochambeau, and General La Fayette, and he invited the members to vote a levy of fifty thousand more men to raise the force of the nation to its full complement.