&w 
 
 Marie Antoinette 
 
 By 
 
 H. BELLOC 
 
 ILLUSTRATED 
 
 New York 
 
 Doubleday, Page & Company 
 1909 
 
ALL BIGHTS KBSBBVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION 
 INTO FOREIGN LANQtTAGBS, INCLUDING THB SCANDINAVIAK 
 
 COPTKIGHT, 1909, BY DOUBLBDAT, PAGB & COMPANY 
 PUBLISHED, OCTOBBB, 1909 
 
TO 
 GEORGE WYNDHAM 
 
 /I o n 
 
INTRODUCTORY NOTE 
 
 The eighteenth century, which had lost the appetite 
 for tragedy and almost the comprehension of it, was granted, 
 before it closed, the most perfect subject of tragedy which 
 history affords. 
 
 The Queen of France whose end is but an episode in the 
 story of the Revolution stands apart in this : that while all 
 around her were achieved the principal miracles of the human 
 will, she alone suffered, by an unique exception, a fixed 
 destiny against which the will seemed powerless. In person 
 she was not considerable, in temperament not distinguished; 
 but her fate was enormous. 
 
 It is profitable, therefore, to abandon for a moment the 
 contemplation of those great men who re-created in Europe 
 the well-ordered State, and to admire the exact convergence 
 of such accidents as drew around Marie Antoinette an 
 increasing pressure of doom. These accidents united at 
 last: they drove her with a precision that was more than 
 human, right to her predestined end. 
 
 In all the extensive record of her actions there is nothing 
 beyond the ordinary kind. She was petulant or gay, 
 impulsive or collected, according to the mood of the moment: 
 acting in everything as a woman of her temper red-headed, 
 intelligent and arduous will always do : she was moved 
 by changing circumstance to this or that as many millions 
 of her sort had been moved before her. But her chance 
 friendships failed not in mere disappointments but in ruin; 
 her lapses of judgment betrayed her not to stumbling but 
 
vi MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 to an abyss; her small, neglected actions matured unseen 
 and reappeared prodigious in the catastrophe of her life as 
 torturers to drag her to the scaffold. Behind such causes 
 of misfortune as can at least be traced in some appalling 
 order, there appear, as we read her history, causes more 
 dreadful because they are mysterious and unreasoned: ill- 
 omened dates, fortunes quite unaccountable, and con- 
 tinually a dark coincidence, reawaken in us that native dread 
 of Destiny which the Faith, after centuries of power, has 
 hardly conjured. 
 
 The business, then, of this book is not to recount from 
 yet another aspect that decisive battle whereby political 
 justice was recovered for us all, nor to print once more in 
 accurate sequence the life of a queen whose actions have 
 been preserved in the minutest detail, but to show a Lady 
 whose hands for all the freedom of their gesture were 
 moved by influences other than her own, and whose feet, 
 though their steps seemed wayward and self-determined, 
 were ordered for her in one path that led inexorably to its 
 certain goal. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTBR PA0 
 
 I. The Diplomatic Revolution ..... 3 
 
 II. Birth and Childhood 24 
 
 III. The Espousals .43 
 
 IV. The Du Barry . . . . . . .61 
 
 V. The Dauphine 71 
 
 VI. The Three Years 98 
 
 VII. The Children 156 
 
 VIII. Figaro 175 
 
 IX. The Diamond Necklace . . . . . .207 
 
 X. The Notables 229 
 
 y XI. The Bastille 259 
 
 XII. October . 287 
 
 XIII. Mirabeau 320 
 
 XIV. Varennes 351 
 
 XV. The War 391 
 
 XVI. The Fall of the Palace . . . . . .411 
 
 XVII. The Temple . .433 
 
 XVIII. The Hostage 464 
 
 XIX. The Hunger of Maubeuge . . . . . 487 
 
 XX. Wattignies 502 
 
 APPENDICES 
 
 APPENDIX A. The Operation on Louis the Sixteenth of France 539 
 
 APPENDIX B. On the Exact Time and Place of Drouet's Ride 543 
 
 APPENDIX C. The Order to Cease Fire ..... 546 
 
 APPENDIX D. On the Loge of the " Logotachygraphe " . . 549 
 
 APPENDIX E. Uponthe"LastPortraitoftheQueen"byKucharski 551 
 
 APPENDIX F. On the Authenticity of the Queen's Last Letter 552 
 
 vii 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 The Last Act of the French Monarchy .... Frontispiece 
 
 VACIKO PACK 
 
 Maria Theresa 18 
 
 Madame de Pompadour 26 
 
 The First Dauphin 36 
 
 Louis XVI. 96 
 
 The Emperor Joseph II. 138 
 
 Marie Antoinette, from the Principal Bust at Versailles . . 158 
 
 The Countess of Provence 172 
 
 Marie Antoinette, by Madame Vigde Le Brun . . 208 
 
 Portrait Bust of the Duke of Normandy .... 220 
 Autograph Note of Louis XVI., Recalling Necker, on July 16th 
 
 After the Fall of the Bastille 284 
 
 The Tuileries from the Garden, or West Side, in 1789 . . 306 
 Facsimile of the First Page of the Address to the French Peo- 
 ple Written by Louis XVI. Before His Flight ... 348 
 Map of the Flight to Varennes and the Return . . (Page) 352 
 Sketch Map of Road from Paris to Varennes, June 21, 1791 " 358 
 Sketch Map to Illustrate Drouet's Ride . " 372 
 
 Potion 384 
 
 Barnave 388 
 
 Facsimile of the First Page of the Letter Written on Sep- 
 tember 3, 1791, by Marie Antoinette, to the Emperor, Her 
 
 Brother 400 
 
 East Front of the Tuileries 420 
 
 An Early View of the Approach to the Tuileries from the Car- 
 rousel, Showing the Three Courtyards .... 430 
 Contemporary Print of the Fighting in the Courtyard . . 436 
 
 A Relic of the Sack of the Palace 440 
 
 ix 
 
x MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 The Tower of the Temple at the Time of the Royal Family's 
 
 Imprisonment 444 
 
 A Rough Miniature of the Princess de Lamballe . . . 450 
 Sanson's Letter Asking the Authorities What Steps He is to 
 
 Take for the Execution of the King .... 458 
 
 Autograph Demand of Louis XVI. for a Respite of Three Days 460 
 Report of the Commissioners That All is Duly Arranged for 
 
 the Burial of Louis Capet After His Execution . . 462 
 
 First Page of Louis XVI.'s Will 464 
 
 Order of the Committee of Public Safety in Cambon's Hand- 
 writing .......... 474 
 
 Last Portrait of Marie Antoinette . . . . . 488 
 
 Map of the Battle of Wattignies and the Relief of Maubeuge 
 
 (Page) 503 
 Gateway of the Law Courts Through Which the Queen Went 
 
 to Her Death .506 
 
 First Page of Marie Antoinette's Last Letter . . . . 526 
 
 Facsimile of the Death Warrant of Marie Antoinette . . 530 
 
MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
';: :. 
 
OFTHE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 THE DIPLOMATIC REVOLUTION 
 
 EUROPE, which carries the fate of the whole world, 
 lives by a life which is in contrast to that of every 
 other region, because that life, though intense, 
 is inexhaustible. There is present, therefore, in her united 
 history, a dual function of maintenance and of change 
 such as can be discovered neither in any one of her com- 
 ponent parts nor in civilisations exterior to her own. 
 Europe alone of all human groups is capable of trans- 
 forming herself ceaselessly, not by the copying of foreign 
 models, but in some creative way from within. She alone 
 has the gift of moderating all this violent energy, of pre- 
 serving her ancient life, and by an instinct whose action 
 i now abrupt, now imperceptibly slow, of dissolving 
 whatever products of her own energy may not be normal 
 to her being. 
 
 These dual forces are not equally conspicuous : the force 
 that preserves us is general, popular, slow, silent, and 
 beneath us all ; the force that makes us diversified and full 
 of life shines out in peaks of action. 
 
 The agents and the transactions of the conserving force 
 do not commonly present themselves as the chief person- 
 alities and the most remarkable events of our long record. 
 The agents and the transactions of the force that perpetu- 
 
 9 
 
4 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 ally transforms us are arresting figures, and catastrophic 
 actions. Those who keep us what we are, for the most 
 part will never be known they are millions. Those, on 
 the other hand, who have brought upon our race its great 
 novelties of mood or of vesture, the battles they have won, 
 the philosophies they have framed and imposed, the polities 
 they have called into existence, they and their works fill 
 history. That power which has forbidden us to perish uses 
 servants often impersonal or obscure; it is mostly to be 
 discovered at work in the permanent traditions of the 
 populace and its effects are but rarely visible until they 
 appear solid and established by a process which is rather 
 that of growth than of construction. That power which 
 keeps the mass moving glitters upon the surface of it and 
 is seen. 
 
 There are, nevertheless, in this perennial and hidden 
 task of maintaining Europe certain exceptional events of 
 which the date is clear, the result immediate, and the 
 authors conspicuous. Of early examples the victory of 
 Constantine in the fourth century, the defeat of Abdul 
 Rhaman in the eighth, may be cited. Chief among those 
 of later times is a decision which was taken in the middle 
 of the eighteenth century by the French and Austrian 
 governments and to which historians have given the name 
 of the Diplomatic Revolution. 
 
 To comprehend or even to follow the career of Marie 
 Antoinette it is essential to seize the nature and the gravity 
 of that rearrangement of national forces, for it determi 
 all her life. JTo the great alliance between France a 
 Austria, by which such rearrangement was effected sh 
 owed every episode of her drama. Her marriage, he. 
 eminence, her sufferings, and her death were each directly 
 
THE DIPLOMATIC REVOLUTION 5 
 
 the consequence of that compact: its conclusion coincided 
 with her birth; from childhood she was dedicated to it 
 as a pledge, a bond, and, at last, a victim. Though, there- 
 fore, that treaty can occupy but little place in pages which 
 deal with her vivid life a life lived after the signing of 
 the document and after its most noisy consequences had 
 disappeared - - yet the instrument must be grasped at the 
 outset and must remain permanently in the mind of all 
 who would understand the Queen of France and her dis- 
 aster; for it w r as her mother who made the alliance, the 
 statesman who presided over all her fortunes planned and 
 achieved it. It stands throughout her forty years like a 
 fixed horoscope drawn at birth, or a sentence pronounced 
 and sure to be fulfilled. 
 
 The Diplomatic Revolution of the eighteenth century 
 sprang, like every other major thing in modern history, 
 from the religious schism of the sixteenth. 
 
 If that vast disturbance of the Reformation which threat- 
 ened so grievously the culture of Europe, which maimed 
 forever the life of the Renaissance, and which is only now 
 beginning to subside, had broken the national tradition 
 of Gaul as it did that of Briton, it may confidently be 
 asserted that European civilisation would have perished. 
 There was not left on the shores of the Mediterranean a 
 sufficient reserve of energy to re-indoctrinate the West. A 
 welter of small States, hopelessly separated by the violence 
 and self-sufficience of the new philosophy would each have 
 gone down the road an individual goes when he forgets or 
 learns to despise traditional rules of living and the cor- 
 *porate sense of mankind. That interaction which is the 
 : iife of Europe would have disappeared. A short period of 
 intense local activities would have been followed by general 
 
6 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 repose. The unity of the Western world would have failed, 
 and the spirit of Rome would have vanished as utterly from 
 her deserted provinces as has that of Assyria from hers. 
 
 If, on the other hand, the French had chosen the earliest 
 moment of the Reformation to lead the popular instinct 
 of Europe against the Reformers, and to reestablish unity, 
 if as early as the reign of Francis I. (who saw the peril) 
 they had imagined a species of crusade, why, then, the 
 schism would have been healed by the sword, the humanity 
 of the Renaissance would have become a permanent 
 influence in our lives rather than an heroic episode whose 
 vigour we regret but cannot hope to restore, and the dis- 
 covery of antiquity, the thorough awakening of the mind, 
 would have impelled Europe towards new and glorious 
 fortunes the nature of which we cannot even conjecture, 
 so differently did the course of history turn. For it so 
 happened that the French - - whose temperament, whose 
 unbroken Roman legend, and whose geographical position 
 made them the decisive centre of the struggle the French 
 hesitated for two hundred years. 
 
 Their religion indeed they preserved. The attempt to 
 force upon the French doctrines convenient, in France as in 
 England, to the wealthy merchants, the intellectuals, and 
 the squires was met by popular risings ; those of the French, 
 as they were the more sanguinary so were also the more 
 successful. The first massacre of St. Bartholomew, when 
 the Catholic leaders were killed in the South, was not for- 
 gotten by the North; and after the second massacre of St. 
 Bartholomew in Paris had avenged it, the Reformation 
 could never establish in France that oligarchic polity which 
 it ultimately imposed upon England and Holland. In a 
 word, the Catholic reaction in France was sufficiently violent 
 
THE DIPLOMATIC REVOLUTION 7 
 
 to recover the tradition of the State; but the full conse- 
 quences of that reaction did not follow, nor did France 
 support the general instinct of Europe, because, allied with 
 the Faith to which the nation was so profoundly attached 
 and had just preserved, was the political power of the 
 Spanish- Austrian Empire, which the French nation, and its 
 leaders, detested and feared. 
 
 It is difficult for us to-day to comprehend the might of 
 Spain during the century of the Reformation, and still 
 more difficult to grasp that external appearance of 
 overwhelming strength which, as the years proceeded, 
 tended more and more to exceed her actual (and declin- 
 ing) power. 
 
 The supremacy of Spain over Europe resided in a dynasty 
 and not in a national idea. It did not take the form of 
 over-riding treaties or of attempting the partition of weaker 
 States, for it was profoundly Christian, and it was military; 
 in twenty ways the position of Spain differed from the hege- 
 mony which some modern European State might attempt 
 to exercise over its fellows. But it is possible to arrive at 
 some conception of what that Empire was, if we remember 
 that it reposed upon a vast colonial system which Spain 
 alone seemed capable of conducting with success, that it 
 monopolised the production of gold, and that it depended 
 upon a command of the sea which was secured to it by an 
 invincible fleet. To such advantages there must further be 
 added an armed force not only by far the largest and best 
 trained in Europe, but mainly composed of the best fighters 
 as well, and a circumstance more important than all the 
 rest --an extent of dominion, due to the union of the 
 Austrian and Spanish houses, which gave to Charles V. and 
 his successors the whole background, as it were, upon 
 
8 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 which the map of Europe was painted: in the sea of that 
 Emperor's continental possessions, apart from a few insig- 
 nificant principalities, France alone survived --an intact 
 island with ragged boundaries, menaced upon every side. 
 For the Emperor, then master of the Peninsula, of the 
 Germanics, and of the New World, was everywhere by sea 
 and almost everywhere by land a pressing foe. 
 
 However much this Spanish-Austrian power might stand 
 (as it did stand) for the European traditions and for the 
 faith of civilisation which France had elected to preserve, 
 it was impossible for the French crow T n and nation not to 
 be opposed to its political power if that crown or that 
 nation were to survive. The smaller nations of the North 
 -the English, the low countries, &c. were in less peril 
 than the French; for these were now the only considerable 
 exception to, and were soon to be the rivals of, the Spanish- 
 Austrian State. Had the Armada found fair weather, 
 Philip might have been crowned at Westminster; but the 
 English united, isolated, and already organized as a 
 commercial oligarchy - - would have fought their way 
 out from foreign domination as thoroughly as did the 
 Dutch. The duty of the French was other; their inde- 
 pendence was not threatened: it was rather their dignity 
 and special soul which were in peril and which had to be 
 preserved from digestion into this all-surrounding influence 
 of Spain. To preserve her soul France gave uncon- 
 sciously perhaps, as a people, but with acute consciousness 
 as a government her whole energies during four genera- 
 tions. The defence succeeded. Through a dozen such 
 civil tumults as are native to the French blood, and 
 through a long eclipse of their national power, they 
 treasured and built up their reserves. After a century of 
 
THE DIPLOMATIC REVOLUTION o 
 
 peril they emerged, under Louis XIV. - - not only the 
 masters, but for a moment the very tyrants of Europe. 
 
 The French did not achieve this object of theirs without 
 a compromise odious to their clear spirit. In their secular 
 opposition to the Spanish-Austrian power, it was the 
 business of their diplomatists to spare the little Protestant 
 States and to use them as a pack for the worrying of great 
 Austria, whom they dreaded and would break down. The 
 constant policy of Henri IV., of Richelieu, of Mazarin, was 
 to strengthen the Protestant principalities of North Germany, 
 to meet half way the rising Puritanism of England, and 
 even at home to tolerate an organised, opulent, and numerous 
 body of Huguenots who formed a State within the State. 
 At a time when it was death to say Mass in England, 
 the wealthy Calvinist just beyond the Channel at Dieppe, 
 for instance was protected with all the force of the law 
 from the fanaticism or indignation of his fellow-citizens; he 
 could convene his synods openly, could hold office at law or 
 in municipal affairs, and was even granted a special form of 
 representation and a place in the advisory bodies of the 
 State. All this was done, not to secure internal order - 
 which would perhaps have been better affirmed in France 
 as it was in England by the vigorous persecution of the 
 minority but to create a Protestant makeweight to what 
 appeared till nearly the close of the seventeenth century the 
 overwhelming menace of the Spanish and Austrian Houses. 
 
 Such was the policy which the French Court wisely 
 pursued during so long a period that it finally acquired the 
 force of a fixed tradition and threatened to last on into an 
 era of new conditions, when it would prove useless, or, 
 later, harmful to the State. The general framework of that 
 Anti-Austrian diplomacy did indeed survive from the latter 
 
10 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 seventeenth till the middle of the eighteenth century; but 
 from the time when Louis XIV. in 1661 began to rule alone 
 to that final rearrangement of European forces in the 
 Diplomatic Revolution, which it is my business to describe, 
 the Catholic powers tended more and more to be conscious 
 of a common fate and a common duty. One after another 
 the portions of the old French diplomatic work fell to pieces 
 as the strength of Spain diminished and as the small Protes- 
 tant States advanced in their cycle of rapid commercial 
 expansion, increasing population and military power; until, 
 a generation after Louis XIV.'s death, Protestant Europe 
 as a whole had formed in line against what was left of 
 Rome. 
 
 It would not be germane to my subject were I to enter 
 at any length into the gradual transformation of Europe, 
 between 1668 and 1741. The first date is that of the treaty 
 which closed the last clear struggle between France and 
 Spain; the second date is that of the first great battle, 
 Mojlwitz,^ in which Prussia under Frederick the Great 
 appeared as a triumphant and equal opponent against the 
 Catholic forces of the Empire. It is enough to say that 
 during that period the results of that great struggle were 
 solidified. Europe was now hopelessly, and, as it seemed, 
 finally riven asunder; and those who proposed to continue, 
 those who proposed to disperse the stream of European 
 tradition gravitated into two camps armed for a struggle 
 which is not even yet decided. 
 
 The transition may be expressed as the long life of a man 
 
 - nay, it may be exactly expressed in the life of one man, 
 
 Fleury, for he stood on the threshold of manhood at its 
 
 commencement and in sight of death at its close : what such 
 
 a long life witnessed, between its eighteenth and its ninetieth 
 

 THE DIPLOMATIC REVOLUTION 11 
 
 year, was if the vast confusion of detail be eliminated 
 and the large result be grasped the confirmation of the 
 great schism and the final schism and the final decision of 
 France to stand wholly against the North. There appeared 
 at last, fixed and consolidated, a Protestant and a Catholic 
 division in Europe whose opposing philosophies, seen or 
 unseen, denied, ridiculed or ignored, even by those most 
 steeped in either atmosphere, were henceforward to affect 
 inwardly every detail of individual life, as outwardly they 
 were to affect every great event in the history of our Race, 
 and every general judgment which has been passed upon 
 its actions. 
 
 The Spanish Power, based as it had been, not on internal 
 resources, but on a naval and colonial supremacy, could 
 not but rapidly decline; it had long been separated from 
 the German Empire; it was destined to fall into the orbit 
 of France. On the other hand, the England of the early 
 eighteenth .century was no longer a small community 
 absorbed in theological discussion; she had become a nation 
 of the first rank, one that was developing its industries, its 
 wealth and its armed strength. She boasted in Marlboroughy 
 the chief military genius of the age; she was already the 
 leader in physics; * she was about to be the leader in 
 mechanical science (with all the riches such a leadership 
 would bring) , and she was upon the eve of acquiring a new 
 colonial empire. 
 
 In France the privileges of the Huguenots had been with- 
 drawn, as the situation grew precise and clear, and the 
 breach between them and the nation was made final by 
 their active and zealous treason in whatever foreign fleets 
 or armies were attempting the ruin of their country. In. 
 England it had been made plain that the oligarchy, and 
 
12 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 the nation upon which it reposed, would admit neither a 
 strong central government nor the presence of the Catholic 
 Church near any seat of power: the Stuart dynasty had 
 been exiled; its first attempt at a restoration had been 
 crushed. 
 
 Meanwhile there was preparing a final argument which 
 should compel men to recognise the, clean. and fixed division 
 of Europe : that argument was the astonishing rise of 
 Prussia, for with the appearance upon the field of this new 
 and strange force an own child of the Reform it was 
 evident that something had changed in the very morals 
 of war. 
 
 When Austria was at her weakest, when the French 
 Court, bewildered but weakly constant to a now meaning- 
 less diplomatic habit, was watching the apparent dissolution 
 of the Empire and was ready to urge its armies against 
 Vienna, when England remained, and that only from oppo- 
 sition to the Bourbons, the only support of the Hapsburgs, 
 there was established within five years the permanent 
 strength of Frederick the Great and the new factor of 
 Prussian Power: a complete contempt for the old rules of 
 honour in negotiation and for the old rules of contract in 
 dynastic relations had been crowned b^a complete success. 
 
 This advent, when every exception -and cross-influence 
 is forgotten, will remain the chief moral, and therefore, the 
 chief political fact of the eighteenth century. By the end 
 of the year 1745 Silesia was finally abandoned by Austria; 
 the Prussian soldier and his atheist theory had compassed 
 the first mere conquest of European territory which had 
 been achieved by any European power since first Europe 
 was organised into a family of Christian communities. 
 It had been advanced for the first time that Europe was 
 
THE DIPLOMATIC REVOLUTION 13 
 
 not one, but that some unit of it might overbear and rule 
 another by arms alone ; that there was no common standard 
 nor any unseen avenger upon appeal. That theory had 
 appealed to arms and had conquered. 
 
 Within three years the international turmoil, of which this 
 catastrophe was immeasurably the greatest result, was 
 subjected to a sort of settlement. One of those general 
 committees of all Europe with which our own time is so 
 familiar was summoned to Aix-la^Chapelle ; representa- 
 tives of the various Powers confirmed or modified the 
 results of a group of wars, and in the autumn of 1748 
 affixed their signatures to a complete arrangement which 
 was well known to be unstable, ephemeral, and insincere, 
 but which was yet of tremendous import, for it marked 
 (though in no dramatic manner) the end of an old world. 
 
 As the plenipotentiaries left their accomplished work 
 and strolled out of the room which had received them, they 
 were still grouped together by such weak and complex ties 
 as the interests of individual governments might decide. 
 When they met again after the next brief cycle of war, these 
 men were arranged in a true order and sat opposing; for 
 England, Prussia, and experiment of schism on the one 
 side; for the belt of endurance on the other. Since that 
 cleavage these two prime bodies, disguised under a hundred 
 forms and hidden and confused by a welter of incidental and 
 secondary forces, have remained opposing, attempting with 
 fluctuating success each to determine the general fortunes 
 of the world. They will so continue balanced and opposing 
 until perhaps by the action of some power neither of war 
 nor of diplomacy unity may be re-established and Europe 
 may again live. 
 
 Of the men who so strolled out of the room at Aix one 
 
14 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 only, still young, had grasped in silence the necessity of the 
 great change; he saw that Vienna and Paris must in the 
 next struggle stand together and defend together their 
 common civilisation and their resisting Faith. He not only 
 perceived the advent of this great reversal in the traditions 
 of the chanceries; he designed to aid it himself, to mould 
 it, and to determine its character. That he could then 
 perceive of how large a movement his action was to be 
 a part no historian can pretend, for at the time no one 
 could grasp more than the momentary issue, and this 
 man's very profession made it necessary for him, as for 
 every other diplomat, to see clearly immediate things and 
 to abandon distant speculation. But though his work 
 was greater than himself and far greater than his intention, 
 yet he deserves a very particular attention; for this young 
 man of thirty-six was Kai^nitp. and he, for a whole genera- 
 tion, was Austria. 
 
 In so determining to effect an alliance between the Haps- 
 burgs and their secular enemy, Kaunitz equally determined, 
 unknown to himself, the whole fortunes of Marie Antoinette ; 
 she, years later, when she came to be born to the Imperial 
 touse was, even in childhood, the pledge he needed. It is 
 "aunitz who stands forever behind the life of Marie 
 'Antoinette, like a writer behind the creature in his book. 
 It is he who designs her marriage, who uses her without 
 mercy for the purposes of his policy at Versailles; he is 
 the author of her magnificence and of her intrigue, he is 
 then also indirectly the author of her fall, which, in his 
 obscure and failing old age, he heard of far away, partially 
 comprehended, and just survived. 
 
 Kaunitz was the original of our modern diplomatists. 
 In that epoch of governing families not a few nobles were 
 
THE DIPLOMATIC REVOLUTION 15 
 
 flattered to be called "the Coachmen of Europe": he alone 
 merited the cant term. He served a sovereign whose armies 
 were constantly defeated; he was the adviser of a mere 
 crown and that crown worn by a woman; in a time 
 when the divergent races of the Danube were first astir, 
 he had at his command or for his support neither a national 
 tradition nor any strong instrument of war, yet, by per- 
 sonal genius, by tenacity, and by a wide lucidity of vision, 
 he discovered and completed a method of "government 
 through foreign relations" which was almost independent 
 of national feeling or of armed strength. 
 
 An absence of natural violence, as of all common emotions, 
 was characteristic of Kaunitz. He disdained the vulgar 
 pomp of silence; he talked continually; he knew the 
 strength and secrecy of men who can be at once verbose 
 and deliberate. Nor could his fluency have deceived any ^< 
 careful observer into a suspicion of weakness, for his curved 
 thin nose and prominent peaked chin, his arched eyebrows, 
 his Sclavonic type, ready and courageous, his hard, pale 
 eyes, showed nothing but purpose and execution; and as 
 his tajl figure stalked round the billiard tables at evening, 
 his very recreation seemed instinct with plans. 
 
 The abounding energy which drove him to success 
 revealed itself in a thousand ways, and chiefly in this, 
 that in the career of diplomacy, where all individuality is 
 regarded with dread, he pushed his personal tastes beyond 
 the eccentric. Thus he had a mania against all gesticula- 
 tion, and he would present at every conference the singular 
 spectacle of a man chattering and disputing unceasingly and 
 eagerly^ yet keeping his hands quite motionless aU the 
 while. Again, when he entered the great houses of Europe 
 and dined with men to influence whom was to conduct 
 
16 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 the world, he did not hesitate to bring with him his own 
 dessert, which when he had eaten he would, to the great 
 disgust of embassies, elaborately wash his teeth at 
 table. In the midst of the hardest toil he was so foppish as 
 to wear various wigs now brown, now white, now auburn. 
 He was a constant traveller, familiar with every capital 
 in Western Europe, yet he so loathed fresh air that he 
 would not pass from his carriage to a palace door unless his 
 mouth were covered. He was a dandy who, in drawing- 
 rooms loaded with scent and flowers, loudly protested against 
 all perfume; a gentleman who, when cards were the only 
 pastime of the rich, expressed a .detestation of all hazard ; 
 a courtier who, amidst all the extravagances of etiquette 
 of the eighteenth century, barely bowed to the greatest 
 sovereigns, and who, on the stroke of eleven, would 
 abruptly leave the Emperor without a word. 
 
 Such marks of an intense initiative, detachment and 
 pride were tolerated in the earlier part of his life with 
 amusement on account of the affection he could inspire; 
 later they were regarded with ill ease, and at last with a 
 sort of awe, when it was known that his intelligence could 
 entrap no matter what combination of antagonist. This 
 intelligence, and the single devotion by which such natures 
 are invariably compelled, were both laid at the feet of Maria 
 Theresa. 
 
 He was older than his Empress by some seven years; 
 there lay between them just that space which makes for 
 equality and comprehension between a man and a woman. 
 The year of her marriage had coincided with that of his 
 own * he had come at twenty-five to the court of this 
 young sovereign of eighteen. She had recognised with 
 a wisdom that never failed her long and active life how 
 
THE DIPLOMATIC REVOLUTION 17 
 
 just and general was his view of Europe, and it was from 
 this moment that her interests and her career were entrusted 
 to his genius. He had already studied in three universities, 
 had refused the clerical profession to which his Canonry of 
 Cunster introduced him, and had travelled in the Nether- 
 lands, in France, in England, and in Italy, where he was 
 made Aulic Councillor, and enfeoffed, as it were, to the 
 palace. 
 
 His abilities had not long to await their opportunity. 
 It was but four years after Maria Theresa's marriage and 
 his own that she succeeded to the throne and possessions 
 of the Hapsburgs : then it was the sudden advent of Prussia, 
 to which I have alluded, began the great change. 
 
 Maria Theresa's succession was in doubt, not in point of 
 right, but because her sex and the condition in which her 
 father had left his army and his treasury gave an oppor- 
 tunity to the rivals of Austria, and notably to France. 
 
 Europe was thus passing through one of those crises 
 of instability during which every chancery discounts and 
 yet dreads a universal war, when the magazine was fired 
 by one who had nothing to lose but honour. Frederick 
 of Prussia was the warmest in acknowledging the title of 
 Maria Theresa; he accepted her claims, guaranteed the 
 integrity of her possessions, and suddenly invaded them. 
 
 From the ordering of that march of Frederick's into 
 Silesia from the close, that is, of the year 1740 Kaunitz, 
 a man not yet in his thirtieth year, was at work to repair the 
 Empire and to restore the equilibrium of Europe. Upon 
 the whole he succeeded; for though the magnitude of the 
 Revolutionary Wars has dwarfed his period, and though the 
 coinplete modern transformation of society has made 
 such causes seem remote, yet (as it is the thesis of these 
 
18 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 pages to maintain) Kaunitz unconsciously preserved the 
 unity of Europe. 
 
 In the beginning of the struggle he had already saved 
 the interests of Maria Theresa in the petty Italian courts. 
 At Florence, at Rome, at Turin, at 'Brussels, his mastery 
 continued to increase. In his thirty-sixth year he was 
 ambassador to London he concluded, as we have seen, 
 the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle ; by his fortieth he had been 
 appointed to Paris, and that action by which he will chiefly 
 be remembered had begun.^4lje had seen, as I have said, 
 the necessity for an alliance between the two great Catholic 
 Powers. Within the two years of his residence in Paris he 
 had successfully raised the principle of such a revolution in 
 policy and as successfully maintained its secrecy. A task 
 which would have seemed wholly vain had he communicated 
 it to others, one which would have seemed impossible even 
 to those whom he might have convinced, was achieved. To 
 his lucid and tenacious intellect the matter in hand was but 
 the bringing forth of a tendency already in existence; he 
 saw the Austro-French alliance lying potentially in the 
 circumstances of his time; his business was but to define 
 and realize it. 
 
 In such a mood did he take up the Austrian embassy in 
 Paris. He was well fitted for the work he had conceived. 
 The magnificence which he displayed in his palace in the 
 French capital was calculated indeed to impress rather than 
 to attract the formal court of Versailles; that magnificence 
 was the product of his personal tastes rather than of his 
 power of intrigue, but the details of his over-ostentatious 
 household were well suited to those whom he had designed 
 to capture. The French language was his own; Italian, 
 though he spoke it well, was foreign to him; the German 
 

 MARIA THERESA 
 
 From the tapestry portrait woven for Marie Antoinette 
 and recently restored to Versailles 
 
THE DIPLOMATIC REVOLUTION 19 
 
 dialects he knew but ill and hardly used at all. His habits 
 were French, to the end of his long life French literature 
 was his only reading, and his clothes, to their least part, 
 must come from the hands of the French. 
 
 He moved, therefore, in that world of Paris and Ver- 
 sailles (as did, later, his pupil, Mercy-d 'Argenteau) rather 
 as a native than a foreigner. Even if the alliance had been 
 as artificial as it was natural, he would have carried his 
 point. As it was, he left Paris in 1753 to assume the Prime 
 Ministry at Vienna, with the certitude that, when next 
 Frederick of Prussia had occasion to break his word, the 
 wealth and the arms of the Bourbons would be ranged upon 
 the Austrian side. 
 
 Upon that major pivot all the schemes of Vienna must 
 turn at his dictation. Every marriage must be contrived 
 so as to fall in with the projected alliance; every action 
 must be subordinated to the arrangement which would prove, 
 as he trusted, the supreme hope of the dynasty. To this 
 one project he directed every power within him or beneath 
 his hand, and to this he was ready, when the time should 
 come, to devote the fortunes of any member of the Royal 
 House save its sovereign or its heir. To this aspect of Europe, 
 long before the termination of his mission in Paris, he had 
 not so much persuaded as formed the mind of Maria Theresa. 
 
 The great and salutary soul of that woman explains in 
 part what were to be the fortunes of her youngest child. Not 
 that Marie Antoinette inherited either the opportunities 
 or the full excellence of her mother, but that there ran 
 through the impatient energy and unfruitful graciousness 
 of the Queen of France a flavour of that which had lent a 
 disciplined power and a conscious dignity to the middle 
 age of Maria Theresa. 
 
20 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 The body of the Empress was strong. Its strength 
 enabled her to bear without fatigue the ceaseless work of 
 her office and in the midst of child-bearing to direct with 
 exactitude the affairs of a troubled State. That strength 
 of hers was evident in her equal temper, her rapid judgment, 
 her fixed choice of men; it Was evident also in her firm 
 tread and in her carriage, and even as she sat upon a chair 
 at evening she seemed to be governing from a throne. 
 
 A growing but uniform capacity informed her life. She 
 had known the value not only of industry but also of enthu- 
 siasm, and had saved her throne in its greatest peril by her 
 sudden and passionate appeal to the Hungarians. It was 
 this instinctive science of hers that had disarmed Kaunitz. 
 If he allowed her to suggest what he had already determined, 
 if he permitted her to be the first to write down the scheme 
 of the Diplomatic Revolution he had conceived, and to send 
 '"j down to history as her creation rather than his own, it was 
 not the desire to flatter her that moved him but a recogni- 
 tion of her due. She it was that sent him to Paris and 
 she .that superintended the weaving of the loom he had 
 arranged. 
 
 Her dark and pleasing eyes, sparkling and strong, con- 
 trolled him in so far as he was controlled by any outer 
 influence, for he recognized in them the Caesarian spirit. 
 
 Her largeness pleased him. When she played at cards, 
 she played for fortunes; when she rode, she roHe with 
 magnificence; when she sang, her voice, though high, 
 was loud, untramelled, and full; when she drove abroad, 
 it was with splendour and at a noble turn of speed. 
 
 All this was greatly to the humour of Kaunitz, and he 
 continued to serve his Empress with a zeal he would never 
 have given to a mere ambition. In deference to her, all 
 
THE DIPLOMATIC REVOLUTION 21 
 
 that he could control of his idiosyncrasies he controlled. 
 His great bull-dog, which followed him to every other door, 
 was kept from her palace. His abrupt speech, his failure 
 to reply, his sudden and brief commands all his manner 
 - were mollified in consultation with his Queen. She, on 
 her part, knew what were the limits to which so singular a 
 nature could proceed in the matter of self-denial. She 
 respected half his follies, and her servants often saw her 
 from the courtyard shutting the windows, smiling, as he 
 ran from his carriage, his mouth covered to screen it from 
 the outer air. Her common sense and poise forgave in him 
 alone extravagances she had little inclination to support 
 in others. He respected in her, those depths of emotion, 
 of simplicity, and of faith which in others he would have 
 regarded as imbecilities ready for his high intelligence to use 
 at will. 
 
 It was neither incomprehensible to him nor displeasing 
 that her temper should be warmer than his intelligence 
 demanded. The increasing strength of her religion, the 
 personal affections and personal distastes which she con- 
 ceived, above all, the closeness of. her devotion to her hus- 
 hand, completed, in the eyes of Kaunitz, a character whose 
 dominions and dynasty he chose to serve and to confirm; 
 for he perceived that what others imagined to be impedi- 
 ments to her policy were but the reflection of her sex and of 
 her health therein. 
 
 Kaunitz saw in Frederick of Prussia a player of worthy 
 skill. It was upon the death of that soldier that he gave 
 vent to the one emotional display of his life; yet he per- 
 mitted Maria Theresa to hate her rival with a hatred 
 which was not directed against his campaigning so much as 
 against the narrow intrigue and bitterness of his evil mind. 
 
n MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 To Kaunitz, again, Catherine of Russia was nothing but 
 a powerful rival or ally; yet he approved that Maria Theresa 
 should speak of her as one speaks of the women of the 
 streets, despising her not for her ambition but for her licence. 
 
 To Kaunitz, Francis of Lorraine, the husband of the 
 Empress, was a thing without weight in the international 
 game; yet he saw with a general understanding, and was 
 glad to see in detail, the security of the imperial marriage. 
 
 The singular happiness of Maria Theresa's wedded life 
 was due to no greatness in Francis of Lorraine, but to his 
 vivacity and good breeding, to his courtesy, to his refine- 
 ment, and especially to his devotion. It suited her that 
 he should ride and shoot so well. She loved the restrained 
 intonation of his voice and the frankness of his face. 
 She easily forgave his numerous and passing infidelities. 
 The simplicity of his religion was her own, for her goodness 
 was all German as his sincerity was all Western and French ; 
 upon these two facts the opposing races touch when the 
 common faith introduces the one to the other. Their house- 
 hold, therefore, was something familiar and domestic. Its 
 language was French, of a sort, because French was the 
 language of Francis; but while he brought the clarity of 
 Lorraine under that good roof, which covered what Goethe 
 called "the chief bourgeois family of Germany," he brought 
 to it none of the French hardness and precision, nor any of 
 that cold French parade which was later to exasperate his 
 daughter when she reigned at Versailles. He was a man 
 who delighted in visits to his countryside, and who would 
 have his carriage in town wait its turn with others at the 
 opera doors. 
 
 Maria Theresa was so wedded, served by such a^Minister, 
 in possession of and in authority over such a household dur- 
 
THE DIPLOMATIC REVOLUTION 23 
 
 ing those seven years between the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle 
 and the French Alliance, between 1748 and 1755. Those 
 seven years were years of patience and of diplomacy, which 
 were used to retrieve the disasters of her first bewildered 
 struggle against Prussia and the new forces of Europe. 
 They were the seven years of profound, if precarious, inter- 
 national peace, when England was preparing her maritime 
 supremacy, Prussia her full military tradition, Uie French 
 monarchy, in the person of Louis XV., its rapid^dissolution 
 through excess and through fatigue. They were the seven 
 years which seemed to the superficial but acute observation 
 of Voltaire to be the happiest of his age: a brief " Antonine" 
 repose in which the arts flourish and ideas might flower 
 and even grow to seeding. They were the seven years in 
 which the voice of Rousseau began to be heard and in which 
 was written the " Essay upon Human Inequality." 
 
 For the purposes of this story they were in particular the 
 seven years during which Kaunitz, now widowed, working 
 first as Ambassador in Paris, then as Prime Minister by the 
 side of Maria Theresa at Vienna, achieved that compact 
 with the Bourbons which was to restore the general traditions 
 of the Continent and the fortunes of the House of Hapsburg. 
 
 The period drew to a close: the plans for the alliance were 
 laid, the last discussions Were about to be engaged, when 
 it was known, in the early summer of 1755, that the Empress 
 was again with child. 
 
II 
 
 BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD 
 
 2ND NOVEMBER, 1755, TO THE AUTUMN OF 1768 
 
 AL that summer of 1755 the intrigue and its success 
 -proceeded. 
 
 I have said that the design of Kaunitz was not 
 so much to impose upon his time a new plan as to further 
 a climax to which that time was tending. Accidents in 
 Europe, in America, and upon the high seas conspired to 
 mature the alliance. 
 
 Fighting broke out between the French and English 
 outposts in the backwoods of the colonies. Two French 
 ships had been engaged in a fog off the banks and cap- 
 tured; later, a sharp panic had led the Cabinet in London 
 to order a general Act of Piracy throughout the Atlantic 
 against French commerce. It Was a wild stroke, but it 
 proved the first success of what was to become the most 
 fundamentally successful war in the annals of Great Britain. 
 
 In Versailles, an isolated and mournful man, fatigued 
 and silent, who was in the last resort the governing power 
 of France, delayed and delayed the inevitable struggle 
 between his forces and the rising power of England. Louis 
 XV. looked upon the world with an eye too experienced and 
 too careless to consider honour. His clear and informed 
 intelligence would contemplate though it could not rem- 
 edy the effects of his own decline and of his failing 
 will. He felt about him in the society he ruled, and within 
 
 gft 
 
BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD 25 
 
 himself also, something moribund. France at this moment 
 gave the impression of a great palace, old and in part ruined. 
 That impression of France had seized not only upon her 
 own central power, but upon foreign observers as well; 
 the English squires had received it, and the new Prussian 
 soldiers. In Vienna it was proposed to use the declining 
 French monarchy as a great prop, and in using it to 
 strengthen and to revivify the Austrian Empire until the 
 older order of Europe should be restored. Louis XV., 
 sitting apart and watching the dissolution of the national 
 vigour and of his own, put aside the approach of arms with 
 such a gesture as might use a man of breeding whom in 
 some illness violence had disturbed. Thus as late as 
 August, when his sailors had captured an English ship of 
 the line, he ordered its release. The war was Well ablaze 
 and yet he would consent to no formal declaration of it; 
 Austria watched his necessities. 
 
 It was in September that Maria Theresa sent word to 
 her ambassador in Paris the old and grumbling but 
 pliant Stahrenberg, that the match might be set to the train : 
 in a little house under the terrace at Bellevue, a house 
 from whose windows all Paris may be seen far away below, 
 the secret work went on. 
 
 It has been asserted that the Empress in her anxiety wrote 
 to the Pompadour and attempted, by descending to so 
 direct a flattery of Louis XV.'s mistress, to hasten that 
 King's adhesion to her design. The accusation is false, and 
 the document upon which it is based a forgery; but the 
 Austrian ambassador was Maria Theresa's mouthpiece with 
 that kindly, quiet, and all-powerful woman. It was she who 
 met him day after day in the little house, and when she 
 retired to give place to the Cardinal de Bernis, that Minister 
 
 
26 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 found the alliance already fully planned between Stahren- 
 berg and the Pompadour. Louis XV. alone was still reluc- 
 tant. Great change, great action of any sort, was harsh 
 to him. He would not believe the growing rumour that 
 Frederick of Prussia was about to desert his alliance and to 
 throw his forces on to the side of the English power. Louis 
 XV. attempted, not without a sad and patient skill, to 
 obtain equilibrium rather than defence. He would consider 
 an arrangement with Vienna only if it might include a 
 peaceful understanding with Berlin. 
 
 As, during October, these negotiations matured so slowly 
 in France, in Vienna the Empress awaited through that 
 month the birth of her child. She jested upon it with a 
 Catholic freedom, laid wagers upon its sex (and later won 
 them)^ discussed what sponsors should be bidden, and 
 decided at last upon the King and Queen of Portugal; to 
 these, in the last days of October, her messengers brought 
 the request, and it was gladly accepted in their capital of 
 Lisbon. Under such influences was the child to be born. 
 
 The town of Lisbon had risen, in the first colonial efforts 
 of Portugal, to a vast importance. True, the Portuguese 
 did not, as others have done, attach their whole policy to 
 possessions over-sea, nor rely for existence upon the suprem- 
 acy of their fleet, but the evils necessarily attendant upon a 
 scattered commercial empire decayed their military power 
 and therefore at last their commerce itself. The capital 
 was no longer, in the Arab phrase, "the city of the Chris- 
 tian"; it was long fallen from its place as the chief port 
 of the Atlantic when, in these last days of October,1755, the 
 messengers of the Empress entered it and were received; 
 but it was still great, overlooking the superb anchorage 
 which brought it into being, and presenting to the traveller 
 
BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD 27 
 
 perhaps half the population which it had boasted in the 
 height of its prosperity. It was a site famous for shocks of 
 earthquake, which (by a coincidence) had visited it since 
 the decline of its ancient power; but of these no more 
 affair had been made than is common with natural adven- 
 tures. Its narrow streets and splendid, if not majestic, 
 churches still stood uninjured. 
 
 The valley upon which stood the commercial centre of 
 Lisbon is formed of loose clay; the citadel and the portion 
 which to this day recalls the older city, of limestone; and 
 the line which limits the two systems is a sharp one. But 
 though the diversity of such a soil lent to these tremors an 
 added danger, they had passed without serious attention 
 for three or four generations; they had not affected the 
 architecture of the city nor marred its history. In this year, 
 1755, they had already been repeated, but in so mild a 
 fashion that no heed was taken of them. 
 
 By All-Hallowe'en the heralds had accomplished their 
 mission, the Court had retired to the palace of Belem, 
 which overlooks the harbour, and the suburbs built high 
 beyond that Roman bridge which has bequeathed to its 
 valley the Moorish name of Alcantara. The city, as the 
 ambassadors of Maria Theresa and the heralds of her 
 daughter's birth were leaving it, was awaiting under the 
 warm and easy sun of autumn the feast of the morrow. 
 
 In the morning of that All Saints, a little after eight, the 
 altars stood prepared, the populace had thronged into the 
 churches ; the streets also were already noisy with the opening 
 [of a holiday; the ships' crews were ashore; only the quays 
 were deserted. Everywhere High Mass had begun. But 
 just at nine at the hour when the pressure of the crowds, 
 both within the open doors of the churches and without 
 
28 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 them, was at its fullest the earth shook. The awful 
 business lasted perhaps ten seconds. When its crash was 
 over an immense multitude of the populace and a third 
 of the material city had perished. 
 
 The great mass of the survivors ran to the deserted 
 quays, where an open sky and broad spaces seemed to afford 
 safety from the fall of walls. They saw the sea withdrawn 
 from the shore of the wide harbour; they saw next a wave 
 form and rise far out in the landlocked gulf, and immediately 
 it returned in an advancing heap of water straight and high 
 as high and as straight as the houses of the sea front. It 
 moved with the pace of a gust or of a beam of light toward 
 the shore. The thousands crammed upon the quays had 
 barely begun their confused rush for the heights when this 
 thing was upon them; it swirled into the narrow streets, 
 tearing down the shaken walls and utterly sweeping out 
 the maimed, the dying and the dead whom the earthquake 
 had left in the city. Then, when it had surged up and 
 broken against the higher land, it dragged back again into 
 the bay, carrying with it the wreck of the town and leaving 
 strewn on the mud of its retirement small marbles, carven 
 wood, stuffs, fuel, provisions, and everywhere the drowned 
 corpses of animals and of men. During these moments 
 perhaps twenty, perhaps thirty thousand were destroyed. 
 
 Two hours passed. They were occupied in part by pil- 
 lage, in part by stupefaction, to some extent by repression 
 and organization. But before noon the accompaniment 
 of such disasters appeared. Fire was discovered first 
 in one quarter of the city, then in another, till the whole 
 threatened to be consumed. The disorder increased. 
 Pombal, an atheist of rapid and decided thought, dominated 
 the chaos and controlled it He held the hesitating court 
 
BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD 29 
 
 to the ruins of the city; he organized a police; as the early 
 evening fell over the rising conflagration he had gibbets 
 raised at one point after another, and hung upon them 
 scores of those who had begun to loot the ruins and the 
 dead. 
 
 The night was filled with the light and the roar of the 
 flames until, at the approach of morning, when the fires 
 had partly spent themselves and the cracked and charred 
 walls yet standing could be seen more clearly in the dawn, 
 ^some in that exhausted crowd remembered that it was the 
 Day of the Dead, and how throughout Catholic Europe the 
 requiems would be singing and the populace of all the 
 cities but this would be crowding to the graves of those 
 whom they remembered. 
 
 That same day, which in Lisbon overlooked the cloud 
 of smoke still pouring from broken shells of houses, saw 
 in Vienna, as the black processions returned from their 
 cemeteries, the birth of the child. 
 
 Maria Theresa, whose vigour had been constant through 
 so many trials, suffered grievously in this last child-bed of 
 hers. She was in her thirty-seventh year. The anxiety 
 and the plotting of the past months, the fear of an approach- 
 ing conflict, had worn her. It was six weeks before she 
 could hear Mass in her chapel; and meanwhile, in spite of 
 the official, and especially the popular, rejoicing which 
 followed the birth of the princess, a sort of hesitation hung 
 over the court. Francis of Lorraine was oppressed by 
 premonitions. With that taint of superstition which his 
 faith condemned, but which the rich can never wholly 
 escape, he caused the baby's horoscope to be drawn. The 
 
30 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 customary banquet was foregone. The dreadful news from 
 Lisbon added to the gloom, and something silent sur- 
 rounded the palace as the days shortened into winter. 
 
 With the New Year a more usual order was re-established. 
 The life of the Court had returned; the first fortnight of 
 January passed in open festivities, beneath the surface of 
 which the steady diplomatic pressure for the French alliance 
 continued. It reached an unexpectedly rapid conclusion. 
 Upon the sixteenth of January the King of Prussia suddenly 
 admitted to the French ambassador at Berlin that he had 
 broken faith with Louis and that the Prussian minister in 
 London had signed a treaty with England. For a month 
 a desperate attempt continued to prevent the enormous 
 consequences which must follow the public knowledge of 
 the betrayal. The aversion of Louis to all new action, his 
 mixture of apathy and of judgment, led him, through his 
 ambassador, to forego the insult and to cling to the illusion 
 of peace, but Frederick himself destroyed that illusion. 
 His calculation had been the calculation of a soldier in whom 
 the clear appreciation of a strategical moment, the resolu- 
 tion and courage necessary to use it, and an impotence of 
 the chivalric functions combined to make such decisions 
 absolute. It was the^ second manifestation of that moral 
 perversion which Easx lent for two hundred years such 
 nervous energy to Prussia, and of which the Occupation 
 of Silesia was the first, Bismark's forgery at Ems the 
 latest and probably the final example : for Europe 
 can always at last expel a poison. 
 
 Frederick, I say, was resolved upon war. He met 
 every proposal for reconciliation with German jests some- 
 what decadent and expressed in imperfect French, which 
 was his daily language. By the end of February, 1756, 
 
 T 
 
 4? V // 
 
 
 
BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD 31 
 
 the attempt to keep the peace of Europe had failed, and 
 Louis XV., driven by circumstance and necessity, had at 
 last accepted the design of Maria Theresa and of Kaunitz. 
 The treaty would have been signed in March had not the 
 illness of the French Minister, the Cardinal De Bernis 
 intervened; as it was,' the signatures were affixed to the 
 document on the^jst of May. By summer all Europe was 
 in arms. The little Archduchess, who was later to lay down 
 her life in the chain of consequences which proceeded from 
 that signing, was six months old. 
 
 The first seven years of Marie Antoinette's life were, 
 therefore, those of the Seven Years' War. 
 
 As her mind emerged into consciousness, the rumours 
 she heard around her, magnified by the gossip of the ser- 
 vants to whom she was entrusted, were rumours of sterile 
 victories and of malignant defeats; in the recital of either 
 there mingled perpetually the name of the Empir and 
 the name of Bourbon which she was to bear. She could 
 just walk when the whole of Cumberland's army broke 
 down before the French advance and accepted terms at 
 Kloster-Seven. Her second birthday cake was hardly 
 eaten before Frederick had neutralised this capitulation 
 by destroying the French at Rosb., ..h. The year which saw 
 the fall of Quebec and the French disasters in India, was 
 that with which her earliest memories were associated. She 
 could remember Kunersdorf, the rejoicings and the confi- 
 dent belief that the Protestant agression was repelled. Her 
 fifth, her sixth, her seventh years the years, that is, during 
 which the first clear experience of life begins proved the 
 folly of that confidence: her eighth was not far advanced 
 when the whole of this noisy business was concluded by the 
 Peace of Paris and the Treaty of Herbertsburg. 
 
32 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 The war appeared indecisive or a failure. The original 
 theft of Silesia was confirmed to Prussia; the conquest of 
 the French colonies to England. In their defensive against 
 the menace to which all European traditions were exposed, 
 the courts of Vienna and Versailles had succeeded; in 
 their aggressive, which had the object of destroying that 
 menace forever, they had failed. In failing in their aggres- 
 sive, as a by-product of that failure, they had permitted the 
 establishment of an English colonial system which at the 
 time seemed of no great moment, but which was destined 
 ultimately to estrange this country from the politics of Europe 
 and to submit it to fantastic changes ; to make its population 
 urban and proletariat, to increase immensely the wealth of 
 its oligarchy, and gravely to obscure its military ideals. In 
 the success of their defensive, as by-products of that success, 
 they had achieved two things equally unexpected: they 
 $ had preserved for ever the South-German spirit, and had 
 thus checked in a remote future the organization of the 
 whole German race by Prussia and the triumph over it 
 of Prussian materialism; they had preserved to France an 
 intensive domestic energy which was shortly to transform 
 the world. 
 
 The period of innocence, then, and of growth, which 
 succeeds a child's first approach to the Sacraments, corre- 
 sponded in the life of Marie Antoinette with the peace that 
 followed these victories and these defeats. The space 
 between her seventh and her fourteenth years might have 
 I been filled, in the leisure of the Austrian Court, with every 
 f advantage and every grace. By an accident, not uncon- 
 y nected with her general fate, she was allowed to run wild. 
 
 That her early childhood should have been neglected 
 is easier to understand. The war occupied all her mother's 
 
<>TUM 
 
 BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD 33 
 
 energies. She and her elder sister Caroline were the babies 
 whose elder brother was already admitted to affairs of 
 State. It was natural that no great anxiety upon their 
 education should have been felt in such times. The child 
 had been put out to nurse with the wife of a small lawyer 
 of sorts, one Weber, whose son the foster-brother of 
 the Queen has left a pious and inaccurate memorial of 
 her to posterity. Here she first learnt the German tongue, 
 which was to be her only idiom during her childhood; here, 
 also, she first heard her name under the form of " Maria 
 Antoinetta," a form which was to be preserved until her 
 marriage was planned. 
 
 Such neglect, or rather such domesticity, would have 
 done her character small hurt if it had ceased with her 
 earliest years and with the conclusion of the peace; it was 
 no better and no worse than that which the children of all 
 the wealthy enjoy in the company of inferiors until their 
 education begins. But the little archduchess, even when 
 she had reached the age when character forms, was still 
 undisciplined and at large. There was found for her and 
 Caroline a worthy and easy-going governess in the Countess 
 of Brandweiss, an amiable and careless, woman, who 
 perhaps could neither teach nor choose teachers and who 
 certainly did not do so. 
 
 All the warmer part of the year the children spent at 
 Schoenbrlinn; it was only in the depth of winter that they 
 visited the capital. But whether at Court or in the country 
 they were continually remote from the presence and the 
 strong guidance of Maria Theresa. 
 
 The Empress saw them formally once a week; a doctor 
 daily reported upon their health; for the rest, all control 
 was abandoned. The natural German of Marie Antoinette's 
 
34 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 babyhood continued (perhaps in the very accent of her 
 domestics) to be the medium of her speech in her teens, 
 and what was of rnore importance for the future not 
 only of her speech but of her thought also. In womanhood 
 and after a long residence abroad the mechanical part 
 of this habit was forgotten; its spirit remained. What 
 she read if she read anything we cannot tell. Her 
 music alone was watched. Her deportment was naturally 
 graceful as her breeding was good; but the seeds of no 
 culture were sown in her, nor so much as the elements of 
 /self-control. Her sprightliness was allowed an indulgence 
 in every whim, especially in a talent for mockery. She 
 acquired, and she desired to acquire, nothing. No healthy 
 child is fitjted_by_ naturejor application and study; upon 
 I aH~~such must continuous habits be enforced to her they 
 I were not so much as suggested. A perpetual instability 
 1 became part of her mind, and, unhappily, this permanent 
 weakness was so veiled by an inherited poise and by a happy 
 heart, that her mother, in her rare observations, passed it 
 by. Before Marie Antoinette was grown a woman that 
 inner instability had come to colour all her mind; it 
 remained in her till the eve of her disasters. 
 
 It is often discovered, when an eager childhood is left 
 
 too much to its own ruling, that the mind will, of its own 
 
 energy, turn to the cultivation of some one thing. Thus, 
 
 in Versailles, the boyhood of the lonely child, who was later 
 
 to be her husband, had turned for an interest to maps and 
 
 pad made them a passion. With her it was not so. The 
 
 /whole of her active and over-nourished life lacked the 
 
 ^ballast of so much as a hobby. She was precisely of that 
 
 kind to whom a wide, a careful, and a conventional training 
 
 is most useful; precisely that training was denied her. 
 
BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD 35 
 
 The disasters and what was worse, the unfruitfulness 
 of the war had not daunted Maria Theresa, but her plans 
 were in disarray. The two years that succeeded the peace 
 produced no definite policy. No step was taken to con- 
 firm the bond with France or to secure the future, when there 
 fell upon her the blow of her husband's death; he had fallen 
 under a sudden stroke at Innsbruck, during the wedding 
 feast of his son, leaving to her and to his children not only 
 the memory of his peculiar charm but also a sort of testament 
 or rule of life which remains a very noble fragment of 
 Christian piety. 
 
 Before he had set out he remembered his youngest 
 daughter; he asked repeatedly for the child and she was 
 brought to him. He embraced her closely, with some pre- 
 sentiment of evil, and he touched her hair; then as he rode 
 away among his gentlemen he said, with that clear candour 
 which inhabits both the blood and the wine of Lorraine, 
 "Gentlemen, God knows how much I desired to kiss that 
 child!" She had been his favourite; there was a close 
 affinity between them. She was left to her mother, there- 
 fore, as a pledge and an inheritance, and Maria Theresa, 
 whose mourning became passionate and remained so, was 
 ready to procure for this daughter the chief advantages of 
 the World. 
 
 The loss of her husband, while it filled her with an 
 enduring sorrow, also did something to rouse and to inspire 
 the Empress with the force that comes to such natures when 
 they find themselves suddenly alone. The little girl upon 
 whom her ambitions were already fixed, the French alliance 
 which had been, as it were, the greatest part of herself, 
 mixed in her mind. Maria Theresa had long connected 
 in some vague manner the confirmation of the alliance with 
 
 
36 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 some Bourbon marriage in what way precisely or by 
 what plan we cannot tell; her ambassador has credited her 
 with many plans. It is probable that none were developed 
 when, a few weeks after the Emperor's death, there hap- 
 pened something to decide her. The son of Louis XV., the 
 Dauphin, was taken ill and died before the end of the year 
 1765. He left heir to the first throne in Europe his son, 
 a lanky, silent, nervous lad of eleven, and that lad was heir 
 to a man nearer sixty than fifty, worn with pleasure of a 
 fastidious kind, and with the despair that accompanies the 
 satisfaction of the flesh. A great eagerness was apparent 
 at Versailles to plan at once a future marriage for this boy 
 and to secure succession. Maria Theresa determined that 
 this succession should reside in children of her own blood. 
 
 Nationality was a conception somewhat foreign to her, 
 and as yet of no great strength in her mixed and varied 
 dominions. How powerful it had ever been in France, 
 what a menace it provided for the future of the French 
 Monarchy, she could not perceive. Of the silent boy 
 himself, the new heir, she knew only what her ambassador 
 told her, and she cared little what he might be; but she 
 saw clearly the Bourbons, a family as the Hapsburgs were 
 a family, a bond in Catholic Europe with this boy the heir 
 to their headship. She saw Versailles as the pinnacle 
 still of whatever was regal (and therefore serious) in Europe. 
 She determined to complete by a marriage the alliance 
 already effected between that Court and her own. 
 i She knew the material with which she had to deal : Louis 
 LXV., clear sighted, a great gentleman, sensual, almost 
 \ lethargic, loyal. ShFTiaarTSiderstood the old nonentity 
 pf^a Queen keeping~her little place apart; the King's 
 spinster-daughters struggling against the influence of inis- 
 
 \ 
 
THE FIRST DAUPHIN 
 
 The father of Louis XVI. 
 
BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD 37 
 
 tresses. She understood the power of Choiseul, with whose 
 active ministry the King had so long allowed his power to 
 be merged; she knew how and why he was Austrian 
 in policy, and she forgave him his attack upon the Church. 
 Though Choiseul had not made the alliance he so used it, 
 and above all so maintained it after the doubtful peace, that 
 he almost seemed its author, as later he seemed though 
 he took so little action the author of her daughter's 
 marriage. She did not grudge the French Minister such 
 honours. She weighed the historic grandeur of the royal 
 house, and what she believed to be its certain future. She 
 sketched in her mind, with Kaunitz at her side, the marriage 
 of the two children as, years before, she had sketched the 
 alliance. 
 
 It was certain that Versailles would yield, because Ver- 
 sailles was a man who, for all his lucidity and high training, 
 never now stood long to one effort of the will; but just 
 because Louis XV. had grown into a nature of that kind, it 
 needed as active, as tenacious, and as subtle a mind as Maria 
 Theresa's to bring him to write or to speak. Writing or 
 speaking in so grave a matter meant direct action and 
 consequence; he feared such responsibilities as others 
 fear disaster. 
 
 It is in the spirit of comedy to see this dignified and ample 
 woman perhaps the only worthy sovereign of her sex 
 whom modern Europe has known piloting through so 
 critical a pass the long-determined fortunes of her daughter. 
 There is the mother in all of it. That daughter had imper- 
 illed her life. The child was the last of nine which she had 
 borne to a husband whose light infidelities she now the 
 more forgave, whose clear gentility had charmed her life, 
 whose religion was her own, and in respect to whose memory 
 
38 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 she was rapidly passing from a devotion to an adoration. 
 The day was not far distant when she would brood in the 
 vault beside his grave. 
 
 The old man Stahrenberg was yielding his place (with 
 some grumbling) to Mercy. He was still the Austrian 
 ambassador at Paris but his term was ending. Maria 
 Theresa would perhaps in other times have spared his 
 pride and would not have given him a task upon which he 
 must labour, but which his successor would enjoy; but 
 in the matter of her little archduchess she would spare no 
 one. She had hinted her business to Stahrenberg before 
 the Dauphin's death. The spring had hardly broken 
 before she was pressing him to conclude it. Up to his very 
 departure her importunity pursued him. When Mercy 
 was on the point of entering his office (in the May of 1766) 
 Stahrenberg, in the last letter sent to the Empress from Paris 
 before his return, told her that her ship was launched. 
 "She might," he wrote, "accept her project as assured, 
 from the tone in which the King had spoken of it." 
 
 Maria Theresa had too firm and too smiling and too 
 luminous an acquaintance with the world to build upon 
 such vague assurance. The dignity of the French throne 
 was too great a thing to be grasped at. It must be achieved. 
 When old Mme. Geoffrin passed through Vienna in that 
 year Maria Antoinetta was kept in the background off 
 the stage but France was cultivated. The baby, w r ho 
 was Louis XV. 's great-granddaughter, Theresa, Leopold's 
 daughter, was presented to that old and wonderful bour- 
 geoise and made much of. They joked about taking her 
 to France; another baby, after all not much older, only 
 eight years older, was going to that place in her time. 
 
 And, meanwhile, the common arts by which women of 
 
BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD 39 
 
 birth perfect their plans for their family were practised 
 in the habitual round. The little girl's personality, all 
 gilded and framed, was put in the window of the Haps- 
 burgs. She was wild perhaps, but so good-hearted! In 
 the cold winter you heard of (all winters are cold in Vienna) 
 she came up in the drawing-room w r here the family sat 
 together and begged her mother to accept of all her savings 
 for the poor fifty-five ducats ! 
 
 Little Mozart had come in to play one night. He had 
 slipped upon the unaccustomed polish of the floor. The 
 little archduchess, when all others smiled, had alone pitied 
 and lifted him! Maria Theresa met the French ambassador 
 and told him in the most indifferent way how her youngest, 
 when she was asked whom (among so many nations) she 
 would like to rule, had said, "The French, for they had 
 Henri IV. the good and Louis XIV. the great." Weary 
 though he was of such conventionalities, the ambassador 
 was bound by the honour of his place to repeat them. 
 
 There still stood, however, in this summer of 1766, 
 between the Empress's plan and its fruition a power as 
 feminine, as perspicuous, and as exact in calculation as 
 her own. The widow of the Dauphin, the mother of the 
 new heir at Versailles, opposed the match. 
 
 She would not retire, as the Queen, her mother-in-law, had 
 done, into dignity and nothingness, nor would she admit 
 so tenacious of the past are crowns that the Bourbons 
 and the Hapsburgs had all the negotiations between them. 
 She was of the Saxon House, and though it was but small 
 a northern bastion as it were, of the Catholic Houses yet 
 she had inherited the tradition of monarchy, and she might, 
 but for her husband's sudden death, have inherited Ver- 
 sailles itself. She was still young, vigorous and German. 
 
40 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 She had determined not only that her son, the new heir, 
 should marry into her house should marry his own 
 cousin, her niece but that he should marry as she his 
 mother chose, and not as the Hapsburgs chose. He was at 
 that moment (in 1766) not quite twelve; the bride whom 
 she would disappoint not quite eleven years old! But her 
 plan was active and tenacious, her readiness alive, when 
 in the beginning of the following year, in March, 1767, 
 she, in her turn died, and with her death that obstacle to 
 the fate of the little archduchess also failed. 
 
 With every date, as you mark each, it will be the more 
 apparent that the barriers which opposed Marie Antoinette's 
 approach to the French throne, failed each in turn at the 
 climax of its resistance, and that her way to such eminence 
 and such an end was opened by a number of peculiar 
 chances, all adjutants of doom. 
 
 The House of Hapsburg was never a crowned nationality ; 
 it was and is a crowned family and nothing more. Its 
 States were and are attached to it by no common bond. 
 There is no such thing as Austria: the Hapsburgs are the 
 reality of that Empire. The French Bourbons were, upon 
 the contrary, the chiefs of a nation peculiarly conscious of 
 its unity and jealous of its past. Their greatness lay only 
 in the greatness of the compact quadrilateral they governed 
 and of the finished language of their subjects, and in the 
 achievements of the national temper. Such conditions 
 favoured to the utmost the scheme of Maria Theresa, not 
 only in the detail of this marriage, but in all that successful 
 management of the French alliance which survived her 
 own death and was the chief business of her reign. She 
 could be direct in every plan, unhampered, considering 
 only the fortunes of her house; Louis XV., and his Ministers, 
 
BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD 41 
 
 as later his grandson, were trammelled by the complexity (I 
 of a national-life of which thag^were themselves a part. I 
 
 ^Versailles' had not declared itself: Vienna pressed. It 
 was in March that active opposition within the Court had 
 died with the mother of the heir. Within a month the 
 French ambassador at Vienna wrote home that "the mar- 
 riage was in the air": but the King had not spoken. 
 
 In that summer, as though sure of her final success, the 
 Empress threw a sort of prescience of France and .of high 
 fortunes over the nursery at Schoenbriinn. The amiable 
 Brandweiss disappeared ; the severe and unhealthy Lorchen- 
 feld replaced her. 
 
 The French (and baptismal form) of the child's name, 
 "Antoinette," was ordered to be used: still Versailles 
 remained dumb. 
 
 In the autumn the parallels of the siege were so far 
 advanced that a direct assault could be made on poor 
 Dufort, the advanced work of the Bourbons, their ambassa- 
 dor at Vienna. 
 
 Dufort had been told very strictly to keep silent. He 
 suffered a persecution. Thus he was standing one evening 
 by the card-tables talking to his Spanish colleague, when 
 the Empress came up and said to this last boldly: "You 
 see my daughter, sir ? I trust her marriage will go well ; 
 we can talk of it the more freely that the French ambassa- 
 dor here does not open his lips." 
 
 The child's new governess was next turned on to the 
 embarrassed man to pester him with the recital of her 
 charge's virtues. The approaching marriage of her elder 
 sister, Caroline with the Bourbons of Naples was dangled 
 before Dufort. 
 
 The play continued for a year. Louis XV. bade his 
 
42 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 minister get the girl's portrait, but "not show himself too 
 eager." He is reprimanded even for his c$urtjsies, and 
 all the while Dufort must stand the fire of the Court of 
 Vienna and its exaggerated deference to him and its 
 occasional reproaches! Choiseul was anxious to see the 
 business ended. Dufort was as ready (and as weary) 
 as could have been the Empress herself, but the slow balance 
 of Louis XV. stood between them all and their goal. 
 
 In the summer of the next year, 1768, the Empress's eldest 
 son, Joseph, now associated with her upon the throne, 
 determined to press home and conclude. It was the first 
 time that this man's narrow energy pressed the Bourbons 
 to determine and to act; it was not to be the last. He was 
 destined so to initiate action in the future upon two critical 
 occasions and largely to determine the fortunes of his 
 sister's married life and final tragedy. 
 
 He wrote to Louis XV. a rambling letter, chiefly upon 
 the marriage of yet another sister with the Duke of Parma. 
 It wandered to the Bourbon marriage of Caroline; he men- 
 tioned his own child, the great-granddaughter of the King. 
 It was a letter demanding and attracting a familiar answer. 
 It drew its quarry. Louis, answering with his own hand 
 and without emphasis, in a manner equally domestic and 
 familiar, threw in a chance phrase: . . . These 
 
 marriages, your sister's with the Infante, that of the 
 Dauphin. ..." In these casual four words a document 
 had passed and the last obstacle was removed. 
 
 The Empress turned from her major preoccupation to a 
 minor one. This child of hers was to rule in France: she 
 was now assured of the throne; she was near her thirteenth 
 birthday and she had been taught nothing. 
 
I 
 in 
 
 THE ESPOUSALS 
 
 THE fortnightly despatches from France customarily 
 arrived at Vienna together in one bag and in the 
 charge of one courier. The Empress would receive 
 at once the letters of Mercy, the official correspondence, per- 
 haps the note of a friend, and the very rare communications 
 of royalty. In this same batch which brought that decisive 
 letter of Louis XV. to her son, on the same day, therefore, 
 in which she was first secure in her daughter's future, there 
 also arrived the usual secret report from Mercy. This 
 document contained a phrase too insignificant to detain her 
 attention; it mentioned the rumour of a new intrigue: the 
 King showed attachment to a woman of low origin about 
 him. It was an attachment that might be permanent. 
 This news was immediately forgotten by Maria Theresa; 
 it was a detail that passed from her mind. She perhaps 
 remembered the name, which was "Du Ban 
 
 The Court of Vienna, permeated (as was then every 
 wealthy society) with French culture, was yet wholly Ger- 
 man in character. The insufficiency which had marked the 
 training of the imperial children especially of the youngest 
 - was easily accepted by those tcr^wliom a happy domestic 
 spirit made up for every other lack injthe family- _Of tVmsp 
 who surrounded the little arc5mluchess two alone, perhaps, 
 
 43 
 
44 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 understood the grave difference of standard between such 
 education as Maria Antoinetta had as yet received and the 
 conversation of Versailles ; but these two were Kaunitz and 
 Maria Theresa, and short as was the time before them, 
 they did determine to fit the child, in superficial things at 
 least, for the world she was to enter and in a few years, to 
 govern. They failed. 
 
 Mercy was instructed to find a tutor who should come to 
 Vienna and could accomplish the task. He applied to 
 Choiseul. Choiseul in turn referred the matter to the best 
 critic of such things, an expert in things of the world, the 
 Archbishop of Toulouse. That prelate, Lomenie de Brienne, 
 whose unscrupulous strength had judged men rightly upon 
 so many occasions and had exactly chosen them for political 
 tasks had in this case no personal appetite to gratify and 
 was free to choose. A post was offered. His first thought 
 was to obtain it for one who was bound to him, a protege 
 and a dependant. He at once recommended a priest for 
 whom he had already procured the librarianship of the 
 Mazarin Collection, one Vermond. The choice was not 
 questioned, and Vermond left to assume functions which he 
 could hardly fulfil. 
 
 There was needed here a man who should have been 
 appalled by the ignorance he might discover in his charge, 
 who should be little affected by grandeur, who should be 
 self-willed, assertive, and rapid in method. One whom the 
 Empress might have ridiculed or even disliked, but whom 
 she would soon have discovered to be indispensable to her 
 plan. Such a man would have tackled his business with 
 an appreciation of its magnitude, would have insisted upon 
 a full control, would have communicated by his vigour the 
 atmosphere of French thought, careless of the German 
 
THE ESPOUSALS 45 
 
 shrinking from the rigidity of the French mind. He would 
 have worked long hours with little Marie Antoinette, he 
 would have filled the days with his one object, he would 
 have shocked and offended all, his pupil especially, and in 
 a year he would have left her with a good grounding in the 
 literature of his country, with an elementary but a clear 
 scheme of the history and the political forces which she was 
 later to learn in full, with an enlarged vocabulary, a good 
 accent, and at least the ability to write clearly and to Work 
 a simple sum. His pupil would have been compelled to 
 application ; her impulse would have been permanently har- 
 nessed; she would have learnt for life the value of a plan. 
 Such a tutor would hardly have desired and would cer- 
 tainly not have acquired a lasting influence later on at 
 Versailles. His work would have been done in those 
 critical years of childhood once and for all. He would 
 probably have fallen into poverty. In later years he 
 might have appeared among the revolutionaries, but he 
 would have found, face to face with the Revolution, a 
 trained Queen who, thanks to him, could have dealt with 
 circumstance. 
 
 In the place of such a man Vermond arrived. 
 
 He was a sober, tall, industrious priest of low birth; 
 his father had let blood and perhaps pulled teeth for the 
 needy. His reserve and quiet manners reposed upon a 
 spirit that was incapable of ambition, but careful to secure 
 ample means and to establish his family and himself in the 
 secure favour of his employers. He was of middle age, 
 a state into which he had entered early and was likely long 
 to remain. His mind within was active and disciplined; its 
 exterior effect was small. He thought to accomplish his 
 mission if he was but regular in his reports, laborious in 
 
46 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 his own study, and, above all, tactful and subtle in handling 
 the problem before him. 
 
 To such a character was presented an exuberant child, 
 growing rapidly, vivacious, somewhat proud, and hitherto 
 unaccustomed to effort of any kind, a monkey for mimicry, 
 clever at picking up a tune upon the keys, a tomboy shout- 
 ing her German phrases down the corridors of Schoenbriinn, 
 a fine little lady at Vienna acting either part well. The 
 light russet of her hair and her thick eyebrows gave promise 
 of her future energy; she had already acquired the tricks 
 of rank, the carriage of the head and the ready mechanical 
 interest in inferiors for the rest she was empty. In this 
 critical fourteenth year of hers, during which it was pro- 
 posed to fashion out of such happy German childhood a 
 strict and delicate French princess, she did not read and 
 she could barely write. The big round letters, as she 
 painfully fashioned them in her occasional lessons, were 
 those of a baby. Her drawing was infantile; and while 
 she rapidly learnt a phrase in a foreign language by ear, a 
 complete revolution in her education would have been 
 needed to make her accurate in the use of words or to make 
 her understand a Latin sentence or parse a French one. 
 
 To cultivate such a soil, exactly one hour a day was 
 spared when the Court was at Vienna somewhat more 
 when it was in the country and these few minutes were 
 consumed in nothing more methodical than a dialogue, 
 little talks in which Vermond was fatally anxious to bring 
 before his pupil (with her head full of those new French 
 head-dresses of hers, the prospect of Versailles, and every 
 other distraction of mind) only such subjects as might 
 amuse her inattention. 
 
 The early months of 1769 were full of this inanity, Ver- 
 
THE ESPOUSALS 47 
 
 mond regularly reporting progress to the Austrian embassy 
 in France, regularly complaining of the difficulty of his 
 task, regularly insisting upon his rules and as regularly 
 failing in his object. In the autumn the Empress was at 
 the pains of asking her daughter a few questions, notably 
 upon history. The result did not dissatisfy her, but mean- 
 while Maria Antoinetta could hardly write her name. 
 
 Side by side with this continued negligence in set training 
 and in the discipline that accompanies it, went a very rapid 
 development in manner. The child was admitted to the 
 Court; she was even permitted the experiment of presiding 
 at small gatherings of her own. The experiment succeeded. 
 She acquired with an amazing rapidity what little remained 
 to be learned of the externals of rank. The alternate phrases 
 addressed to one's neighbours round a table, the affecta- 
 tion of satiety and of repose, the gait in which the feet are 
 hardly lifted; the few steps forward to meet a magnate, 
 the fewer to greet a lesser man, and that smiling immobility 
 before the ordinary sort, which is still a living tradition in 
 great drawing-rooms; the power of putting on an air in 
 the very moment between privacy and a public appearance 
 - all these came to her so naturally and by so strongly 
 inherited an instinct, that she not only charmed the genial 
 elders of the Austrian capital but satisfied experienced 
 courtiers, even those visitors from France, who examined 
 it all with the eyes of connoisseurs and watched her deport- 
 ment as a work of art, whose slight errors in technique they 
 could at once discover but whose general excellence they 
 were able to appreciate and willing to proclaim. 
 
 She did indeed preserve beneath that conventional sur- 
 face a fire of vigorous life that was apparent in every hour. 
 Once in the foreign atmosphere of France and subject to 
 
48 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 exasperation and contrast, that heat would burst forth. 
 She became, as her future showed, capable of violent scenes 
 in public and of the natural gestures of anger it is to 
 her honour that she was on the whole so often herself. Here 
 at Vienna in this last year her young energy did no more 
 than lend spirit and grace to the conventions she so quickly 
 acquired. 
 
 The opening of the year 1770 found her thus, her German 
 half forgotten, her French (though imperfect) habitual, 
 her acquaintance with the air of a Court considerable. 
 Though she was still growing rapidly she was now dressed 
 as a woman and taught to walk on her high heels as did the 
 ladies her seniors. Her hair was brushed off her high 
 forehead in the French manner, the stuff of her frocks and 
 the cut of them was French, her name was now permanently 
 Frenchified for her, and she heard herself called everywhere 
 "Marie Antoinette"; none but old servants were left to 
 give her the names she had first known. 
 
 March passed and the moment of her departure 
 approached. The child had never travelled. To her 
 vivacious and eager temper the prospect of so great a journey 
 with so splendid an ending was an absorbing pleasure. It 
 filled her mind even during the retreat which, under Ver- 
 mbnd's guidance, she entered during Holy Week, and every 
 sign of her approaching progress excited in her a vivid 
 curiosity and expectation, as it did in her mother a mixture 
 of foreboding and of pride. 
 
 The official comedy which the Court played during 
 April heightened the charm: the heralds, the receptions, 
 that quaint but gorgeous ceremony of renunciation, the 
 mock-marriage, the white silver braid and the white satin 
 of her wedding-clothes, the salvoes of artillery and the 
 
THE ESPOUSALS 49 
 
 feasts were all a fine great play for her, with but one inter- 
 lude of boredom, when her mother dictated, and she wrote 
 (heaven knows with what a careful guidance of the pen) 
 a letter which she was to deliver to the King of France. With 
 that letter Maria Theresa enclosed a note of her own, 
 familiar, almost domestic, imploring Louis XV., her con- 
 temporary, to see to the child as "one that had a good 
 heart," . . . but was ardent and a trifle wild. 
 
 These words were written upon the twentieth of the 
 month; on the morning of the twenty-first of April, 177() ? 
 the line of coaches left the palace, and the archduchess 
 took the western road. 
 
 There was no sudden severance. Her eldest brother, 
 Joseph, he who was associated with her mother in the empire, 
 accompanied her during the whole of the first day. Of an 
 active, narrow, and formal intelligence, grossly self-sufficient, 
 arithmetical in temper, and with a sort of native atheism 
 in him such as stagnates in minds whose development is 
 early arrested, a philosopher therefore and a prig, earnest, 
 lean, and an early riser, he was of all companions the one 
 who could most easily help Marie Antoinette to forget 
 Vienna and to desire Versailles. The long hours of the 
 drive were filled with platitudes and admonitions that 
 must easily have extinguished all her regrets for his Court 
 and have bred in her a natural impatience for the new 
 horizons that were before her. He left her at Melk. She 
 continued her way with her household, hearing for the 
 last time upon every side the German tongue, not knowing 
 that she heard also, for the last time, the accents of sincere 
 affection and sincere servility: the French temper with 
 its concealed edges of sharpness was to find her soon enough. 
 
 Her journey was not slow for the times. She took but 
 
50 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 little more than a week to reach the Rhine from Augsburg 
 - a French army on the march has done no better. It 
 was on the evening of the sixth of May that she could see, 
 far off against the sunset, the astonishing spire of Strasburg 
 and was prepared to enter France; only the Rhine was 
 now between her and her new life. 
 
 She bore upon her person during this last night on 
 German soil a last letter of her mother's which had reached 
 her but the day before yesterday. It was the most intimate 
 and the most searching she was to receive in all the long 
 correspondence which was to pass between them for ten 
 years, and it contained a phrase which the child could hardly 
 understand, but which, if texts and single phrases were of 
 the least advantage to conduct, might have deflected her 
 history and that of Europe. ' The one felicity of this 
 world is a happy marriage: I can say so with knowledge; 
 and the whole hangs upon the woman, that she should be 
 willing, gentle, and able to amuse." 
 
 Next day at noon she crossed in great pomp to an island 
 in mid-river, where a temporary building of wood had been 
 raised upon the exact frontier for the ceremony of her 
 livery. 
 
 It is possible that the long ritual of her position she was 
 to endure it for twenty years ! was already a burden 
 upon her versatility, even after these short weeks. Here, 
 on this island, the true extent of the French parade first met 
 her. It Was sufficient to teach her what etiquette was to 
 mean. The poor child had to take off every stitch of her 
 clothes and to dress, to a ribbon or a hair pin, with an order 
 strictly ordained and in things all brought from Versailles 
 for the occasion. Once so dressed she was conducted to a 
 central room where her German household gave her to her 
 
THE ESPOUSALS 51 
 
 French one, at the head of which the kindly and sometimes 
 foolish Comtesse de Noailles performed the accustomed 
 rites, and the archduchess entered for ever the million 
 formalities of her new world. They had not yet fatigued 
 her. She was taken to Mass at the Cathedral; she received 
 the courtesy of the old bishop, a Rohan, in whose great 
 family Strasburg was almost an appanage. ^ 
 
 There was a figure standing by the Bishop's side. She saw, 
 clothed in that mature majesty which a man of thirty may 
 have for a child of fifteen, the bishop's coadjutor, a nephew 
 and a Rohan too. She noted his pomposity and perhaps 
 his good looks, but he meant nothing to her; he was but 
 one of the Rohans to be remembered. He noted her well. 
 
 Next day and for six more her journey proceeded amid 
 perpetual deputations, Latin, flowers, bad verses, stage 
 peasantry, fireworks, feasts, and addresses, until, a week after 
 she had crossed the Rhine, she slept at Soissons and knew 
 that on the morrow she would see the King. 
 
 The pavement of the long road out from Soissons, the 
 great royal road, had sounded under the wheels of her car- 
 riage for now the best part of the day. She had already 
 found Choiseul awaiting her in state and had exchanged 
 with this old friend of her mother's those ceremonial compli- 
 ments of which the child was now well weary, when, through 
 the left-hand window of her coach, which was open to the 
 warm spring day, she saw before her a thing of greater 
 interest the league-long line of trees that ends abruptly 
 against the bare plain and that marks the forest of 
 Compiegne. 
 
 Into this wood the road plunged, straight and grand, 
 until after a declivity, where a little stream is crossed (near 
 the place where the railway lines join to-day) there appeared 
 
52 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 awaiting her, as Choiseul had awaited her some miles 
 before, a great and orderly group of people, of carriages, and 
 horses; but this company was far larger and was ranked 
 with more solemnity than others that had met her upon her 
 progress. She knew that it was the King. 
 
 The splendour which a history full of trumpets had lent 
 to the French name, the lineage of the kings, the imagined 
 glories of Versailles all these had penetrated the nursery 
 and the schoolroom of the princess. As she came down 
 from her carriage, with either hand reposing in the hands of 
 her escort, an awe of the Capetian monarchy came upon 
 her, and she knelt upon the roadway in the midst of the 
 Court, of the princesses who now first saw the little heiress 
 of their lives, of the gilded carriages and the men-at-arms. 
 
 The King raised her up and kissed her forehead; he 
 motioned forward a heavy, lanky, frowning boy, his grand- 
 son, for whom all this pomp existed. The lad shuffled 
 forward, bent a little perhaps, and kissed her in his turn 
 with due ceremony for he was to be her husband. When 
 this little ritual and its sharp emotions were over she had a 
 moment, before her introductions to the Blood, to the 
 King's mature daughters, to the Orleans and the rest, in 
 which to seize with the bright glance that was always so 
 ready for exterior things, the manner of the King. 
 
 Louis XV. was at that moment a man just past his six- 
 tieth year. Long habit had given him, as it gives to all 
 but the greatest of those educated to power, an attitude 
 constrained though erect. His age had told on him, he had 
 grown somewhat fat, he moved without alertness and 
 a weakness which had appeared but lately - - his rare and 
 uncompleted gestures expressed the weight of his body; 
 but his muscles were firm, his command of them perfect, 
 
V OF s 
 
 THE ESPOUSALS 53 
 
 and he still had, especially in repose, so far as age can have 
 it, grace. 
 
 The united pallor of his complexion, which had been 
 remarkable in youth, seemed now more consonant to his 
 years. The steady indifference to which he had reduced 
 his features was now more dignified than when its rigidity 
 had seemed unnatural and new. His expression even 
 acquired a certain strength from the immobility and firm- 
 ness of his mouth whose lines displayed a talent for exact 
 language and a capacity for continued dignity; but his 
 eyes betrayed him. 
 
 They were warm in spite of a habit of command, but the 
 sadness in them (which was profound and permanent) was 
 of a sort which sprang from physical appetites always 
 excessive and now surviving abnormally beyond their time. 
 There was also in those eyes the memory of considerable 
 but uprooted affections, and, deeper, of a fixed despair, 
 and deeper far a veil as it were behind their brightness 
 - the mortal tedium, to escape from which this human 
 soul had sacrificed the national traditions and the ancient 
 honour of the crown. 
 
 This great monarch, whom no one since his boyhood had 
 approached without a certain fear, received his grandson's 
 betrothed with an air almost paternal. It was a relaxation 
 upon his part to which he owed, during the remainder of 
 his life, the strongly affectionate respect which Marie 
 Antoinette, vivacious and ungoverned, paid to him alone 
 in the palace. 
 
 He presented the rest in turn. She heard names which 
 were to mix so intimately with her own destiny, and when 
 they set out again upon the road she could discreetly watch 
 during the long ten miles to Compiegne, Chartres who 
 
 
54 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 would soon be Orleans, the faded faces of the King's 
 spinster-daughters, the old Duke of Ponthievre; and she 
 watched with a greater care that daughter of his whose 
 foolish, dainty, and sentimental face, insecure upon its 
 long thin neck, was that of a young, unhappy widow:. the 
 Princesse de Lamballe. 
 
 When they had slept at Compiegne in state, the whole 
 pageant moved on next morning down the Paris road upon 
 the last day's march of that journey, and the child thought 
 that she was now upon the threshold of nothing but an 
 easy glory. She was nearing amid great mobs and a whole 
 populace come out to greet her, not only Paris and Ver- 
 sailles, but much more that woman whose name her 
 mother had heard and half forgotten, whose name she 
 herself had never heard. It was a name w r hose influence 
 was to deflect the first current of her life: the name of 
 Du Barry. 
 
 There is but one instrument efficacious to the govern- 
 ment of men, which is Persuasion, and Persuasion sickens 
 when its agent fails in dignity. 
 
 Dignity is the exterior one of the many qualities necessary 
 to commandment; these in some cases touch closely upon 
 virtue, so that, in some situations of authority, a dignified 
 man is presumably a good one. But in the particular case 
 of national government it is not so. The audience is so 
 vast, the actor so distant and removed, that in this matter 
 dignity resides mainly in the observance of whatever ritual 
 the national temper and the national form of the executive 
 demand. Such functions of ritual endanger rather than 
 strengthen the soul of him who is called upon to assume them. 
 
THE ESPOUSALS 55 
 
 To his intimates they appear as mummeries. It is often a 
 sign of personal excellence in a ruler that he is disgusted with 
 them and even casts them aside; but they are necessary to 
 the State. For if such ritual is ill-observed, dignity fails; 
 in its failure persuasion, I say, sickens, and when persuasion 
 sickens, government, upon which depends the cohesion of a 
 nation and the co-ordination of its faculties, breaks down. 
 
 The method of government in France at this time was 
 a true personal monarchy. 
 
 The institution had increased in consciousness and in 
 executive power down the long avenue of fourteen hundred 
 years. Its roots were in Rome. It stood up in the seventh 
 century as a memory of the Roman Peace, in the eighth 
 as a promise to restore the Roman order. From the ninth 
 onward it was vested in a Gaulish family and already had 
 begun to express the Gaulish unities; by the thirteenth its 
 mission was ardent and victorious. When the religious 
 wars of the sixteenth century were resolved in a national 
 settlement and the Bourbon branch was finally acknowl- 
 edged, the crown was supreme and the whole people held 
 to and were summed up in the Monarchy. It had made 
 a yeoman of the serf, it had welded the nation together, it 
 had established the frontiers, it had repressed the treason 
 of the wealthy Huguenots: it was France. 
 
 The person of the Monarch was public and publicly 
 worshipped. His spoken words were actually law: he 
 could impose a peace; his private decision could suspend 
 a debt, imprison a transgressor, ruin or create an industry. 
 Into such a mould had the French energy forced the execu- 
 tive when the genius of Richelieu and the cunning of Mazarin 
 confirmed the powers of the throne, and left them in legacy 
 to the virile sense of Louis XIV, 
 
 
56 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 This King was very great and cast accurately also to 
 the part he should fill. The conventions and the trap- 
 pings of the part delighted him; he played it royally, and 
 when he died, though he left the crown to an infant great- 
 grandson, yet its security seemed as permanent as does 
 to-day the security in similar powers of our English rich. 
 But that great-grandson, at first gradually and at last 
 rapidly, undermined the stable seat he had inherited. Louis 
 XV., by his good qualities as well as by his evil, tended more 
 and more to reject the ritual necessary to his kingship. His 
 good breeding and his active physical appetites, his idleness 
 and his sincerity, all combined to weary him of the game, 
 so that at the end of his long reign he had almost ceased in 
 the eyes of the populace to be a King at all. 
 
 The Monarchy therefore perished, and mainly through 
 Louis XV. 's incapacity to maintain its essential livery. 
 Its collapse, its replacement (with consequences enormous 
 to the whole of Europe) by that other French formula 
 which we call "The Revolution" or "The Republic" was 
 so exactly contemporaneous with Marie Antoinette's mar- 
 riage and with her presence at Versailles, that far too great 
 a part in the catastrophe is assigned to her own mis- 
 judgments and misfortunes. No error or disaster of hers 
 gave the death shock to the institution with which her life 
 was mingled; that stroke had been f delivered before the 
 child crossed the Rhine, and the moment when the blow 
 was struck was that in which Mercy had penned the name 
 "Du Barry," which Maria Theresa had read so carelessly 
 in Vienna on the same day that brought the letter sealing 
 her daughter's marriage. 
 
 The public appearance of Madame Du Barry was the 
 turning point in the history of Versailles, and the little 
 
THE ESPOUSALS 57 
 
 archduchess, when she came upon French earth, did not 
 bring a curse to her new country, for the destiny of that /I 
 country was already determined; rather this France which I 
 she had entered had prepared a tragedy for her and a fate / 
 expected by her own unhappy stars. 
 
 Those who have watched the destruction of an old and 
 strong wall will remember that it seemed at first to resist 
 with ease every battery of the assault. At last there came 
 one effort, more violent than the rest, which broke long, 
 zig-zag lines throughout the fabric. The work was done. 
 A few succeeding impacts visibly disintegrated the now 
 loosened stones until the whole fell rapidly into ruin. So it 
 was with the French Monarchy. The Regency, the float- ; 
 ing theories of public criticism, the indeterminate foreign/ 
 policy, the military reverses of the Seven Years' War, the 
 careless lethargy of touis XV. in State affairs, had impaired M 
 the fabric of tradition, but that fabric still stood. It might 
 yet have been restored and made whole had not the King 
 in his last years chosen a particular mistress and presented 
 her in a particular manner, which threw chaos into the 
 scheme which every Frenchman took for granted when he 
 considered his sovereign. This last thud, coming after 
 so many accumulated tremours, loosened all the wall. The 
 trials and distractions of the next reign did but pull apart, 
 and that easily, the loosened stones. The imposing posture 
 which the French demand of their symbols had been dropped 
 by the old King; the new one could not restore it. Choose 
 at random any man or woman of your acquaintance in 
 history, put them upon the throne after the death of Louis 
 XV., and though the succeeding quarter of a century would 
 have varied somewhat with various individualities in power, 
 
 the doom of the Monarchy would by none have been averted. 
 
 1 
 
58 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 Let us see what happened when that fatal news of 
 Madame Du Barry's advent spread through the Court 
 and the capital of France and reached, like the ripple of a 
 wave, the shores of Vienna. 
 
 The King (as has almost every other king in history) had 
 indulged his body; he had also indulged his desire for 
 intimate companionship, his man's whim for an expression, 
 a tone of voice, or a gesture. This licence, which to their 
 bane is granted to privileged and symbolic men, had led 
 him into every distraction. His amours were many, but 
 middle age had fixed his routine, if not his constancy, upon 
 one woman of remarkable character. 
 
 Madame de Pompadour, as she came later to be called, 
 was not of the nobility. To have taken a mistress publicly 
 from the rank of business people was a serious reproach 
 to the King; but though the mass condemned such an 
 alliance, and though the wealthy, both of the middle class 
 and of the courtiers, found an added blame in the financial 
 reputation of her father and the notorious lightness of her 
 mother, yet there was about this young, vigorous, and com- 
 manding hostess something that could prevent too violent 
 a reaction of opinion. 
 
 She was extremely rich; her drawing-room had held all 
 the famous men of her day; her education .was wide and 
 liberal, her judgment excellent. She played and sang 
 with exceptional charm. She had good manner; she rode, 
 spoke, read, and entertained as might the principal of her 
 contemporaries. 
 
 The acknowledged position of such a woman at Court, 
 though a new degradation, was a tolerable one. It was 
 easy for the most reserved to understand how, in those 
 years between thirty and forty when the strong* oA^ 
 
THE ESPOUSALS 59 
 
 take root, the King had found in her company a sort of 
 home. Her character was, moreover, comprehensible and 
 secretly sympathetic to that vast proprietary body, the 
 Bourgeoisie, which then were and are now the stuff of the 
 nation. 
 
 She was prudent, she could choose a friend or a servant; 
 her vivacity did not lack restraint. She was decent, fond of 
 quiet silk, of good taste in decoration and of management. 
 Her position at Versailles was a sort of opjiquest effected 
 by the middle classes over the Court. Such a mistress, 
 ruling for many years, tne nation received at last with far 
 more calm than could the buzzing nobles of tlie palace. 
 As she (and the King) grew older, as her power became 
 absolute and his individual presence grew remote, the 
 situation was acceptable to Paris even more than to those 
 who immediately surrounded the throne. 
 
 She died. There was an interval of puzzled silence 
 about the person of the King. No one dreamt of a new 
 power at Court. A nullity of action in the King himself, 
 a few more stories, obscure and scandalous, the end of the 
 reign and the accession of the heir who should bring with 
 him such reforms as all the intellect of the country 
 demanded: these were the expectations which followed 
 her death, and especially were they the hope or the certitude 
 of that group of men, mostly not noble, who had long 
 managed both law and finance. 
 
 This prospect had, however, omitted one capital factor 
 in the calculation. Louis XV., during these long years of 
 regular habit, had grown old, and age in such a character, 
 thus isolated, thus re-entrant, and yet hungry for whatever 
 might tempt the senses, could only lead to some appalling 
 error. In years he was, when Madame de Pompadour 
 
60 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 died, but little past fifty, but that blindness to exterior 
 opinion and that carelessness for the future which properly 
 belong to an age much more advanced, had already 
 spread like a veil over his mind. After an interval of less 
 than four years from the Pompadour's death, the nation 
 and the capital and those leaders of opinion who awaited 
 a mere negative decline full of petty rumours but con- 
 trolled as to great affairs by that Choiseul whom the Pompa- 
 dour herself had chosen for Minister, were presented with 
 the Du Barry: the scandal and its effect were overwhelming. 
 This woman was a prostitute. -. 
 

 IV 
 THE DU BARRY 
 
 THE presence of the Du Barry at the Court of Ver- 
 sailles, the fact that this presence preceded the 
 Austrian child's arrival, that it was first publicly 
 admitted at the first public appearance of the Dauphiness, 
 and that the four years of her tutelage were overshadowed \ 
 by the new Royal Mistress was the initial and irretrievable I 
 disaster of Marie Antoinette's life. It moulded her view / 
 of the nation and of the family with whom she had now to 
 mingle; it deeply affected the populace she was to attempt 
 to rule; it cloistered, warped and distracted her vision of 
 France at a moment in adolescence when vision is most 
 acute and the judgment formed upon it most permanent. 
 All the Queen's tragedy is furnished by the early spell of 
 this insignificant and licentious woman. 
 
 With her advent was introduced for the first time into 
 the Court that insolent and calculated disregard for rule 
 in gesture and vocabulary in which the rich will often 
 secretly relax their ordered lives, but which, when it appears 
 publicly amidst their daily furniture, is as shocking as 
 nakedness or as blood. 
 
 Judged in the pure light of human morals the position 
 of the Du Barry was surely less offensive to God than that 
 of any mistress any King has ever chosen. Louis wronged 
 no one by this whim. He wrecked no remains of chastity 
 the woman had never known the meaning of the word. 
 
 61 
 
62 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 He wronged no subject (as has and does almost every royal 
 lover in every amour) her marriage had been but a 
 hurried form run through to satisfy etiquette, "that she 
 might be presented at Court." He provided himself with 
 a companion too inferior to make political intrigue her 
 main ambition, and with one that could and did surround 
 him with an abject but constant, familiar, and comfortable 
 affection. It was such a vagary of old age as those in which 
 have terminated countless lives, when old gentlemen of 
 breeding but of enfeebled will surround their last years with 
 youth and with the vigour, tainted vigour, that is inseparable 
 from vulgarity. There is not one of us but has come upon 
 a dozen such unions: they are often confirmed by a tardy 
 marriage. 
 
 But in the case of Louis and this scandal of his a neces- 
 sary element to such disgrace, the element of retirement, 
 was lacking. Those symbols which, if they are insisted 
 upon, are mere hypocrisies but which, taken normally, are 
 the guardians of a tolerable life, were outraged. The eyes 
 of the noblewomen at Versailles were full, some of a real 
 or affected timidity, others of a real or affected dignity. 
 Such ladies as chose to be sprightly or even to advertise 
 their loose habit with over-brilliant and vivacious looks, 
 retained, considered, and could always assume, refinement; 
 but the beautiful eyes of the Du Barry were brazen. The 
 mignardises which are always ill-suited to a woman might 
 be deliberately affected by the less subtle of the more elderly 
 beauties: with the Du Barry, despite her evident youth, 
 they had already become native and ineradicable. She 
 lisped alarmingly; she lolled, or, when it was necessary 
 for her to sit erect, was awkward. Her entry into a room 
 was conscious; her assertions loud, her amiability oiled, 
 
THE DU BARRY 63 
 
 her animosities superficially violent. It is upon solemn 
 occasions that such deficiencies are most glaring, and 
 solemn occasions were of continual recurrence at Versailles. 
 In a word, she was most desperately out of place, and there- 
 fore produced an effect as of dirt, jarring against whatever 
 was palatine and splendid in the evil of the Court by her 
 parade of the loose good-nature and the looser spites of the 
 Parisian brothels. 
 
 Yet it is not difficult to see what had brought the King in 
 to so fixed a relation with her. Whoever will compare any 
 of the portraits of her by Drouais with any by Boucher of 
 the Pompadour will see, not the same character indeed, but 
 the same brows and forehead. 
 
 Louis could not continue in those early and familiar 
 relations with her which had become a necessity to him, 
 unless in some way her place were publicly acknowledged; 
 but to force such a personality upon the Court, to give it 
 precedence and to see that its position should be permanent, 
 was an effort he had avoided for months. A scene was 
 intolerable to him. He suffered from the most common 
 defect attaching to men of lineage and wealth in that he 
 feared, or rather could not endure, the prospect of violence. 
 Orders even, and debate, if they were of a personal and 
 verbal kind, he shrank from as do some men from loud 
 noises. The more important and decisive of his actions 
 were effected in short notes, every line of which, as we read 
 them to-day, manifest his urgent need of isolation: of 
 getting the business done without the friction of another 
 presence, and once done, put aside for ever. 
 
 For the public presentation of the Du Barry the marriage 
 of his grandson, and especially the presence of the little 
 archduchess, offered a fatal opportunity. It would be 
 
64 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 impossible for the malicious to allude to the office of the 
 Mistress in the presence of the child; the occasion would 
 compel the princes and princesses of the blood to attend, 
 and would equally forbid any general revolt. He deter- 
 mined to give the archduchess a formal banquet on the 
 journey before the Court and its company had reached 
 Versailles, to summon to it the chief members of the Court, 
 and to let them find at table, without warning, the woman 
 whose existence had hitherto not been spoken of in his 
 presence. 
 
 The official limit of Paris upon the west in those days 
 - a line drawn far beyond the houses and enclosing many 
 fields, gardens, and suburbs, ran from what is now the 
 Trocadero to what is now the Arc de Triomphe. Out- 
 side the gate or barrier was an empty space of land but 
 partially cultivated, and with no more than a scattered 
 house or two upon it, save where, along the waterside and 
 on the hill above it, clustered the village of Passy. This 
 empty space merged gradually into what were then the 
 wild and unfrequented Boulogne woods. Just on the 
 edge of these, in a situation which was close to the town 
 and yet upon one side accessible to the forest, stood a 
 royal hunting-box called "La Muette," which had gradu- 
 ally developed into a little palace. Here, on the evening of 
 the day after Compiegne, the long and splendid train of the 
 Court arrived, bearing in the chief coach the King, the 
 Dauphin, and this new Austrian girl for whom Louis had 
 already shown so much respect and tenderness, and whose 
 entry into her rank he was yet to distort. 
 
 The day had been long for the child, but her curiosity 
 and the vitality of her years had forbidden her to feel 
 fatigue. 
 
THE DU BARRY 65 
 
 . Dense mobs of people, cheering and running by the side 
 of the carriages, had indeed been familiar to her since her 
 babyhood, but the vivacity and the shrillness and the 
 surprising contrasts of this active civilisation, its solemn 
 roads, its simple architecture, broken by an occasional 
 and unexpected magnificence, the long lines of ordered 
 trees which here seemed as native as in her own country 
 they had seemed artificial and foreign; the half-hour's 
 glimpse of an austere French convent which she had had 
 W T hen she visited at St. Denis (in passing) ; the King's 
 daughter, veiled among the Carmelites; the outskirts of a 
 gigantic city such as she had never known all these suf- 
 ficed to distract her until the fall of the cold spring evening, 
 when the line of carriages clattered into the paved court- 
 yard of La Muette. 
 
 As though such experiences were not sufficient to bewilder 
 her with the new world, the girl found when she came to 
 her room, attended by Madame de Noailles and the ladies 
 of her suite, such a parade of diamonds upon her table as 
 to-day one will see only in the vulgar surroundings of a 
 public show. 
 
 The instinct for gems which was latent in her, but which 
 the extreme simplicity of the Austrian Court had not per- 
 mitted to arise, awoke at once. They were the diamonds 
 of the woman who would have been her mother-in-law, had 
 she lived, or rather who, had she lived, would never have 
 permitted this marriage. They had reverted to the Crown 
 upon her death, and Louis XV. had had them placed 
 there upon Marie Antoinette's table in readiness for her 
 appearance; he had so sent them partly from a sort of 
 paternal kindness, partly from a desire typical in him to 
 exceed even in giving pleasure; but also, perhaps, partly to 
 
66 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 atone for the harm he was about to do her. For \vhen 
 the child came down, some two hours later, and was led in 
 the strict etiquette of the Court procession into the dining- 
 hall of the little palace, she could not but notice throughout 
 the meal that followed a constraint less natural than that 
 regular constraint of the French court life which, in twenty- 
 four hours of experience, had already struck her quick 
 apprehension. It was not that men and women Waited for 
 the King to speak, but that their answers were given without 
 vivacity, and W T ith that curious mixture of restraint and pur- 
 pose which she had already perhaps noticed, in her brief 
 acquaintance with the French, to be the mark of their 
 conversation in anger. She saw also that the old King 
 looked straight before him with something of sullenness 
 in his dignity, and she saw sitting next to him a woman 
 whose presence there must have perpetually intrigued her 
 imagination. That woman was the Du Barry. 
 
 To whatever adventures and novelties the children of 
 gentlefolk are exposed, there is always one note of vulgarity 
 which they can make nothing of, and which, while it offends 
 them, disturbs and astonishes them much more than it 
 offends. In the midst of that curiously silent, erect, and 
 very splendid table, where forty of her sex and of her rank 
 were present, the presence of this one woman was in its nervous 
 effect like the intolerable reiteration of a mechanical sound 
 interrupting a tragic strain of music. The Du Barry had 
 not the art, so common to the poorest members of the 
 nobility or of the middle class, when they would slip in 
 among the wealthy, of remaining silent and of affecting a 
 reverence for her new surroundings. She held herself 
 with a loose ease before them all, was perhaps the only one 
 to laugh, and permitted herself an authority that was the 
 
THE DU BARRY 67 
 
 more effective because it hardly concealed her- very great 
 hesitation in this first public recognition of her place. 
 
 What the child Marie Antoinette made of such an appari- 
 tion will never be known. Her first letters to her mother 
 upon the matter come later, when she had fully understood 
 the insult or at least the indignity which had been done her. 
 The only record we possess of her emotion is this: that 
 when just after supper some courtier was at the pains 
 to ask her with infinite respect and a peculiar irony, what 
 she had thought of Madame Du Barry, she said, " Charm- 
 ing," and nothing more. 
 
 Next day in the early morning the coaches took on again 
 the last steps of the journey to Versailles. Twelve miles 
 which were a repetition of those scenes, those crowds, and 
 i those cheers of which the little archduchess was now 
 sufficiently weary, but which were leading up to that event 
 towards which her childhood had been directed, and which 
 could not but drive out of her mind the doubts of the 
 evening before. 
 
 By ten o'clock the procession had passed the great gates 
 of Versailles ; three hours were spent in the long, distressing, 
 and rigid ceremonies of the Court in whose centre she was 
 now placed and whose magnificence now first enveloped 
 her. It was one before the procession formed for the mar- 
 riage ceremony, and had placed at the head of it the girl, 
 and the boy whom, in this long trial of two days, she had 
 but little regarded. 
 
 She came under the high vault of the new, gilded chapel 
 as full of life as the music that greeted her entry. On her 
 left the boy, to whom so much publicity was a torture, 
 went awkwardly and with the nervous sadness of his eyes 
 intensified ; his gold braid and his diamonds heightened his 
 
68 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 ill-ease. He managed to give her the ring and the coins 
 proper to the ceremony, to kneel and stand when he was 
 told; but she went royally, playing, as girl-children so 
 easily play, at womanhood, and smiling upon all around. 
 
 The contrast was gravely apparent when they passed 
 together down the aisle with the Quete, and when they sat 
 - he effaced, she triumphant during the little sermon 
 which the Grand Almoner was bound to deliver. The Heir 
 was not relieved till the Mass was over and the book was 
 brought wherein the signatures of the witnesses and prin- 
 cipals to a marriage are inscribed. 
 
 It is natural to the extreme of privilege that it should 
 affect occasional and absurd simplicities. The last genera- 
 tion of Versailles was eager for such things, and it had 
 become the custom that a royal marriage should be regis- 
 tered not in any grand and parchment manner, but in the 
 common book of a parish church, the church to whose 
 parish the palace was nominally attached. Father Allart, 
 the rector of this, in whose hard and unimportant life such 
 days were set, came in to give the book. The Grand Almoner 
 set it before them and they signed the King first, with 
 his large and practised name; the Dauphin next in a writing 
 that was thin, accurate and null. He passed the pen to this 
 little new wife of his who was to sign third. At so practical 
 a test her womanhood dropped off her, her exceedingly 
 ignorant childhood returned. She got through the " Marie" 
 with no mistake of spelling, but the letters were a trifle 
 uncertain and the word askew. Why had not someone 
 ruled a line as lines are ruled in copy-books? "Antoi- 
 nette," the second word, was larger and gave more trouble; 
 the last letters fell away deplorably, and when it came to 
 the third name, "Josepha," it was too much for her 
 
THE DTI BARRY 69 
 
 altogether. She did her best with the "J" it ended in 
 a huge blot, and she became so flurried that she spelt her 
 last name anyhow, without the "e," and let it go to pieces. 
 She was relieved to give the pen to Provence, who, though 
 he was yet so young, wrote his name strongly like a man. 
 Artois, Mesdames, the Orleans followed. Each as they 
 signed could see at the head of the page that deplorable 
 and dirty scrawl which the child, whose advent each of them 
 feared, had left as a record of her fifteenth year. 
 
 The Court left the chapel. As they passed into the 
 outer galleries of the palace before the enormous and increas- 
 ing crowd which thronged the stairways and the landing- 
 floors, the air seemed much darker than when they had 
 passed in an hour before. Through the great windows 
 the sky could be seen lowering for a storm. As she entered 
 the private apartments to receive homage the darkness 
 increased; the ceremony was not over before a first loud 
 clap of thunder startled them; the rain fell with violence 
 upon the populace that had crowded the gardens, the 
 fireworks set out for that evening were drenched, the fine 
 dresses of the Paris shop-women were spoiled; all the 
 grandeur in front of the palace was lost in umbrellas. 
 It cleared, and they crushed in, with their muddy boots 
 well scraped, to file in thousands, a long procession urged 
 on by the Guards, and passing, behind a barrier, down the 
 immense hall, where the tables were set for cards. The King 
 and his Court played solemnly like actors who must pre- 
 tend to see no audience, sitting thus as a public symbol of 
 the nation. 
 
 The crowd passed thus, company after company, staring 
 at Monarchy and at the dresses and the gems till the West 
 grew dark, and the myriads of candles reflected on a wall 
 
70 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 that was all mirrors, lent that evening its true colours. 
 When the last reluctant sight-seer had looked his last over 
 his shoulder, and had felt the tapestry drop behind him, the 
 ceremony ceased, the tables were cleared, the King rose 
 and conducted the bride to her room. A full ceremonial of 
 etiquette was wearily and thoroughly performed, the Grand 
 Almoner (once again) blessed the children's bed, and that 
 was the end of the marriage. 
 
 Outside, the crowd went back through the May night to 
 their lodgings or to Paris, full of feasting, damp, surrounded 
 by the fresh air that follows rain. They carried with them 
 a confused memory of a great outing music, grandeur, 
 diamonds, innumerable lights, no fireworks, and a storm. 
 
THE DAUPHINE 
 
 WEDNESDAY, I&TH OF MAY, 1770, TO TUESDAY, lOra OF MAY, 1774 
 
 WHEN the mock-marriage was over and the night 
 passed, and when, with the Thursday morning, 
 the long routine that was to be her life opened 
 upon her, the child could watch with less excitement and 
 with less illusion the nature of that new world. Her vivacity 
 was not diminished, but her spirit immediately adopted 
 a permanent attitude of astonished observation towards 
 emotions and conventions whose general scheme she could 
 not grasp at all. Daily the incidents which passed before 
 her while they violently moved, also repelled her senses; 
 she was reconciled to them only by their repetition. 
 
 Versailles was the more bewildering to her because, in 
 all its externals, it was the world she had known from her 
 birth. The French cooking, architecture, dress, and social 
 manner had for a century imposed themselves upon the 
 palaces of Europe; but the French mind, now first in contact 
 with her own, remained to her a marvellous and unpleasing 
 revelation, which, even after years of regarding its energy, 
 still shocked her. 
 
 There was a ball that night. She danced with her 
 bright-eyed and tall young brother-in-law; at what he 
 was sneering she could not understand, nor even if the 
 boy's expression was a sneer: she knew that it was strange. 
 She did not notice the absence of half the Court; she did not 
 
 71 
 
 
72 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 know that her mother's request for Precedence to be given 
 to the Princesses of Lorraine had raised this silent French 
 storm; had she been told she would not have comprehended. 
 The extreme and individual French jealousies, the furious 
 discussions that underlie the united formality of French 
 etiquette, were alien and inhuman to her German breeding; 
 for active and living, almost Southern, as was this Viennese 
 girl, she enjoyed to the end the good simplicity of her mother's 
 race. She danced with young Chartres. If something in 
 him chilled her, she could not divine what it was in that 
 character which even then seemed closed, and which later 
 was to make him vote her husband's death, and sit at 
 wine in his palace while she sat a prisoner and widowed in 
 her prison at hand. 
 
 For days the feasts continued and for days her unexpected 
 experiences of persons and of a strange nationality were 
 relieved by pageants and popular clamours which, at her 
 age, could distract her from weary questions. It was at 
 one of these that there sounded once more that note of 
 disaster which came at rhythmic intervals across her life 
 and continued to come until a climax closed it. She had 
 leave to go with her aunts, the King's daughters, by night 
 with a small escort to see the public holiday in Paris which 
 celebrated her marriage. She was to go without ceremony, 
 not to be recognized, merely to satisfy a child's curiosity 
 for a spectacle in her own honour. As the coach came 
 up the river roadv towards what is now the Trocadero 
 hill she could already see far off the flash of the rockets, 
 and she heard with increasing pleasure the roar of a great 
 crowd met to do her honour. As she neared the great 
 square which is called to-day the Place de la Concorde 
 she was disappointed, as children are, to see that the coach 
 
 
THE DAUPHINE 73 
 
 was late; the great scaffolding and final set-piece in which 
 her initials were interlaced with those of the Dauphin was 
 sputtering out in the inglorious end of fireworks but 
 something more intimate to her (had she known herself) 
 and worse than her childish disappointment had marked 
 the moment of her arrival. The coach was stopped 
 abruptly, the guards closed round it, and it was turned 
 back at once towards Versailles. As it rumbled through 
 the darkness more quickly than it had come, she seemed to 
 hear in the distant clamour both fierceness and terror. It 
 was a sound of panic. She heard the news whispered 
 respectfully and fearfully to her aunts during a halt upon the 
 way. Perhaps they thought her too young to be told. She 
 complained as she went that the truth was concealed from 
 her, and when they reached the palace late that night she 
 was crying. Next day the news was public, and she learned 
 that after this first rejoicing in what was to be her capital 
 city, there had been crushed and maimed and killed many 
 hundreds of her people; it proved one of those misfortunes 
 which, as much from their circumstance as from their 
 magnitude, remain fixed for years in the memory of a nation, 
 and the day on which she learned it was the last of the 
 month of her wedding. 
 
 During the summer that followed this presage she learnt 
 the whole lesson of Versailles. She was still a child. 
 Mercy still wrote of her to her mother in a tone which, 
 for all its conventional respect, was a tone now of irritation 
 against, now of amused admiration for, a child. She had 
 her daily childish lessons with the Abbe Vexmond and daily 
 exasperated him by her distractions. She still wrote 
 painfully her childish letters to Maria Theresa, took her 
 little childish donkey -rides, and was strongly impressed, 
 
74 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 as a child would be, by those of her elders who alone could 
 show some authority over her Mesdames, her husband's 
 aunts. She was growing fast; and there is nothing more 
 touching in the minute record of her life than the notes 
 of her increasing stature during this year, so oddly does 
 the nursery detail contrast with the splendour of her place 
 in Europe and the titles of her role. 
 
 She was still a child, but as her fifteenth birthday 
 approached and was passed she had learnt (while it wearied 
 her) the full etiquette of her part, and she had begun, 
 though imperfectly, to recognise what were the politics of 
 a Court and in what manner intrigue would approach her; 
 how to avoid or master it she discovered neither then nor 
 at any later time throughout her adolescence and maturity. 
 
 With the advent of winter and its long and brilliant 
 festivals, another thing which she had begun to comprehend 
 in the Palace became for tyer a fixed object of hatred; the 
 position and influence of the Du Barry. 
 
 She knew now what this official place was which the 
 Favourite held. Her disgust for such regulation and pomp 
 in such an office would in any case have been strong, for 
 Marie Antoinette came from a Court where the sovereign 
 was herself a woman and where all this side of men's lives 
 was left to the suburbs; that disgust would in any case have 
 been sharp, for she was too young and too utterly 
 inexperienced to be indulgent: it would in any case have 
 been increased by a sense of isolation, for all around this 
 German child were the French gentry taking for granted 
 that everything touching a King of France, from his vices 
 to his foibles, must be dressed up in a national and sym- 
 bolic magnificence. Her disgust would, I say, in any case 
 have risen against so much complexity allied to so much 
 
 
THE DAUPHINE 75 
 
 strength, but that disgust turned into an active and violent 
 repulsion when she saw the Du Barry not only, as it were, 
 official but also exercising power. This to her very young 
 
 id passionate instinct, whether of sex, of rank or of policy, 
 was intolerable; it was the more intolerable in that the 
 Du Barry's first exercise of power happened to go counter 
 to interests which the Dauphine regarded rather too em- 
 phatically as those of Austria and of her family. 
 
 The chief Minister of the Crown, the Due de Choiseul, 
 kindly, sceptical, well bred and rather hollow, had been, if 
 not the mere creation or discovery, at any rate the ally of 
 Madame de Pompadour. Madame de Pompadour had been 
 a statesman herself: Choiseul had perpetually supported 
 her and she him, more especially when he ran in the rut of 
 the time, showed himself conventionally anti-Christian, and 
 (having been educated by the Jesuits) was drawn into the 
 intrigue by which that order was suppressed, He had been 
 Ambassador at Vienna, though that in a year when Marie 
 Antoinette was a baby, so that she had no early memories 
 of his snub-nose and happy, round face; but she had known 
 his name all her life from the talk of the palace in Vienna, 
 and she had known it under the title which he had assumed 
 just after her birth. The Due de Choiseul was for her, as 
 for every foreigner, a name now permanently associated 
 with French policy and a Minister who was identical with 
 Versailles. Maria Theresa was grateful to him for having 
 permitted the marriage of her daughter : that daughter after 
 some months of the French Court very probably imagined 
 that he had not only permitted but helped to design the 
 alliance. It was against this man that the Du Barry 
 stumbled. 
 
 It would not be just to accuse the young woman Du Barry 
 
76 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 of design. The State was a very vague thing to her. She 
 held good fellowship with many, owed her advancement to 
 Choiseul's enemies, and was, in general, the creature of the 
 clique opposed to him, while for D'Aiguillon, who already 
 posed as the rival of the elder man, she felt perhaps a per-' 
 sonal affection. She was very vain and full of that domestic 
 ambition which comes in floods upon women of her sort 
 when they attain a position of some regularity. She loved 
 to feel herself possessed of what she had learned in the old 
 days to call (in the jargon of her lovers) "office," "power"; 
 to feel that she could "make" people. As for the pleasure 
 of an applauded judgment, or the satisfaction of that appe- 
 tite for choice which inspires women of Madame de Pompa- 
 dour's sort in history, Du Barry would not have understood 
 the existence of such an emotion. The most inept and the 
 most base received the advantage of her patronage, not 
 because she believed them capable of administration, but 
 simply because they had shown least scruple in receiving 
 her, or later, amid the general coldness of the Court, had 
 been the first to pay her an exaggerated respect. As for 
 those with whom she could recall familiarities in the past, 
 she was willing to make the fortunes of them all. 
 
 Though such an attitude could easily have been played 
 upon by the courtiers of her set, it could never have supplied 
 a motive force for her demands nor have nourished the 
 tenacity with which she pressed them; that force and 
 that tenacity were supplied to her by her own acute sensitive- 
 ness upon her new position. The angry pique to which all 
 her kind can be moved in the day of their highly imperfect 
 success was aflame at every incident which recalled to her 
 the truth of her origin and the incongruity of her situation: 
 in her convulsive desire to revenge against every slight, 
 
THE DAUPHINE 77 
 
 real or imagined, she found an ally in the old King, her 
 lover. He also knew that he was in a posture of humilia- 
 tion, and under his calm and tired bearing he suffered 
 a continual irritation from that knowledge. As he pottered 
 about his frying-pans, cooking some late dish to his liking, 
 or went alone and almost furtively down the hidden stair 
 between her little, low, luxurious rooms and his own rooms 
 of state, his silent mind was even less at ease than in the 
 days, now so long past, when an utter weariness with the 
 things of the flesh and a despair of discovering other emo- 
 tions had first put into his eyes the tragedy that still shines 
 from them upon the walls of Versailles. 
 
 All, therefore, that the Du Barry did, through Louis XV. 
 as her power increased was notjojc this or that person whom 
 she feared or loved; it was ratherjagainsj; this or that person 
 whose presence she found intolerable. All that she sug- 
 gested, so far as persons were concerned, the King was 
 ready to achieve. 
 
 Had some married woman of force and subtlety formed 
 the centre of opposition to the favourite, the reign would 
 have ended easily. Mary of Saxony, the Dauphin's mother^ 
 had been such a woman and would, had she lived, have con-\ 
 ducted affairs to a decent close. Fate put in the place of I 
 such a woman first, three old maids the King's daughters I 
 -and next this little girl, the Dauphine. 
 
 The origins were slight, but in its course the quarrel 
 gathered impetus. At first came that silent great supper- 
 party at La Muette and the instinctive repulsion which the 
 child felt and which this woman from the streets as instinct- 
 ively resented. Next, in the summer, one of the Dauphine's 
 women had a sharp quarrel with the favourite in the stalls 
 of the Court theatre. The favourite had her exiled from 
 
78 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 Court, and the Dauphine, crying secretly with anger in 
 her rooms, could obtain no redress. During the summer 
 absences of the Court in the country palaces a perpetual 
 travel and larger room to move prevented an open battle; 
 in the following winter that very grave event, the exile of 
 Choiseul, sealed the difference. 
 
 It was the error of Choiseul not that he had opposed 
 the favourite's entry on the contrary, he had thought it 
 a useful whim that would amuse and occupy his sovereign 
 but that he could not take her seriously. His "world," 
 his relatives, his intimates, those whom he had placed and 
 salaried during twelve years of power, were outspoken in 
 their contempt for the Du Barry. Her own simple spite 
 lumped all together and made the Minister the cause of her 
 difficulties and their victim. For months she had half 
 amused, half frightened Louis by an increasing insolence 
 to De Choiseul at cards and at table. He had met this 
 insolence at first with the ironic courtesy that he must have 
 shown in his life to a hundred such women ; later by a care- 
 ful and veiled defence; last of all by a resigned and some- 
 what dignified expectation of what he saw would be the end. 
 
 When a society approaches some convulsion the pace 
 of change increases enormously with every step towards the 
 catastrophe. " This at least no one dreams of. That 
 at least cannot happen!" But this and that do happen, 
 and at last all feel themselves to be impotent spectators of 
 a process so forcible and swift that no wisdom can arrest it. 
 Political literature in such moments turns to mere criticism 
 and speculation; it no longer pleads, still less directs. So 
 it is to-day with more than one society of Western Europe; 
 so it was with the close of Louis XV. 's reign. 
 
 In May, 1770, when the Austrian Alliance was con- 
 
THE DAUPHINE 79 
 
 summated by the arrival of Marie Antoinette, and by the 
 wedding at Versailles, the revocation of the one conspicuous 
 statesman in France would have seemed impossible. He 
 had no more capacity than have the most of politicians, but 
 he did at least reach that rough standard demanded in 
 that trade, and his name was rooted in the mind of his 
 own public and of Europe. If the dismissal of Choiseul 
 had been proposed in the summer, there still remained 
 enough active force opposed to this new Du Barry woman 
 to have prevented the folly; but at the rate things were 
 going every month weakened that force; by the end of the 
 year it was too late to act in his defence. 
 
 On Christmas Eve fat Hilliers came lurching out of 
 the Favourite's room and brought Choiseul a note in 
 Louis' hand. It was a short note exiling him to his 
 place at Chauteloup and relieving him of office. 
 
 There was no one to replace the Minister: the action 
 was that of a common woman who exercised a private 
 vengeance and who could conceive no reasons of State. Yet 
 no one was astonished save perhaps the child to whom 
 so vast a change was the climax of all that had bewildered 
 her since she had first spoken to the French Court. 
 
 Maria Theresa and Mercy, her ambassador to Versailles, 
 had that knowledge of the world which permitted each to 
 find footing, even in such a welter. Each from a long ex- 
 perience knew well that the depth of political life moves 
 slowly for all the violent changes of machinery or of names. 
 Each felt the Alliance the object of all their solitude to 
 be still standing in spite of Choiseul's fall ; and each divined 
 that their little Princess, who was the pledge of that alli- 
 ance at the French Court, and whom they destined, when 
 she was Queen, to be its perpetuator, might at this moment 
 
80 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 weaken and ruin it : her probable indiscretion and her sim- 
 plicity were the points of danger. Her plain spoken anger 
 might ruin their plans for a recovery of Austrian influence. 
 Each, therefore, concentrated upon a special effort Mercy, 
 by repeated visits from the Austrian Embassy in Paris to 
 the court at Versailles and by repeated admonitions; Maria 
 Theresa (in whom the fear for her daughter's future and 
 position was even greater than her solicitude for the 
 Austrian policy) by repeated letters, too insistent perhaps 
 and too personal wholly to effect their object. 
 I Marie Antoinette was persuaded to a certain restraint, 
 I but she was neither convinced nor instructed. She saw 
 the whole situation as a girl would see it, in black and white : 
 Madame du Barry Was of the gutter, and had yet been 
 able to destroy a name which she had always heard associated 
 with the fortunes of her own family and the dignity of the 
 French Crown. The complexity of the situation, the short 
 years it was likely to last, the necessity during those years of 
 weighing the intricate and changing attachments of the grea?t 
 families in their interlacing groups all this escaped her. 
 
 So little did she see the intricate pattern of politics that, 
 when Louis XV., less than two months later, ^gxiled the 
 higher courts of law and all but roused a rebellion, she did 
 not connect with the reign of her qnemy this act of violence 
 which isolated and imperilled the Crown^Jshe thought it 
 royal, immediate, and just, still seeing mere kingship as 
 children see it in a fairy tale, beneficent and paternal. 
 
 The six months of administrative anarchy that followed 
 meant nothing to her. When, in July, D'Aiguillon inept, 
 a mere servitor of the Favourite's was at last appointed 
 to the vacant post of Prime Minister, this act in its way 
 more astounding than the dismissal of Choiseul was 
 
 ' 
 
THE DAUPHINE 81 
 
 only remarkable to her because it was the Du Barry's 
 doing. And during the whole of her sixteenth year she re- 
 presented at Court a fixed indignation which, in her alone, 
 steadily increased as the powers of the Favourite became 
 absolute; for as Marie Antoinette approached woman- 
 hood she developed a quality of resistance which was the 
 one element of strength of her early character, but from 
 which was fatally absent any power to design. That obsti- 
 nate power of resistance was to raise around her multiplying 
 and enduring enmities ; it was to mature her in her first 
 severe trials, but it was also to bring her to the tragedy 
 which has lent her name enduring and exaggerated nobility. 
 
 This opposition which the Dauphine offered to Madame 
 du Barry, an opposition which did but rise as that woman 
 (during 1771) opened, one after the other, all the avenues 
 of power to her lowest or least capable courtiers, took on 
 no form of violence. 
 
 Marie Antoinette, as the pale auburn of her hair and her 
 thick eyebrows darkened, as her frame strengthened and 
 her voice took on a fuller tone, added to the vivacity of her 
 childhood a new note of passionate emphasis which was 
 ill-suited to her part, and which in any circumstances but 
 those of luxury would have approached vulgarity. In 
 many mino^r matters she forebore to put the least restraint 
 upon a momentary annoyance; she would have some 
 design she disapproved destroyed; a bookcase, though it 
 was Gabriel's, she had broken before her eyes, to appease 
 her discontent. But in the major matter of this quarrel 
 she put on a sort of solemnity, and her resistance took the 
 simple but unconquerable form of silence. She would not 
 recognise the Favourite, though she were to meet her five 
 Ijpes a day, and she would not address one word to her. 
 
MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 That silence, which kept open at Court a sharp wound 
 and which stood a permanent and a most powerful menace 
 to all that had power at Versailles, became for Mesdames, 
 the King's daughters (who had first given this example), and 
 for all the defeated parties a welcome symbol though for the 
 Princess herself it was a most perilous one. To break that 
 silence was the effort of every converging force about her. 
 I Her mother in repeated warnings ; Mercy, the King, and most 
 lof all the Favourite herself, came to think it a first point of 
 policy that what might have been pardoned in the child 
 should not remain a cause of acute offence in the woman. 
 She was now nearly eighteen months at Versailles ; she had 
 entered her seventeenth year. But whenever the Du Barry 
 crossed her in the receptions or met her eyes at table, what- 
 ever beginnings of a salute may have escaped the loose 
 manner of the Favourite, she suffered the mortification 
 of a complete refusal. The feminine comedy was admirably 
 played, and for the Dauphine the King's mistress remained 
 a picture or an empty chair sometimes to be blankly 
 gazed at never to be recognised or addressed. 
 
 There was indeed a moment in August when the 
 Dauphine's resolution wavered. Mercy had visited the Du 
 Barry; he had spoken to her intimately and with gallantry. 
 He ha'd probably promised her the graces of the Dauphine ; 
 he returned to Marie Antoinette to press his advice. So 
 pressed she promised her mother's ambassador that she 
 would speak, but when the moment came and the meeting 
 had been carefully arranged, after cards at evening, she 
 remembered too much: she remembered perhaps most 
 keenly a recent thing, the choice of ^~ this woman's 
 
 friends, in spite of her protests, for ladies in 
 
 waiting. She strolled to the table where and the 
 
THE DAUPHINE 83 
 
 Favourite were talking together. As she came up Madame 
 du Barry put on an air of expectation which invited her 
 approach. The girl hesitated and turned back. A scene 
 not consonant to that society was avoided only by Madame 
 Adelaide, who had the presence of mind to summon her 
 niece at the critical moment of the insult ; but the fiasco led 
 to further and more peremptory orders from her mother, to 
 a long and troubled interview between Mercy and the King, 
 and at last to the conclusion at which they all desired. The 
 Dauphine recognised the Du Barry; but the recognition 
 came in a manner so characteristic of Marie Antoinette that 
 it would have been better for her and for them if they had 
 not won their battle. 
 
 Upon the New Year's Day of 1772 at Versailles, on which 
 day it was agreed (and this time most solemnly vowed) that 
 a greeting should be given, and during the formal reception 
 held at Court that day, there came a moment when in an 
 uneasy silence, the moving crowd of the Court saw the 
 Dauphine approach the Favourite, pass before her, and 
 say as she parsed not so directly nor so loudly as might 
 be wished, but still so that the Du Barry might have taken 
 the words as addressed to herself: "There are very many 
 people at Versailles to-day." Before a reply could be 
 given her she had passed on. Next day she said to Mercy: 
 "I shall not let that woman hear the sound of my voice 
 again." 
 
 The moment of time during which this quarrel reached 
 its height was one of extreme anxiety to Maria Theresa, 
 and indeed to all. It was that during which the first 
 public renunciation of the international morality which 
 had hitherto ruled in Christendom was in negotiation at 
 the instance of Prussia. It was secretly proposed that 
 
84 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 an European government should be disregarded without 
 treaty and subjected to mere force without the sanction 
 of our general civilisation. Frederick had suggested to 
 Russia long before with deference, recently to Catholic 
 Austria with a sneer, the partition of Poland. 
 
 It is characteristic of the more deplorable forms of 
 insurgence against civilised morals that they originate 
 either in a race permanently alien to (though present in) 
 the unity of the Roman Empire, or in those barbaric prov- 
 inces which Were admitted to the European scheme after 
 the fall of Rome, and which for the most part enjoyed but 
 a brief and precarious vision of the Faith between their 
 tardy conversion and the schism of the sixteenth century. 
 Prussia was of this latter kind, and with Prussia, Frederick. 
 To-day his successors and their advisers, when they attempt 
 to justify the man, are compelled still to ignore the European 
 tradition of honour. But this crime of his, the partition of 
 Poland, the germ of all that international distrust which 
 has ended in the intolerable armed strain of our time, has 
 another character attached to it : a character which attaches 
 invariably to ill-doing when that ill-doing is also uncivilised. 
 It was a folly. The same folly attached to it as has attached 
 to every revolt against the historic conscience of Europe: 
 such blindnesses can only destroy; they possess no per- 
 manent creative spirit, and the partition of Poland has 
 remained a peculiar and increasing curse to its promoters 
 in Prussia; to their mere accomplices in St. Petersburg it 
 has caused and is causing less weakness and peril; while 
 it has left but a slight inheritance of suffering to the 
 Hapsburgs, whose chief was at the moment of the crimes 
 but a most reluctant party to it. 
 
 There is not in Christian history, though it abounds in 
 
THE DAUPHINE 85 
 
 coincidence or design, a more striking example of sin suitably 
 rewarded than the menace which is presented to the 
 Hohenzollerns to-day by the Polish race. Not even their 
 hereditary disease, which has reached its climax in the 
 present generation, has proved so sure a chastisement to 
 the lineage of Frederick as have proved the descendants of 
 those whose country he destroyed. An economic accident 
 has scattered them throughout the dominions of the Prussian 
 dynasty; they are a source everywhere of increasing danger 
 and ill-will. They grow largely in representative power. 
 They compel the government to abominable barbarities 
 which are already arousing the mind of Europe. They 
 will in the near future prove the ruin of that family to which 
 was originally due the partition of Poland. 
 
 Enormous as was the event, however, both in its quality 
 of evil and in its consequences to mankind, it must not detain 
 /the reader of these pages. Its interest here lies only "W Yi 
 
 first and principal example which it affords of . , 
 
 Tiaicls 
 Antoinette's direct and therefore unpolitical temper. . 
 
 was indeed only upon the verge of womanhood she hau 
 but completed her sixteenth year, but her failure to under- 
 stand the critical, and, above all, the complex necessities of 
 the Hapsburgs at that moment was characteristic of all the 
 further miscalculations that were to mark her continual 
 interference with diplomacy for twenty years. It was 
 imperative that ^ustrja^should find/ support in the grave 
 issue to which Maria Theresa had been compelled against 
 her conscience and her reason. Berlin and St. Petersburg 
 suddenly having agreed to a material aggrandisement, help 
 was imperative, and help could only come from her ally at 
 Versailles* Upon this one occasion, if upon no other, the 
 young daughter of the Empress was justified in working for 
 
86 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 her family, and that could only be done through the woman 
 whose influence was now the one avenue of approach to 
 Louis XV. A recognition of the Du Barry was essential to 
 Vienna in that new year of 1772. The Dauphine made it, 
 but she made it in such a way that it was a worse insult 
 even than had been her former silence. Had war broken 
 out that spring, at the melting of the snow, it is possible or 
 probable that Versailles would not have supported Vienna 
 against Prussia and Russia in arms. 
 
 There was almost a quarrel between the growing girl and 
 the Empress, her mother. To that mother she still remained 
 the child who had left Vienna two years before; but then, 
 in Versailles and to those who saw her, this year made her 
 a woman. 
 
 That she had passed the boundary of adolescence was 
 Apparent in many ways. She was more and more enfran- 
 tradif.d from the influence of elder women notably of her 
 aunts, her intimacy with whom faded through- 
 1772 and disappeared in 1773. Her step had acquired 
 that firm and rather conscious poise which was to distinguish 
 her throughout her life. The growth of her stature was 
 now accomplished, and she was tall, and though her shoul- 
 ders had not the grace and amplitude which they later 
 assumed, her figure had, in general, achieved maturity. Her 
 hair, now a trifle darker and browner in its red, her eye- 
 brows, always pronounced but now thicker and more 
 prominent, announced the same change. Her motives also, 
 though insufficient in judgment, were deeper in origin. Her 
 resistance to her mother's and to Mercy's most pressing 
 insistence in the matter of the Favourite was a resistance 
 no longer even partially suggested to her by others ; it was due 
 now to a full comprehension of the old King's degradation, 
 
THE DAUPHINE 87 
 
 and to a formed abhorrence of the Du Barry. Moreover, 
 when she yielded for a moment as she did perhaps 
 three times in the course of two years --it was with some 
 measure of thought: she consented to approach the King's 
 mistress at moments when the ambassador or her mother 
 had convinced her by speech or letter of an acute necessity ; 
 but already, in her excuses when she refused, she began to 
 use the argument of a woman, not of a child she pleaded 
 "the authority of her husband": it was a phrase in which 
 she, least of all, put faith. 
 
 With this advent of womanhood there came, of necessity 
 to a character so ardent, fixed enmities. She was no longer I 
 despised as a child; she was hated as an adult. Mesdames,! 
 the King's daughters, whose influence over her had dis- 
 appeared, joined, in their disappointment, the over-large 
 group of her detractors. The fatal name of "Autrichienne," 
 the foreign label that clung to her at the scaffold, 
 originated in the drawing-rooms of the three old maids, 
 and all around her, as her power to order or to fascinate 
 increased, there increased also new hatreds which attained 
 to permanence, because her German memories, her eager 
 action, her crude and single aspect of the multitudinous 
 and subtle French character, her rapid turning from this 
 pleasure to that, her ignorance of books and of things, lent 
 her no power to wear those courtiers down or to play a 
 skilful game against them. 
 
 Forgetfulness was easy to her. To help her to forget 
 she had the intoxication of that moment which comes once 
 in life and in the powerful blossoming of our humanity. Her 
 eighteenth year, the last year before she ascended the 
 throne, was the great moment of her youth. 
 
 She had not been beautiful as a child, she was not destined 
 
 
88 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 to real beauty in her womanhood ; but at this moment, with 
 the spring of 1773 and on to that of 1774, there radiated 
 from her the irresistible appeal of youth. 
 
 Paris, which had learnt to despise and half to hate the 
 Crown, which had felt itself widowed and abandoned by 
 the emigration of the Bourbons to Versailles, caught her 
 charm for a day. When she made with the Dauphin her 
 first official entry into the city, great crowds acclaimed her 
 perpetually; she had that emotion, so dear to Women that 
 it will drive them on to the stage itself, of a public applause 
 directed toward their persons : the general applause of Paris 
 was almost an applause of lovers. For just these passing 
 hours on a sweet day in early June she saw and loved the 
 city wherein her doom was written upon every stone, and 
 for these hours the Tuilleries which she inhabited were faery 
 and so full of delight that she could not tell whether the air 
 Was magical or owed its fragrance only to the early flowers. 
 
 In such a mood, daily drinking in happiness and a certain 
 sense of power, admired almost openly by distant men and 
 -very likely --by Artois, her young brother-in-law, who 
 had known her all these years, she passed the high tide of 
 the summer and autumn, and found in the ensuing winter 
 for the first time that lively and absorbing interest in social 
 pleasure which very largely determined her life. 
 
 Of the balls in which she danced, of the masked balls that 
 were her special delight, one stands out in history and 
 stood out in her own memories, even to her last hour, a night 
 unlike all others. 
 
 The reader has divined that the marriage of May 1770 
 had been no marriage. It was contracted between children ; 
 
THE DAUPHINE 89 
 
 and years must pass years which were those of the 
 school-room for both of them before Maria Theresa could 
 expect an heir with Hapsburg blood for the French throne. 
 But the years passed; the child was now a woman, and 
 still the marriage remained a form. 
 
 From an accident to which I will return in its propern 
 place, the Dauphin and herself were not wife and husband j 1 
 and to this grave historical fact must largely be attributed ' 
 the fliga.sfr.prsjjifli^wprp> fro follow For the moment, how- 
 ever, this misfortune did little but accentuate her isolation 
 and perhaps her pride. In her childish advent to the 
 Court it could mean nothing to her. Lately she had 
 understood a little more clearly; but she was pure; her 
 training was in admirable conformity to her faith. She was 
 not yet troubled until the opening of that last year, '74, 
 with its gaiety and pride. This season of vigour, radiance 
 and youth lacked the emotion which has been so wisely and 
 so justly fitted by God to that one moment through which 
 we make our entry into a full life. She was married to the 
 heir of France: her virtue and her pride forbade her to be 
 loved. Yet she was also not married to that heir, and her 
 life now lacked, and continued to lack, not only love but 
 the ardent regard that was her due. 
 
 No Frenchman could have turned her gaze. Between 
 her temperament and that of her husband's nation the 
 gulf was far too deep. But one night, late, as she moved, 
 masked in her domino, through the crowd of a Paris ball- 
 room, she saw among so many faces whose surface only 
 was revealed to her another face of another kind, a boy's. 
 It arrested her. The simple and sincere expression which 
 Versailles had never shown her, the quiet manliness which, 
 in Northerners, is so often allied to courage and which stands 
 
90 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 in such contrast to the active virility of Gaul all that 
 which, in the secret places of her German heart, unknown 
 to herself, she thought proper to a man, all that whose lack 
 (though she could not analyze it) had disturbed and wounded 
 her in the French palace, Was apparent in the face before 
 her. She asked his name and heard that it was Fersen. 
 He was a Swede, the son of a considerable political noble, 
 sent here on his travels with a tutor. She went up and 
 spoke to him. 
 
 She could look into his eyes and see their chivalry. His 
 low, handsome forehead, his dark brows, his refined, firm 
 lips, his large and gentle eyes, completed in detail the pro- 
 found impression with which that first glance had struck 
 her. Once she had begun to speak to him, so masked, she 
 continued to speak continually. A boy of eighteen is far 
 younger than a girl of his age they were born within six 
 weeks of each other, and he was a child compared with 
 her; he desired her, she consenting, and he became hers 
 in that moment. When they had separated and he reached 
 his rooms at morning there was ready in his heart what 
 later he wrote down, that the Dauphine was delightful, and 
 that she was the most charming princess he ever had 
 known. She upon her side had followed him with her eyes 
 to the door of the great assembly. She Was not to see him 
 again for four years, but during all those years she remem- 
 bered him. 
 
 This was the way in which Marie Antoinette entered 
 life, and almost simultaneously with that entry came her 
 ascent of the throne: the old King was changing. t 
 
 He suffered. His digestion failed; from time to time 
 
THE DAUPHINE 91 
 
 he would abandon his hunting. It was in the January of 
 1774 that the Dauphine had met Axel de Fersen. Before 
 the spring of that year Louis XV. 's increasing infirmities 
 were to reach their end. 
 
 Gusts of strong faith swept over him in these failing years, 
 as strong winds filled with a memory of autumn, will sweep 
 the dead reeds of December. His fear of death, and that 
 hunger for the Sacraments which accompanies the fear, 
 came to him in dreadful moments. For thirty-eight years 
 he had neither communicated nor confessed. All his life 
 he had avoided the terrace of St. Germain's, because a 
 little lump far off against the eastern sky was St. Denis, 
 the mausoleum of the kings, and he had not dared to look 
 on it. But, with no such memorial before him, death now 
 appeared and reappeared. 
 
 Once in his little private room it was late at night 
 and November he played at cards with the Du Barry. 
 They were alone, save for an old crony of his pleasures, 
 Chauvelin, which well-bred and aged fellow stood behind 
 the woman's chair, leaning upon it and watching the 
 woman's cards in silence, his rapacious features strongly 
 marked in the mellow light of the candles. Something 
 impelled the woman to glance up at him over her shoulder. 
 "Oh, Lord! M. de Chauvelin, what a face!" It was the 
 face of a dead man. She leapt and started from it, and 
 the body fell to the floor. 
 
 The King, his age and apathy all shaken from him, 
 
 shouted down the empty corridors: "A priest! a priest!" 
 
 They came, and in the presence of the King absolved what 
 
 lay immovable upon the shining floor, in a hope or wish 
 
 4:hat some life lingered there. But Chauvelin was quite 
 
 
92 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 Now, in his last Easter, the dread came back for ever and 
 inhabited the King. Upon the Maundy Thursday of '74 
 (it was the last day of March) the Court were all at Mass, 
 and the sermon was ending. The priest, strong in that 
 tradition of Bossuet which had not perished, turned to the 
 royal chair and related for his peroration the legend of an 
 ancient curse: "Forty days, and Nineveh shall be no more." 
 All the Court heard it and forgot it before the chanting of 
 the creed was done but the King was troubled. He 
 reckoned in his mind; he counted dates and was troubled. 
 
 The liturgical times went by; he abandoned his mistress; 
 he lived apart and gloomy: but his Easter duties were not 
 accomplished, nor did he communicate or confess, nor was 
 he absolved. Then the cloud lifted and he began to forget, 
 and the tie which held him to the Du Barry and which 
 had in it now something of maturity and routine, was very 
 strong upon him. He yielded and returned to her where 
 she waited for him down the park at the little Trianon. 
 His domesticity returned but not for long. 
 
 It was upon Tuesday the twenty-sixth of April that he 
 came in from hunting changed. He would not eat. He 
 wondered a little and was cherished by his companion, but 
 his fever grew. Next day he woke to suffering. He 
 attempted to hunt, but his knees were weakened and he 
 could not ride his horse; and coming back to Trianon, he 
 groaned with his head in torment. His dread increased; but 
 his doctors, who had been long familiar with his moody 
 interludes, thought little of the thing. They carried him 
 back through the trees to the palace, to his own room in 
 the Northern wing, and that day and the next, as the fever 
 grew, rumours went louder and louder in the palace. On 
 the Friday, at eventide, as a candle chanced near the face 
 
THE DATJPHINE 93 
 
 of the sick man, the doctor looked closer; and in the next 
 hour, before midnight, the Princess Clothilde, talking in 
 Madame de Marin's room in whispers to the Duke of Crois, 
 opened a note from the Dauphine. She cried aloud: 
 "They say it is the small-pox!" 
 
 They dared not tell him. He had the assurance to 
 demand the truth, and when he heard it he said: "At 
 my age a man does not recover." He maintained from 
 that moment, through the increasing torment and dis- 
 figurement of his disease, a complete mastery over himself 
 and even to some extent the power of ordering the Court. 
 He saw to it that his grandson, the Dauphin, should not come 
 near his room, for of all the royal families in Europe the 
 French Bourbons alone had not been vaccinated. He 
 accepted the services of his daughters. 
 
 One thing alone he hesitated on, and that was to relin- 
 quish the society of his Favourite. 
 
 He was too proud and too silent a man for his contempo- 
 raries or for ourselves to knowtEeTull cause of his hesitation. 
 Passion at that moment it could not have been. The 
 possibility of his survival he had himself denied, and his 
 every phrase and act showed how clearly he felt the approach 
 of death. He himself had drawn the secret of his malady 
 from the reluctant Cardinal whose duty it was, as Grand 
 Almoner, first to inform him of his danger, but whose worldly 
 fear of consequence had kept him from speaking though 
 he was urged to his duty by every prelate at Court. The 
 King was in no doubt as to the nature of the soul, nor as to 
 the scandal which, under the special conditions of his 
 throne, his one great frailty had given. He knew the 
 Church; he could not, as might a philosopher, take refuge 
 in the memory of good deeds to outweigh the evil, or (as 
 
94 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 might a monarch of a different civilisation) in the deep 
 hypocrisies which there shield birth and wealth from self- 
 knowledge. His Christian faith was strong and clean. 
 Yet he hesitated. If he still clung to the Du Barry, it 
 Was perhaps, because nothing was left him in the visible 
 world but the gaiety and the assiduous care which had 
 endeared this woman to him. 
 
 She kept near him throughout the first hours of his malady, 
 and every evening, when the princesses had left their father's 
 room, she would come in by a private further door and 
 sit beside the little camp bed on which he lay. She over- 
 came all repugnance; she soothed his pustuled forehead 
 with her hand. He felt, perhaps, as though to abandon her 
 was a first breaking with life. 
 
 The aged Archbishop of Paris, himself suffering griev- 
 ously from the stone, bore, not without groaning, the jolting 
 journey to Versailles; he came to undertake himself what 
 the Grand Almoner dared not do to demand the dismissal 
 of the Favourite. He was not allowed into the King's 
 room. The group of courtiers continually present in the 
 outer chamber, the (Eil de Bceuf, could watch with much 
 amusement the gestures of command and of refusal that 
 passed between the Archbishop and the Duke of Richelieu 
 in the antechamber beyond. At last he was admitted, but 
 it was arranged that others should be present, and nothing 
 passed between him and the King save a word of con- 
 dolence from each for the other's suffering. 
 
 It was by no stimulation from without but by his own act 
 that the King took the last step in his penance. Upon 
 Tuesday the third of May, towards midnight, Madarn,e 
 du Barry being with him, as was her custom, to tend him 
 through the night, he said to her, in those brief sentences 
 
THE DAUPHINE 95 
 
 of his which had for years forbidden discussion or reply, 
 that he must prepare for his end and that she must leave 
 him; he told her that a refuge was prepared, and that she 
 should want for nothing. She stumbled half fainting from 
 the room to the Minister whose career she had made, the 
 Duke of Aiguillon, believing with justice that he was not 
 ungrateful, and in his rooms she cried and lamented through 
 what remained of darkness. 
 
 With the morning the King gave D'Aiguillon his orders, 
 and that afternoon the Duke, worthily loyal although his 
 career was ended, sent his own wife to take her in a hired 
 carriage, without circumstance and therefore without dis- 
 grace, to their country house some miles away. It was the 
 thirty-fourth of the forty days. 
 
 That evening the King asked Laborde, his valet, for 
 Madame du Barry. The servant answered that she was 
 gone. "Already?" he sighed, and her name was not 
 heard again. 
 
 Thursday and Friday passed : the first with a rally which 
 the more foolish hoped would save the life of the King; 
 the second with the disappointment of all that corrupt and 
 intriguing clique which depended upon his recovery. 
 
 Meanwhile the Dauphine kept her rooms. She knew 
 what desperate court would be pressed upon her husband 
 and herself were the doors to be opened; nor did the 
 Dauphin give a single order of the hundred that were 
 already^solicited of him, save that all should be ready for 
 the whole Court to leave for Choisy. Early upon the morn- 
 ing of Saturday this seclusion was broken : long before the 
 common hour of the palace, at half-past five, a roll of drums 
 awakened its people, and the princess came down with all 
 her ladies to see the Sacrament carried through Versailles. 
 
96 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 Between a double row of the guard, under the great 
 canopy that was reserved for such solemnities, the priests 
 carried the Viaticum, and about It in a long procession 
 as It passed, were the torches and the candles. She stood 
 with her sister-in-law at the head of the crowd in the great 
 hall outside the bedroom door; she endured the stench 
 of corruption that filled the air, though every window was 
 open to the morning; she caught, by her tall stature and 
 straight carriage, the scene that was acting within. 
 
 Between the purple robes and the surplices, in the ring 
 of Waxen lights, she saw the old man, whom alone she had 
 respected and indeed loved in her new home, attempt 
 to raise himself, calling: "My great God has come to me. 
 My great God!" She saw him with what 
 strength he had plucking the cotton cap from his head and 
 failing in his effort to kneel. His face was no longer the 
 face she had known, but crusted dark and hideous, swollen, 
 horrible. She heard the Grand Almoner repeat the King's 
 strong phrase of repentance, passionately solemn, and she 
 knew the voice so well that perhaps she also heard the 
 mumble in which he urged its repetition. Then the doors 
 closed; the Court dispersed. She regained her apartments 
 and the isolation and the strain returned. They told her 
 of his increasing delirium, of the crowds that came from 
 Paris daily, of the certain approach of death. So 
 Sunday and Monday went by the thirty-eighth, the 
 thirty-ninth day. 
 
 The dawn of Tuesday broke upon a clear sky. It was 
 the fortieth day. 
 
 The spring on that fine morning turned to summer, and 
 before noon the park was full of a crowd which moved as 
 though on holiday. The Parisians had come increasingly 
 
LOUIS XVI. 
 
 The principal bust at Versailles 
 
THE DAUPHINE 97 
 
 since Sunday into Versailles. The inns were full and at 
 all the tables outside the eating-houses of the town the people 
 eat their midday meal with merriment in the open air. 
 Between the Park and the town, huge and isolated, already 
 old, the palace alone was silent. There, each group shut 
 close in its own rooms, awaited the one dismissal, another 
 the fruit of long intrigue, another, in a mixture of eagerness 
 and dread, the new weight of royalty. It was the tenth 
 of May, and still the agony endured. A candle burnt in a 
 window above the courtyard. Passing groups looked up 
 at it furtively; grooms, with bridles ready in their hands, 
 glanced at it from beneath the distant doors of the guard- 
 room and saw it twice renewed, as one o'clock and two 
 struck through the afternoon from the chimes of St. Louis. 
 Three struck. They looked again and it was still shining. 
 Within, his head supported by Laborde the valet, his 
 mind still clear, the old King still attempted with his dis- 
 torted lips the answers to the prayers for the dying. He 
 heard them faintly and more faintly in that increasing 
 darkness which each of us must face. When the priest at 
 last came to those loud words, "Go forth, thou Christian 
 soul," his murmuring ceased. The candle at the window 
 was extinguished. The clatter of horse-hoofs rose from 
 the marble court and the jangling of stirrups against mount- 
 ing spurs. The Duke of Bouillon came to the door of the 
 room, stood before the silent crowd in the (Eil de Bceuf, 
 and said with ritual solemnity: "Gentlemen, the King is 
 idead!" 
 
 " At that same hour on that same day, a British man-of- 
 War sailed into Boston harbour. She bore orders to impose 
 Uie tax on tea which ultimately raised America. 
 
VI 
 THE THREE YEARS 
 
 TUESDAY, THE lOrn OF MAY, 1774, TO EASTER SUNDAY, APRIL 19, 1778 
 
 FROM the death of Louis XV. to the close of the 
 summer of 1777 is a period of somewhat over three 
 years. In those three years the fates of the French 
 monarchy and of the Queen Were decided. For though no 
 great catastrophe marked them nor even any considerable 
 fruit of policy, and though an onlooker would have said no 
 more than that something a little disappointing had, in the 
 process of these years, chilled the first enthusiasm for the 
 new reign, yet we can to-day discover within their limits 
 most of those origins from which the ruin of the future was 
 to come. 
 
 For the Queen especially, whom hitherto her minority, 
 her seclusion and the deliberate silence of her childhood 
 had guarded, the opportunities for action which her hus- 
 band's accession suddenly offered were opportunities of 
 fate, and the three years with which this chapter has to deal 
 were for her young and exalted innocence of eighteen like 
 that short week of spring when seeds are sown in a garden : 
 they were a brief season of warmth, of vigour, and of clarity 
 during which circumstance sowed for her in every variety 
 the seeds of misfortune and of death. All is there: the 
 advent of an uneasy gaiety; the solace of gems, of cards, 
 of excessive friendships; the vivid but wholly personal, 
 erratic and capricious intervention in matters of State; the 
 
 98 
 
THE THREE YEARS 99 
 
 simple confidence in the policy of her mother's Austrian 
 government and the continual support of it; the enmities 
 which all active natures provoke, but which hers had a talent 
 for confirming; the friction of such an activity against the 
 hard and, to her, the alien qualities of the French mind 
 all these, which the princess could try to ignore when her 
 husband was but heir and she in her retirement, appear with 
 the first months of her liberty as Queen, strike root, and are 
 seen above ground before she has completed her twenty- 
 second year. And with these positive irritants their negative 
 reactions also come: the Court assumes its divisions; the 
 stories and the songs and the nicknames begin against her; 
 the popular legend concerning her is conceived; the trend of 
 the Orleans faction in antagonism to her is established, and 
 a new generation contemporary with, or but slightly senior 
 to, her own has become fixed within the same three years in 
 a direction which though none then saw it could not 
 but destroy her in the progress of years. 
 
 To understand in what way the common accidents 
 that brief three years' term moved to their great effec 
 is necessary to know two things : first, the physical infrrn- 
 '*JL nndfT whi^h T.rwis^XV/ suffered, and, secondly, the 
 nature of the Bourbon Crown he wore : for it is the conjunc- 
 tion of such an infirmity with such an office that lends to the 
 first years of his reign and to the first errors of his wife 
 their capital importance in the history of that one woman ' 
 and of the world. 
 
 Louis, it had first been whispered, and Was now upon 
 his accession commonly asserted, could have no heir. 
 
 When first the mere form of marriage between him in 
 
100 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 his boyhood and Marie Antoinette (a child) had been 
 solemnised, no public and no familiar regard was paid to 
 the relations between them. The great ceremony was 
 necessarily esteemed a solemn and irrevocable betrothal 
 rather than a wedlock, and (as I have already said) it was 
 taken for granted that in some two or three years the process 
 of nature would continue the royal line. 
 
 But as the princess advanced to her sixteenth, to her 
 seventeenth year; as her upstanding and vigorous youth 
 achieved first a full growth, then ripeness, then maturity, 
 and yet provoked no issue, the common explanation of 
 such an accident could not but be generally given and the 
 impotence of the Dauphin was universally accepted. At 
 eighteen, in the last autumn of the old King's reign, the 
 young wife had stood apparent and triumphant, clothed 
 with a charm which, if it was not that of beauty, was 
 certainly that of exuberant life; a whole ball-room had 
 been arrested at her entrance; the crowds of Paris had 
 quickened at her approach; the lively look, the deep brows, 
 
 i the full hair, tender and vaguely red, which Fersen had 
 
 suddenly revealed, were those of a woman informed 
 
 \vith an accumulated and expectant vitality. It was 
 
 not in her that the defect could lie. Louis, so it plainly 
 
 seemed, was deficient and was in title only her husband. 
 
 A conjunction of this kind is not uncommon even in an 
 active, healthy, and laborious lineage of the middle rank; 
 among the wealthy it is frequent, in the genealogy of 
 families which carry a public function, such as those of 
 monarchs or of an oligarchy, for all the careful choice 
 which their marriages involve, it is often present. Such 
 accidents are provided for. In mary cases probably, in 
 some certainly, a suppositions child is introduced; when. 
 
THE THREE YEARS 101 
 
 that course is difficult or repugnant the situation ix acknowl- 
 edged, the consort chooses between her devotions and a 
 lover; all the planning and all the necessary preparation 
 which attach to the succession regard the brother or cousin, 
 who is henceforward accepted as the heir, and his position 
 is the more highly established from the contrast his vigour 
 may afford to the paucity of the reigning incumbent. 
 
 I say such a conjunction is of a known type in history; 
 there were precedents for action and a certain course to be 
 pursued. Monsieur, the King's brother, would have 
 attracted the service and respect to which his then vigorous 
 intellect was fitted. The Queen's vagaries would have 
 been contemptuously excused, for she would have stood 
 apart from the line of succession, and her character would 
 have been indifferent to her husband's subjects. The 
 Crown as an institution would have suffered little, though 
 its immediate holder would have lost personal prestige, had 
 the conjecture of Louis' impotence, which was, upon the 
 King's accession, common to the Court and the populace, 
 been confirmed. 
 
 Now that conjecture was, as the future showed, erro- 
 neous. A very careful, sceptical, and universal observer 
 might have discovered, even as early as this year of Louis' 
 accession that it was erroneous. 
 
 In the first place the gestures, habits, and character of 
 the King were not such as should be associated with this 
 kind of imbecility. His body was indeed unhealthy and 
 diseased; it was the body of a nervous, overgrown, loose- 
 limbered child, inherited from a nervous father and from an 
 exhausted race; a body which nature would have removed 
 as it removed his son's, had not the doctors built up upon 
 its doomed frame an artificial bulk of flesh. I say he was 
 
102 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 diseased,, but not in, the manner then believed. The 
 febrile attachment to violence, the lack of humour, the 
 weary eye, which betray an insufficiency of sex and which 
 we so frequently suffer in political life and at the university, 
 were quite absent in Louis. Contrariwise he was good- 
 humoured and kindly (saving to cats), very fond of hard 
 riding and capable in that exercise; he was further of an 
 even though astonishingly slow judgment and possessed 
 that desire to make (to file, saw, fit, design, ply a trade of 
 hand and eye) which is an invariable accompaniment of 
 virility. He loved and practised mechanical arts, such 
 as the locksmith's or the watchmaker's. There was noth- 
 ing in him of what is nowadays called (by a French 
 euphemism) "The Intellectual." 
 
 Were positive evidence lacking such general contrasts 
 between what he was supposed to be and what he was would 
 still have great weight ; but evidence more exact can be dis- 
 covered. The letters written by Marie Antoinette to her 
 mother afford it. 
 
 Maria Theresa was in an increasing torment, as each 
 passing month excited her bewilderment, lest her daughter 
 should furnish no heir to the French throne and the object 
 at once of her strong motherly affection and of her political 
 scheme should fail. Her questions were frequent, urgent 
 and clear: her daughter replied to them in terms which a 
 very little reading will suffice to illumine. Marie Antoinette 
 was young and, as I have said, essentially pure; she did not 
 fully comprehend the nature of a situation which was under- 
 mining her serenity and gravely marring her entry into life, 
 but she was able both to express her dissatisfaction and yet to 
 assure the Empress upon more than one occasion that she 
 had at last a reasonable hope of maternity. These hopes 
 
THE THREE YEARS 103 
 
 were in each case disappointed. That such hopes, on the one 
 hand, certainly existed, and that the whole atmosphere of 
 IKT married life was, upon the other, false and almost 
 intolerable, depended upon the fact that Louis suffered 
 from a partial and only a partial mechanical impedi- 
 ment. This impediment a painful operation would suffice 
 to remove; but the knowledge that it was but partial, the 
 divergent advice of doctors and the lethargy which invariably 
 deferred his decisions, all impelled the young man towards 
 procrastination, with the result that in a few months 
 the brief period immediately and before his accession his 
 wife had learned that fever of the mind which accompanies 
 alternations of nervous incertitude; she had weighing upon 
 her a perpetual and acute anxiety which was the more 
 corroding in that it contained so considerable an element 
 of physical ill-ease. 
 
 The detail is highly intimate and would merit no 
 place in any biography but this. It must be fixed, and 
 has been fixed here, first because to neglect it is to ignore 
 the misfortune from which (if from one origin) flowed the 
 destruction certainly of the Queen, and very probably of 
 the French Monarchy itself a matter of moment to 
 every European; secondly, because history has never yet 
 given it its true place nor fully set forth its nature and 
 importance. 
 
 In such a situation Marie Antoinette's quick nature took 
 refuge in every stimulant ; wine she disliked it was among 
 her few but marked eccentricities that throughout her life 
 she would taste nothing but water but gaming, jewels, 
 doubtful books, many and new voices about her, violets 
 contrasts, caprice upon caprice, unexpected visits, /~ 
 passions for this or that new friend, excessive laun : devoted^ 
 
 ^ * 
 
 i 
 
104 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 excessive pique), emotions seized wherever they could be 
 found watching in merry vigils for summer dawns, masked 
 balls that took up all the winter nights, escapades: in a 
 word, a swirl of the fantastic and the new became for her a 
 necessity that had it taken some one form would have 
 been called a vice. Her dissipation was driven, as vice is 
 driven, with a spur; it was compatible, as vice is compatible 
 with her original virtues; it produced, as vice produces, 
 a progressive interior ill-ease. She was a tortured woman 
 in those years. 
 
 Children became a craving to her. 
 
 One day as she went, with the lady who was supposed to 
 control the etiquette of her life, as she went sadly in her 
 coach along the western road, she turned off it along a by- 
 lane for her pleasure, and reached that village of St. Michel 
 which lies upon the slope of the hill above Bougival. As she 
 passed through the village in her grandeur and took the 
 Louveciennes road, she saw a peasant child and, by a 
 sudden but most intense and profound impulse, caught it 
 up and said she would make it hers. It was a little tiny 
 boy, still a baby, toddling upon the road; it had been chris- 
 tened James; the name of its parents was Amand. The 
 freak was good news for them; they blessed her, and she 
 went away. And the child was to be adopted and brought 
 up at her expense, and she was to watch it in Versailles. 
 
 Very many years later his name came up again, obscure, 
 but fixed, in the roll-call of a battle, and We shall read it 
 once more, stamped across the strange sequence of her life. 
 
 assure vone desires to see, in a very modern and tawdry 
 
 had at laliat evil had possessed the mind of this well-born 
 
 j. 
 
 
 , 
 
THE THREE YEARS 105 
 
 lady, let him watch (from some distance) a certain financial 
 world in London and that cosmopolitan gang in Paris to 
 which that world is allied by blood and in whose support 
 whenever it is endangered they are to be found, 
 for in Paris and London they are one. With far morei 
 refinement and with infinitely greater variety, she (like those! 
 modern money-dealers) sought in a rush of fantastic andl 
 novel experience to assuage a thirst. They have no plea 
 save the coarseness of their lineage. She had for excuse 
 the gnawing of a position which none about her compre- 
 hended and which she herself, though her body resented it, 
 saw but dimly with her young mind, and which disturbed 
 her as a confused, intolerable thing. 
 
 From within, therefore, she is amply to be excused ; but 
 consider the effect of her fever upon those who saw her. 
 Consider the effect of this new manner of hers upon the 
 public function of the French Monarchy. 
 
 The French have, with their own hands, destroyed the 
 conception of "a king": in Europe to-day we look around 
 and find nothing of monarchy remaining. A few impover- 
 ished symbols, a few indebted, a few insufficiently salaried 
 men, of whose true character the public knows nothing, 
 afford or^do not afford unifying titles for a bureaucracy 
 there, an oligarchy here: in Italy a national name, in Spain 
 a moribund tradition. But that monarchy which the 
 Gaulish energy had drawn out of the stuff of old Rome 
 was another matter; it was a sacramental alliance between 
 an idea and a thing. 
 
 The Idea was that of the Gallic formula "without author- 
 ity there is no life" for authority is authorship: this 
 Gallic formula also sustains the faith. 
 
 The Thing was one lineage of actual Jiving menr devoted ^i 
 
 
106 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 from father to son sacrificed almost as in a public sac- 
 ' rifice condemned to the perpetual burden of being mixed 
 into this Idea and of supporting the burden of its intensity 
 and power. 
 
 There had descended from the Merovingian and the 
 Carolingian families to the Capetian, bearing a power 
 that increased with every century, the conception of a creative 
 executive made flesh; an executive that should reside in the 
 living matter of a family of men who should be seen, known, 
 touched, loved or hated; who should rapidly pronounce 
 new and necessary laws, actively preserve the yet more 
 necessary body of ancient and fundamental custom, observe 
 in public the religion of the community, and, above all, 
 lead in battle. That was the role; that was the mould, 
 the bond of heredity forced many an incongruity into that 
 mould (a child sometimes and sometimes a madman), 
 yet so short is one human life in the general story of a 
 nation the gap thus formed was rapidly filled by a suc- 
 cessor, and the permament impression remained of a 
 soldier incarnating a community of soldiers. 
 
 This institution had now endured for much more than 
 a thousand years. This Gallic institution had impressed 
 itself (here, as in Germany, by imitation; there, as in 
 Britain, by direct importation) upon all the civilisation 
 of the West. It had grown old, as must all human institu- 
 tions that have no direct sustenance from forces outside 
 time; but even so it maintained a mysterious vitality. 
 Its kings were anointed. It held a sort of compact with 
 the Divine, and in this its old age was still alive with a 
 salutary if a grotesque publicity. 
 
 The King and Queen of France were the least protected 
 of any in the realm from insult, satire, and gibe; even 
 
THE THREE YEAfcS 107 
 
 where their own law protected them a general conspiracy, 
 as it were, the instinct of all society, defended the 
 pamphleteer. 
 
 The King and Queen were publicly owned: all they \ 
 had was public money; all they did they did before a crowd. 
 Every week they dined at a table in a vast hall. Their 
 nobles stood by but did not eat before them a thousand 
 or (according to the weather) ten thousand of the populace 
 defiled curiously and unceasingly. They prayed in public. 
 They were expected to receive in public the applause or 
 the condemnation of all. They were public for the destruc- 
 tion of secret things, conspiracies, masonries, Templars, 
 trusts, rings. They were publicly approached by any 
 at random and publicly claimed as the public redressers of 
 wrong always in theory and often in actual fact. Nay, 
 their physical acts were public. They dressed and undressed 
 before an audience or rather were dressed and undressed 
 by these. The birth of every royal child was witnessed by 
 a mob crowding the Queen's chamber. 
 
 The vast inconvenience of such a part was but one 
 aspect of its sanctity, and the Crown united, as in the 
 heart of a mystery, the functions of Victim and of Lord. 
 
 Amid the great new wealth of the eighteenth century, 
 and in the glare of its brilliant new intelligence, it may be 
 imagined with what a fence of tradition and precedent 
 public opinion and its own nature insisted on defending 
 this national centre. The anecdotes of that rigid, minute, 
 and often inhuman etiquette are too well known to need 
 repetition here. Two instances may suffice. 
 
 The Queen could drink nothing by night or by day but 
 from the hand of the highest in rank of the women present, 
 nor could this last accept the glass and the water save 
 
108 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 from the hand of a page. The King must not eat at all 
 until he had performed an ablution like a priest : the vessels 
 of this and the napkin were sacred; rather than put them 
 to a profane use, when they had once done their service 
 they were destroyed by fire. 
 
 Such extravagances in the old age of an institution 
 lend themselves to ridicule as do (for instance) the fantastic 
 ceremonies of our House of Commons or the comic-opera 
 costumes of our court officials and of peers. But though, 
 isolated, they present this weakness, collectively, and seen 
 in relation to the function they serve, such survivals have 
 a meaning, and a consideration of such ceremonial helps 
 men to a comprehension of the institution it surrounds. 
 
 Conceive, then for it is the note of all this chapter 
 the impact of such a mood as that of the distracted Queen 
 upon such a Court, stiff with such traditions and living 
 under such a bright beam of publicity, the mark of a 
 million eyes all keen to discern whatever trifle was done 
 between midday and dawn! Marie Antoinette chafed 
 impatiently against this central national institution. The 
 fever now upon her caused her always to despise and 
 sometimes to neglect the rules that were of the essence of 
 her position. The moral and internal constraint which 
 tortured her inflamed her to "live her life"; but for 
 those of great wealth and opportunity such a mood is and 
 must be dissipation ; dissipation in its fullest sense : the dis- 
 persion not only of character and of self-discipline, but 
 of responsibility, of externals even, and at last of power. 
 It meant, and necessarily meant, the patronage of those 
 far below her and their consequent estrangement; the 
 contempt of those immediately beneath her and their 
 consequent enmity. 
 
THE THREE YEARS 109 
 
 Just after the old King's death the Court was at 
 La Muette. She must needs, to prove her liberty, go up 
 and talk familiarly to an old gardener like any Lady Bounti- 
 ful. The old gardener's annoyance is not recorded; that 
 of her ladies is. They complained to the King, who was 
 troubled, but who, knowing the truth, answered, "Let 
 her be." 
 
 That same day, when a deputation of the Burgesses' 
 wives paid her their court, coming from the city at her gatei 
 and full of ceremony, she could do nothing more dignified! 
 than giggle at their awkwardness and at their dress. In* 
 the intervals of, according to each, a pompous greeting, 
 she must whisper to one or other of her ladies most unpom- 
 pously; the very servants were rendered uneasy by her 
 manner. 
 
 In how many ways and how rapidly this mood (this I 
 physical, fatal, necessary mood) was to wear down her \ 
 position immediately after her accession to the throne \ 
 many examples will show. The best and the most general 
 aspect from which one may first regard it is her attempted 
 immixture in public affairs, for that also was a fretful and 
 personal thing, part of her mood. 
 
 The first six or seven months of the new reign cover 
 the 'period which was officially that of mourning for Louis 
 XV. and are for the general historian of this importance: 
 that in them was fixed the new ministerial tradition which 
 culminated in the summoning of the States-General. 
 
 This new tradition owed nothing to the Queen. She 
 was hardly aware of its presence. For her the choice off 
 new Ministers was a personal and almost a domestic! 
 
110 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 business in which she somehow had a right (and could find 
 it entertaining) to play a part she knew not what or how. 
 That part of hers turned out, as a fact, a small part and 
 indecisive, utterly without plan ; but such as it was it marks 
 her necessity for action and change, and exhibits her place 
 beside the King. In the intervals of choosing a new hair- 
 dresser and a new dressmaker, she paused now half an 
 hour, now an hour, in the cabinet, hearing names which 
 lshe hardly knew, and giving random advice which must 
 lhave strained her audience to the very limits of toleration. 
 It was not mere Austrian action. Her brother the 
 Emperor would often beg her not to meddle; the Austrian 
 ambassador, Mercy, deplored her innocence of affairs and 
 her inability to follow any one interest for one hour. Her 
 mother wrote affectionately and worriedly, giving her the 
 stale old advice of supporting Vienna but fearing her 
 capacity to do so. Meanwhile, the Queen herself acted 
 from the simple motive of being seen about, and added to 
 this the equally simple motives of private tastes. Thus she 
 would have restored Choiseul to some office. He came 
 up a month after the accession, and she greeted him very 
 kindly. He had helped to make her Queen, he was the 
 traditional ally of Vienna, and though Vienna certainly 
 did not want him now, Marie Antoinette went by the name 
 and its associations alone: she judged as a child would 
 judge. The King, who had no intention of accepting 
 Choiseul, made a little awkward conversation with him, the 
 opening * of which turned pleasantly upon the old man's 
 baldness, and next day Choiseul went back home, "to see 
 to the tedding of his hay." 
 
 \ Again, the choice of Maurepas for chief Minister, four 
 Weeks before, was not as has been represented hers. 
 
THE THREE YEARS 111 
 
 The King chose his father's old friend rather for permanent 
 adviser and companion than as a' first Minister -- which 
 title indeed he never received, and that Maurepas entered 
 at all was the work not even of the King himself, but of his 
 aunt, Mme. Adelaide. In the confusion of the first two 
 days when Sartines, Choiseul, Machault were all possible 
 as prime ministers and all discussed, Madame Adelaide 
 repeatedly suggested Maurepas' name. To her and her 
 sisters he was a tradition, part of a time which these old 
 maids looked back to with regret as the last time of dignity, 
 before mistresses had destroyed their father's Court and 
 half exiled them to their apartments. 
 
 Maurepas was seventy-three; he had left office between 
 forty and fifty, and had done so from a quarrel with the 
 Pompadour. This alone recommended him to Louis XV.'s 
 daughter; that he should have been untouched by the 
 vile interregnum of the Du Barry recommended him still 
 more. Madame Adelaide had known him in power when, 
 as a girl of seventeen, the eldest of the sisters, she was cer- 
 tain of life, in tune with her great position, and pleased 
 with all she saw. Now after twenty-five years, which had 
 been increasingly marred by a distant and bitter isolation 
 from the Court, his name recurred to her as that of a fellow- 
 sufferer and a memory of her youth. Madame Adelaide's 
 devoted service in her father's last illness (she had caught 
 the small-pox herself in attending him) gravely increased 
 the weight of her advice. It was through her that Louis 
 XVI. received the old man, and, once received, he remained. 
 True, Marie Antoinette had carried the message to the King 
 from his aunt, but she had done no more than this. 
 
 If it is asked why, with so little influence, the Queen's 
 perpetual interference was none the less permitted, and 
 
112 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 why this girl of eighteen, vivacious as she was ignorant, 
 might ceaselessly bustle in and out of the council chamber, 
 the answer is not that she was Queen for no Queen had 
 yet acted thus at Versailles, nor would any woman conscious 
 of power have done so but first that her whole self was 
 mow restless beyond bearing, and next that the King was 
 ashamed to withstand her whom, afflicted as he was, he 
 bould hardly propose to command or regulate. With every 
 fresh opening of the council door she made an enemy, with 
 yione a friend; but Louis all the while could only answer, 
 TLet her be." 
 
 In one thing only during these months had she a clear 
 object, and that was not a policy: she was determined 
 to be rid of the Du Barry's name. That woman was far 
 away, exiled to Burgundy from the moment of the accession, 
 to return afterwards to Louveciennes, but some of her clique 
 remained, hated by all the populace and half the Court as 
 much as by the Queen. With so much support Marie 
 Antoinette succeeded. Three weeks after the death of 
 Louis XV., D'Aiguillon was relieved of the department of 
 Foreign Affairs: the grant of public money which he 
 received on his resignation it was but 20,000 would 
 seem to us in modern England pitifully small, for we take 
 it for granted that public officials should have a share in 
 the public funds. But it is significant of the time and of 
 the French temper that the grant was vigorously opposed 
 and was obtained only on the personal demand of old 
 Maurepas, who (by one of those coincidences so frequent in 
 aristocracies) happened to be the uncle of this his chief 
 political opponent. 
 
 Here was Marie Antoinette's one success. The Austrian 
 Court and Embassy had desired to keep D'Aiguillon lie 
 
THE THREE YEARS 113 
 
 could be played upon. Marie Antoinette had rejected 
 their advice, she had gone, day after day, to the King, until 
 he had consented to deprive D'Aiguillon of his post 
 and immediately her deficiency was apparent. To deprive 
 D'Aiguillon was, in politics, not necessary, and, if accom- 
 plished, not final. To find someone for the Foreign Office 
 who should at once be able and yet work contentedly 
 under old Maurepas was of both immediate and of weighty 
 importance. She refused to interest herself in the matter! 
 
 Luckily for France, .Vergennes, then the representative 
 of Louis at the Court of Stockholm, was chosen by the 
 good judgment of the King, in spite of an impossible 
 oriental wife. 
 
 Vergennes, approaching his sixtieth year, tenacious, 
 silent, industrious, highly experienced, and microscopic, 
 as it were, in the detail of diplomacy, was just such an one 
 as the French needed to conserve the forces of their nation, 
 to balance the smaller states against the rivals of Versailles 
 and to choose the very moment for the attack on England 
 which, later, was to establish the United States. It is 
 probable that, but for him, in the embarrassment of French 
 finance and the consequent weakness of French arms, the 
 nation would have fallen into some German conflict or have 
 been abused before some German contention. As it was, the 
 French owe in great part to Vergennes that peaceful accumu-J 
 lation of energy which permitted the revolution to triumph.! 
 
 In the nomination of this considerable diplomatic force! 
 the Queen had no part at all. i 
 
 She had no part in the nomination of Turgot. * 
 
 It is difficult to write the name of " Turgot " without admit- 
 ting a digression, though such a digression adapts itself 
 but ill to any account of the Queen. 
 
114 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 Turgot is the name that dominates the first two years 
 of the reign for every historian. The time has hardly 
 come to criticise him. Criticism of his faults is easy; a 
 full appreciation is difficult, so near are we still to his time, 
 and so exactly did he represent the spirit which was at that 
 moment germinating in every intellect, so active was he in 
 its expression. The over- simple economies, the plain 
 egalitarian political theory, the positive scepticism (the 
 Faith was then at its lowest throughout the world), the 
 glorious self-possession, the rectitude, yes, and the interior 
 glow of the "Philosophers," all the Genius of the Republic 
 was incarnate in this man. When upon that singular date 
 (it was the 14th of July) he entered the Ministry, 
 there entered with him the figure, winged for victory yet 
 austere, whose mission it was to create the great and perilous 
 Europe we now know. I mean the Republic. Already 
 Napoleon was born. 
 
 Marie Antoinette had no knowledge of this spirit. It 
 had not approached her. She knew vaguely that it was 
 indifferent to her religion (to which the very young woman 
 was already sensibly though slightly attached). She knew 
 much more clearly from current talk that it (and Turgot) 
 stood at that moment especially for Retrenchment; and that 
 word Entrenchment she approved, for she had no conception 
 
 'of the sensations that might ensue upon it to her own life 
 if from a word it should become a policy. And Turgot 
 
 1 himself had spared her sensibilities by doubling her 
 pin-money. 
 
 (I say she had no part in the nominating of Turgot - 
 in his fall she was to have too great a part. 
 
 By the end of August the new Ministry and its policy 
 were complete. All the Du Barry gang and all the memo- 
 
THE THREE YEARS 115 
 
 ries of Louis XV.'s end were gone burnt and hanged in 
 effigy by the populace as well. In their place sat a council 
 whose actual head and principal figure was the young 
 King, slow, large, assiduous, freckled, pale, in a perpetual 
 obese anxiety, ardently seeking an issue to the entanglement 
 of his realm; whose senior was the chiselled old Maurepas, 
 intensely national, witty, experienced in men, but neither 
 instructed nor of a recent practice in affairs; whose foreign 
 affairs were dealt with by the methodical gravity of Ver-_~ - 
 gennes; whose navy was in the honest hands of Sartines, 
 and whose finance the pivot of every policy, but in 
 France of '74 life and death lay under the complete con- 
 trol fXaxg^^ C 
 
 I have said that finance had become for the French in 
 1774 a matter of life and death; and the point is of such 
 capital importance to the Queen's story that I must beg 
 the reader to consider it here, at the outset of her reign. 
 
 What was the economic entanglement of the French/ 
 Crown at this moment r| The reply to that question is 
 not part of Marie Antoinette's character and conduct, but 
 it so persistently and gravely affected her life and it is so 
 dominating a feature of revolutionary history that a clear 
 conception of it must be entertained before any general 
 understanding of the period can be achieved. Not that the 
 financial difficulty was a main cause of the Revolution 
 to assert as much would be to fall into the puerile inver- 
 sion which makes of history an economic phenomenon * 
 but that the financial difficulty was a limiting condition 
 which perpetually checked and perverted the thought 
 of the time whenever that thought attempted to express 
 itself in action. 
 
 The clearest background against which to appreciate the 
 
116 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 finance of old monarchical France is that of the England 
 which was its triumphant rival. 
 
 The United Kingdom had at that time less than half the 
 population of France. The territory of England was in 
 much the same proportion at least, her arable and 
 industrial territory. Her white colonial population was 
 larger then, in proportion to her home population, than it 
 is now, but she had not then the full wealth of India to tax 
 nor the vast revenues now drawn, both in usury and in true 
 profit * from Australasia, Southern America, and Africa. 
 In other words, the prosperity of England at that time was 
 domestic and real; it contained no parasitic or perilous 
 element which a war could interrupt and a defeat destroy. 
 This England bore with ease a national debt of over 130 
 I million pounds. She was about to engage in a struggle 
 [which would nearly double that debt, and yet to feel no 
 ^weakness. She raised a revenue of ten to eleven millions, 
 which in a few years rose without effort to fifteen then 
 at the end of it all she was free to triple her debt during 
 the great European war against Napoleon, and yet trium- 
 phantly to increase, and, when the war was over, to survive, 
 1 the only nation with a credit, and at once the bank and 
 / the workshop of Europe. 
 
 France, so much larger in area and population and 
 inheriting so superior a tradition of magnitude, had all but 
 failed. With citizens double the English in number, and 
 with an arable soil in proportion, the French Crown could 
 only with the utmost difficulty attract to the exchequer a 
 sum of barely twelve at the most and counting every 
 expedient, thirteen million pounds from the national 
 
 1 1 mean by usury interest levied upon unproductive loans; I mean by true profit the share of produce legiti- 
 mately claimed by the lender of funds which have been put to productive use. 
 
THE THREE YEARS 117 
 
 income. Briefly, England could support with ease a larger 
 debt than could this neighbouring nation, twice her size; 
 England could spend with prodigality as much as that 
 nation was compelled to spend with parsimony; and 
 England could raise without effort a revenue already 
 equal, soon to be^superior, to that which the rival govern- 
 ment could but barely extract from its subjects. 
 
 Nor does this comparison exhaust the contrast between 
 financial health and disease upon either side of the Channel. 
 England thus prosperous was increasingly at ease; France 
 thus exhausted was increasingly embarrassed. Deficit 
 followed deficit; that expenditure should exceed revenue 
 had become a normal annual incident publicly discounted, 
 nay, a sort of fixed ratio appeared between w r hat should 
 be and what was the income of the government, and the 
 expenditure exceeded revenue with a solemn regularity 
 much in the proportion of 44 to 37. In the American War, 
 which either nation was approaching, England, defeated, 
 was to incur 170 million of debts, and yet to emerge, a few 
 years after the defeat, financially stronger than ever in the 
 Wars of the Revolution. France, victorious, was to incur 
 but a third of that liability, and yet in the Revolution 
 France was compelled to declare herself insolvent. 
 
 Why did so startling a contrast appear? To us to-day 
 it is almost inconceivable. The French are now some- 
 what less in population than the English, they pretend to no 
 serious empire beyond the Mediterranean, yet they raise for 
 "national purposes a larger revenue, and they raise it with 
 far greater facility; they support a debt double our own, 
 without troubling the least gullible and most thrifty invest- 
 ing public in Europe. Considerable additions to their total 
 liability hardly affect their credit, while England's falls by 
 
 
118 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 t a quarter of its index upon the issues of a hundred and fifty 
 millions. The value of their agricultural land rises rapidly, 
 as does that of their urban; they find public money for 
 enterprises which we scout or neglect. Their universities, 
 though dependent on public funds, abound; their national 
 church, deprived of official assistance, flourishes on but a 
 fraction of their surplus wealth; their historical buildings 
 are kept up in magnificence upon public funds. It is 
 . I difficult, I say, for an Englishman to try to appreciate 
 I/ the overwhelming economic advantage which, under 
 v, George III., England enjoyed over the Bourbons, who were 
 I her rivals ; because in the course of a century, and especially 
 " of the present generation, the tables have been turned. 
 It is England now that is in doubt as to her financial posi- 
 tion and her fiscal methods. It is in England that money 
 is lacking for necessary social reforms. It is English 
 credit which fluctuates with violence, and English direct 
 taxation which is strained to breaking point. 
 
 In the time of which I write all these perils and disad- 
 vantages attached to France and to France alone. The 
 /France which England faced in the great struggle was 
 !.a France labouring in anxiety for money, and the cause 
 
 )*of that increasing pressure is apparent to History: the 
 method of public economics had failed in France then as 
 Iperhaps it is now failing here in England. 
 
 Men inherit, and of necessity every generation is shut 
 in with custom. Who would in England to-day dream 
 of taxing the mass of Englishmen or rather, of taxing 
 them directly and to their own knowledge ? The very idea 
 is laughable! There may be coming into a ( coal-miner's 
 cottage in Durham twice the income of a clerk, but who 
 would dare send in an assessment or talk of a shilling in 
 
THE THREE YEARS 119 
 
 ^_ 
 
 the pound ? The clerk must pay ; the miner go free for 
 such is the tradition of the Six. Who would rate the houses 
 of the wealthiest class as the houses of the middle class are 
 rated? It would seem madness. So, but in a more acute 
 fashion, did the financial system of France suffer' at the 
 end of the eighteenth century. Its data, its conventions 
 were those of an older state of society long departed. It 
 pre-supposed the manor, and the manor was dead; it pre- 
 supposed the self-contained countryside at a moment when 
 the various provinces of the whole State had long been 
 intimately bound together by commerce and when strong 
 international links of exchange had already begun to arise. 
 The evil was a fiscal system out of touch with the realities 
 of the time. The remedy was a violent and rapid remodel- 
 ling of that system. All could perceive the evil, many the 
 remedy; but custom and the collective force of private 
 avarice in the individual minds, checked, and checked 
 sharply, with the blind control of a natural force, all reform 
 that attempted to act and to do. The attempt at reform 
 was baulked, as a natural force baulks human purpose, by 
 a million atomic actions. The million separate interests 
 refused it. 
 
 For such an attempt, for such audacity, Turgot with 
 his austere, convinced, and isolated mind, was better suited 
 than any other man; yet even he in a very few months had 
 refused to level the hard-grained social knots which blunted 
 every tool of the reformer who would level the inequalities 
 of the State. Within two years his attempt had failed and 
 he had resigned but while the resistance of the tax-payer 
 counted for much in his resignation, the increasing ill- 
 balance of his young Queen counted for more. 
 
 During the first part of his administration of finance 
 
 \ 
 
120 IV.ARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 her ill-balance was not so marked as to give promise of 
 what was to come. No folly, no conspicuous extravagance 
 marred the first weeks of her reign her inchoate and girl- 
 ish interruptions into the Council were of ill-omen; but as 
 the new Court settled down into its stride, accumulated its 
 first traditions and began to take on a character of its own, 
 her aspect in the public eye was daily fixed with greater 
 1 clearness, and the impression so conveyed to a nation 
 I already in rapid transition was a further element of irri- 
 '! tation and confusion. 
 
 For the permanently present threat of poverty and 
 embarrassment, which with every year corroded more and 
 more deeply the public service and rendered less and less 
 stable the general equilibrium of the State, lent to the 
 habits the Queen was about to form, and still more to the 
 public exaggeration of those habits, a gravity they could 
 never otherwise have assumed. It was part of her lot that 
 she could not, from the very nature of her position, under- 
 stand the relationship between her petty extravagances 
 and the popular ill-ease. 
 
 She was right. Her extravagance, such as it was, came 
 slowly nay, though showing excess in her character, it 
 was never really excessive in amount; the sums we mention 
 when we speak of it are trifling when we compare them 
 with the financial debauchery of our own age. Why, that 
 whole annual increase in her allowance which Turgot has 
 been blamed for making would not have paid for one night's 
 riot in the house of some one of our London Jews, nor 
 even when her expenses did exceed the limit she should have 
 set upon them; even when, as month followed month, the 
 love of jewellery and the distraction of cards involved her 
 in private debt, the sums so wasted in a whole year were 
 
THE THREE YEARS 121 
 
 not what some of our moderns have scattered in a few days. 
 Her total debts after two years were less than 20,000! 
 Moreover, careless and wasteful as the girl was for those 
 well-ordered times, her excesses never bore an appreciable 
 proportion to the scale of the public embarrassment. Her 
 difficulties were never so great but that the sale of a farm 
 or two could meet them. Had the Bourbon Crown enjoyed- 
 a private as well as public revenue, her lack of economy t 
 and of order would perhaps never have been heard of. 
 
 But it is the characteristic of any morbid condition 
 that the slightest irritant produces an effect vastly beyond 
 its due consequence. The financial embarrassment from 
 which the Kingdom suffered may or may not have been 
 relievable by the plain and harsh methods of Turgot 
 it is a question to which I will return but even if they 
 were so relievable, their immediate application could not 
 but be an aggravation of popular suffering; and just in the 
 years when increasing economic difficulty and sharp econ- 
 omic remedies for it were catching the public between two 
 millstones of poverty below and retrenchment above, the 
 populace had presented to them, upon a pinnacle whence 
 she could be observed on every side, a young woman 
 who in some sense summed up the State, and yet who, 
 in mere externals at least, showed a growing disregard for 
 method and a pursuit of every emotion that might distract 
 her from what the French thought her duty, but what she 
 knew to be the tragedy of her marriage. 
 
 The mourning of the Court forbade display until the 
 autumn of 1774, and though with the autumn and the 
 winter there was some relaxation of ancient rules and some 
 revolt already observable upon Marie Antoinette's part yet 
 there against the fixed and inherited rules of her station, 
 
122 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 was nothing which had yet seized the popular imagin- 
 ation nor even gravely affected her position within the 
 narrow circle of her equals. It was not until the next year, 
 1775, that the error and the misfortune began. 
 
 It had long been intended that her brother, the Emperor 
 Joseph, should visit France, and by his more active 
 character persuade Louis XVI. to an operation which 
 he perpetually postponed. The repeated adjournment 
 of this visit (which was to resolve so many doubts) 
 was among the fatal elements of the Queen's early life. 
 In the place of that sovereign, the youngest child of the 
 Hapsburgs, Maximilian, little more than a boy, fat, and 
 what would have been called in a lower rank of society 
 deficient, waddled into the astonished court at La Muette 
 in the opening of February. 
 
 The accident of his arrival did neither the Queen nor 
 the Court any great hurt among the crowds of the capital. 
 His startling ignorance and heavy lack of breeding amused 
 the crowd; they were glad to repeat the amusing anecdotes 
 of his awkwardness as later, in their Republican armies, 
 they were glad to caricature his obesity when he had 
 achieved the ecclesiastical dignity of a princely arch- 
 bishopric. But among her intimate equals the visit was 
 disastrous. The Princes of the Blood insisted upon receiv- 
 ing his call before they paid their court to him, since he 
 was travelling incognito. It was a point (to them) of grave 
 moment. The Queen rubbed it in with spirit. She would 
 not let him pay such a call. She told them that her brother 
 "had other sights to see in Paris and could put off seeing 
 the Princes of the Blood." The King stood by during the 
 quarrel, irresolute, upon the whole supporting his wife. 
 The King's brothers for the moment supported her also; 
 
THE THREE YEARS 123 
 
 but the kernel of the affair lay in her disregard of inherited 
 tradition, in her contempt for those fine shades of mutual 
 influence and deference which to the French are all-impor- 
 tant indications of authority, but which to her were mean- 
 ingless extravagances of parade. Chartres, during the prog- 
 ress of what he thought an insult, she a piece of common 
 sense, deliberately left the Court, publicly showed him- 
 self in Paris, and was applauded for his spirit. 
 
 This wilfulness, this picked quarrel, sprang from the 
 same root as, and was similar to, whatever other fevers 
 disturbed her entry into her twentieth year. 
 
 The Queen conceived a violent affection for the Princesse 
 de Lamballe, a young woman of the Blood, but Piedmon- 
 tese, the widow of a debauchee a simpering, faithful, 
 stupid, sentimental and most unfortunate young woman, 
 often gushing in her joy, next in grief wringing her enormous 
 hands. It was an attachment almost hysterical and subject to 
 extreme fluctuations. The Queen conceived a second attach- 
 ment, with the opening of this year 1775 for another woman, 
 as good-natured indeed, but more solid and more capable 
 of intrigue, than Madame de Lamballe, the Comtesse de 
 Polignac. In the empty society of the one, in the full and 
 babbling coterie of the other, Marie Antoinette expended the 
 greater part of her energy. Finding to hand, as it were, the 
 De Guemenees (and Madame de Guemenee constitutionally 
 fixed as "Governess to the children of France" chil- 
 dren that did not exist), she plunged also into the 
 Guemenee set, and there she discovered, for the first time 
 in her young life, a powerful drug for the stimulation of 
 whatever in adventurous youth has been wounded by dis- 
 appointment and youth's hot despair gambling. The 
 gambling took root quickly in this girl who hated wine 
 
124 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 and had desired so much of life. It was large in '75; 
 in '76 it was to be ruinous to her watched and doled 
 allowance. 
 
 Meanwhile the tailors and the milliners and all the ruck 
 of parasites were taking advantage of the new reign to play 
 extravagant experiments in fashion, to build fantastic 
 head-dresses, and to load humanity with comic feathers. 
 She did not create such novelties, but she was willing to 
 follow them. 
 
 The young bloods, in one of those recurrent fits of Anglo- 
 mania to which the wealthy among the French are sub- 
 ject, must introduce horse - racing. She passionately 
 approved. It gave her gambling the familiarity or lack of 
 restraint which she was determined to breathe for the 
 solution of her ills; it gave her the feeling of crowds about 
 her, of pulse and of the flesh. 
 
 Young Artois, the youngest of the King's brothers, 
 because he was the most vivacious of those nearest her, 
 must be her constant companion. Mercy noted his 
 "shocking familiarity"; he feared that scandals would arise. 
 They did. 
 
 Again, as the new reign advanced, her unpolitical and 
 most unwise concern for personalities showed more vividly 
 than ever. Because the ambassador in London was in her 
 set she must take up his cause with a sort of fury, when 
 he was accused of abusing his position for the purpose of 
 commerce. He was acquitted, but, much more than the 
 trial or any of its incidents, the open and passionate atti- 
 tude of the Queen struck the society of the time. So in 
 the very moment of the coronation she again openly received 
 Choiseul, though she knew that he could never return 
 to Court, that her mother and all Austria disapproved. 
 
THE THREE YEARS 125 
 
 Much worse than all of these, the constant jar upon her 
 nerves broke down a certain decent reticence, the barrier of 
 silence which should, always in a woman of her age, and 
 doubly in a woman of her position, be absolutely immov- 
 able. She publicly ridiculed the painful infirmity of the 
 King. Her sneers at his incapacity were repeated; they 
 crept into malicious, unprinted songs ; she permitted herself 
 similar confidences, or rather publicities, in her correspond- 
 ence; she wrote them with her own hand, and there is 
 little doubt that others besides those to whom they were 
 addressed saw that writing. He, poor man, went on pain- 
 fully with his duty, hour by hour in his councils, consider- 
 ing the realm, distantly fond of her, but necessarily feeling 
 in her presence that mixture of timidity, generosity, and 
 shame, the secret of which was no longer private to his 
 wife and him, but, through her lack of elementary disci- 
 pline, spreading grotesquely abroad in exaggerated and 
 false rumour to the world. 
 
 So much had been accomplished by her own character 
 and destiny when a full year had passed after the old King's 
 death. She had made the Crown a subject of jest, her 
 character suspect, her husband, that is, the foundation of 
 her own title, ridiculous, when the date had arrived in the 
 summer of '75 for the solemn coronation of Louis at 
 Rheims. 
 
 Mercy, with an inspiration sharper than that which 
 diplomats commonly enjoy, had suggested her coronation 
 side by side with that of the King. Such a ceremony 
 might have retrieved much. Precedent was against it, 
 but after so very long an interval precedent was weak; 
 at best it could but have afforded a spiteful and small 
 handle for the enmities which Marie Antoinette had 
 
 
126 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 already aroused. She had but to insist, or rather only to 
 understand, and her fate would have halted. She was 
 indifferent. The miraculous moment when high ceremonial 
 and the subtle effect of historic time combined to impress 
 and to transform the French nation, the moment of the 
 unction of the King, found her nothing more than the chief 
 spectator in the gallery of the Cathedral transept looking 
 down upon all that crowd of peers and officers whose 
 position in the ceremony was exactly fixed. 
 
 She had come in to Rheims the night before under a 
 brilliant moon, driving in her carriage as might any private 
 lady. The "chic" of such an entry pleased her. She had 
 allowed the King to precede her by some days and 
 whatever magic attached to the ritual descended upon him 
 alone, and left her unsupported for the future. Her let- 
 ter to her mother, written upon the morrow of the occa- 
 sion, shows how little she knew what she had missed. The 
 Court returned to Versailles, the careless vigour of her life 
 was renewed, the thread of her exaggerated friendships 
 and her exaggerated repulsions was caught up again. 
 
 When her young sister-in-law was married a few weeks 
 later to the heir of Piedmont and Savoy, she did not con- 
 ceal her relief at the departure from court of this child with 
 whom, for some reason or another, she could not hit it off. 
 When Madame de Dillon, with her Irish beauty, passed 
 through the Court, that lady moved Marie Antoinette to yet 
 another violent friendship luckily of short duration. As 
 for the Princesse de Lamballe, she had already revived for 
 her the post of Superintendante of the Queen's Household 
 (a post that had not existed for thirty years), and later 
 she insisted upon there being attached to it the salary 
 (which France imagined enormous) of 6,000 a year. 
 
THE THREE YEARS 127 
 
 It is of great interest to note that public dissipation or 
 abandon of this kind, glowing familiarities, long-lit and 
 brilliant nights, an ardent pursuit of what had become 
 to her a very necessity of change all, in a word, that was 
 beginning to fix her subjects' eyes upon her doubtfully 
 and not a little to offend the mass of the nobility around 
 her, all that was found in her insufficient to the niceties 
 and balance of the French temper, was easily excused by 
 foreign opinion. Just that something which separates the 
 French from their neighbours was lacking to the foreign 
 observance of this foreign woman. Her carriage, which to 
 the French was a trifle theatrical, seemed to foreigners 
 queenly ; her lively temper, which the French had begun to 
 find forward, was for the foreigner an added charm. 
 
 There is no need to recall the rhetoric of Burke, for 
 Burke was not by birth or training competent to judge; 
 but Horace Walpole, who was present that very summer 
 at the Court of Versailles, and saw the Queen in all her 
 young active presence at her sister-in-law's wedding-feast, 
 writes with something of sincerity, and, what is more, with 
 something for once of heart in his words. He thinks there 
 never was so gracious or so lovely a being. 
 
 One judgment I, at least, would rather have recovered 
 than any of theirs. It has not been communicated. I 
 mean that of Doctor Johnson. For Doctor Johnson some 
 months later stood by the side of his young girl friend, 
 behind the balustrade at Fontainebleau, watching curiously 
 with his aged and imperfect eyes this young Queen at the 
 public ceremony of the Sunday Feast. The old, fat, wheezy 
 man, who now seems to us England incarnate, stood there 
 in the midst of the public crowd behind the railing, block- 
 ing its shuffling way as it defiled before royalty dining, 
 
 
128 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 and took in all the scene. The impression upon a man 
 of such philosophy must have been very deep. I believe 
 we have no record of that impression remaining. 1 
 
 Though Marie Antoinette's carriage and her manner had 
 founded of her so beneficent a legend abroad and had 
 begun in her new home so much of her future disaster, 
 with those who knew her most intimately and who were of 
 her own blood, with the Hapsburgs of Vienna, her conduct, 
 certainly not queenly, seemed not even tragic. They scolded 
 sharply, and the Emperor, her brother, crowned a series of 
 violent notes by one so violent that Maria Theresa kept it 
 back. To her childlessness (which was for them a fault in 
 her) , to her conduct (which her own family who had known 
 her as a child exaggerated at such a distance) was added 
 the exasperation of remembering that with some elementary 
 caution she might have acted as the agent of the allied 
 Austrian Court whose daughter she was ; they were angered 
 in Vienna to see that, instead of so acting, she wasted her 
 position in private spites and private choices. 
 
 In fine, when the Day of the Dead came round and the 
 leaves of '75 were falling, she could look back from her 
 twentieth birthday to her accession, and the view was one 
 of eighteen months of mental chaos wherein one emotion 
 rapidly succeeded another, each sought for the purpose of 
 , distraction and oblivion, and of feeding in some sort of fire- 
 work way that appetite for life which Louis could not 
 nourish with a steady flame. With the next year further 
 elements were to be added to those existing elements of 
 dissipation. The foundations of the future, which she had 
 already levelled out, were to be strengthened. The public 
 
 1 The life of Doctor Johnson has become an object of such widespread national study that more than one 
 reader may be acquainted with his judgment of the scene. If it exists, it should be published to the advantage 
 of history. 
 
THE THREE YEARS 129 
 
 judgment of her was to become more apparent, and the 
 legend which at last destroyed her was to take a firmer root. 
 
 The year 1776, for ever famous in the general history of 
 the world, was the climax and the turning-point of this 
 early exuberance and excess. In its first days, during the 
 hard winter which marked the turn of the year, she had 
 begun amusements which for the first time permitted her 
 to cross the barrier which divides the reproach of one's 
 intimates from public scandal. Her play had grown from 
 mere extravagant gambling to dangerous indebtedness, and 
 she had been bitten by the love of jewels, especially of 
 diamonds. In this year, too, the simple and somewhat 
 empty friendship which she still slightly bore to Madame 
 de Lamballe was finally replaced by more violent caprices ; 
 she began to associate with the powerful Guemenees, with 
 the gentle but subtle and intriguing Countess of Polignac. 
 
 Her indiscretion rose continually. In February she was 
 seen with the Princesse de Lamballe whirling over the snow 
 into Paris, without an escort, as a private woman might, 
 to the disgust and the hatred of the crowd. 
 
 The exhilaration of the cold for her who was from 
 Vienna the exhilaration of her twentieth year, her love 
 of merry domination over the timid little tall companion, 
 whom she so soon was to abandon, drove her from audacity 
 to audacity. Her sledges, which had been but a domestic 
 scandal at Versailles, dared to reach Sevres, St. Cloud; 
 they crossed the river, because the hunting wood of 
 Boulogne invited them. Upon one fatal morning she 
 traversed that last screen and shot through Paris on her 
 shining toy. 
 
 The sledge was daringly, impudently alone. There was 
 no guard, no decent covering for royalty, no dignity of 
 
130 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 pace or even of ornament; its pace was a flash, and its 
 high gilding a theatrical decor; mixing with that flash and 
 that gilding was the jangling of a hundred little bells. 
 
 The streets were all aghast at such a sight. Sevres and 
 the villages round Versailles had stared, bewildered, to 
 see a Queen go by in such a fashion; but Paris was too 
 great to be merely bewildered, and Paris grew angry, as 
 might an individual at a personal insult offered. 
 
 The next month saw her first reckless purchase of gems; 
 she pledged her name for .16,000, and acquired in exchange 
 of that debt diamonds not only expensive beyond the 
 means of her purse, but unworthy of her rank and of the 
 traditions of her office. 
 
 To such follies she added her personal interference in 
 the matter of Turgot. That bright-eyed, narrow, intelli- 
 gent, and most un-Christian man, had missed the problem 
 ready to his hands. In time of war, with a good army and 
 a soldier behind him, he might have solved it; in a time 
 of luxury, misery, and peace he could not. In the very 
 days when he was propounding his theories of unfettered 
 exchange and of direct taxation for the salvation of the 
 Monarchy, the harvest of '75 had failed. In the one ex- 
 ceptional moment of famine when interference with trade 
 was certainly necessary to French markets, his free trade 
 doctrine was imposed. A popular hatred rose against 
 him, and he was hated not only by the populace, who felt 
 the practical effects of his economic idealism, but by the 
 rich handful who were still devout and who could not 
 tolerate his contempt for the Faith, by the corrupt who 
 could not tolerate his economy, and by the vivacious who 
 could not tolerate his sobriety. His rapid and funda- 
 mental reforms, moreover, were opposed by the Parlement 
 
- 
 
 THE THREE YEARS 131 
 
 of Paris 1 as by a wall. They refused to register the 
 edicts. He had still great influence with the King, though 
 hardly with any other effective power in the State, and in 
 the month of March the King in a Bed of Justice com- 
 pelled the Parlement to register Turgot' s decrees and 
 give them the force of law. It registered, them; but none 
 the less Turgot was doomed. 
 
 Mercy, who saw very clearly that the man must go, but 
 who also saw clearly the extreme danger that the Queen 
 ran in taking upon herself any part in his going, did all 
 that his influence could command to prevent her inter- 
 ference. He spent his energy and his considerable persua- 
 sion in vain. The one motive force and the only one that 
 could persuade her to public action had already stirred 
 the Queen ; she believed herself to have received a personal 
 affront; the Cabinet had recalled a favourite from the 
 Embassy of St. James's. The girl was determined upon 
 revenge, and because Turgot, as Comptroller-General, 
 showed most prominently in the Cabinet, it was upon Tur- 
 got that her wrath fell, or rather it was Turgot falling from 
 power whom she precipitated by her final influence. Upon 
 the 10th of May, Guines, whom the Cabinet had recalled 
 from London, was raised to a Duchy in a public note; by 
 the 12th, Maurepas had told the Comptroller-General 
 that his office was vacant, and Marie Antoinette talked 
 wildly of sending him to the Bastille. 
 
 There was at this time in Paris a man called Necker 
 with whom history would have little concern had not the 
 accident of the Revolution later thrown his undetermined 
 features into the limelight. He was a product of Geneva, 
 
 1 It should be made clear, though it is elementary, that the Parlement of Paris, by nature a supreme court of 
 law, exercised also the anomalous but traditional function of registrar of royal decrees. Nor was a law a law 
 until this body had consented to enroll it or had been overcome by a grave, rare and solemn public ritual of 
 the King's called "a Bed of Justice." 
 
132 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 a money-dealer, therefore, and a Calvinist by birth and 
 trade in no way by individual conviction, for his energies 
 had long been directed to the accumulation into his own 
 hands of the wealth of others. His reputation as a solid 
 business man was therefore high, and he was very rich; of 
 moral reputation, as the Catholic French understand the 
 term, he had none. 1 His dealings with the treasury had 
 brought his name forward, and in a few months, under a 
 different title, he replaced Turgot at the head of the embar- 
 rassed finances of the country! . . . Societies in disso- 
 lution do such things. 
 
 His conception of reform was what one might expect from 
 such a lineage. He cooked the public accounts, flattered all 
 to remain in power, was hopelessly void of any plan, and, 
 to meet the crisis, just borrowed: the first of modern stock- 
 jobbers to conduct a state, and the model to all others. 
 He was destined to become a sgrt of symbol of liberty . . . 
 and therein he is an example to democracy as well as to 
 money-changers . 
 
 To the signal folly of precipitating Turgot's fa!l the 
 Queen was content to add further marks of excess. As 
 though her purchases earlier in the year had not been 
 sufficient, she must buy bracelets now worth three years of 
 her income bracelets, the news of which reached Vienna 
 and she must give rein to every conceivable indulgence 
 in the passion of gambling. All the world talked of it, 
 and all that summer, as the influence of her new friends 
 rose and as her careless excitement reached its limit, 
 the fever grew. 
 
 1 His vivacious and ugly daughter was to be a catch famous throughout Europe. Years later Fersen of all - 
 men! was suggested to her. Pitt in '85 had a bite at her ill-gotten dowry. Luckily for the girl, she escaped 
 him, but she married De Stafil, became famous, wrote her lively and didactic comments on the Revolution, gre^, 
 uglier still v showed a small black moustache, at last wore a. turban and drove Napoleon to desgaiiu 
 
THE THREE YEARS 133 
 
 At Marly, during the summer visit of the Court, later 
 in the year at Fontainebleau, she carried on the scandal. 
 One autumn night in this last place bankers from 
 Paris kept the faro tables open for thirty-six hours; they 
 were the hours before her birthday, and the Mass of All 
 Saints was held before a Court, pale and crumpled with 
 the lack of sleep. The morrow, her twenty-first birthday, 
 was sour with the memory of the reproach against that 
 debauch. The- Court returned for the winter to Ver- 
 sailles, and Maria Theresa determined that it was time 
 for the Queen's brother, the Emperor Joseph, to make the 
 journey he had long promised, and to stem these rapids 
 which threatened to become a cataract in which every- 
 thing might be swept away. Her scolding letters to her 
 daughter were accompanied by active plans for the jour- 
 ney of her son. She expected, and not without reason, 
 that that son's advent would change all, for she knew that 
 he would have the direct mission to persuade Louis to an 
 operation, to relieve the imperfect marriage of the burden 
 that pressed upon it, and to remove from the life of that 
 young wife the intolerable nervous oppression whence all 
 this increasing violence proceeded. 
 
 It is to the Emperor's journey, therefore, that all one's 
 attention should be directed as one reads her life from the 
 closing days of 1776 to his appearance in Paris, after 
 repeated delays, in the spring of the following year. 
 
 Meanwhile that other spirit whose action was to come 
 in upon her life, America, was born. The week that had 
 seen Turgot's dismissal had seen passed in Philadelphia 
 the Pennsylvania Resolution of Separation from the Eng- 
 lish Crown, and in the keener intellectual life of Virginia it 
 had seen produced upon the same day the first statement 
 
134 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 of those general principles which the Colonies had 
 drawn from Rousseau, and upon which were to be based, 
 for whatever good or evil fortunes still attended it, the 
 democracy of our time. The revolt grew from those skir- 
 mishes of '75 that had begun the civil war, to the Sepa- 
 ratist decisions of '76, the strain upon England's tenure 
 of her empire increased, and Vergennes all the while watched 
 closely, hoping from that embarrassment to find at one 
 moment or another the opportunity for relieving his coun- 
 try from the permanent threat of an English war. 
 
 It was a difficult and a perilous game. A British suc- 
 cess might be, or rather would be, followed by swift venge- 
 ance against the embarrassed and fettered Crown of 
 France. The Cabinet of Versailles would need allies 
 against what was believed to be an all-powerful navy and 
 for eighteen months Vergennes was working to obtain these 
 allies, in spite of the terror which the British fleet inspired. 
 This policy, whose ultimate results were to be so consid- 
 erable and so unexpected, took a new shape upon a cer- 
 tain day which should perhaps be more memorable in 
 the history of the United States than any other. I mean 
 the 28th of November of this year 1776. 
 
 Early that morning, the weather being clear and the wind 
 southerly, a pilot from the rocks of Belle Isle had made 
 out three ships in the offing, but they were hull down; 
 later, he saw one bearing a strange, quite unknown flag. 
 He sailed towards it. The colours were those of the new 
 Republic, and the stars and stripes flew above a sloop of 
 war that carried Franklin; she had with her two English 
 prizes for companions. Franklin landed. Within three 
 weeks he was in Paris, and by the first week of the New 
 Year he was at Passy in the suburbs, the guest of Cttaumopt, 
 
THE THREE YEARS 135 
 
 from whose great house and wide park proceeded the care- 
 ful intrigue by which the Thirteen States were finally estab- 
 lished in their Independence. 
 
 All who can pretend to history have respect for Ver- 
 gennes, but that respect is far heightened by the close read- 
 ing of what followed. 
 
 Alone of the European States Great Britain could not 
 be balanced but could balance. Great Britain was secure 
 among them and their insecurity. Great Britain alone in 
 her growing monopoly of industry and in her impregnable 
 self-sufficiency, economic and military, could not be pinned 
 down into a diplomatic system; she alone could afford to 
 scorn alliance, and could in a moment change from friend 
 to foe and strike at any exposed and vulnerable part of the 
 European group especially at a maritime neighbour. 
 The British army maintained a proved excellence of a 
 hundred years; it was particularly famous for its endur- 
 ance; its records of capitulation were rarer than those of 
 any other ; it could afford to be small ; its infantry stood fire 
 brutally and could charge after losses that would have 
 been fatal to its rivals; it had for framework the squires 
 and the yeomen of solid countrysides, for material the still 
 manly remains of a peasantry in the English shires, the 
 Highlands, whose native language, diet, and race were 
 at that time corrupted by nothing more alien than a little 
 garrison. Finally, there was then available to the full for 
 purposes of war the vigour of an as yet unruined and not 
 yet wholly alienated Irish. 
 
 A navy, adequate in numbers, but no drain upon the 
 productive power of the nation, gave mobility to this 
 force, the soil of these Islands fed the people upon it, and 
 meanwhile an industry, textile and metallic, such as no 
 
136 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 other country dreamed of, supplied an increasing and 
 overflowing resource for war. It is but a hundred and 
 thirty years since things were thus. A vast change has 
 passed, and it is difficult for the modern student, per- 
 plexed and anxious for the future of his country, to enter 
 into the international policy of his fathers; yet must he 
 grasp it if he is to understand what a revolution was effected 
 by the issue of the American War; for it is probable that 
 when the first complete survey of modern Europe is taken, 
 the separation of the American colonies will estab- 
 lish a fixed date which marks not only the division between 
 the monarchical and the beaurocratic, the old and the new 
 Europe, but also, in our province, the division between 
 what had been England and what later came to be called 
 "the Empire" -with the destinies befitting such a title, 
 and the colonies to which it is attached. 
 
 Vergennes saw that this England, free upon the flank 
 of his embarrassed country, was now suddenly engaged in 
 the most entangling of nets, an unpopular and distant 
 civil war. He knew that with a Protestant population of 
 her own blood (at that time the States were in philosophy 
 wholly Protestant, in tradition entirely English) would only 
 be attacked by the governing families with 'the utmost 
 reluctance. There was no fear of extreme rigours, or of 
 sharp, cruel, and decisive depression; there was sympathy 
 and relationship on both sides. Therefore the war would 
 drag. 
 
 Vergennes had seen, two years before, the little English 
 garrison permitting the inhabitants to arm and drill without 
 interference; he knew that opinion in England was divided 
 upon the rebellion. His whole attention was concentrated 
 upon the prolongation of that struggle and upon postpon- 
 
THE THREE YEARS 137 
 
 ing, to the last, the intervention of France. His attention, 
 so given, was successful, and he secured his object. 
 
 At first and for as long as might be he would support, 
 unseen, the weaker of the combatants. He received Frank- 
 lin, though privately; he refused ships or a declaration 
 of war. Arms and ammunition he liberally supplied 
 but he did so through a private and civilian person, whom 
 he vigorously denounced in public, who had to go through 
 the form of payment from the United States, as might any 
 other dealer, and who was very nearly compelled to go 
 through the form of receiving heavy punishment as well. 
 The private firm so chosen was " Roderigo Hortalez et Cie"; 
 the modern cheat of anonymity in commerce had begun, 
 and Roderigo Hortalez was, in reality, that same shifty, 
 witty, courageous, and unsatisfied man who had already 
 played upon Versailles and Vienna and whose pen was later 
 to deliver so deep a thrust at the Monarchy. Caron, or, to 
 call him by the title of nobility he had purchased, "De 
 Beaumarchais." 
 
 While Vergennes was acting thus, every effort was being 
 made at Vienna to advance the journey of the Emperor: 
 postponed from January to February, from February to 
 March, that journey was at last undertaken, and with the 
 first days of April, 1777, Joseph was present upon French 
 soil, and driving down the Brussels road towards Paris. 
 
 But all that while, in spite of his advent, the rush of the 
 Court had increased, and to the twenty other fashions and 
 excitements of the moment one more had been added 
 enlistment for America. The youngster, who was typical 
 of all that wealthy youth, not yet sobered or falsified by 
 
138 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 fame, La Fayette, was determined to go; and almost as a 
 pastime, though it was a generous and an enthusiastic one, 
 the American Revolution was the theme of the Court in 
 general. It became the theme of the Polignac clique in 
 particular, a theme sometimes rivalling the high interest 
 of the cards or lending an added splendour to fantastic 
 head-dress and to incongruous jewels. 
 
 And the Queen meanwhile, quite lost, pushed the pace 
 of all the throng about her, despairing of any remedy to that 
 evil which her brother was posting to reform. 
 
 If Fersen had been there! 
 
 Upon Friday evening, the 18th of April, the Emperor 
 Joseph drove past the barrier of St. Denis and entered 
 Paris. It was already dark, but the stoic was in time 
 for dinner. He was in strict incognito, that he might 
 be the more admired, and had given out the arrival of 
 "Count Falkenstein" to all the world. He slept in the 
 humblest way at his Embassy ; he had hired two_plain rooms 
 in Versailles by letter at a hotel called "the Hotel of the 
 Just," presumably Huguenot; next day he paraded as The 
 Early Riser and was off to Versailles before the gentry 
 were out of bed : the whole thing was as theatrical as could 
 be. He wished to meet his sister alone but he let every- 
 body know it. He came up to her room by a private stair 
 and spoke of it as an act of simplicity and virtue. The 
 man was of the kind to whom most unhappily for them 
 and their founder Marcus Aurelius provides a model. 
 His certitudes were in words or negations; his pride in 
 things facile and dry; his judgments vapid, determined, 
 superficial and false in a manner Prussian without the 
 

 
 THE EMPEROR JOSEPH II. 
 
 From the tapestry portrait woven for Marie Antoinette 
 and recently restored to Versailles 
 
 
THE THREE YEARS 139 
 
 Prussian minuteness. In a manner French, but with 
 none of the French clear depth and breadth. Of hearty 
 Germany he had nothing; and among all the instruments 
 of action designed in Gaul he could choose out only one, 
 the trick of sharp command, which the accident of despotic 
 power permitted him to use over a hodge-podge of cities 
 and tongues. 
 
 The task before him, which was the re-establishment at 
 Versailles of the interests of Austria, comprised two parts: 
 first, he must counsel or compel the Queen who stood for 
 Austria at Versailles to such conduct and dignity as 
 would permit her to exercise permanent political power; 
 secondly, and much more important, he must force the 
 King to that operation from which* he so shrank and yet 
 by which alone the succession of the Crown through 
 Marie Antoinette could be assured. 
 
 For the first of these tasks, the reform of his sister's com 
 duct, Joseph's empty character, without humour and with-f 
 out religion, was wholly insufficient nay, it provoked the 
 opposite of its intention. The obvious truth of his harsh 
 criticism moved the Queen, but his bad manners, his public 
 rebuke, offended her more. His precise (and written!) 
 instructions forced upon her one irksome and priggish 
 month of affected rigidity; she did but react with the more 
 violence from the absurd restraint. With the second and 
 more positive task he was more fortunate. His brutal 
 questions, his direct affirmation and counsel, his precise 
 instructions, all conveyed in the sergeant-major manner 
 which is of such effect upon the doubtful or the lethargic, 
 accomplished their end. Louis inclined to the side which 
 had for now three years urged medical interference ; he sub- 
 mitted to an operation, and the principal question at issue 
 
140 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 for two great States was in this secret manner accom- 
 plished: it was the one success, the only one, of Joseph's 
 tactless and unwise career. It was of the highest conse- 
 .quence to him and his house, and all Europe; for, his 
 counsels once obeyed, the maternity of Marie Antoinette 
 was ultimately sure. When the Queen should have borne 
 a child there could but follow the rage of disappointed 
 successors, a secure and increasing influence upon her part 
 over her husband, through this the antagonism of the 
 monarchy of the nation, and at last the Revolution and 
 all its wars. 
 
 The reader may inquire the precise date of so momen- 
 tous a detail. It is impossible to fix it until (if it still exist) 
 the document once in the hands of Lassone be published; 
 but we can fix limits within which the operation must have 
 taken place. It must have been within that summer of 1777, 
 in one of three months, June, July, or August ; probably 
 In late August or the beginning of September It was cer- 
 Itainly later than the 14th of May, when, according to Mercy, 
 the private interviews upon the matter between Joseph and 
 Louis were still unfinished. Marie Antoinette's letter of 
 June 16th makes it probably later than that date. A 
 phrase of Maria Theresa's on the 31st of July, refer- 
 ring to news of the 15th (the last news from Mercy), 
 makes it possible that she thought all accomplished 
 by the 15th of July. A phrase of Mercy's on the 15th 
 of August makes it more probable still. By the 10th 
 of September a phrase used by Marie Antoinette in her 
 correspondence with Maria Theresa makes it certain. 1 
 
 Compared with this capital consequence of his journey 
 the rest of Joseph's actions, opinions, and posings in France 
 
 l See Appendix A. 
 
THE THREE YEARS 141 
 
 are indeed of slight importance. His affectation of retire- 
 ment and simplicity, his common cabs, his perpetual appear- 
 ance in public and as perpetual pretence of complaint at 
 his popularity are the tedious trappings of such men. In 
 some things he was real enough ; in his acute annoyance with 
 the Queen's set, for instance especially with Madame de 
 Guemenee, and her late hours, high play and familiar, 
 disrespectful tones. He was sincere, too, in his astounding 
 superficiality of judgment; he was keen on science, eager 
 for the Academies, and in that scientific world of Paris 
 which boasted Lavoisier and the immortal Lamark, dis- 
 covered that "when one looks close, nothing profound or 
 useful is being done." 
 
 At the end of May he left for a tour in the French prov- 
 inces. His ineptitudes continue. He has left notes of 
 his opinions for us to enjoy. He judges the army, and 
 condemns it all except the pipe-clay and white facings 
 of the Artois Regiment. That pleased him. He saw 
 nothing of the cannon which were to break Austria and 
 capture a woman of his house for Napoleon. He judges 
 the navy after a minute attention, and finds it on the eve 
 of the American War! thoroughly bad. One thing he 
 does note clearly, that Provence, the King's brother, has 
 been going through France in state, as though sure of the 
 succession. After what had passed at Versailles, such 
 expectations on the part of Louis XVI. 's brother must have 
 bred in Joseph a mixture of anxiety and amusement. 
 
 He returned to Vienna, and began to address himself 
 to his next failure in policy and judgment he coveted 
 Bavaria. The death of the Elector of Bavaria would raise 
 the issue of his succession. That death was approaching, 
 and Joseph began to intrigue through Mercy, through his 
 
142 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 piother, and as best he could through his sister, for the 
 succession to the Duchy and for the support of France 
 against Prussia in his outworn, out-dated ambition. While 
 he still played with such toys, much larger forces were ready 
 to enter the scene, and changes that would make the little 
 balances of German States forgotten; for as that summer 
 of 1777 heightened, dry, intensely hot, and as all the air of 
 the life around Versailles was cleared by the new intimate 
 relations of the Queen and her husband; as the chief domes- 
 tic problem of the reign was resolved, as it became increas- 
 ingly certain that the royal marriage would soon be a true 
 marriage and the way to the succession secure, there had 
 come also the certitude of war with England in the matter 
 of the American colonies. 
 
 It is upon this latter certitude that attention must now 
 be fixed, before one can turn to the tardy accomplishment 
 of the Queen's hopes for an heir. The foreign policy of 
 that moment is essential to a comprehension of her fate, 
 for upon the unexpected turn of that unexpected conflict with 
 Great Britain was to depend the fatal respite which des- 
 tiny granted to the French Monarchy: a respite of years, 
 during whose short progress the financial tangle became 
 hopeless, the Queen's ill-repute fixed, and the Crown's last 
 cover of ceremony destroyed. 
 
 I say there had come a certitude of war with England. 
 
 Of three things one: either England would reduce the 
 rebels ; or, having failed so to reduce them, she would com- 
 promise with them for the maintenance of at least a nom- 
 inal sovereignty; [or, she would wholly fail and would be 
 compelled wholly to retire, jn the first case it must be 
 her immediate business to attjack the French Government 
 whose secret aid had alone made the prolongation of rebel- 
 
THE THREE YEARS 143 
 
 lion possible; inutile second case, with still more security, 
 and a still more confident power, she could attack an enemy 
 which, because it had not dared openly to help her foes, had 
 earned their contempt and lost its own self-confidence. 
 In the third case she would find herself free from all em- 
 barrassment and at liberty to destroy a rival marine, whose 
 inferiority was incontestable but whose presence had been 
 sufficient to embarrass her complete control of the North 
 Atlantic, and to sustain however disingenuously her 
 rebellious subjects. 
 
 In any one of these three issues a war with England 
 must come. But these three issues had not an equal chance 
 of achievement. A complete victory of the British troops, 
 probable as it was, could hardly result in a permanent 
 military occupation of a vast district, English in blood and 
 speaking the English tongue. A complete defeat of British 
 regulars at the hands of the varied and uncertain minority 
 of colonists, and the acknowledgment of American inde- 
 pendence by a Britain unembarrassed in Europe, was 
 an absurdity conceivable only to such enthusiastic boys 
 as was then the young La Fayette, to such wholly un- 
 practical minds as that of Turgot, or to popular journalists 
 of the type which then, as to-day, are uninstructed whether 
 in historical or in military affairs. 
 
 The middle issue was so much the more probable as to 
 appear a calculable thing: the troops of George III. would 
 determine the campaign, but the settlement following the 
 expensive success of the British army would be a com- 
 promise whereby the colonies should be free to administer 
 their own affairs, should be bound in some loose way 
 to Great Britain, and should stand benevolently neutral 
 towards, if not in part supporters of, her position in Europe. 
 
144 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 The formula which guides a commercial State such as 
 Britain in its colonial wars has long been familiar to its 
 rivals; it is as simple as it is wise. Though we give it 
 the epithet of "generous" and speak of the "granting 
 of self-government," while enemies will call it, with equal 
 inaccuracy, "a capitulation" followed by "an alliance," 
 the nature and purpose of such compromises are those of a 
 fixed policy and one upon whose unalterable data the 
 British Empire has been built up. 
 
 It was in the nature of things that the British Govern- 
 ment in this summer of '77 should first seek to master the 
 Americans in the field, next compromise with the defeated 
 colonials, set them up as a nation nominally dependent, 
 really allied, and so find itself free in Europe for the great 
 duel with France. At Versailles Vergennes prepared not 
 attack but resistance, and pulled with an accurate propor- 
 tion of effort all the strings that should delay Great Britain, 
 on the one hand, and, on the other, unite into one body of 
 resistance against her the Atlantic seaboard of Europe and 
 the principal navies of the continent that is, the Powers 
 of France and the Peninsula ; the admiralties of Versailles, 
 Lisbon and Madrid. 
 
 As the Emperor Joseph's carriage rolled westward 
 along the main road of Brittany, approaching the gates of 
 Brest, Vergennes was signing for despatch to the Spanish 
 Court that note of his which inaugurated the active part of 
 his plan of defence against England. Precisely a week 
 later, Burgoyne and his forces started southward from 
 Canada upon what should have been the decisive march 
 of the British campaign in America. 
 
 A consideration of the map will at once convince the 
 reader, first that Great Britain was in a position suitable 
 
THE THREE YEARS ' 145 
 
 to immediate victory, and, secondly, that the military 
 advisers of her government had formed the best possible 
 plan for its rapid accomplishment. 
 
 What was the military object of the war? The control 
 of a seaboard : a seaboard stretching indeed through fifteen 
 degrees of latitude, and extending in its contour over far 
 more than fifteen hundred miles, but a seaboard only. 
 Behind it lay districts which for military purposes did not 
 exist - - untouched, trackless, resourceless. The life of the 
 colonies, especially their life during the strain of a war, 
 flowed through the ports. 
 
 Again, this band of territory ran from a long southern 
 extremity, whose climate was unsuited to active work by 
 Europeans, through a middle temperate interval to another 
 extremity of winter fogs and rigorous winter cold. A 
 continental climate rendered the contrast of North and 
 South less noticeable, for the warm continental summer 
 embraced it all, and the cold continental winter penetrated 
 far south; but that contrast between the two halves of 
 that seaboard was sufficient to afford a line of social and 
 political cleavage already apparent in the eighteenth cen- 
 tury and destined in the nineteenth to occasion a great 
 domestic war. 
 
 Again, there lay behind this seaboard, at a distance no- 
 where greater than three hundred miles nor anywhere 
 much less than two, that valley of the St. Lawrence which 
 Great Britain firmly held ; her tenure was secure in the diver- 
 sity of its race, religion and language from those of the 
 rebels and in the unity which the admirable communications 
 of its great waterway confirmed. 
 
 Here then was a line already wholly held, the St. Law- 
 rence, and parallel to it a line already partially held, and 
 
* 
 
 146 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 always at the mercy of the British fleet the ports of the 
 seacoast. Up and down the belt of land between those 
 parallel lines went the scattered bands of the rebels. Even 
 their organised armies were loosely co-ordinated in action 
 and expanded or diminished with a season. 
 
 The obvious strategy for the British was to cut that inter- 
 vening belt in a permanent fashion by establishing a line 
 from the St. Lawrence to the sea, and so to separate for 
 good the forces of their opponents and then to deal with 
 them in detail and at leisure. 
 
 An accident of topography afforded to this simple prob- 
 lem an obvious key: just down that dividing line, which 
 separates the nothern climate and the Puritan type of 
 colony from the rest, a sheaf of natural w r ays leads from 
 the coast to the valley of the St. Lawrence, and of these 
 the plainest and by far the best is the continuous and 
 direct depression afforded by the long, straight valley of 
 the Hudson and continued in one easy line along the 
 depression marked by Lakes George and Champlain. 
 There is not upon all that march one transverse crest 
 of land to be defended nor one position capable of 
 natural defence, and in its whole extent water carriage is 
 available to an army save upon the very narrow watershed 
 where (according to the amount and weight of supplies) 
 two or at most three days must be devoted to a land 
 portage. But even here, between the foot of Lake George 
 and the Upper Hudson, existed then what is rare even to-day 
 in the New World, a road passable to guns. 
 
 Under such conditions, even had the rebellion been 
 universal and homogeneous, the strategy imposed was 
 evident. The sea was England's; the English forces had 
 but to land in force, to occupy one or more of the ports at 
 
THE THREE YEARS 147 
 
 the outlet of these ways leading to the valley of the St. 
 Lawrence, and simultaneously to march down from that 
 valley to the sea. They would thus cut the rebellion in 
 half; the cut so made could easily be permanently held, 
 and the English henceforth could operate at their choice 
 and in increasing numbers from any point of the coast 
 against either section of a divided enemy. 
 I say this was the obvious plan even had the rebellion 
 been homogeneous or universal; but it was neither 
 and nowhere was it weaker or more divided against itself 
 than on this very line of cleavage. It was precisely in the 
 valley of the Hudson and at its mouth that the British could 
 count upon the greatest hesitation on the part of their 
 opponents and of most support, sometimes ardent support, 
 on the part of their friends. New York was thoroughly 
 in the Royal power and the plan of marching from the St. 
 Lawrence down to that harbour seemed certain to conclude 
 the campaign. Leaving such garrison as New York 
 required, Howe sailed with 20,000 men in this opening of 
 the summer of 1777 to attack some one of the harbours; 
 after a cruise of some hesitation he sailed up the Delaware 
 and landed to march on the source of supply, Philadelphia. 
 At the same moment Burgoyne set out upon his march from 
 the St. Lawrence valley to the sea. 
 
 Each was easily successful. Washington, covering Phila- 
 delphia from a position along the Brandywine, was com- 
 pletely defeated. Philadelphia was in British hands before 
 the close of September ; an attempt at relief was crushed in 
 the suburbs within a week. As for Burgoyne, his force, 
 though it amounted to less than a division, was equally 
 at ease. He swept easily down Lake Champlain: the 
 American irregulars abandoned the isthmus and their 
 
148 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 positions near Ticonderoga, which were militarily iden- 
 tical with that pass. He pursued the enemy to the extrem- 
 ity of the water, and on southward up the valley, towards 
 the watershed; defeating every rally and confident of 
 immediate success. 
 
 It was but early in July, and he had already accomplished 
 half his route, and could boast the capture of over a hun- 
 dred cannon mainly of French casting. 
 
 All had gone well. The news reaching London, reached 
 Paris and Madrid by the mouths of English Ministers and 
 Envoys, whose tone was now of an increasing firmness, 
 and who, in the immediate prospect of success, began to ask 
 in plain terms how matters stood between France and 
 Spain, and whether these two Bourbon crow r ns were pre- 
 pared for open war. 
 
 Vergennes was in an agony of writing, of secrecy and of 
 defence, urging Spain to draw secretly close to France that 
 both might stand ready for the inevitable blow which 
 England would deliver when the colonies were once sub- 
 dued. 
 
 What followed was Burgoyne's woodland march of a 
 few miles across the portage from the lakes to the Hudson. 
 
 The cause of that march's amazing delay, and of the 
 disaster consequent upon such delay, will never be 
 fully explained; because, although not a few acquainted 
 with European roads and European discipline and arms 
 are also acquainted (as is the present writer) with the 
 unmade country traversed by that force, yet there was 
 no contemporary who, by a full double experience of 
 American and European conditions, could present in his 
 account the American advantage in such a country at 
 that time, and the corresponding difficulties of European 
 
THE THREE YEARS 149 
 
 troops. From Fort Anne, where the last American force 
 had been scattered, to Fort Edward, where the Hudson 
 is reached, is one day's easy walking. It took Burgoyne's 
 army twenty-one. I have neither space nor knowledge to 
 say why : German slowness (half the army was German) , 
 the painful construction of causeways, officers (one may 
 suppose) drinking in their tents, a vast train, an excess 
 of guns, a fancied leisure all combined to protract the 
 delay. The month of July was at an end when the British 
 reached the river, and, having reached it, the men were on 
 fatigue day after day bringing in the guns and supplies 
 that had come by water to the extremity of Lake George. 
 
 In this way August was wasted, and an attempt to raid 
 draught cattle a few miles to the south-east at Benning- 
 ton in Vermont was, in spite of the active loyalty or treason 
 of many colonists, defeated and destroyed a disaster due 
 to the foreign character, the small number employed, and 
 the dilatory marching of the troops so detached. It was 
 mid-September before the army crossed the Hudson to its 
 western bank, where a small auxiliary force approaching 
 from the Mohawk valley was to have joined it. That 
 force failed to effect a junction. All were bewildered, and 
 now a heavy rain began to soften the green ways and to 
 swallow the wheels of the guns. Burgoyne reached no 
 further south than the site of a drawn struggle before the 
 mouth of the Mohawk. And already the American irregu- 
 lars, on hearing of the British difficulties, had gathered 
 and grown in number; they were at last near double the 
 invading force, and September was ending. The woods 
 were full of colour as Burgoyne's little army fell back - 
 but a few miles, yet back; an irresolution was upon it, 
 because advance was no longer possible, and yet a full 
 
150 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 retreat would mean the failure of all the large plan of 
 England. There was a rally, a success, a failure, and the 
 loss of guns. With October they were beneath the heights 
 of Saratoga. Certain supplies attempted to reach them 
 by crossing the river ; the far bank was found to be held by 
 the increasing forces of rebellion. 
 
 It was determined to abandon the effort and to retire - 
 at last, but too late. The road to the lakes was blocked; 
 more guns were lost; the enemy were gathering and still 
 gathering, a random farmer militia whom such an entan- 
 glement tempted: they were soon four to one. An attempt 
 at relief by the little force down river from New York 
 had failed. On the 12th of October, a Sabbath, the 
 harassed army reposed. On the 13th a Monday, Burgoyne 
 ordered an exact return of forces, forage, and supply; some 
 five thousand were to be found, but not four thousand men 
 could stand to roll-call armed; not two thousand of these 
 were British; perhaps a week's supply remained; of all 
 his park thirty-five pieces alone were left to him. He 
 called a council, to which every officer above the rank of 
 lieutenant was summoned, and that afternoon the pro- 
 posals to treat were drawn -up and despatched; by ten, 
 Gates, in command of the American force, had sent in 
 his reply. Tuesday and Wednesday were taken up in 
 the terms of an honourable surrender not exactly ob- 
 served. On Thursday, the 16th, these terms were signed, 
 and on that day, that repeated day the 16th of October, 
 the keystone of the British plan in North America had 
 crumbled, and the strong arch of a wise strategy was ruined. 
 
 It was but a small force that surrendered in those lonely 
 hills to a herd of irregulars. The causes of the failure 
 were many, tedious, gradual, and therefore obscure; but the 
 
THE THREE YEARS 151 
 
 effect was solemn and of swelling volume. It roused the 
 colonies ; it slowly echoed across the Atlantic ; it changed the 
 face of Europe. 
 
 The French Court, at the moment of that surrender in 
 the woods three thousand miles away, sat at Fontainebleau, 
 decided for pleasure. 
 
 Goltz, watching all things there for the King of Prussia, 
 
 his master, wrote (on that very day) that the French had 
 
 let their moment slip : England was now secure, he thought 
 
 -for one of the great weaknesses of Prussia is that, like 
 
 self-made men, jshe has no instinct for fate. - 
 
 Florida Blanco (upon the very day that Burgoyne's 
 troops piled arms) was writing from Madrid to Vergennes 
 that "the two courts" (of France and Spain) "should do 
 all to avoid cause of complaint on the part of Great Britain 
 at such a time." 
 
 Vergennes himself, gloomily alone amid the foolish 
 noise of Fontainebleau, in the sweat of late hours and gam- 
 ing, thus abandoned by Spain and seeing his hopes of the 
 Spanish alliance going down, wrote (on that same 16th of 
 October, the day that Burgoyne's troops piled arms!): 
 "The Ministers of England think her the mistress of 
 the world. . . . My patience has been hard tried 
 . . . true, the two (Bourbon) crowns must go warily. 
 . . . I hope the constraint may end, but I have no wish 
 for war. ... I only ask that England shall not com- 
 pel us to do what she dares not do herself, that is, to 
 treat these Americans as pirates and outlaws." 
 
 In such a mood of despondence and of anxiety the French 
 Foreign Office awaited the first blow England might choose 
 to deliver; in such a mood of reluctance and fear Spain 
 refused to declare herself on the side of the French should 
 
152 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 England choose to strike; and in such a tension Western 
 Europe stood for one week, another, and a third, when, 
 early in November, came the first rumours of the truth. 
 How they came it is impossible to determine. They came 
 before known or common methods could have brought them ; 
 they came before true news, like a shadow or a presage. 
 On the 7th of November Vergennes had written to 
 Noailles of a hint of some English defeat, "not too much 
 to be trusted." On the 15th he was wondering at the 
 insistence of the English ministers upon their Pennsylvanian 
 successes, at the English silence upon the Hudson march. 
 As the month wore on, as the English insistence grew 
 gentler, the English silence more profound, Vergennes 
 determined his final policy; but even as he was drawing up 
 his memorandum in favour of recognition to be granted 
 to, and of alliance to be concluded with, the United 
 States, on the 4th of December, and before this document 
 was signed, full news came and all was known. The 
 4th of December is a day propitious for arms; it is the 
 gunners' festival. 
 
 The issue was not long in doubt. Upon the 5th, the 
 story and consequence of Saratoga were drawn up and 
 despatched on every side. Upon the 6th, the fateful 
 document calling the American delegates to an audience 
 with Louis was submitted to that King, and he wrote in 
 his little sloping hand at the foot of it that word "approuve," 
 which you may still read. 
 
 Upon the 8th, Franklin at Passy drafted, Deane, Lee, 
 and he also signed, their memorable acceptance. The 
 days that followed, to the end of '77 and beyond it, were 
 occupied in nothing more than the confirmation of this 
 revolution in policy, and it was certain that by the 
 
THE THREE YEARS 153 
 
 New Year the French Crown would support the Rebellion 
 in arms. 
 
 Such were the three years in which the seeds of the Queen's 
 tragedy were sown : they were sown deep. The stock of her 
 disaster was established in a vigorous soil; but during the 
 silent period of its growth, before the plant had come to 
 its evil maturity, a few deceitful years were still to hide 
 from her the sequence of her fate. For the two glories of 
 life were upon her, victory and the birth of children. 
 
 In common with all her Court the Queen could now, in 
 the hale winter of '77-'78, imagine herself upon the thresh- 
 old of a new and fruitful life. Her chief anxiety was now 
 dispelled, for she might await securely the advent of an 
 heir. Her vivacity and her distractions seemed now as 
 harmless as her habit of changing pleasures was now fixed; 
 her casual but active excursions into public affairs had 
 now in her husband's eyes an excuse or motive they for- 
 merly had lacked, and her political interference, though 
 utterly without plan, was even destined to achieve for a 
 moment a peculiar, if deceptive, success. 
 
 This period of her life ends with a scene which the reader 
 may well retain, for it sums up the change; a scene which 
 forms the happy conclusion of so much unrest and the 
 introduction to a brief, a most uncertain, but while it 
 lasted an enlarged and a conquering time. 
 
 The new year had come. The winter festivities of 
 early '78 were at their height awaiting their end at the 
 approaching carnival. It was the 21st of January a date 
 thrice of great moment to the French people and the 
 Queen was holding a ball (characteristically hers) in the 
 
154 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 palace. There was a fuller life that evening, in the glare 
 of a thousand candles, than had yet been known; a more 
 continuous and a more vivacious noise of laughter and of 
 music. Paris had come more largely than usual; there were 
 many strangers, and the air seemed full of an exultant con- 
 ciliation. Upon this joy and movement there fell a sud- 
 den silence; it was a silence the Queen well comprehended 
 and had expected too, for Provence, coming straight from 
 the Council, had entered the room and had given her the 
 message she awaited. The message was repeated, whis- 
 pered first, then louder and more eager questions and 
 replies were everywhere heard; voices rose louder: young 
 Artois openly cheered. 
 
 The English ambassador had turned at the unusual 
 scene and knew its meaning; he despatched to his Govern- 
 ment that night the news that the Independence of the 
 United States had been recognised and orders to the French 
 navy signed. 
 
 What followed may be briefly told. In somewhat over 
 a fortnight the treaty of recognition and of alliance with 
 the new Republic was concluded. The approaching affair 
 with England began to equal, very soon it wholly sur- 
 passed, in interest and peril the petty Bavarian quarrel, 
 and though war was not formally declared, French ships 
 were in February already attacked by English. In mid- 
 March the treaty was notified by the French Ambassador 
 in London to the Prime Minister of England; forty-eight 
 hours later Lord Stormont at Versailles, had demanded 
 and received his papers. A month of preparation passed. 
 
 At last, upon Easter Sunday (the 19th of April in that year) 
 two couriers riding crossed each other at the royal gate of 
 
THE THREE YEARS 157 
 
 Versailles the one reaching,. the other leaving, the palau'an 
 He that drew rein and was ending his journey bore great" 
 news : D'Estaing had sailed from Toulon with twenty ships 
 of the line, and the campaign was opened. He that set 
 spurs and was but just beginning his post bore great news 
 also, for he had upon him that letter (it is still preserved) 
 in which Marie Antoinette told her mother that now she 
 was certainly with child. 
 
154 
 
 VII 
 
 THE CHILDREN 
 
 EASTER SUNDAY, APRIL 19, 1778, TO MONDAY, OCTOBER 22, 1781 
 
 THE expectation of an heir, the Queen's ascendancy 
 over her husband, the promise of adventurous 
 war, proceeded with the year. Meanwhile the 
 little business of Bavaria somewhat marred the hopes of 
 the now renewed and invigorated monarchy. It is a 
 business history should make little of; hardly a combat 
 I rather a diplomatic rupture soon arranged. It covered 
 the year exactly it was settled with the close of it ; but it 
 had its significance in the Queen's life, for her political 
 action in it confirmed and extended the popular idea that 
 Marie Antoinette was treasonable to French interests in the 
 department of foreign affairs. 
 
 The most apparent thing of that moment was the new cer- 
 titude and strength of the Queen now that she was to be a 
 mother. Her love of change became less frivolous, more 
 mixed with character; her old passionate friendships, her 
 appetite for colour of every kind in jewels, in fantasies, 
 in voices took on some depth and permanence. Even 
 her interference with public affairs was no longer the mere 
 whim that had been the bane of Turgot: it had objects; 
 those objects were pursued, though they were personal and 
 unwise. Unfortunately her mother and Mercy persuaded 
 her, just as her strength appeared, not to the aggrandise- 
 ment of her husband's throne, but to the mere fending 
 
 156 
 
THE CHILDREN 157 
 
 off Prussia from Maria Theresa's land in the Bavarian 
 quarrel. There arose concerning her action a swarm of 
 whispers, voices not yet of moment, though numerous in the 
 taverns and clear at Court. 
 
 The Elector of Bavaria had died while Versailles and 
 all the Court were in the height of their absorption in the 
 American Rebellion; just in that last December which was 
 full of the first active approach of Vergennes towards the 
 American envoys. The passing of the Electorate to another 
 branch of the family, and that branch childless, or rather 
 lacking direct legitimate issue, threw the musty anarchy 
 of German archives open to the lawyers; they were rum- 
 maged and a dust arose. The various fragments out of 
 which the old Duchy and the newer Electorate Were pieced 
 together found claimants everywhere, and the two heads of 
 antagonism were necessarily Vienna and Berlin: Berlin, 
 which would support the heir to the old Duchy at a 
 price; Vienna, which would protect the reigning Elector 
 for the reversion on doubtful pleas of inheritance 
 to some half of the mosaic over which he ruled. 
 
 There was here no plain conscience of civilised right 
 against a northern and blundering atheism such as had 
 earlier supported the defence of Maria Theresa against the 
 too successful cynicism of Frederick the Great. The 
 ambitions of Joseph were the ambitions of a philosopher; 
 they were at least as empty and by no means as thorough 
 as the soldierly ambitions of his opponent, the King of 
 Prussia: the injury was mutual, the contempt of justice 
 equal, for Joseph was a pupil of Frederick's in wrong-doing. 
 To each, however, the complex little territorial quarrel 
 seemed of secular magnitude. Maria Theresa was mad- 
 dened with anxiety and wrote, so maddened, despairing 
 
158 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 appeals to her daughter at Versailles. Mercy moved all 
 his persuasion to persuade the intervention of France. 
 Vergennes as resolutely refused to be involved, England 
 was approaching Austria, to the detriment, it was hoped, 
 of the Bourbons, the whole weight of diplomatic thought 
 was at work, and Europe was warned and threatened with 
 incredible futures as one or the other of the two enemies 
 armed for the acquisition of a titular sovereignty over the 
 tortuous and overlapping boundaries of a feudal ruin. 
 Such were the petty concerns of statesmen and even of 
 demagogues in a year when the young men who were to 
 fight at Valmy were already boys. The politicians 
 wrangled over the Bavarian succession as we to-day wrangle 
 over colonial things, imagining them to contain the future 
 fate of Europe. 
 
 The Queen at first did little. Mercy complained of her 
 detachment. She was occupied in the greater matter of 
 her maternity, passing all the time of the first leaves and 
 the early summer rains in quietude at Marly; she would 
 have no Court about her, and when she wrote to Maria 
 Theresa it was perpetually of the child. That seclusion and 
 that hope so much attached to her the new affection 
 and the new pride of Louis that when at last she spoke 
 to him, and spoke with increasing violence, for her family 
 and for Vienna, she largely accomplished her aim. She 
 did not intend to involve the Foreign Office - - Vergennes 
 was apparently immovable but so great was now her 
 influence with Louis that by autumn she did obtain a 
 tardy intervention, and until she obtained it she showed 
 in every way her determination to be heard. The first acts 
 of war in July moved her to countermand a feast at Trianon ; 
 during August she frequently disturbed the Council by her 
 
MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 From the principal bust at Versailles 
 
THE CHILDREN 159 
 
 presence. In September she put forward an uncertain 
 proposal for mediation. It was refused, and her anger 
 added to the difficulties of the French Crown. But she 
 did obtain the forgotten act was to re-arise, enormous, 
 at her scaffold she did obtain a subsidy. Treaty 
 demanded it: it had been refused: the whole duty of the 
 Bourbon Crown was to watch finance yet fifteen mil- 
 lion went to Austria. The taverns made it a whole con- 
 voy of gold; there were songs against the Queen, accus- 
 ing her of "paying out French gold." Older and worse 
 stories about her were revived. The printed obsceni- 
 ties from London and Amsterdam began to flow. 
 The set at Court which had called her openly "the Aus- 
 trian" before her accession, and since her accession had in 
 secret still so called her, passed on the term to the street, 
 and the nickname was common in Paris before the end 
 of the year. 
 
 All these things she had forgotten before the winter 
 closed upon her, and her hour approached. They were 
 indeed little things; seedlings. Much greater was the 
 coming of an heir and Fersen's return. 
 
 He had come back late in August. The moment she 
 had seen him, with his tall, upstanding gait and serious 
 eyes, she came forward and reminded him (and those 
 about her) of his old acquaintance he was a friend. 
 The lad was still quite young; here was she now a woman, 
 and the effect of four years, changing her so greatly in body 
 had less changed him in body ; it had less changed her in 
 heart. For as the days fell shorter and autumn lapsed into 
 winter, his rare and brief notes betray the growing charm of 
 
160 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 the woman who perpetually remembered him. All through 
 the months of the cold, through the time of her approaching 
 childbirth, and through the gaieties of the new year that 
 succeeded, he remained. Many noted her visage and her 
 tone, once especially when she sang and looked at him 
 during her singing. At last he also when in April he 
 left the Court, bitten with the gallant adventure of Amer- 
 ica, like so many of his rank he also had understood. 
 She followed him perpetually with her eyes; she followed 
 him as he left her rooms again for the last time, and it was 
 noted that there were tears in her eyes. A wealthy 
 woman rallied Fersen as he left upon his conquest; he 
 was now old enough to deny gravely that any woman of 
 that Court had deigned to consider him: having so denied 
 it he was gone. 
 
 As for the Queen, she wrote or spoke of him in 
 public as a young nobleman only, now known and 
 worthy of advancement, and since she kept the rest strictly 
 in her heart no emphasis here of that which lay at the 
 root of her life would give it dignity or value in these pages. 
 Yet throughout these pages the name of Fersen should 
 be the chief name. 
 
 He was gone for five more years after so brief a sight 
 of new things. 
 
 Meanwhile the Court awaited the birth of an heir. 
 
 There was a murmur all around. Monsieur had writ- 
 ten frankly enough to the King of Sweden that his hope 
 of the succession was gone. The Court was transformed, 
 and Marie Antoinette especially was a new power: the 
 light calumnies were grown heavy now; the ryenge_or 
 
THE CHILDREN 161 
 
 personal touches was becoming a State affair; a weight of 
 office was upon her, for she was now to be half the Crown 
 and the true wife of a King who governed, and the mother 
 of a King after him. 
 
 It was on the 19th of December, in the very early 
 hours long before dawn, that her husband was warned: 
 in the forenoon her travail began. 
 
 I liave said that the French Monarchy was a sacramen- 
 tal and therefore a public thing. The last act of its 
 public ritual was about to be accomplished; for the last 
 time it rose to the mystical duties of its office and dared to 
 mix with the nation, not as a person, but as an Institution 
 for whom, being immortal, peril was nothing, and, being im- 
 personal, decency and comfort nothing. Could it have so 
 dared again it would have been saved, but it did not dare. 
 
 The populace demanded admittance to the birth, and 
 were admitted in the ancient way. The square room in 
 which the Queen lay, upon a low little camp-bed before the 
 fire, was crowded in a moment; upon the carved marble of 
 the chimney-piece two street arabs were seen climbing. 
 The market-women were there, mixed with the ladies of the 
 Court, and a great press of the poor from the streets had 
 found an entry and were packed also upon the great stairs 
 outside. Everything was a-buzz and a-tiptoe, questioning, 
 craning for the news; the market-women commiserated 
 and complained; the ladies-in-waiting stood silent, each 
 estimating the event the change there would be at 
 Court, the strong place the King would now hold, and above 
 all, the new power of the mother the little heir, the boy 
 who should dispossess Monsieur, exile Artois perhaps, and 
 recapture the heart of the crowds to the Bourbon name. 
 
 For some critical moments there was a silence. 
 
162 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 Vermond (the tutor's brother), who was her doctor, or 
 her midwife, had ordered every crevice to be closed. Even 
 the chinks of the window had paper gummed to them. 
 In such an air and under such an ordeal the Queen fainted. 
 Louis in a passion of sense thrust his arm through a 
 pane of glass and let in the winter cold; Vermond lanced 
 a vein, and with the bleeding and the fresh draught of air 
 the Queen returned to life. They told her that the child 
 was a girl. 
 
 There were great crowds at her churching and some 
 eagerness. The Latin Quarter was impassable with folk 
 as her coach crawled up the hill towards the shrine of Ste. 
 Genevieve. The square in front of the Cathedral was 
 very full but they lacked a Dauphin. The King was 
 glad enough. When, upon Christmas Eve, the child had 
 grasped his finger, he had told his pleasure to all. Her 
 name and godparents, her household and her future were 
 discussed as solemn things. But in Versailles the air was 
 dull with anti-climax; they had depended upon, or braced 
 themselves for, or begun their intrigue against, a son of 
 France and none was there. 
 
 The little girl who thus was born alone survived. Her 
 brothers perished the heir in prison; her father and 
 her mother both were publicly destroyed. She lived. 
 The country house of her old age I w T ell remember, a sol- 
 emn and lonely place, small and grey and deep in the 
 woods --long empty. It fell into ruins, was sold for 
 stone, and a road driven over it ; but after nightfall horses 
 refused to pass the place, and legends of darkness clung to 
 the last blood of the Bourbons. 
 
THE CHILDREN 163 
 
 It was but the close of January when the Queen returned 
 from La Muette and her churching to Versailles and the 
 disappointment of Versailles. It was just a year from the 
 ball-room scene that had meant war with the English. 
 That year had done nothing but maintain the struggle to 
 the surprise and encouragement of the French Ministry; 
 it had done no more, but even that was much. The naval 
 actions had been at the worst indecisive, the English com- 
 munications along the rebel coast were now in perpetual 
 jeopardy, and would so remain until a French fleet was 
 destroyed: none was destroyed. Even an attempt to 
 blockade the French in Boston harbour had failed, and in 
 November D'Estaing had slipped away from Byron under 
 the advantage of a storm. Of all the operations of that 
 year perhaps the most momentous to history was the 
 chance and inconclusive fight of July in the Atlantic, for 
 it gave the Queen occasion to doubt the courage of Chartres 
 and to ridicule it: and Chartres, soon to be Orleans, found 
 his growing hatred of her fixed forever. 
 
 As for her, she kept her carnival, the carnival of 1779. 
 Her less light purpose now earned her reproaches far more 
 deep than those which had pursued her first childless years ; 
 but in her new hopes she could forget them, and her much 
 rarer omissions did not remain in her mind. She did not 
 see how solidly the foundations of her fate were being laid 
 in the dark, and how every trivial folly was her foe ; no act 
 of hers proved great enough to destroy the last effect of 
 these trivial follies. 
 
 She went to the Opera-ball on Shrove Tuesday with the 
 King it was a folly (they said) to leave Versailles so 
 soon. v " She went without him a week later it was a folly 
 tcTgcf alone. That night, her coach breaking down, she 
 
 
164 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 must take a public fly a piece of common sense. She 
 spoke of the adventure, and it pleased her hugely, but the 
 populace twisted it into I know not what adventures, 
 repeated and enlarged in a thousand ways. 
 
 When in April the measles incommoded her, she must 
 retire to Trianon for a month it was common sense; 
 but it was "breaking roof" with the King and therefore 
 a lesion in the constant etiquette of the Crown. She took 
 with her her young sister-in-law, Madame Elizabeth, 
 whom she had once petulantly avoided, and now, saner, 
 loved; and Madame de Lamballe was there too. It was 
 common sense; but her absence from the Court was hate- 
 ful, was an insult to the courtiers, and the presence at the 
 Trianon during the day of four gentlemen, her friends, 
 was more hateful still. The lies poured out in a printed 
 stream from London; and the Paris coffee-shops, and the 
 drawing-rooms too, had now woven round her an enduring 
 legend of debauchery more real than things witnessed or 
 heard. The calumny was fixed. 
 
 If a moment must be chosen of which one can say that 
 it was the decisive moment in her public ill-repute, the 
 moment before which that repute was yet fluid, the mo- 
 ment after which it was set, then that moment must be 
 found in this summer of her twenty-fourth year, 1779. 
 It was an effect coming well after its cause : the high tide of 
 a wave that the first reckless three years had raised. 
 
 It may be asked -whether, had some shock or some neces- 
 sity wholly changed her, had she given up every lightness 
 as she had already given up most excesses, she might not 
 yet have warded off the approaches of a distant judg- 
 ment. No, she could not. The character of the attack 
 upon her she could have modified ; but she could only have 
 
 
THE CHILDREN ' 165 
 
 diminished its volume by increasing its intensity, or its 
 rapidity by extending its already almost universal vogue: 
 she could not have escaped it. The most sober actions 
 of that enthusiastic nature would now for ever be criticised./ 
 Had no money gone on slight pleasures, the money spent 
 in every error of foreign policy would have been put downV 
 to her; every unpopular dismissal she was to be guilty of, j 
 innocent or no, and her name was to be, in every story of 
 intrigue, however incredible, pre-judged. She was destined, 
 henceforward, to be forgotten in victory and remembered 
 in defeat, nor could anything have saved her save a sudden 
 comprehension of France. No God revealed it to her, and 
 to the general protest that was rising beneath her came 
 accident after accident, some hardly of her doing, some 
 not at all, but every one pointing towards the single issue 
 of her fate, not one in aid of her. 
 
 The nights of August were hot and the early autumn 
 also. The customary tours of the Court had been coun- 
 termanded to save money. The princesses walked at 
 evening and mingled with the crowd on the terrace of the 
 palace, where was the band. It gave scandal. It gave 
 scandal that she should walk later with Artois. It gave 
 most scandal that Madame de Polignac, with her refined 
 and silent face, her gentle deep-blue eyes under that dark 
 hair - a type not national should so entirely possess 
 the Queen. 
 
 The Polignac clique demanded and obtained on every 
 side. It was a double evil: a proof to the Court that the 
 aristocracy as a whole were excluded from favour and 
 that a faction ruled; a proof to the nation that, at 
 a time when finance was the known burden, and when^ 
 in the midst of prosperity, a permanent crisis weighed 
 
 s 
 
166 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 on the impatient poor and the public forces alike, the 
 executive, the King, could blindly spend money and 
 endow every Polignac claim. The sums involved in 
 this patronage of the Polignacs, as in every other public 
 extravagance of the French, were small. The debts of a 
 Pitt or a Fox were far larger, the luxury of our modern 
 money-dealers are mountainous compared to them; but 
 they fell on a nation wholly egalitarian, unused to and 
 intolerant of government by the wealthy, and a nation 
 which regarded (and regards) its government as the prin- 
 cipal engine to use against the rich, not in their aid. 
 
 Trianon, not enormous in its cost, grew to be yet another 
 legend, and that legend was not diminished when, in the 
 summer of 1780, a little theatre was opened there, a little 
 stage for the Queen. 
 
 All the world did such things ! None could blame her 
 yet all did. After all, one great house after another had 
 put up its show most of them more costly than hers : 
 but there was in her gradual extension of the amusement 
 something that aggrandised it and made it a public talk; 
 her invitation to the great Paris companies of actors, her 
 very seclusion at first, with its opportunity for rumour, 
 later her open doors, swelled the comment and the offence 
 of Paris. Paris detested the private theatre from the 
 first. There was in it a mixture of carelessness for the 
 /State and of personal abasement which it could not tolerate 
 fin a French Queen; yet how simple was the distraction to 
 her, and how could the subtleties of these Paris critics, 
 themselves the best actors in the world, deriding acting 
 and despising it, be comprehensible to her ? She played on. 
 
 The King came often. He applauded. She permitted 
 in this year 1780 at least no one but the royal family 
 
THE CHILDREN 167 
 
 to witness her from the audience . . . but the parts were 
 many and needed many players. She made dull Campan, 
 her librarian, manage for her; she gave no place in the dis- 
 traction to those who thought their presence about her to 
 be a most solemn right and duty. In the autumn to the 
 acting she must add singing, though her voice was not 
 always in tune and was often displeasing in its lack of 
 volume. Stage parts demanded stage lovers, and hear- 
 ing this, Mercy in his turn opposed. He came at her 
 invitation (but he insisted on being hidden behind the 
 lattice of a box), he applauded her acting somewhat, was 
 courtier-like to her singing but he disapproved. 
 
 Silent, a little bent, low-voiced, a man of but fifty-three 
 - though seemingly older Mercy was now at tl^e hpj.ofoL 
 of that long career during wtich for twenty-two years he 
 was Austria itself permanently present before Marie 
 Antoinnette, a spy over her for her mother's sake and 
 for her own, a devoted servant of the Hapsburgs and 
 Lorraine. 
 
 His nobility was of the Empire: a Belgian from Liege, 
 a man without nationality, and with no comprehension 
 of the rising religion of patriotism, he had from his child- 
 hood formed part of that cosmopolitan soldiery which was 
 the shield of Maria Theresa; he lived for that Great Lady 
 who maintained him in his embassy, and in his manner and 
 tradition he maintained the character it had had under 
 his master, Kaunitz. 
 
 He had passed all his early manhood in that splendid 
 riverside house in Paris which the dandyism of the great 
 diplomatist his teacher had demanded. His youth 
 reserved, awkward and probably laborious had left him 
 very observant. He had adopted for life all the externals 
 
168 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 of the Parisians, but with the narrowness of his profes- 
 sion he had failed to see that inmost part of them 
 which was so soon to launch the tempest of wars against 
 all that bunch of private interests on which he depended, 
 and to destroy it. The French Crown was nothing to him, 
 and whether in Paris, at Versailles, or down river in his 
 great country house at Conflans, the French nation left him 
 careless. He was lord of a French manor in Lorraine, of 
 another near his chateau on the river. His wines were 
 French, and marvellous, and cellared in 15,000 bottles, 
 which the peasants of the Oise drank for him joy- 
 fully in '92 nothing more saddened the old man in his 
 exile when the Revolution was on. 
 
 His horses were superb. Even of coachmen he boasted 
 two each beautiful and large; each equal in domestic 
 rank. 
 
 Unmarried, he maintained with dignity an opera-singer 
 of some fame and of the refinement customary in that trade; 
 at the close of his life he left upon record their "close and 
 rooted friendship." 
 
 Such was the man who for nine years had watched his 
 princess as she grew to womanhood and at last to mother- 
 hood at the French Court, and for nine years had sent 
 those long, regular, and careful letters to Maria Theresa 
 which are now our source for quite half the history of the 
 place and time. His life also was at a crisis and a change in 
 this year of 1780, for in the autumn of it his great sovereign 
 died. 
 
 Maria Theresa was sixty-three. She was still vigorous 
 in body, powerful in voice, alert in brahvJbut for many years 
 a great melancholy had not abandoned her. She had con- 
 tinually contemplated her husband's tomb; her letters to 
 
THE CHILDREN 169 
 
 her children, and especially to the Queen of France, were 
 full at the last of an approaching silence. The Bavarian 
 trouble had broken her ; in the long expectation of a grandson 
 to the French throne she had been disappointed ; the future 
 of her daughter had terrified her for she saw the 
 gulf. It was upon the 24th of November that she felt 
 her fatal illness; until the 29th she wrote and dic- 
 tated her affairs of State, and on that very date wrote at 
 length to the Queen. Then she saw Death coming visibly; 
 she staggered into a chair, and with words of rational 
 charity upon her lips she died. 
 
 It was a week - - Wednesday, the 6th of December 
 before the news could reach Versailles. It came at evening. 
 Marie Antoinette saw suddenly receding, as the sea had 
 receded from Lisbon at her birth, the principal aspect of 
 her life. The memory of her mother, and the constant 
 letters scolding, anxious, loving, or imperious had been 
 her only homely thing where everything around her had 
 been alien and increasingly alien. Her mother for nine 
 years, her mother and Mercy's voice, had been tangible: q 
 all the rest was strange. That deep inner part which she 
 did not or could not show, which she herself perhaps did 
 not know, and which appeared but three times upon the 
 surface of her life, rose through its eager and not profound 
 levels of sense. Her whole frame was broken; she spat 
 blood. She put herself that hour in black of every kind 
 disordered, and she met the coming year charged with a 
 sorrow that could now never wholly leave her. \But that 
 year_was^to gjye- her the two chief things of that phase in 
 her life the newof a successfulbattle and the birth of a 
 
 son; and a third the wom^nMotte, througlTwhom 
 the chief of her evils were to come upon her. 
 
 
170 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 Far off in Virginia, La Fayette lay at Richmond with a 
 handful of men. Cornwallis made a dash for him and 
 failed, marched back, burning and plundering, to the coast, 
 received a confused tangle of orders, entered Yorktown 
 and awaited the English fleet. Washington had heard how 
 Grasse in the West Indies would sail with the French fleet; 
 he marched southward to join the French commanders. 
 With him was young Fersen, who for so long had not seen 
 France and who was there volunteered for America: with 
 him also was Rochambeau and all his men, and they hurried 
 to victory together through the wet, heavy summer of 1781 
 along the Atlantic plain. 
 
 Meanwhile in Versailles nothing w T as toward. The 
 Court had lost its old gaiety in the stress of the war and of 
 the " economies." The Queen awaited and implored a son. 
 The Emperor, coming in July 1781, for the second time 
 to a country he despised, "found much improvement," was 
 entertained at Trianon, and went away. It was August, 
 hot, drowsy, and silent; it was September, and an intense 
 anxiety for the birth now at last, if it might be of 
 an heir. 
 
 And as that September passed, two things came into 
 this strange life upon which so many varied things arose 
 and joined darkly in their dates; each accident was quite 
 unknown to the Queen. 
 
 The first was this, that th_J^ritish fleet coming up to 
 save Corirsjiallis^ found Grasse-^alrgaSy within the bay, 
 was b&ten off, and with it the chance of succour; so that 
 La Fayette and Washington .meeting could and did, 
 just as the month e^ded, lay^siege. 
 
 The second was this : that up in the mountains of Alsace, 
 a lady, a friend, introduced a younger lady and a poor one 
 
THE CHILDREN 171 
 
 to the notice of the Bishop of Strasburg. He was that 
 coadjutor to the see, now succeeded to it, whom Marie 
 Antoinette had seen as a child the first to meet her in 
 France after her crossing of the Rhine. He was now 
 the Grand Almoner, and was spending the end of the hot 
 season in his palace of Saverne. It was thus that the 
 woman La Motte first touched her victim, the Cardinal 
 de Rohan. And it so happened that the Cardinal de 
 Rohan, who had been the first to greet the Queen on her 
 passage of the Rhine as a child, now aspired to be her lover, 
 or as his fatuous misconception of her would have put 
 it "one of her lovers." She for her part had resolutely, 
 avoided him. He was odious to her. Upon his ambition) 
 and credulity this woman La Motte was to play. 
 
 It had been upon April 25 that Cornwallis in the 
 Carolinas had broken camp and started northward, to 
 conquer and to hold the central seaports of the rebels, as 
 he had conquered and held Charlestown. .On the 20th of 
 May his two hundred miles were marched, and he had 
 joined the troops in Virginia. 
 
 That march was not followed in Versailles and even 
 had it been followed, nothing would have been thought of its 
 progress. The war had lingered so long, the issue had so 
 dragged that no chance could be foreseen, and the tangle 
 of those wildernesses without roads, hardly with towns, was 
 beyond European imagining. They knew that young La 
 Fayette was still desolate somewhere there they knew no 
 more. Fersen if more than his bright image came to 
 her, if rumours of his letters home could come to her 
 must have given the woman who remembered him something 
 
172 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 of his own lassitude: cooped up as was that Swede in 
 New England, without supplies, without money, cursing 
 the Americans, telling the French Cabinet they were masters 
 of folly, saying the Southern States were conquered by the 
 British, and complaining with a Northern complaint of the 
 indiscipline of the French. But there was greater business 
 to engage attention at Versailles; the Queen was again 
 
 f with child ; and JNecker, failing at the vast financial tangle, 
 had fallen. 
 
 Just as Cornwallis and the army in Virginia met to 
 complete the war, Necker had been sent back from his 
 command of the exchequer to those private 'and less 
 reputable dealings with which the Puritan was more 
 familiar and at which he was more successful than in the 
 /financing of a military nation. The Queen, who had not 
 
 I driven him forth at all, who would have had him remain, 
 was blamed because she did not save him. Trie rising 
 Democratic opinion of Paris had already vaguely begun to 
 favour Necker's ineptitude : he was a foreigner ; he had no 
 faith (save the Genevese mask) ; he was novel, he was 
 a change he was therefore demanded, and his dishonesty 
 
 /was not comprehended; yet that dishonesty was even 
 
 then about to cost some price to the French State, for 
 by his counsel and after his dismissal appeared that 
 first sham Exchequer Statement to deceive the nation, 
 to cajole it into a loan, to embitter it for the future; and 
 the blame of the trick was to fall on the Crown and not on 
 him, its author. 
 
 It was October, 1781: Cornwallis was surrounded in 
 Yorktown : the British fleet had failed to relieve him and 
 
THE COUNTESS OF PROVENCE 
 
 From the bust at Versailles 
 
OFTHE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF 
 
THE CHILDREN 173 
 
 the siege advanced; the parallels were opened; they 
 were firing at six hundred yards, and Cornwallis still held 
 on. The third week, and they were firing at three hundred: 
 two redoubts still forbade a nearer approach. On the 
 14th, the two redoubts were. carried by the French, and 
 next day came the storming. 
 
 The river lay near a mile broad behind Yorktown: he 
 might yet cross to Gloucester; his guns were dismantled 
 and his force shattered, more by sickness than by fire, 
 but he made the attempt, and the wind defeated him. Upon 
 that ominous Friday, the 19th, he laid down his arms, and 
 England had lost the war. By an accident native to linger- 
 ing campaigns, a series of chances and one coincidence at 
 the end the entry of the French fleet had suddenly 
 determined the issue: the young boys of the French Court, 
 heretofore grumbling and themselves disliked, were sud- 
 denly become heroes; the colonists, "half savages," "mostly 
 traitors to the English," were suddenly become "the athletes 
 of Liberty" ; many in England and all the Rivals of Eng- 
 land made up their minds that the business of England 
 was at an end. 
 
 It was Fersen, with his command of French and English, 
 who had negotiated that surrender. Soon he would return. 
 
 At Versailles that October Friday and the week-end 
 following it were still. For the few days the Court was 
 silent. The issue of the expected childbirth had been 
 debated or feared; it was now not mentioned in an 
 intensity of expectation. The morning of the Monday 
 that silence continued. The King had ordered his Hunt ; 
 
174 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 four of the carriages were already started; when he 
 bethought him before he left to see the Queen again. He 
 thought her to be in pain, and though she denied the pain, 
 he ordered the Hunt to return, and an unusual rumour 
 and press at once filled the great galleries. It was a little 
 after eleven o'clock when the passages and halls were full 
 of a gathering crowd, and the cold and splendid staircase 
 which made the royal life at Versailles a public thing, a 
 thing of the open air, were already crammed before noon 
 by a mob of the populace; but this time custom was dis- 
 dained and the doors were shut fast. Within the Queen 
 lay groaning on her pallet-bed before the fireplace, but there 
 was air around her: no such press as had all but killed 
 her three years before. Yet_that_ exclusion of the populace 
 .helped to kill the 
 
 At one o'clock a Swedish noble, chancing to be at the 
 Queen's door, was told the news. He was caught and electri- 
 fied by it as though he" had been of the French blood. He 
 turned to the first woman he met and said: "We have an 
 heir!" Now that woman happened to be Provence's wife, 
 and the scene her red anger and her disdain, his bewilder- 
 ment were taken up at once into the laughter of the 
 moment. All the world laughed or cried; it was like 
 the excitement of a great victory turning the tide of a dis- 
 astrous war. 
 
 The Queen, when she could speak, noting the silence 
 round her pallet, and hearing the noise without, said faintly 
 and smiling: "I have been a good patient. . . . Tell 
 me the truth." They were still silent, and she was sure 
 that another daughter had been born, till the King came 
 in and said to her: 
 
 "The Dauphin begs leave to come in." 
 
VIII 
 FIGARO 
 
 MONDAY, OCTOBER 22, 1781, TO APRIL 27, 1784 
 
 THE birth of an heir struck, as it seemed, an epoch 
 in the evident transformation of the Monarchy, 
 and in the increasing position which Marie Antoi- 
 nette occupied upon that scene; not that such a birth was 
 either unexpected or unlikely. The Court and the nation 
 had known for now three years that the royal family was 
 established; it was certain that children would now support 
 and surround the throne, and even in the preceding year 
 nothing but a natural accident had postponed the hope of 
 a prince. But the living presence of the child, the found- 
 ing of a secure succession within so short a period from 
 the earlier disappointment, had, as have all symbols, an 
 effect greater than that which calculable changes could 
 expect. 
 
 A wide popular enthusiasm, though later it was extin- 
 guished, did for the moment rise spontaneously to the 
 encouragement of Government, and that initiative which 
 the French had for centuries demanded and still demanded 
 from the custodians of their State was, as it were, thrust 
 into the hand of Louis. 
 
 Of all qualities in ruling that which this people will least 
 forgive is ease: n^4heirdelight at the news of a Dauphin, 
 France, and particularlyParis, implicitly urged td^energjT 
 if not the good-humoured and slow-thoughted man who 
 
 175 
 
176 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 was in theory the whole executive, at least the machinery 
 of which he was the centre. A new. phase of one sort or 
 another had certainly begun. 
 
 Sudden causes of change are never unaccompanied by 
 coincidence; allied forces invariably converge upon the 
 main cause of change and unite for a common effort. Three 
 such advancing supports synchronised in these last months 
 of 1781 the new aspect of the Austrian Alliance, the suc- 
 cess in America, and the death of old Maurepas, who since 
 the accession of Louis XVI., had presided at the Council. 
 Each of these accidents was singly powerful; in their com- 
 bination they were irresistible; and a moment of oppor- 
 tunity to which a man of rapid decision might have given 
 the greatest effect, was apparent even to Louis in the close 
 of that year. 
 
 The resnlt^of_Marifl. There t sa^sjdeath, am^ofjpseph II. 's 
 itircolilfoiled power in Austria^, had ^aoiffiL^niatured. The 
 naif J^rt^ersTsleTTtr^e^nuty of the Emperor towards the 
 Faith whose doctrines were in his little vision as bar- 
 baric as the Gothic architecture, and whose rapid elimination 
 from European culture he took for granted was, if not 
 the mainspring, at least the chief expression of that general 
 action whereby he imperilled his house and profoundly 
 modified the situation of Austria. His preparation to 
 rob and destroy the religious orders, his unconcealed con- 
 tempt for the ideal they represented, his similar pretension 
 that patriotism was a superstition, his petty but sincere 
 conviction that none save material benefits guided by 
 moral abstractions were of use to mankind in a word, his 
 despotic jjlheism culminated in an " Edict-of Toleration^" 
 which, when allowance is made for a century's development, 
 may be compared for its affront against the customs of his 
 
FIGARO 177 
 
 subjects to that which had cost James II. of England his 
 throne. In itself it had no bearing upon France and 
 was hardly heard of in that country, but it was a recanta- 
 tion of all that Maria Theresa had stood for; it meant 
 an open admiration for Frederick of Prussia, his method 
 and his principle; it argued a philosophy which would, not 
 reluctantly and of necessity, but eagerly and of set purpose, 
 overset old traditions and sacred landmarks that had 
 attempted the suppression of a national language in Hun- 
 gary, and was to suggest time and again as a simple solution 
 of political problems, the denial of all that for which men 
 have always been prepared to die. 
 
 This act, the precursor and the type of so many others 
 of his, was signed in Vienna during that same month of 
 October, 1781, which saw the happy delivery of his sister 
 at Versailles, and the culmination of the American War 
 upon the Chesapeake. Nay, these capital events fell 
 within one week. It was upon a Monday that the Edict 
 was promulgated, upon the following Monday that the 
 Dauphin was born, upon the Friday between that the Eng- 
 lish and German garrison in Yoj^townjaid^down. jts arms. 
 
 The success of the war in America, especially the dram- 
 atic finale ofCornwallis^s^urj^nder, had an effect upon 
 opinion in Paris which, though it was sudden and short, 
 was yet very powerful. The French, having of all nations 
 by far the most general experience of war, are slow to adven- 
 tures of such a kind as their intervention in America: the 
 Court had been especially slow; the King perhaps the 
 most reluctant of all --in the last peril of death he exclaimed 
 against the memory of that campaign. Once engaged, 
 therefore, if matters had gone ill (as the French troops in 
 America most characteristically swore they would go ill!), 
 
178 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 or even if a long and indefinite campaign had dragged 
 on through succeeding years, so that the full financial 
 effect of the struggle could have been felt before its close, 
 then the whole weight of blame would have fallen upon 
 Versailles. As it was, Yorktown came like the thrust of 
 a spur, and the Monarchy, doubtful as was its course, leapt 
 forward. 
 
 I The death of Maurepas was the last coincidence of these 
 three; it was as exactly synchronous and as full of effect 
 as either of its fellow accidents. The capitulation of Lord 
 Cornwallis was known in Paris precisely thirty-one 
 days after it had taken place. It was upon the 19th of 
 November, a Monday, that Louis had the news. The 
 Queen had not yet risen from child-bed. Louis was sit- 
 ting with her in her room when the Due de Lauzun was 
 announced, and gave the message that Yorktown had sur- 
 rendered. Upon the Wednesday following, De Maurepas 
 was dead. The importance of that passing lay in this, 
 that Louis, at such a juncture, now first attempted to be 
 free. 
 
 All men are chafed, and that perpetually, by what they 
 know of their own defects, and Louis could not forget, 
 from his accession onwards, that it was always in him to 
 yield to a quicker brain. He thought it shameful in a King. 
 He never yielded from weakness, but often from bewil- 
 derment. His own decision would come to him after he 
 had acted on the decision of another. He understood, 
 he desired to act, later than did his advisers: often so late 
 that, by the time his will was formed, occasion had passed. 
 If, when his slow judgment had matured, he found it dif- 
 ferent from tjfat upon which immediate action had been 
 taken, he was angered. If that immediate action had 
 
FIGARO 179 
 
 proved disastrous, he was secretly indignant that his slower 
 wit had not prevailed. But, stronger than all these reasons, 
 the mere instinct of the imperfect warned him to a distaste 
 of guidance. 
 
 He had, however, come to the throne a boy; in years but 
 twenty, in experience (save in the excellent art of horse- 
 manship) null. He had found ready to hand his old min- 
 ister, Maurepas, courteous, active, with a good though a 
 too facile judgment; a patriot whose career had been 
 ruined by the mistress of Louis XV. (in itself this was a 
 recommendation to the young King), and a courtier whom 
 his father, the Dauphin, had, upon his deathbed, pointed 
 out to be the true counterweight to the irreligion of Choiseul : 
 Louis XVI. had accepted such a guide and had upon the 
 whole not repented of his choice. For seven years the 
 young King had received the counsel of this old man; a 
 habit had been formed, and a strong affection with it. But 
 as Maurepas approached his end, as the gout forbade him 
 his former clearness of thought, and a continual confine- 
 ment interfered with his attendance at the Council, the 
 maturer judgment of Louis began, though secretly, to 
 assert itself. He showed for the depositary of so lengthy 
 a Court tradition a filial devotion; he would come in person, 
 and familiarly, to bring news to the old man's room 
 notably the news of the Dauphin's birth was so given, 
 domestically and alone. There subsisted between them 
 one of those intimate relations which so often arise between 
 the permanent official upon the one side, and the respon- 
 sible authority upon the other: it became a personal tie, 
 and when Maurepas died Louis would renew it with no one. 
 After some hesitation the King lit for a first minister upon 
 Vergennes, but he would not give to this new officer the 
 
180 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 official title; he was jealous of a fuller power which he now 
 proposed to exercise continuously and with a more direct 
 affirmation than in the past. Louis was incapable of the 
 task he so attempted, but if ever there was a time in the 
 reign when such a task could be attempted, this autumn 
 ind winter of 1781 was that time. 
 
 Here then was the field: a treasury embarrassed, but 
 , in appearance at least, by a frank audit for the 
 cooked accounts Necker had prepared before his dismissal 
 bore that aspect and title of a public audit ; great and unex- 
 pected success in a doubtful foreign war; a monarch 
 possessed of a power approaching that of a modern Cabi- 
 net, and now ready to experiment with that power; 
 abroad, Joseph II., who was the chief element of inter- 
 national politics and the national ally of France, had 
 entered upon a new direction of the Austrian House. Upon 
 such a field was to work the increasing influence of the 
 >ueen. 
 
 It is-lrtte-fehat a certain part of her repute was now fixed 
 fin public^opidbirrtEat she was extravagant, that she was 
 
 >und toiSv^trrrt^57~Tn^F~sEe^ ^was foreign. The legend 
 tad arisen in Paris, and no detail of her action, no appre- 
 ciation of complexity could easily alter the simple con- 
 clusions of the Parisian populace. But, on the other hand, 
 she was the mother of the heir, her position was stable 
 while the opinion of the capital was not so, and it did not 
 seem impossible that in the long course of years the great 
 and dumb national mass should be so indoctrinated in her 
 favour, as the growth of her children, an older judgment 
 in her, and perhaps a continued peace and a return to 
 prosperity, should restore the tradition of the monarchy, 
 or rather confirm it in its new characters. 
 
FIGARO 181 
 
 If the King was now ready to act and to reform the 
 State, Marie Antoinette was of far more influence with 
 him than ever she had been before. It was hers, if she 
 chose, to regulate the new phase of Government. She 
 did in part so choose, and she might have succeeded. 
 Her habits would, indeed, have continued her cards, 
 her theatre, her gems, her familiarity but all, as it 
 were, tinctured, accepted, taken with the life of the Court 
 and little affecting a new-found order. Had the problems 
 presented to her been of those that fitted her intuition 
 or experience, she might even then have lifted her fate. 
 For a year and for more than a year all 1782 and on 
 into 1783 the solidity of her position was assured; the 
 future was apparently prepared. A group of trifling in- 
 cidents passed her quite, or almost, unperceived in the 
 midst of an established leadership in Europe, of royal visits 
 that cemented a general alliance, and of accomplished 
 hopes ; another year passed, she was presented her influ- 
 ence being then at its height with the affair of the 
 Scheldt, a problem in which the interests of her Austrian 
 House clashed with that new patriotism which, least 
 of all things French, could she understand. She 
 blundered, she necessarily blundered; but as she looked 
 around to see what forces were left her, she found not 
 only the results of that blunder confronting her, but 
 an appalling menace proceeding from a direction wholly 
 unconnected with her life from the business of the 
 diamond necklace and beside it, grown suddenly quite 
 loud like an offensive chorus of disdain, the voice 
 of a writer whom she had half patronized and wholly 
 despised, frKp npgWWl yf"ce of Caron Bea""i archaic* hy 
 the beginning of '84 S one of those accidents the pen of 
 
182 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 Beaumarchais had shaken her influence and that of 
 all the Monarchy; by the end of '85 the other the affair 
 of the necklace had destroyed it. 
 
 The year 1782 opened upon the new gladness of the 
 Queen; her churching at Notre Dame (now customary) 
 was marked, if not by a vivid popular greeting yet by no 
 coldness. At the Hotel de Ville in the evening she met an 
 official and commercial world that was warmly hers; she 
 shared as warmly in the glories of the American news; 
 she would have driven home in her own carriage the wife 
 of La Fayette to show her enthusiasm for his triumph and 
 his return. Her ampler manner, her more contained and 
 settled bearing, was consonant with the position she had 
 gained; it promised her, in those who saw and approved 
 it among the magistracy of the city, a continuance and an 
 increase of influence. Back at Versailles she continued 
 without scandal, and yet at a fast-rising expenditure, the 
 habits which had now become permanently hers: new 
 fashions in dress perpetually changing and in head-dress, 
 cards to the small hours , and her private theatre at Trianon 
 still receiving her upon its stage to the applause now, not of 
 a half-dozen or so of the royal family, but of a full audience ; 
 many courtiers, many friends of friends, and even the offi- 
 cers of the Guard were permitted to see her painted behind 
 the foot-lights, to note her true rendering of vivacious parts, 
 and to accept when she sang her imperfectly-trained, 
 insufficient and somewhat violent voice. Of these regu- 
 lar dissipations the last was the most criticised, though 
 even that seemed by this time so normal that of itself it 
 did not lessen her growing power; but in distant connection 
 
1 OF 
 
 FIGARO 183 
 
 with her taste for such things there arose, and precisely 
 at this critical moment, a discussion which was largely to 
 affect her life: it was the discussion upon the "Mariage 
 de Fiaro' 
 
 de Figaro" was no great thing; it was a 
 well-written play from the pen of a man, now advanced in 
 middle age, whose diction and care for letters were typical of 
 his own time, but whose vices were entirely modern. Born 
 in a low position, his darting mind had carried him to a sort 
 of fluctuating eminence, especially in wit. He had taught 
 music to princesses, married an infatuated widow, adopted 
 her name of Beaumarchais, purchased some insignificant 
 post arid with it a nominal right to the "de" of nobility, 
 preserved his health, speculated, probably robbed, certainly 
 made and lost considerable sums, traversed and thoroughly 
 understood English society, repaid its hospitality by advanc- 
 ing the American cause in France, speculated upon the 
 commissariat of that campaign, rendered jealous years ago 
 the equally cynical Voltaire, and now, at fifty, was getting 
 talked of again in the matter of his new play. 
 
 He and it were little things to Marie Antoinette, but the 
 rumour of them was considerable, for, a few months before, 
 at the end of the past year, the King had heard that this 
 "Mariage de Figaro" was not tolerable. It was a satire 
 upon all established things. The play was already ordered 
 for the Theatre Frappa-is- -T,miis had it read to him pri- 
 vately, and for once made a rapid decision. As literature 
 he could not judge its considerable merits; as politics he 
 put his foot down: such laughter at such an expense to gov- 
 ernment and all tradition were not to be borne and the 
 licence was withdrawn. The public rumour rose and grew. 
 
 Every witty lady about the Court and in the capital, many 
 
184 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 more who desired a reputation for wit, insisted upon read- 
 ing the play; upon hearing it read aloud; upon having 
 Beaumarchais come and read it aloud. All the Polignac 
 world was mad on it. Lomenie de Brienne boasted that 
 he had heard it oftenest. The Princesse de Lamballe moved 
 heaven and earth to have it read by the author in her very 
 rooms. 
 
 The "Mariage de Figaro" was, therefore, to the Queen 
 a perpetual phrase on the lips of the smart, literary and 
 unliterary: it is doubtful if she read a line of it, but she 
 heard of it and heard of it again. She forgot it for 
 the moment; later she remembered it again - - not to 
 her good. 
 
 Meanwhile a much larger matter vexed her. In the midst 
 of her active and interested life, of promotions, personal 
 successes and habitual pleasures, the insistence of her 
 brother Joseph continually pursued her, and a mixed 
 anxiety, an anxiety to be political, an anxiety to escape 
 responsibility, came to her almost daily from Mercy imme- 
 diately, ultimately from Vienna: she felt upon her the 
 uneasy burden of the Hapsburgs. 
 
 While her mother still lived there had at least been 
 between her and Marie Antoinette an unbroken habit of 
 command upon the one side, obedience and protest upon 
 the other. The pressure of Vienna had been a natural 
 one then. Maria Theresa possessed, moreover, the tact not 
 only of a woman, and of a religious woman, but the large 
 vision of a careful and perilous diplomacy brought to 
 success. Joseph lacked all these: religion, honour, tact, 
 acquaintance, experience. His commands to Mercy were 
 as crude as any of his judgments upon [the world: "Had 
 Mercy seen the Queen?" "Was she doing her duty by the 
 
FIGARO 185 
 
 House of Austria?" "Would Mercy suggest this, that?" 
 "Since the Queen was so powerful with the King, why had 
 this, that detail of French policy not exactly suited the 
 demands of the Empire ? " Broken by the buffer of Mercy's 
 long experience these arid and unfruitful hastes came less 
 brutally to the ears of Marie Antoinette. She never felt 
 herself the servant of her family, nor in direct antagonism 
 to the Crown of her husband; she felt only that she was 
 perpetually required to be doing she hardly knew what - 
 much as in her mother's time, but without the aid of her 
 mother's handwriting and remembered voice; certainly 
 without her mother's wisdom to control. 
 
 The pressure from Joseph II. continued; it was to be two 
 years before it took effect in a great matter, but when that 
 matter arose the Queen's plain service to Vienna some- 
 thing far in excess of what she had shown in the Bava- 
 rian affair showed how much that irksome and long 
 pressure had effected. She came . to act as an Austrian 
 army would have acted, and quite understanding all she 
 did, she came very near to betraying her allegiance to the 
 French throne. 
 
 For the rest these early months of '82 were filled, among 
 her pleasures and her rising power, with other annoyances; 
 notably that from time to time her friends in that exces- 
 sive society of hers spoke to her of their debts, and she 
 knew well that in the matter of money grants at that 
 moment of increasing embarrassment in public finance the 
 King himself was slow to listen to her. 
 
 There were many such friends. The greatest and the 
 nearest perhaps of those whom Marie Antoinette knew to 
 be embarrassed were the Guemenees, and the Duchesse de 
 Guemenee, the titular governess of the Dauphin, a woman 
 
186 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 whom she met most constantly and cherished, closely con- 
 cerned her. 
 
 fShe further suffered the ceaseless and recurrent advances 
 the Cardinal de Rohan. It had become enough for her 
 to see his handwriting upon a note to make her burn the 
 thing unread. Her dislikes were now often reasoned, always 
 steady; it was enough that she had to meet the Grand 
 Almoner upon State occasions of religion or ceremonial ; her 
 society she forbade him. Had the Cardinal wanted proof 
 of that stupidity which he was later to plead in Court as 
 the excuse of his follies, he could have given none better, 
 nor any of more weight with posterity, than his complete 
 ignorance of such a woman as was this daughter of Maria 
 Theresa*, and his absurd advances to gain her intimacy, her 
 support, and possibly her heart. Had he known women 
 even vaguely, by types, this florid and handsome man would 
 have abandoned at fifty the attempt to interest a vital, 
 impetuous woman of twenty-seven, loving swift pleasure, 
 but superior to him in rank, chaste, a mother, and carrying 
 against him in particular a traditional grudge for the loose 
 jests which, during a brief embassy at Vienna, he was wont 
 to pass at the expense of her own people. B;u-thir Cardinal 
 de Rohanjdid not know-women evee-iajhe mass, and it 
 waSnecessary, as he thought, that he should play cards 
 with her and be from time to time one of the fifty or so 
 who eat supper with her at Trianon. He had the weakness 
 of stupid men when they are well born and have attained 
 office I mean the ambition for political titles. 
 
 A thousand lesser incidents of this time she could not 
 herself, had you asked her daily, have recorded. One 
 among such petty details it is worth the reader's while to 
 recall, though it had made upon her even less impression 
 
FIGARO 187 
 
 than the babble about Beaumarchais' play; though it 
 passed completely from her memory. It was the presence 
 now and then upon the stairways of Versailles, and for 
 moments only, of a short woman, very fair, with a small, 
 well-arched foot, and delicate hands, quick and even fur- 
 tive of glance, not beautiful but attractive and provoking 
 in face, dressed in a manner that combined excess with the 
 evidences of poverty, but in her gestures of a passable breed- 
 ing. This figure was often seen; now leaving the room 
 of some lady of the Court, now crossing the courtyard on 
 foot towards the town. 
 
 The Queen may or may not have heard that this woman, 
 though an adventuress, was (from over the left) a Valois; of 
 some birth, therefore, but very poor, and given to Borrowing 
 small sums: Marie Antoinette's sister-in-law of Provence, 
 Madame, may or may not have told the Queen that she 
 had got this woman a tiny advance of thirty pounds upon 
 her tiny pension of twenty-four. Whether her name of "De 
 la Motte," or so much as the presence of this chance passer, 
 was noted by Marie Antoinette is not known, but cer- 
 tainly if either were it took no more place in her mind than 
 any other of the hundred insignificant names she heard 
 and forgot every day. Moreover, after the early spring of 
 1782, this woman was no longer seen at Versailles; she had 
 borrowed a few pounds, and was gone. 
 
 With May the true life of the Court and the active inter- 
 ests of the Queen awoke to receive the first of those great 
 political visits which form the historical pageant of Ver- 
 sailles: the heir of Catherine of Russia came with his wife, 
 and the whole year might almost have been named from so 
 conspicuous an event. 
 
 The inordinate pomp of royalty in its old age had led to 
 
188 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 a fashion of incognito which did not have, and was not 
 intended to have, its occasional modern effect of privacy, 
 but which, by cutting short interminable and necessary 
 ritual, left a crowned traveller the freer for luxury and 
 dissipation. It saved them the judges, the orators, the 
 Governors, the Universities in general the middle classes, 
 and left them free for actors, wine, and their own com- 
 pany, and the frenzied plaudits of the innumerable poor. 
 The Emperor of Austria had set the fashion five years 
 before; it was followed now by the Russian Court, and 
 Catherine's son chose to present himself in France under 
 the somewhat theatrical alias of the "Comte du Nord." 
 
 The Grand-Duke Paul had the face of a Tartar, and 
 what was piquant the manners, and, above all, the ready 
 epigrams of a Parisian. His wife was a huge German 
 woman, rather absolute and what was curious 
 learned. For exactly a month they dominated the Court of 
 France; from the end of May to the end of June they filled 
 it with their presence, and not a little of the hankering after 
 French things and French alliances, which, much later, 
 distinguished Paul III. during the revolutionary wars, may 
 have sprung from this short and vivid episode of his twenty- 
 eighth year. 
 
 It is characteristic of Marie Antoinette that the pros- 
 pect of a great encounter and of the society of equals con- 
 fused her; it is equally characteristic of her that once 
 she had got over that nervousness she drew the young man 
 and his wife at once into that rather isolated and over- 
 familiar circle of intimates with which Mercy, her brother, 
 and the French reproached her, but without which, as it 
 seemed, she could not live. Behind the solemn and rare 
 functions, the regal hospitality of the Condes at Chantilly 
 
FIGARO 189 
 
 and the Court ball at Versailles, was a whole atmosphere 
 of gambling and private theatricals; of plays at Trianon, 
 intimate suppers, costly presents given at a moment's 
 thought, and, very late at night, in the rooms of Madame de 
 Polignac or in the Queen's, when the King had left them, a 
 complete ease full of little improvised dances and familiar 
 jests. In such an atmosphere the German Grand-Duchess 
 maintained, perhaps a little stiffly, her formal compliments, 
 but the Russian Grand-Duke went headlong; he suffered 
 the spell; there was even a moment when he confided to 
 the Queen his humiliation at home and the tyranny of his 
 mother Catherine. 
 
 Upon one matter the husband and the wife most cer- 
 tainly agreed, for to the second it was belles-lettres, to the 
 first Paris iana: they must have things read to them "by the 
 authors." All the little tricks with which the wealthy 
 and leisured inveigle the masters of the pen to visit 
 their palaces, to amuse them for an hour, were set at work. 
 
 Of the many so caught one was especially demanded, 
 and the Queen heard again, not without boredom, the per- 
 petual name of Beaumarchais. "Oh, yes, you must hear 
 Beaumarchais ! " Madame de Lamballe had got him to 
 her rooms. It was difficult, but she had got him. The 
 Archbishop of Toulouse knew him well. He was splen- 
 did. 'You must hear him read this play of his; it has been 
 forbidden, you know. It is seditious. It is so witty, 
 and he does read it so well! " The Comte du Nord and his 
 wife asked no better than to be in the swim. Beaumarchais 
 was willing enough; he came and read to them, and they 
 heard from his thin ironic lips, saw illustrated by his exact 
 gesture and brilliant, ambitious little eyes, the edge and 
 sharpness of a drama that worked once it was public 
 
190 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 like an acid, to the destruction of all their world. How 
 they applauded! 
 
 That warm month of long evenings that fade into early 
 dawns shining with lamps in the park, with candles and 
 mirrors in the vast length of the palace, was approaching 
 its end, when, for the last time, Marie Antoinette devised 
 her last considerable fete once more at Trianon. 
 
 It was to be a garden fete at night: by this time certainly 
 wearisome to the Grand-Duchess, but to the Grand-Duke 
 attractive with this one flaw, that on the morrow he would 
 be gone. The fete was held; it was brilliant and full. 
 At its close when, as custom demanded, the royal party 
 passed out, down a lane of guests on either side, the Queen 
 saw for a moment a pair of red stockings; the legs 
 were neither meagre nor young. All the rest of the figure 
 was a large dark cloak, but she caught beneath the hat of 
 it the somewhat flushed and large face of the Qrand Almoner. 
 
 This little incident disturbed her. Here was a private 
 gala of her own, given only to those of her private circle 
 privately invited by her, and this odious man must creep in. 
 Next day when her guests were gone she spent some por- 
 tion of her considerable energy in ferreting out the culprit. 
 The incident was traced to the lodge-keeper of Trianon, 
 who had taken a bribe from the cardinal under a promise 
 that if he were let in he would keep a strict disguise and 
 would not penetrate into the gardens. The lodge-keeper 
 was sent his ""way to starve, and later since he really did 
 begin to starve was given back his place by this impul- 
 sive woman. 
 
 It was a very little though a very exasperating incident 
 that a great officer of the Crown, whom etiquette com- 
 pelled her to meet in chapel, but whom she had carefully 
 
FIGARO 191 
 
 excluded from her intimacy and her privileges, should have 
 appeared by a trick at a party so especially her own. Per- 
 haps she remembered it as one remembers for a long while 
 petty accidents that have sharply moved us for an hour. 
 He certainly remembered it, for he had been found out in 
 no very dignified manoeuvres. He* was certainly sore; 
 but in men of his stupidity, of his privileges, and of his 
 habits of luxury, hatred is no enduring passion. His ambi- 
 tion, however, such as it was, remained; he was the 
 more determined to succeed in that high object of 
 recognition and of friendship with the Queen, from the 
 results of this disastrous attempt and from the failure of 
 
 his appearance on that June night at Trianon 
 
 It was but a week later that Madame de la Motte came into 
 Paris, called at his palace in the Marais, and reminded 
 him of his earlier charities. 
 
 The uneventful summer came and passed, full of the 
 customary glories, of the customary distractions. No date 
 marked evil or good. The American War, though it lan- 
 guished, was now decided, and England had given up the 
 struggle. The reform of the French finances, though cease- 
 lessly a topic of council, was as ceaselessly neglected. The 
 Emperor continues to badger Mercy, and Mercy to badger 
 the Queen upon matters of no importance save to Joseph 
 II.'s ill-considered plans of aggrandisement. 
 
 Fersen, pottering between Philadelphia and Baltimore, 
 wrote home wearily but not to her. 
 
 
 
 It was a long summer of nothingness, during which 1 * 
 Marie Antoinette's position was confirmed, her public view 
 
192 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 a trifle, if but a trifle, enlarged. With her habits permitted, 
 her popularity sufficient, her influence established, she 
 had a foretaste of that security such as should accom- 
 pany middle life, and such as is native to women for whom 
 such satisfaction is allied with maternity ; she turned for an 
 added interest to her children. 
 
 The little Princess Royal could talk and run; the baby 
 Dauphin knew his sister already and moved his arms at 
 her approach. The two children between them filled daily 
 a larger and more natural place in the Queen's thoughts. 
 They could not indeed weaken the habits which those 
 first feverish three years had rooted and the next had done 
 nothing to destroy, but their innocence and the nameless 
 bond of flesh enlarged her; their growth, their surprising 
 discovery of new days. It was not wholly without reason 
 that the King their father grew at this moment to listen 
 in smaller things to her advice beyond that of others. 
 
 Ceremonial, or rather lucrative, as were the functions 
 of the Princesse de Guemenee, she was yet constantly 
 in attendance upon the children, of which she was titular 
 governess, and the Queen was constantly in her society. 
 The charge was a great one; if it had first been granted as 
 a favour to one of the set of favourites, it had now ripened 
 into something more, for the common interest in such a 
 couple as Madame Royale and the heir gave rise, in this 
 middle of '82, to an occasional communion between the 
 Queen and the gouvernante, which neither found in the 
 general and much more continual amusement of their set. 
 Their intimacy was the greater that the children had been 
 sent through the park to Trianon during the hot weather, 
 that the Princesse de Guemenee was with them secluded 
 there, and that there she and the Queen were necessarily 
 
FIGARO 193 
 
 often alone together. In her favourite retreat and under her 
 domestic trees, the approaching vaccination of the little girl 
 a matter of moment at that time and a dozen details of 
 the sort concerned them. By a petty accident of a sort 
 common to aristocracies, the Cardinal de Rohan, the 
 Queen's aversion, happened to be own brother to Madame 
 de Guemenee, the Queen's chief friend. Not a word was 
 said in favour of that brother, for these were matters uponrA 
 which even the Queen's favourites were compelled to keep \ 
 silence; but the populace, who do not understand such \~s 
 complexities, remembered the relationship. 
 
 The complaints of the lesser woman upon the debts of 
 herself and her husband though such complaints are 
 wearing to the closest friendships did no more than 
 slightly weary the Queen. They were soon forgotten, for 
 Marie Antoinette held in a profound manner that faith in 
 chance good fortunes and in ultimate relief without which 
 those who never labour could not live; and when the com- 
 plaints were done with, she turned to speak of the children. 
 
 So August went by and most of September, when, one 
 morning at the close of that month, Monsieur de Guemenee 
 very suddenly declared that he could not so much as attempt 
 to pay his debts, and threw himself upon his creditors. 
 
 It was a shock. I hav^regeatedjy4nsisfed in this book 
 upon the insignificance of French extravagance in the close 
 of the eightegntE~cenIu^rinc^inparison with the modern 
 figures of our Plutocracy, and on the modesty of the sums 
 the historian has tc^deaLsdth ^5^000 a year was a princely 
 fortune; the Cardinal de Rohan's .30,000 a year seemed 
 almost the revenue of a State, an income beyond com- 
 putation. Well, in such a world, accustomed to such a 
 scale of wealth, the Guemenees went bankrupt for a solid 
 
194 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 million of our English pounds. It opened a whirlpool 
 in the finances of the time, and the creditors, to make mat- 
 ters worse, were of every rank and spread throughout the 
 kingdom; there were peasants among them, prelates, far- 
 mers-general, and most clamorous of all a few 
 large and many small shopkeepers of Paris. To these 
 last especially to the smaller ones delay would be 
 fatal. Delay was precisely the expedient chosen. 
 
 There exists a little, ill-written scrawl addressed to the 
 princess; it is ill-spelt, with words omitted in its haste. 
 It runs: "You have* heard that my daughter's vaccination 
 has gone off well I breathe again! . . . The King 
 will see you get those letters all right." That scrawl was 
 written by Marie Antoinette and the "letters" mentioned 
 were the Moratorium which a French King could of his 
 own free will impose as might the caprice of a judge 
 upon the process of law. It was a royal decree forbidding 
 during the King's pleasure the recovery of a debt. The 
 creditors must wait till it was lifted. 
 
 That little scrap of paper was not known to the populace 
 it was not discovered till a few years ago but the populace, 
 with an instinct that rarely failed them during the pre- 
 revolutionary and revolutionary time, guessed by what 
 influence had been granted this privilege of delay; with all 
 its fatal consequences to the smaller folk, who spread their 
 anger until Paris was humming with it, and even the remoter 
 provinces (notably Brittany), wherever there was a 
 wretched unpaid creditor to be found, whispered the 
 name of the Queen. 
 
 She, upon her part, felt she had done next to nothing 
 an obvious and small act of courtesy for a dear friend. 
 She had chosen that very moment to be at La Muette with 
 
FIGARO 195 
 
 the Court not at Versailles, to which such things were 
 native, but right at the gates of Paris, and there thought 
 fit to do something more for her friend than the trifle already 
 effected. She went to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, 
 Fleury at a time when the Treasury in its deep embar- 
 rassment was expecting the counter-shock of the Amer- 
 ican War, at a time when the last additional taxes could 
 hardly be paid to ask him if (irony of ignorance!) "some- 
 thing could not be done" for the Guemenees. Fleury could 
 do nothing, and it was as well. 
 
 All this while and all that summer and autumn the little, / 
 active, furtive woman, De La Motte, the Valois with the / 
 well-arched foot and the shifty but provocative eye, was 
 pecking at De Rohan : now knocking discreetly at his palace 
 doors in Paris, now travelling, as cheaply as could be, to his 
 great chateau in the Vosges borrowing a few pounds, and 
 again a few pounds. It was a very little thing, like a drift- 
 ing rag in a great city but a rag infected with the plague. 
 
 In such a commotion as the crash of the Guemenees 
 made, no one noticed that the Queen procured for her 
 chief friend, for one who hardly desired it and who was 
 ill fitted for it, for Madame de Polignac, the high post 
 which Madame de Guemenee had been compelled to resign. 
 The new charges such an appointment involved were for- 
 gotten in the torrent of feeling that followed the great bank- 
 ruptcy. It came just as the excitement upon America had 
 thoroughly died down, just as the bills for that war had 
 to be met, and just as winter was upon the populace. The 
 new taxes were collecting, the whole financial system was 
 
196 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 at a breaking point, when early in '83, Fleury resigned 
 the finances. His fall was furthered by the Queen, who 
 remembered his refusal. 
 
 If, a year before, the satire of Beaumarchais had been 
 wisely suppressed by the King, and if nine months before, 
 even the reading by heirs apparent of so fierce a piece of 
 wit was thought hazardous, now it was plainly a peril. 
 To extend the fame of that solvent of society, even by dis- 
 creet recitations within the palace was unwise; to act it, 
 to add to its native force of aggression gesture, life, and 
 publicity of the stage, would be a piece of madness. Most 
 ardently was that amusing piece of madness desired by the 
 lassitude of the Court and by those amateurs in changing 
 pastime who surrounded the Queen. It is said that she 
 pleaded again for her friends, and begged, as she had before, 
 f6r the piece to be licensed. If she did so, she failed; for 
 leave to act the " Mariage de Figaro," even upon the private 
 stage of a courtier, was again refused. 
 
 Side by side with such details went the growth of yet 
 another great European conflict, and with it once again the 
 pressure of Austria upon Marie Antoinette. 
 
 For over a century the Scheldt had been closed to com- 
 merce by international treaty, and the trade that should 
 naturally flow along that magnificent estuary of which 
 Antwerp is the port had been artificially deflected to Hol- 
 land. The Austrian Netherlands were therefore mechan- 
 ically starved of a trade that had once been pre-eminent 
 in Europe. It was as though Lancashire should be for- 
 bidden by a parchment to use Liverpool to-day, and should 
 be dependent upon Preston or as would more probably 
 follow upon Bristol and Glasgow. That part of the 
 Low Countries which is, roughly speaking, the Catholic 
 
FIGARO 197 
 
 part and most of which is now included in Belgium formed, 
 by an accident of history, an isolated fragment of the Haps- 
 burg domain, and the closing of the Scheldt acutely affected 
 a monarch whose mind, being narrow, was especially alive 
 to anomalies that interfered with the rotundity of his rights. 
 There was to Joseph II. something monstrous in the decay 
 of Antwerp and the silence of that vast waterway some- 
 thing out of nature, like the diversity of tongues, within his 
 empire; it was a sentiment he felt less keenly in matters 
 less disadvantageous to himself. 
 
 The chief beneficiary by this quaint artifice was, of 
 course, Holland, but, among the greater powers, England. 
 If anyone would know why, he has but to travel to-day 
 from the Pool of London to Antwerp, and wonder next 
 morning at the orderly and teeming crescent of the quays. 
 Antwerp is London's chief and most dangerous rival. 
 
 It was, therefore, during the failure of England in America 
 that Joseph proposed the destruction of so ancient an 
 instrument as the Peace of Westphalia and determined 
 upon the opening of the river. To such a project the assent 
 of France was essential, but the Cabinet of Versailles, in 
 one of those acts of wisdom which were not unknown to 
 the decaying Monarchy, postponed the discussion to the 
 close of the war. The war had been over since the autumn 
 of '82 ; the peace had been signed at Paris in the new year. 
 It was in 1783,, therefore, that there began the growing 
 pressure of Joseph II. upon Mercy, of Mercy upon IV^ajie 
 Antoinette, to see that the interests of Austria in this matter, 
 as in others of the past, should predominate at Versailles. 
 This purely Austrian move, though it took months to 
 mature, was the political motive of the whole year, and 
 side by side with it, like a tiny instrument accompanying 
 
198 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 a loud orchestra, went the rising popular demand for 
 Beaumarchais* play: also, just once or twice and for a 
 moment only, one can hear in the background the occa- 
 sional note of Madame de La Motte. Thus on Candlemas 
 Day (a feast of the 2d of February) she was seen at Ver- 
 sailles. It was a brief episode; she stood patiently in the 
 rank of petitioners waiting for the Queen to pass upon her 
 way to High Mass, and presented some modest demand - 
 directly or indirectly for money. It was refused, with a 
 crowd of others, by the secretaries appointed to examine 
 such things; and, if the Queen's eyes had rested upon her 
 face at all, no sort of impression of her remained. The 
 Queen entered the chapel, and the Cardinal de Rohan 
 pontificated there. 
 
 "Figaro" was more amusing and deserves a greater 
 mention. All the jokes of the spring and all the society 
 question was of "Figaro." By June, somehow or other, by 
 some intrigue, very possibly by a word from the Queen, 
 the scandalous, the delightfully tickling attack upon all 
 their privileges, their scandals their very life ; the comedy 
 that half of them already knew by heart, and from which 
 the younger could recite whole passages in Beaumarchais' 
 very manner, was to be acted at last but only for the 
 Court. Of course, such a scandal could not be allowed in 
 Paris, or in the town. The Hall of the Menus Plaisirs was 
 got ready, the parts were learnt, the actors of the Comedie 
 Fran9aise were come, the courtiers and their wives had 
 their tickets in hand, the carriages were at the door, the 
 theatre half full, when a messenger came from the King 
 bearing a lettre de cachet, a peremptory, secret and imme- 
 diate order: the "Mariage de Figaro" was not to be played. 
 
 All who have seen a jostle of the wealthy suddenly 
 
FIGARO 199 
 
 deprived of some pleasure especially of a satire upon 
 themselves may imagine the anger that arose. Mean- 
 while the King, who had bethought him so late of this 
 vigorous act, murmured thoughtfully in his room that 
 probably in the long run Beaumarchais would have the 
 best of it. 
 
 He had. By September M. de Vandreuil had the play 
 ready for "the ladies" and young Artois he had put up 
 a private stage. The smart and the literary were assured 
 there would be no disappointment nor was there. Beau- 
 marchais had been recalled by a special secret messenger 
 from England, whither he had retired in a pretended 
 pique; secret permission was given, the "Mariage" was 
 secretly played (before two hundred people), and the thing 
 was done. Play-acting and a sort of passionate frivolity 
 had conquered the State. I must ask pardon for wasting 
 so many lines upon so light a matter. A I 
 
 Two greater things were at hand : Calonne was about lA\| 
 be put at the hefl^ of the firm noes: Joseph JT. was begirt I 
 ning to be decisive about the SrheldL 
 
 The business of the Scheldt had dragged all through 1783. 
 The active hostility of France and England had ceased a 
 year before to the grave disadvantage of England. 
 Peace had been actually signed for nine months, yet noth- 
 ing had been done, and the Cabinet of Versailles still tem- 
 porised. To Joseph this recalcitrance upon the part of his 
 ally was not only irritating, as had been years ago the French 
 hesitation to support him in the Bavarian chance of war, 
 it was incomprehensible; he could lay it to nothing but 
 folly. To what depths of folly Versailles might descend 
 he would admit even his clear brain incapable of judging. 
 The French lay, as he conceived, open to every attack. 
 
200 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 Theirs was a power visibly in decay which had made 
 indeed a chance lucky move beyond the Atlantic, but 
 which could not long continue great. It was surely their 
 duty, as it was obviously their policy, to be guided by 
 Vienna. It was not till now after so many years!- 
 that he had come across the sharp French "jib" which has 
 since his time disconcerted so many diplomatists. 
 
 For the statesmen of that people, under every regime, 
 at least, every modern regime (wherein I count the lajter 
 ministers of Louis XV. and the anti-clericals of the present 
 Republic) have much in them, whatever their rank, of 
 their own peasantry. It is as though the Frenchman, w T hen 
 he acts as a Minister for the collectivity of France, were 
 collectively inspired and thought like the mass of plough- 
 men that build up his nation. As the peasants perpetually 
 bewail the weather, so he the times. As the peasants curse 
 authority (which they are so zealous to maintain as a 
 guarantee of property), so the statesman the regime of his 
 epoch. As they will speculate rashly once in a gener- 
 ation, so he in the Seven Years' War or in 1870. As they for 
 years after such an error build up a fortune in the stodg- 
 iest securities, so he will build up alliances and an army 
 in the long periods of national repose. As they with pro- 
 testations of ruin and yet with courtesy will relinquish 
 as make-weight to a bargain some article wholly worth- 
 less to them, so he will reluctantly throw into the diplomatic 
 scale some barren or untenable possession overseas. As 
 they in a bargain ask with the most natural air a most 
 fantastic price, so he in a diplomatic proposition. But, 
 above all, as the French Peasantry, when their apparent 
 stupidity tempts the city man to ask for something that 
 really concerns them, become first dumb, then nasty, so the 
 
FIGARO 201 
 
 French Statesman, quite unexpectedly and in one day, 
 clouds over and reveals an astonishing obstinacy to yield 
 any point of material value to his nation. 
 
 The opening of the Scheldt was of no advantage to 
 France. The existence of a strong Austrian State to the 
 north of her was a thing to avoid; the diplomatic tradition 
 of a hundred years was in support of Holland, and, though 
 the Austrian Alliance had changed much, it had been made 
 to exercise pressure towards the Elbe, not towards the 
 North Sea. Hence for all the courtesy, the postponements, 
 the protestations of a continued warmth in the alliance and 
 the rest of it, France steadily refused to move. The 
 Emperor Joseph did something he had been slow to do of 
 recent years: he wrote directly to his sister. 
 
 
 
 Far off in the Vosges Madame deLa Motte,the little, proud, 
 active woman with the furtive eyes, was closeted with the 
 Cardinal de Rohan in his chateau of Saverne. She had, 
 she told him, all but recovered her true place as a Valois, 
 she needed aid for a very little time longer. Here was a 
 bill upon a Jew, down on the plain in Nancy; quite a 
 small bill not a hundred and fifty pounds. The Car- 
 dinal backed her bill. j 
 
 Marie Antoinette could not for the life of her have shown 
 you the Scheldt on the map; she knew her own incom- 
 petence, the advice she proffered was null or uncertain, 
 and, in any case, whatever slight suggestion she may have 
 made, was quite passed by in the counsels of her husband. 
 From that moment Joseph was turned, if somewhat slowly, 
 towards action. He would clear the Scheldt by force, and 
 
202 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 compel the Cabinet of Versailles to follow; he took his 
 time and made his plan but he did not succeed. 
 
 The advent of Calonne was not the least of the acci* 
 dents that impeded him, and Calonne's appointment with 
 its large consequences was partly as were now so many 
 things the workof the Queen. A man of fifty, pro- 
 vincial, a gentleman, a good lawyer; Calonne was a friend 
 of the Polignacs; and Marie Antoinette, on that account 
 alone, supported his candidature to the Direction of Finance: 
 when she knew him she grew to dislike him. He was 
 intensely national, vigorous, gay, a trifle too rapid in 
 thought, ambitious, virile with a Latin virility; he was of 
 a type she could never affect, and it is certain that he de- 
 spised her intellect and resented her interference with affairs 
 he probably showed it. 
 
 But once he was appointed to the Treasury her dis- 
 taste came too late. That department, as the entangle- 
 ment of the public fortune increased in complexity, grew 
 to absorb in importance every other. The complete 
 autonomy of each minister within his department (which 
 was a necessary consequence of Autocracy and the mark 
 of government at Versailles) left him independent of his 
 colleagues. The vast consequence of any Exchequer Act at 
 that moment and thenceforward made the Exchequer 
 supreme over War, over Home, and even over Foreign affairs. 
 
 It is difficult to describe the man: his acts must de- 
 scribe him. It is enough to say that he was not corrupt, 
 that he carried through his attempt with courage, that>he 
 spent the public money largely and gaily to forward his 
 plan of procuring a large increase of revenue rather than 
 a large reduction of expenditure; that he was saddled with 
 the remains of the American War debt; was heir in office 
 
FIGARO 203 
 
 to dishonest and incompetent Necker, and that, so far as 
 mere administration could, it was he in particular who 
 later opened the Revolution by one act of courage, and 
 not without del ; beration, when he clearly saw that an active 
 nation needed action to live: for it was he who summoned 
 the Notables and so convened the first of the Assemblies. 
 
 A 
 
 The winter of '83-'84 was very hard. The new taxes 
 imposed in the desperate attempt to fill the Treasury during 
 the preceding year, before Calonne came, were just begin- 
 ning to tell. The new loans which were Calonne's own 
 hung over the prosperity of the State. . . . The 
 Queen was at ease ; the letters of Rohan no longer came for 
 her to burn; he no longer crept by tricks into her presence. 
 . . . Then there was "Figaro." "Figaro" was being 
 talked of more than ever. . . . The King must give his 
 consent . . . he had given it to a private stage. . . . 
 Come, would he not give it for the public ? The play lay 
 there, in the minds of the leisured and the wealthy; it 
 was potentially a destroyer of the State, on which they 
 battened; but boredom is stronger than appetite with the 
 smart, and the smart urged "Figaro" on towards its full 
 and final publicity. 
 
 The winter drew on towards spring. It still froze hard. 
 Calonne continued loans and largesse. "To be free of 
 tangle you must borrow; to borrow you must be at ease; 
 to be at ease, you must spend." He spent largely upon 
 the poor of Paris; he consented to fetes; he took the thing 
 at a charge. As a nation in the grasp of a dreadful foe 
 might win through by loan upon loan and pouring out fresh 
 millions, bribing colonial soldiers recklessly five, six, 
 
204 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 seven, ten shillings a day, and to hell with the commis- 
 sariat so he in the grasp of an embarrassed fiscal system 
 that was dying in an agony and that nothing could recover. 
 Such procedure invited force of itself; it paved the way for 
 a vast physical, armed change to effect renewal. With the 
 old regime no man could have done anything, not the gay- 
 est or the most daring; and what regime has ever changed 
 itself ? J^olonne was killingthe old regime. 
 
 He even attempted to f eedthe people of Paris by free gifts. 
 But still the people of Paris were not contented, and above 
 them, in the ranks that make "Opinion," there was an in- 
 creasing demand, an insistence for the " Mariage de Figaro." 
 It was already March, and the play was still disallowed. 
 
 L.. 
 
 In his bishop's palace that March, the woman La Motte 
 was telling the Cardinal de Rohan one of those truly consid- 
 erable lies upon which history turns; a lie comparable to 
 the lie of Bismarck at Ems or to any other that any of 
 my readers may cherish. The Cardinal sat listening, his 
 florid, proud, prominent, unintelligent face all ears. "She 
 had reached the result of so much patient waiting. Her 
 dignity of Valois (and she was a Valois) was to be recog- 
 nised; her lands (she had no lands) were to be restored to her. 
 It was the QUEEN whom she had conquered: the QUEEN 
 was now her friend, her intimate friend. The QUEEN would 
 do anything in the world for her. Through her was Rohan's 
 avenue to ^fegjQtJEEN. Her poverty was at an end. She 
 could soon repay so many years of his kindness.' 9 
 
 
 
 Marie Antoinette was concerned with little in those 
 weeks; it is just possible she again spoke a word for that 
 
FIGARO 205 
 
 eternal " Figaro." If she did she was but one of a hundred 
 and the King gave way. The censorship should be removed, 
 but on condition that certain passages most offensive to the 
 established order of the State should be deleted. On that 
 point Louis would not budge ... it made all the 
 difference. They were deleted, and the King mis- 
 judging now said (not without foreboding): "I hope 
 it will be a frost." On the first night the Public 
 answered him. 
 
 A vast crowd broke for hours against the railings of the 
 Comedie Franaise, a crowd in which every kind of man 
 was crushed against every kind. The doors opened to a 
 mob that stormed the theatre like a citadel, and that, when 
 it entered, could see, in reserved places, and entered in earlier 
 than the public, every head in Paris that counted. Even 
 Monsieur, deep in his private box, was there, and there 
 behind their bars were the Parliament, the Ministry even, 
 discreetly, the Church. 
 
 The play began. . . . To-day, in a society which it has 
 helped to create, its jests seem obvious, its epigrams plati- 
 tudes. To that eager people, starved of reform in the 
 midst of a huge transformation of society, they were bril- 
 liant exactitudes of wit, struck off like bright coins 
 precisely the thing desired. This man found satisfied as 
 the play proceeded his revenge against bought law, that 
 man his brooding against an old insult of privilege, that 
 other his disgust at an apparent national decline, yet 
 another his mere hunger: and all these Frenchmen found in 
 the play an echo of their national contempt for a government 
 that cannot excuse itself, even by logic; all found and each 
 found his necessity for passion against existing things 
 assuaged by the sparkle and the venom of the play. They 
 
206 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 roared at it with delight as men do at the close of suc- 
 cessful assault. They laughed as do men satisfied to reple- 
 tion. They felt a common enemy gone under. There was 
 not one so privileged but had heartily supped of ridicule 
 against some aspect of the society he had learnt to despise. 
 The curtain fell to a storm of triumphant noise. The 
 Parisians went out into the darkness full and fed with 
 the idea of change, and a great crack had opened in the 
 walls of the palace. It was the 27th of April, 1784. 
 
IX 
 THE DIAMOND NECKLACE 
 
 FROM APRIL 27, 1784, TO AUGUST 15, 1785 
 
 S the summer of 1784 broadened through May and 
 June, it led on the Queen to every grace of life, 
 and at last, as it might have been imagined, 
 security. The season itself was fruitful and serene: 
 the establishment of prestige abroad so often a forerun- \ 
 ner of evil to European nations was now triumphantly 
 achieved. There was now about the Court an air of solidity 
 and permanence, which the visits of foreign princes continued 
 to confirm, and this air (thanks to Calonne's largesse) 
 seemed less poisoned by that financial ill-ease which had 
 turned even the last victories of the American War into 
 doubtful and anxious things. 
 
 Marie Antoinette had entered into that content and calm h 
 which often introduces middle age after a youth tormented 
 by an inward insecurity. Her inheritance was sure. Her 
 children had not yet betrayed the doom of their blood. 
 The legend of her follies meant daily a little less, because 1 
 daily it became more and more of a legend worn by time, \ 
 dangerous only if its set formula should be filled with life 
 and reality by some new scandal. The violence of her youth 
 now seemed exorcised; her fulness of feature, which had 
 shocked the taste of Louis XV. 's Court, accorded with these 
 her later functions of authority. She was indeed in that full 
 flower of womanhood which later so perturbed the memories 
 
 207 
 
208 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 of Burke and lent one famous passage of sincerity to his 
 false political rhetoric. 
 
 As Marie Antoinette so entered at last into maturity, and, 
 it would seem, into peace, the comedy which was to bring 
 upon her every humiliation entered upon the Stage of this 
 World. In the waters below her, Jeanne de La Motte de 
 Valois, fishing for goldfish, struck and landed her Cardinal. 
 
 Gustavus of Sweden, Northerner and Flibbertigibert, 
 the same that had slung diamond necklaces round the Du 
 Barry's little dog and the same that had despised the 
 Dauphine, was at Court in the early days of that June, 
 and saw the Queen now a woman; his affections were 
 immediately moved. There was a touch of flirtation 
 between them; on her side also a real friendship which 
 for years continued in correspondence for the softness 
 of the North never failed to soothe and to relieve this 
 Austrian woman caught in the hardness of French rules 
 and the pressure of French vitality. He had come as the 
 "Comte de Haga," and she feasted him well. That new 
 toy, a balloon, was sent up to amuse him she had it called 
 by her name and he was shown all that Trianon could 
 show by day or by night. She was the more gracious from 
 the awkwardness of Louis, who came ill-dressed to meet 
 Gustavus and who was slow with him. She gave him 
 deference. She consented, at one great supper of hers, 
 to stand w T ith her women and supervise all, while he was 
 seated. Only she would not dance with him; she said she 
 danced no more. . . . 
 
 Meanwhile, accompanying the King of Sweden and ever 
 at his side, Fersen was come again to Versailles. 
 
 He was now a man. War had made him. Marie 
 Antoinette could silently watch in him a very different car- 
 
MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 By Madame Vigee Le Brun 
 
THE DIAMOND NECKLACE 209 
 
 riage and a new alertness of the visage, but his eyes still bore 
 the tender respect that she had known and remembered. 
 
 He was now for some years to come and go between 
 Versailles and the world. He was a Colonel of French 
 Horse, and his place was made. . . . 
 
 The King of Sweden went down well; the Court was full 
 of him. The Queen surpassed herself in well-receiving him. 
 
 The month of June was filled with this sincere and pleas- 
 ing gaiety; but all that June, far off, the La Motte was 
 going and coming in her secret ways, talking to the Cardinal 
 of letters to her "from the Queen," assuring him that these 
 letters gave proof of his growing favour. She did more and 
 boldly ; she affected to show him those royal letters ! 
 
 There was a soldier of sorts, cynical, ramshackle, hard 
 up, like all her gang, Retaux de Villette by name; he it 
 was who wrote these letters whenever the La Motte might 
 ask him so much a time. They must have amused him as 
 he wrote them ! He was at no pains to disguise his hand ; 
 he wrote straight out to his "dear heart," the Comtesse 
 de La Motte Valois, anything she asked him to write 
 especially praise of Rohan and when he had written it 
 (at so much a time) he would boldy sign " Marie Antoinette" 
 with a flourish; and the La Motte would show the letter 
 to Rohan, and Rohan (that is the amazing and simple 
 truth) would believe them to be the Queen's! 
 
 If the Cardinal had any doubts at all they were easily 
 dispersed. Cagliostro, who enjoyed the Illumination of the 
 Seventh House, and had powers from the other world, most 
 strongly reassured him for a fee ; the seen and unseen 
 powers all combined to reassure the fatuous Rohan, and he 
 was ready, as June ended, to believe not only that he was 
 in favour with the Queen, but in very peculiar favour 
 
ir 
 
 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 deed, and that all this show of avoidance and silence upon 
 
 r part was a mask necessary to conceal a deeply-rooted 
 j/enderness. She might turn her head away when the 
 Grand Almoner passed on his rare and pompous occa- 
 sions of ecclesiastical office in the galleries of Versailles. 
 She might refuse to speak to him a single word. She 
 might, whenever she deigned to speak of him to others, 
 speak with complete contempt and disgust. She might 
 (as she had and did) successfully prevent the smallest 
 honour or moneys coming to him. But, oh! he saw it all! 
 It was but a mask to hide her great love and, sooner or 
 later, he would have his reward for such long and patient 
 waiting ! 
 
 He in his turn wrote constantly. To the letters the La 
 Motte showed him dainty scented notes on little dainty 
 sheets of gilded blue (but written, alas! by such rough 
 hands) he would answer, with imploring, respect- 
 ful, adoring lines, handed to the La Motte that she- 
 might give them to her great and high friend. Now he 
 could understand why Cagliostro had promised him in 
 oracular enigmas that "glory would come to him from 
 a correspondence," and that "full power with the Govern- 
 ment" was immediately awaiting him. He was ready to 
 assume it. 
 
 July was empty enough for the Queen. Her guest was 
 gone; there was little doing at Versailles. Her amuse- 
 ments, especially her theatre, she had deliberately given up, 
 determined to let the legend against her die. She waited 
 through the dull month a little worried. Her brother 
 the Emperor was still fussing about his diplomatic quarrel, 
 the opening of the Scheldt, and the rest of it; she was 
 anxious for him and for peace. Henry of Prussia would 
 
THE DIAMOND NECKLACE 211 
 
 soon be visiting Versailles, there intriguing (as she dreaded) 
 against her Austrian House. But, on the whole, the 
 month of July, 1784, was a dull month for her. It was 
 not dull for the La Motte. 
 
 The male La Motte in early July sauntered, on those 
 fine, sunny days, in the Palais Royal. He was looking for 
 something; he was looking for a face and a figure not too 
 unlike those of the Queen of France. It was not a difficult 
 thing to find ; the type was common enough, and in the first 
 days of his search he found it. The woman was a woman 
 of the town, young, with a swelled heart, as it were, and no 
 brains; she was timid, she was ready to swallow anything 
 offered her. He followed her with gallantry, and found 
 that her professional name was D'Oliva; her true name 
 the more humble one of Le Quay. For a week or so this 
 new lover of hers went on like any other, he appeared and 
 reappeared most naturally; but when the week was over 
 and he had grown most familiar to her and perhaps 
 with his birth and high accent most revered La Motte 
 confided to her great and flattering news. There was a 
 great Lady at Court who sought her aid in a matter of vast 
 importance, and that great Lady spoke perhaps for a Lady 
 greater still. The grandeur of the position was left to 
 brew, and on the 22d of July, when it was already 
 dusk, the great Lady (who was the female La Motte) 
 swept into the poor girl's humble lodgings a vision of the 
 Court and the high world; she told the wide-eyed hussy 
 things that seemed too lofty for human ears. The Queen 
 had need of her. 
 
 For herself (said the La Motte) she was the Queen's 
 one great, near friend (she showed a letter one of the 
 famous letters),, and if the D'Oliva would do as she was 
 
MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 begged to do, the gratitude of the Queen would far excel 
 in effect the paltry 400 pounds that she, La Motte, would 
 give. Come, would she help the Queen ? 
 
 Oh, yes! the D'Oliva would help the Queen! She would 
 come next day to Versailles ! 
 
 Why, then, all was well. . . . And that very night, 
 post-haste, the interview over, Madame de La Motte 
 galloped off to Versailles to take a room with her maid. 
 
 For the Queen the dreary month was ending there 
 was no trouble upon her horizon. She had written again 
 to Sweden; she asked for, and obtained, the reversion 
 of the See of Albi for a friend of the King of Sweden's. 
 There was no other news. 
 
 History does not show perhaps one situation more 
 wonderfully unlike the common half-happenings, com- 
 plexities and reactions of real life, nor one more won- 
 derfully fulfilling the violent and exact, simple, and pre- 
 arranged ironies of drama, than the contrast of that night: 
 the Queen in the palace, ignorant of any ill save the old 
 and dwindling tales against her, listless after a summer 
 month of idleness and of restraint and coming right up 
 at her, down the Paris road, the woman who was to des- 
 tsoy^her altogether. 
 
 The La Motte and her maid got into Versailles very late. 
 They took rooms at the Belle Image. Next day La Motte 
 and Retaux,the soldier, came, bringing the poor girl D'Oliva, 
 with them; and after a short walk in the town, during 
 which she was left in the hotel with that "great Lady," 
 before whom she trembled, they told D'Oliva that they 
 had seen the Queen and that all was well. They waited 
 till the morrow. On the evening of that morrow, the 
 24th of July, Madame de La Motte warned the D'Oliva 
 
THE DIAMOND NECKLACE 213 
 
 that the time was come. She dressed her all in white, 
 magnificently; she gave her a letter and a rose, and said: 
 "To-night we go into the Park together, and there you 
 will see for a moment a great Lord. Give him this 
 letter and that rose, and say these words: 'You know 
 my meaning!' You will have no more to do." It was 
 about eleven, a dark night and no moon, when the two 
 women went together into the vast gardens of the palace. 
 
 As you stand in the centre of the great fa9ade of Ver- 
 sailles, and look westward down a mile of formal lawn and 
 water, there lie to your left in the palace what were the 
 Queen's rooms, and to your left in the gardens a large 
 grove called "the Queen's Grove," in which are the trees 
 that can be seen nearest to her windows or to be reached 
 most quickly from what were her private doors. 
 
 Near and within this grove, by an appointment which 
 the La Motte had sworn him to observe, paced and repaced 
 the Cardinal. The La Motte had told him he would see 
 the Queen. 
 
 In an enormous cloak of dark mysterious blue that 
 covered his purple to the heels, in a broad soft hat that 
 flapped down and hid his face, this fool of magnitude paced 
 the gardens of Versailles and waited for the delicious hour. 
 Behind him as he paced followed respectfully a man of his 
 one Planta, a sort of insignificant noble. The hour came. 
 The La Motte found the Cardinal. She led him along a 
 path among the high trees and there for a moment near 
 a hornbeam hedge that grew there, he saw dimly a woman 
 in white, showing tall and vague in the darkness. This 
 figure held forward to him in some confusion a rose, and 
 said very low, "You know my meaning!" Rohan seized 
 the hem of the white dress and kissed it passionately but 
 
214 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 before another word could pass a man came forward at 
 speed and whispered as in an agony: " Madame! D'Artois 
 is near Madame!" The La Motte said " Quick ! . . ." 
 The thing in white slipped back into the shadow of a 
 bush, the Cardinal was hurried away but his life had 
 reached its summit! He had heard dear words from the 
 lips of the Queen! . . . 
 
 Marie Antoinette was asleep perhaps, or perhaps chat- 
 ting, muffled, with Polignac's wife, or perhaps, more likely, by 
 her children's nursery beds, watching their repose and ques- 
 tioning their nurse in the wing of the great palace hard by. 
 A hundred yards away, in the darkness of the grove out- 
 fiside, that scene had passed which set the train of her 
 H destiny alight; and the explosion caused by it ruined all 
 / that creviced society of Versailles and cast it down, casting 
 [ down with it the Queen. 
 
 There existed at that time a necklace. Fantastic stories 
 have been told of its value; of those sovereigns to whom it 
 was offered, and who, with a sigh, had been compelled 
 to refuse it. It may very likely have been offered to Marie 
 Antoinette (with her old passion for jewels) some years 
 before, in '79, after the birth of her first child. It may be 
 that the^ King would have given her the expensive 
 thing ,64,000 was the price of it it may be he had 
 never seen it. At any rate, all the world knew that 
 the unrivalled necklace existed, and had for some years 
 existed as the property of two Court jewellers who worked 
 in partnership, Boehmer and Bassange, and that they 
 could not find a purchaser. The reader should remember 
 this necklace, for though it will not be before him till six 
 months after this July of '84, yet, but for the scene in the 
 "Queen's Grove," Rohan would never have handled it, 
 
THE DIAMOND NECKLACE 215 
 
 and had Rohan never handled it, there would not have 
 arisen that enormous scandal that came so opportune to 
 new rumours and new angers, and in the end dragged down 
 the Queen. &ft/ \lm, 
 
 /$ -$ 
 
 With August came Prince Henry of Prussia and all the 
 bother of him. The Emperor was gressiog the Dutch 
 more and more. France was half inclined to prevent that 
 pressure, in spite of the Austrian Alliance. France was 
 determined, at any rate, to prevent Austria, allied or not, 
 from strengthening herself upon the North and East. 
 England, to keep the Scheldt shut, was more than half 
 inclined to prevent that pressure, in spite of Holland's 
 attitude during the American War. Prussia stood by to 
 gain and part of Prussia's chance was the opportunity 
 of feeling and influencing Louis XVI. 's Cabinet. 
 
 prince Henry came, as Frederick's brother, to feel and to 
 influence; to see how much could be done by way of_separ- 
 atingVjenna from Versailles. It was a strain on the Queen. 
 What could she know of these intrigues and counter- 
 intrigues? She saw things, now as ever, few and plain; 
 she saw a Prussian separate her House and the House into 
 which she had married. Therefore Prince Henry's visit 
 was a difficulty to her. She solved it as one might expect 
 of her character, by avoiding him. She wrote to the King 
 of Sweden a little too familiarly, and assured him that she 
 had hardly seen the visitor: she "was at Trianon continually, 
 with intimates only." Paris thought much of him (for 
 Prussia was then, as now, efficient) ; she was very properly 
 fatigued, but, improperly, she did not conquer her fatigue. 
 During all his stay he saw her perhaps not half a dozen 
 
216 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 times, though he (as might be expected of his character or 
 of any of his descendants, ancestors, or collaterals) stayed 
 on and on and on. ... He stayed steadily on in France 
 till November! and before November enough had 
 happened ! 
 
 The little Dauphin was really ill. His mother was 
 anxious. St. Cloud was bought for him, in some vague 
 hope that the "air" was better there as though the "air" 
 of one suburb more than another could cure the rickets of 
 the Bourbons. 
 
 Next, it was known that the Queen was again with child. 
 She wrote of it (familiarly enough) to the King of Sweden. 
 
 More than this, war was apparent. The Emperor's 
 smouldering quarrel with the Dutch had broken into flame; 
 upon the 4th of October, 1784, an Imperial ship had sailed 
 up the Scheldt to see if the Dutch would oppose an entry. 
 The Dutch did oppose it ; they shot at the Imperial ship and 
 took it, and every ruler in Europe put his hand to the hilt 
 of his sword. 
 
 So far Marie Antoinette had done little at Versailles, 
 but be worried by all this complex quarrel; a fortnight 
 before the incident she had told her brother that "really 
 she was not so important at Versailles"; she hoped it was 
 a thing to shirk. Now that the guns had begun, she was in 
 a panic and made a call upon her old and natural violence. 
 She effected little: Vergennes and the tradition of French 
 diplomacy were too much for such tantrums, but the 
 superficial aspect of her action was striking. It was known 
 that she continually saw the King, that she made scenes, 
 that she stormed. It was known that she was "Austrian" 
 in all this, if it was not understood by the people that she 
 had failed. On the contrary, when in the upshot a com- 
 
THE DIAMOND NECKLACE 217 
 
 promise was arranged, she appeared once more in that 
 most odious light a woman sending French tribute to 
 Vienna. 
 
 For when the Emperor consented to the closing of the 
 Scheldt (it was not till February of the next year that he 
 gave way), the French Cabinet, which had firmly supported 
 Holland, was gradually influenced to guarantee the indem- 
 nity which the dignity of the Imperial Crown demanded: 
 it was close on ten million florins. 1 The Dutch refused so 
 large a sum. The Queen wrote, cajoled, insisted in favour 
 of her brother, her House, and Austria. The French Foreign 
 Office, true to its tradition of taking material interests 
 seriously, stood firm and backed Holland steadily. At last 
 the French agreed to take over and to pay as sponsors for 
 Holland one-half the sum demanded of the Dutch Govern- 
 ment, if thereby they might avoid war in Europe. The 
 payment w r as due to the Queen's vigour or interference, and 
 meanwhile there had arisen one of those large and sud- 
 den affairs which give everything around them a new mean- 
 ing, which emphasise every coincident evil, and draw 
 together into their atmosphere every ill-will and every 
 calumny. Just before Marie Antoinette appeared before 
 the populace as one who was sending millions of French 
 treasure to her foreign brother, came the explosion in the 
 interval of all this diplomacy and negotiation of what is 
 called in history "The Affair of the Diamond Necklace." 
 The truth with regard to that famous business is as 
 follows : 
 
 When the Cardinal de Rohan left the Park that mid- 
 night of July after the rapture of a word from the ridic- 
 ulous D'OIiva, he was fallen wholly in the hands of the 
 
 ^ The fiction of the indemnity is entertaining. The Dutch were to yield Maestricht as the equivalent to the 
 Emperor's granting the closing of the Scheldt. The indemnity was to " redeem " Maestricht. 
 
218 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 La Motte. She it was, as he thought, who had don^ T this 
 great thing for him. She had given him the Queen; and 
 he was now entirely sure of his right to act for Marie 
 Antoinette and to serve her. The La Motte began by 
 begging money of him for the Queen's pet charities. She 
 obtained it: first, two or three thousand pounds at the end 
 of August. Retaux wrote the letter: "It was for people 
 whom she wanted to help." Retaux signed it with his 
 "Marie Antoinette": and Rohan paid. A few pounds of 
 it went to the unhappy woman whom La Motte had used, 
 the rest to creditors or show. Much of the time when the 
 Scheldt business was at its height, just as Prince Henry was 
 leaving and all were talking of the Queen, in the autumn of 
 1784 a new letter came (again from Retaux' hand) asking for 
 four thousand. There was the signature " Marie Antoinette," 
 there the beloved terms, and Rohan blindly paid: his man 
 took the money to the La Motte, "to give the Queen." 
 The Cardinal was sure of his way now; he was a master; 
 the Queen was under obligation to him. The money was 
 spent in a very lavish display by the male and the female' 
 La Motte. They travelled with grandeur; they visited 
 in a patronising manner the earlier home of their poverty; 
 they lived high. With the end of the year 1784 more 
 money was needed and here enters into history that 
 diamond necklace which had so long been waiting its cue 
 to come upon the stage. 
 
 The name of La Motte was now current in the mouth 
 alone and among the populace, not at Court for one 
 who could do much. Bassange heard, from a friend, of the 
 La Mottes : of Madame de La Motte. He sent the friend 
 to see whether his white elephant of a necklace could be 
 moved towards that quarter. Madame de La Motte said 
 
THE DIAMOND NECKLACE 219 
 
 wisely that she must see the jewels, a day or two after 
 Christmas. She saw them; for three weeks they were kept 
 on the hook. Upon the 21st of January, 1785, a date 
 that has appeared before and will appear again in this 
 history, she sent and told them that the Queen would buy, 
 but (in her usual manner) a "great lord" would be the 
 intermediary; and on the 24th, by the time it was full 
 daylight, the great lord came in the winter morning to do 
 that little thing that led to so much at last. It was the 
 Cardinal de Rohan who came, handled the jewels, bar- 
 gained, promised four payments (at six-monthly intervals) of 
 16,000 each, the first for the first of August (the date 
 should be noted), and demanded delivery on the 1st of 
 February. The jewellers brought the gems on that day to 
 his great palace in the Marais, and he then told them 
 frankly that the buyer behind him was the Queen. 
 
 They saw her signature, "Marie Antoinette de France"; 
 they saw a part at least of her letter, to the effect that she 
 the Queen was not accustomed to accommodation and there- 
 fore begged him to negotiate. They were satisfied, left the 
 necklace, and were gone. That night the Cardinal gave 
 it to Madame de La Motte at Versailles, or rather, hiding 
 himself in an alcove, saw it given to a man who acted the 
 part of the Queen's messenger and who was, of course, 
 Retaux. 
 
 this, I say, passed on the 1st of February, 17857^ 
 tt day, Candlemas just two years after Madame de 
 La Motte had made her desperate effort to approach the 
 Queen with a petition Rohan and the jeweller, one as 
 Grand Almoner in the high religious function of the day, 
 the other as a man in the crowd, each watched the royal 
 party go by and noted the Queen; each missed the jewel 
 
220 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 that surely she should be wearing on the morrow of its 
 purchase, and each saw that it was not yet worn. Each 
 for different reasons wondered, but each for different rea- 
 sons was silent, and each determined, for different reasons, 
 to wait. Meanwhile the necklace was in the custody of 
 the male La Motte ready for its journey to London, the 
 refuge of the oppressed. 
 
 Lent passed. On Easter Sunday the Queen's third 
 child he who became the Dauphin of the Imprisonment 
 was born. If, thought Rohan, the Queen had purposely 
 waited before putting on the necklace, in order to avoid a 
 coincidence of date between his visit to the jewellers and 
 her first wearing of the gem, surely a long enough space 
 would have passed by the time of the Relevailles, the cere- 
 monial churching in Notre Dame which followed the birth 
 of every member of the Blood Royal. The Relevailles ap- 
 proached. It was more than eight months since the Cardinal 
 had been given that rose at midnight, and he began to grow 
 anxious. The necklace haunted him. . . . Far off in 
 London, the male La Motte was selling, stone by stone, 
 the better part of it; the rest Retaux was carefully dis- 
 posing of in Paris itself. 
 
 It was on May 24 that the Queen proceeded to Paris 
 for the ceremony of the Relevailles. All the antique gran- 
 deur was there and the crowds, but over all of it and over 
 the crowds a new and dreadful element of popular silence. 
 The guns saluted her through a silent air. In the streets 
 of the University the very wheels of her carriage could be 
 heard, so hushed was the crowd. The rich in the opera 
 that evening cheered her, but going in and coming out 
 through popular thousands she heard no cheers. She 
 supped in the Temple with Artois, whose appanage the 
 
PORTRAIT BUST OF THE DUKE OF NORMANDY 
 
 The second Dauphin, sometimes called Louis XVII., who died in the Temple. 
 
 This bust was broken in the fall of the palace, and has recently 
 
 been recovered and restored to Versailles 
 
THE DIAMOND NECKLACE 221 
 
 liberties of the Temple were, and she could see through 
 the night in his garden, as she had seen so often before in 
 his feasts and his receptions, the dimmer and more huge 
 from the blaze of light near by, that ominous great 
 Tower which, it is said, she had always dreaded and 
 dreaded more acutely now with an access of superstitious 
 fear. "Oh! Artois, pull it down!" The Grand Almoner 
 was present at this high function; he watched her and 
 marvelled that the necklace should still be hidden away. 
 
 The next morning she could be certain how Paris had 
 changed. There was throughout its air a mixture of indif- 
 ference and of dislike that poisoned her society with it. 
 Paris now thought of her fixedly as the living extrava- 
 gance of the Court. St. Cloud was at their gates to reproach 
 her, with its title of the "Queen's Palace," its printed 
 "Queen's" orders on the gate. The Deficit was there to 
 reproach her. Her very economies, the lesser festivities, 
 the abandoned journeys of the Court, her rarer and more 
 rare appearances in the capital, the lack of noise in Trianon, 
 were, in the public mouth, a consequence of past excesses. 
 The judgment was false, but it stood firm. 
 
 Her undue influence over the King and the councils of 
 the King was another legend, less false than that of gross 
 extravagance. There was no proof, but a crowd has more 
 judgment than an isolated man, and the crowd divined 
 what we now know. They had divined it in this critical 
 year which saw France balancing on the verge of war with 
 Austria, and which, before its close, saw the payment of 
 the Dutch indemnity by the French to the Queen's brother 
 at Vienna. All her action for twelve months was wholly 
 Austrian in their eyes, and they were wholly right. It was 
 a popular atmosphere, so sullen and so prepared, 
 
222 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 full for a year past of "Figaro's" ironic laughter against a 
 regime already hurrying to its end, thai the explosion of that 
 summer was to come; for the 1st of August was near, 
 and with it the time for the first instalment upon the 
 necklace. 
 
 In June the Comte de La Motte was back from London 
 paying part of the money he had received for the diamonds 
 to a Paris banker one Perregaux. 
 
 In July on the mid-Tuesday of the month . Boehmer, 
 in his capacity of Court Jeweller, brought to Versailles 
 certain jewels. He brought with him also a letter which 
 he gave to the Queen at midday as she came out of Mass; 
 he gave her the letter with mystery and with profound 
 respect, and was gone. The Queen read that note; it was 
 incomprehensible to her. It assured her of her jewellers' 
 unalterable devotion ; it begged her to believe that Boehmer 
 and Bassange were willing to accept her "latest proposals," 
 and it ended with their satisfaction that "the finest set of 
 diamonds in the world should adorn the greatest and the best 
 of its Queens.' 9 Whether Marie Antoinette had even heard 
 of the necklace in the past we cannot tell, though prob- 
 ably, like all the rest of the world, she had. Whether she 
 had or not, the note was equally mysterious to her. The 
 Comptroller of the Household, the Baron de Breteuil, was 
 told of the little bother; he sent for Boehmer, asked him 
 what on earth the note meant, but he only received mys- 
 terious replies leading nowhere. 
 
 If it be asked by the reader why, seeing a complication 
 of some sort before her, Marie Antoinette did not at once 
 
 ;rder an investigation to be pursued by the police, the 
 nswer is simple enough to anyone acquainted with her 
 haracter: the annoyance bored her. Her instinct was 
 
THE DIAMOND NECKLACE 223 
 
 simply to avoid it. She may (some say so) have spared 
 herself trouble upon some theory that the jeweller was 
 mad: anyhow, she spared herself the trouble. 
 
 If it be asked how the complication ever arose, why that 
 enigmatical letter was written, and why, once written and 
 delivered, Bcehmer should have hesitated and equivocated 
 meaninglessly in his answers to Breteuil, the answer is 
 simple when one hears what had just passed in that lower 
 world of duped Cardinal and intriguing, most impudent 
 of adventurers, rapscallions, and spiritualists. 
 
 Madame de La Motte had been driving Retaux of late 
 to write more frequently than ever his "Marie Antoinette" 
 letters to the Cardinal. The poor soldier was not a woman, 
 
 Ihe was not even a writer of fiction, and he had been kept 
 hard at it to force the note of love so often and in such 
 
 (various ways; until at last, one letter had been ordered 
 of him saying, as the date of the first instalment approached, 
 that "really the price was too high." Couldn't the Car- 
 
 | dinal, for her sake, get some 8,000 off the price ? If he 
 could, the Queen would pay on the 1st of August, not the 
 16,000 then due, but a full 28,000. The Cardinal read 
 and obeyed. The jewellers were agreeable. Hence Bceh- 
 mer's note of July 12th, and hence (since he was con- 
 vinced that the Queen, by the very method of her pur- 
 chase, desired secrecy above all things) his evasive replies 
 to De Breteuil. 
 
 Thus, in that world beneath of which she knew nothing, 
 things were coming to an issue against Marie Antoinette: 
 one last event did all. Upon the Saturday before the pay- 
 ment was due, the Cardinal (acting upon a further letter) 
 gave Bcehmer something over 1,000 and said to him that it 
 was free money over and above the fixed price to 
 
MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 console him for the unwelcome news that the first instal- 
 ment could not be met quite punctually. Come, the 
 Queen would certainly pay on the 1st of October ; it was 
 but two months to wait. He had seen it in a note of 
 the Queen's which the Comtesse de La Motte liad just 
 shown him. 
 
 It is probable that even the Cardinal had become sus- 
 picious now he says as much himself but his pride and 
 his fear of exposure held him. As for the jeweller, the 
 interview of that Saturday broke his back; he was dis- 
 tracted. On the Tuesday (or the Wednesday) the climax 
 of the comedy w T as reached. The Comtesse de La Motte 
 met the two partners Bcehmer and Bassange together and 
 told them boldly that the signature "Marie Antoinette de 
 France" was a forgery so there! In the stupefaction that 
 followed she added the quiet advice that for their money 
 they must bleed the Cardinal "He had plenty" and 
 so left them. 
 
 Then followed that general scurry which is the note of 
 embroglios as they flare up towards their end. Bassange 
 runs here, Bcehmer runs there; the one to Rohan in his Epis- 
 copal Palace, the other to those who can help him with the 
 Queen notably to Madame de Canapan, who has left an 
 exaggerated and distorted account of the interview. To 
 Bassange the Cardinal (anything to gain time in the hurly- 
 burly) swears the signature is true; to Boehmer Madame 
 de Campan, with her solid, upper-servant face, announces 
 the redundant truth that he seems to have been let in. 
 As for the La Motte, she flies to Rohan, and he (any- 
 thing to keep things dark and to protect a witness to his 
 incalculable stupidity of a coxcomb) consents to hide her; 
 he gives her asylum in his great house. 
 
THE DIAMOND NECKLACE 225 
 
 Next Bcehmer goes to Versailles at once and im- 
 plores the Queen to see him. The Queen has really had 
 her fill of this kind of thing; she refuses. But next week 
 she consents, and the revelations begin. 
 
 It was at such a moment, with such storms about her, in 
 the full and growing unpopularity of her Austrian influence 
 in the affair of the Dutch indemnity, in the full and grow- 
 ing renascence of the legend of her extravagance, that 
 Marie Antoinette had determined not only to play once 
 more in her theatre at Trianon the chief reproach of the 
 past, a legend with the populace for unqueenly exposure, 
 for lack of dignity, for expense not only to break her 
 [ wise resolve, which had been kept for more than a year, 
 , that her plays should cease, but actually to play another 
 piece by that same Beaumarchais whose wit was the spear- 
 head of the attack upon the old regime. The decision 
 came neither of cynicism nor of folly upon her part; it came 
 of tragic ignorance. 
 
 It was while she was rehearsing her part of "Rosine" 
 that she was persuaded probably by Madame de Cam- 
 pan herself to send for Boehmer and to hear his tale. 
 He came upon the 9th of August, Tuesday, by the Queen's 
 command, to Trianon. At first he simply asked for the 
 money he believed his due. When he saw that Marie 
 Antoinette neither understood why it should be paid, nor 
 for what, nor by whom, he told the whole story as he had 
 heard it. He was sent off to write down coherently and at 
 length in a clear memorandum the details of this amaz- 
 ing thing, and when he had gone the Queen raved. 
 
 Each consequence and aspect of the abomination, as 
 each successively appeared to her, struck her with separate 
 and aggravated blows. Her name linked with a libertine 
 
226 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 whom, of all libertines, she most loathed a man who was 
 the object of her dead mother's especial contempt! 
 The half-truths that would come in; her love of jewellery - 
 now long conquered, but now widely remembered! Her 
 secret debts now long paid, but already a fixed idea 
 in the public mind! At the best that such a man had 
 thought it conceivable that she should be such a woman; 
 at the worst that the world might believe it! 
 
 Upon Friday the report of Boehmer came in. She mas- 
 tered it that day and the next, and on Sunday the 14th, the 
 eve of the Assumption, she begged her husband to spend all 
 the day with her at Trianon. He willingly came. They 
 together but surely at her initiative determined on a 
 gujilic-tiial. Mercy would have done what w r e do now in 
 England when there is danger of public scandal and the 
 weakening of government; he would have paid the La 
 Motte woman something to be off. Vergennes was strongly 
 in favour of silence as strongly as Downing Street would 
 be to-day for he was of the trained diplomatic kind. The 
 King's honour, the Queen's intense and burning indignation 
 against calumny persuaded them to risk publicity. 
 
 The course taken was, I repeat, not a course easy for my 
 modern readers to understand; we take it for granted in 
 the modern world, and especially in England, that a matter 
 of this sort, involving, as it were, all the social fabric, is 
 best snuffed out. Thus the French Foreign Office were 
 willing to destroy the Pannizardi telegram, an<l rather to 
 give a traitor the advantage of concealing damning evidence 
 against him than to risk a rupture with Italy. Thus the 
 English Home Office allows criminals of a certain stand- 
 ing to go free rather than endanger social influences whose 
 secrecy is thought necessary to the State; nor do we allow 
 
THE DIAMOND NECKLACE 227 
 
 any to know what sums or how large are paid for public 
 honours, nor always to what objects secret subscriptions of 
 questionable origin in Egypt, for instance are devoted. 
 Louis XVI. and his wife at this critical moment decided 
 otherwise and upon another theory of morals. They decided 
 to clear by public trial the honour of the Crown. That 
 decision, more than any other act, cost them their thrones. 
 It has preserved the truth for history. 
 
 The Feast of the Assumption has for centuries attracted 
 the French by its peculiar sanctity. Even during that 
 phase of infidelity which, before the Revolution, covered 
 all their intellect and still clings to the bulk of their lower 
 middle classes, the French maintained it. Even to-day, 
 when a fierce anti-Christian Masonry has moulded groups 
 of artisans and intellectuals into ardent champions against 
 the Faith, the Assumption is universally observed. In the 
 Court of Versailles, though now but a ceremony, it was the 
 noblest ceremony of the year. 
 
 It was warm noon upon that 15th of August. The 
 Court in all its colours stood ranked outside the Chapel 
 Royal. The Grand Almoner, the Cardinal de Rohan, 
 taller than the prelates and the priests around him, stood 
 ready in procession to enter and to celebrate the Pontifical 
 High Mass as soon as the King and Queen might appear; 
 but the King and Queen, and a minister or two in atten- 
 dance, were waiting behind closed doors in Louis' pri- 
 vate room. The procession still halted: the Court was 
 already impatient: the doors still stood closed. They 
 opened; a servant came out and told the Cardinal that the 
 King wished to see him a moment, The servant and he 
 
228 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 went in together, and the doors shut behind the purple of 
 Rohan's robes and the lace upon his wrists and shoulders. 
 
 The Court outside grew weary of waiting. A quarter 
 of an hour, twenty minutes passed; it was near the half- 
 hour when those doors opened again and the Head of 
 the King's Household, the Baron de Breteuil, appeared 
 with the Cardinal at his side. A lieutenant of the Guard 
 happened to be by. Breteuil summoned him and said 
 aloud: "The King orders you not to leave the Cardinal 
 as you take him to his palace: you are answerable for his 
 person." 
 
 So Rohan was arrested, and there is no record who 
 sang Mass that day. 
 
X 
 
 THE NOTABLES 
 
 AUGUST 15, 1785, TO AUGUST 8, 1788 
 
 FOR the Queen the decision to send the CardjbaaL-lo- 
 trial was a final action. The thing was done 
 and, for that matter, nearly done with. 
 
 When she could find time in an interval of her occu- 
 pations to write to her brother Joseph it was not till a 
 fortnight later the whole letter, though it dealt in detail 
 with the affair as one deserving a full explanation, was 
 written upon a tone of relief. It was tuned, all of it, to one 
 key-phrase: "I am delighted to think that we shall never 
 hear of this filthy business again." 
 
 4 Hardly was that decisive act accomplished than there 
 suddenly appeared upon twenty points of the horizon, not 
 only in frontal advance but upon either flank and in either 
 rear of the perilous position she occupied, as many separate 
 forces unconnected or but vaguely in touch with one another; 
 some directly antagonistic to others, but all having it in 
 common that the Queen was their objective, and that the 
 trial of the Cardinal had been their signal for mobilisati' 
 and the march. 
 
 It is in the character of unwisdom to analyse and to f 
 ceed upon the results of analysis : in the character of wis 
 to integrate the whole point. The analysis of the situatic 
 just before the Cardinal's arrest showed clearly one 
 great factor of opposition, the Rohan clan. They 
 
230 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 everywhere in France contemporary and in France historical ; 
 they filled Marie Antoinette's generation and a hundred 
 years. The sisters, cousins, brothers-in-law were ubiqui- 
 tous. Paris was conspicuous with their palaces, the 
 Court with their functions, the provinces with their loyal 
 dependants or necessary adherents. They were the nucleus 
 of the strongest group that remained to the wealthy 
 nobility. The Guemenees, the Soubises, even the Condes, 
 were one with all the Rohans. A Rohan put to open trial 
 would have in that day the effect which a chief of our 
 modern financial gang put to open trial might have 
 to-day. Imagine one of our judges forced to try a 
 Rothschild! 
 
 The Queen saw clearly it is always easy to see one 
 
 simple thing clearly - - that one gr^gm force opposed to 
 
 her; she determined to brave it; but latent, unconscious of 
 
 Themselves until her own action called them into being, 
 
 how many other forces were there not! 
 
 There was no member of the higher nobility but to a greater 
 or less degree felt vaguely a right to immunity frpm such 
 publicity and this man was of the highest of the nobility, 
 a type. There was no member of the clergy but could 
 formulate a clear historical and legal right to the exemption 
 of a cleric from the judgment of a lay tribunal and this 
 man was of the highest of the clergy. 
 
 Had he been Archbishop of Toulouse or Sens, or any 
 
 iolly Gallic see even, his case would have been simpler; 
 was Bishop of Strasburg and his metropolitan was 
 
 Mainz: the Archbishop of Mainz was a conceivable 
 jpponent. 
 
 Me was a prince of the Church : Rome had a right to speak; 
 
 and almost did. 
 
 
 
THE NOTABLES 231 
 
 He was a prince of the Empire: Vienna had a right to 
 speak and almost did. 
 
 Austria and France had for now two years been at a strain : 
 it was just two years since Joseph had written his first 
 serious letter upon the Scheldt to his sister : the government 
 of Austria was embittered, and had for sovereign a man who 
 would not refuse to trade upon the embarrassment of Ver- 
 sailles. The last negotiations for indemnity against the 
 opening of the Scheldt were still pending. The moment 
 was opportune. 
 
 The Cardinal could be judged by but one tribunal of the 
 King's, and that a quasi-governmental body which had for 
 a generation stood in increasing opposition to the Crown 
 the Parlement. For them also the moment was opportune. 
 
 He could be tried in but one town, and that town the 
 capital, which had now taken up such a definite position of 
 hatred against the Queen; in but one part of that town, in 
 the Palais, right in the heart of Paris upon which all the 
 crowds of that unity so easily converge, and whose towers 
 were a perpetual symbol of the Monarchy which had 
 deserted its ancient seat for the isolated splendour of 
 Versailles. 
 
 But of much more weight than even these considerable 
 and separate bases of resistance was that indefinitely large 
 body of smaller and more fluctuating dangers whose integra- 
 tion the Queen should have seized if she was to save herself 
 from destruction. 
 
 There are in politics, as in physics, conditions of unstable 
 equilibrium in which a mass of fragments, seemingly in 
 repose, may at a shock be exploded. Their energy lies 
 ivjidy to be released by the least disturbance. It is the 
 business of statesmanship to remove or to dissolve such as 
 
232 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 these before large things are undertaken, lest a violent motion 
 explode them. A thousand such lay about the palace of 
 Versailles, threatening the Queen. Whatever particular 
 grudges_ (even in friends) had had time to grow, the mem- 
 ories of hatred in enemies, the last of the T)i] Barry's f nation, 
 the last of D'Aiguillon's. The suspicions of the devout 
 against her frivolity, the contempt of the philosophical for her 
 religion, the irritation of the politician against her presence 
 at the Council, the necessary enmity of Calonne all the 
 imperfect and capricious pleasures she had failed to pursue, 
 all the losses, dismissals, and humiliations rightly or wrongly 
 laid to her charge, were there, not consciously prepared, but 
 fatally bound to spring to life if once a body of action against 
 her took visible form. That form^th^-teial-of the Cardinal 
 was to present. When such a body of opposition was in 
 motion all would attach themselves to it, each from an aspect 
 of its own. All the old dangers, as each appeared, made 
 alliance with the new and immediate perils. 
 
 Madame de La Motte was arrested three days after the 
 Cardinal, in the early hours of the 18th of August, just back 
 at dawn in pomp from a great provincial party in Cham- 
 pagne. Her husband fled to London, there to meet a sym- 
 pathy readily extended to such exiles, and to keep in touch 
 with those centres of enmity against the French Crown and 
 religion with which he was familiar. It was on the very day 
 when Paris was in the first busy rumour upon the whole 
 matter when it was learned that the Cardinal had been 
 allowed to burn half his papers, that La Motte had got 
 away, that suspicion was permitted to attach to the Queen 
 it was upon such a day, the 19th of August that the Queen 
 chose to re-open the theatre at Trianon and to re-open it 
 with a play of Beaumarchais'. 
 

 THE NOTABLES 233 
 
 Many tragedies in history contain some such coincidences 
 1 ut none so many or so exact as those which accompany and 
 
 etermine the tragedy of Marie Antoinette. 
 Consider the position: the legend of her extravagance 
 rearisen unjustly. Trianon, is unjustly the chief 
 popular symbol of that extravagance. The theatre of Tria- 
 non, the most in view, the most obvious of its expenses, she 
 had wisely suppressed during many months, The park at 
 St. Cloud, at the gates of Paris, is a further count in the 
 indictment against her. Her visit to Paris former churching 
 in May has proved her grievously unpopular: the hated 
 financial agreement with Anstrifl in regard to the Scheldt is 
 developing, as it is believed (and rightly believed) , under her 
 guidance. Upon all this comes the thunder-clap of Rohan's 
 arrest and just as men are beginning to comprehend and 
 to explain it, just as the public and foreign enmity necessarily 
 suggest her complicity, say that "there is more than meets 
 the eye," that "you will see, the Queen will make victims of 
 them all ; but she is responsible for the purchase of the gems ! " 
 Just as the obvious lies were establishing themselves 
 through the embryonic press of those days and the cafe 
 gossip in that very Assumption week she chooses to appear 
 upon heritage at Trianpn, dressed and painted for a part 
 written by whom ? By the man Caron Beaumarchais by 
 purchase whom all the vulgar now associated with the 
 most successful attack upon the existing regime, whom 
 the older and the higher world remember as the associate 
 and perhaps the partner of the Jewish clique in London that 
 had published the first dirty lie against Marie Antoinette's 
 chastity when she was as yet but a child of eighteen. 
 
 Why was such a folly committed ? The answer to that 
 question is all around the reader to-day. That society did 
 
234 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 not know its doom. It was "chic," it was "the thing" for 
 the ruling powers to read and to see acted criticism upon 
 themselves. The little spice of danger they could think 
 it no more was a piquant addition to jaded and well- 
 known pastimes. But the Queen ! How terribly more great 
 and more real the living consequences were to be to her than 
 to any such abstraction as "a regime" : she was to see and to 
 feel continued physical violence, to be menaced with 
 muskets, to be forced from her husband before his death, 
 to have her child dragged from her; she was to be wholly 
 abandoned, tortured silently by a subterranean silence and 
 at last publicly killed. 
 
 To the coincidence of that piece of folly another was soon 
 added. All the succeeding month was full of the last negotia- 
 tions with Austria: on the 19th of September public dis- 
 cussion of the necklace had gone far enough to move her to 
 a long letter; shejvrote and explained disdainfully to her 
 brother on the 20th was definitely signed the ^obligation 
 ^njjiepart of France for half the Dutch indemnity. Austria 
 received for no reason save the Queen's pressure amllm 
 imaginary relief from war about a million pounds* With 
 the public debt already a m5t!er^funiebateand about to 
 become the critical matter for action, it was a monstrous 
 thing. 
 
 Budget for budget stating the proportions in terms of 
 modern revenue it corresponded to what a payment of 
 between ten millions or twelve would be to-day. Stated in 
 terms of ease of payment, of ability to pay, it represented far 
 more than such a sum would represent in a modern budget 
 - and not a penny of that humiliating obligation need have 
 been incurred but for the Queen. 
 
 Those historians who regard as beneath discussion the 
 
THE NOTABLES 235 
 
 great popular cry of the Revolution that Marie Antoinette 
 "sent money to Austria" are too ready to neglect whatever 
 is rhetorical. Tumbrils of gold did not pass as the 
 populace believed but this enormous obligation was 
 incurred, and incurred through her and in favour of her 
 brother. 
 
 That autumn, winter, and spring the necklace was the 
 theme. The confused currents of opinion had this in com- 
 mon that all accused the Queen, just as, in the great modern 
 parallel of the Dreyfus case, the confused currents of 
 opinion, differing widely and sometimes in direct opposition 
 on vital points, had it all in common that the Catholic Church 
 was the real defendant throughout and the real villain of the 
 piece. According to some Rohan was the Queen's lover, 
 afraid to accuse her or perhaps too fond but at any rate he 
 had purchased the necklace by her orders. According to 
 others the La Motte had been the Queen's cat's-paw in trick- 
 ing Rohan. According to others again, more extreme, the 
 Queen had been herself the actual agent throughout, and 
 would now, by an official pressure, procure a verdict 
 against her lover and her friend in order to whitewash her 
 own character. In general the absurdity which took most 
 hold was nearer to the latter theory than to any other: it 
 became a test point simply whether Rohan would be ac- 
 quitted or condemned. Rohan acquitted, the Queen (by 
 some wildly illogical process of general opinion!) was sup- 
 posed to be proved guilty of authorship in the whole affair. 
 If Rohan was condemned, she was equally guilty of author- 
 ship only, in that case the mob and the foreigner would 
 say that wicked judges had proved pliant to Court influence. 
 
 As in the modern trial which I have already quoted as 
 the great historic parallel to the trial of Rohan, no evidence 
 
236 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 could affect the minds of those who had already concluded: 
 to make their fixed conclusion fit in with the facts any con- 
 tradiction of human psychology and human probabilities 
 was admitted. Did some pornographer attack the Queen 
 and defend Rohan? Straightway he was a hero! Had 
 there been a Pantheon he would have had his burial 
 there. Did some anonymous pamphleteer assert his con- 
 viction of the Queen's guilt ? Straightway he was an author- 
 ity. Did some obscure and needy man take money to sup- 
 port the immense power and fortunes of the Rohans against 
 the impoverished crown ? Straightway (like those who sup- 
 ported Jewish finance in the modern parallel I have quoted) 
 he became a being full of self-sacrifice defending the weak 
 and the oppressed against haughty power. The document 
 whereby the necklace was ordered was signed "Marie An- 
 toinette de France,' 9 - a signature quite impossible in form 
 and not even remotely resembling in handwriting that of 
 the Queen. No matter. It must be supposed, "for this 
 occasion only," that she wrote thus once at least. Or, if 
 that lie was too hard to swallow, then she had had Rohan 
 sign thus, or get it signed thus, precisely in order to cover 
 her tracks by an improbable signature. Aa^ihing^ at all 
 was sai4^and believed especially in foreign countries 
 providedjtjmplicatedjfie^tteeftr 
 
 The preliminary stages of the trial were long. Oliva 
 was not arrested till late in the winter, at Brussels, fluttering 
 and confused; Retaux not till the spring, at Geneva. 
 
 The Queen endured those months of increasing public 
 insult and increasing doubt. She was in her fourth preg- 
 nancy, and, what was more, her character, to some extent 
 her body, had aged somewhat. She had passed that thirtieth 
 year which her mother had foreseen to be critical for her; she 
 
THE NOTABLES 237 
 
 had come to what a superstition or a coincidence made her 
 regard as the beginning of bitter years. 
 
 Meanwhile in his room at the Bastille, where he was con- 
 fined, the Cardinal held his court, enjoyed his receptions, 
 and continued to impress the Parisians with all the pomp 
 of his rank. It was not till the end of May that he was 
 taken to the Conciergerie the last step before the public 
 trial; he went by night upon the 29th of the month. On 
 the next day, the 30th of May, 1786, in the morning, the 
 Parlement met in the Grand Salle, the indictments were 
 read and the pleadings opened. 
 
 That trial has been described a thousand times. The 
 Rohans of every degree were packed at the doors of the court. 
 The deference they met with, the immense crowds which, 
 during those long two days, awaited the verdict, the anxiety 
 at Versailles all these are the theme of every book that has 
 dealt with this best known of historic trials: they need not 
 be repeated here. At the close of the proceedings came the 
 significant thing: the public prosecutor demanded no more 
 than that the Cardinal should apologise for having thought 
 the Queen capable of such things, and should resign the 
 Grand Almonry on that small point, the forty-nine judges 
 deliberated a whole day long. 
 
 It was dark, it was nine o'clock on the 31st of May when 
 their conclusion was announced: some would have con- 
 demned him to the mere apology and resignation thus 
 demanded, a few to apology but not to resignation, the 
 majority were simply for acquittal, and at last, by twenty- 
 six votes to twenty-three, Rohan left the court completely 
 absolved. For the rest the La Motte was ordered to be 
 flogged, branded, and imprisoned at Salpetiere. Her hus- 
 band in contumacy to the galleys. Retaux to be 
 
 
238 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 transported. As for Oliva, they declared her not to fall 
 under the matter they had to try she was free. 
 
 In Paris the acquittal of the Cardinal (which meant to the 
 mob simply the condemnation of the Queen) caused an 
 immediate popular outburst of cheering and congratulation. 
 They surrounded his palace. They demanded and obtained 
 its illumination. He was compelled to show himself and to 
 be acclaimed. Then, as must ever be the case with such 
 false heroes, he was completely dropped. Those who had 
 done most to secure the verdict were most in a position to know 
 the perils of further ovation. When the King had stripped 
 him of every possible function and emolument and had 
 exiled him to the Velay, the Rohans themselves were the most 
 assiduous to impose silence upon him and to force him back 
 into obscurity. He lived, unnoticed and unremembered, 
 remote in Strasburg; was advised, on election to the States- 
 General two years later, not to sit; sat, refused the civil 
 oath, emigrated, survived the Queen by some ten years, and 
 died, doing after that no more evil. 
 
 No public insult could more deeply have wounded the 
 Queen than this verdict and that demonstration. Her 
 health was touched, but much more her very self was over- 
 shadowed as she feared and she was right for ever. 
 She had not even, as have we, the resource of history. She 
 did not know how thoroughly history can deal with these 
 Popish plots and Royal Necklaces and Dreyfus Innocencies 
 and the rest, nor how contemptuously time and learning 
 together expose at last every evil intrigue. She only knew 
 and she was right that in her time the calumny would 
 never be set right. And indeed this one of the great historical 
 enthusiasms for falsehood was not set right till our own 
 time. Napoleon, musing years after upon the verdict, 
 
 
THE NOTABLES 239 
 
 called it, with his broad judgment and his opportunities for 
 < comparison and knowledge, the beginning of thejieyglution, 
 the gate of her tomb. Marie Antoinette was of no great 
 judgment she was contemporary to it all; no experience or 
 research, but only instinct, could guide her but some such 
 dreadful presentiment of the capital importance of the affair 
 stood fast in her mind : in part it greatly ripened her view 
 of this bad world; much more it oppressed or broke the 
 springs of her spirit, and while there is henceforward in all 
 she did new tenacity and much calculation of effort, there is, 
 much more, an inner certitude of doom. 
 
 The King went off to Cherbourg where Calonne, still seek- 
 ing to re-establish the finances by an extended public 
 employment of labour and by display, had achieved the first 
 stage of that magnificent artificial harbour, the model of all 
 i its kind that were to follow in Europe and on the Mediter- 
 ranean. Everywhere Louis met with easy but fervid acclam- 
 ation. He had never seen the provinces before. He came 
 Iback radiant. The new warmth and zeal, which, under 
 another aspect and reacting against other stimuli, were so 
 
 soon to produce the great change, had already touched the 
 people, and he had bathed, as it were, in a public energy 
 which, till then, cabined in Versailles or wearied by the 
 
 cliques of Paris, he had never known. All that enthusiasm, 
 I his and his people's, he communicated in many letters to the 
 < Queen; but she had suffered her blow, and nothing now 
 i could undeceive her but that fate was coming. Her relation 
 I the Archduke, the last of so many royal visitors at Versailles, 
 ihad gone. In July her fourth child was born a girl; and 
 
 that same summer every stranger that passed through Paris 
 i noted the beginnings of the storm. The pamphlets were 
 
 awake; the press had risen to a continuous pressure of 
 
240 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 
 suggestion, anecdote, and attack, and the necessity for facing 
 and solving the violent fiscal problem was no longer a theory 
 to be discussed politically but a thing to be done. 
 
 The Court was brilliant in a last leaping flame. Fontaine- 
 bleau that autumn was glorious with colours and men; the 
 balls at Versailles that winter shone with a peculiar and 
 memorable splendour but it was the end. There were to 
 be no more glories : the last ball had been given, the last 
 progress made. 
 
 Calonne, whose French audacity might a little earlier 
 have saved the State, dared an experiment which failed - 
 but which, from its nature and the things it could but breed, 
 led on to the Revolution. He determined (and he persuaded 
 the King) to summon, for consultation upon the finances and 
 the betterment of the realm, a council of all those who led 
 in the nobility, the Church, the Parlements, the Services, 
 the great municipalities. This convention was to be named, 
 
 Iupon the parallel of the last similar summons now some 
 two centuries old an assembly of "the Notables." The 
 Ministry were given the King's decision suddenly, upon the 
 29th of December. The Notables were to meet upon that 
 day month. More than one critic especially among the 
 aged foresaw, the dyke once opened, what a flood would 
 follow; all, wise or unwise, felt that the meeting would be 
 the end of most that they had known and the beginning of 
 quite new perils and perhaps new energies or a new world. 
 Whether or no the Queen were hurt at a sudden determina- 
 tion in which she had taken no part nor even had a voice, 
 she very rapidly in the next six months rose to hold the 
 Government in her hands: thenceforward to the meeting 
 of the States-General and the opening of the Revolution, her 
 decision and her vigour take part in all those acts a dozen 
 
THE NOTABLES 241 
 
 at the most which proved ultimately the authors of her 
 destruction. 
 
 The Notables met or rather did not meet upon the 
 day named, the 29th of January, '87. They came to Paris 
 on the appointed day, they met in the streets of Paris, in 
 drawing-rooms and elsewhere; but those provincial mayors, 
 great judges, and members of the high nobility had to wait 
 and chafe for many days before they were legally convened. 
 Criticism and violence of tongue had time to grow; there 
 was a sense of weakness, of anarchy even, in the petty 
 details of governmental action following on such delay. 
 When they did meet, before their debates had time to 
 develop, one event after another was transforming every- 
 thing around the Queen. 
 
 The Polignacs had quarrelled with her; Madame de 
 Polignac, her life-long friend, had threatened to retire from 
 her post with the Children of France. Many most 
 had followed them; all whom the Polignacs had benefited, 
 through the Queen, for so many years. A last and new 
 faction, more intimate, more wounding, more in possession 
 of her secrets, and more dangerous than any other was 
 thus formed. 
 
 Vergennes was just dead; the King, should Calonne fail 
 in the great business of Reform which the Assembly of 
 Notables had opened, would be left without a Chief Minister, 
 and the Queen's place was plainly ready for her in his 
 council-room. 
 
 More than these, the La Motte had escaped from prison, 
 and had fled (of course) to London. 
 
 There was not then, as there is to-day, in London a vast 
 and organised journalistic system by which news is afforded, 
 withheld, or falsified at will. Nay, even had there been such 
 
242 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 a monopoly, journals had not one-hundredth of the power 
 they have to-day. Again, those who governed England then 
 were usually well-travelled and were acquainted with the 
 French tongue. Again, there existed, what has since failed 
 us, strong independent opinion and a cultivated middle class. 
 The female La Motte was, therefore, not welcomed with those 
 transports of affection or homage which she would receive 
 to-day; but there was already sufficient horror at continen- 
 tal procedure and sufficient certitude in the baseness of 
 all administration of justice abroad to stand her in very 
 good stead. The nourishment of the public conscience upon 
 the sins of foreigners had already begun. La Motte was 
 something of a martyr, and, as she seemed poor, could make 
 some livelihood out of the public folly. She began that 
 series of pretended "Revelations" which were in some few 
 months to be among the principal torments of the Queen. 
 Whether (like Esterhazy by, our Press in the parallel I have 
 already drawn) she was bribed to say such things, we have 
 no record. At any rate her publications paid her for 
 a time. 
 
 jf It has been said that Marie Antoinette helped the La Motte 
 I to fly from prison. It may be so. When in a great public 
 quarrel the innocent side is blundering and unwise, its acts 
 of unwisdom are incalculable. Marie Antoinette had 
 certainly sent to have the woman visited in prison. It is 
 possible that, as she had hoped a public trial could help her, 
 so she hoped now the La Motte loose would do less harm 
 than the La Motte imprisoned and gagged, wuth every 
 rumour free to circulate. Perhaps she was wholly ignorant 
 of the whole matter. Anyhow, the La Motte was loose - 
 and the flood of calumny springing from London flowed 
 against the Queen and did its work. She, at Versailles, 
 
THE NOTABLES 243 
 
 < grew every day to be more and more absorbed in the crisis 
 which was developing with such rapidity for it was 
 already apparent as March proceeded that the experiment 
 
 i 'of the Notables had failed. Calonne had still his native 
 
 i courage and his peculiar rapidity of manoeuvre ; he fought 
 his hand hard but the opposition was too plain, too large, 
 
 ; and too strong for him. His plan had been just he had 
 conceived the reformation of lightening the worst taxes 
 
 ; and of arranging the more equal redistribution of the burden 
 
 ' upon land a new redistribution in which no privilege 
 should exist of rank or custom and, more daring, but still, 
 in the tradition of Turgot, he had planned an adumbration 
 of the Revolution by proposing provincial, local, and par- 
 ochial assemblies. 
 
 Two currents of hostility met him : one that the Notables 
 in the main stood personally for privilege; the other that 
 everyone in France desired more change, and above all, more 
 "democratisation" of the centre of the national machinery. 
 There was an appetite for debate, for V facts"; a demand 
 for exact accounts and public audit and public acceptance 
 of taxes, v 
 
 These two currents gained their intensity, however, from 
 the legend which had gathered round Calonne, as the 
 Financier of the Deficit and the Adviser of the Throne. A 
 
 i symbolic character, which was never his but which has 
 endured almost to our own time, was popularly super- 
 imposed upon him, a character of mere frivolity, of mere 
 extravagance in time of security, especially of subservience 
 to fancied expensive whims of the Queen. 
 
 She, alas ! thought to do a public service and a strong one 
 by persuading Louis to the dismissal of his Minister when 
 his failure with the Notables was proved. She won. On 
 
244 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 the 8th of April, 1787, Calonne fell, to be exiled, to fly (of 
 course) to London, and thence, only too probably, to help 
 swell that river of evil speaking and writing which, since 
 her thirtieth year, flowed so regularly against the character 
 of Marie Antoinette; but which now broke all bounds and 
 filled half the pamphlets. 
 
 If in this she acted publicly, decidedly, and to her hurt, 
 in her next equally decisive step the Queen acted even more 
 publicly, more decisively, and more both to her own hurt and 
 that of the alien populace whom she already detested but 
 desired, in such a crisis, to rule. After some mention of 
 Necker, she forced Lomenie upon the King. 
 
 The writing of history, more than any other liberal occu- 
 pation, suffers from routine. I will not detain the reader of 
 this chronicle with any long digression upon the effect of 
 the French Revolution, upon the nature, the prodigious 
 force, and the universality of what may be called, according 
 to the taste of the scholar, the Catholic reaction or the 
 Catholic renaissance of our day. Still less would I disturb 
 the progress of my story with a divagation upon the ease 
 with which our academies here fall into every trap set them 
 by the enemies of the Faith abroad whether those enemies 
 be random politicians, high stoics, skeptics of a noble 
 temper, common usurers, or men fanatical against all re- 
 striction of the senses. But I will so far delay the reader at 
 this moment as. to state plainly a succession of undoubted 
 historical and contemporary truths in no particular order, 
 and to beg him to reach a conclusion by a comparison of 
 them all. 
 
 It is in thejcotitine of our universities to say that Catholi- 
 
THE NOTABLES 245 
 
 cism was struck to death by two^great upheavals ; theJLeiaiv 
 mation opened it to attack; the Revolution dealt the mortal 
 blow :jt is now said to be dying, and especially in France. 
 This is the first truth ; that our universities say these things ; 
 some regret, some are pleased ; but it is believed and said in 
 either camp. Next, it is true that Louis XVI. practised his 
 religion and believed in it. Next, it is true that his Queen, 
 never wholly abandoning the rule of religion far from 
 it was now, in 1787, particularly devoted and increas- 
 ingly exact in her observance; daily, as she daily suffered, 
 more penetrated inwardly by the spirit of the Church^ 
 A fourth truth is that no single man pretending to high 
 intelligence in that generation of Frenchmen believed in 
 more than a God : the only quarrel was between those who 
 believed in such a Being and those who denied this last of 
 dogmas. The fifth truth is, that but yesterday all the 
 French hierarchy and all the 80,000 priests of the Church 
 save, perhaps, three suffered the loss of all corporate 
 property and all established income rather than vary in 
 one detail from the discipline of Rome. The sixth truth 
 is that the prominent and outstanding names of the French 
 hierarchy or of the Church's defenders before and during 
 this revolutionary crisis were: Rohan, an evil liver, a cheat, 
 a fool, and a blackguard; Talleyrand something even lower 
 in morals than he was higher in wit; the Archbishop of 
 Narbonne -- living six hundred miles from his See with 
 his own niece for mistress; Gregoire, a full schismatic and 
 in his way an honest man; Maury, a vulgar politician, 
 like one of our own vulgar politicians to-day, a priest 
 out for a fortune, a sort of "Member of Parliament," a 
 petty persecutor of the Pope in person and of the Papacy, 
 in time a Cardinal and this man Lomenie. The 
 
246 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 seventh truth is that Marie Antoinette (who practised her 
 religion) ardently supported Lomenie and befriended him, 
 and that, therefore, Louis (who was devout) accepted him 
 for Chief Minister. 
 
 Read these undoubted truths together and decide whether 
 the Faith has advanced or receded in a hundred years. 
 
 Who was Lomenie de Brienne? He had had, these 
 twenty years, a reputation for what is vaguely called in 
 aristocracies "ability." He had presented the address 
 of the Clergy in the Coronation year. He was Arch- 
 bishop of Toulouse. He suited La Fayette's idea of 
 honesty. He had inordinate passions. He was yet fur- 
 ther and later Archbishop of Sens for the sake of the 
 pickings. He had led with no scruple of honour the 
 opposition to Calonne in the Notables. Mercy favoured 
 him. Vermond, the Queen's old tutor, who owed all to 
 him, supported his claim, and Marie Antoinette imposed 
 him. But who was he? 
 
 He was an active, careful, and laborious atheist to 
 whom the King, by a scruple, refused the See of Paris, 
 holding "that the See of Paris is peculiar and had always 
 better be held by a man who believed in God." He was a 
 wit, he loved wealth inordinately and that was all. He 
 had his reputation with the wealthy, but no action of his 
 remains. Such was the hierarchy of that moment, and to 
 a circle of such men was power restricted. And Lomenie 
 de Brienne was made and put into his seat by the advice 
 of Vermond, Marie Antoinette's old tutor, by the advice 
 of Joseph II., a protector of religious doubt; he repaid her 
 by a constant devotion. 
 
THE NOTABLES 247 
 
 It was on May-day, 1787, that this personage was 
 put, with an inferior title, at the head of the finances, 
 a position which -- now more than ever --was neces- 
 sarily the chief post in the French State. On the 25th 
 the Notables, from whom he came and whom he had 
 led, were dissolved. . . . 
 
 Fersen, eager to spend one last day in Versailles, had 
 come for a few flying hours. He watched their dissolution 
 as a show ... he did not return till the eve of the 
 Revolution, and, once returned, he remained a pledged 
 sacrifice, a servant, to the end. . . . 
 
 The Notables had done nothing, and Lomenie himself 
 proceeded to do much the same; or rather to bring forward 
 for the third time as an active proposition for the mil- 
 lionth as a theory propounded the scheme of financial 
 reform which every predecessor had, in one shape or 
 another, presented. The destruction of the fossil com- 
 partments walls which separated various antique forms 
 of taxation, a larger total tax, a more equitable distribution ; 
 the abolition of imposts uselessly vexatory; loans to oil the 
 wheels of change. 
 
 The Notables had gone: but to register such decrees a 
 power parallel to that of the Throne must as we saw in 
 the case of Turgot concur. The permanent body of 
 legal advisers to the Prince a conception as old as Rome 
 and morally in continuity with the Empire the body 
 which had tried Rohan the Parlement pleading the 
 absence of a regular budget and of public discussion, 
 refused to register, and within three months of Lomenie de 
 Brienne's appointment, the Parlement in session had pro- 
 ceeded from Sabattier's famous pun 1 to affirm that no 
 
 x " Vous demandez 1'ftat des recettes ces sont les tats generaux qu'il nous faut.V 
 
248 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 permanent impost could be levied upon the nation without 
 the summons and consent of the States-General. 
 
 The reader should pause upon that phrase. 
 
 The conception that All should rule is cceval with society. 
 
 But the words so used by Sabattier were not a mere opinion 
 nor a mere reiteration of justice. They were spoken in 
 that assembly of lawyers which formed the chief body of 
 the State, and once spoken in such an air they were creative. 
 
 X^'sjiemorable declaration of July, 1787, launched the 
 JEtesobttiea. 
 
 Nothing can reinvigorate itself or snatch itself from 
 decay save by a return upon itself and a recapture of its 
 own past. To revive the States-General was to bring back 
 to life the vigour of the Middle Ages, and to renew at 
 the close of this last long and glorious but exhausted phase 
 in the national life the permanent energy of Gaul. 
 
 When in the eleventh century the great transition from 
 the Dark Ages to mediaeval civilisation was accomplished, 
 there came, along with the new Gothic architecture and 
 the new national tongues, as the last fruit of that florescence, 
 an institution known in each province of Christendom 
 by some local name (for the creation was local and spon- 
 taneous) but everywhere bearing the same characters, in 
 formation, object, and inner nature. This Institution had 
 for its purpose the affirmation of a doctrine fundamental 
 in the Faith, that sovereignty lies and can only lie with the 
 community. This Institution had for instrument where- 
 with to enforce that right a conception at once as mystical 
 and as plain as any that the Faith has admitted or revealed 
 in her strict dogmas, the conception of representation: two 
 
THE NOTABLES 249 
 
 men should speak for thousands; the spirit of a commun- 
 ity should enter and be seen through individuals who 
 should speak with the voice of districts; these represen- 
 tatives should be the very numbers for whom they stood: 
 an institution as tangible, as real, as visible as the Sacra- 
 ment; as mysterious as the Presence of the Lord. It was 
 a miracle of faith, but it conquered; and even to-day, woe- 
 fully corrupt, there resides in Representation something of 
 majesty and a power in moments of great danger or of 
 great national desire to gleam for a moment through the 
 dead body of an Institution whose whole principle of 
 popular sanctity has been forgotten. 
 
 The theory of Representation sprang, I say, naturally 
 from that young and happy time when Europe arose from 
 sleep: the century of the Christian reaction against Asia. 
 
 The valleys of the Pyrenees, a scene of continual armed 
 endeavours, spurred on by the constant pressure of Islam, 
 first organised the idea. 
 
 The cool and cleanly little town of Jaca an outpost 
 on the Roman road into Spain that led down to the fron- 
 tiers of the Moors the little frontier town of Jaca saw 
 the first strict gathering of the kind in the very first of the 
 Crusades: but Jaca was not alone; it was throughout 
 Christendom a natural, a simultaneous growth. The 
 southern cities of Gaul, the great provinces, Languedoc, 
 Beam, distant and isolated Brittany, the compact England 
 of the thirteenth century, followed; lastly, and not till the 
 opening of the fourteenth century, a united and majestic 
 gathering of Representatives, designed to bring before the 
 Crown at Paris the voice, complaint, or will of all its sub- 
 jects, emerged. 
 
 These assemblies, a Cortes in Spain, a Parliament in 
 
250 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 England, were in France called Estates and that rare one 
 which stood, not for one province of Gaul, but for all 
 combined, was known as the States-General. Like every 
 other institution of its kind it was alive with the mediaeval 
 passion for Reality. Not abstract statistics nor some 
 crude numerical theory, but the facts of society were 
 recognised in, or rather everywhere translated into, these 
 representative bodies. There were corps of nobles 
 since the Middle Ages, descending from the Roman centur- 
 ies and their rich landed class, had nobles for a reality. 
 The priests were separate; the commoners. In some cases 
 (notably in towns) special corporations had special dele- 
 gates ; in all especially in the States-General of France 
 the various aspects of the State were present in the 
 shape of innumerable statements and mandates enforced 
 upon the Representatives (and therefore the servants) of 
 clerical and commercial corporations, of territorial units, 
 of municipal authorities. 
 
 So long as the high attempt of the Middle Ages was 
 maintained so long these councils flourished. That 
 attempt bent down and failed in the sixteenth century 
 and with it declined, corrupted, or disappeared the cor- 
 porate assemblies which were to the political sincerity of 
 the Middle Ages what the universities were to its intel- 
 lectual eagerness, the Gothic to its majestic insistence upon 
 eternal expression. 
 
 In certain places the advent of the Renaissance in the 
 sixteenth century closed the story of representation; in 
 others, under the influence of the Reformation, became 
 a form. In the two chief centres of the West two varied 
 fortunes attached to the two failing branches of that great 
 mediaeval scheme. In Protestant England the form of 
 
THE NOTABLES 251 
 
 Representation survived; in Catholic France the memory. 
 By one of those ironies in which History or Providence 
 delights, the English oligarchy, which, in the phrase of a 
 principal English writer, "had risen upon the ruins of 
 Religion," the Howards, the "Cromwells," the Cecils, and 
 the rest, maintained the form of The House of "Commons." 
 The squires used that organ in the seventeenth century to 
 destroy the power of a Crown whose own folly had, through 
 the plunder of the Monasteries, led to its own complete 
 impoverishment and to the enrichment of the gentry. 
 The squires maintained that Crown but kept it as their 
 salaried servant, and thus throughout the eighteenth cen- 
 tury the fossil of a representative system was in England 
 not only cherished but actively cherished to serve us as 
 the armour of privilege. Parliament remained intensely 
 national, full of sacred ceremonies and forms, and 
 still using conveniently to the rich some shadow of 
 that theory of national sovereignty which, in breaking 
 with the Faith, the nation had broken with, perhaps 
 for ever: whether for ever or not our own immediate 
 future will show. 
 
 For Europe the strange accident by which dry-bones 
 Representation thus survived in England was of vast con- 
 sequence. This fossil bridged the gulf between the liv- 
 ing Parliaments of the Middle Ages and the advent of 
 modern democracy and by a curious inquiry into the 
 archaeology and the extinct functions of English public life, 
 Catholic Europe has begun to reconstruct its own past. 
 For England the consequences of the survival are known 
 to all who have watched the complexion of the Commons 
 and type of membership that House enjoys and the 
 strange mode of recruitment of the Lords. 
 
252 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 In France the fortunes of Representation, that medi- 
 aeval thing, became, from the moment when the Middle 
 Ages failed, very different. The States-General stood 
 by the side of, and nominally informing, a Roman and 
 centralised sovereignty: they were not, like the English 
 Parliament, an institution immixed in and at last iden- 
 tical with, a wealthy oligarchy; they were an institution 
 that stood by the side of and was at last suppressed by a 
 national despotism. They ceased abruptly (in 1614), 
 but they never lost their soul. Should they hear the call 
 to resurrection they could rise whole and quick, a com- 
 plete voice of the nation to counsel or to command. In 
 July, 1787, with the protestation of the Parlement of Paris 
 and its appeal to the past, that call had come, and from 
 that moment onward it was plain that all France would 
 now soon be found in action. Within two years the thing 
 was decided. 
 
 What was the Queenji position those two ypars ? She 
 was in the saddle. Her fulness of life, her firmness of pur- 
 pose, had come upon her quickly. She was already divorced 
 from joy; she was already, and for the first time, mixed 
 ^constantly with public affairs. It is sometimes written that 
 Jtomenie de Brienne "gave her a place in the Council." 
 yThat is nonsense. She chose to enter publicly what, in 
 / private, had been hers since the March of 1787 at the latest; 
 what had been partly hers long before. Her strength of 
 utterance, her now formative disillusions (for disillusion- 
 ment is formative in women), her apparent peril (for peril 
 is formative in those who desire to govern) , her recent griev- 
 ous humiliation and suffering (for these are formative in all), 
 
THE NOTABLES 253 
 
 formed her and gave her fixed and constructive power. 
 It was most imperfectly, at moments disastrously, used ; but 
 if the reader would understand the violent five years which 
 follow this moment and culminated in the crash of the throne, 
 he must first seize the fact that, though vast impersonaKj 
 forces at issue were melting and recasting France, andi 
 therefore Europe, the personality nearest the executive// 
 throughout was that of Marie Antoinette. w 
 
 In her room at Versailles met the coming intriguers 
 during the struggle with the Parlement under Brienne. 
 She it was against whom the dishonoured Orleans, with 
 the instinct of a demagogue, intrigued and whispered. She 
 it was who spoke of "a necessary rigour" when the fight- 
 ing begun; she we may presume or be certain who 
 forbade the King to fly in the days of October; she cer- 
 tainly upon whom the great effort of Mirabeau turned ; she 
 who planned or rather guided the escape to Varennes; she 
 who principally suffered from the recapture; she who con- 
 stantly and actively advised Vienna, Mercy, Fersen, Mallet, 
 in the perilous months that followed that failure; she who 
 sustained the Court after the 20th of June; she against 
 whom Paris charged on the 10th of August: hers was that 
 power the memory of which exasperated the Revolution and 
 drove even its military advisers to useless reprisals, and to 
 her death at last. 
 
 I do not say that the powers of that awful time were per- 
 sonal or of this world far from it. Nor do I say that you 
 : will not find crowded into that little seon of years a greater 
 crowd of high and individual wills than a century may 
 count in meaner times - - there were a regiment of active, 
 organising, and creative minds astir within a mile of Notre 
 Dame. Still less do I pretend that the Queen's judgment, 
 
254 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 her rapidity, her energy, and her certitude were comparable 
 to any of a hundred or more in that arena. She was 
 nothing compared with their greatest, little compared with 
 their least. But I say that close to the executive to that 
 which, until August, '92, could command soldiers, sign 
 edicts, and, above all, correspond with foreign Powers its 
 adviser, its constant moderator, at times its very self, was 
 the Queen. 
 
 , Her last child, the baby of eleven months, was now in 
 the July of 1787, dead. It was the second death of a thing 
 loved that she had known her mother's the first; it was 
 the first death she had seen of a thing loved. In the deser- 
 tion of her friends, the great part she had to play, the open 
 wound of the necklace verdict, she took that death as but 
 one more poignant sorrow. The little girl had been ailing 
 for but four days: Marie Antoinette shut herself up with 
 her husband and his sister for one day in Trianon to recover 
 from that shock. She returned to act. 
 
 She applauded and sustained her husband or rather 
 Brienne during the struggle with the Parlement all July. 
 She heard (and .despised) the call for theJStates-General. 
 When the Lit de Justice, the solemn ceremony by which the 
 King could enforce the registration of his edicts in spite of 
 the Parlement's refusal, was held on the 6th of August, it 
 was held at Versailles, as it were under the Queen's eye: the 
 Parlement replied by refusing to admit the registration so 
 made. 
 
 - ; The Parisian crowd surrounded the Parlement in Paris 
 and applauded : not for this or that, nor for the nature of the 
 taxes protested, nor for anything but for that prime principle 
 that the States -General should be summoned. The 
 Queen ordered economies: they came into force at once, 
 
THE NOTABLES 255 
 
 that very week. Those who lost their posts became new 
 enemies of hers: the economies were nothing to the crowd: 
 she gained nothing with the public : she lost more with Ver- 
 sailles. It was dangerous for her to approach the Capital. 
 
 If she had hoped, by an economy that seemed to her so 
 important, to affect the Parlement, Marie Antoinette was in 
 grevious error: in error from that lack of perspective and 
 oJL#ri{> which her position, and above all her character, 
 had left in her. Within a week of it all the Parlement had 
 replied by a renewed refusal to register, a renewed demand 
 for the States-General, and was away at Troyes, exiled but 
 sitting in full power, deliberating and enthusiastically sup- 
 ported by Paris old and new. At Versailles, Lomenie de 
 Brienne, the Queen's man, demanded the title, beyond the 
 practical power, of Chief Minister: such a demand led to 
 the resignation of what little brains were left in the Council. 
 In September he compromised with the Parlement, and let 
 it return. 
 
 Lomenie next formulated decrees which proposed indeed 
 to rely on ordinary taxation but to an extraordinary extent 
 and on a novel scheme and to call the States-General 
 within five years: he intended (as did the Queen) to adjourn 
 and surely to drop the meeting of the States- General alto- 
 gether. In November, when a majority in the Parlement 
 was secured by the absence of some, perhaps the purchase 
 of others, he caused the King,, to meet that body and 
 i then raised its anger again by registering without rwmtrng 
 votes and, as it were, by the autocratic power of the King. 
 If, as is possible, the Queen did not advise or countenance 
 this last act, at any rate the whole tone of her correspon- 
 dence applauds the decision. 
 
 The consequences following on this error were immediate. 
 

 256 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 Orleans, now the Queen's chief enemy, made himself a 
 spokesman of discontent and was exiled to the provinces ; he 
 attributed his disgrace to the Queen. Sabattier and Tieteau 
 de St. Just were arrested on the bench itself. The States- 
 General precisely because it had been proposed to consider 
 them "in five years," and because the Parlement had insisted 
 on an earlier date, were more in the public mouth than ever; 
 and as the year closed, Brienne and all Brienne stood for, 
 bethought them of some wide action that should remove all 
 this friction and leave government secure. 
 
 That action had the Queen for its authoress. It was an 
 attempt at despotic reform without representation, an 
 Austrian model, and it was named "The New Order." 
 
 No year in Marie Antoinette's life had more affected her 
 experience, her character, and her position in the State than 
 this of 1787, her thirty-second, which now drew to an end. 
 She had made a Ministry; she had influenced, supported, in 
 part createeU-a policy; she had reaped the full harvest of 
 pain in the first death of a child, in the growing illness of 
 her eldest son, in the flood of calumny which had succeeded 
 the La Motte's escape from prison. She had come rapidly 
 to actual power, she was exercising it with facility and 
 every act of hers led more nearly and more directly to the 
 ^cataclysm before her. 
 
 The public hatred of her had immensely grown in inten- 
 / sity, in volume, but especially in quality, since she had 
 / .manifestly become the chief adviser^of her husband and jhe 
 creator^iLa-Scheme oL government . The Polignacs, as I 
 have said, had joined the enemy. Orleans was now defi- 
 nitely the head of her bitter opponents. The drawing-rooms 
 of Paris had joined the populace against her. It had been 
 actually proposed to mock her effigy during the rejoicing at 
 
THE NOTABLES 257 
 
 the return of the Parlement from exile. The wits had 
 renewed their nicknames: she was "Madame Deficit" as 
 well as "the Austrian" she had always been and by the 
 winter all the quarrel in which the Parlement, the crowd, 
 and nearly every permanent force were now ranged against 
 the Crown, saw in her the core of the resistance and the 
 personal object of attack. 
 
 The year 1788 at its very opening showed clearly how far 
 the development had gone. That system of " a new order" 
 - a powerful, uncriticised Crown, thorough reform, the 
 negation of ideas saw, risen up against such feminine 
 and practical conceptions, those much stronger things, 
 dogmas. The civic religion of the French and the creed of x 
 the era they were framing emerged. Before Easter the ' 
 Parlement had denied the right of the executive to imprison\ 
 at will, as also the right of the Prince to assimilate his edict! 
 to a public law, and had demanded the complete freedom! 
 of the three lawyers who had been arrested. But an \ 
 ominous thing the Parlement claimed no privileges. It/ 
 demanded the release of its members as citizens and of 
 human right against the arbitrary power of the Crown. 
 
 Against such a force as this a creed the only weapon 
 that "The New Order" and the Queen could imagine was a 
 reform of machinery. In this, as in so much else during the 
 furious struggle of those eighteen months, "The New Order" 
 fore-planned much that the Revolution itself was to achieve : 
 it was modern, it was suited to circumstance, but lacking 
 first principles it was apparent and direct, but lacking 
 nationality and being opposed to the summoning of the 
 States -General it was doomed. The scheme of "The New 
 
 Order" included a igplacing of all this antique, corporate, 
 and privjlp^pjjfvwpf ^ f|ip Paglomont by-a High Court 
 
258 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 more fully reflecting the governing classes of the nation. 
 It was not unwise, and Marie Antoinette to judge again 
 from her correspondence and from the universal opinion of 
 contemporaries was largely its originator and wholly its 
 ally. IJL miserably failed. 
 
 The secret plan of it surrounded with fantastic pre- 
 cautions was divulged. The threatened Parlement (and 
 it had the whole nation behind it) met at once, and D'Epres- 
 menil explained the peril, and declared once more, but far 
 more directly than before, for the principles upon which the 
 Revolution was to turn, and especially the right of the States- 
 General alone regularly and periodically summoned to 
 grant supply. The arrests that followed arrests which the 
 Queen called with quite singular blindness << acts_nLrigp_ur" 
 - perilous as she saw, but necessary as she imagined - 
 were the signal for an approach to civil war. 
 Order" jwas resisted forcibly in J 
 
 by the privileged, by custom, by the populace (who feared 
 new taxes), by local patriotism which feared the loss of local 
 character and (what indeed so soon did come) the merging 
 of all in one homogeneous State. All the troops were out; 
 revolt 
 
 In June, 1788, the Clergy summoned to meet and grant 
 an aid as a last desperate resource for means replied by 
 an assertion in turn of their immutable custom and peculiar 
 right. In July "The New Order" broke down. The de- 
 mand for the States-Geneial was acceded to by the Crown 
 and by the Queen. On the 8th of August, 1788, they were 
 definitely summoned for the May Day of the following year. 
 
XI 
 THE BASTILLE 
 
 AUGUST 8, 1788, TO SEPTEMBER 30. 1789 
 
 THE decision was taken. France was alive with the 
 advent of the States-General. The autumn of 
 1788 had come. Fersen was with the Queen. 
 It was more than fourteen years since, a boy of eighteen, 
 Northern, dignified, and grave, his large and steady brown 
 eyes had met hers from far off among the hundreds in the 
 Masked Ball at the Opera. He was then a child. She also 
 was a child, pure, exiled, of an active timidity, and not yet 
 even Queen. I have written what happened then: the rare 
 occasions on which he had come and gone. Now he was 
 here with her at Versailles. 
 
 The something permanent which every human life has 
 known had entered in that moment of her girlhood and 
 settled finally within her heart. The accidents of living did 
 little to disturb so silent and so secure a thing. He had been 
 but a chance visitor to Paris a Swedish lad on his Grand 
 Tour when they had thus met for ever; during the critical 
 t first three years of her reign he had been away in his own 
 country. He had returned, as I have said, in the summer 
 of 1778. The worst of her torments was settled then: she 
 was to be a mother; she might expect an heir to the throne; 
 the adventure, the successful adventure, of America had 
 begun. A position of womanhood and of rule, such dignities 
 and such repose, might have paled or rendered ridiculous 
 
 259 
 
260 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 the chance passion of extreme youth: they did neither. 
 Whether he came or went, his quiet image the one fixed 
 thing she had known in a world she could not know 
 remained. He had been received at once right into the 
 tiny inner circle of the Polignacs before he left for the 
 American War. He had been with the Queen continually, 
 reserved and of that breeding which she longed for, the 
 unpassionate poise of the North. Her child, her husband's 
 child, was born; '79 and its war news came, and Fersen 
 had resolved at last to go. He also by that time, as has 
 been read, knew what had entered his life. 
 
 The Queen, as he inhabited the halls of Versailles during 
 his farewells, had followed him with her eyes, and very often 
 they had filled with tears. All the world saw the thing. 
 He had gone off at last to America, to wonder at the swamps 
 and the bare landscape, the odd shuffling fighting and the 
 drag of an informal war. His English gave him work enough 
 interpreting between his own French Generals and Wash- 
 ington; he wrote home from time to time to his father, he 
 busied himself in learning his military trade but of Ver- 
 sailles or to Versailles there was not a word. During all the 
 three years, '80-'83, that he suffered the new countries, the 
 Queen and he heard nothing the one of the other. 
 
 He had returned to Europe; but it was only the journey of 
 his sovereign Gustavus that kept him some months in 
 France, though a colonelcy, more or less honorary, and a 
 pension of some hundreds had been given the young man 
 there. A wealthy marriage, long arranged in England for 
 him, he let slip without concern. The proposal (a year 
 before the affair of the necklace) that he should marry 
 Necker's ugly daughter, he resigned at once in favour of his 
 friend, young Stael, his sovereign's ambassador. With a 
 
THE BASTILLE 261 
 
 commission in Sweden as well as in France, it was his own 
 country he preferred. His moments at Versailles were rare, 
 his visits very brief such as that in which he saw the Not- 
 ables dissolved (of which scene he records his judgment) ; in 
 none did he more than appear, silent, for a very few hours 
 or days at Versailles. The girl who had met him, a boy, in 
 '74, was now a woman of thirty and more: chance glimpses 
 alone had lit up the very long space of those years : she had 
 suffered all the business of the necklace, all the rising hatred 
 of Paris, without any too close a word from him; she was 
 entering the Revolution and the way to death when he 
 reappeared: henceforward he did not leave her. 
 
 That bond, which time had neither increased nor dimin- 
 ished and which permanent absence and silence had left 
 unfalsified, now became a living communion between them. 
 He was never what is called her "lover" ; the whole sequence * 
 is that of a devotion as in a tale or a song, and yet burning 
 in living beings: a thing to the French incomprehensible, 
 to men of other countries, to Englishmen, for instance, 
 comprehensible enough but, whether comprehensible or 
 not, as rare as epic genius. 
 
 Brienrie had fallen: the Queen, and the Queen alone, 
 had put back Necker in his place. Why had she done this ? 
 From a desire to rule, and an opportunity for it. 
 
 There are those who discover in themselves the capacity 
 to govern, that is to organise the wills of men. Often great 
 soldiers find this in themselves, and are led to govern a 
 whole state at last: such as Napoleon. 
 
 There are others to whom cheating, intrigue and cunning 
 are native: such are, at bottom, however high their station, 
 
262 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 the slaves, not the dictators or the helpers, of their fellow- 
 beings; they have a keen nose for the herd ; they will always 
 follow it, and it is their ambition to fill posts where they can 
 give favours and draw large salaries. Of this sort are par- 
 liamentary politicians to-day: from such we draw our 
 ministers. They have of poor human nature an expert 
 knowledge such as usurers have and panderers; they are, 
 therefore, not unsuited to choose permanent officials or to 
 recommend to others places of trust and power. 
 
 There is a third kind, and to this third kind Marie Antoi- 
 nette belonged as many another woman and feminine man 
 has belonged. It neither organises nor intrigues; it desires 
 to do neither, and is incapable of both. All it desires is to 
 be able to say " I govern," The accident of the last two years 
 had permitted her to say this but, having said it, she could 
 say nothing more. She knew the outcry against Calonne: 
 she undid him. She knew the reputation of Brienne: she 
 made him. She saw Brienne most evidently out of favour 
 with opinion; she unmade him. She heard shouts for 
 Necker and Necker was summoned to her little room, was 
 regally examined, graciously received and installed. 
 
 Those who can govern through a period of peril, that is, 
 those who can organise the wills of men during the short and 
 indeterminate time before any resultant of clashing social 
 forces has yet appeared, note, decide, order, speak, and do 
 and when it is too late to act, their genius tells them that 
 it is too late. In the early winter of 1788 it was not yet 
 too late. What would one possessed of the power of govern- 
 ment have done ? In the first place, such an one would 
 have stated the evil publicly in detail and with authority; 
 in the next, chosen not one but a body of men to deal with 
 particular difficulties (as, for instance, a particular legiste, 
 
THE BASTILLE 2G15 
 
 for the troubles of that absurdity, the Common Law; a par- 
 ticular soldier to suggest a reform of the army, &c. ; in the 
 third, used as allies all the positive forces available, all the 
 enthusiasms, all the tide to this force (by persuasion) how 
 much may not be harnessed? So Mirabeau would have 
 done; so Napoleon did; so some ready eye in 1788 might 
 have planned. The States-General is the fever ? You shall 
 have it: in Paris, with splendour. The Commons are the 
 cry ? They shall be in full double number and with special 
 new powers a new dress, perhaps, as well. The nation 
 is crying out for Government ? Give them the Crown : the 
 King on horseback day after day. 
 
 Had some such judgment controlled thai, 
 
 would haye^ preserved the Monarchy, old institutions clothed 
 in their old names would have been squeezed and fitted into 
 new moulds: France so changing, there would have been 
 some change in Europe an episode well worthy of memory 
 and noted by special historians. The Bishops of the Church 
 in France would to-day have been what Rohan and 
 Narbonne were then; the Faith, already derelict, would by 
 this time very probably have descended to be a ritual for 
 wealthy women or an opinion for a few valueless, weak men: 
 that self-praise and that divorce from reality which is the 
 mark of our backwaters in Europe and of our new countries 
 everywhere would (perhaps) have settled in the succeeding 
 century upon all Europe, and, for the first time in its long 
 history, our civilisation would have missed one of its due J ) 
 resurrections. As it was, God intended the Revolution,. 
 Therefore, every error and insufficiency in those directing \ 
 its inception was permitted, and therefore, on account of 
 such insufficiency, the full force of a military people ran 
 freely, as run natural things, and achieved what we know. 
 
264 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 The Queen had nominated Necker from a mere desire to 
 rule, and had therefore simply chosen the man most loudly 
 called for. Necker, on his side, was well worthy of so facile 
 a judgment; he was all that is meant by Geneva. 
 
 By his own standards, which were those of a company 
 promoter, he was just barely honest by those of chivalric 
 honour he was deplorably tainted. Full of avarice, order and 
 caution, a very Huguenot, he sought everywhere an eco- 
 nomic solution for political problems ; unsoldierly, of course, 
 and in the presence of danger worthless, he was none the 
 less patient in detail and of a persevering kind ; very vacil- 
 lating in the presence of fierce and conflicting desires around 
 him, he was yet tenacious of a general plan. To all these 
 characters he added that kind of ambition which is avid of 
 popularity on condition that it shall face no bodily risk and 
 that it shall labour in words or on paper only. He had his 
 reward: his insignificant figure was for a year the symbol 
 of all the great ferment; his presence with, or absence from, 
 the Council was the test of advance or of retreat in the 
 revolutionary movement. So for one year then for a few 
 months he is forgotten; then he hears a mob in the street, 
 and flies. 
 
 With such a man as figurehead it is not difficult to judge 
 the obvious development of the autumn and winter which 
 produced the first great Parliament. Opinion was invited : 
 the pamphlets poured in. On matters already fixed in public 
 opinion Necker could be decisive, as, for instance, that 
 the Commons in the approaching Assembly should be as 
 numerous as the clergy and the nobles combined for this 
 was the universal rule in provincial parliaments; but when 
 (two days after Christmas) this point (which had afforded 
 food for violent writing but was in reality certain to be 
 
THE BASTILLE 265 
 
 conceded) when, I say, this point was fixed by King 
 and Queen and Council, Necker so drafted the decision as 
 to make it appear all his own to the populace: while at 
 Court the angry higher nobility said it was all the Queen's. 
 A far more decisive matter and one that escaped the parti- 
 sans was whether the Nobles, Clergy, and Commons 
 should sit and vote together, as the necessity for a Popular 
 Will for one voice demanded, or should play the 
 antique fool and, in a crisis so actual and vivid, solemnly 
 vote separately, checking each other's decisions, nullifying 
 the public mandate all for the sake of custom. Here 
 Necker could have decided and changed history: but there 
 was not an opinion sufficiently unanimous to guide him in 
 his nullity. He left that essential piece of procedure to be 
 settled by the Estates themselves when they should have 
 met ; he thus (as will be seen) made of the firsl. and most 
 necessary act of the States-General, the insistence of the 
 Commons that all should vote together, an illegal thing 
 and so coloured all their succeeding action with the colour of 
 rebellion. One thing Necker had done of his own judg- 
 ment, and it was idiotic. He had summoned the Notables 
 again for a month in the autumn he was soon glad to be 
 rid of that folly : the decree I have mentioned followed, and 
 in February, 1789 legally before the end of January 
 the elections to the States-General began. 
 
 No such complete representation of a great nation has 
 been attempted since that day; no such experiment could be 
 attempted save with political energy at white heat and under 
 the urgent necessity of a secular charge. The confused noise 
 which filled the rising spring of '89 was, for once, the voice of 
 ALL; thousands upon thousands of little primary assemblies, 
 of advisory letters, of plaints, of legal suggestions, of strict 
 
266 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 orders and mandates to the elected (without which no politi- 
 cal freedom can exist) of corporate actions by guilds, by 
 townships, by chapters, by every form of political personality, 
 filled and augmented the life of France. So vast was the 
 thing that to this day, amid the libraries of monographs that 
 seem to exhaust the Revolution, all have shrunk from the 
 delineation of this rising ocean of men. There is no final 
 work upon the elections of '89. No one has dared. 
 
 April passed. The deputies began to stream into Paris. 
 Paris, the last days of that month and the first of the next, 
 began to overflow into the royal town at its gates. Sunday, 
 the 3rd of May, saw one long procession of every kind and 
 fortune pouring, in spite of the drenching weather, from the 
 capital up into the hills of Versailles. Upon the morrow 
 the opening religious ceremony of the Session was to be held. 
 
 At about six o'clock of the morning of Monday, the 4th 
 of May, it was still raining not violently, but still raining; 
 the dawn struggled in wet clouds over the woods and the 
 plain of Paris beyond, and the pavements of Versailles were 
 shining flat under the new day, with large puddles in their 
 worn places. As the light broadened the rain ceased. The 
 uniform and dull low sky began to break and gather: the 
 innumerable crowd moved. Some thousands were sodden 
 after a night spent out of doors; many thousands more, 
 moving from their packed rooms, where a bed was a guinea 
 and the mere shelter of a roof a well-let thing, began to 
 crowd the pavements, the roofs, the cornices; as for the 
 windows, every window had its bouquet of heads at high 
 price, well-dressed heads and eager. The morning rose 
 and grew warm. 
 
THE BASTILLE 267 
 
 The palace of Versailles looks east and north down towards 
 the woods that hide Paris; it looks down three broad, 
 divergent avenues spreading like the fingers of a hand, and 
 starting (as from the palm of such a hand) from a wide space 
 called the "Place d'Arnaes," which forms a huger outer 
 court, as it were, to the huge Court of the Kings. To the 
 right and to the left of this main square and its avenues, as 
 you look from the palace, lie the two halves of the town: 
 the northern, to the left, has for its principal church Notre 
 Dame; the southern, to the right, has for its principal church 
 St. Louis, which is now the Cathedral; each building is by 
 situation and plan the centre of its quarter. The way from 
 Notre Dame to St. Louis is up the Rue Dauphin, across the 
 great Place d'Armes and then down the Rue Saborg all in 
 a straight line not half a mile long, with the great Place tak- 
 ing up more than the middle third. From the one church 
 to the other was the processional way of Versailles; it was 
 chosen for that day. From seven onwards the Parlement 
 had been gathering in Notre Dame; not till ten did the royal 
 carriages arrive, all plumed and gilded, swung low and 
 ridiculous : the King and his household, the Queen and hers; 
 the Princes of the Blood -- but as for Orleans he was already 
 with the lords in the Church, disdaining his rank and 
 making a show of humility. They all set out in procession 
 for St. Louis, the clergy of Versailles in a small surpliced 
 body leading, the dark Commons next, the embroidered and 
 feathered Nobility, the Priests, the Household, the music, 
 the Bishop; then the Blessed Sacrament in the Archbishop 
 of Paris' hands, with Monsieur and his brother and two 
 more of the Blood at the corners of the canopy; last of all 
 the Queen and her ladies all in the order I have named; 
 two thousand and more four-front, the length of a brigade 
 
 
268 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 and every one of them (save the Archbishop who held the 
 Monstrance) with a blessed candle in his or her hand. By 
 the time the head of the line was at St. Louis, the tail had 
 hardly left Notre Dame, 1 and as each detachment took the 
 line, young Dreux Breze, Master of Ceremonies, on foot 
 since seven, ordered them. 
 
 The myriads of people saw them go by. The sun was 
 shining at last: all could be seen, yet the cheers were pointed 
 and full of meaning; the silence also was full of meaning. 
 They cheered the Commons as those six hundred went by, 
 in black without swords all in black save for a Breton 
 amongst them. Some curiously picked out Mirabeau; they 
 were silent at the lords' blaze of colour, half-cheering only 
 Orleans, his face such a picture! the sacred candle flickering 
 in his hands; they did not (as would a modern crowd) all 
 uncover to the Blessed Sacrament; they cheered the King. 
 Then, as the Queen passed, there passed with her a belt of 
 silence. As she went slowly with her ladies along that way 
 silence went with her; cheering went before and after. 
 At one place only was that silence broken, where a group of 
 rough women suddenly shouted out, as she passed, insulting - 
 vivats for Orleans: it may be that she stumbled when she 
 heard them. 
 
 From the advanced colonnade of the great stables 
 (where the sappers are lodged to-day), upon the roof 
 of the colonnade, there was a truckle-bed and many 
 cushions laid, and on it was lying the broken body of 
 her son, the Dauphin, who would not inherit all these 
 things: he was very visibly dying. His miserable little 
 frame, all bent and careless, lay there at its poor ease. 
 
 His listless and veiled eyes watched the procession go by. 
 
 1 Carlyle, of course, puts one church for the other, and makes the procession walk wrong way about. The 
 Cambridge History, however, is accurate in this detail. 
 
THE BASTILLE 2G9 
 
 It is said that his mother, in that half-mile of ordeal, 
 glanced up to where he lay, and smiled. 
 
 The sun still shone upon the double row of soldiers the 
 blue of the Gardes Fran9aises upon this side, the Red of 
 the Swiss upon that; the crowd was in gaiety - - the 
 wet were now dry; the last of the line were now gone 
 and the doors of St. Louis had closed on them. It had 
 been a great show, and all the place and its pleasures 
 were open to the people. Next day the Session was 
 opened in that same hall which had been raised two years 
 before for the Notables. 
 
 A member of the Commons, sitting in the back row of his 
 order, would have seen before him, rank upon rank, the 
 dense mass of black uniform menace which his six hundred 
 presented, half filling the floor of the great oblong hall; 
 to left of him, against a row of columns, the clergy of every 
 rank; to the right against the opposite row of columns, 
 the blaze of the Nobles among them Orleans, his face 
 insolently set towards the Throne. Far above and beyond 
 them all, at the end of the hall, like an altar raised upon its 
 steps, was the last splendour of the Throne. The golden 
 threads of the lilies shone upon the vast canopy of purple 
 velvet that over-shadowed it; seated upon it, alone above his 
 kingdom, the last of the kings possessed a great majesty, 
 in which the known hesitation of his gait, the known lethargic 
 character of his person, were swallowed up in awe: an 
 enormous diamond gleamed in the feather of his hat. Below 
 and around him were grouped the Princes of the Blood and 
 the great officers of State, and in front of the group in a 
 long line sat the Ministry. Necker among these the only 
 one dressed as the Commons were dressed appealed to 
 the Commons, while at the foot of the throne, in purple and 
 
270 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 silver white, a little diamond circlet and a heron's feather 
 in her hair, stood the Queen. 
 
 This the Commons could see, under the light that fell 
 from high windows near the roof; it fell over two thousand 
 of the public guests chosen rather than a true public; 
 they filled the galleries above, they swarmed in the dark 
 aisle beneath, undivided from the three orders a famili- 
 arity shocking to our historians who, craning their necks, 
 have watched as a privilege and with respect the fag-end of 
 the House of Commons or the County Council from a pen. 
 To the command of Dreux Breze, all that great hall rose: 
 the King rose also, read his short speech in a firm voice, 
 and put on his hat to sit down. The Nobles covered 
 themselves at the King's gesture: among the Commons 
 there was confusion - - they did not know the etiquette, or 
 rather, some did, some did not. The incident was insigni- 
 ficant and comic : a graver thing followed it. Barentin_rose, 
 the Keeper of the Seals: he spoke for an hour. Had he 
 spoken for three minutes and spoken but one sentence it 
 would have been all he had to do, for he was there to tell 
 Jthem that it was left to the Three Orders to sit separate or 
 II together as they might choose. All the Revolution was latent 
 in that order. 
 
 The Nobles would vote to sit separate ; possibly the clergy : 
 the "National Assembly" - as all thought of it, as all called 
 it would be turned into a "Lords and Commons" an 
 absurd, complicated and do-nothing machine with privileges 
 and customs, quaintnesses and long accommodations be- 
 tween this house and that; it would lose touch with the 
 general ,* the sap of national life would be cut off from it; 
 it would not be able to create; it would be the jest of that 
 which really governed. As in England to-day our various 
 
THE BASTILLE 271 
 
 elected bodies are the jests of the plutocracy, so in 1789 the 
 "National Assembly," tripartite, played upon by vanity and 
 ignorance, would have become the jest of the Crown. But 
 in France an institution, once unreal, disappears, and before 
 July the Assembly was, according to this plan, to disappear. 
 It was deliberately conceived as a means of nullifying and. 
 destroying the Parlement. 
 
 [eckgr spoke next. He spoke for three hours, and was 
 listened to throughout, for he dealt with finance. His 
 speech was full of lies but his name had not yet lost the 
 titular place of idolatry. When he had ended his Genevese 
 falsehoods, the ceremony was over and all were free to dine. 
 But with Barentin's words the Revolution had begun. 
 
 All May Gaul worked and seethed. The instinct of 
 numbers aimed straight for the objective upon which all 
 turned, and the Commons demanded the accession to one 
 corporate Assembly o the Nobles and Clergy. They nego- 
 tiated with the privileged houses ; they affirmed the principle 
 of combined voting: Necker sent for soldiers. By the end 
 of the month the last attempt at some voluntary arrange- 
 ment had failed. Meanwhile the King, by some lethargy or 
 through the intrigue of some cabal, had not yet formally 
 received a deputation of the Commons. 
 
 What did the Queen make of that May ? The days seemed 
 to her first an ugly rumour throughout Versailles, buzzing 
 round the palace soon an uproar. She stood with the few 
 that actively maintained privilege against the Commons; 
 but, a trifle wiser than they, she brought in their counsels 
 in a moderate form to the King. It was not enough: the 
 troops still came into Paris Gaul still rose higher and 
 higher; and through the tumult something much more to 
 her, more intimate, infinitely more acute and true, ran and 
 
MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 held her as a physical pain will pin the mind and hold it dur- 
 ing the playing of some loud and meaningless music: it 
 was the dying of her little son; he lay at Meudon dying. 
 
 The end of the French Monarchy was mirrored in the 
 fate of the last bodily forms that were to contain its Idea. 
 The Bourbon heirs, one after another, died before succession. 
 Louis XV., a great grandson, himself delicate from birth, was 
 succeeded by a grandson again, a boy painfully saved by the 
 doctors a man throughout life partially infirm. The 
 line had come at last to this child, the Dauphin, whose 
 advent had been the opportunity for such strong joy through- 
 out the country and in whom the New Age was to find its 
 first King. All the phases of doom had shown themselves: 
 first, the high promise, then the vague doubts, the mysteries 
 of a general disease ; lastly the despairs. For a month, ever 
 since the opening of the States-General, which he had lan- 
 guidly witnessed, it had been but a question of the day on 
 which the boy would die. That day had come. 
 
 It was on the 3rd of June, at Meudon. The King and 
 the Queen had come in answer to sudden and graver news 
 of their child; they reached the place in the early afternoon 
 - and they were implored to return. The boy was within, 
 at his agony. The King sank into a chair and cried that his 
 son was dead, and the poor lad's mother, suddenly broken 
 in the midst of so many and such great public alarms, of 
 her government, her resistance and her perils, suddenly knelt 
 down and cried wildly, rocking her head in her hands, bury- 
 ing her face on Louis' knees: she called out to God. They 
 were left thus together, and at one the next morning the 
 Dauphin was dead. 
 
 It was as though two majesties or angels challenged each 
 other in those days: the majesty which reigns inwardly and 
 
THE BASTILLE 273 
 
 which everywhere makes of a son's death the supreme 
 agony of the world, though sons die hourly; the majesty 
 which reigns outwardly and which commands, once in a 
 thousand years, the passing of societies and kingdoms. For 
 while this death was doing at Meudon, in the Commonwealth 
 the last decisions also were at hand. Two days after the 
 sad procession of ranks and delegates had done honour to 
 the dead child, the Commons summoned for the last time 
 the Clergy and the Lords to join them and form one body 
 to mirror the nation. It was but three days after the little 
 body had been taken to lie at St. Denis among the Kings, 
 that the next step was taken. The Revolution broke with 
 law it now first began to be the Revolution and to do. 
 The Commons declared themselves to be no longer the 
 "Commons," but with all of the privileged orders who 
 would join them they declared themselves to be the 
 "National Assembly": those who would not join them 
 were no part of the body which was to remake the world: 
 their legality was not to avail them: the Commons had 
 "made act of sovereignty," and the strain between two 
 centres of authority, the Crown and the Representatives 
 had begun. 
 
 It was this that the Queen must watch and parry and 
 try to understand, now, when the first part of her flesh had 
 gone down into the grave, and her brain, shaken with 
 despairs, must attempt to control and to comprehend the 
 wave; and her eyes, weary of weeping, to read orders, to note 
 faces, and her voice, with which she could not longer call 
 her son, to command. She was in the centre of the resist- 
 ance for a month, and it failed. 
 
 For a few days, in spite of the call for troops which had 
 been heard and the troops were coming for a few days 
 
274 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 more, speech was still formidable and every phase of the 
 debate ringing through the great shed of the Menus was a 
 further affirmation of the new and violent sovereignty of 
 those usurpers, the Assembly. In twenty-four hours a 
 decision was taken by the Crown. 
 
 To the assumption of/ sovereignty by the Commons the 
 Court replied. There was to be a Royal Session on the 
 Monday following, the King present, and all the division 
 between the orders settled by his final voice as to the 
 Commons declaration it was ignored. 
 
 And meanwhile Speech was silenced. Barentin, Keeper 
 of the Seals, had seen to that. He wrote to the King that 
 it was imperative the Commons should be silenced until the 
 Royal Session was held. He wrote : "Coupez Court." 
 Have done with the business ! A simple way to silence the 
 Commons was found. 
 
 It was upon Friday the 19th of June that Barentin had 
 written his letter to the King. Upon the Saturday mor- 
 ning, the 20th, the weather having turned to rain and 
 the streets being deserted, the first stray members of 
 the Commons came up to the door of the Menus to 
 resume their debates. No notice had reached them, nor 
 even their elected Speaker, Bailly, the worthy astronomer. 
 They came with umbrellas dripping above them, the mud 
 splashing their black stockings and black knee breeches, the 
 rain driving in upon their black Court coats. They tried the 
 door: it was locked, and a sentry came forward. They saw, 
 streaked under the rain, a little scrap of writing nailed to the 
 door. The Hall was "closed by royal order," and, within, 
 the sound of hammering marked the carpenters at work 
 preparing for Monday's ceremonial. They wondered: 
 others came ; the group grew until at last many hundreds of 
 
THE BASTILLE 275 
 
 the Commons stood there without, upon the pavement of 
 the wide planted avenue. Mirabeau was there and Robes- 
 pierre was there, Sieves, Bailly all the Commons. Up at 
 the end of the way the King's great Palace lay silent and, as 
 it were, empty under the rain. No one crossed its vast open 
 courtyard; its shut streaming windows stared dully at the 
 town. The Commons moved away in a herd, leaving the 
 sentry and his comrade to pace and be drenched, and the 
 little scrap of writing to be washed and blurred on the 
 locked door. As they moved off the noise of hammering 
 within grew fainter till they heard it no more. 
 
 That very middle-class sight, a great mob of umbrellas 
 wandering in the streets, was full of will: wandering from 
 one place to another they landed at last in a tennis court 
 which was free, just where a narrow side-street of the south- 
 ern town makes an elbow. Into that shelter they poured: 
 and over against them, watching all they did from above, 
 from his home just across the lane, was Barentin, Keeper 
 of the Seals. He saw the umbrellas folded at the door, the 
 hundreds pressing in, damply; he saw through the lights of 
 the court their damp foot-prints on the concrete of the hall 
 a table brought: JBai%, the president, standing upon it 
 above the throng and reading out the oath that they \ 
 " ^jWJLj""/ rfiftper** Ml they fod given the rmfrVrf -rr~ 
 constitution" then the press of men signing that declar- 
 ation one by one. 
 
 He heard the mob gathering outside and filling the street. 
 Among them at least one witness has left a record of what 
 could be heard through the open doors how Mirabeau 
 reluctantly signed, pleading popular pressure; how one man 
 only refused to sign, thinking it what it was, rebellion. He 
 was Martin, of Auch. 
 
, 
 
 276 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 / It was the summer solstice, a date unlucky to the 
 Bourbons. 
 
 The King heard all these things but there was nothing 
 
 to be done. Sunday passed, and Monday the Royal 
 
 \ Session was postponed. It was not till Tuesday morning, 
 
 \the 23rd, at ten that the procession formed and that Louis 
 
 prepared to attend it. It was still raining. 
 
 All the pomp that could be gathered had been gathered 
 for that occasion, though the very skies were against it. 
 Four thousand men stood to arms, lining that less than half 
 a mile from the Palace to the Menus. Hidden in the woods 
 beyond, camped up on Satory and dispersed in the suburbs 
 around, six regiments more were ready. A vast crowd, 
 wholly silent, watched the Court go by. The Queeh un- 
 broken (but carrying such recent agony!), Artois vivacious 
 and trim, the Ministers hurried, Louis somewhat bent, 
 fat, suffering. 
 
 A man who saw that sight has written that he thought to 
 see some great funeral go by: he was right. Of the two 
 million dead which the Revolution demanded from Moscow 
 to the Tagus, the first was passing in the splendid coach of 
 mean, JUnquestioned Security. That fixity 
 of political creed and that certitude inlsocial structure, which 
 hitherto no wars had shaken in Europe for century upon 
 century of Christian order, had perished. Men cannot live 
 or breathe without political security, yet for now more than a 
 hundred years Europe has in vain awaited its return. 
 
 The King had reached his throne in the great shed of the 
 Menus; the Queen was beside him ; the Orders, the Nobles 
 and the Clergy stood ranked on either side ; then after some 
 delay the Commons were permitted to enter by a mean side- 
 door and to fill the dark end of the place with their dark 
 
THE BASTILLE 277 
 
 numbers. . . . Where was Necker? The Symbol of 
 the New Age was not there; the fatuous Genevese had stayed 
 at home. He had presided at the Council which had 
 drawn up the declaration the King was about to read. He 
 -may have suggested certain softenings of phrase in it; they 
 may have been rejected by the Queen or another but it 
 was a document the responsibility of which he, in duty, 
 bore; it was for him to resign or to be present: he hedged 
 by his absence and let it be thought that he protested. 
 
 With a rumble and a shuffling the twelve hundred of them 
 sat down. When they were all well sat down, Barentin 
 in a loud voice proclaimed: "Gentlemen, the King gives 
 you leave to be seated!" The King turned to the Queen 
 upon his left and bade her also take her throne. She cour- 
 tesied with an exaggerated grandeur and chose to stand 
 while the whole long speech was delivered a royal witness to 
 the Crown of which she was now much more the strength and 
 principle than any other there. 
 
 The speech was decisive. It willed this and that in strong 
 imperatives even the voice of the King, into whose mouth 
 these words were put, was firm: he willed very liberal and 
 modern things but no divided authority above all, no 
 divided authority! The new and rival sovereign, the 
 Usurper, must resign. The Commons were but the Corn-, 
 mons. Of their recent claim no word, but, upon the 
 contrary, an assertion that the States-General might not, 
 even were they to vote in common, determine their own 
 procedure. 
 
 As he read, here and there a man would applaud even 
 from among the Commons. 
 
 "Remember, gentlemen, that none of your plans, none of 
 your schemes can become law without my express approval. 
 
278 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 It is I that have, till now, given my subjects all their 
 happiness. . . . And the speech closed with: "I 
 
 command you, therefore, gentlemen, to disperse at once. 
 To-morrow you shall come each into the Hall assigned 
 to his order." 
 
 When he had read these words the King sat down: the 
 speech was ended. There was but a moment between his 
 ending and his rising again to go. The Queen, very digni- 
 fied, rose with him. Together, and followed by their train, 
 they left the hall. It was just noon. 
 
 The Nobles rose in their turn and left the building: the 
 Bishops preceded them, but of the lower clergy many 
 half, perhaps lingered. The body of the Commons 
 refused to move. 
 
 They sat massed, in silence, at the far end of the great 
 gaudy shed. Over against them, at the further end, the 
 workmen had begun to take down the scenery of that royal 
 play; the curtains were being lowered, the carpets rolled up, 
 and there was hammering again. Across the empty benches 
 of the nobles and the Hierarchy, in the empty middle of the 
 hall, every exclamation, however subdued, of the bewildered 
 but determined Commons echoed: but the background of 
 that interval was astonishment and silence. 
 
 This curious and dire silence, a silence of revolt, lasted 
 perhaps half an hour, when there entered into it the Master 
 of the Ceremonies, young Dreux Breze. 
 
 He was little more than a boy, just married, of a refined 
 and rather whitened sort, tall, covered with cloth of gold. 
 He was not ashamed to stud his hands with diamonds, like 
 an Oriental or a woman; he shone with light against the 
 dark mass of the Commons, and he alone wore a sword. He 
 bore no sign or sacred letter, and his mere office was not 
 
THE BASTILLE 279 
 
 awful. 1 He advanced, and in that slightly irritable but 
 well-bred drawl of his he muttered something as though 
 ashamed. They cried "Speak up!" He spoke louder. 
 "They had heard the King's orders. ..." He 
 repeated the phrase. Various cries and exclamations 
 arose. Then Mirabeau, standing forward, said - - What 
 did he say ? It is uncertain, and will always be debated, 
 but it was something like this: "We are here by the will of 
 the people and only death can dismiss us." Dreux Breze 
 walked out with due ceremony, backward. 
 
 Well, then, why was Death not brought in to sweep the 
 Commons ? Here were soldiers all around foreigners, 
 Germans, and Swiss, in number a full division: why was no 
 shot fired ? Because, although apparently no force lay 
 opposed to them save the mere will of less than a thousand 
 unarmed debaters, there did in fact lie opposed to them the 
 potential force of Paris. Close on a million souls, say two 
 hundred thousand men capable of bearing arms, almost 
 homogeneous in opinion, lay twelve miles down the valley, 
 as full of rumour as a hive at the sound of a musket they 
 might rise and swarm. It was not a calculable thing; Paris 
 might after half an hour of scuffle turn into a mere scat- 
 tered crowd: there might be a fierce resistance, prolonged, 
 bleeding authority to death unless a sufficient force con- 
 tained Paris also, as the debaters at Versailles were already 
 contained. That force was summoned. 
 
 Thirty regiments moved. All the last days of June the 
 great roads sounded with their marching from every neigh- 
 bouring garrison. The rattle of new guns one morning 
 
 1 It had originally been created to provide a salary for one, Pot, who was further dignified with the title of 
 Rhodes names curiously English. 
 
280 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 woke from sleep the unknown Robespierre, who watched 
 them from his window passing interminably under the July 
 dawn; they baited their horses in the stables of the Queen. 
 Of nearly all the troop so gathering one little portion, the 
 half -irregular militia body (militia, but permanently armed) 
 called "the French Guards," was other than foreign. The 
 "French Guards" might not indeed be reliable but, as it 
 was thought, they hardly counted. The rest were for the 
 most part German-speaking mercenaries, the solid weapon 
 of the Crown: and still they gathered. 
 
 Neck to neck with the advance of that mobilisation the 
 Assembly raced for power; for every brigade appearing you 
 may count a new claim. In the first hours of their revolt, 
 when Dreux Breze had just retired, they proclaimed them- 
 selves "Inviolable" -that is, in their new sovereignty, 
 they declared an armed offence to that sovereignty to 
 be treason. 
 
 The sight of Paris, heaving as for movement on the 24th 
 of June, Wednesday, when the news of the royal session 
 and its sequel came, determined the Duke of Orleans to 
 take a line. He desired to profit by the dissensions. He 
 continually bribed and flattered and supported, by his wealth 
 and through his parasites, the vast and spontaneous surge of 
 opinion, adding perhaps a fraction to its power. He was 
 among the stupidest of the Bourbons, for he thought in his 
 heart he might be king. This null and dissipated fellow 
 led a minority of the Nobles to the Commons and declared 
 their adhesion to the Assembly: that was the Thursday, 
 the 25th the next day the Court itself, the King, deliber- 
 ately advised the union of all the orders! 
 / The Court had yielded for the moment. The Court 
 thought it was better so: the troops were gathering, soon 
 
THE BASTILLE 281 
 
 a blow was to be struck, and the less friction the better while 
 it was preparing. . . . 
 
 So, as the first week of July went by, everything was 
 preparing : the Electorial College of Paris had met and con- 
 tinued in session, forming spontaneously a local executive 
 for the capital: certain of the French Guard in Paris had 
 sworn to obey the Assembly only, had been imprisoned 
 . . . and released by popular force . . . and par- 
 doned. The last troops had come in; the Assembly was 
 finally formed. On the day when it named its first com- 
 mittee to discuss the new Constitution, the Queen and those 
 about the Queen had completed their plan, and the Crown 
 was ready to re-arise and to scatter its enemies. 
 
 There was in this crisis a military simplicity as behoved 
 it, for it was a military thing. No intriguing. Necker, the 
 symbol of the new claims, was to go booted out at a 
 moment's notice and over the frontier as well. A man of 
 the Queen's, a man who had been ambassador at Vienna, 
 a very trusted servant of over fifty years continually with 
 the Monarchy, a man of energy, strong-stepping, loud, 
 Breteuil was in one sharp moment to take his place. Old 
 Broglie, brave and renowned, was to grasp the army 
 and the thing was done: the Assembly gone to smoke: the 
 debating over: silence and ancient right restored. And as 
 for the dependence on opinion and on a parliamentary 
 majority for money! . . . why, a bold bankruptcy and 
 begin again. 
 
 So the Queen, s fl w foe sharp issue, now that all the regi- 
 ments were assembled. A corps of German mercenaries 
 were in the Park, encamped ; their officers were cherished in 
 the rooms of the Polignacs : they were a symbol of what was 
 toward. Paris might or might not rise. If it rose, there 
 
282 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 would be action ; if not, none. In either case victory and a 
 prize worth all the miserable cajoling and submission to 
 which the Court had been compelled while the soldiers were 
 still unready. They were ready now. So the Queen. 
 
 On Saturday the llth of July, at three in the afternoon, 
 Necker was sitting down with his wife and a certain 
 friend to dinner: the excellent dinner of a man worth 
 four millions of money doubtfully acquired. Ten thou- 
 sand men lay at arms within an hour of Versailles; at all 
 the issues of Paris were troops amounting to at least two 
 divisions more mainly German cavalry : one regiment at 
 Charente, Samade; one regiment at Ivry, one, of German 
 hussars, at the Champ de Mars; one, of Swiss infantry, with 
 a battery, at the Etoile (where is now the Arc de Triomphe). 
 Two more, German, south of the river; a whole camp at the 
 northern gate and many others. No food could enter 
 the city save by leave of that circle of arms. . . . To 
 Necker, so sitting there at table, was brought a "note from 
 the King; he opened it: it told him he was ordered out of 
 office and ordered out of the kingdom too. He finished his 
 dinner, and then took horse and coach and drove away 
 along the Brussels road. 
 
 There followed three days which very much resembled, 
 to the Queen and the General Staff of the Resistance, those 
 days during which a general action is proceeding at the 
 front and a stream of accounts, true and false, exaggerated, 
 distorted, coming pell-mell and in the wrong order, confuse 
 rather than inform the anxious ears at headquarters far in 
 the rear. Men tore galloping to and fro continually up and 
 down the twelve miles of road between the palace and the 
 gates of Paris. "Paris had risen." "No, only an unarmed 
 mob parading the streets." "Yes, there had been a collision 
 
THE BASTILLE 283 
 
 
 
 with Lambesc's cavalry." . . . On Sunday, late, a 
 cloud of dust was Lambesc's orderly coming to Ver- 
 sailles with news: there had been no bloodshed. Monday 
 more rumours: "They are forging weapons." . . . 
 "They cannot move: . . . they lack ammunition." 
 . . . "They have formed patrols: . . . the streets 
 are patrolled." Then, at night, fires were reflected on the 
 cloudy sky down the valley the populace were burning 
 the Octroi Barriers. 
 
 It was determined by the chiefs of the army to force the 
 northern gate of Paris and so to subdue the tumult but 
 there was neither fear nor haste: the tumult was a mere 
 civilian tumult: the thousands roaring in Paris had no arms 
 - and then what about organisation ? How can a mob 
 organise? Tuesday came, the 14th of July, a memorable 
 day, and in the forenoon news or rumours reached Versailles 
 that a stock of arms had been sacked. It was the Arsenal 
 
 no, this time came details ; it was the Invalides that had 
 been sacked twenty thousand muskets. More news: pow- 
 der had been found and seized by the mob; in the great 
 square before the Town Hall a jolly priest, sitting astride of 
 a barrel, was seeing to the serving out of powder and of ball 
 
 one almost heard the firing. "The Bastille has most of 
 the ammunition in Paris. No mob can take that! The pieces 
 have been trained on the street a whole fortnight since." 
 "The Bastille has checked the mob." "No, they have 
 sacked that also, with all its ammunition." "They have 
 captured artillery." "Nonsense! a mob cannot capture 
 guns!" Then again, more definite and certain, longer 
 accounts, eye-witnesses, as the afternoon drew on to evening. 
 One: "It has fallen." Another: "I saw the governor 
 killed. ... a thousand men in the crowd were hit, 
 
. / 
 
 MA 
 
 284 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 but the crowd kept on. . . . How many dead? A 
 hundred, at least a hundred." "They have cannon on 
 Montmartre the northern gate cannot be forced." 
 Berthier wrote to the King alone: "To-night the troops 
 will master the streets." And meanwhile, like a chorus of 
 human voices to all this roar of powder, the Assembly 
 pouring out decisions and acting the moral sovereign man- 
 fully in the face of material arms sitting "permanently." 
 Even at midnight, when nearly all was known and the 
 popular victory assured, Bailly the Speaker was still sitting 
 there presiding after a sitting of seventy-two hours over the 
 drowsy Commons. 
 
 And they had voted! They had voted regrets for Necker; 
 they had voted the responsibility of all advisers of the King 
 for these calamities: they had voted bankruptcy "infamous." 
 So many moral broadsides fired at the Queen. 
 
 The morning of the 15th came; the firing had ceased, 
 the smoke had rolled away, and with it the issue of the 
 action lay plain. Paris had conquered. 
 
 The King alone with his brother, unarmed, unguarded, 
 walked to the Parliament House and announced the with- 
 drawal of the mercenaries ; the Queen bitterness of irony ! 
 had to stand smiling with her children at the central 
 balcony of the palace above the courtyard and to receive 
 the ardent homage of the people for the failure of her great 
 design; in a few months, in October, she was to stand 
 on that balcony again. 
 
 All that day and the next the King sat anxiously with his 
 Council debating only one thing Marie Antoinette's 
 purpose that he should fly. She urged it with vehemence: 
 her jewels were packed and ready they would fly to Metz 
 and conquer in a civil war; but the majority outweighed 
 
v 
 
 v 
 
 AUTOGRAPH NOTE OF LOUIS XVI. 
 
 Recalling Necker, on July 16th, after the fall of the Bastille 
 
THE BASTILLE 285 
 
 her, notably old Broglie, who feared the issue of German 
 mercenaries against French troops and the Kin^ 
 remained. She with angry tears gave way: it was decided 
 that the King should, upon the contrary, seek Paris on the 
 morrow, accept and legalise the acts of the city, its new 
 popular armed force, its new elected Mayorality, La Fayette 
 the chosen head of the one, Bailly occupying the other. 
 
 The royal plan had failed: let the King accept the new 
 conditions and meet Paris half-way. Such were the! 
 decisions, and Louis wrotfi-lo Necker recalling^ him -- the 
 abortive Ministry of tne Resistance was ended. 
 
 But thaT night, inThe dead darkness, Artois fledJrom the 
 coming terror; old Vermond also, the friend and tutor, 
 Enghien, Conde, many another; and *the Queen, with 
 passionate love, compelled one now again her friend to fly : 
 the Madame de Polignac. She fled and was saved, bear- 
 ing with her two ill-spelt, blotted lines in Marie Antoinette's 
 untrained and hurried hand: "Good-bye, dearest of my 
 friends; it is a dreadful and a necessary word. Good-byei*s 
 
 In this way did the Assembly enter into its sovereignty, 
 and in this way did Marie Antoinette first find though l\ 
 she never knew or grasped but first find the temper of I) 
 the Fre^cLpaopl^^^wliosp Jca?rA 
 
 organise Jrom below. f 
 
 That creative summer of '89, in which the Assembly, now 
 victorious, began its giant business, was in the Queen's eyes 
 nothing but a respite for the Throne, or a halt in a retreat 
 between one sharp action lost and the next to be ventured 
 later, when new troops should be at hand and a new occasion 
 serve. That these speech-makers hard by should declare 
 
286 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 a new creed of Rights, should in words abolish Feudal 
 Dues, should debate the exact limits of the King's power - 
 all that was wind. Even the anarchy, coincident with that 
 vast transition, powerfully as it affected her spirit (and her 
 letters show it) with horror, affected it still more with hatred 
 and with a determination so to hold or tame this wild beast, her 
 husband's people, that her son should have his right at last, 
 and that she herself might be free from a ceaseless humiliation. 
 
 They were killing men everywhere: they had killed the 
 offensive and corrupt old Foulon in the streets of Paris - 
 he and his powerful, loathsome son-in-law, Berthier: 
 square-jawed, an oppressor grievous to God, Berthier who, 
 so lately, in those abortive three days of the Resistance, had 
 sat at the King's elbow promising that Paris should be held ; 
 Berthier had been clubbed to death and shot down as he 
 swung a musket in defence of his big body. In the prov- 
 inces everywhere the country houses burned. 
 
 The Queen waited. She wrote to her brother, to her dear 
 friend Madame de Polignac; she chose (in the absence of 
 that friend) a new governess for the Children of France, 
 the worthy widow of Tourzel, a duchess for the occasion. 
 She waited and did nothing. AllSeptember was a wrangling 
 over the King's Veto his rigKTTo refuse a law: she may 
 have knowTl 1 vaglfely that to her the nicknames of "Veto" 
 was thereby attached : she did not heed it. In the last days 
 of the month a vigorous attempt to persuade the King to 
 fly was once more made and once more failed. By Octo- 
 ber new troops had come their numbers were to prove 
 insufficient for attack but fatally sufficient for enthusi- 
 asm, and that enthusiasm of loyal courtiers (breaking 
 out almost within earshot of a Paris fretting at every 
 delay, hungry, mystified) provoked the next disaster. 
 
XII 
 OCTOBER 
 
 SEPTEMBER 23, 1789, TO MAUNDY THURSDAY, APRIL 1, 1790 
 
 ON THE 23rd of September the Regiment of Flanders 
 marched into Versailles. 
 To seize all that follows two things must be clearly 
 fixed: First, that the Queen was now separate frniruall 
 the life around Jier ; secondlyjiiat the accidents of the next 
 fortnight determined all that remained of her life^^ 
 
 The Revolution, now organised, possessed of regular 
 authorities and of a clear theory, was in action, moving 
 with the rapidity of some French campaign towards clean 
 victory, or, upon an error or a check, defeat a defeat 
 absolute as are ever the failures of high adventure. 
 
 The Queen has been called the chief opponent of that 
 Revolutionary idea and of those new Revolutionary authori- 
 ties: it is an error so to regard her; she did not meet their 
 advance in so comprehensive a fashion. She saw nothing 
 but a meamngtes&^tgrm whirling about her; she cared for 
 nothing hi the great issue but tKe^reserratronr- during the 
 tempest, and the full restoration aAf the encLof-it, of all that 
 was to have been her little son's; she feared as her only 
 enemy a violent and beastly iKngj^aT^^bTliTwEose activity 
 
 she recognised all that had so long bewildered her in the 
 French people; but while she feared it she also despised 
 it as a thing less than human, incapable of plan, able to hurt 
 but certain at last to be tamed. The march of Paris upon 
 
 287 
 
288 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 Versailles which was now at hand, with its flaming brutality, 
 its anarchy of thousands and of blood, confirmed in her for- 
 ever her wholly insufficient judgment. From those days 
 until she died her only appeal was to the foreigner, her only 
 strategy the choice of manner and of time for using an 
 actual or a potential invasion. 
 
 It may next be asked why the Regiment of Flanders march- 
 ing in led to such abrupt and to such enormous conse- 
 quences ? It was accompanied by a section of guns only, 
 and though its ready ammunition was high for a mere 
 change of garrison in those days, 1 it was but one unit more 
 where, three months before, division after division had 
 been massed round Paris and throughout Versailles. 
 
 The answer to the question is to be found in the temper 
 of those who watched that entry. It took place in the after- 
 noon with imposing parade ; the grenadiers of Flanders filed 
 up the Paris road between the ranks of the Body-guard - 
 a new regiment of the Guard which was still stranger and 
 somewhat hostile to the temper of the crowd. Again, Flan- 
 ders was a quasi-foreign regiment, comparable to those 
 which the Crown had drafted in before the rising of Paris 
 destroyed the plan of a civil war and had since, on a deliber- 
 ate pledge, withdrawn. Again the reinforcement coin- 
 cided with that long verbal struggle upon the acceptation 
 by Louis of the Decrees (of the Rights of Man and the 
 abolition of Feudal Dues) a verbal struggle apparently fu- 
 tile, but in essence symbolic of the Veto of the Crown. To 
 this it must be added that Paris, in which, in spite of harvest, 
 a partial famine reigned, was again roused for adventure; 
 that now for weeks the opposition of the King to the Decrees 
 of the Assembly had exasperated the leaders of opinion 
 
 ^hey were eleven hundred strong, with about half a dozen reserve cartridges a man and the pouches full; 
 also one waggon of grape for the guns attached to the regiment. 
 
OCTOBER 289 
 
 those innumerable writers and those orators who could now 
 voice, inflame, and even guide an insurrection; finally, it 
 must be remembered that there remained but one solid 
 and highly disciplined body intact throughout the insurrec- 
 tions of that summer, the desertions and the siding of the 
 troops with the populace this was the Army of the East 
 that lay along the frontier under the command of Bouille. 
 It was of no great size some 25,000 men, but it was 
 largely foreign (Swiss and German) in composition, was 
 excellently led, well drilled, already political in the united 
 spirit of its command. Thither it was feared and hoped 
 the King would fly: a regiment or two to flank his evasion 
 and to escort it would be sufficient: this was the meaning 
 of the Regiment of Flanders. 
 
 All this, however, would not alone have provoked an upris- 
 ing : the departure of the King actually attempted might have^ 
 done so, but we now know, and most then believed, that 
 though the Queen urged flight, Louis would not consider it. 
 The true cause of the catastrophe; the disturbance, which 
 ruined the unstable equilibrium of political forces that 
 October, was a manifest exaltation or crisis of emotion 
 observable in the officers of the newly arrived regiment, 
 still stronger in the Guards, pervading the whole Court, and 
 nowhere centred more fiercely than in the heart of the Queen x 
 It was as though the tramp of that one column of relief, 
 added to so much restrained and impatient emotion, coming 
 after the silent angers of that long summer, coinciding with 
 a critical intensity of indignation and of loyalty within the 
 palace, was just the final sound that broke down prudence./ 
 All the commissioned, many of the rank, betrayed the new 
 glow of loyalty in chance phrases and in jests ; chance swords 
 were drawn and shown, chance menaces or chance snatches 
 
290 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 of loyal songs in taverns led on to the act which clothed all 
 this rising spirit with form, and stood out as a definite 
 challenge to Paris and to the Assembly. 
 
 It was customary (and still is) for the officers resident 
 in a French garrison to entertain the officers of a newly-come 
 regiment. The Guards had never done so yet. They were 
 all of the gentry, the general custom of the army affected 
 them little, for in all ranks the gentlemen of the Guard were 
 in theory, to some extent in reality, equal in blood. Never- 
 theless their officers chose, for the purposes of a political 
 demonstration, the pretext of a custom hitherto thought 
 unworthy of their corps. The Guard had fixed upon 
 Thursday, the first of October, to show this civility to 
 Flanders. In the atmosphere of these days the occasion 
 could not but become a very different matter from such 
 a dinner as the mess of even the premier corps so 
 acting for the first time could offer to a provincial body 
 of the line. 
 
 In the expenses determined 1 and the place chosen, it 
 was evident that all the Court was moving: the great theatre 
 of the palace, unused for so long and reserved for the great- 
 est and most official ceremonies, was made ready, lavishly; 
 the tables were set upon its stages, the lights, the decorations 
 were the King's; and when the officers of Flanders, all, 
 perhaps (save their Colonel) , unready for so much splendour, 
 found themselves in the Salle d'Hercule the guests of the 
 palace rather than of the Guards it was apparent that 
 some large affair was before them: they were led to the 
 theatre and the banquet began. 
 
 It was just three o'clock: down in the town the Assembly 
 
 1 The dinner alone, apart from wine, ices, lights, etc., was, even in the prices of that day over i a head, 
 say nowadays 2. Yet the individual hosts were asked for but five shillings each: the difference must have 
 been paid! And the winel 
 
OCTOBER 291 
 
 was voting the last clauses of the Constitution. In 
 the courtyards of the palace the private soldiers of 
 Flanders had gathered, buzzing, at the gates later, and 
 for a purpose, some few were admitted, but that was 
 not before some hours had passed: they pressed curi- 
 ously, now and then making way for some belated 
 member of the band, which, with that of the Guards, was 
 to play at the banquet. 
 
 The tables were set in a horse-shoe, and two hundred and 
 ten places were laid: more than the two messes were con- 
 cerned ! Eighty seats were for the Guards for all that 
 could be found connected with Guards and the Guards 
 were there in full; double their usual number were in Ver- 
 sailles: there were others, strange guests and chosen volun- 
 teers. There were others, men whose presence proved a 
 certain plan, officers of the local national militia, the new 
 armed force of the Revolution, but officers picked carefully 
 for their weakness or their secret disapproval of the national 
 movement. So they sat down and began to eat and drink; 
 there were provided two bottles a man. 1 
 
 Outside the great empty theatre the autumn evening 
 closed; within, by the thousand lights of it, the ladies of 
 the Court, coming, as the banquet rose higher, into the boxes 
 to applaud, saw one by one the white cockades of the Guards 
 transferred to their guests. The national colours were 
 regulation for Flanders; they were the essential mark of the 
 new national Militia yet, first one guest then another, 
 eagerly or reluctantly, weakly or defiantly, took on the white 
 cockade of the old Monarchy which the Guards still 
 legally wore. The women folded paper cockades and 
 threw them down ... at last all seated there were 
 
 1 2 10 men, 400 bottles. 
 
292 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 under the emblem; some say that black for the Queen was 
 also shown. They drank to the King, the Queen, the Heir; 
 the noise of laughter and of enthusiasm grew, the toasts and 
 the cheers were exchanged from the boxes to the stage; 
 the floor of the theatre filled with new-comers speech and 
 the exhilaration of companionship gained on them and rose. 
 Some there in wine felt now again, like a memory in the 
 blood, the old and passionate French love of the Kings. 
 Some, who had come to Versailles secretly determined for the 
 Crown, now at last gave full rein and let the soul gallop to 
 its end. All were on fire with that Gallic ardour for adven- 
 ture against great odds, and in all that Gallic passion 
 for comradeship was aflame. Some few of the rank and 
 file were admitted . . . the heavy men of Flanders 
 . . . they also drank. The Queen (the meat being now 
 gone, the fruits come) was seen ; whether come by reluctance 
 or willing, in her box. . . . They cried her name, and 
 swords were drawn. They clamoured for her to come 
 down from where she sat there radiant, hearing at last the 
 voices and the mood upon which (so little did she under- 
 stand of war) she imagined and had imagined her victory to 
 depend. 
 
 She came down and passed slowly before them and their 
 delirium, smiling highly, holding in her arms her little son; 
 and the King, less certain of the issue, heavy, splashed with 
 the mud of his hunting, went with her as she proceeded. 
 They passed. The height of their fever was upon these sol- 
 diers; one leant over to the band and suggested, "Pleasant 
 it is to be . . . The band consulted ; they were not 
 
 sure of the tune. "Well then, play 1 'O Richard! Oh, my 
 King! 999 That everybody knew, anyone could sing it: it was 
 a tune of the day and with the music madness took them. 
 
OCTOBER 293 
 
 They poured out into the cold night air of the marble court, 
 singing, cheering, all armed defiant of the new world. 
 The whole life of the Palace and its thousands, invigorated, 
 mixed with music and re-heightened the strain. Sundry 
 bugles were blown as though for a charge. The noise of 
 that clamour rang through the town, the populace without 
 the gate was gathering, the Militia armed, and the crowd 
 thus alarmed in the far night could see, beyond the court, 
 under the brilliant windows of the front, a herd of men still 
 cheering madly, the gleam of swords raised, and one dark 
 figure climbing to the King's window to seize and kiss his 
 hand ; and against the light within the shadows of the family 
 approving. 
 
 The colonel of the Versailles Militia went to the Palace 
 and returned: the crowd dispersed, the cheering of the 
 revellers died away. Next day was sober; yet even all next 
 day the exaltation, though now sober, grew. The national 
 uniform of the Militia was insulted and challenged in 
 Versailles, turned out of the palace. The Queen, ineffably 
 ignorant, gave colours to a deputation of that Militia and 
 begged them, with a smile, to believe that yesterday had 
 pleased her greatly she had seen certain of their officers 
 at the feast and so little was enough to deceive her! 
 There was another milder meeting (for the men), a mere 
 exchange of glasses, and all Saturday, the 3rd of October, 
 the armament of the Crown, such as it was some thou- 
 sands stood ready and did not forget the valour and the 
 ardent loyalty which their chiefs had lit with such memor- 
 able cheers and songs. 
 
 But another noise and another life began beyond that 
 fringe of woods which eastward veiled Paris. The million 
 of that place were in a hum: messages from them and to 
 
294 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 them. Marat had explored the new force in Versailles, the 
 presses in Paris were raining pamphlets something 
 confused and enormous, a vision of their national King 
 abandoning them, a nightmare of treason ; all this mixed with 
 hunger oppressed the mind of the million. I say "mixed 
 with hunger," for though there was by this time plenty of 
 grain there was little flour, and in the lack of bread violent 
 angers had risen: some thought the Assembly (their talis- 
 man), the very nation itself, to be again in peril from the 
 soldiers. So all Sunday, October 4, the hive of Paris droned 
 in its narrow streets and gathered; upon Monday, for the 
 second time that year, it swarmed. 
 
 To the west and to the south of Paris there runs a ring 
 of clean high land against the sky, and it is clothed with 
 forests; one part of it, still charming and in places aban- 
 doned, is called the Forest of Meudon, and many who read 
 this have walked through it and have seen at the end of 
 some one of its long rides the great city below. 
 
 In the morning of Monday, the 5th of October, 1789, 
 the far corner of these woods near Chatillon rang with shots, 
 and down one alley or another would come from time to time 
 the soft and heavy beat of horses at a canter, as grooms and 
 servants moved with the guns. The King was shooting. 
 A south west wind blew through the trees with no great 
 violence; some rain had fallen and more threatened from 
 the shredded, low, grey clouds above. Of all the company 
 in those alleys and between those high trees, on which the 
 leaves, though withered, still hung, the King alone was 
 undisturbed. His pleasure in horsemanship and his seven 
 miles' ride from the palace, his delight in the morning air a 
 
OCTOBER 295 
 
 and his keen attention to the sole occupation that called out 
 his lethargic energy, forbade him to consider other things; 
 but all his suite were wondering, each in his degree, what 
 might be happening in the plain below them, or in Paris, or 
 in the town of Versailles which they had left for it was 
 known that Paris was moving. 
 
 All morning long they shot in those woods until, when it 
 was already perhaps past noon and rain had again begun 
 to fall, a sound of different riding came furiously up the 
 main alley which follows the ridge and springs from the 
 high road. It was the riding of a man who rides on a 
 fresh horse and changes post, and is a courier. His name 
 was Cubieres, and he was a gentleman of the Court flying 
 with news, straight in the long French stirrup, with a set 
 face, and his mount belly to the ground. He took one 
 turning, then another, came thundering up to the King 
 and drew rein. 
 
 The King, as this messenger reached him, was noting his 
 bag in a little book. The message of Cubieres was that Paris J 
 had marched upon Versailles, that the great avenue road i 
 was black with tattered women and with men, seething and/ 
 turning, and demanding food and blood. He brought no 
 rumours, and he could tell the King nothing of the Queen. 
 The King mounted. All mounted and rode at speed. They 
 turned their mounts westerly again, and rode at speed toward 
 Versailles. And as they rode two feelings dully contended 
 in the mind of Louis: the first was anxiety for his wife; 
 the second annoyance at the sudden interruption of his 
 business; and later, as the bulk of the palace appeared far 
 off through the trees, he was filled with that irritant wonder /V 
 as to what he should do, what his action should be: tne/l/ 
 trouble of decision which cursed him whenever he and t 
 
296 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 A action came face to face. The wind had fallen and now 
 <, the rain poured steadily and drenched them all. 
 
 
 
 Consider that grey morning in the town also I mean in 
 the town of Versailles and how under that same covered 
 sky and those same low shreds of flying cloud the empty 
 streets of Versailles were arming. 
 
 Upon the broad deserted avenue before the gates of the 
 National Assembly there were no passers-by ; the drip from 
 the brown leaves of the trees, the patter from the eaves 
 of the stately houses, and the gurgling of water in the gutters 
 enforced the silence. Now and then an official or a member 
 in black knee-breeches and thin buckled shoes, delicately 
 stepping from stone to stone, would hurriedly cross over the 
 paving, cloaked and covered by an ample umbrella, as was 
 the habit of those heroes when it rained; but for the rest 
 the streets were empty, the seats shining with wet under the 
 imperfect autumn light. Far off, beside the railing and 
 before the wrought- iron gates of the palace, the troops were 
 beginning to form, for it was already known that the bridge 
 of Sevres had been left unguarded and that the mob was 
 pouring up the Paris road. The troops came marching 
 from one barrack and another in the various quarters of the 
 town, converging upon this central place, and some, the 
 Swiss, were issuing from the outlets of the palace itself, 
 and some, the Mounted Guard, were filing out of the half- 
 moon of the royal stables, where now the Sappers and the 
 22nd of Artillery may be found. They formed and formed 
 under the weather. The Body-guard upon their great horses, 
 deeply mantled and groomed as for parade, lined all the 
 front; behind them the Swiss on foot filled the square of 
 
OCTOBER 297 
 
 the courtyard ; Ragged Flanders, the Ragged Regiment of 
 Flanders, famous in song for its rags as for its amours and 
 its drums, 1 stood by companies before them all in the wide 
 public place, where all the roads of Versailles converge and 
 make an approach to the Court and form an open centre for 
 the royal city. 
 
 The formation was accomplished, food was served, arms 
 piled. They stood there in rank alone, with no civilians 
 to watch or mock them under the rain, and behind them the 
 great house they were guarding stood empty of Monarchy. 
 And before them the wide avenue from Paris, the Avenue, 
 which was the artery of opinion, of energy, and all the 
 national being at that moment, stood empty also, and it 
 rained and rained. The great body of troops, red, yellow 
 and blue in bands, were the only tenants of the scene. 
 
 Within the Assembly a debate not over-full of purpose had 
 alternately dragged and raged: it had been known almost 
 from the opening of the sitting that Paris would move. 
 Those premonitions which have led the less scholarly or 
 the more fanatical of historians to see in the Revolution a 
 perpetual pre-arrangement and cabal, those warning things 
 in the air which you find at every stage of the great turmoil 
 (rumours flew before the King all the way to Varennes, 
 and the victory upon the right wing at Wattignies was 
 known in Paris an hour before the final charge) , those inex- 
 plicable things had come, and immediately upon their heels 
 had come direct news from one messenger after another: 
 how the wine merchants' shops had been sacked, how the 
 bridge of Sevres was passed, how the rabble were now 
 
 1 "' avail un Grenadier," etc. 
 
298 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 but five miles off and breasting the hill. That futility, which 
 the Revolutionary Assemblies suffered less perhaps than 
 other Parliaments, but which is inherent in all representative 
 discussion, condemned this engine of the new Democracy to 
 discuss on such a day nothing of greater moment than the 
 
 rder of that day, and the order of that day was the King's 
 letter: for the King had written that he would "accede" to 
 the Decrees (of Rights of Man and to the extinction of the 
 feudal Dues), but that he would not "sanction" them. And 
 on the verbal discussion between the words "accede" and 
 the word "sanction" legal tomfoolery was fated to bat- 
 ten, while up in the woods of Meudon the King who 
 had written that letter was still shooting peacefully and 
 innocent of guile, and while so many thousands, desperately 
 hungry, were marching up the road having Maillard as 
 who should say murder for their Captain, and dragging 
 behind them a section of their guns. 
 
 From such futility and from such tomfoolery the debate 
 was just saved by the strength of personality alone. Moun- 
 ier, in the Speaker's chair, lent energy to them all, though of 
 a despairing kind; and when someone had said to him, "All 
 Paris is marching upon us," and had foreseen the invasion 
 of the palace and perhaps the ruin of the Crown, he had 
 answered, according to one version, "The better for the 
 Republic," according to another version, " The sooner shall 
 we have the Republic here." 
 
 At the back of the great oblong colonnaded hall, trim 
 Robespierre, fresh from the Sign of the Fox and from 
 his farmer companions, was, in that vibrating and carrying 
 little voice of his, laying down decisions. There should 
 be no compromise ; if they compromised now the Revolution 
 was lost. But he was careful to be strictly in order 
 
OCTOBER 299 
 
 he was always careful of that and the thing on which he 
 advised "no compromise" was not the mob, but the letter 
 of the King. 
 
 A larger man touched nearer to the life, though it was but 
 an interjection; for Mirabeau, ever vividly grasping facts^ 
 and things, had hinted at the Queen : that mob was march- 
 ing on the Queen. He had said that he would sign if, in 
 whatever might follow, "The King alone should be held 
 inviolate." And there is one witness who affirms that he 
 added in a whisper, which those on the benches about him 
 clearly heard, that he meant specifically to exclude from 
 amnesty and from protection the woman against whom > 
 so many and such varied hatreds had now converged, and 
 who stood to a million men for innumerable varied reasons 
 a legendary enemy, but one in her flesh and blood to be 
 hated the negation of all the hope of the moment and of 
 French honour and of the national will. 
 
 This woman, upon whom already lay the weight of so much 
 discontent and terror, sat that morning for the last time in 
 Trianon, where the rain was beating against Gabriel's graceful, 
 tall windows and streaming down the panes. Some ill-ease 
 compelled her, though the place was protected, remote and 
 silent, and though the weather was so drear, to wander in 
 her gardens and to cross the paths between the showers. 
 In the early afternoon she was in the Grotto, and it was 
 there that the news came to her, for a messenger found her 
 also as that other one had found her husband. He bade 
 her come at once to the palace and told her that the mob 
 had filled the town. 
 
 She came; it was still the middle afternoon, and such light 
 
SOO MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 as the day afforded was still full, when she saw from the 
 windows of the ante-chamber, looking over the full length of 
 the courtyard, beyond the line of soldiers, that eddying vol- 
 ume of the populace and heard the noise of their mingled 
 cries. It was the first time in her life that she had seen the 
 people menacing. She listened to the distant roaring for a 
 long time in silence, with her women about her, until the noise 
 of horse hoofs clattered upon the flags below, and she knew 
 that Louis had returned. He came, booted and splashed, 
 up the great stairs; there members of his Ministry and 
 his advisers were ready. Marie Antoinette entered with 
 them into the Council Room, and as the door was 
 shut behind her there was shut out, though barely for an 
 hour, the instant noise of that peril. 
 
 This is the way in which Paris came to Versailles and 
 began its usurpation of the Crown. 
 
 There is a tall window in Versailles in the corner of the 
 Council Room whence one -can see the courts opening 
 outwards before the palace, and so beyond to the wide 
 Place d'Armes. Through that window, streaming with 
 rain under the declining light of the pouring October day, 
 could be seen the tumult. 
 
 All the wide enclosure before the palace was guarded and 
 bare. Over its wet stones came and went only hurried 
 messengers orderlies from the armed forces or servants from 
 the Court. Holding the long 300 yards of gilded railing 
 was the double rank of the Guards, mounted, swords 
 drawn; next the Dragoons, a clear and detached line 
 of cavalry; in front of these, in triple rank, the Regiment 
 of Flanders. 
 
OCTOBER 301 
 
 Three armed bodies thus guarded the sweep of the railings 
 and the approach to the palace in parallel order, and beyond 
 them, right into the depths of the landscape, marched a 
 vast and confused mob filling up the three great avenues 
 and crowding half the Place d 'Armes ; in that mob, met at 
 first in formation but now mingled with the populace, could 
 be distinguished many of the armed Militia of Versailles. 
 At such a distance no distinct voices could be heard, but 
 roaring sound or murmur like the noise of a beach rose from 
 the multitude and outweighed the furious patter of the rain 
 on the glass: at rare intervals a shot was fired, wantonly, 
 but no news of bloodshed came. From time to time a 
 patrol of the Guard could be seen, towering on chargers 
 high above the populace, forcing its way through; swords 
 also, sometimes striking, could be distinguished. This uncer- 
 tain and menacing sight, blurred in the rain, was all that 
 the palace could distinguish. 
 
 Within the King's room were a deputation of women and 
 Mounier, the President of the Assembly, had been received, 
 council upon council was held, that the Queen at least should 
 retire to some neighbouring town, that the King should 
 fly but nothing was determined, and to that reiterated 
 policy of flight so often suggested since July, now so press- 
 ing, the King murmured as he paced back and forth, "A 
 King in flight! ... It is said that the horses were 
 
 ordered; but with every moment the plan became more 
 difficult. Darkness fell upon a sky still stormy; the troops 
 still held their lines, but the noises seemed nearer and more 
 menacing. It was imagined better to withdraw the Guard 
 at least, as the pressure upon them increased. 
 
 The order may be criticised, but it may also be defended. 
 La Fayette was marching on Versailles from Paris with a 
 
302 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 considerable force of partly trained militia. The Guards 
 round whom the legend of the supper had grown, and whose 
 white cockades were an insult to the national colours, exas- 
 perated the populace beyond bearing, and were, it was 
 thought, the main cause of the pressure to which the 
 troops were subjected. Wisely or foolishly, the_Guard 
 waswithdrawn, the line regiments alone were left^Jto 
 contain the liiob . 
 
 ~^Ir wasT eighrVclock, and for two hours further a futile 
 deliberation proceeded in the royal rooms. In those hours 
 first one messenger then another convinced the King of a 
 thing inconceivable in those days personal danger to himself 
 and especially to the Queen. At ten o'clock he signed the 
 Decrees, the refusal of which were thought to be the 
 
 litical cause of the tumult. At midnight could be heard 
 at last the regular marching of drilled men: La Fayette 
 had arrived with 20,000 from Paris not soldiers, if 
 you will, men of but three months' training, but in 
 uniform, capable of formation and well armed the 
 ]\felUia of Paris. 
 
 So profound was the mental distance between the sur- 
 roundings of the King and the leaders of the reform that not 
 a few at Court feared this relieving force, thinking that such 
 a man as La Fayette might be tempted to capture the Mon- 
 archy with it and to betray it to the mob ! They understood 
 him little. He showed that night some statesmanship, great 
 activity, and an admirable devotion to duty: it was his 
 judgment that failed. He judged falsely of what the crowd 
 were capable; he underestimated^ his countrymen and he 
 judged falsely of what hisjMililia could do; he overestimated 
 uniforms and an imperfect drill. He urged that the regular 
 troops, the pressure upon whom after all these hours was now 
 
OCTOBER 303 
 
 almost intolerable, should be withdrawn; he further urged 
 that he should be permitted with his Militia and with some 
 few of the Guard to police the open spaces and to protect the 
 palace. V 
 
 His advice the advice of the only man with a large armeo!/ 
 force behind him was accepted. By two o'clock there was 
 silence and, as it was thought, security. Men slept as they 
 could in such shelter as they might find or in the open. Far 
 off there was the glare of a fire where, in the midst of the 
 crowd, a wounded horse had keen killed and was roasting 
 for food. The hubbub within the palace had died down; 
 nothing was heard but the rhythmic clank of a sentry, or, 
 as the hours passed, the challenge of a relief. The Queen 
 also slept. 
 
 What followed has been told a thousand times. Her 
 great bedroom looked east and south; it was the chief 
 room in her wing, which, just beyond the central court, corre- 
 sponded to the King's upon the northern side. From that 
 room to the Council Chamber and to the King's private 
 apartments there were three ways: the way by the main 
 gallery of mirrors which her household took upon Sunday 
 mornings and on all sorts of grand occasions to join the King 
 for High Mass. A second shorter way through little rooms 
 at the back, which were her own private cabinets ; and thirdly, 
 a half-secret passage worked, now in the thickness of a floor, 
 now in the space between two floors, and leading directly 
 from the King's room to her own. 
 
 All that afternoon and evening the new strength of her 
 character had conspicuously appeared. Her friends, and 
 her enemies, remarked it equally. There was something 
 in her almost serene during these first experiences of peril ; 
 but they were to grow far more severe. Her children she 
 
304 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 had sent into the King's wing. She was assured of peace 
 at least until morning, and she slept. 1 
 
 Farther along than the tall chapel whose roof so dominates 
 Versailles, towards what is now the limit of the Hotel of 
 the Reservoirs, in the court which is called that of the 
 Opera House, one of the great iron gates which gave entry 
 into the palace grounds stood open on that gusty night of 
 rain. A single sentinel chosen, from the Militia, stood before 
 it. By this gate not a few of the crowd found their way 
 into the palace gardens, and, coming to the Southern wing, 
 vaguely knew, though the interior of the place was doubtful 
 to them, that they stood beneath the windows of the Queen. 
 
 Marie Antoinette had slept perhaps three hours when she 
 / awoke to hear cries and curses against her name, and staring 
 in the bewildered moment which succeeds the oblivion of 
 sleep she saw that it was dawn. Then next she heard some- 
 where, confused, far off, in the centre of the buildings, a noise 
 of thousands and cries. Her maid threw a petticoat upon 
 her and a mantle, and delayed her a perilous moment that 
 she might have stockings on as she fled. She made for the 
 private rooms that would take her to the King's wing, when, 
 as the noise of the invading mob grew louder and their leaders 
 (missing her door) poured on clamouring to find and to 
 kill her, one of her Guards half opened the door of her 
 room and cried, "Save the Queen!" The butt of a musket 
 felled him: the Queen was already saved. 
 
 The violence of those who thus poured past her door found 
 no victim. She had run through her little library and 
 boudoir, knocked at the door of the (Eil de Bceuf and had it 
 hurriedly opened to her : she had knocked and knocked and 
 someone had opened the door fearfully and shut it again 
 
 1 Fersen was in the palace that night. It has been affirmed that he was with her. The story is certainly 
 false 
 
OCTOBER 305 
 
 when she had passed through. She saw the (Eil de Bceuf 
 barricaded. A handful of the Guard went desperately piling 
 up chairs, sofas and footstools against the outer doors, while 
 she slipped through to the King's room. He meanwhile, as 
 the assault on the palace had awakened him also, had run 
 along the secret passage to her room, and, seeing it empty, 
 had come back to find her in his own. 
 
 The eruption of the mob had been as rapid as the bursting 
 of a storm. The immediate forming of the La Fayette's 
 Militia Guard and its victory proved almost as rapid. The 
 first shot had been fired at six, probably by one of the Guards 
 at the central door: within an hour the Militia had cleared 
 the rabble out, even the tenacious pillagers were dislodged 
 and the populace stood, thrust outside the doors and massed 
 in the narrow marble court beneath the King's windows, 
 in part discomfited but much more angry, and with a policy 
 gradually shaping in the common mouth : a policy expressed 
 in cries that "they would see the King," that "the King was 
 their King," that "they must bring back the King to Paris." 
 
 The morning had broken clear and fine and quite calm 
 after the rain of yesterday and the wind of the night; its 
 light increased with the advancing hours: the energy of the 
 mob remained and in the midst of it a long-bearded man, 
 half-mad, an artist's model, was hacking off the heads of the 
 two Guards who had been killed when the palace was rushed. 
 
 The Queen looked down upon the flood of the people from 
 the windows of her husband's room. Her sister-in-law 
 was at her shoulder, her little daughter close to her left side, 
 arid in front of her, standing upon a chair, the Dauphin was 
 playing with his sister's hair and complaining that he was 
 hungry : and all the while the mob shouted for the King. 
 
 The King showed himself. They would see the Queen 
 
306 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 too : and La Fayette, still their adviser and still trusted in a 
 bewildered way as a sort of saviour, told her it was impera- 
 tive that she should come. She went, therefore, to the great 
 central room of all that house, the room which had been the 
 state bedroom of Louis XIV., and stepped out upon the 
 balcony of its central window, holding her children by the 
 hand. The mob roared that they would have no children 
 there. She waved them back into the room, and stood for 
 some moments surveying the anger of the unhappy thousands 
 packed beneath, with the new and serene day rising in the 
 eastern heaven behind them. Her hands were on the rail 
 of the balcony. She hardly moved. There were weapons 
 raised in the tumbling crowd: one man aimed at her and 
 then lowered his musket. La Fayette came forward, took 
 her right hand, knelt and kissed it, and the little scene 
 was over. 
 
 How could she have known until that moment that there 
 
 ^were such things ? 
 
 It was certain more and more as the day grew to noon 
 
 ( that the Court must obey and that the populace had morally 
 conquered. In a little inner room the King and Queen sat 
 together, and together they decided (or, the King deciding, 
 she could not but decide in the same necessity) that they 
 would return to Paris. She turned to her husband and said : 
 " Promise^iie~at least this: that when next such an occasion 
 shall come, you will fly while yet there is time." Louis, to 
 whom the idea of flight was hateful, let his eyes fill with tears, 
 but did not answer. 
 
 Louis' decision to return was a wise decision. The popu- 
 I lar demand was not to constrain but to possess their King. 
 
OCTOBER 307 
 
 It was not until later that the changing mood of Paris and its 
 success seemed to make of that moment of October the 
 beginning of the King's captivity; with some little difference 
 in persons and in wills, this yielding to what all the national 
 sentiment demanded might even yet have made of the 
 Crown once more an active national emblem and of the 
 person of the King a leader. 
 
 It was half-past one when the carriages with difficulty 
 came to the palace. It was two before the march to Paris 
 began. 
 
 The road from Versailles to Paris falls and falls down a 
 long easy valley which the woods still clothe on either side 
 of the very broad and royal highway : the woods rose in that 
 autumn dense and unbroken for many miles. Two things 
 contrasted powerfully one against the other: the howling 
 turbulence of the crowd, the stillness of nature all around. 
 It was as though some sort of astonishment had struck the 
 trees and the pure sky: or as though these were spectators 
 standing apart and watching what tempests can arise in the 
 mind of man. 
 
 The season was late; the foliage was but just turning; 
 the gorgeous leaves hung tremulous in that still air: none 
 fell. The masses of colour in the thickets of Viroflay were 
 tapestried and immovable; and all this silence of the world 
 was soft as well. The air had about it that tender, half- 
 ironical caress which it possesses on perfect autumn days 
 in the Parisis, and the sky was of that misty but contented 
 blue which they know very well who have wandered in that 
 valley upon such days. Cleaving through such beatitude, 
 a long line of shrieking and of clamouring, of laughter and 
 of curses, of the shrill complaints of women, of the moans 
 of pain and of fatigue, mixed with the sudden wanton 
 
308 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 discharge of muskets, went, for mile after mile; the 
 populace drawing back their King to Paris. 
 
 It is not seven miles from the Palace to the river not 
 another four to what were then the barriers of the city. 
 They took for these eleven miles all but seven hours. The 
 coaches crawled and pushed through the swarm of the angry 
 poor. The Queen, her husband and her children, Monsieur, 
 Madame Elizabeth, the governess of the royal children - 
 all sat together in one great coach rumbling along in the midst 
 of insult and of intolerable noise. From where she sat, facing 
 the horses near the window, the Queen could see far off at 
 the head of that interminable column two pikes slanting in 
 the air. The heads of the Guards who had saved her were 
 upon them. 1 She could see here and there, close under those 
 trophies, glints of yellow, where certain of the Foot Guards 
 were marched like prisoners along, with the blue of the 
 national Militia, flanking and escorting them on either side ; 
 and, mixed in the crowd, the Mounted Guardsmen were 
 there, prisoners also, with the Mounted Militia holding them. 
 Of all that followed after, she could see nothing but she 
 could hear. There was the rumbling of the wheels of the 
 two cannon, the great sixty waggons loaded with flour, 
 and she could hear the cries that cursed her own name. 
 The afternoon wore on. The sun lay low over the 
 palace they had left ; it was dusk by the time they reached 
 the river; it was dark before they came to the barriers 
 of the town. 
 
 There, by the same gate of entry w r hich the first of the 
 Bourbons had traversed two hundred years before, the 
 Monarchy re-entered that capital which, for precisely a 
 century, it had, with a fatal lack of national instinct, aban- 
 
 1 Or else they were not: there are two versions. 
 
OCTOBER 309 
 
 doned. Bailly, the Mayor, met them under torches in the 
 darkness and presented the keys of the city. The Royal 
 Family must needs go on, late as it was and they lacking 
 food, to the Hotel de Ville, that the crowds of the city might 
 see them. It was not until ten o'clock that the unhappy 
 household, the little children broken by such hours and so 
 much fasting, found themselves at last under the roof of 
 the Tuileries. 
 
 The Tuileries were a barracks. 
 
 The huge empty line of buildings, which, had they been 
 thus abandoned to-day, would have been made a Sunday 
 show, had in that age been put to no use; they had become 
 in the absence of the Court but a warren of large deserted 
 rooms. Furniture was wanting; there was dust and negli- 
 gence everywhere; the discomfort, the indignity, the friction, 
 were but increased by the hasty swarms of workmen 
 who had been turned on in a few hours to fit the place for 
 human living. No more exact emblem of the divorce 
 between the Crown and Paris could be found than the 
 inner ruin of that royal town house, nor could any 
 deeper lesson have been conveyed had the last of 
 the Bourbons but heeded it than the reproach of 
 those rooms. >. 
 
 As for Paris Paris believed it had recovered the King,) 
 The month and more that followed was filled with a series of 
 receptions and of plaudits. The Bar, the University, the 
 Treasury, last of all the Academy all the great bodies of 
 the State were received in audience and joined in a general 
 welcome. Parliament was at work again before the end of 
 the month, first in the Archbishop's palace upon the 
 Island, later in the great oval manege or riding-school 
 which lay along the north of the palace gardens. It 
 
310 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 was there that all the drama of the Revolution was to 
 be played. 1 
 
 That drama began to work, as winter advanced with a new, 
 a more organised, and, as it were, a more fatal rapidity; 
 and as the volume of the reform grew and its momentum 
 also rose, the Queen sank back further and further into the 
 recesses of her religion . 
 
 Her energy was not diminished. Those few months of 
 silence did but restore her power to act with speed and even 
 with violence in the succeeding year, but for the moment, 
 like a sort of foil to the speed of the current around her, she 
 steadfastly regarded Jhe only things that remain to the 
 doomed or the destitute. 
 
 The communion of her daughter chiefly concerned her 
 then. To this it was that she looked forward in the com- 
 ing spring, and this (insignificant as the matter may seem 
 to those who know little of such minds) was the fixed interest 
 of that winter for the Queen. 
 
 Her letters during those months betray that momentary 
 isolation. She inclined once more, after the tumults and 
 defeats, to a not very worthy contempt for the slow, insuffi- 
 cient, and absolutely just mind of her husband. There are 
 phrases of violence like the sudden small flames of banked 
 fires in those letters of hers in that season ; but her reserve 
 remains absolute. She boasts that she "had seen death 
 from near by." But "she will keep to her plan and not 
 meddle." "My business is to see the King at ease." Then 
 again, later, in Lent she sneers: "One at my side is prepared 
 to take things in a modest way." She follows with a phrase 
 
 * Those curious to retrace the very sites of history, may care to know exactly where the manege stood, 
 since in the manege, as a great phrase goes, "La France fit I'eternel." The major axis of its ellipse corre- 
 sponded to the pavement to the north of the Rue de Rivoli under the Arcades, and the centre of this axis was 
 where the Rue Castiglione now falls into the Rue de Rivoli. Its southern wall slightly overlapped the line of 
 the present railing of the Tuileries Gardens; its northern was about In a line with the northern limit of the 
 property now occupied by the Continental Hotel. 
 
OCTOBER 311 
 
 that is reminiscent of the audacity she so recently showed 
 and was again so soon to show: "/ shall not let the power 
 of the Throne go at so cheap a rate." This letter, which, 
 read to-day after so many years, breathes the too jagged 
 vigour of the woman, has about it an awful character; 
 for she wrote it to a man who, even as she wrote it, was lying 
 dead; her brother and her mainstay, the Emperor. The 
 desire to return to the arena is still in her: she writes once, 
 wistfully, "I must get hold of the leaders." There are other 
 letters, passionate, womanish letters to her woman friends. 
 To Madame de Polignac, out in exile at Parma, letter after 
 letter. In these, as in all the rest, you read her jpsfapt. of serku. 
 sion from the fight. That interval was one of five months. 
 
 SheTn those five months, from the Days of the Dead in 
 November, 1789, to the very early Easter of 1790, was like an 
 athlete who, in the midst of some furious game, stands apart 
 for a moment recovering his breath and relaxing his muscles 
 while the struggle grows more active, separate from him, but 
 acted before his eyes. Soon he will re-enter the press with a 
 renewed vigour. And so did she when after that sad winter 
 she combined with Mirahejm, and the driving force in those 
 "two minds tried to work in a yoke together. But for the rest, 
 I say, religion chiefly held her. Her isolation was not so 
 much a plan (as she pretended) as a physical and necessary 
 thing. She was exhausted. She had done with the body 
 for a moment. She was concerned with the soul. 
 
 If one could portray graphically the accidents of that 
 tragic life, if a mould could be taken of her great hopes and 
 her great sufferings, if a cast in relief could be made of 
 her passion, you would find, I think, in such a map of her 
 existence two high peaks of exalted suffering and vision: 
 the death of her son so small in history, so great to her 
 
312 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 would be the first; and the second would be those hours in 
 October when she, to whom such all such things had been 
 mere words, was first in her wealthy life threatened with cold 
 air against her body, the vulgar in her bedroom, and death; 
 when she first saw a weapon levelled at her and first came 
 in physical contact with violence, a thing that all save the 
 wealthy and their parasites daily know. These were the 
 two strong, new, and terrible days which had bitten into her 
 experience. These were and remained her isolated mem- 
 ories. The rest, her future evils, came by a more gradual slope : 
 her very death was to her less enormous. Her dumbness 
 during these winter months of '89 and the working inwards of 
 her life was a reaction of repose after the shock of October. 
 By the vast mass of the Louvre there is a church dedicated 
 to that Saint Germanus who preached against Pelagius in 
 Britain, and who, as an old man, had laid his hand upon the 
 head of the young Saint Genevieve, the goose-girl, near 
 Mount Valerian and had foreseen her glory. This church 
 has much history. From its tower rang the call to arms 
 which roused the populace of Paris against the wealthy 
 oppressor of the Huguenot faction and maddened the poor 
 to take their revenge in the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. 
 It was and is the parish church of the palace. Here, before 
 Lent was over (upon Wednesday in Holy Week), the little 
 girl, her daughter, knelt at her first communion. The 
 Queen stood and knelt in the darkness of the nave, dressed 
 without ornament, her fine head serious, her commanding 
 eyes at once tender and secure. 
 
 I cannot write of her or hear of her without remembering 
 her thus; and that last power of hers, a power made of 
 
OCTOBER 31. '5 
 
 abrupt vivacity tamed at last by misfortune into dignity j 
 and strength, here, I think, begins. Such a power was not i 
 henceforward the permanent quality of her soul far from 
 it - - but it appeared and reappeared. It was strong 
 more than once for a moment in the last hours before she 
 died . . . and how well one sees why such as had 
 perceived in her the seeds of this force of the spirit, even 
 when she was distraught and played the fool in youth, 
 now, when it had blossomed, worshipped her! Upon 
 this last mood her legend is built and survives. She had 
 a regal head. 
 
 She stood in the nave unnoticed in her black dress with- 
 out ornament, and saw the little girl go up in white and veiled 
 to the altar-rails. There was no one there. Never since 
 Constantine had the Faith been lower in France; but the 
 Faith is a thing for the individual mind and not for 
 majorities. 
 
 They went back homewards. They gave alms. 
 
 Meanwhile, though this was her true life for those months, 
 one must speak of what went on without : the rising of the 
 Revolutionary song and the noises at her feet. For out of 
 this swelling energy and increasing peril was to grow her 
 experiment of an alliance with the virile brain of Mirabeau. 
 
 There stands, side by side with the activity of mortal life, 
 a silent thing commonly unseen and, even if seen, despised. 
 It has no name, unless its name be religion: its form is the 
 ritual of the altar; its philosophy is despised under the title 
 of Theology. This thing and its influence should least 
 of all appear in the controversies of a high civilisation. 
 With an irony that every historian of whatever period must 
 
314 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 have noted a hundred times, this thing and its influence 
 perpetually intervene, when most society is rational and 
 when most it is bent upon positive things ; and now at the 
 moment when the transformation of society towards such 
 better things seemed so easy and the way so plain, now in late 
 '89, before any threat had come from the King or any danger 
 of dissolution from within, this thing, this influence, entered 
 unnoticed by a side-door; it was weak and almost dumb. 
 It and it alone halted and still halts all the Revolutionary 
 work, for it should have been recognised and it was not. It 
 demanded its place and no place was given it. There is a 
 divine pride about it and, as it were, a divine necessity of 
 vengeance. Religion, if it be slighted, if it be misunder- 
 stood, will implacably destroy. 
 
 It was the Queen's birthday, the Day of the Dead, 
 November 2, 1789, one of those fatal and recurrent dates 
 to which her history is pinned, which saw the sowing of 
 that seed and the little entry of what was to become the 
 major and perhaps the unending feud of our modern 
 democracies. 
 
 The clergy of the French Church were* then national to a 
 degree hitherto unknown in the history of the Church in any 
 of her provinces. The national movement swept them all. 
 The Episcopacy represented, in some few of the greatest 
 sees the Revolutionary enthusiasms, in the mass of bishops 
 the resistance to the Revolution which was exactly parallel 
 to the attitude of the lay nobility. The parish clergy 
 reflected with exact fidelity the homogeneous will of the 
 nation. It was a priest who furnished the notes of the 
 Revolutionary movement in the capital of Normandy. 
 Later it was a priest who wrote the last (and the only liter- 
 ary) stanza of the Marseillaise. Even the religious, or what 
 
OCTOBER 315 
 
 was left of them (for monastic life had never fallen to a lower 
 state or one more dead since first St. Martin had brought it 
 into Gaul), met the movement in a precisely similar fashion, 
 suspected it in proportion to their privilege or their wealth, 
 welcomed it in proportion to their knowledge of the people 
 and their mixing with them. It was the poor remnant of 
 the Dominicans of Paris that received and housed and gave 
 its name to the headquarters of pure democracy, the 
 Jacobins. 
 
 The clergy, then, were but the nation. The long cam- 
 paign against the Faith, which had so long been the business 
 of the Huguenot, the Deist, the Atheist, and the Jew, had 
 indeed brought the Faith very near to death, and, as has so 
 often been insisted in the course of these pages, it is difficult 
 for a modern man to conceive how tiny was the little flicker- 
 ing flame of Catholicism in the generation before the 
 Revolution, for he is used to it to-day as a great combative 
 advancing thing against which every effort of its enemies' 
 energies must be actively and constantly used. The clergy 
 as a body of men were national and willing to aid the nation ; 
 the Faith, which should have been their peculiar business, 
 had almost gone therefore it was that to put to national 
 uses what seemed the grossly exaggerated endowments of 
 religion seemed a national policy in that embarrassed time. 
 Therefore it was that the endowments so attacked could ill 
 defend themselves, for the philosophy of their defence, which 
 lay in their religion, was forgotten. Obviously necessary 
 and patriotic as the policy seemed, it awoke that influence 
 of which I speak, which does not reside in men and which 
 is greater than men, which only acts through men, but 
 is not of them; and Religion seemingly all but dead 
 rose at once when it felt upon it the gesture of the civil power. 
 
316 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 316 
 It 
 
 was, I have said, the 2nd of November, the Queen's 
 | birthday, the Day of the Dead, that the vote was taken upon 
 /. the Confiscation of religious endowments. The light was 
 railing as that vole began, 'rhe candelabra of the great 
 riding-school were lit, and it was full darkness before the 
 vote was ended, for five-sixths of all possible votes were cast 
 and nearly one thousand men voted each to the call of his 
 name upon a roll. When the figures were read, a majority 
 of 222 had decided the thing, and, in deciding it, had deter- 
 .mined the dual fortunes of Europe thenceforward to our 
 | own time. The Revolution, a thing inconceivable apart 
 from the French inheritance, Catholic Dogma, had raised an 
 tissue against the Catholic Church. For three weeks had 
 the matter been debated ; the days of October had launched 
 it, and while yet the Parlement was in Versailles a bishop 
 one later to be famous under his own name of Talley- 
 rand had moved in favour of that Act. 
 
 It was a simple plan, and to see how immediate and 
 necessary it seemed we have but to read the figures of the 
 clerical funds and of their iniquitous distribution; yet it 
 failed altogether and had for its effect only one effect much 
 larger than any one dreamt the creation of enmity in the 
 only Thing that could endure, indefinitely opposed to the 
 Revolution, mobile, vigorous, and with a life as long or 
 longer than its own. 
 
 The figures were these: In a nation of 25 milliojis now 
 raising, by a grinding and most unpopular taxation, less than 
 18,000,000 in the year, and of that paying quite one-half as 
 interest upon a hopeless and increasing debt was present a 
 body of men, 40,000 in number, whose revenues had always 
 been considered as the retribution of a particular function now 
 \ universally disregarded; and these revenues would almost 
 
OCTOBER 317 
 
 suffice to pay the amount which would save the nation fronf 
 bankruptcy. The property from which these revenues were 
 derived was sufficient to cancel the debt and to set the nation 
 free upon a new course of readjusted taxation, an increased 
 and unencumbered activity and, as it seemed to all at that 
 moment, to save the State. Talleyrand himself in his clear 
 and chiselled speech put the matter with the precision of a 
 soldier. The reform would wipe out all encumbrances^ 
 permit the destruction of the old and hateful taxes, notably 
 the salt tax, suppress the purchase of public offices, and 
 meanwhile permit the nation in its new course to pay without 
 grievous burden regular salaries to the clergy as civil servants 
 according to their rank, which salaries would abolish t 
 gross inequalities which had arisen in the economic develop- 
 ment of fifteen centuries. No ordained priest would have 
 less than what was in those days regarded as a sufficient 
 maintenance. The monstrous revenues of certain sees 
 which were of no service to Religion or to the State, would 
 disappear. 
 
 The plan was simple, it seemed most rational, and, as I 
 have said, it was voted from it was to proceed directly 
 within two months the creation of those Government notes 
 upon the security of Church lands, whose very name is for 
 us to-day a summary of the disaster the. Assignats : the 
 Assignats, which have become. a cant term for worthless 
 paper. Before Christmas that ominous word was to appear. 
 Before spring the false step of dissolving the moribund 
 religious orders was to be taken. Before summer the plan 
 to establish a national Church controlled by the State! 
 was to be formulated ; within a year that simple plan of dis- 
 endowment had bred schism and the fixed resistance of the 
 King, later it engendered Vendee, Normandy, all the civil 
 
318 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 wars, and -- with a rending that has all but destroyed Europe 
 - a separation between the two chief appetites native to 
 mankind, the hunger for justice in the State, and that other 
 hunger for God, who is the end of the soul. The wound is 
 not yet healed. 
 
 Such was the principal act passing during those months 
 of the winter and spring under the eyes of the Queen in her 
 retirement and silence; accompanying that act was much 
 more. The first of the plots had broken out, the first of 
 those recurrent and similar plots for saving the person of the 
 King; the first of the victims, Favras, had been hanged; 
 the first hint, therefore, of a distinction between the King as 
 head of the nation and the King as a person to be preserved 
 had appeared. It was to grow until it threw into the whirl- 
 pool of the Revolution the flight to Varennes. 
 
 Just before the end of February the force upon which 
 Marie Antoinette now most relied her brother Joseph - 
 died. Leopold, a character of no such readiness or matur- 
 ity, succeeded him, and the Queen, reading his letter upon the 
 27th, knew that she had come to that turn of human life after 
 which, even for the most blest, everything is loss without 
 replacement, until we stand alone at the tomb. Even for the 
 most blest : for her the turn had come just as she and all of 
 hers must sail into the darkness of a great storm. 
 
 I have said that it was on the last day of March, Spy 
 
 Wednesday, that she had stood obscure in her plain black, 
 
 blotted against the darkness of the nave and watching the 
 
 communion of her child. Upon the next day, Holy 
 
 / Thursday of 1790, was published by order of the Revolu- 
 
 / tionary Parliament, that official paper called "The Red 
 
 Book," which suddenly heralded to all the public all that 
 
 her Court had been, which gave body and form to all those 
 
OCTOBER 319 
 
 hitherto vague rumours and legends of extravagance and folly 
 which had been the chief weapons of her enemies. It 
 was as though a malarial, impalpable influence weakening 
 her had suddenly distilled into a palpable and definite 
 material poison. It was as though some weapon of mist, 
 which though formidable was undecided, had become 
 suddenly a weapon of steel. The publication of that list 
 of pensions, of doles, of bribes effected in her fortunes a 
 change like the change in the life of some man whose repu- 
 tation has hitherto suffered from hints and innuendoes, and 
 who suddenly finds himself with the whole thing published 
 in the papers upon the witness and record of a Court of Law. 
 Let a modern reader imagine what that publication was 
 by so stretching his fancy as to conceive the delivery to 
 general knowledge in this country of what is done in payment 
 and receipt by our big money-changers, our newspapers, our 
 politicians, and let him imagine (by another stretch of fancy) 
 a public opinion in this country already alive to the existence 
 of that corruption and already angry against it: then he will 
 see what a date in the chances of the Queen's life was this 
 Holy Thursday! <^ 
 
 Ot'lTe business now before herself and such as were states- V^ 
 men around her was no longer to make triumphant, but I 
 rather to save the Monarchy. SJ 
 
XIII 
 
 ^** -* ^ - 
 
 mRABAU 
 
 FROM APRIL 1, 1790, TO MS5NJOHE_iil^THE 20rn JUNE, 1791 
 
 THERE existed in France at that moment one force 
 which, in alliance with the Government, could 
 have preserved the continuity of institutions, 
 among other institutions of the throne. That force resided 
 in the personality of Mirabeau. 
 
 Had he survived and so succeeded for his failure was 
 only possible with death the French nation might indeed 
 have preserved all its forms and would then have lost 
 its principle and power. It might have been transformed 
 into something of lower vigour than itself, it might have 
 grown to forget action, and the nineteenth century, which 
 was to see our civilisation ploughed t>y the armies and sowed 
 by the ideas of Napoleon so that it became a century 
 enormous with French energy and has left us to-day under a 
 necessity still to persevere might have been a time of easy 
 reaction: a Europe without Germany, without Italy: a 
 Europe having in its midst the vast lethargic body of the 
 French monarchy and dominated wholly by the mercantile 
 activity of England. 
 
 This, I say, might, or rather would, have been the fate 
 of the Revolution, and therefore of the world, with what 
 further consequences we cannot tell, had Mirabeau, once 
 in alliance with the Court, survived; for wherever in his- 
 tory the continuity of form has been preferred, to a spirit 
 
 820 
 
MIRABEAU 321 
 
 of renascence, such lethargy and such decline has succeeded. 
 But though an effect of this kind would have resulted for 
 Christendom in general, for the Queen and for her family 
 the success of Mirabeau would have been salvation. The 
 air and the tradition of the palace would have survived; 
 she would have grown old beside her husband in a State 
 lessened but preserving many of the externals of power; 
 her later years wise, resigned, and probably magnificent. 
 As it was, the alliance between Mirabeau and the Court 
 was made but before the first year of its effect had run, 
 Mirabeau was dead: he dead, the slope of change led 
 Marie Antoinette, with rapid and direct insistence, to flight, 
 to imprisonment, and to the scaffold. 
 
 It is but very rarely that so much can be laid to the action 
 of one brain in history. What were the characters in Mira-l 
 beau's position that made it true of him in this spring of 
 1790? They were these: that he had through certain 
 qualities in him become accepted as the organ of a jx^piilap 
 movement; that, by other qualities more profoundly rooted 
 in him, he was determined upon jprdej; and, finally, that 
 an early maturity of judgment already hardened before 
 his fortieth year strong passions often satisfied and their 
 resulting fruit of deadness, much bitter humiliation, the 
 dreadful annealing of poverty working upon known and 
 vast capacity, had rendered him quite careless of those 
 imaginary future things the vision of which alone can sup- 
 port men in the work of creation. He was now a man 
 walking backwards, observing things known, judging men, 
 testing their actions and motives as one would test natural 
 and invariable forces, using the whole either to achieve 
 some end which had already been achieved elsewhere 
 which was in existence somewhere and had reality or 
 
322 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 to preserve things still standing around him, things whose 
 nature he knew. He would have preserved all, and he 
 would have degraded his land. This most national of 
 Frenchmen would have closed to France her avenue of 
 growth. He was "practical": and the chief quality of his 
 people, which is the power most suddenly to evoke a cor- 
 porate will, he did not comprehend. It was a mystery, 
 and therefore he ignored it. Of things hidden he could 
 divine nothing at all. The Faith, for example, being then 
 driven underground, he utterly despised. 
 
 His command of spoken speech, sonorous, incisive, 
 revealing, dominating by turns; his rapid concentration 
 of phrase, his arrangement and possession (through others) 
 of innumerable details, were points that made him the 
 chief of a Parliament: his courage and advancing presence 
 - for he was a sort of lion peculiarly suited him to the 
 Gauls, and his love of men, which was enormous, for- 
 bade the growth of those feminine enmities which are the 
 only perils of our vulgar politicians to-day, and which 
 sprouted from debate even in the high temper of the Revo- 
 lution, as they must sprout wherever talking and not 
 fighting is the game. 
 
 His travel, his wide reading, his communication through- 
 out Europe and in the greatest houses with numerous close, 
 varied and admiring friends, gave him that poise and 
 that contempt for vision which made his leadership, when 
 once he led, secure. 
 
 With all this went the passion to administrate, to do, 
 which months of speeches and of opposition to the executive 
 had but swollen. In April his opportunity came. 
 
 It was the Queen who made this capital move. 
 
 For many months, indeed, he would have come in secret 
 
MIRABEAU 323 
 
 to the aid of the Court. From the very meeting of the 
 States-General the year before, Mirabeau had known that 
 his place was with Government rather than in the tribune. 
 His past of passion forbade him executive power. Necker, 
 with quite another past a nasty financial past had 
 dared to insult him in the early days of the Parliament. All 
 the summer he had begged La Marck, his friend, to speak 
 for him to the Queen, to the Throne. La Marck, who was 
 very close to the Queen and was a companion since Trianon, 
 had spoken, but Mirabeau was still a voice only, and, to 
 women, an unpleasant one. In October he had directly 
 attacked the Queen she held him responsible for the two 
 dreadful days and the insults of the drag back to Paris. 
 The decrees in November which preserved the Assembly 
 from decay, by forbidding its members to accept office, had 
 closed the Ministry to him: in December he had tried to 
 work a secret executive power through Monsieur and 
 Marie Antoinette's distrust of Monsieur had again foiled 
 him. La Marck had given up hope of helping his friend, 
 the decrees and the debates of the Assembly shook the 
 Throne with increasing violence, the King was counselless, 
 when, after some long debate within herself, of which, in 
 the nature of the thing, we can have no hint or record, the 
 Queen, in the days when the preparation for her child's 
 sacrament was her chief affair, and a fortnight or so before 
 that communion, determined to unite the brain of Mira- 
 beau to the Crown. 
 
 ^She^easily^ persuader) Louis. Before or after that per- 
 suasion she spoke to Mercy, and Mercy wrote to that ances- 
 tral Balzic land whither La Marck, certain that nothing 
 could be done in Paris, and desiring to check the effects of 
 the revolt in the Austrian Netherlands upon his estates, 
 
324 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 had betaken him three months before. La Marck at once 
 returned; he crossed the frontier, and in his private house 
 up along the Faubourg St. Honore, Mirabeau and Mercy 
 met upon an April evening. All was most secretly done, 
 so that none, not the populace, nor the Parliament, nor the 
 courtiers nor even Necker should know. These two 
 very separate abilities, Mercy and Mirabeau, recognised 
 each other: for some days yet, the latter and the greater, the 
 storm-tossed one, doubted; he still spoke of "an embassy" 
 for his reward he stooped to beg favour again of La 
 Fayette. At last he was convinced of the Court's sincerity, 
 and on the tenth of May he wrote for the King that is, 
 for the Government (there was no other) that first 
 admirable Letter of Advice which remains the chief monu- 
 ment of his genius. In one year he had proceeded from 
 being an Evil Reputation to be a Speechifier, from a Speechi- 
 fier to a something inspiring dread: now he was secretly 
 in power; in half -power; his was one of the hands on the 
 tiller. To himself that year had been but a year of debt 
 and makeshift; his principal relief at this vast change was a 
 relief of the purse. 
 
 Mirabeau wante^Lnioney. He was a gentleman, and his 
 honour wanted it. In his appetite for it he did all a gentle- 
 man would do, sacrificing that which men not gentlemen 
 would not part with to save their lives. He approached 
 enemies and friends indifferently. La Fayette, whose 
 militia power offended him and whose nullity drove him 
 wild, La Fayette whom he had attacked and publicly jeered 
 at, he quietly tapped for ,2,000 and railed when that cau- 
 tious Saviour of Two Worlds sent less than half the sum. 
 He had the gentleman's morbid shame of old debts and the 
 gentleman's carelessness in contracting new. He was of the 
 
MIRABEAU 325 
 
 sort that kill themselves rather than finally default, and 
 yet who take the road that makes defaulting sure. To such 
 a man, now rising on the Revolutionary wave, entertain- 
 ing, ordering secretarial work on every side, playing the 
 part of a public god, the offer of the Court was new life. 
 Yet here again some apology must be offered to the modern 
 reader for the pettiness of the sum which sufficed in those 
 days to purchase so much power upon such an occasion. 
 For the salvation of the Monarchy Mirabeau was to receive, 
 upon the payment of his debts, not half the income we give 
 to a politician who has climbed on to the Front Bench: 
 when he had accomplished his task he was to receive, 
 upon retirement, a sum that would just purchase such a 
 pension as we accord for life to a nephew or a son-in-law 
 fatigued by two years of the Board of Trade. He accepted 
 the terms: but for him, and for those like him, a wage, 
 however shameful or secret, is but an opportunity for intense 
 and individual action. He was the more himself and the 
 less a servant when he had wages to spend.. He designed 
 his campaign at once: to see the Queen upon whose energy 
 alone he relied and in whom though he had never kissed her 
 hand or spoken to her face to face he divined a corre- 
 sponding courage; and next, through her, while maintain- 
 ing his demagogic power, to crush the growth of anarchy 
 by the welding of an army; and at last $0 restore the Mon- 
 a civil war. For order was, he imagined, the cnief 
 
 affair, and anarchy was all that great brain could discover 
 in the early ferment of the time. 
 
 He was a man very capable of being a lover: he was an 
 artist who ardently desired an instrument: he trusted his 
 capacity with women, and he far over-priced the powerJa- 
 'qction, though, not the vigour, of the Queen. She upon her 
 
326 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 side dreaded the meeting and delayed it, though Mercy 
 himself and the new Archbishop of Toulouse, now her 
 confessor, urged it. 
 
 Upon the 4th of June the Court had left Paris for St. 
 Cloud to spend, within an hour of the capital and with- 
 in sight of it, the months of summer. That memorable 
 anniversary of her son's death isolated and saddened the 
 woman upon whom was thus thrown a responsibility too 
 great for her judgment. All the month she hesitated, 
 while the notes from Mirabeau in his new capacity as 
 Counsellor of the Court, coming in continually more insistent, 
 more authoritative, and more wide, made the meeting a 
 necessity. At last, upon the 29th, she decided. A 
 room was chosen, "such that none could know" ; he was 
 to come upon Friday, July 3, to the little back door 
 of the garden toward the park; there was a further delay - 
 he was put off to the morrow. He slept at his sister's house 
 at Auteuil, and early on the Saturday morning, taking his 
 sister's son with him for sole companion, disguised, he 
 drove to the little garden door. Everything was silent 
 about him in the summer morning as he drove from Auteuil 
 to St. Cloud, that nephew of his riding as his postilion, 
 and no one by. A certain suspicion weighed upon him. 
 He remembered the delays, the secrecy; he remembered that 
 no friend loved him as much as each loved or hated the 
 Crown. Before he put his hand to the latch he gave the 
 boy a note and said: "If I am not returned within three- 
 quarters of an hour, give this to the Captain of the Militia," 
 and, having said this, he went alone into the garden. 
 
 In France and throughout his world the event of those 
 days was the JFederaiion. In ten days all the delegates 
 would meet upon the Champ^ deJVta rs for the anniversary 
 
MIRABEAU 327 
 
 of the Bastille: the change in men was to be confirmed in a 
 vast meeting of friendship: the King was to swear and a 
 world quite renewed was to arise. Even in London the 
 blaze of the triumph had struck the street, and the com- 
 mon shows were preparing pictures and models of the feast. 
 Upon this all Europe was turned as the delegates came 
 swarming daily into the simmering July of Paris and as the 
 altar rose upon the great open field by the river. For 
 him, and now for history also, a greater, what might, had 
 Mirabeau lived, have been a more enduring scene, was the 
 secret morning meeting so prepared. 
 
 The Queen awaited him in a room apart, the King at 
 her side. She awaited with some hesitation the fierce step 
 and the bold eye, the strong, pitted face of "the Monster." 
 but her rank and a long apprenticeship to reception had 
 taught her to receive. He came in and saw this woman 
 whom he had so much desired to see; he spoke with her 
 for half an hour, and as he left her he kissed her hand. 
 Two things remained with him : the moderation, the over- 
 moderation of the King, but in her a sort of regal deter- 
 jninatioa which was half an illusion of his own, but which 
 most powerfully filled his spirit and which left him enfeoffed 
 to the cause he had so long chosen to serve. He came out 
 to his nephew, where the carriage waited, radiant, all his 
 energy renewed. He had perhaps a clear conception of 
 the Queen in action supporting him, determining the King, 
 eagerly accepting his wisdom and his plans. In that he 
 gave her far too great a place; but great men impute great- 
 ness, and l^Tirabeau was too great for wpmpjp. 
 
 The show of the Federation passed, gloriously; the life 
 of the nation rose to passion and broke bounds. In the 
 matter of the .army, by which alone Authority could live, 
 
328 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 Mirabeau saw its strengthdissolved. The melting of society 
 had destroyed that discipline, the hardest, the most neces- 
 sary and the least explicable bond among men: the frontier 
 mutinied for arrears of pay, and with the first days of 
 August it was evident that neither for defence nor for the 
 re-establishment of law could the army be available. The 
 army, that one solid weapon of the Monarchy, was now 
 cracked all down the blade. The Army of the East, 
 long, as I have said, the chief resource of the executive, 
 was affected like the rest of .the service. There Bouille, 
 a trained and careful man, wealthy, noble of course, 
 whiggish in politics, and of middle age, held the command and 
 saw from one day to another in all the garrisons of his com- 
 mand the method of soldiers failing. One .mutiny followed 
 another; regimental chests were seized for arrears of pay; 
 the non-commissioned officers were no longer with the 
 cadre in spirit; officers of the lower grades had been insulted, 
 of the higher reluctantly and more reluctantly obeyed. 
 
 It was at this moment that Mirabeau saw fit to give that 
 grave advice for which posterity has judged him so hardly, 
 and which yet betrays the decision of his soul. He deter- 
 mined upon Jyil war. 
 
 Many things might have saved him and the nation from 
 such a policy: notably La Fayette, a plaster head of the 
 Militia might have been made a reserve force behind the 
 failing regulars, and it has been pretended that La Fayette 
 and Mirabeau were now quite separate, and the wealthy 
 young fellow useless to his elder the Statesman, because 
 La Fayette, in opposing Mirabeau's presidency of the 
 Assembly for the Federation, had offended the vanity from 
 which great orators suffer. The cause is insufficient. 
 Mirabeau had lost all hope that La Fayette could act. He 
 
MIRABEAU 329 
 
 passed him by. What as a fact did prevent the immediate 
 prosecution of Mirabeau's policy was the insufficiency of 
 the Queen, and this it was that saved the country and the 
 memory of her adviser from a course that would certainly 
 have preserved the Throne.* 
 
 Contrasted against the surroundings of her family and 
 her Court, even of her immediate enemies, her decision had 
 shone; contrasted against Mirabeau's will it was pale. 
 she even attempted to foist upon him, that 
 
 project of .foreign intervention which, three years later, 
 killed her; and his famous words in his Advice of August 
 13, seemed to her rhetoric or worse. Its style was "extra- 
 ordinary": he was "mad." "Four enemies are at the 
 charge," he had written, "the taxes, repudiation, the army, 
 and winter" she could not bear the style : but he was right. 
 The harvest was in it was not sufficient; a new and vast 
 increase of assignats was voted Mirabeau himself most 
 urgently advising it and on all this, at the end of August, 
 came Nancy. 
 
 The chief and the last foundation of force for the King 
 were the Swiss regiments. Those of the Guard in the 
 last supreme moment of the Monarchy all but saved it. At 
 Nancy in that August of 1790 three regiments were quar- 
 tered, two French, one Swiss, that called "Chateau Vieux." 
 They mutinied, mainly for pay; after scenes which do not 
 concern this book, they were broken upon the last day 
 of the month, with a loss to the still disciplined troops 
 opposing them of forty officers and ten times that num- 
 ber of men. The gravity of that day was of a kind we also 
 know, when, in some crisis (with us such crisis has been for 
 generations foreign, not domestic), a much graver thing, 
 a much louder noise, brings to a pitch emotion ready for 
 
330 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 violence and suddenly presents as a reality what all had 
 desired or feared. Of such are the first shots of a war, 
 the first news of a fatal illness. The French mutineers 
 were disbanded. The opinion of the moment would have 
 tolerated no course more severe : but and this was the 
 wedge that stuck into the heart of the time and clove men 
 asunder the Swiss were made such an example of old 
 things as the whole Revolution had come to sweep away. 
 True, their own rich officers were the judges of the Swiss; 
 what was done did not then lie and does not lie -to-day on 
 the conscience of the French people; but when of these 
 foreign peasants, driven by poverty to a foreign service and 
 maddened to mutiny by the fraudulent retaining of their 
 pay, one-half were made the subjects of a public horror, the 
 country gasped. The town of Nancy, a town of great 
 beauty, the flower of Lorraine, had fought with and had 
 supported the mutineers. It suffered the sight of half 
 of the whole Swiss regiment marched out for punishment, 
 half sent to barracks and then reserved for some obscurer 
 fate. Of those so publicly destroyed, two-thirds were for 
 the galleys, near a third were hanged on high gallows before 
 all, to turn the stomachs of the new Citizens of a free state; 
 one was broken on the wheel with clubs, his bones crushed to 
 satisfy the privileged in a social order already infamous, 
 his blood spattered on the pavement of a town which had 
 befriended him. It was an anomaly of hell fallen in the 
 midst of the new hopes and within six weeks of that clamour 
 of good-will upon the Champ de Mars when all such night- 
 mares were to have been buried for ever. 
 
 The Assembly voted its thanks for the restoration of 
 order: the vote was moved by Mirabeau. Bouille com- 
 manded an army now silent, and the thing was done. 
 
MIRABEAU 331 
 
 But the minority of wealthy men that had thus dared 
 applaud the executions at Nancy was now cut off from 
 fellowship with the nation, and the civil war which Mira- 
 beau desired was come in spirit for the Government, 
 the only possible executive, the Crown, was with that 
 minority. 
 
 Necker, lost in public opinion, defeated in finance, 
 thoroughly terrified at the sound of arms, was off across 
 the frontier for ever to Geneva, his Bible and his money- 
 bags. For a few months Mirabeau's strength was to remain 
 increasing, the one central thing but secretly his power 
 of action was marred, for, while the Court listened and 
 heard him, it did not move. He would have seen the Queen 
 
 she would not see him. Already his complicity was 
 guessed by a few it had been denounced frenziedly and 
 amid Parliamentary jeers and laughter by one young man, 
 since dead: but the rumour had terrified the palace. Mira- 
 beau, still taking the palace's pay, still pouring in upon it 
 Advices which he desired to be commands (and yet still 
 refused so much as a Royal audience) grew continually 
 upon the Parliament. 
 
 As his power over the Assembly increased, his^rel^against 
 the hesit.fliTmT__nf the Court. iTifTfapM w^ it; it increased 
 X) desperation, and that desperation was the more exasper- 
 ated because a man of his temper could not grasp in 
 the absence of personal interviews what it was that 
 held back the Crown. Yet to a man of another temper 
 the explanation would have been easy. There was a con- 
 flict, not only of mediocrity with genius, not only of two wills 
 
 the one accustomed to an inert command, the other avid 
 to exercise a vigorous one, but a conflict also of ends to 
 be attained; for that which Mirabeau desired and 
 
332 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 which he thought the King and Queen to desire was a 
 national thing, whereas what the King and Queen now 
 desired was a personal thing. He all the while was con- 
 sidering the Monarchy, an institution necessary to his 
 country : they thought more and more daily of their individ- 
 ual selves: their habits, their wounded right, their chil- 
 dren their religion. 
 
 In nothing did the friction of that new machine, the 
 alliance between Miral^an anjJthg-T'^i^ show more than 
 in this mfliter of religion. To Mirabeau, as to every vigor- 
 ous spirit of that generation, the Faith was inconceivable. 
 How far, by an effort of fancy, he could picture minds that 
 held it one cannot tell, but one may be certain that he 
 could not but associate such minds., with ineptitude. Now 
 the business of 1790, unknown to the men who most mixed 
 in that business, was Religion. France had of herself 
 transformed herself in eighteen months. The Roman 
 conceptions had returned, the municipalities governed, 
 the whole people were moving in a stream together, equal- 
 ity had re-arisen to the surface of things; war, if war came, 
 would be a national thing the life in each had deter- 
 mined to be based upon a general will. At this over- 
 whelming change the Parliament had assisted; it was 
 their function to express its main features in new laws, 
 and, as to details, to thresh them out in debate and make 
 them fit the new scheme: among these details was the 
 definition of the Clergy's status. The Catholic Church 
 was present for the peasants, at least and it must 
 there still be recognised, its powers must be defined, the 
 terms of its recognition must be formulated. These cul- 
 tivated men of the Parliament and I include the bishops 
 had no conception of Resurrection. The Church was 
 
MIRABEAU 333 
 
 an old thing, passive, woven into the lower stuff of the 
 State; it would not again be what a dim tradition affirmed 
 it once to have been. Let it die down quietly in its villages 
 and go. As for the Institution of it, the higher-salaried 
 places its use in Government why, that was to be 
 Gallican. 
 
 Just before the Federation in July, the CIVIL CON- 
 STITUTION OF THE CLERGY had passed the 
 House. Just before Nancy the King had assented, and 
 it was law. 
 
 To the men who spoke and legislated, it was a just and 
 straightforward law; to us who know a future they could not 
 know, it was a monstrous absurdity. Priests and bishops 
 "elected" not by an enthusiasm or by clamour or by a 
 populace ardent, but by paper votes as we elect our 
 dunderheads to Westminster! Unity, the prime test of life, 
 secured by no more than a letter to Rome announcing elec- 
 tion and courteously admitting communion. Every diocese 
 and parish a new creation, created without any consultation 
 of Peter and his authority ! Yet such was the sleep of the 
 Faith a century ago that this incredible instrument provoked 
 discussion only; and such protests as came were not pro- 
 tests of laughter or even of anger, but protests of argu- 
 ment with after-thoughts of money. But the King and 
 the Queen believed. 
 
 Had she not suffered, this void of the century in matters 
 of the soul might have left Marie Antoinette indifferent. 
 She had been indifferent to that prig brother of hers 
 when he played the philosopher at Vienna and the fool in 
 the Netherlands. The populace, who guard the seeds of 
 religion, were unknown to her as to the King and to 
 the Parliament. But she had so suffered that she had 
 
 \ 
 
334 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 concentrated upon the Creed : her husband had always held 
 it simply --he was a simple man. Now, when he signed 
 the Civil Constitution and she knew of that act, it was 
 proof that they had done with the national ferment, that their 
 concern was to get away to return and to reconquer; that 
 henceforward no public act of theirs, no acceptation of any 
 Reform, had in it or was meant to have the least validity 
 in conscience. She especially was quite cut off henceforward 
 from the crown she had worn it was no longer a symbol 
 of her state for her; and if she had continued to wear it, 
 as Mirabeau desired, after a reconquest achieved through 
 civil war, she would have worn it contentedly over defeated 
 subjects rather than over a nation. 
 
 All this Mirabeau saw as little as he saw the passion 
 of the village priests, the anger of the women in the country- 
 sides. The resistance (which immediately began) he 
 thought purely political. Priests that would not take the 
 oath were Partisans of the old tyranny and breakdown; 
 the Pope, who was preparing his definite refusal, was a 
 subtle Italian whom he, Mirabeau, must meet by a Gallic 
 brutality. To the King Mirabeau secretly represented the 
 Civil Constitution and the gathering revolt against it as an 
 excellent lever for recruiting the provinces and raising that 
 civil war of the Government against anarchy which was his 
 whole policy; but to the Assembly (and here it was most 
 of himself that appeared) he spoke against the Church's 
 refusal to accept with a violence that astounded, and at 
 times provoked to rebuke, his most extreme admirers. 
 All his spirit during that autumn and early winter of 1790- 
 91 is one of diatribe and fury against the intangible foe he 
 himself had raised. 
 
 On the 26th of November he forced the Assembly to vote 
 
MIRABEAU 335 
 
 the prosecution of priests who refused the oath; on the 4th 
 of January he accused the hierarchy of their old game 
 "too well known in our history" -of playing for an "ultra- 
 montane" authority; ten days later, on the 14th, he 
 broke all bounds: swore that the priests cared little if 
 religion died (and much he cared for it!) so that their 
 power was saved. The priests present left the hall. He con- 
 tinued with greater violence, and all the Assembly protested. 
 On the proposition of Camus (himself next door to a 
 Huguenot) it was moved and carried that Mirabeau be no 
 longer heard. When, a bare week after all this, a Letter 
 of Advice reached the King from Mirabeau headed, "On 
 the Way to make use of the Civil Constitution," how should 
 the King not be bewildered ? 
 
 The King read it; he found a stupefying series of coun- 
 sels. How could so simple a man as he understand the con- 
 tradiction between Mirabeau's public speeches and secret 
 executive advice? "No time" (he read in Mirabeau's 
 private communication to the Crown), "no time could be 
 more favourable for uniting all the malcontents, the most 
 dangerous ones, and raising his royal popularity to the 
 detriment of the Assembly"; he was to provoke resistance 
 secretly, to refuse executive aid : to throw the odium of the 
 Civil J^ktastifctttieii und of llie~pJets^ resistance to it on the. 
 Assembly. What could a man of Louis' kind make of all 
 this ? Had Marie Antoinette been a she-Mirabeau, as 
 Mirabeau half believed her to be, she might have followed 
 the plan. Contrariwise, she was a Christian mother, much 
 too untaught and too devout by now to use religion for 
 political intrigue. To emphasise their bewilderment, this 
 Husband and Wife find that their late Confessor whom 
 they had indignantly rejected for his schism had taken 
 
336 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 the oath at the pressing of Mirabeau himself. ... It 
 is not to be wondered at that Mirabeau's advice in every- 
 thing hung fire. 
 
 There were other glaring contrasts between his public 
 and his private view: there was Mirabeau's high playing of 
 the demagogue role. He must roar with the Jacobins: that 
 organisation, the "radical thousand" of Paris, and a hun- 
 dred and fifty societies at its back throughout France, 
 already directed the storm from the October of '90. He 
 mixed with it, flattered it, became its powerful spokesman 
 in the Assembly, was its President by the end of November; 
 and while he so marked and emphasised with his voice and 
 will almost every one of the succeeding steps that led 
 towards a pure democracy, he marvelled that the Court 
 would not accept his secret counsel and believe his support 
 of the Crown to be his true motive of action all the while. 
 It was indeed his main motive; but men of his stature also 
 require applause, and the double part he filled was acted 
 too brilliantly upon its public side for his private states- 
 manship to which all his intellect and much of his heart 
 was really devoted to obtain full weight at the palace. 
 He was permanently rgj&teusted, and he met that mistrust 
 by chance phrases of contempt or insult which he may or 
 may not have intended to be repeated to the woman and 
 the office which he desired both to guide and to save. 
 
 In one thing, however, his influence still weighed: in that 
 one thing it would have sufficed, had he lived, to save the 
 Queen. I mean in the plan, still debated and still post- 
 poned, for the abandonment of Paris by the Crown. 
 
 I have said that the main understanding between the 
 Queen and Mirabeau lay in thisTthat for hrm_g, jpati'orml 
 for her a domestic end was now in view. For months he 
 
MIRABEAU 337 
 
 had urged a public withdrawal from the capital, a public 
 appeal to the armed forces, a withdrawal to some near and 
 loyal town, a town with a palace and tradesmen dependent 
 on it to Compiegne, for instance, a long day's ride 1 away; 
 thereafter an appeal to the provinces and, if the extremists 
 and Paris would fight, then a civil war and a reconquest 
 of power. He had talked of the Queen on horseback 
 with her son; he resurrected Maria Theresa and imagined 
 bold things. The Queen desired for her husband, herself, and 
 her children merely safety: but she would not leave the King. 
 
 Once that summer the Queen and her children had driven 
 out from St. Cloud towards the western woods that over- 
 hang the Seine; the King and his gentlemen had ridden 
 westward also in the wooded plain below. Many in either 
 retinue had thought the moment come, but each party 
 returned at evening. 
 
 Returned to Paris in the autumn, the rising flood of pub- 
 ilic feeling made a public appeal and a public withdrawal 
 more difficult with every succeeding month, and month 
 after month it was postponed. 
 
 The foreigner, of whom the French had hardly thought 
 during the first months of their enthusiasm, now re-arose 
 i before them; many were already anxious for the frontier, 
 i and already the irritant of German menace, which was to 
 i lead at last from Valmy to Wattignies and from Wattignies 
 Jto Jena, had begun to chafe the military appetites of Paris. 
 Were war to break out with the spring of the next year 
 may, were it only in the air the escape of the King from 
 ! Paris would be more difficult than ever. 
 
 It was at the close of October, 2 before the Court had left 
 
 1 To be accurate, a little less than fifty miles. 
 
 - 2 Oct. aoth, not the aard, a date accepted since the publication of Bouill^'s Memoirs in 1833, but corrected 
 by collation with the original two years ago. 
 
338 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 St. Cloud for Paris, that the plan for leaving Paris first took 
 definite shape and that Louis sent Parniers with a message 
 to Bouille at Metz. 
 
 Mirabeau had pointed to Bouille as the only general 
 to defend that march. Not because Bouille was on the 
 frontier, but because Bouille had got his army in hand 
 again, was very capable, did not intrigue. But Bouille, 
 in Mirabeau's design, was to come westward and to receive 
 the King at Compiegne. The General himself accepted 
 such a plan and urged it. The King still preferred a flight 
 to the very frontier, Besanon for choice, and it is impos- 
 sible when his reluctance to leave at all is considered, 
 his whole character, his wife's counsel, and her previous 
 attitude in the letters and appeals of that summer to 
 doubt that the Queen had moulded that decision. It 
 was not a firm choice. Bouille's son, coming at Christmas 
 to Paris to sound people and things, found La Fayette 
 of very dubious loyalty, and he doubted the aid of the 
 Militia. He saw Fersen (the young fellow took for granted 
 that Fersen was the Queen's lover) ; he saw him in Fersen's 
 own house in the Faubourg St. Honore. They discussed 
 the rottenness of the army, the unlikeliness of immediate 
 foreign aid. It was decided to postpone the thing for 
 three months. 
 
 And meanwhile the Queen heard debated before her the 
 alternatives of a flight to the frontier and of a domestic 
 rising nearer Paris in defence of the Crown. She was by 
 all her bent and was increasingly to be in favour of 
 foreign^ support; but Mirabeau's counsel was something 
 to her. At the end of February it prevailed, and La Marck 
 came to Bouille at Metz with the news that Mirabeau's 
 plan should be considered. Bouille agreed. There was 
 
MIRABEAU 339 
 
 to be no suggestion of flight : the Court's choice of the frontier 
 was to be abandoned. Compiegne should be the goal of a 
 short and determined march. The soldier rejoiced, as did 
 Mirabeau , that a final decision had been made, that no near 
 presence of foreign aid was expected, and that the idea of a 
 flight to the frontier was given up. March, perhaps the 
 close of it, was to see the thing done, and so with the spring 
 was to be issued the challenge to civil war: then and then 
 only, if necessary, might follow a retirement upon a fortress. 
 The thing was dangerous and more dangerous. Mes- 
 dames, the King's aunts, had left their country house at 
 great pains for Italy : the populace had all but detained them. 
 La Fayette, a month later, had disarmed certain gentlemen 
 of the palace and had insisted that his Militia alone mount 
 guard. It was certain, as March crept on, that the decision 
 must soon be taken, and that the double power of Mirabeau 
 over Coiirt anH Parliament, could alone force the exit from 
 'aris to a well-chosen town, and so decide the issue of a 
 Restoration of the Monarchy now so grievously imperilled. 
 Mirabeau still grew in power, still spoke in his loudest tones, 
 still watched, and drove all his team of political dupes and 
 Royal clients, still remained strongly double. Swearing to 
 one that he had all ready for the end of Monarchy if the 
 King should fly; writing continually (and more sincerely) 
 to another his plans in aid of such a flight; asking for 
 yet more money (on the 2nd of March); urging a further 
 double-dealing with the Assembly in a secret and verbal 
 message to the King (on the 13th) ; betraying the Jacobins, 
 his Jacobins, in a private letter (on the 21st). Doing 
 all this with his intrigue fully formed, and the Royal 
 Family already sheltered under the wing of that intrigue, 
 Fate entered. 
 
340 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 It was on the 24th of March that Mirabeau wrote 
 his last letter to La Marck. His friend had mining 
 rights in the Kingdom: the new mining laws were 
 down for debate that week. He promised to speak, 
 and on the morning of the 27th he called on La 
 Marck upon his way to the manege; he was faint 
 and compelled to rest awhile upon a couch there, but he 
 rallied and went on to the Parliament. It was Sunday. 
 The streets were full of people : he was recognised, followed 
 and cheered. 
 
 Upon that 27th of March he spoke more than once: his 
 ill ease was not apparent. On the 28th he was struck. 
 But even so lying in his bed, for the next three days, in spite 
 of an increasing agony, he made of his moments of respite 
 occasions for set w r ords, usually well chosen, pagan, proud, 
 memorable, and a trifle affected. A crowd in the street 
 without kept guard and silence. A crowd was about his 
 bed continually. Talleyrand, reconciled, came; La Marck, 
 who loved him, came repeatedly and a hundred others. 
 He spoke, and they spoke, of Death, as a matter for con- 
 verse, often for jest. La Marck quizzed him: "Oh, you 
 connoisseur of great death-beds ! " Talleyrand told him that 
 he came "like the populace, to hear." A man who loved him 
 said well, "that he acted death as a great actor upon a 
 national stage." Astounding courage, and more astound- 
 ing silence upon the thing he had never cared for or believed: 
 all the greatness and all the void of the eighteenth century 
 was here. He admitted God, however, and rallied his 
 good doctor, a materialist as then were all, and still 
 are most, experts in viscera: the days were sunlit, 
 and. the sun reminded him of God. So for four days ; 
 upon the fifth day, the 2nd of April, at half-past eight 
 
MIRABEAU 341 
 
 in the morning, those watching his last and silent agony, 
 saw that he was dead. 
 
 Many modem historians have said that the death of 
 Mirabeau affectedjbut little the plans that had been made 
 for'flight. 
 
 It is an^error,. The death of Mirabeau changed all, and 
 it was one more of those hammer-blows of Fate exactly 
 coincident with the sequence of the Queen's weird. 
 
 It is true that the flight was already long arranged. It is 
 true that its very details were planned for the most part long 
 before Mirabeau died. Nevertheless, had Mirabeau lived, 
 the whole thing would have had a different issue; and for 
 this reason, that Mirabeau dominated all that world 
 not only the world of the Court but also the world of Par- 
 liament, and, in some indirect way, the world of Opinion as 
 well by Will. Any action that the Court had taken with 
 Mirabeau alive and active would have been bent to Mira- 
 beau's plan, and even if the flight had been, not (as he coun- 
 selled) to Compiegne, but to Montmedy and the frontier, 
 Mirabeau would have forced at once its success and a con- 
 sequent civil war. He would have permitted no departure 
 without being privy to it; he would have sworn, shouted, 
 cajoled and persuaded doubly upon either side for Mira- 
 beau was a soldierly man; he had a plan and could use 
 men by ordering. He could use them for the achievement 
 of a fixed end which was now the salvation of the Monarchy; 
 for he believed the Monarchy to be the skeleton and frame- 
 work of France and this creative light of the revolution 
 around him seemed to him a mere mist and dazzle. Great 
 as he was, I repeat it, the Revolution seemed to him to 
 
342 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 be drifting towards an Anarchy. He was like a landsman 
 who may be brave and dommSkring but who shudders when 
 he first comes across the temper of the sea. 
 
 But what might have happened is but hypothesis. For 
 Mirabeau died; and Mirabeau once dead it was necessarily 
 certain that the Court, left to itself, should attempt to preserve 
 not Monarchy but merely the Court. Mirabeau living, that 
 determination of theirs to save their bodies would have done 
 no harm, and the eagerness of the Queen to get away to the 
 neighbourhood of friends would have been used as human 
 intelligence uses the instinct of animals. Mirabeau dead, that 
 force ran ever along its own blind line, attempting merely to 
 save the persons of the King and Queen and their children. 
 Attempting so small a thing, it happened to fail. But on 
 the failure or success of that attempt the largest things 
 depended. 
 
 It was, as we have seen, upon Saturday, the 2nd of April, 
 that Mirabeau died, and had said in dying that there went 
 with him the las_^ shred of jh^^Monarchy. 
 
 The Sunday following his deathwas~TEaF upon which 
 the Schismatic Priests said their first Masses in every par- 
 ish of the city. 
 
 I have not space to reiterate in this volume the vast 
 issue involved. I have sufficiently emphasised and shall 
 further emphasise the profound truth that gvery .Civij 
 Revolution is^ theological at bottom, because, at bottom, 
 it must be based upon a divergent pf pbilpgnpjiy between 
 the philosophies of the old order and the new. A chance 
 test of philosophy thrown at random into the Revolu- 
 tionary movement had separated men suddenly and was 
 
MIRABEAU 343 
 
 rifting the State asunder; for a fortnight Paris raged upon 
 the Nationalisation of the Church. 
 
 I will not detain the reader. There was here one of 
 those double duties where the wisest get most bewildered 
 and the most sincere go the furthest astray. Let the 
 reader remember (difficult as it is to do so in the religious 
 atmosphere of our time) that with the educated of that 
 day Religion was dead with the populace of Paris even 
 more dead. The thing was a mere emblem. Its last 
 little flickering light (which we have since seen to grow 
 to so great a flame) was not comprehended, save as a polit- 
 ical institution, by the great bulk of the Parliament, by the 
 professions, by the workers; the very beggars in the street 
 despised the Faith, and the shrines were empty. You 
 were a priest or one of the very few Mass-goers? Then 
 you were suspected of supporting the old forms of civil 
 polity! After the Civil Constitution of the Clergy you 
 deliberately refused to take a reasonable oath to the Con- 
 stitution and the new-born Liberty of Men ? Then you 
 were a traitor, and a silly traitor at that. Let it be remem- 
 bered that at this moment Religion had no warriors. All 
 the vast rally of the nineteenth century was undreamt of. 
 The bishops were place-hunters full of evil living; 1 the 
 Creed an empty historic formula: a convention like the con- 
 ventions of "party" in England to-day. The reader 
 must see this, in spite of all the nineteenth century may 
 have taught him to the contrary, or he will never see the 
 Revolution. 
 
 In such a crisis fago _f actors, quite uncomprehended, 
 stood like rocks they were but small minorities: so are 
 rocks small accidents in the general sea. The one was 
 
 1 Consider J^Jgr. of Narbonne. His mistress was his own niece. 
 
344 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 that littfe group of people who still practised the united 
 
 and it just so happened that of these 
 the Kinff was one, Joisi sister another, and, from the begin- 
 ning in her light, easy way, latterly with increasing depth, 
 his wife^ a third ; the other factor was the mass of the hum- 
 bler Glergy. They felt as by an instinct the note of unity; 
 they refused to subscribe: to all, or nearly all, the bishops 
 it was for the most part a matter of rank and policy 
 to resist the Bill; to the two-thirds of the country Clergy 
 to resist the Law was loyalty to our Lord. 
 
 What the King felt in that quarrel we all know. Marie 
 Antoinette, in spite of her devotion, was never able to 
 neglect the human, the purely temporal, the vulgarly 
 political aspect of the quarrel. Her husband, sincerely 
 sympathetic though he was with the French temper, thought 
 mainly of the Divine interests in the matter; though he 
 thought slowly and badly, that was his thought. The 
 populace, the politicians all the world saw nothing 
 whatsoever in the Catholic resistance but a dodge devised 
 by privilege to put a spoke in the wheel of the Revolution. 
 And Paris especially, having for so long abandoned relig- 
 ion, raged round the refusal of the priests. 
 
 It is pitiful to read how small a rally the Faith could 
 make! One chapel in all Paris was hired for the true 
 Mass to be said therein, and handfuls here and there put 
 forward a timid claim to approach the only altar which 
 Rome acknowledged. I say it for the third or for th? 
 fourth time, to-day we cannot understand these things 
 for the Resurrection of the Catholic Church stands betweei 
 us and them; but to this Paris on that Lenten Sunday, tb3 
 3rd of April, 1791, the presence of the Schismatic Clerg;, 
 each in his parish, was a plain challenge launched again& 
 
MIRABEAU 345 
 
 the Crown, and it was nothing more: the attachment of 
 the Court to the Roman Unity seemed to Paris a mere 
 political intrigue, odious and unnational and stinking of 
 treason. For a fortnight the Parisian anger raged, and 
 the 17th of April was Palm Sunday. 
 
 It has become a rule for those who are in communion 
 with the Catholic Church that they should receive the 
 Sacraments at least once a year, and that at Easter or there- 
 abouts; a rule defined, if I am not mistaken, during the 
 struggle with the Lutheran that latest of the great heresies. 
 This rule the King had satisfied, and on that Palm Sunday 
 had taken Communion in his Chapel from a priest who 
 had not sworn the Civic Oath. All the customary talk 
 of some religious necessity by which he was in conscience 
 compelled to leave Paris is balderdash. The attempt he 
 made the next day, the Monday, to leave the city in order 
 to spend the Easter days in the suburban palace of St. 
 Cloud was purely political. Religion had no part therein. 
 It cannot be determined to-day unless indeed further 
 evidence should come before us how much the mere 
 desire to prove a liberty of action on the part of the Court, 
 how much a sort of challenge sure to be defeated, how 
 much a hope that escape would be easier from a subur- 
 ban point, entered into this plan; but it is quite certain 
 that the Body of the Lord and His Resurrection had noth- 
 ing whatsoever to do with it. And when upon Monday 
 of Holy Week, the 18th of April, a little before noon, the 
 royal family got into their carriage to drive, as was their con- 
 stitutional right, to the neighbouring palace, those few miles 
 away where the populace could not surround them, a crowd, 
 organised as were these crowds of the Revolution, held them 
 all around. The scene has been repeated too often to be 
 
346 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 repeated here; one character marks it it is one of profound 
 importance. For the JJrsLtjme armed and disciplined Jorce 
 was wholly upojijhe side of the Revolution. 
 
 The Militia whiclT'Ea Fayelle hacTTormed were with the 
 people, and the common will of that great mob was present 
 also in the 'men who bore arms. It had not been so in any 
 of the movements antecedent to this, unless we admit the 
 sharp national anger of the loose and almost civilian "French 
 Guards" against the hired German Cavalry in July, 1789. 
 Hitherto there had been a distinction between the people at 
 large and that portion of the people \vhich was armed and 
 disciplined, a distinction which now broke down because 
 to the French temper on this Monday of Holy Week, 1791, 
 the issue was too grave for such distinctions. The national 
 King must be kept in Paris, the people would noJLlet him 
 leave, much as a man will not let his money go out of his 
 sight or out of his control. 
 
 Let it be noted that here, as is invariably the case through- 
 out the history of the French people, the general mass had 
 easily learned a secret thing: all the bamboozlement had 
 failed as it is failing to-day in spite of the financial press, 
 the Secret Societies, and every other instrument of fraud. 
 The vast crowd which hustled round the King's carriage 
 knew and freely repeated his project of invasion which had 
 now been so carefully and, as it was thought, so secretly 
 plotted for six months. 
 
 The French people are accustomed to, and have, as it 
 were, an appetite for, duels in the dark where one of the two 
 combatants must die. There was determination upon 
 the one side without proof that the King desired to 
 fly and must be restrained. There was determination 
 upon the other accompanied by frequent denial that 
 
MIRABEAU 347 
 
 the King should escape to the French frontier and 
 should be free. 
 
 Not the next day, but the day after, Wednesday in Holy 
 Week, the Queen, the Queen herself pulled the trigger. 
 All that blind force of desire for the mere personal safetY_j>f 
 her^family, which Mirabeau would have controlled, but 
 which in her unguided hands was an jinreasoning torrent, 
 impelled her action. She wrote to Mercy that her very life 
 was in danger and that the business must be done with next 
 month at the latest. She mentioned the place of flight, 
 Montmedy. 
 
 Eight weeks followed, during which every effort of the 
 royal family was directed to the achievement of a mere flight. 
 
 The limits of these pages do not permit me the many 
 details which could make of that early summer a long book 
 of intrigue. When the thing had failed each had his excuses, 
 and Bouille would have it that with a docile obedience on 
 the part of the Court he could have saved the Court. It 
 may be argued that if the King had gone by way of Bheims 
 he would have escaped. It may be argued that the delay of 
 twenty-four hours (which certainly did take place) made 
 such and such a difference. All these arguments fall to 
 the ground when it is considered that the King did escape 
 from Paris, escaped easily along the road to the frontier, 
 was safe and trebly safe until, as will be seen, two accidents, 
 wholly incalculable and each a clear part of Fate, broke 
 that immemorial Crown of the French Monarchy. The 
 first (as will be seen) was the grrpr jf it was an error 
 made by young Choiseul^ on the Chalons road a mere 
 mechanical one ; the second much more miraculous 
 was the rute of \J)rniif>t n galloping in a dark night under 
 a covered moon wildly through the very difficult ridgeway 
 
348 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 of Argonne, and even that miracle only just came off by 
 fifteen minutes. It was not delay, whether of twenty- four 
 hours or of a fortnight which brought them back to Paris. 
 It was that other force for which we have no name, but which 
 one may call if one likes, Necessity or Something Written. 
 
 Fersen, who loved the Queen and whom the Queen loved, 
 had stood in the centre of the plot, had seen all the con- 
 spirators, and brought to its climax everything. He was 
 now to risk his life. The great travelling-carriage called 
 a berline (which easily held three people upon either side), 
 was waiting in its shed in the stables of the house he had 
 hired, as the summer solstice a date fatal to the Bourbons 
 was approached. Fersen himself in disguise was to 
 drive them, disguised also, from their palace by night in a 
 cab to where that travelling-coach awaited them. Their 
 passports were ready; the children's governess, the Duch- 
 ess of Tourzel, was to play the part of the chief personage 
 and to be called the Baroness of Korff. The Queen was to 
 be the governess of her children, and the King her valet, his 
 sister a maid; the children were to be Madame de Korff 's 
 children, and the Dauphin was dressed as a girl and called 
 by a girl's name. 
 
 There are a few square yards in Paris which should be 
 famous in history. Here Joan of Arc fell in her failure to 
 force the Western gate of the city. Here to-day is the hotel 
 called the Hotel de Normandie, frequented by foreigners, 
 and opposite is a money-changer's booth. Here the Rue 
 St. Honore crosses the Rue de 1'Echelle. There 1 at mid- 
 
 1 To be accurate, the exact spot was a few steps to the south of the present crossing, and much about the 
 middle of the modern Rue de 1'Echelle, and opposite No. 6 of that street. 
 
FACSIMILE OF FIRST PAGE OF THE ADDRESS TO THE 
 
 FRENCH PEOPLE 
 Written by Louis XVI. before his flight 
 
MIRABEAU 349 
 
 night on the 20th of June, Fersen, dressed as a coachman, 
 was waiting with his cab to drive them to the travelling-coach 
 which awaited them at the eastern boundary of the city. 
 He had already visited the palace to make all sure. His 
 disguise was good, his acting excellent. His love compelled 
 him. He took snuff with the other cabbies. He waited 
 resignedly. The lights went out, midnight approached, 
 and first one, then another of certain beings approached him 
 down the dark alley that led from the courtyards of the 
 palace. The King came, and the Royal children, their 
 governess, and the King's sister. Last of all, and after some 
 delay, the Queen. All of them had escaped safely from 
 what was the chief barrier around them all the Militia 
 Guard. When they were well in their cab, Fersen, that 
 devoted man, drove them in a leisurely manner to the gates 
 of the city, found the berline drawn up on the highroad, and 
 with it two Gentlemen of the Guard who had come, dis- 
 guised in old yellow liveries, to act as postilions, while a third 
 had ridden on to the first post-house. Fersen had the berline 
 driven by his servants, himself upon the box, and so reached, 
 in that earliest of all dawns of the year, the first post and 
 relay, the suburban post-house of Bondy. 
 
 There was light in the North . He saw before him at that 
 hour the free road to the frontier; the country and the 
 simple minds of subjects; the happy past returning; the end 
 at last of all that Parisian fever, and the chastisement per- 
 haps of all that Parisian violence at any rate, the solution 
 of the whole affair. His friend was free. 
 
 The King had but to reach the garrisons of the east, 
 and Austria would move, the last of the regular French 
 
350 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 armies would advance: now that the royal person was no 
 more in danger from such a march, the march on Paris 
 would begin. 
 
 But it was the summer solstice, a moment ill-omened to 
 the Bourbons. 
 
XIV 
 
 VARENNES 
 
 IOM MIDNIGHT OF MONDAY, JUNE 20, 179L TO JUST AFTER SEVEN 
 ON THE EVENING OF SATURDAY, JUNE 25, 1791 
 
 IT was no longer night; it was near day, the brighten- 
 ing air smelt of morning. The links of the harness- 
 chains clattered a little as the relay horses were 
 backed against the pole of the big carriage. Fersen saun- 
 tered to the carriage window of that side upon which the 
 Queen sat. He called out loudly her supposed mistress's 
 isumed name, "Madame Korff," saluted her and turned 
 to go on his lonely cross-country ride to Bourget and the 
 Brussels road, by which he also purposed to fly. But, 
 iven as he turned, they say that she held his hand a 
 oment and slipped upon his finger a ring. It was a ring 
 if yellowish gold, broad and heavy, and having 'set in it 
 n unknown stone. It is still preserved. Here is the story 
 f the ring : 
 
 It was again the 20th of June the summer solstice 
 that strikes, and strikes again, and again at the Bourbons 
 nd at the soldiers of the Bourbons. Nineteen years had 
 assed since the dawn when Fersen had left the Queen at 
 Bondy, seventeen since he had broken his heart at her 
 eath, and had become silent. His campaigns had for- 
 bidden him to show prematurely the effect of advancing age; 
 deed, as men now count age, he had not reached the 
 
 351 
 
EogKd. Mife 
 
 ARIS 
 
 2. 
 
 'HATEAU THIERRY 
 
 Mor^ 
 
 where Commissioner 
 met the. Royal Family 
 on thtur return 
 
 jntmirail 
 
 MAP OF THE FLIGHT TO VARENNES AND THE BETUKN 
 352 
 
VARENNES 353 
 
 limits of decline his fifty -fifth year was not accomplished. 
 . . . But emotions so inhuman and so deep had so torn 
 him in his vigour that there had followed a complete and an 
 austere silence of the soul: he had long seemed apart from 
 living men. His face preserved a settled severity, his eyes 
 a contempt for the final moment of danger: that moment 
 had come. 
 
 He was Marshal of the Forces; the populace of Stockholm 
 was in rumour, for the North still had vigour in it, impreg- 
 nated from France. He had been torn from his carriage, 
 chased from the refuge of a room, and now stood bleeding 
 on the steps of the Riddenholm alone (the Squires were 
 within the church, barricaded: they had left him outside 
 to die). The populace, hating him, hated even more a 
 ring which they saw large and dull upon his finger, for 
 they said among themselves that the ring was Faery, and 
 that death issued from its gem whenever it was held for- 
 ward; Death flashed from it and struck whomsoever it was 
 turned upon. Charles Augustus himself had seen it upon 
 parade; it had lowered upon him, and he had fallen dead 
 from his horse. . . . Fersen, so standing, wounded and 
 alone, with the mob roaring round the steps, held his sword 
 drawn in his right hand but the ring upon his left was a 
 better weapon, and no one dared come forward. 
 
 At last a traitor (since there is a traitor in every tragedy), 
 a servant of his who had turned fisherman, drew other 
 fishermen round him and whispered to them to gather 
 stones : thus, from a distance, standing upon the steps above 
 them, Fersen was stoned and died. 
 
 When he was quite dead the populace drew round his 
 body, but they would not go too near, and even as they 
 approached they shielded their eyes from the ring. But 
 
354 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 this traitor, Zaffel, bolder than the rest, went forward also 
 with an axe, and, shielding his eyes also, he hacked the 
 finger off. The people cheered as they would cheer a man 
 that had plucked a fuse from a shell. He ran, with his head 
 still turned, to the riverside, and he threw the finger with 
 the Queen's ring upon it far out into the stream. 
 
 Next day Stockholm was as calm as though there had 
 been no evening tumult. Zaffel at early morning took his 
 boat out upon the cold lake water by a pleasant breeze, anc| 
 pointed up river: he had a plan to fish. When he had left 
 the many islands of the town behind him and had passed 
 into a lonely reach of pine-trees, he felt a gentle shock upon 
 the keel, and the boat stood still. . . . He went forward to 
 the bows and looked over; he could see nothing but very deep 
 green water bubbling below. As he came back aft the 
 masthead caught his eye, and there, clasping it, was a 
 severed hand; the blood vhich was apparent at the wrist 
 was not running. The hand grasped the trunk of the mast 
 with rigour, and Zaffel, as he saw it, shuddered, for one 
 finger of that hand was gone. 
 
 The boat went forward in spite of the tide and aslant 
 the wind, with the sheet loose and the sail at random, and 
 he in the boat could feel for hours that the impulsion of 
 its course was from the masthead to which he no longer 
 dared look upwards. The boat cut steadily across the 
 eddies of the Moelar. At times he tried the tiller, but he 
 found the fixed movement unresponsive to his helm. 
 
 There is no darkness in the North at this season, but 
 a twilight which, if there are clouds, fades from the grey 
 of evening to the grey of dawn; he had sat cold, crouching 
 in the stern of his boat, throughout all the hours of the day, 
 and now this grey twilight was upon him. In the midst 
 
VARENNES 355 
 
 of it he saw far up-stream a white rock from which, 
 as it seemed to him, some phosphorescence glowed unnatural, 
 and in the midst of that light, upon a ledge of the stone, was 
 the ring. He took it, as at a command; then at last he 
 dared look up at the masthead. He saw the hand, now 
 whole, relax and change and disappear, and he felt the boat 
 go free, turn and drift down stream. 
 
 When he was back upon the quays of Stockholm, all his 
 body trembling with a fast of twenty-four hours and with 
 the cold of the morning, his neighbours, as they caught 
 the mooring rope, asked questions of him. He answered 
 them with meaningless songs, and then, as the vision 
 returned, with pointings and terror. He was mad. 
 
 They took him off to the Bethel beyond the stream. 
 On the Knights' Island, within the church of Riddenholm, 
 the Squires who had deserted Fersen upon the day before 
 were at that moment gathered round the coffin to do hon- 
 our to his burial; and upon the pall they noticed (some cur- 
 ious, some indifferent) the broad band of yellowish gold 
 and the unknown stone. 
 
 When it came to the burial, the grave-diggers dared not 
 put it into earth as they should have done; they gave it to 
 his family. With them it still remains, to do evil and dis- 
 turb his sleep. 
 
 From Bondy the great carriage went forward under the 
 growing light of the day. At Claye a cabriolet with the 
 Queen's waiting women joined them and followed the 
 berline. That increasing light forbade the family to sleep; 
 they settled in comfort upon the broad and padded seats of 
 white velvet, leaning back into them, and every word they 
 
356 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 said revealed the enlarging confidence of their souls. The 
 King felt himself already upon horseback; the Queen and 
 the Duchess repeated the roles they were to play on what- 
 ever little public occasions the rapid journey might involve 
 them in. The Duchess as Madame Korff, in whose name 
 the transport had been made out; the Queen as her gover- 
 ness and so forth. They went rapidly in that mixed 
 landscape of wood and market-garden, and half -continuous 
 village which still marks the confines of Paris and of the 
 influence of Paris. Now they were in the open country, 
 with Paris quite forgotten, now in a district with a dialect 
 of its own sure test of honesty and of freedom. The 
 countrysides were awake, the mowers were in the field, 
 the road was down among the narrow pastures of the 
 Marne, and at last in Meaux, where for the first time they 
 halted for a relay. 
 
 So near to Paris, the wealthy equipage and its suite 
 attracted no curiosity, while prudence still restrained the 
 travellers from showing themselves in the market-square, 
 fatigued as they may already have been by a continuous 
 travelling of now over five hours for it was past six 
 and the town was astir by the time the berline and the 
 cabriolet had rumbled in. To this concurrence of good 
 accidents the neighbourhood of the capital added another 
 element, for the posting station of Meaux was so used to the 
 continual passage of considerable travellers (how many of 
 the emigrants had it not re-harnessed!) that not only was 
 the whole place incurious, but also the relay was rapidly 
 effected. It was not a quarter of an hour before they were 
 off again upon the Chalons road. 
 
 By the route they had chosen, which had the advantage 
 that it was somewhat shorter and, what was of even more 
 
UNIVERSITY I 
 \^ OF / 
 
 VARENNES 357 
 
 importance, less frequented than the main way through 
 Chateau Thierry and Epernay, the distance before them to 
 Chalons, the next large town, was somewhat over seventy 
 miles. It would fill the whole morning and more. They 
 fell to talking to one another with some little anxiety as to 
 what might happen when Chalons, with its considerable 
 population, its newspaper and its activity, was reached. 
 But their immunity at Meaux, the advent of a pleasing, 
 shaded and tolerable day, the remote countrysides through 
 which they passed after branching off the main road at 
 La Ferte, dulled their fears, or rather exorcised them. 
 They fell to eating a sort of picnic without plates, cutting 
 their meat upon their bread, and drinking their wine from 
 | a cup passed round. No sunlight fell upon the green 
 blind of the off-side window to fatigue their eyes ; no reflec- 
 tions of excessive heat as the morning rose shone from the 
 road upon the white velvet of the cushions: they were in 
 comfort and at ease. 
 
 By eight they were upon the side-road they had chosen; 
 by ten, at the hour when the peasants were reposing under 
 the high quadruple rank of roadside trees, with their scythes 
 at rest beside them, they came to the post of Viels-Maisons. 
 They were behind their hour a trifle but they were 
 by this time quite secure in mind. The governess had given 
 ! the children air, and had walked with them up the long 
 I hill by which the road leaves the Marne valley. The pace 
 had been hardly business-like, perhaps to save fatigue; the 
 King had sauntered from the carriage more than once, 
 to stretch his legs at the post-houses; there were even occa- 
 sions upon which he had spoken to the little groups of 
 peasants that surrounded the carriage as the new horses 
 were put in. For a moment, indeed, some anxiety 
 
358 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 very probably baseless had arisen amongst them at 
 sight of a horseman who seemed to be following the car- 
 riages; the children and their governess, who were on- the 
 back seat, had noticed a rider far down the road behind 
 them, but he turned off and was seen no more. 
 
 In the stables of Viels-Maisons was a postilion of the 
 name of Picard; his action is worthy of note to anyone 
 who would comprehend the nature of this journey, the emo- 
 tions which it aroused in those who witnessed it, and the 
 tangle of authority amid which the flight was driven. His 
 action is worthy of note, especially to those who would see, 
 as it is necessary to see, the Champenois peasantry who form 
 the background of all the picture. He first, at this long dis- 
 tance from Paris, fifty miles and more, recognized the King. 
 
 Sketch Map of the Road from 
 
 PARISTO VARENNES 
 
 June 21st. 1791 
 
 PARIS ...... ...**** rf t(l ' l!l11 Milo 
 
 He might have sold the knowledge; he might have gam- 
 bled on the royal family's success, have whispered his 
 recognition, and have waited for his reward. He might 
 have presupposed the final success of the National Gov- 
 ernment, and have taken immediate steps to earn its grati- 
 tude by denouncing the King: This peasant did none of 
 these three things. He held his tongue. 
 
 The carriages rolled onward. At midday when, at 
 one of the posting stations in that great bare, dusty plain, 
 an isolated place, the King had strolled out again, in the; 
 
VARENNES 359 
 
 interval of the harnessing, to joke with a knot of poor 
 yokels and to give charity to them, Monstier, one of the 
 Guards who were acting as drivers, ventured a timid 
 remonstrance, and Louis said what should never be said 
 within the hearing of the gods that he was now safe 
 from all accidents. When he had said this he continued 
 to talk to the poor about him: he talked of their crops 
 and of the hay that he saw tedding. 
 
 It is possible that some one of these wondered a little 
 overmuch at the grand people; it is possible there had been 
 rumours: but if any beggar or mower among them guessed, 
 he also held his tongue and the carriages rolled onward. 
 
 The day, still veiled and moderate, was at its height; 
 it was two o'clock, or a little later, when the road which had 
 hitherto borne every mark of age, took on the appearance 
 of new work, the line of trees was interrupted, and the stones 
 of the kerb were clean and freshly sawn. A green valley, 
 then but imperfectly drained, though but slightly below 
 the general level of the Champagne, lay across its course. 
 . . . An older track had skirted this marshy land, but 
 for now six years the road had cut straight across the doubt- 
 ful soil upon a great embankment, which was one of those 
 new engineering works of which the reign, for all its financial 
 embarrassment, had been full. Upon this embankment 
 stood (and stands) the posting-house, and upon such a site 
 little else could stand. There were at that time but two 
 other roofs: a blacksmith's forge and a tavern. The 
 post was called "the Petit Chaintry"; it is Chaintrix to-day, 
 and a hamlet still. Here lived an elderly man, Lagny, a 
 widower, with his daughters and one son-in-law, by name 
 
360 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 Vallet, a dangerous lad, for he had travelled, and had 
 been himself brought up in the noise and curiosity of an 
 inn; nay, he had seen Paris, and had marched with the 
 Federals upon the Champs de Mars the year before. Only 
 rarely did Vallet visit his wife's home but there is a fate and 
 a God. In this lonely plain of Champagne where no one 
 travels, where few then knew Paris, even, let alone the 
 Court, this man happened on that one day to be at the 
 stables of his father-in-law's posting-house; he happened 
 also to be by nature the nature of a townsman garrulous 
 and touched with melodrama. He recognised and wor- 
 shipped the King. From that moment the secret was 
 dissolved and in loyalty perhaps half an hour was 
 consumed. 
 
 No record remains of the spreading of the news, but 
 proof remains of the result. Vallet insisted on riding him- 
 self upon the leaders; he rode hard, and twice he let his 
 horses down, breaking harness; so that an hour perhaps was 
 lost by his hard riding. Before even the berline and its 
 attending cabriolet left Chaintry, Lagny and his daughters 
 had been told. The royal family had not denied the 
 recognition; they had even, in reward for the loyalty 
 displayed, bestowed gifts upon the innkeeper. It 
 is certain that the news must have spread through the 
 countryside. 
 
 In such an atmosphere of recognition, nay, of open depen- 
 dence upon the loyalty of those who knew them, they trav- 
 ersed the remaining twelve miles of road and entered 
 Chalons, where alone they feared arrest and in whose 
 crowds only detailed forethought and plan could have 
 preserved them unknown. That plan and that forethought 
 had been wholly absent; a vague instinct of its necessity 
 
VARENNES 361 
 
 had in the morning haunted the fears of the travellers, but 
 now, after the safety and isolation of the many long hours 
 from Meaux, it was forgotten. 
 
 They entered the big town at four o'clock; the two carri- 
 ages drove clattering through its streets ; they pulled up at the 
 posting-house in the Rue St. Jacques. Viet, the post-master 
 came out to see to the horses. A crowd gathered, and to every 
 one in that crowd and to Viet, and to any one of the town 
 who cared to ask, the presence of the King was perfectly 
 well known. It was discussed with approval or disapproval; 
 indeed, the journey would have ended here, but that Viet 
 himself, true to the character of the peasant (for he was 
 peasant-born), refused all risk. Officially he knew noth- 
 ing; he would neither detain nor speed the King; he was 
 obstinately silent. Whether Louis won, or his enemies, 
 he, at least, would be safe. 
 
 As he was buckling the last of the fresh horses, a man 
 dressed with care and with some appearance of wealth, 
 approached him, and insisted upon what was, by the Con- 
 stitution, his duty, but Viet gave him no change and was 
 still silent. The man dressed with care and with some 
 appearance of wealth, failing to move this very minor 
 functionary, went off to the Mayor, Chorez by name; 
 there was no time to lose ; horses are unharnessed and others 
 harnessed in but a little delay. The Mayor was as silent 
 as Viet: he took refuge in that common excuse of tem- 
 porisers and cowards he demanded "proof." It is prob- 
 able that the well-dressed man with some appearance of 
 wealth went off upon the frontier road. We do not know, 
 for we do not even know his name; but when a little before 
 five o'clock the berline had halted a moment at the foot 
 of a rise, surely it was the same man who passed it rapidly 
 
362 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 and muttered to the royal family as he passed: "You 
 have planned ill!" 
 
 The town of Chalons lies upon the border of an exten- 
 sive plain peculiar in French history. Here, as tradition 
 will have it, Attila's army was destroyed by the Romans 
 and the Barbarians whom the Romans had trained. 
 It is a wide and desolate space, which the prosperity suc- 
 ceeding the Revolution has transformed, but which, as we 
 watch it to-day from a distant height, still bears something 
 of its ancient poverty to the eye, at least so level is it 
 and so treeless. Far off to the eastward runs the wooded 
 wall of Argonne, very faint and small; at the base of this, 
 the town of Ste. Menehould. 
 
 From Chalons to Ste. Menehould, by the straight road 
 bridging the plain, is a long day's march, twenty-five 
 miles or more: and there is very little between. The pas- 
 sage of this bare, direct and dusty stretch was, the fugitives 
 might imagine, the very last and the least of the risks they 
 were to run. Chalons, which alone they feared, had not 
 detained them, the emptiness of the countryside renewed, 
 or rather rendered absolute their confidence. Within an hour 
 they would be at the bridge of Somme-Vesle, an utterly 
 deserted spot, with nothing but the stables of the post to 
 mark it. 
 
 At this point of their successful journey let the reader 
 note in what order the guarding of the flight had been con- 
 ceived by Bouille. 
 
 The first stages of it till beyond Chalons were to be 
 quite bare of soldiery, lest suspicion should arise and Paris 
 receive the alarm; but once well past Chalons, the hundred 
 
VARENNES 363 
 
 miles and more accomplished, small posts of cavalry, 
 mostly German mercenaries, were to be placed upon one 
 pretext and another, at intervals along the way, until at 
 Varenncs, Bouille's own son should meet the fugitives 
 with his troop, and eastward from Varennes the remain- 
 ing miles to Montmedy, which was their goal, they would 
 need no special guard; they would be in the thick of Bouille's 
 army. The first of these small posts was one of German 
 mercenary Hussars under the Due de Choiseul, a nephew 
 of the old statesman of Louis XV. It was to expect the 
 King at Somme-Vesle at one giving as its excuse for its 
 presence escort for a convoy of bullion but an exact 
 keeping of the time-table was urgently necessary, for it 
 would be perilous for the foreign troops to hang about 
 indefinitely in these eastern villages. 
 
 It was at the lonely post-house of Somme-Vesle, then, 
 that the first soldiers were to be looked for by the King; 
 there, as it had been arranged, the first Hussars would 
 be seen, posted upon the lonely road; these would close up 
 immediately behind the carriage for a body-guard. With 
 each succeeding stage of the shortening trial troop after 
 troop would join that barrier and increase it, Dragoons 
 at Ste. Menehould, more at Clermont, till, before the eve- 
 ning gathered, the Royal Family would have between them 
 and the National Government of Paris or the young patriots 
 of the villages of the Marne, a guard of their own soldiers, 
 an escort warding them into the heart of the frontier army 
 that was to be their salvation. 
 
 The hour passed quickly it was not yet six, when the 
 King, who had watched with his old interest in maps 
 every detail of the road, and had followed it with the guide- 
 book upon his knee, heard the brake upon the wheels; 
 
364 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 a slight descent ended, and the carriage drew up. A long 
 farmhouse, with stable door and garden gate shut tight 
 and with no head at a window, stood, French fashion, all 
 along the kerb. They looked from the window, noted the 
 desertion of the fields, the silence of the house, and the broad 
 paved way, and asked with a growing anxiety what they 
 feared to know, the name of the place. 
 
 The third Gentleman of the Guard, Valory, who had at 
 each stage gone before them to have the horses ready, 
 came to the door and told them it was the posting-house 
 of Somme-Vesle: of soldiers not a sign; a few peasants, 
 slouching off to the fields. 
 
 Long before the King, with his delays of loyalty and his 
 breakdowns, had reached Chalons, just upon three, under 
 that veiled sky and upon a dip of that monotonous, dead 
 straight, white road, close to the bridge and posting-house of 
 Somme-Vesle, half a troop of Hussars were up and mounted. 
 They were Germans, but their foreign gutterals were not 
 heard by the sleepy ostlers of the place, for, in some dis- 
 order, the little knot of mounted men were at attention. 
 At their head, upon his finer horse, sat Choiseul, and with 
 him Aubriot, a lieutenant of Dragoons, and old Goguelat, 
 used to commissariat, to organization, and to plans. They 
 pointed westward up the Chalons road, looking along 
 its right line between the parallel perspective of its trees. 
 Choiseul especially strained his eyes to see whether no ris- 
 ing dust or no distant specks of a large vehicle and a cabriolet 
 following might announce the advent of the King, but there 
 was no sign upon the road. He had so sat his horse for hours. 
 
 It was eleven when his light travelling-carriage had 
 
VARENNES 365 
 
 trotted up to the stables, 1 his German soldiery had joined 
 him before noon, and by one, as the time-table of the plan 
 had been given him, the berline should have been there. 
 
 Two o'clock passed. An anxious hour of waiting brought 
 no news. Yet another hour of growing anxiety upon the 
 soldiers' part, of growing suspicion in the inn. And now 
 it was three o'clock; but there was no sign upon the road. 
 
 Already the hoofs of these fifty mercenaries had been 
 clattering and pawing for three hours and more round and 
 about the long white wall of the posting-house. The 
 ostlers, the few and sleepy ostlers, were not fond of such 
 visitors, nor were the peasants in the fields. 
 
 De Choiseul had much to think about beside the punc- 
 tuality of the fugitives as he sat his horse there, straining 
 his eyes along the road. The people of the place had 
 asked him familiarly, in the new revolutionary manner, 
 what this body of horse was for. They might have added: 
 "Why was it foreign, mercenary horse?" Such a ques- 
 tion was certainly implied. . . . Why had an army of 
 the frontiers thrown out a point of its cavalry-screen towards 
 its base against all the known rules of war, instead of 
 towards the frontier which it was to line and defend ? 
 . . . If it was for orders or for manoeuvring, why did 
 they stick close to this one posting-house ? . . . Troops, 
 even unsuspected troops, had been known to comman- 
 deer food-stuffs without payment: and the peasantry 
 were sullen. 
 
 All these things were passing in the minds of the French 
 peasants there, and Choiseul, who was also French, knew 
 what was passing through their minds. There was some- 
 
 1 He had come from Paris, where he had made the last arrangements, and with him and in his carriage he 
 1iad brought Leonard, the Queen's hairdresser. This garrulous fellow he had sent forward down the road 
 to Montm&ly, and his mysterious hints at important secrets did much to spread the news. 
 
366 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 thing more: the countryside was armed. The Revolu- 
 tion had made of every village a tiny, ill-trained but fur- 
 nished military post; of every market town a section with 
 two guns and a team of gunners; of every city a rough 
 volunteer garrison, with ammunition and with arms, without 
 discipline for a campaign, but in a momentary scuffle pos- 
 sessed of the power to wound. 
 
 Had even this been all, what Choiseul did might not have 
 been done ; but it was not all. There had always been present 
 in the minds of these officers upon the frontier the per- 
 manent indecision of fears of the King. The date of the 
 flight had been postponed and postponed. Choiseul him- 
 self, who had been in Paris with the King twenty-four 
 hours before, was aware of that indecision and those fears. 
 
 It was three, and half -past three, and later; it was four 
 and still nothing appeared. The road still lay empty and 
 silent; the posting-house became, if possible, a trifle more 
 curious; the group of peasantry increased: the men were 
 hustled. Why did not these foreign soldiers unsaddle ? 
 What was the urgency ? Choiseul had his reply ready, his 
 casual piece of news: "They were expecting treasure, and 
 he was ordered to furnish an escort." Why, then, let them 
 trot up the road to meet it! . . . With every quarter of 
 an hour the strain grew greater. 
 
 Four o'clock passed, and half-past four. It was for 
 Choiseul to judge exactly (as it has been for how many 
 another soldier commanding thousands where he com- 
 manded fifty) beyond what point resistance would mean 
 disaster. From time to time a peasant crossed a distant 
 field, bearing, perhaps, a message to his armed peers; from 
 time to time an ostler would ask a question of one of the 
 Hussars and disappear; bearing, perhaps, a message of his 
 

 VARENNES 367 
 
 own, and Choiseul thought, "If the country was raised 
 behind him, in Argonne, the King is cut off and lost! " 
 
 Among so many Germans a French soldier was easier of 
 approach. The post-master of the place, lounging by, made 
 up to speak to Aubriot. What he said was this: "So the 
 King is expected to pass ? ... At least, the people 
 are saying so." . . . He sauntered away. 
 
 It was near five. By Choiseul's watch it was a trifle 
 later still. The situation could no longer be borne, and 
 the moment for retreat had come. Ten to one the King 
 had not started after all. . . . 
 
 As Choiseul left he saw that fresh horses were put into his 
 travelling-carriage ; he ordered into it his valet and the 
 Queen's hair-dresser, Leonard, whom he had brought from 
 Paris; he gave them a note which said that it had been 
 necessary for him to abandon Somme-Vesle, and that, more- 
 over, he doubted if the Treasure would come that day. 
 He himself was going to rejoin the General, and new orders 
 must be issued on the morrow. This note was to be shown 
 to the officer in command at Ste. Menehould, and given 
 to the officer in command at Clermont. Thence they were 
 to post for Montmedy. This note written and handed, 
 open, to his valet and Leonard, Choiseul saw the carriage 
 | go; and when he had seen it well away he turned rein, 
 ordered his weary Germans, and bent reluctantly eastward 
 along the road which his command had traversed that 
 morning. 
 
 So they rode back till, at Orbeval, Choiseul took a guide, 
 crossed Neuville Bridge and plunged into Argonne, lest 
 by following the highroad right into Ste. Menehould they 
 might raise that alarm which at every cost it was his duty 
 to allay. ... In vain. The country was already 
 
368 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 awake: that rumour, that something in the air which no 
 historian has ever traced, had preceded him, and a woman 
 in Ste. Menehould had said to a soldier in a tavern that "the 
 King would pass that way." 
 
 In this way was the post of Somme-Vesle abandoned. 
 It was in the neighbourhood of half-past five when the 
 cavalry marched out and up the slight eastern slope of the 
 road; just hidden by the brow of hill behind them as they 
 left the spot where they had waited it for so long, the King's 
 berline had begun the last climb before the descent to the 
 post-house. Fifteen minutes economised on the Royal 
 Family's delays would have saved them. 
 
 The berline waited, as it had waited so often that day; 
 the horses were changed in as humdrum a fashion. Within 
 the carriage a doubt had fallen on the fugitives. . . . 
 It was a lonely house in a lonely dip of the plain with a 
 vast, straight, empty road rising upon either slope before 
 it and beyond. They drove on to Orbeval, but in a mood 
 now changed ; they passed Orbeval and approached the long 
 hill-forest of Argonne. 
 
 It was already full evening; the clouds upon the western 
 horizon had lifted; the reddening and descending sun 
 shone for the first time that day against the rise of the 
 Argonne woodland ridge and upon the bare, rolling folds 
 of corn-land and of mown pasture at its base. 
 
 Under the level shafts of that sunset the belated berline 
 approached Ste. Menehould. They passed the lonely 
 tavern upon the height called "At the Sign of the Moon"; 
 they saw for a moment upon their left a mill not yet grown 
 famous, the mill of Valmy; the shadows lengthened, and 
 
VARENNES 369 
 
 just as the sun disappeared they rattled full speed into the 
 main square of the town. 
 
 The green blinds were up to admit the cool of the even- 
 ing. The Queen looked from her window, without conceal- 
 ment, and saw the gossiping and curious crowd which a 
 French town collects upon its public place at the end of day. 
 She saw the soldiers some of them, she thought, saluted; she 
 saw their officer. He came up and addressed her respect- 
 fully, in his garlic-accent of Beam. He certainly saluted 
 fully, and she bowed her acknowledgment of the salute. 
 She saw and heard no more, unless perhaps she saw, on 
 the King's side and through the open window of it, a young 
 man still heavy with the swagger of the dragoons (for he had 
 served), and still insolent with the brave insolence of sol- 
 diers; clear in eye, hooked in nose, bronzed, short, 
 alert and, as it were, itching for adventure. If she did 
 see this figure, she saw it for but a moment: the horses were 
 in, the whips were cracking, the carriage was on the move: 
 he had thus for a moment passed her window, coming in 
 from the fields, where he had been mowing; he had passed 
 for a moment, and was gone. It was Drouet, the acting 
 post-master of the place, and the son of the old post-master. 
 He had noted that the yellow coach was huge and heavy; 
 he had found just time to say to his postilions, "Don't 
 kill the cattle"; then he had gone off: it was but a moment 
 of time. 
 
 They were off, a top-heavy haystack of a thing, rolling 
 full speed up the hill beyond the river, and right into the 
 advancing darkness. As they went, rising high with the 
 road, through the orchards and into the forest and the 
 hills, they heard, far behind them one pistol shot, and then 
 another, the distant noise of a crowd, high voices, and the 
 
370 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 shuffling of horse-hoofs. But the cries grew fainter, and 
 they had soon left all far behind. They gained the com- 
 plete silence of the high wood, under the stars. They 
 began the ascent of Argonne. 
 
 But already in Ste. Menehould all was known. The 
 girl who had said "It was the King," was now but one of 
 many. The popular Council had met, and hardly had it 
 met, and hardly had the crowd outside in the square appre- 
 ciated the rumour, when those came in from Neuville 
 village who had an hour or two before watched the move- 
 ment of Choiseul and his Hussars, and the retirement of 
 the cavalry over the bridge of Neuville into the forest, seek- 
 ing Varennes. Their report added certitude to the gen- 
 eral clamour: "Choiseul and his Hussars had hung about 
 the posting-house of Somme-Vesle for hours!" "They had 
 taken a guide and were in the woods behind Ste. Menehould 
 at that moment." The troops in Ste. Menehould itself 
 must have the same purpose. There was no doubt at all 
 it was the King. And to this news there was added news, 
 that Choiseul and his Hussars were keeping in touch with 
 the main road, scouting back from time to time, ready and 
 watching. 
 
 The handful of cavalry at Ste. Menehould were French, 
 not German. When Leonard had passed through, half an 
 hour before, and had shown ChoiseuPs note to the officer 
 in command, that Captain had bid his men unsaddle and 
 take their ease. They were now filled with the evening's 
 fraternity and wine. There was an attempt to gather them 
 against the townspeople. It failed. And as the twilight les- 
 sened one resolution after another was taken in the Town 
 Hall, with the rapidity that marked the action of the Revo- 
 lution everywhere, from Paris to the smallest village. The 
 
VARENNES 371 
 
 municipal drum beating and the tocsin noisy against the 
 hills, vote after vote proceeded. The Captain of the troop 
 was arrested; the troop itself disarmed. The despatch of a 
 courier to pursue and intercept the King was decided, 
 and that courier chosen and named. 
 
 It was upon young Drouet, for his horsemanship and his 
 courage, that the choice fell. He took with him a com- 
 panion, Guillaume, an innkeeper, such as he himself was, 
 once a dragoon, as he himself had been; they saddled the 
 last two horses left in the stable and thundered off up the 
 long hill that rises from the town into Argonne, down the 
 sharp ravine of the Islettes and onward along the great 
 eastern road the road to Metz whither all thought the 
 King was bound. An hour ahead of them on that same 
 road rattled the cabriolet and rolled the huge berline. 
 
 There was a moon, but the clouds covered her. The 
 darkness of this, the shortest night of the year, deepened 
 for its brief hours, but there was still a glow in the north as 
 they neared, towards ten o'clock, the post of Clermont. 
 Drouet heard voices in the darkness before him; it was 
 his own postilions on their way back from the end of the 
 stage, and Drouet hailing them heard that the travellers, 
 when the relay horses were harnessed, had given the order 
 to leave the main Metz road, and to turn up northward 
 to Varennes. 
 
 The military temper of this people! The halt had 
 not lasted a moment, but in the moment Drouet had formed 
 his plan. 
 
 He had not, it seemed, a stern chase before him, a mere 
 gallop up the Metz road. The quarry had doubled and along 
 its tracks were Guards. There were troops at Clermont 
 as there had been at Ste. Menehould; there would now be 
 
372 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 troops every few miles until the headquarters of the treason 
 should be reached; it was his business to warn the citizens 
 against Bouille, to avoid the outposts of that commander, 
 to cut by a corner way across the elbow ahead of the royal 
 
 Drouets track through the. forest 
 
 along the ridge . . ,.>. I 
 
 Probable track of DeChoiseuls Hussars -._ -. |j 
 
 Scale of English Miles 
 
 Approximate, point at which 
 Drouet left, the, High Road 
 /brcst 
 . '. ? 1 
 
 carriages, to intercept them and to thwart all. He took at 
 once, therefore, to the wood upon his left; he took it where 
 now the railway most nearly approaches the road, about 
 half a mile beyond the level crossing and plunged with 
 his companion into its long, deep dries. He galloped up 
 
VARENNES 373 
 
 the steep to a farm he knew upon the summit, risking holes 
 and fallen trunks of trees. Once there he followed, along 
 the crest of the ridge, a green lane of immemorial age that 
 runs along the summit. It was well past ten. Up on the 
 ridge of the forest these two men galloped steadily and hard 
 through the night, with high trees like a wall on either 
 side. Three hundred feet below, upon the open plain that 
 skirts the wood, the berline swayed at speed along the 
 paved highroad. So the race ran. The fugitives slept 
 unwarned and deeply as they drew on to Varennes through 
 the silent darkness. On the hills above, with every beat 
 of the hoof upon the turf, the two riders neared and they 
 neared. Upon who should win that race depended the 
 issue of civil war. 
 
 On the issue of that race all the future depended: all 
 France and all Europe. The riders had eleven miles of 
 rough woodland in the dark to cover, an hour at most for 
 their ride. Below them on the highroad, with a start of 
 two miles and more, their quarry was hurrying, rolling 
 to Varennes. If the wheels and the smooth road beat 
 them, it was Austria over the frontier, France without gov- 
 ernment, defeat, and the end of their new world; but if 
 they in the woodlands beat the wheels on the smooth road, 
 then the Revolution was saved. 
 
 Through a clearing in the midst of the tangled under- 
 growth the two riders saw before them, as they still rode 
 furiously, the glimmer of a known white stone, a land- 
 mark; they sheered down a ride to the right: the wood 
 ended abruptly, and they saw below them the lights of 
 Varennes one or two at that late hour, and the twinkle 
 of the town lamps in the square of the town. The grasses 
 of the forest were dull no longer under the anger of their 
 
374 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 ride: they clattered on a highroad for a moment, next in 
 the narrow street of Blainville Hill. They came down 
 upon the bridge head and saw the dark line of the river; they 
 halted the sweating beasts and strained to listen. They 
 heard no sound, except the panting of their mounts; there 
 was no rumbling of wheels, no distant approach of riders, 
 no noise of cavalry. It struck eleven as they waited so. 
 They had been beaten, and the berline had already passed 
 the town and its one bridge; or the wheels had not yet 
 rumbled in, and they had won. It struck eleven as they 
 waited so. 
 
 Guillaume crossed the bridge to the main square to see 
 what he could find, whether indeed they had come too late, 
 and whether between them and the fugitives was now cast 
 abroad that compact screen of cavalry which had failed at 
 Somme-Vesle and at Ste. Menehould. Drouet stayed on 
 the hither side of the bridge, inquiring among the taverns of 
 the upper town if any had seen a large travelling-coach go by. 
 It seems that no one had noticed such a thing. . . . 
 Yet the berline was there. 
 
 He saw it suddenly, up the steep hill; he saw the two 
 great lights of it, and he heard the postilions protesting 
 that the stage was finished, that they were not bound to go 
 down the hill, that their mistress at Clermont needed the 
 horses early next morning for the carrying of her hay. 
 But even in the midst of the discussion, though he could not 
 see the horses in the darkness under the houses, he could 
 hear the skid upon the wheels, and he knew that the heavy 
 vehicle had begun to move. He ran down at once to a 
 little inn called "The Golden Arm," burst in upon a group 
 of rustic politicians, and warned them in one word that 
 a large carriage would next moment go braked and slid- 
 
VARENNES 375 
 
 ing past; that carriage would hold, he said, the King, their 
 public King in flight for the frontier. 
 
 The military temper of this people! Here were a hand- 
 ful of men in the black darkness of the now moonless 
 night, with not five minutes in which to make the decision 
 that should transform the whole polity in which they lived. 
 Yet they saw in a flash and Drouet saw clearest of them 
 all first, that the high town was not occupied with troops, 
 and that therefore the commanding officers and those 
 awaiting the King must be in the low town beyond the river; 
 secondly, that but one communication connected the King 
 and his rescuers, and that that communication was the narrow 
 bridge across the Aire, the river of Varennes; thirdly, that 
 they could gather in those few minutes no forces, even of the 
 smallest, wherewith to hold the bridge, and that the least 
 noise, until the bridge was held, would give the alarm. 
 
 There stood at the bridge head a great van for the removal 
 of furniture, packed, with its pole upon the ground, wait- 
 ing for the dawn, when it should be harnessed and started 
 upon its road. In a moment they had drawn it across 
 their end of the narrow bridge and blocked the approach. In 
 the same moment certain of their companions had warned 
 the officials of the town, and these, especially Sauce, the 
 Procurator, saw to the rousing of every house upon the 
 hither side of the river. 
 
 All this was done with such rapidity that the officials 
 were astir, the bridge barricaded, and two men already 
 armed, before the royal carriage had skidded half-way down 
 the hundred yards of hill. At that point an archway running 
 under an old church blocked the road ; at that archway the 
 
376 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 two armed men posted themselves, and just as the out- 
 rider of the fugitives had come into the narrow pass, the 
 challenge was given which ended the hopes of the Mon- 
 archy. For the two sentries thus improvised challenged, 
 the outrider dismounted, voluble, the horses of the cab- 
 riolet were thrown back upon their haunches, the huge 
 coach-and-six behind it slithered somehow to a stop upon the 
 steep road, and the Queen suddenly realised that the crash 
 and the disaster had come. She heard the threat to fire. 
 She looked from her window, as the Duchess fumbled for 
 the passports, and uttered one of those phrases memorable 
 in history for their anti-climax: she begged the gentlemen 
 who had stopped them to go through the formalities quickly, 
 as she was desirous of reaching the end of her journey as 
 quickly as might be. 
 
 The two armed men had increased now to eight; to this 
 little group was added a German soldier or two wander- 
 ing aimlessly upon leave, uncommanded and perfectly 
 drunk. The ladies in the cabriolet had got out and had 
 been thrust into the inn; but even when matters had gone 
 so far, that incertitude and fear of responsibility, which had 
 saved the family thrice already in their flight, all but saved 
 them again. The passports seemed regular, and had it 
 not been for the wild energy of Drouet, his threats and his 
 violence, the journey would have proceeded, the van would 
 have been rolled back from the bridge, the relay of horses 
 in the square of the lower town would have been har- 
 nessed, Bouille's own son, who had been waiting in a hotel 
 beyond the river all day and was waiting there now in the 
 dark, expectant, would have accompanied them out of the 
 borough. . . . With the dawn, which was now not two 
 hours off, the vanguard of Bouille's cavalry would have en- 
 
VARENNES 377 
 
 sured their safety forever. But Drouet stormed, shouted 
 perpetually the words "High treason!" and gained all that 
 he desired, which was delay. "If there were any doubt," 
 said Sauce, " to wait for morning would do no harm. The 
 horses needed rest, the night was dark." He lifted the 
 lantern in his hand and put it closely and curiously into 
 the face of the Queen: :< You must get down, Madame; 
 you must get down." He would not endorse the pass- 
 port until the morning. 
 
 Even during the few words of this conversation, the 
 crowd had continued to increase, and with the crowd the 
 armed men. It occurred to the King to command; he did 
 it paternally, with a "Now, then," and a "Come, come," 
 bidding the postilions go forward. Nothing, happened. 
 He looked out of the window and saw that the postilions 
 had dismounted, and there came again, now from a great 
 number of levelled muskets, the threat to fire. There was but 
 one faint and last chance against discovery: to pretend 
 no more than an inconvenience, and to do as they were bid. 
 
 The family got down wearily (for twenty-four mortal 
 hours they had been cramped upon that journey), entered 
 the house of Sauce the Procurator, just opposite, and waited 
 for the morning. Meanwhile in the street outside the 
 clamour of Ste. Menehould was repeated, the tocsin sounded 
 and the drum, and the men of the town armed by tens and 
 by hundreds, and at last all the population, children and 
 old men and women, were crowding the street, and filling 
 it with perpetual noise. 
 
 It was not yet light when the Hussars, Choiseul and his 
 Hussars, came blundering out of the wood. Mercenary 
 troops have great advantages. If the troops are foreign 
 the advantages are greater still ; but a disadvantage attaches 
 
378 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 to such troops, which is the need of interpreters. They 
 could understand nothing of what was going on around 
 them, they could not understand the speech that was made, 
 urging them to save " their" King. 
 
 They were ordered to charge, and did so, clearing the 
 street, and they formed after the short charge in front of 
 the mean house which held the royal family. There 
 could be no further doubt in the townsmen's minds ; it was 
 indeed the King. 
 
 The Hussars and the King and the Queen, his gaolers, the 
 Municipality, all were in a general agreement that with 
 dawn the royal family should continue its journey. But 
 meanwhile the incalculable element, the populace, swelled 
 out of all knowledge. When the first light showed in the 
 streets far more than the population of Varennes was there. 
 They poured in from the countrysides ; the men going to the 
 fields to catch the grass with their scythes before the dew was 
 off it heard the news and came ; those coming in for market 
 to the lower to\vn heard the news and came ; the Men of the 
 Forest came. And the rumour that Bouille was on the 
 march with his army, at the head of the hired German 
 cavalry, did but increase the crowd. 
 
 It was full day. For a second time under the increas- 
 ing menace the Hussars were ordered to charge. They 
 hesitated, and against them, now in rank, were the armed 
 men of the local National Guard. The sun had risen. 
 Goguelat tried to force his way forward, trusting that if 
 he did so his Hussars would follow. But these looked on 
 in a kindly German way, bewildered, and the officer of 
 the National Guard shot Goguelat, who fell from his 
 horse. The crowd, already morally impassable for its 
 determination and its arms, was now physically so. All 
 
VARENNES 379 
 
 down the street to the bridge and all round, up the courts 
 and alleys, one could see nothing but the crowd; and the 
 proportion of Militia uniforms among them, the number of 
 bayonets that showed above their shoulders, increased as the 
 hours passed, as four o'clock struck, and five, and six. 
 
 The King's green coat had been seen a moment at the 
 window; the cheers that met it (for they were cheers, not 
 groans) were now swelled by the voices of some ten thou- 
 sand armed men, and already the cry was raised "for 
 Paris." . . . Already had the scouts of Bouille's 
 Uhlans appeared far off upon the sky-line of the eastern hills. 
 
 He could never have passed the bridge in time. Noth- 
 ing but artillery could have cleared the town. The gen- 
 eral and popular decision was made and grew ; no discipline, 
 no individual command could meet it. The cry of "Paris" 
 filled the air, now with a meaningless noise, now with a 
 comic rhythm, such as impatient audiences make in theatres 
 or soldiers on the march. There were negotiations, but 
 with every mention of "Montmedy," the shout of "Paris" 
 grew louder. 
 
 The couple of guns, which the National Guards of the 
 town were allowed by law, had at their head, as was only 
 right, a gunner. It was this gunner who brought the 
 good news out at last and said that the King had consented 
 to return. 
 
 By seven the whole swarm of thousands, with the ber- 
 line wedged in the midst, were off back westward again 
 upon the Paris road, a vast dust about them, songs, and 
 what is more curious speed, but a speed which was soon 
 crushed under the pressure of such a multitude. As they 
 lost the horizons of Varennes, the last sight they saw behind 
 them was the main body of Bouille's German cavalry as 
 
880 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 it came over and formed upon the hill beyond the river, 
 baffled. By ten, in a violent heat of the sun, the throng had 
 crawled to Clermont; the first, the only doubtful and the 
 fatal stage of the capture and the return was accomplished. 
 
 What had happened that the King's mind should change ? 
 For all those hours in Varennes every official had desired 
 the continuation of the journey; all the "responsibles" 
 had withstood the growing anger of the populace, when 
 suddenly, Radet, the gunner, had announced a capitulation, 
 and, almost as suddenly, within the half-hour before seven, 
 after all those dark and morning hours of delay, the King 
 had consented to return. 
 
 What had happened was this : Two men had come with 
 authority from Paris, from the Parliament Bayou and 
 Romeuf were their names; they had reached Varennes in 
 the morning, the first exultant, the second reluctant; each 
 came burdened with that Authority by which the French 
 live, and both had entered the house of Sauce. The Queen 
 had stormed, and had dashed their written message of 
 Authority to the ground, but even the reluctant Romeuf 
 had picked it up and laid it again reverently before her. 
 Authority by whicji the Frenrh live lay 
 
 It was this which compelled the King. To 
 this he had yielded. 
 
 The military temper of this people! 
 
 The Parliament learnt the flight of the King at about 
 eight or nine o'clock in the morning following that midnight 
 adventure. Bayou was commissioned to "pursue, capture, 
 and report" in the forenoon of that day the 21st of June. 
 
VARENNES 381 
 
 He started eleven hours behind the King. The King, 
 driven by Fersen, had passed the barriers of Paris, as we 
 have seen, just after midnight of the 20th. 
 
 It was close on noon when Romeuf had shot like an 
 arrow through the Porte St. Martin, galloping hell and 
 'leather along the great frontier road. Louis was at Chain- 
 try then, fifty miles ahead. An hour after Bayou, Romeuf, 
 who had been sent also, followed upon another trail: he 
 was a royalist and hated the job, but he obeyed orders; at 
 last he caught the right scent from witnesses and rumour, 
 and was thundering off with a heavy heart, but a soldier, 
 down the same way. 
 
 Bayou rode and he rode, a ride to test his breeches. 
 Seventy miles, eighty miles, is a ride for any man. Bayou, 
 relaying at every post and covering, in between, his fif- 
 teen miles an hour or more, galloped into Chaintry just 
 before six in the evening, and there at Chaintry where 
 at midday Louis and Marie Antoinette had graciously 
 revealed themselves to old Lagny Bayou found a sus- 
 picious man, one De Briges, very evidently employed to 
 follow and to aid the fugitives. Bayou dismounted, held 
 that man prisoner, and dined, but not before he had sent 
 on, by his written Authority, Lagny's boy helter-skelter 
 up the road to rouse Chalons beyond. 
 
 Romeuf was less speedy, but a fine rider for all that. He was 
 an hour behind Bayou, he reached Chaintry on account of 
 missing the scent at starting two hours behind him, 
 when Bayou, having dined and sent forward that mes- 
 senger, was already off in a carriage to Chalons fol- 
 lowing the trail. They met at Chalons a town all 
 informed and astir thence forward, the two together, 
 Bayou eager, Romeuf in despair for his friends (but 
 
382 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 discipline constrained him), drove not rode, past the 
 bonfire glare and howling of Ste. Menehould, all night 
 through Argonne, till by morning they came with their 
 Authority to Varennes. 
 
 And in this day and night of hard -riding Frenchmen, 
 a third must be mentioned: Mangin, druggist and lawyer 
 of Varennes, had galloped from Varennes at dawn, had left 
 his horse collapsed at Clermont, had relayed and relayed, still 
 riding, urging back to Paris to give news to the Parliament. 
 
 He passed in a flash the carriage of Bayou, careless of 
 it; long before six he was at Ste. Menehould, changed horse, 
 was off to Orbeval, changed horse, was off to Somme-Vesle, 
 changed horse, was off to Chalons, riding and riding hard, 
 nearly fifty miles and not yet eight o'clock. He ate and 
 drank and mounted, re-horsed, and on: what skin! All 
 the long road all day, gallop and change and gallop under 
 the sun: twelve hours in the saddle when he came to the 
 deep Marne, sixteen when he dashed into Bondy. . . . 
 A companion, who had met him, rode on to share his 
 triumph. . . . Mangin shook him off. . . . The 
 suburbs of Paris . . . the barrier eighteen hours 
 of it before he got his foot to ground and staggered 
 into the Assembly! Lord! what a ride! 
 
 It was ten at night; the hundreds of candles guttered 
 and glimmered over a handful of exhausted men upon 
 the benches of the Parliament; Mangin handed his mes- 
 sage to the Chair, and his ride was done. Good Lord, 
 what a ride! 
 
 Beauharnais was in the Chair: remarkable for this, that 
 his widow married Napoleon. 
 
VARENNES 383 
 
 Beauharnais read the message: "The King was taken!" 
 As Parliaments go that Parliament was drastic and imme- 
 diate ; it came to its conclusion in two hours a space 
 of time that meant thirty miles to a courier. It nomi- 
 nated, somewhat after midnight, three commissioners: Bar- 
 Maubaurg of the centre, of the left and of 
 
 the" right and with them Damas for military orders. 
 Each young, each growing in fame Barnave and Petion 
 already famous they left together with the morning. 
 
 It was Thursday, Corpus Christi. Every village of the 
 Marne Valley was garlanded and upon holiday, the church 
 doors stood open to the humming air of midsummer, the 
 peasants, most of them at games, some few in procession or 
 coming out from Mass, upon that great feast made every stage 
 of the road alive ; as the sun rose to noon, the population of the 
 villages on either slope of the river valley poured in like rivulets 
 down the chalky lanes, swelling the mob upon the great 
 highway. By the afternoon the throng had so largely 
 increased that the carriage of the Parliamentary Com- 
 missioners could no longer go at the trot, it was walked, 
 as was walked, surrounded by a larger, dustier, much fiercer 
 crowd, that other carriage, the berline, which was crawling 
 to meet them across the flat miles of Champagne. 
 
 The hills grew higher, the dale narrower, as their slow 
 progress brought them past Dormans, and gradually, 
 with the multitude about them, to Mareuil. The setting 
 sun was on the famous vineyards and on the fringe of forest 
 far above: they were anxious, perhaps, whether they would 
 meet the returning fugitives while yet it was light, and so 
 be spared the risk of confusion and perhaps disaster in the 
 darkness. 
 
 But that meeting could not now be far off. Rumour 
 
384 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 first, then couriers, going before the gradual advance of 
 the King's captors announced his advent, and the three 
 Commissioners wondered what they would see. Reports 
 had already moved them, true details in the midst of much 
 fable, of invasion and of fancied massacres and fires . . . 
 the mob at Chalons, the sleepless night of consultation, 
 the irruption of a violent militia from Rheims, the ter- 
 rible slow march on the Epernay road with its jeers and 
 anger and threats of death; the violent jostle at Epernay 
 itself the fear that the prisoners might never reach the 
 capital. They had heard composedly of these things, 
 with clearer and clearer detail as the later passages of the long 
 agony were given: they were now very near the meeting. 
 
 The hot day had fallen to its end, and evening was come 
 quite pure over the high plateaus that bound the valley; 
 it was darker upon the water-meadows of the valley floor 
 when they saw before them, a long way off, the dust, and 
 heard the noise, when they came near and smelt the incal- 
 culable crowd that roared round the carriages of the King. 
 
 The advent of the Commissioners of Parliament threw 
 an abrupt silence over the French, ever avid for worship: 
 these three dissimilar men, one of whom alone approached 
 greatness, were taken as transubstantiate with the National 
 power. In such an attitude, near the doors of the berline, 
 in the centre of the compact thousands that were massed, 
 hats off and reverent in gaze, between the hillside and the 
 river, Petion read the Decree of the Assembly. 
 
 With excuses upon their part and voluble instance from 
 the King, Petion and Barnave managed to get them- 
 selves into the carriage, for the Queen took the Dauphin 
 on her knee, the Princess stood before her aunt, and Petion 
 decorously straightened between the Duchesse de Tourzel 
 
PETION 
 
VARENNES 385 
 
 and Madame Elizabeth, faced Barnave, who sat, more 
 generously large between the King and Queen. 
 
 At last the Commissioners could watch that driven group. 
 Three nights without sleep, two of agony; three days, one 
 of flight, two of intolerable heat, insult, violence, and a 
 snail's-pace progress, had left them feverish, and yet as 
 sufferers are when all is quite abnormal interested in tiny 
 things, and careless. Their linen was dirty in the extreme 
 the Queen's grey dress stained, torn, and roughly mended, 
 the King's brown coat a very dusty brown; but their faces 
 were clean they had washed at Epernay and they 
 were not unlively. 
 
 It got darker and darker; the noise of the crowd out- 
 side calmed a little, though from time to time a great rustic 
 head would lumber in at the window to stare at royalty. 
 The Queen, who had talked rapidly from the moment she 
 had seen her deliverers, Madame Elizabeth, who had 
 caught and pressed Petion's arm and clung in a foolish 
 ecstasy of terror, kept up a ceaseless chatter and the 
 King, against his wont, joined in. They had not meant 
 to leave the country far from it. " No " (from the King) ; 
 "I said so positively. Did I not?" (appealing to his wife). 
 "We are really anxious about the three Guardsmen. 
 We went to Mass at Chalons this morning but it was 
 constitutional, I assure you." Only once did the reserve 
 of an earlier (and a later) time appear upon the Queen; 
 it was when Barnave hinted that one of the men on the box 
 was Swedish, when Petion added that the man who had 
 driven the coach from the Tuileries was a Swede called ? 
 . . T he pretended to hesitate about the name : the Queen had 
 said, " I am not in the habit of learning hackney coachmen's 
 names," and, after saying it, was, for perhaps the first time 
 
386 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 in two hours, silent. Then she forgave them forgave 
 Barnave at least and talked on in lower tones. She was 
 getting to like Barnave. The little boy, playing with the 
 buttons on Barnave's coat, made out the letters on them. 
 "It says 'we will live free or die." He was proud to read 
 such small letters so well. He repeated the phrase, but no 
 one of his elders answered him. 
 
 Petion, upon the back seat, felt an arm upon his in the 
 darkness. He remembered the same arm as it held him 
 close when he had met the berline two hours before. He 
 saw under the moonlight the white and small hand of 
 Madame Elizabeth lying near his, and it occurred to him 1 
 that this very pious, very narrow, very distant girl either 
 suddenly loved him or feigned love in order to corrupt his 
 republican ardour for he was already republican. 
 
 It is objected with indignation that women of birth do 
 not so demean themselves with country lawyers. The indig- 
 nation is fatuous, but the objection is well founded. Women 
 of birth have indeed so profound a repugnance for his class 
 that even the bait of a great fortune, though it often com- 
 pels them to a marriage, will hardly overcome the loathing, 
 and if they must yield to passion it is more commonly to 
 favour a groom than a solicitor. But this woman had no such 
 frailties. She was saintly, foolish, well bred and bewildered. 
 She may have made herself as pleasant a companion as it 
 was in her power to be, for by such easy arts the rich, when 
 they fall, will always try to appease their conquerors. More 
 than that she certainly did not do. The Queen knew better 
 in what way to command her captors; she fixed upon Bar- 
 ^ave^and within the first day of their companionship she 
 had drawn him from that other camp into hers. 
 
 J Jle has recorded this sensation at length in print 
 
VARENNES 387 
 
 They slept at Dormans so much as they could sleep 
 with the mob howling all night in the square outside. Next 
 day, Friday, the third of that return, the fourth of that 
 martyrdom, they continued the Paris road. The day was 
 yet hotter than the yesterday had been, and the violent and 
 the out-o '-works from Paris began to join the crowd. At 
 evening the tower of Meaux stood up before them against 
 the red sky. 
 
 There, at Meaux, Marie Antoinette took a turn with 
 Barnave; long, quiet looks, a familiar and continued con- 
 versation, a stroll in the garden alone and decent confi- 
 dences during the night, finally captured Barnave. He was, 
 from the moment of their return to Paris, the Queen's. 
 
 He suffered no conversion in opinion, he did not forget 
 his early political principle, he simply became indifferent to 
 it and a servant of something that lived and suffered and 
 exercised also upon some few and he was one a charm, 
 perhaps of voice, perhaps of carriage, but, at any rate, 
 of sex. 
 
 He worked henceforward absolutely for Marie Antoinette. 
 He achieved so little that his name will hardly appear again 
 in this record of her fall, but his name should be retained as 
 a proof of what she still was to men. 
 
 He has long been accused of treason. He would have 
 told you that he betrayed a formula, a phrase, to be the 
 more loyal to a soul and body which he had come, as by a 
 revelation, to understand. But Barnave was wrong: not to 
 bodies or things, but to ideas, are men rightly subject: 
 religion resides in dogma : loyalty must express itself in a 
 creed, and the Word is God. These reasonings against 
 reason, these preferences of the thing to the idea, are dan- 
 gerous to honour. 
 
 
388 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 Henceforward Barnave was near her always : advised her 
 secretly, wrote to dictation from her lips : ran risk and peril, 
 and at last died by the same hands which had killed her also 
 upon the scaffold. 
 
 This bishop's Palace at Meaux, the halls that Bossuet had 
 know r n, was their last resting-place. The sun was well up, 
 it was already warm when they left the town for the slow 
 stretch of thirteen hours to Paris. 
 
 The weather would not change. The same intense and 
 blinding heat pursued and tortured them; but it was now 
 less tolerable than ever, both from the length to which the 
 strain had been spun out, and from the increasing crowds 
 which lined the old paved road in a wider and wider margin 
 as they neared the capital. The flat hedgeless fields seemed 
 covered with men as the prisoners saw it through their 
 low windows to the horizon. The murmur beyond had 
 swelled into a sort of permanent roar, which mixed with the 
 songs and cries of the few hundred that still kept pace with 
 the carriages, and now that they had left the valley of the 
 Marne and entered the dry plain that bounds Paris to the 
 north, the drought and the dust were past bearing. The 
 approach of evening afforded them no relief. At the gate 
 of the city, where at least they might expect the contrast of 
 the familiar streets and the approach to repose, they were 
 disappointed. The driver had orders to skirt the barrier 
 round to the western side. So for some two hours more this 
 calvary dragged on: the ragged marchers themselves were 
 exhausted, many clung to the sides of the coach. Some 
 few had climbed upon its roof and jeered and threat- 
 ened those three Guards, who sat silent in their yellow 
 liveries not replying, awaiting their chance of escape at the 
 end of this endless journey. 
 
BARNAVE 
 
VARENNES 389 
 
 When the last slope into the town was climbed, the 
 travellers, as they crossed the flat summit where is now the 
 Triumphal Arch of Napoleon, could see at last before them, 
 beyond lines of trees and about the innumerable heads, the 
 windows of their palace sending back the evening light in a 
 blaze, and to the left that huge oblong roof of the riding- 
 school where sat the Parliament. 
 
 Meanwhile, as the berline passed the barrier the bellowing 
 and the songs, the tramping and the press of moving poverty, 
 white with dust and parched to drunkenness, ceased sud- 
 denly. It was like a stream of anarchy breaking against 
 that curious homogeneity of attitude and clear purpose 
 which marked the capital upon every principal day of the 
 Revolution and cut it off sharply from the provinces and 
 even the suburbs around. 
 
 This new and purely Parisian crowd which they now 
 entered, silent, dark-coated and with covered heads 
 largely of the middle class thronged all the length of 
 the Champs Elysees and packed the Place de la Concorde. 
 The myriad fixed eyes of it saw the convoy show black 
 against the western light upon the summit of the hill; 
 they watched it creeping down the avenue between the 
 double line of soldiery, each section of which, as the King 
 passed, reversed arms as at a funeral soldiers reverse arms. 
 
 There was no sound. The spontaneous discipline which 
 makes Paris a sort of single thing, living and full of will, so 
 controlled this vast assemblage that neither a cry was raised 
 nor a hat lifted. The note of the whole was silence. 
 
 During the full half-hour of that long approach down the 
 hill this silence endured; the carriage was at the gates of 
 the Tuileries Gardens, had entered them. Within the rid- 
 ing-school, the manege where sat the Parliament, to 
 
390 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 benches that rapidly emptied as the curiosity of the 
 Deputies drew them away, Fursy was droning out a 
 report upon fortified places of the first, the second, and the 
 third class. Outside, the crowd still denser but silent as 
 ever, the berline passed and the sections saluted a 
 reversed salute, on either side; it was within a furlong of its 
 goal when, from a platform outside the Parliament building, 
 a young member of the Royalist right drawing himself well 
 up that he might be observed, lifted his hat and very gravely 
 and pronouncedly made obeisance to the Crown. 
 
 The spell was broken. There was a scuffle, a hubbub, 
 a general war; the slowly moving crowd crested into weapons 
 as a deep swell at sea will crest into foam. The postilions 
 of the berline urged their horses; a hundred yards to go, 
 and the hedge of soldiery was forced and the mob was 
 upon the carriage. The three Guardsmen sat still un- 
 touched, with death upon them ; but the horses floundered 
 through the deafening cries and strugglers, trampling and 
 rearing; the great vehicle was hauled and piloted in; the 
 wrought-iron gates clanged behind it. It was past seven 
 and the journey was ended. 
 
 A week had gone. On Monday night they had watched 
 with Fersen; all Tuesday fled; on Wednesday night and 
 morning suffered at Varennes, and in the slow drag-back to 
 Chalons ; on Thursday at Epernay met the Commissioners, 
 all Friday suffered their captivity till Meaux was reached 
 and now, as the light of Saturday began to fall, the hunting 
 was over. 
 
A 
 
 XV 
 THE WAR 
 
 FROM SATURDAY, JUNE 25, 1791, TO HALF-PAST EIGHT ON THE 
 EVENING OF JUNE 20, 1792 
 
 * MAN, callous or wearied by study, might still dis- 
 cover in the pursuit of History one last delight: 
 the presence in all its record of a superhuman irony. 
 
 In Padua, where the Polignacs had taken refuge with 
 their loot, the Emperor Leopold, returning from Tuscany, 
 was at that moment their host and guest. With them and 
 their circle he discussed the enormities of the French and the 
 approaching escape of his sister and the King; for he was 
 cognisant of that plan; he knew that since the death of 
 Mirabeau the idea of relying upon French arms against the 
 Parliament had been abandoned, and that an invasion by 
 foreign allies jwas the scheme of the Court. 
 
 Leopold certainly designed, when the first part of that 
 scheme was accomplished and the King was in safety on 
 the frontier, to strengthen the royal armies with his own 
 and to advance upon the Revolution. Varennes, I repeat, 
 was everything. The King once free of Paris, and the 
 armies would have been over the frontier. The King a 
 captive in Paris, and compelled to pose as the acting and 
 national Executive, war was another matter. The French 
 nation could act as one force. 
 
 So insecure and dilatory were the communications of the 
 - time that for a whole fortnight nothing but guesses reached 
 
 391 
 
392 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 Padua. Upon the second of July these guesses urged Leo- 
 pold to write; but at last, upon the 5th, a fortnight after 
 the flight, came definite and official news. The King had 
 succeeded. He was safe in Metz with the army of Bouille. 
 The Queen was safe beyond the frontier in Luxembourg. 
 
 Leopold sat down and wrote at once a sort of psean, a 
 cry of triumph and of immediate action, and offered his 
 treasury, his army, his everything to his sister for the imme- 
 diate march against the French people. 
 
 She, in Paris, watched and guarded every way, had found 
 it possible to write to Fersen two notes which, when he 
 destroyed these many monuments of her love for him, he 
 copied with his own hand. Her main preoccupation is that 
 he should not return by stealth. She tells him he is dis- 
 covered, and that his part in the flight is known; she begs 
 him to keep safe. But it is probable or certain from one 
 phrase in these notes that in the bitter anger of the moment 
 she desired to be rescued by a chivalry under arms, and 
 would appeal to war. 
 
 That determination in turn she abandoned, and from the 
 month of August onwards until nine months later, the armed 
 struggle began, one plan, lucid, and especially lucid when one 
 considers that it proceeded from so imperfect a judgment as 
 hers, possessed her and was continually expressed: she 
 demanded a congress backed by arms, the uiiinediatejhreat 
 of a vast but silent force, and no wordjvf hmtilitir" Never- 
 theless and largely, as we shall see, -through her, war came. 
 It came with the spring and these few months after Varennes 
 are but the lull before the noise of the first guns. 
 
 I would here admit into the text of this book one of those 
 discussions which, in History of a living sort, should but 
 rarely be admitted, and belong rather to an appendix. 
 
THE WAR 393 
 
 I admit it because a conclusion upon it is vital to any com- 
 prehension of the Queen and of the European position which 
 ended in the struggle between France and Europe. 
 
 No historical quarrel has been more warmly debated than 
 this. Did the old society, notably the Germanics, and at 
 last all the privileged of Euroj^down to the very merchants 
 of tKe city of London, attack the Revolution to destroy it ? 
 Or did theRevolution break out in a flame against them, 
 and compel them to the action they took and to the genera- 
 tion of war which ended in Waterloo ? 
 
 In the current negation of morals the question has been 
 thought by many to lack reality. Yet such is the nature 
 of man that if he cannot give a human answer upon the 
 matter of right and wrong, and a decision upon his motive, 
 all his action turns to dust, and he can neither approve 
 nor disapprove any human act. Now when man can 
 neither approve nor disapprove, things cease to be, so far as 
 his intelligence is concerned; and without morals even his 
 senses are dead. Therefore is it, and has it always been, of 
 supreme importance to every great conflict of History that the 
 one side or other should justify itself in motive. And there- 
 fore has this discussion raged around the origins of the 
 Great War, 
 
 There is one sense in which the debate can never be 
 resolved. It can be argued for ever as a metaphysical 
 proposition; just as a man may argue whether a spherical 
 surface is concave or convex, and fall at last into mere 
 legomachy, so it may be eternally debated as to which of the 
 two combatants was legitimately defending his existence. 
 It is evident that both were in this position. 
 
 Again, there is a fruitless and eternal debate opened if we 
 are to consider separately every chief personality concerned,. 
 
394 ' MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 Did Brissot really want war ? Did Danton want it ? Did 
 the Emperor want it ? Did Berliruaiant it ? Did .Spain ? 
 Did the ^King. Louis ? I^id Dumouriez ? The varying 
 ignorance of each character named, the varying intensity 
 of the emotions and necessities of each, the divergence of 
 particular objects in each individual case make such a 
 synthesis impossible. But if one looks at the field in general 
 and considers the common action of men between the 
 return from Varennes and that April day when Louis was 
 compelled to read out the Declaration of War before the 
 French Parliament, a true picture, I think, arises in the mind, 
 which when, if ever, the Revolution ceases to incline to 
 judgment will be the final judgment of History. It is as 
 follows : X 
 
 /All desired war: all feared $. All attempted to postpone 
 it. But, as all energy of its nature polarises, these energetic 
 hatreds and fears gathered round two centres. The one 
 in France had for its heart the young men from the south 
 and all their group, soon to be called the " Girondins," who, 
 when the new Parliament gathered at the close of the 
 summer of Varennes, rapidly came to lead it. These men, 
 Gallic in temper, more and more desired to bring to the 
 issue of arms sooner rather than later what they thought 
 must end could not but end in war. Round this clear 
 opinion, by the time winter had come, what was living and 
 active in France increasingly gathered. It is a phenomenon 
 repeated a hundred times in the history of the French peo- 
 ple. We shall certainly see an example of it in our own 
 generation. The hand once upon the hilt of the sword 
 draws it. 
 
 Over against this current of opinion the Emperor (Marie 
 Antoinette's brother), the King of Prussia, the English 
 
THE WAR 395 
 
 Oligarchy. The Spanish Bourbons also tended to war; 
 their decision was not due to an increase of determination 
 they were determined on the main question all along 
 but to the gradual settlement of details long in negotiation 
 between them. These details settled, and the mutual suspi- 
 cions and jealousies of the Allies sufficiently though partially 
 appeased, the privileged bodies of Europe certainly marched 
 against France, and to the Girondin crusade was opposed 
 something which was intended not to be resistance but rather 
 a rapid and successful act of police. The thing had got to 
 end, and, though the Powers only crossed the frontier in the 
 succeeding summer, all the Courts of Europe and all the 
 privileged bodies of the old Society were contented and glad 
 that the fight was on. Nor were any more contented than the 
 governing class in England, who had helped to engineer 
 the campaign and who could not but reap the fruit 
 of it, though it was profoundly to their interest not to 
 bring into the field the insufficient armed forces at their 
 command. 
 
 In the appreciation of this situation an element must be 
 remembered without which the modern student goes all 
 astray. The Allies were bound to win. We to-day, looking 
 back upon those amazing twenty years, forget that truth. 
 Valmy, though still almost inexplicable, has happened, 
 and we take it for granted. The long straggling regiments 
 of Napoleon, the butchers' boys turned generals, the vul- 
 garian dukes and marshals, the volunteer gunners and the 
 rest of it, won; and their victory is now part of the European 
 mind. In that winter before the war broke out, as '91 
 turned into '92, it was not so. 
 
 The elements obvious to every thinking man, especially 
 to the cold and therefore profoundly insufficient judgment 
 
S96 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 of alien observers in Paris itself (of such coxcombs as 
 Gouverneur Morris, for instance), were elements which 
 made the final and rapid defeat of the Revolution certain, 
 and gave that approaching defeat all the qualities of 
 what I have called it, an act of police. The Allies 
 might be jealous and suspicious one of the other, 
 but there can be no doubt once an accord was come 
 to and it was reached in the early months of '92 
 that against the anarchy into which the French 
 people had fallen, and the hopeless indiscipline of their 
 swollen armies, the operations of the invaders would soon 
 become but a series of executions, and a summary and 
 severe suppression of armed mobs. The enthusiasm of the 
 Girondins, and soon of all France, was the enthusiasm of 
 rhetoricians and that self -doubting expectation of the impos- 
 sible which is proper to inebriate moods. Nor was there one 
 commander of experience west of the Rhine who anticipated 
 victory for the French, nor one commander east of the Rhine 
 who dreaded the failure of the Kings. It was mere sound 
 as poetry and music are mere sound that urged the French 
 to war. And those who in theory combated the policy of 
 war, of whom Robespierre w r as the most remarkable, those 
 who, from their concrete experience, desired to fend it off 
 (with the army in such a state! with the military temper 
 of the people so hopelessly wild!) that is, you may say, 
 every general officer foresaw at the best some sort of 
 compromise whereby the Revolution would end, after some 
 few battles lost, in some sort of a Limited Monarchy. 
 It was the appetite for a Limited Monarchy which made 
 so many acquiesce in such a campaign in spite of the cer- 
 tainty of defeat. It was the fear that the great ideal of the 
 Revolution miht tail off intaLimitH fonRrch that 
 
THE WAR 397 
 
 made the most ardent democrats oppose the policy of what 
 could not but be a disastrous war. 
 
 Meanwhile, during the earlier months of this develop- 
 ment, the French nobles who had crossed the frontier 
 (the fimigresL and notably the brothers of the King, were 
 an element of peril to either side, lest, a small and irresponsible 
 body, they should provoke hostilities before either side 
 demanded them. The Emigres were active because they 
 had nothing to lose, and careless of this moment because 
 for them negotiation was unnecessary. To restrain this 
 activity was the chief anxiety of the great interests which 
 were slowly coalescing into that invincible instrument of 
 war whose mission it was to restore order under the King 
 of Prussia and the Duke of Brunswick. As the months 
 proceed, as the coalition forms, this disturbing element is of 
 less and less importance. In the early summer of '92, when 
 war is once declared, the Emigres fall into line with the 
 rest of the Allies ; and when the invading army crosses the 
 frontier, the Emigres cross with it in the natural course of 
 things and merge in the general flood. 
 
 Such was the general development of the European situa- 
 tion between the month of July, 1791, and the month of 
 April, 1792. 
 
 What, during that period, was the particular disposition of 
 the Queen ? 
 
 She was very active. She had determined upon a lucid 
 plan, and of all the brains that were thinking out how and 
 when, if ever, the struggle should come, hers was perhaps 
 the most tenacious of its purpose. 
 
 We have a dozen letters of hers between the return from 
 
398 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 Varennes and the end of the year. One of great length, 
 written to her brother in September, is accompanied by a 
 memorandum and exactly details her plan. With the 
 exception of two which were written, as a blind, for publica- 
 tion, and which in a private note she ridicules and disowns, 
 
 ^* with her thesis. She pro- 
 
 poses that the International Congress should be called. In 
 her later letters she begs that it maybe called near the frontier, 
 as for instance, at Cologne. Before it is summoned, and 
 during its session, there must be gathered an overwhelming 
 military force ready to invade at once. But not a syllable 
 must be breathed that could be taken as menace. In this 
 plan Marie Antoinette was considering the personal safety 
 of her husband and her child ; and the whole theory of the 
 action she advised pivoted upon a certain conception of 
 the French people which>was now so fixed in her mind that 
 nothing could dissolve it ^her theory was that the French were 
 not a military people; that they spent energy in words, and 
 that before a plain evidence of force they would always give 
 wayj she carried that theory of hers, little as it later accorded 
 with the brute facts of actual war, unmodified to the scaffold. 
 if I have repeatedly insisted in this book upon the inability 
 (lof Marie Antoinette to perceive the French mind. As a 
 young woman her misconception of her husband's people 
 
 1< dealt with no more than personalities, ladies' maids, duch- 
 I esses, and the rest. When Gaul moved, and when she 
 ' began her attempt at power in 1787, along through the 
 communal millioned action of the Revolution, this miscon- 
 ception became a strong creed, a vision as it w r ere. She 
 saw the French people intensely active, cruel, cowardly, 
 and unstable : much in them of the cat and the fox, nothing 
 of the eagle. She perceived their great mobs and their 
 
THE WAR 399 
 
 sudden united actions but these phenomena were to her 
 sporadic; she saw them she did not reason upon them, nor 
 argue from them some peculiar regimental talent in the 
 populace; and if you had told her that these appearances of 
 marching thousands were due to a power of organisation 
 from below a national aptitude for the machinery neces- 
 sary to arms and to diplomacy the words would have 
 seemed to her simply meaningless. She could not so much 
 as conceive humanity to be capable of organisation save by 
 the direct action of a few placed above it. 
 
 .Of military Qualities she understood nothing; She con- 
 fused order, silence, and similarity of buttons with discipline. 
 She had no conception of ferocity as the raw material of 
 valour. Safe out of Paris she would without a moment's 
 hesitation have ordered the invasion, and she would have 
 expected its successful issue in less than six weeks. Even in 
 Paris she would have bargained to conquer with a "whiff 
 of grape-shot" or some such rubbish; but in Paris, without 
 one regiment to hand and without jggular artillery, she 
 felt that the very bodies of Eer family were injeril from 
 "monsters and from tigers" the words are her own : hence 
 only did she hesitate and o^injjul^an armed congress rather 
 thanan invasion. To that armed congress and its menace 
 she had no doubt at all that the French would yield. 
 
 A metaphor will explain the situation clearly. A human 
 being, caught by some fierce animal but not yet mauled, 
 appeals in a whisper to a comrade near by to load, and, if 
 possible, by some demonstration of human force or of will 
 to make the wild best loose its hold; he begs that comrade 
 to do nothing merely provocative lest the animal should rend 
 him upon whom it has pounced : but, of course, that comrade 
 is to fire at the first active gesture of attack the brute may 
 
400 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 deliver. Of the ultimate victory of his armed comrade 
 the man in peril feels there can be no doubt at all ; he only 
 advises a particular caution on account of his own situation 
 and impotence. 
 
 Moreover, she was convinced, and says it in so many 
 vords, that the French would give way at once before the 
 >resence of a great and silent but determined force upon 
 heir frontier. 
 
 So clear is the plan in her mind that she is bitterly 
 impatient of the necessary caution and delay of diplomacy, 
 and of the long process of negotiation whereby Berlin is 
 brought into the agreement, the tergiversations of Madrid 
 are discounted and the exact balance between desire for 
 war and pow r er to wage it are sounded. JHere and there 
 the peevishness of her early womanhoodappears in the 
 complaints she makes, almost as though she had been aban- 
 doned by her brother and his armies/7 
 
 At last, in February, 1792, this~7ong correspondence is 
 ended. The French nation has, upon the whole, accepted, its 
 young rhetoricians enthusiastically acclaimed the approach 
 of war. She, true to her plan, proposes that her brother shall 
 meet this growing enthusiasm by positive demands, defini- 
 tively formulated, dealing with the internal affairs of the 
 French people, proceeding from Vienna and demanding in- 
 stant reply. We now know that she herself drafted these 
 demands, and on the 16th of February Mercy writes to tell 
 her that the Emperor will order the French Parliament to 
 maintain French Monarchy, in its full rights and liberty, to 
 withdraw the French armies from the frontier, to respect the 
 imperial rights of the Alsatian feudatories ; and that he will 
 at once back up this ultimatum with an additional force, 
 beyond that already gathering, of 40,000 men. She acknowl- 
 
$ 
 
 flnint 
 
 i, tftUfi^ 
 
 t *f to 
 
 f/ 
 
 I 
 
 (Tut ttjittt/ieLr n'tn it * ft J. Vim 
 
 * 
 
 > 
 
 ^ 
 
 FACSIMILE OF FIRST PAGE OF MARIE ANTOINETTE'S LETTER 
 
 Written on September 3, 1791, to the Emperor, her brother, proposing 
 armed intervention 
 
THE WAR 401 
 
 edges the plan and confirms it. A fortnight later, upon the 
 1st of March, Mercy can give her the last great news: 
 Prussia has formally consented to move, though demanding, 
 of course, from the French Monarchy after its victory, 
 compensation for the cost of the campaign which will 
 surely be willingly accorded. 
 
 It was on the 1st of March, I say, that this final news was 
 written, when, as so continually chances throughout 
 Marie Antoinette's life, a special fate appears and intervenes. 
 
 On the 1st of March the King of Prussia has agreed 
 to march with Leopold, and all is ready for that armed 
 demonstration which would, as she was convinced, calm this 
 great storm about her. On that same day, the 1st of 
 March, Leopold lay dead. Doctors assure us that he was 
 not poisoned. 
 
 Two things followed upon that death: first, tbe faejf her 
 nephew, a sickly boy of twenty-four, now held in Vienna 
 all the power that in those days accompanied the Crown, 
 and he in his weakness was now the master of the armies 
 his father haoT summoned. 
 
 Secondly, there must be a 1p"g ^play fnrjVip hnsin^g anrl 
 
 the trapping olhis electip" Qr>r l his ^rnY^F 
 
 Her plan meanwhiJjia4"-feuld. It was to be not a 
 silent threat of arms, but war. The French temper 
 had taken Leopold's command as a challenge. The ulti- 
 matum she had suggested or drafted was met by a total 
 change in the Executive of France. Dumouriez was 
 made the chief man in the new Ministry and was 
 personally in charge of Foreign Affairs. The guns were 
 certainly ready. For ten days after Dumouriez' nomination 
 she drew from him his designs ; and on the tenth day wrote 
 secretly to Mercy in cipher betraying his plan of campaign 
 
402 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 upon the Meuse. Three days later the last of her friends 
 who could command an army, the King of Sweden, stabbed 
 a fortnight earlier, died; and on the 20th of April her hus- 
 band, "the Head of the French Executive," read out in a 
 firm voice a declaration of war against her nephew, "the 
 King of Hungary" - for he was not yet crowned Emperor. 
 Having so read it in a firm voice he went back home, and 
 Marie Antoinette and he must now bethink themselves 
 how the madness of the people, when the invasion should 
 begin, might be fended off -- at least from their own persons 
 and from their heir, until their saviours should show the white 
 Austrian uniforms in Paris and march the grotesque Prussian 
 march within sight and hearing of the Tuileries. On the 
 30th of the month she advised Mercy that the first proclama- 
 tion of the invaders had best be mild. 
 
 Such had been the plan of the Queen, and such its for- 
 tune; and by such a fate had she been shadowed. For the 
 sake of clarity I have omitted during this recital all save 
 her negotiation. I will briefly return to the drift of the 
 Revolutionary progress around her, and show how this also 
 led up to that fatal conclusion, from the failure of the flight 
 to Varennes at the end of June, 1791, to the declaration 
 of war in the following April. 
 
 When spirits are at high tension and in full vision, as it 
 were, often a shock brings back the old, sober, and incomplete 
 experience of living. Such a shock the flight to Varennes 
 had afforded. While the royal family were yet absent 
 there had been talk against the very institution of the 
 
THE WAR 403 
 
 Crown; and some rich men had spoken of the Republic; 
 the Revolutionary exaltation ran very high. The flight 
 was arrested: the royal family were brought back, and in 
 a sort of mechanical, unconscious way ^reaction gathered, 
 force ; after all (the politicians thought) the nation must 
 not lose, could not afford to lose, might lose its very soul 
 in losing, the web of inheritance which had come to it 
 from so many centuries. 
 
 This force of r^artinn. exploded when, during the Feasts 
 of the Federation, three weeks after the return of the royal 
 family, a popularoutbreak upon the Chnrgp r|ft Mars 
 was repressed by the declaration of martial law, the use of 
 the Militia under La Fayette, and the authority of the 
 Mayor of Paris. 
 
 The Revolution,"going the way we know it did, the hatreds, 
 the threats of vengeance covertly growing from that day 
 (which the poor and their champions had already christened 
 among themselves the "Massacre of Champ de Mars") 
 take on a great importance; but to the people of the time 
 the tumult and its armed repression did not seem of any 
 great consequence save as the beginning of quieter things. 
 The end of the summer was principally occupied in some 
 speculation as to what the new Parliament would do when it 
 
 should be convened in the autumn. That Parliament was 
 
 -*n ~ 
 
 restiofee44irpewer: the NationajjVssembly which had made 
 the Revolution was to bedissolxed. This second body was 
 
 * "*- ___ v 
 
 to do no more than elaborate Jhfi^dfibnls nf laws; it was 
 called, and remains to history, " The Legist Hvp " 
 
 By an ironical accident, this very Parliament of one year, 
 from which the great and by this time well-known^leaders 
 of the early Revolutionary movement were specifically 
 excluded (for no man might sit in it who had sat in the 
 
404 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 National Assembly) had thrust upon it the duty or the burden 
 of the Great War. Such was the Revolutionary time and air, 
 that from anywhere genius sprang; and through these men 
 of the Legislative so many of them young, nearly all of 
 them unknown chosen only to sit in an ephemeral 
 assembly for a year there blew such inspiration as Plato 
 thought to blow through poets, but which, in times of social 
 creation blows through rhetoricians too. Chief among these 
 was the group of men from the South who were later called 
 the ffironde. It was their business to demand and to with- 
 stand the first assault of Europe, and indeed before the 
 Parliament met at all, it was certain that the assault would 
 come, for in the August of 1791, in the midst of the reaction 
 which overshadowed Paris, and while the principal leaders 
 of the Revolution were exiled or in hiding, there was drawn 
 up that compact between the German monarchs \vhich is 
 called the Declaration of Pillnitz. 
 
 This document has too often been put forward as an 
 example of the hesitation and moderation of the Kings. 
 Such a view of it is an academic reaction from the 
 old, popular, and vague but in the main just conception that 
 privilege made deliberate war upon the Revolution: a 
 conception which often took Pillnitz for the inception of 
 that counter- crusade. 
 
 The matter can be presented quite simply to the reader: 
 The Emperor, Marie Antoinette's brother, whom we have 
 seen so eager, had the flight to Varennes succeeded, to move 
 his armies at once, combined at Pillnitz with the King of 
 Prussia in an appeal to all monarchical governments that 
 they should use such strength as might give back to the King 
 of France his old arbitrary power, and re-establish him 
 therein. The two allies swear publicly that they will use 
 
THE WAR 405 
 
 all necessary force, when such an appeal bears fruit, to 
 support this universal assault upon the French people, and 
 meanwhile they will direct their troops to the best striking 
 points from which the military action of that people may 
 he paralysed. 
 
 There is the Declaration of Pillnitz in a few words; and 
 while one partisan may insist upon its caution or nullity, 
 another upon its insolence and provocation, all must agree 
 who read history quietly and without a brief, that it was a 
 violent and public declaration of hostile intention as it was 
 also the first definite public act from which hostilities sprang. 
 
 The Parliament met in September. Its proposed second- 
 ary value soon proved to be primary; the splendid definition, 
 rapidity and precision of the National Assembly was well 
 reflected among these younger and less tried men : but much 
 more powerful than Parliament was the growing exaltation 
 of the populace. 
 
 That had many roots: the oblivion of the French (after 
 forty years) of what war might mean, the impatient passion 
 for any solution which all feel during a moment of strain, 
 most of all the moral certitude (and how well founded !) that 
 if the enemy delayed they delayed only for their own purpose, 
 and that war must certainly come all these pressed to the 
 final issue: the noise of the cataract could already be heard. 
 
 As to the acceptation of the Constitution by the royal 
 family, their reluctance, . the Queen's anger, it but little 
 concerns the story of her fate. At bottom she and Louis 
 also were willing enough by this time to sign anything and 
 to swear anything. The war must come, and the war would 
 solve all. The Queen herself, who was now, as I have 
 shown, in the thick of the intrigue, put it simply enough to 
 the man she most loved, to Fersen^ in a note that has been 
 
406 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 preserved and which she wrote before the end of September. 
 "It would have been more noble to refuse ^the_Constitu- 
 tion) . . . it is essential to accept_(it), in order to 
 ^cTestrov anv suspicion that we ai_iioL-aduiiiLin goo3~Taith. : 
 
 >o far as concerns that unhappy and devoted life, one 
 incident deserves a very special mention. Twice in the 
 autumn there had been talk of yet another flight: the plan 
 was not impossible, but it had been dropped, partly because 
 the King might have had to fly alone, partly because the 
 Queen was confident that a show of strength and a vigorous 
 menace upon the frontier would be enough to change all. 
 In the new year the proposal for their escape took on a more 
 serious form, and Fersen reappeared for the last time, and 
 for the last time saw the Queen. 
 
 It was upon Saturday the llth of February, 1792, that he 
 started upon that perilous journey, and it was his business 
 to discuss in detail and by word of mouth whether escape 
 was still possible. Upon Monday, the 13th, at evening, he 
 passed the barrier of Paris. He saw the Queen before he 
 slept, and next day at midnight spoke secretly to her and to 
 her husband together. He carefully noted before them the 
 routes that might be followed: the method of escape: per- 
 haps (as had appeared in several plans) the string of forests 
 that run up from Paris north-eastward toward the marches 
 of Flanders. 
 
 The King and the Queen wasted no little time in that mid- 
 night hurried parley in reproaches against the ingratitude 
 of all, and in bewailing their isolation. The next day Fer- 
 sen left with nothing done. He returned indeed to Paris 
 four days l&ter, but he dared not enter the palace. The 
 whole thing was futile and every plan had broken down. 
 
 He never saw her again. 
 
THE WAR 407 
 
 A fortnight later he wrote his King, in Sweden, detailing 
 all that they had told him. 
 
 Before he could reply or act, the King of Sweden had been 
 shot in a masked ball at Stockholm, and some days later, as 
 the reader knows, he had died. 
 
 The Declaration of War had not only broken the original 
 plan of the Queen; it had changed from a general and partly 
 passive to a particular and active terror the life of Paris 
 around her. Nothing had yet appeared to show as a reality 
 what all knew in theory, the extreme peril of the nation, the 
 military certitude inspiring the Allies, the despair increasing 
 among what was left of the French Regulars. There had 
 indeed been desertions immediately following the declaration 
 of war, especially desertions of the German mercenaries, in 
 bulk. A skirmish, or rather a panic upon the frontier, had 
 also given evidence of the rot in the jumble of armed men 
 whom the Revolution could summon. The first tiny action 
 it was hardly an action at all had seen mutinies and the 
 massacre of officers. Paris once more rose and fermented, 
 and there was a surging around the walls of the palace. 
 The enemy had not yet crossed the frontier; but in the short 
 breathing-space before he should appear, and while the 
 royal family were holding a fortress, as it were, for their 
 own security until that enemy should arrive, Parliament 
 put as a sort of ultimatum to the King a demand for th 
 execution of two decrees : one against the Clergy who woul 
 not subscribe to the Civic Oath; a second in favour of t 
 formation of a camp of 20,000 volunteers under the wal 
 of Paris. 
 
 The error of uniting in onejg^uisition two such diverse 
 
408 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 posterity can recognise. For the men of the time 
 there was a plain link between either demand, for the 
 recalcitrant Clergy seemed to them nothing more than anti- 
 nationalists, and it seemed to them that nothing but an 
 anti-national desire for the occupation of Paris by the 
 foreigner could make the King hesitate to permit the forma- 
 tion of the camp of volunteers. 
 
 It was upon the 19th of June that the King published his 
 veto, against both these bills or projects of the Parliament, 
 behind w r hich lay the violent opinion of active Paris. 1 
 
 What follows is well known. Paris rose, and rising 
 poured into the palace. It was the 20th. 
 
 The 20th of June: the anniversary of the flight: the 
 summer solstice fatal to the Bourbons. 
 
 It has been said that the rising^ was artificial and 
 arranged. The same nonsense is talked of the St. Bartholo- 
 mew. No one who has seen such things can believe them 
 artificial. They are corporate things. There was little 
 violence, though there were many arms among those thou- 
 sands upon thousands; and as they poured through the 
 rooms, which opened one into the other like a gallery, they 
 were not much more (save for their rough clothes and their 
 arms) than the same populace which had demanded for 
 generation after generation, and had obtained, the right to 
 see, to visit, to touch their public King. 
 
 The Court had forgotten the popular conception of the 
 Monarchy; but the.^ogulace necessariljjDreserves a longer 
 memory than the rich. The thing was a menace, upon the 
 whole not ill-humoured: a violent recollection that the King 
 was the servant of the common weal, and its symbol, some- 
 thing to be handled, met, and perhaps ordered. The mob, 
 
 1 And what was more significative, the whole of the little wealthy reactionary minority was opposed to the 
 projects, and signed a petition in proof of its opposition. 
 
THE WAR 409 
 
 in whom atheists can see no more than a number of poor 
 men, cried out its significant cries, against " Mr. and Mrs. 
 Veto," making a popular jest of this public power. But 
 in those moments when one jest perhaps might have put the 
 King at the head of popular emotion again, he and his wife 
 remained no more than what the decline of the Monarchy 
 had made them; individuals in peril, and courageous; not 
 the Nation incarnate. 
 
 If any Angel had for its function the preservation of the 
 French Crown and Nation, that Angel, watching such a gulf 
 between the people and the Monarchy, must have despaired 
 of the latter's hope and of the former's survival: neverthe- 
 less, despite that divorce, the French people after grievous 
 wounds have survived. 
 
 The last group which that roaring torrent of the rabble 
 saw was the Queen and her children, her friends, especially 
 Madame de Lamballe and the governess, the Duchess of 
 Tourzel, a soldier or two, a minister and one or two others, 
 crowded in the recess of a window behind a great table which 
 had been pushed into the embrasure to defend them. The 
 little heir to that Monarchy which had failed to understand 
 sat on the table, very much afraid, and the Queen put on 
 his head with loathing the red cap of liberty which the mob 
 demanded. The day was sweating with heat, the cap 
 was thick and dirty, and Santerre, who was there, passing 
 them forward by bands in front of the table, a popular leader 
 of the crowd, seems to have ordered that it should be 
 removed. It was already nearly dark; it was half -past 
 eight before that violent but not tragic tumult had sub- 
 sided, and before the last of the street people went back out 
 
410 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 of the palace, which they thought rightly a public thing, on 
 to the public paving which at least was still certainly theirs. 
 
 Outside, during all that night, all the talk was of the war. 
 
 When would the invaders cross the frontier and when 
 would the first shock come ? 
 
 
XVI 
 THE FALL OF THE PALACE 
 
 FROM HALF-PAST EIGHT IN THE EVENING OF THE 20rn JUNE, 1792, 
 TO EIGHT IN THE MORNING OF THE lOra AUGUST, 1792 
 
 THE noisy, good-natured, and very dangerous mob 
 had gone at last; their final stragglers, gazing, 
 curious and tired, at the pictures and the gilding (the 
 trappings of their Public King in his great Public Palace), 
 had wandered out. A few steps on the wide stone stairs of 
 the central pavilion were still heard lazily descending. 
 The dishevelled family was at rest. 
 
 A little group of Deputies remained behind, and talked 
 in low and careful voices to the King and Queen prin- 
 cipally to the Queen, for she was voluble. She was suave, 
 though somewhat garrulously suave. "Would not some 
 of these gentlemen come and see her put the Dauphin 
 to bed?" A familiar appeal made by the very wealthy to 
 the middle class rarely fails. They followed respectfully and 
 a little awkwardly to where, in a small bed out of her room, 
 the child slept. She had him ready for bed in a few moments ; 
 then she said to him smiling: 
 
 "Tell the gentlemen you love the Nation, darling." 
 
 The drowsy child repeated mechanically, "I love the 
 Nation." 
 
 The Middle Class were enchanted. She laid him down, 
 doubtless with every maternal charm; she turned to go 
 before them, certainly with an exaggeration of that excessive 
 
 411 
 
412 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 carriage which had delighted so many foreigners and depen- 
 dants for now twenty years and had done much to lose her 
 the respect of her French equals at the Court. The select 
 committee of the Middle Class came after. 
 
 "See what damage they have done: look at these doors!" 
 The Deputies stooped solemnly to examine the broken panels 
 and the hinges torn from their screws, the oak splinters 
 showing dark against the white paint and the gold. They 
 admitted serious damage they regretted it. 
 
 "Who is the proper authority to take note of this?" 
 They looked at one another; then one of them, remembering 
 the Constitution, Liberty and the rest of it, said: 
 
 "Nowadays the proper authority before which to bring 
 such misdemeanours is a Justice of the Peace." 
 
 "Very w T ell, then," she replied sharply, "send for one." 
 
 A servant was despatched and returned with a Justice 
 of the Peace. He gravely took written notes of all : 
 
 "Item: the lower left panel broken; 
 
 "Item: the upper left panel cracked; 
 
 "Item: the lower right hinge of the door torn off, and the 
 post splintered." 
 
 All was done in order, and they returned to find the King. 
 
 The King was annoyed. They noticed him grumbling 
 and moving his lips and teeth. He was even a little excited, 
 but his training in names and faces, which is the acquired 
 talent of high functionaries, served him well. He spoke 
 with authority, knowing each of them and addressing 
 them in turn, and after speaking of the mob he particularly 
 complained that roughs climbed the palings of the Tuileries 
 gardens and disturbed his privacy. The Queen interrupted 
 from time to time to reproach them. "Why had they not 
 prevented the procession of the mob through the palace ? 
 
THE FALL OF THE PALACE 413 
 
 Why, at least, had they rot given warning? The Depart- 
 ment had done its duty! Why not they?" The King 
 continued in another tone, till, at last, some of them coming 
 nearer home asked him for news of the armies. His dignity 
 as the Executive (which he still was) forbade him any full 
 replies: he had good news, very good news. . . . He 
 could tell them no more. 
 
 They suspected [we know] that there was no news at 
 all ... only a few packed, ill-ordered garrisons awaiting 
 the attack; a long line in the field all the way from 
 Belfort to sea, numbering but 80,000 men, and half of 
 that an ill-clothed helter-skelter of broken companies: 
 divided counsel, no plan, and, a few marches east, that slow 
 concentration of the allies upon Coblenz which now drew to 
 its close. 
 
 So the Deputies left them : the sky was still full of light on 
 this slowest night of the year, and Paris after the uproar of 
 that bacchanalian Wednesday, the 20th of June, was silent. 
 
 Meanwhile the South had risen. 
 
 On that same Wednesday evening messengers from 
 Montpellier had reached Marseilles; on Friday they were 
 feasted, and when the banquet was over, one of the Mont- 
 pellier men, Mireur, with a voice of bronze, rose to sing them 
 a new song. It had come from the frontier, he said ; as for 
 the air he did not know whence it was, but he thought 
 (wrongly) from the opera "Sargines." He sang it, and the 
 men that gathered outside the open windows to hear upon 
 that summer evening, the guests within, and soon all the 
 city, were swept by the MARSEILLAISE. 
 
 The next day the Municipality of Marseilles met, 
 
414 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 determined upon spontaneous action in company with all 
 the South : they decreed the raising of a volunteer battalion 
 in spite of the Crown ; the next, the Sunday, when all were 
 abroad and could read, the walls were placarded with the 
 appeal to join. Monday and Tuesday the names poured in : 
 a committee was chosen to pick only the best in character 
 and health. Its work was at once accomplished; within 
 twenty-four hours five hundred had been so chosen out of 
 the throng of volunteers; within forty-eight they had been 
 enrolled, drilled for hours, and separated by companies 
 under officers of their choice. Three days of rapid organisa- 
 tion and continued drilling followed: the route was traced, 
 a time-table drawn up, the expenses estimated and provided. 
 A section of guns (harnessed to men) with its caisson was 
 drafted ; the stores and baggage were concentrated too. Upon 
 Monday, the 2nd of July, at nightfall, a week after the first 
 appeal, through a crowd of all the city that pressed on every 
 side, they marched out by the northern gate of Marseilles 
 singing their song. Next morning, just as the arid eastern 
 hills began to show against the beginnings of the dawn, 
 they entered Aix and had accomplished the first stage of 
 their advance. "The Executive" - that is, the Crown - 
 had warned every authority to disperse, thejn and all such 
 others, but the wind on Paris was from the South, and they 
 and their song could not be hindered. 
 
 Meanwhile, in the German town of Frankfort, there 
 hummed a continually increasing crowd : the Emperor was to 
 be crowned. Here, therefore, were all those who had a 
 business with Austria, and here was, among others, a Swiss 
 Huguenot, Ma ] 1 et jjnPan . upon whom more than upon any 
 
THE FALL OF THE PALACE 415 
 
 other in that town the King of France and the Queen in her 
 extremity depended. He was a journalist, very keen about 
 accounts and probity in small money matters, of the bour- 
 geoisie, sedate and perpetually attempting to understand 
 the French people, now from this side, now from that: 
 they interested him hugely. His work, however, was not to 
 pursue this fascinating study, but to save the persons of the 
 royal family he served : in this task he showed that same 
 discipline and devotion which his compatriots were later to 
 show under arms. He bore as his chief principles, as his last 
 instructions, two orders: one order to keep the farce of thq 
 varjgoing, and never to let it be hinted publicly or breathed 
 that there was collusion between those who sent him and the, 
 
 invading Austrian_]3ower" The other order was thi^ 
 "produce a manifesto to be signed from the camp of the i 
 ing army, and to strike, as it was hoped, blind terror into ihe 
 leaders of the NationajjiuEEement : the time had come (so it 
 was imagined at the Tuileries) to threaten the worst and so 
 
 tame Paris. 
 
 * . 
 
 He took his journey (but was scrupulous to give an exact 
 account), left his family in Paris, passed through Geneva, 
 his home, and now, by the end of June, was here at Frankfort. 
 
 He had chosen his centre well, for upon Frankfort con- 
 verged all news, and from Frankfort went out ill orders: 
 orders to Coblenz whence the armies were to march to the 
 relief of the Tuileries; news from Brussels, which was of 
 the first moment, for here Mercy d'Argenteau, the Mpert 
 upon France, was ready every day to advise; here was the 
 danger of attack from France most felt, and here, most 
 central of all, was Fersen. 
 
 Fersen heard regularly from Paris, wrote as regularly. 
 Since the death of the King of Sweden his official position 
 
 
416 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 had been less, but those whose business it was to discover 
 truth, the diplomats, knew that the last and most intimate 
 thought of the royal family was to be reached through that 
 channel alone. Austria and Prussia, Frankfort, that is, 
 hardly acted upon his advice as to war (and in his diary he 
 bitterly reproaches them for their neglect) , but they sucked 
 his knowledge and to-day it is through him that we know, 
 somewhat late, the principal truths upon those last few weeks 
 of the French Monarchy. 
 
 What did the Court of the Tuileries demand, and what 
 will was behind it in so demanding ? 
 
 Mallet du Pan was there at Frankfort with no credentials 
 but a sheet of note-paper, and written on the top of it in 
 Louis' hand two lines of writing unsigned. " The person 
 who shall present this note knows my intentions; entire 
 confidence may be put in what he says." What instructions 
 had he ? 
 
 Fersen was stationed at Brussels with an organised letter- 
 service between the Tuileries and himself, written in secret 
 ink, full, confidential and direct. All that he told Mercy 
 or another went to Frankfort. What message was thus 
 continually conveyed ? 
 
 The demandjTom thft-Tnifcrifts was an urgent demand 
 for immediate invasion, and forerunning it, a drastic pro- 
 clamation from the armed force at Coblenz : the will which 
 inspired that demand was the TvjU-o 
 
 A mn in flight could cover the distance from Paris to 
 Brussels in two days; an urgent runner in three. Nor- 
 mally the courier with his post-bag arrived on the morning 
 of the fourth day. From Brussels to Frankfort worse roads, 
 varying frontiers, and the German lethargy between them 
 compelled news to a delay of close upon a week. 
 
THE FALL OF THE PALACE 417 
 
 The ferment in Paris was rising; the Federals of the 
 South were on the second day's march northward when, 
 in the middle of the first week of July, the Queen, whose 
 policy, or rather passion, could bear no more delay, wrote 
 to Mercy and to Fersen separately two letters of great weight. 
 These letters have never yet been given their due. The 
 student should note them closely if he is to understand all 
 that followed. 
 
 The originals have, perhaps, not come down to us, but 
 either man, Fersen or Mercy, noted their intents, and we 
 thus know them. 
 
 These letters Lasserez brought into Brussels, riding on the 
 morning of Sunday, the 8th of July, and on the next day 
 Mercy and Fersen, meeting, consulted on their purport. 
 The Queen, with whom the project of such an engine was 
 familiar, now definitely demanded a separate and nominal 
 threat against the town of Paris, and a menace that the whole 
 pity should be jigld hostage by the invading German 
 armies against the safety TJFlier husband, herself and her 
 child. This clause her judgment of the French character 
 assured her to be efficacious ; this clause she insisted should 
 bemadded to the Manifesto which was even now preparing. 
 
 It was upon July the^ 9th~ I say, that the two men met 
 and consulted upon the Queen's orders: that day they sent 
 off command or counsel to the Rhine. 
 
 On the 14th, while, in that same Paris, Louis was once 
 more swearing to the Constitution upon the Champ de Mars, 
 while hour for hour, far off on the Rhone a priest receiving 
 the Marseillaise Battalion was adding his famous verse 
 "of the Children" 1 to their famous hymn, in Frankfort the 
 last of the Emperors was receiving with incredible 
 
 1 " Nous entrerous dans la Carriere," &c., the best verse and the only poetry of the lot. 
 
418 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 magnificence the Crown of the Empire. The note 
 inspired by Marie Antoinette was at the gates of his town. 
 
 It entered: Mallet saw it. "Paris is to be destroyed by 
 fire and the sword if the royal family are harmed": it was 
 approved. From Frankfort it went back as a new clause 
 to Coblenz; there it was incorporated in the Manifesto 
 and signed. Immediately, the ink barely dry, it was pub- 
 lished (upon the 25th of July) to the world, above the sig- 
 nature of the Duke of Brunswick and in the name of that 
 perfect and mechanical army which Prussia in especial could 
 move with the precision of a physical law upon the capital 
 that phrase had doomed. 
 
 This was the origin of that famous Clause VIIL which 
 ordered, if the Tuileries were forced, nay, if submission to 
 the Royal Family was not at once made, that feussi& 
 and Austria would take "anjmforgettable^yengeance,'' 
 that Paris should be given up "to military execution and 
 subversion, and the guilty rebels to the death they deserve.," 
 
 Such was Marie Antoinette's one piece of formulated 
 policy the first in which she had been able to act as clearly 
 as she saw; it was also (her last interference in political 
 affairs. It had been lit by her hand, this match that fired 
 the hesitating war: it had run its train through Brussels to 
 Frankfort and back to Coblenz, lingering in no one place 
 for a full day: now it had touched powder. Three days 
 later the Manifesto was spoken of in Chalons; secret copies 
 were in print, the King received it. 
 
 All Paris knew it, though not yet officially, when upon 
 the evening of Sunday, the 29th of July, the dusty 
 500 of Marseilles with their guns, crossing the bridge at 
 Charenton, saw the distant towers of Notre Dame above 
 the roofs of Paris and reached their goal. 
 
THE FALL OF THE PALACE 419 
 
 Let soldiers consider the nature of this exploit, and politi- 
 cians consider what that civilisation is whose comprehension 
 I have shown throughout these pages to have so vainly 
 fatigued so many aliens. 
 
 The French of Marseilles had trained for but three days. 
 They had left the Mediterranean in the height of a torrid 
 summer; their organisation was self-made, their officers 
 self-chosen, their discipline self-imposed. They had cov- 
 ered five hundred miles of route, dragging their cannon, 
 at the rate of precisely eighteen miles a day; they planked 
 across the bridge at this the end of their advance, solidly, 
 in formation, still singing their song, and at the roll-call 
 every name was answered. . . . Their small numbers 
 have made them appear to some historians insignificant 
 (or a legend), to others rather a symbol of the military 
 power in the populace which was to sack the palace than the 
 attack itself, but they were more; they were, as tradition 
 justly represents them, the framework of the force that 
 decided the critical day of the Revolution, as their song was 
 its soul. 
 
 They marched in next morning by the St. Antoine Gate, 
 with their drums and colours before them, the crowds of the 
 suburbs blackening the site on which the Bastille had stood ; 
 and half Paris, as it were, going out to meet them. They 
 passed over to the Island, formed at the Mairie where Petion 
 the Mayor greeted them; re-crossed the river (followed by the 
 crowd) and took their places in the barracks assigned to 
 them, upon a corner of what is now the Boulevard des 
 Italiens ; ^fromjliateyenirig the struggle between the City and 
 
 to follow was but a manoeuvring for position on either side, 
 that of the populace and of the Tuileries. 
 
420 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 This last had now for long been steadily arming and 
 was already strong. The King, the executive, held the 
 arsenals, the regular army and a good half, even, of the auton- 
 omous Militia. What was of more importance, the Crown 
 and its advisers could rely not only upon the machinery 
 but upon the devotion of the one well-disciplined corps which 
 had not gone to the front: the JWly-ffliarH. These excel- 
 lent mercenaries, nearly all Swiss by birth and nearly all 
 ignorant of the French language, were precisely such 
 material, human for courage and mechanical for obedience, 
 as should overcome almost any proportion of civilians 
 especially such as might be spoilt by playing at soldiers. 
 A recent law passed by the Legislative Assembly forbade 
 their presence in Paris. The "Executive" parried such 
 mere word of the "Legislative" by posting them in suburbs 
 between which and the palace were only woods and fields. 
 When danger was imminent, in the last hours of the truce, 
 they were marched in and occupied the Tuileries, law or 
 no law. 
 
 to the strengtk^f the King's position 
 
 against the populace are urged (Napoleon, no mean judge, 
 and an eye-witness, thought it the stronger, and his estimate 
 of the King's forces brings them to about 6,000 men); 
 these are, first, that uo building pan be held in the face of 
 artillery, for the popular force had guns ; secondly, that it 
 was but defensive, and that the assault, though repulsed, might 
 return. The first of these is based on a misconception of the 
 terrain and supply, the second upon a general ignorance 
 of arms. 
 
 For the first : there was no position whence artillery, even 
 were it available in time, could be used against the long walls 
 of the palace, ayQ by passing through narrow streets easy 
 
THE FALL OF THE PALACE 
 
 421 
 
 for infantry to defend, and as a fact the guns were not avail- 
 able to the populace either in sufficient amount or (what is of 
 more importance) with sufficient training and supply. 
 Guns, popularly manned and ill supplied, emplaced in the 
 labyrinth which flanked the palace could be captured (and 
 in fact were captured) by the trained infantry defending it. 
 The short range alone would make certain the destruction 
 of their teams by sharp-shooting from the upper windows. 
 
 The second objection a reply to which shows how 
 considerable were the King's stake and chances is met 
 by the military consideration that nothing more needs a 
 special organisation and training than a successful rally. 
 An assault, if it is of any consequence, must be pressed hard; 
 if it is fully repulsed, its head and energy are crushed at their 
 highest vigour ; the defeat is more crushing than that of a 
 defensive which retires in time. This is generally true of 
 soldiers in the field. It is always true of civilians. The 
 doubts and defections that accompany a civil war, the con- 
 version of the great body of cowards and the still larger 
 majority of indifferent men, the claims of regular domestic 
 life, the absence of a commissariat, the near presence of 
 women and children, the contrast which the return of quiet 
 after the blow presents to the pain and terror of a renewed 
 struggle, make it, as it were, impossible for a defeated mob 
 to return, after an interval, against the regular force which 
 has repelled it; moreover, the regulars, once victorious, can 
 pursue, scatter, and destroy the unorganised mass, while 
 its leaders are arrested and judged ; jTnrJf? fVi^rp 
 
 history of a popular rising which, when it has 
 
422 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 calculation of victory was reasonable, and their chances of 
 the best when the defence of the palace was organised in 
 these first days of August. It was calculated that the 
 populace even with artillery could do little against the 
 palace: that the trained men would crush the mob once 
 and for all. Had that defence succeeded, the advent of the 
 foreigner, perhaps allied with one of the royal armies, was 
 secure. That the defence qfjthg^jpalacp failed was due 
 partly to the lR^k^fJh^jP n g pn ^ f y in fV> ^ gajrisnngj more to 
 a 1aYJg^nfjrmf:ecl JeaHprsVijpj but most of all to the unex- 
 pected, incalculable and hitherto unequalled tenacity and 
 determination of the insurgents. 
 
 With every day the tension increased. The Federation 
 delegates who had come from all over France to the Feast 
 of the 14th of July, many of whom lingered in the city, 
 clashed in the streets with courtiers, and with those who, 
 whether by temperament or service, were still supporters 
 of the Crown. 
 
 Just when the Marseillais w r ere entering Paris, Brunswick 
 had broken camp and the marg^ of jjig Alljps into TWnpp 
 had begun. Less than a hundred miles of flat road along 
 ttefMoselle valley separated Brunswick from the outposts 
 of the defence: Paris itself was hardly further from him 
 than is York from London. Rapidity would put the first 
 garrisons of the frontier into his hands within a week 
 and even the tardiness which the Prussian calculation and 
 the Prussian confidence involve, could hardly (it was thought) 
 delay for a fortnight the news that the frontier was passed. 
 
 In the passionate quarrel the enemy's character of invader 
 was forgotten. Not only to the Court but to many who 
 could now remember nothing but the ancient tradition 
 of the Monarchy, the enemy seemed a saviour. Bands parad^ 
 
THE FALL OF THE PALACE 423 
 
 ing the pavement by night threatened their fellow-citizens 
 with Brunswick, songs threatening vengeance against the 
 revolutionaries were heard abroad after carousals, and a 
 continuous series of petty street fights, increasing in gravity, 
 enlivened the attention of either side. 
 
 Hardly were the Marseillais in Paris, for instance, when, 
 that same evening of their arrival, after a banquet, a violent 
 quarrel between them and a body of armed royalists had 
 broken out. They carried their side-arms only, but blood 
 was shed, and as the victims upon the defeated side of this 
 brawl were carried to the Guard-room in the palace, the 
 Queen, seeing blood, thought that the final struggle had 
 begun. She was relieved to see the King go down amongst 
 the wounded, staunching the blood of one with his hand- 
 kerchief. Her women, fearing what she had feared, began 
 crying each for one of hers. "Is my husband wounded?" 
 "Is mine?" She could not forbear from one of those 
 insults which had lost her the affection of so many, and from 
 one of those reflections which proved how little she conceived 
 the French nobility. "Ladies," she said to the noblewomen 
 about her, "your husbands were not there." She had no 
 further opportunity to revile them: it was perhaps the last 
 expression of her contempt for a people whom she believed 
 to have grown incapable. 
 
 Either side continued to arm. The heat, growing steadily 
 in intensity, had bred by the 3rd of August a very thunder- 
 ous calm, when the King announced to the Assembly the 
 terms f Fmriffwj^V's Maflifrg*^ j^ was received in silence, 
 and those who least knew and know the city thought and still 
 think that the news was met with indifference. But during 
 that night, while a furious storm struck Paris time and time 
 again with lightning, one workman's suburb, St. Marcel, sent 
 
424 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 word to another, St. Antoine: "If we march to the palace, 
 will you ?" In the midst of the thunder, messengers returned 
 saying: "We will!" And in the night as they went and 
 came, they passed men bearing the dead whom the lightning 
 had struck and killed. Very late and before the growling of 
 the thunder had ceased, certain of the Marseillais must 
 go to the walls of the palace and shout the chorus of 
 their song. 
 
 Next day they asked for ball-cartridge. Sergent, the 
 official guardian of the Militia ammunition-reserve, had 
 been struck in the face when he had gone, as his duty com- 
 pelled him, to the palace a fortnight before; he had been 
 struck because his politics were known. Should the insur- 
 rection fail, his signature for rebel ammunition would be 
 his death warrant. Nevertheless, remembering that 
 blow, he signed; and the arsenal served out ten rounds 
 a man to the Battalion of Marseilles. They crossed the 
 river so armed, and were received at the Cordeliers, 1 which 
 was Danton's fief, and Danton restrained them till such 
 poor and hasty organisation as could be undertaken should 
 be effected. It was the end of the week which had seen 
 their entry into Paris, and nothing had been done. The 
 Tuileries continued to arm, the populace to convene, and 
 between the combatants the Parliament daily lost its power 
 and grew bewildered. 
 
 On Sunday, at Mass, always a public occasion in the 
 palace, men passed and re-passed each other in the gallery, 
 and there were quarrels. This also was the last time in 
 which the Monarchy was treated as a general thing with 
 the next morning its isolation began. On Monday the King 
 was begged to fly, at least to Compiegne: the road was 
 
 Now the Clinical Museum opposite the faculty of Medicine in the University. 
 
THE FALL OF THE PALACE 425 
 
 guarded and it was an easy ride if he went alone round by 
 Poissy and the north. He refused. On Tuesday the last 
 preparations were made in the suburban garrisons of the 
 Crown soldiers. On \Yednesday, the 8th, in the morning, 
 the Swiss Guard was warned that on the morrow before dawn 
 it must be accoutred. 
 
 The Parliament, more and more bewildered, vacillated and 
 was hardly heard as the two antagonists rose from their 
 places to fight. The deputies refused all action. It had 
 been proposed to them to condemn La Fayette for a hurried 
 journey he had taken to Paris after the last insurrection 
 to defend the King. They had refused by a very great 
 majority. Now, on this 9th of August, the fatal eve of 
 the struggle, they debated an academic point whether 
 the King should abdicate or no; they adjourned it to dine 
 . . . and after dinner they did not meet. 
 
 But all the while upon that Thursday evening, troops 
 were afoot along the Rueil road; the doors of the Palace 
 were open to men who entered one by one, armed and were 
 stationed; the sound of carpenters was heard in the Long 
 Gallery of the Louvre, sawing the planking of the floors, by 
 night, to make a gap between the Louvre and the Tuileries ;* 
 mounted^ police rode up in squads to the courtyard and 
 took their stations; there was also the rumbling of waggons. 
 In the sections south of the river and eastwards St. Antoine 
 and St. Marcel were moving; wherever the people had 
 strained at the leash too long, the popular assembles sat in 
 their close halls choosing the men who should take the 
 Guildhall by right of the City's decision and in spite of the 
 law, and proclaim the insurrection. 
 
 The last of the day declined and the night came, but 
 
 The gap was six feet broad. Too narrow, for the insurgents next day leaped it and bridged it, and by 
 that entry forced the Tuileries. 
 
426 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 the unnatural heat would not decline, and the open windows 
 all about, the lights shining from them, and the vigil which 
 so many kept, gave the effect of an illumination. 
 
 That night, short and stifling as it was, was drowsy; a 
 necessity for sleep oppressed the city. Danton himself, 
 in the thick of the rising, attempted a moment of repose; 
 he had hardly lain down when he was roused again. The 
 watchers in the palace felt midnight upon them and would 
 have slept. The barrack-beds which filled the attics in their 
 regular lines were strewn with men; the gentry who had 
 volunteered, certain also of the Militia, lay silent in the 
 darkness, their muskets slung beside them, their large allow- 
 ance of cartridges served. Below in the great rooms and on 
 the stairways groups of mixed soldiery lay huddled, servants 
 armed, and policemen: every kind of man. The Regulars 
 who formed the core of this force, the Swiss, lounged in their 
 bare guard-room or sat silent upon the stone benches of the 
 yard ; some few files of them stood at ease upon the stairs of 
 the lesser hall. 
 
 Upon this silence there crashed at about a quarter to one 
 o'clock the noise of cannon. The report was hard and close 
 at hand it came from the Pont Neuf at the further end of 
 the Louvre, and the united fabric of the long walls trembled 
 to it; the heavy pictures and the mirrors shook. The six 
 thousand who garrisoned the Tuileries expected an imme- 
 diate advance of the insurrection : for a moment the whole 
 palace was roused. Those battalions of Militia which had 
 been camped in the garden for a reserve began to file in by 
 the central doors: the cavalry mounted to take up their 
 stations at the narrow issues of the Louvre, and everywhere 
 
THE FALL OF THE PALACE 427 
 
 the lights moving before the windows of the vast fa9ade 
 showed the ordering of men. 
 
 This general stir had hardly arisen when it was perceived 
 that this first shot had been but a signal, for to the call of 
 that cannon no other succeeded, but almost immediately 
 the steeples of the city trembled to the first notes of bells. 
 
 The deep and heavy bells, that had for centuries raised the 
 alarm of invasion or of fire, began to boom just east of the 
 University; they were answered by the peal of St. Anthony 
 over the river, by the tocsins of St. John and St. Gervase; 
 St. Laurence rang, and southward upon the night boomed 
 the huge tower of the Abbey, which had heard the same 
 sound nine hundred years before, when the dust of the 
 Barbarian march hung over Enghien, and smoke went up 
 from burning farms all down the Seine. The Cathedral 
 followed: thenceforward no one could hear the striking of 
 the hours, for the still air of the night pulsed everywhere 
 with the riot of the bells. Two sounds alone could pierce 
 the clamour: the high bugle-call to which the French still 
 mobilise, and the sullen fury of the drums. The horses, 
 therefore, of the defenders in the courts of the palace, the 
 continual clattering of their hoofs upon the paving, the 
 clink of metal as the lines were formed, the tramp of the 
 reinforcements arriving all the movement of the six thou- 
 sand who gathered to support the Crown, was set to this 
 music, and the air they breathed was full of the noise of the 
 bells. 
 
 Yet for some hours after the posts had been taken the 
 advent of the rebels was expected in vain. Paris seemed 
 empty, or full only of this increasing and ominous sound. 
 Of men there was no trace. The stone courtyards before 
 the palace and the streets that led to the Square of the 
 
428 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 Carrousel were silent. They lay open and deserted under 
 the sky, and so remained even when the first stars paled 
 and when there was already a hint of dawn. A doubt rose 
 among the Royalists, first whispered, then openly spoken, 
 and leading at last to jests: the insurrection had missed 
 fire; the bells had failed. No voice of the insurgents had 
 been heard, nor had any rider brought news of their 
 approach, when the last of the stars had gone and the 
 Militia companies, still remaining as a reserve in the western 
 gardens, saw the day rise gorgeously beyond the palace they 
 were to defend. 
 
 In a small room whose window looked toward the east, 
 the Queen, with some few of her women, waited for the 
 day. The ceiling was low, and its air of privacy gave some 
 little respite from the strain of the eve and of the morrow. 
 She lay upon a sofa, but she could not sleep; she spoke but 
 rarely and that in low tones, and vaguely watched the night. 
 With the first grey of the morning she rose, unrested, and 
 bade them dress her boy, the child who alone in that great 
 house had slept throughout the alarms. Then, under the 
 growing light, she saw the Princess Elizabeth near her, who 
 called her and took her to a window whence she might watch 
 the rising of the sun. They stood together beside the open 
 casement gazing at the city in silence. 
 
 Early as was the hour (it was but little past four) the 
 tone of the air already promised a blinding summer's day. 
 The end of darkness had lifted no mist from the gardens. 
 The last heats of yesterday blended with the new warmth 
 of the sunrise that stretched bright red across the far sub- 
 urbs where the populace stood to arms; behind the con- 
 fused high roofs and spires of their capital the two Princesses 
 saw advancing at last great beams of power and, enflaming 
 
THE FALL OF THE PALACE 429 
 
 the city, an awful daybreak. The younger woman was 
 afraid and spoke her thought, saying that it looked like 
 some great disaster, a burning spread before them. 
 
 Now that it was broad day the vigour of the Queen 
 returned. She became again the will of the defence, and 
 its leader if it had a leader. She had not expected 
 defeat even in the worst silences of the night; with the new 
 day she was confident of success. 
 
 The commander of the Paris Militia, one Mandat, who 
 had lately come by rote to that function, she knew to be 
 sound. He had garrisoned the bridge-head by which alone 
 the transpontine mob could cross the river to the palace; 
 his cavalry also held the narrow arch at the Guildhall, by 
 which alone the east end could come. Petion now became 
 the mayor of Paris, who had been summoned to the palace 
 for a hostage, had gone the Parliament had demanded 
 him but Mandat remained and his presence sufficed for 
 her. Upon that presence she relied : when she came to seek 
 him she found that he too had disappeared. The Town 
 Hall had summoned him twice, and twice he had refused. 
 At the third summons he had gone, suddenly, unescorted, 
 "to account for his command." She began to wonder, 
 but her hope was still maintained. She crossed to 
 the room where she could find her husband, and she 
 engaged upon thejas^_actjvhich freedom permitted her to 
 command. 
 
 Still pursued by memories of what the Court had been, 
 she determined to show the King to his subjects, and to 
 present a sight which should exalt his soldiery and linger 
 in history as the appeal which saved him. 
 
 The King obeyed her summons: he had better have 
 remained to repose, for she found him but recently awakened 
 
430 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 from a stupor into which he had fallen at the end of the 
 night when all his garrison had risen to the alarm. 
 
 The servitors, the gentlemen, the Militia, and the strict 
 Swiss beside them saw, as they stood drawn up in a ramb- 
 ling line upon the western garden terrace, the figure for 
 which they were to die. 
 
 He appeared at the main central door, weary, dishevelled, 
 and, as it were, aged. His violet coat recalled the periods 
 of mourning. The shadow in which he stood enhanced 
 the sombre colour of his clothing and the pallor of his 
 freckled face; his stoutness and his habitually sanguine 
 temper rendered that pallor unnatural and suggested catas- 
 trophe or disease. His paunch was obvious, his hair 
 deplorable. With such an introduction to their loyalty he 
 wandered heavily from end to end of the line. There was 
 a laugh by one light-head he was covertly insulted as 
 he passed he was certainly of less and less moment in their 
 eyes with every step he took in Jhis unhappy review. When 
 it abruptly ended, old Mailly went down stiffly on one knee 
 and tendered his sword, then stiffly rose again. Again in 
 the ranks some one laughed. From this scene the King 
 returned to his room in silence. 
 
 She also, the Queen, returned from it angry and in tears, 
 the more embittered that she herself had designed the 
 thing. 
 
 The first news that met her on her return to the palace 
 was the death of Mandat. As the details were told her she 
 understood, though vaguely, what a blow had fallen. He 
 had reached the Town Hall "to account for his command," 
 but had found there, not the hesitating constitutional body 
 which he expected and which had a right to summon the 
 head of the Militia. He had found instead a ring of new 
 
THE FALL OF THE PALACE 431 
 
 faces, the insurrectionary CommjLie: the Revolution, 
 maddened and at bay, had glared at him across the lights 
 of the hall. As he went down the steps to the street, blinded 
 by that vision of terror, some lad shot him dead, and with 
 that deed the wfrole plan of the defence crumbled. The 
 bridge-head and the archway w r ere abandoned. 
 
 The crowds of the south and east gathered as the mor- 
 ning advanced; their way was now clear, and yet, to those 
 watching from the palace windows, it still seemed as the 
 sun rose higher that the movement had failed. Seven 
 chimed above the central portico; it chimed slowly upon 
 bells of nearly a hundred years; the half-hour sounded, and 
 still the courts of the Carrousel lay empty. But the deserted 
 air was ominous. No street cries rose from the neighbour- 
 ing market-stalls. There was no sound of workmen upon 
 the new building of the bridge 1 down river; the regular 
 sawing of stone and the ring of hammered iron were silent. 
 
 At last a head showed above the high wooden palings that 
 separated the courtyard from the square. Then another, 
 the heads of ragged street-boys, who peered over, standing 
 on their companions' shoulders. A stone was thrown. 
 One of the sentries aimed, and in a twinkling the dirty, 
 beardless faces disappeared. As yet no shot had been fired. 
 
 A noise like that of swarming bees came confusedly from 
 the quays, muffled by the intervening wing of the Louvre. 
 It approached, still dull and blanketed by the vast building; 
 for a moment it was swallowed up in the deep passage 
 beneath the Louvre; then, with an immediate and over- 
 whelming roar it burst into the square of the Carrousel. 
 
 1 Now called the Pont de la Concorde. 
 
 
432 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 Some one in command must have dashed upstairs, to where 
 from the higher attic windows he could overlook the hoard- 
 ing : such an one saw the Carrousel crammed with a violent 
 whirlpool of men that seethed and broke against the great 
 oaken gates of the yard. Even as he looked the gates gave 
 way or were opened which he could hardly distinguish in 
 the press. The inner court filled as the torrent of arms 
 surged through the entry. At a window of the upper floor 
 certain gentlemen who had volunteered knelt, with their 
 muskets upon the crowd below. 
 They waited for the order to fire. 
 
 
XVII 
 THE TEMPLE 
 
 THE vanguard of the mob came pouring in. 
 They swarmed through the arches under the Long 
 Gallery and the main body of them still came swing- 
 ing up to it along the riverside. 
 
 The sun, well up and brazen, touched the metal about 
 them and sent dancing gleams from pikes and curved hooks 
 bound to staves. Before that uneven crowd the long 
 shadows of morning stood out sharply, thrown along the 
 uneven paving of the narrow quays. They sang or jested: 
 they jostled and could not order themselves. There were 
 no soldiers among this first batch of the insurrection, nor 
 even a body of the half-trained Militia, nor had they any 
 guns. So they swarmed through the public archways 
 under the Long Gallery, so they packed and surged in the 
 square of the Carrousel. Before them were the walls of the 
 central courtyard of the palace and a great gate shut against 
 them. 
 
 Of the fourteen guns that the palace commanded, five 
 faced them in this court, ready to fire should the crowd 
 burst in. Three were advanced in the emptiness of the 
 square; two, in support, were just outside the main door, 
 whence the central staircase of the Tuileries swept up to 
 the royal rooms. At that door the lads who had climbed 
 the outer walls of the courtyard could also now see some 
 - few of the Guard drawn up in formation outside the palace 
 
 433 
 
434 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 door and already retiring; the rest were massed behind 
 these in the hall : the solid body of Swiss who were the kernel 
 of the defence. 
 
 These thousand mercenaries and more, immovable men, 
 had in their attitude something at once of the grotesque 
 and the terrible. Stiff and strict as lifeless things in their 
 red and white, tight hose and musket erect and firm, they 
 were ready first for me volley, then for the charge, and every 
 man (in that timeJwhen ten rounds was thought a day's 
 provision) carried forty rounds upon him. The pale> 
 unmoved faces of the mountaineers were here and there 
 diversified by some livelier face, their rough-cut hair by the 
 careful barbering of the wealthy, for there were gentry of 
 the King's who had borrowed uniforms of the Guard and 
 had slipped in among them and now stood part of the 
 silent rank. 
 
 The roaring of voices in the Carrousel beyond the walls of 
 the courtyard increased continually; the other noise of the 
 sea of Paris rose with it every moment, and on the first floor 
 where the Royal Family and some few advisers sat, all this 
 gathering crowd outside the courtyard walls was watched by 
 those who were responsible for the unity of the nation in 
 face of the advancing invasion, and for the person of what 
 was still the King. Chief of those so responsible was Roe- 
 derer. He stood there for that new public authority, the 
 elected county-body which alone had legal power; he con- 
 sidered only the necessary survival of the King. 
 
 Already, at dawn, he had advised that the King should 
 leave the defence to others; now, hours later, as the mob 
 and its noise swelled and swelled, he insisted once more. 
 It was but a personal act whose value in the military thing 
 that followed only those present could judge, nay, only those 
 
THE TEMPLE 435 
 
 who knew, as only contemporaries can know them, the per- 
 sonal forces at work. There was no capitulation here. . . . 
 
 But in the judgment of the greatest master of war, 
 Louis leaving the defence by those few yards deter- 
 mined the issue; for it was Napoleon, himself perhaps a 
 witness, who said that if the King had then been seen on 
 horseback before the palace, his troops would have had the 
 better of the fight. But the King did what he thought was 
 necessary for the moment of peril, and guarded his family. 
 He said, "Let us go." As he passed through the corridors 
 of the palace down to the main doors upon the garden side, 
 he said to those who heard him, "We shall be back soon." 
 He believed it and they also. None saw in this precaution 
 an element of defeat, and yet that sort of shadow which doom 
 throws before itself as it advances vaguely oppressed the 
 palace. 
 
 The King, the Queen, and their children, Madame de 
 Lamballe and Madame de Tourzel, the governess, the hand- 
 ful of ministers and friends, had nothing, to do with the 
 military schemejofjjie defence. Louis had thought it pru- 
 dent, and his advisers also, that those few steps should be 
 taken between the palace and the Parliament House that 
 lay beyond the palace garden, and as they went along the 
 broad garden way between the formal trees, few thought, if 
 any thought, that those few minutes in the privacy of their 
 grounds were final. Later, all called it the beginning or the 
 presage of defeat . 
 
 The King walked solidly on in front by himself, mur- 
 muring from time to time that the leaves had begun to 
 fall very early that year. The Dauphin, holding the Queen's 
 hand, trotted by her side and amused himself by pushing 
 away with his feet those same dead leaves, until, the sickly 
 
 / 
 
436 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 little chap growing weary, a Grenadier of the Royal Militia, 
 which formed their little escort, lifted the Prince in his arms 
 against his blue coat. The Queen's face, mottled red and 
 white in the violence she did herself by that retreat, was now 
 disfigured by tears, and the crowd beyond the palisades 
 of the garden, seeing Royalty thus taking refuge, broke 
 through a gate and made a hubbub round the Parliament 
 door. But a couple of dozen members made a way through 
 them and met the royal party, assuring them of an asylum 
 within. With some little pushing, complaints, and speechi- 
 fying, they got them into safety, and the King so took his 
 place beside the Speaker in that great oval of the riding- 
 school in the early but hot and sunlit morning, the 
 Queen and the children behind him upon the bench of 
 the Ministers; and there the Grenadier gently put down 
 the child. 
 
 Vergniaud was in the chair, and, when the King had 
 spoken his few words to the Parliament, it was Vergniaud 
 who assured him of the protection of the laws. But there 
 was a prejudice too strong in volume, of too recent a date, 
 and too lively in character, to permit of the open presence 
 of royalty at their debates. Royalty must, at least in name, 
 withdraw, and Louis and his wife and the children and 
 some few of their attendants, consented to enter a little box 
 where the shorthand reporters of a certain journal had 
 usually their place. It overlooked the hundreds of the 
 Assembly from a little above their level, and was so placed 
 at th esouth-eastern corner of the great ellipse that the sun, 
 creeping round, was bound to beat upon it through the high- 
 arched southern windows as the day wore on. The grating 
 was removed, they were attempting some repose in that 
 strict lodgment, when the sudden sound that all so tensely 
 
THE TEMPLE 437 
 
 awaited broke out beyond the garden trees. The firing had 
 begun. It was a little after nine. 
 
 Cabined as they were within the little box, whose outer 
 wall gave upon the gardens of the Palace, they could hear, 
 trembling through the stone and noisy through the open 
 windows on that hot August morning, the rattle of the mus- 
 ketry of the defence. The Marseillais had come up in their 
 turn; they had come into the courtyard. They had par- 
 leyed with the Swiss. The gentry at the broad windows 
 of the first floor, each group twelve front, three deep, had 
 opened fire to stop that parleying. But of what so passed 
 the Parliament and the little party in the reporters' box 
 knew nothing. They heard but one discharge of cannon, 
 booming dull, and after that a silence. The debate in the 
 hall of the Parliament ceased. It was the moment when 
 the Swiss had rallied and when the defenders of the palace 
 had swept the populace from the Carrousel, and had so 
 thought to have ended the day. There were many in that 
 hall who thought it ended also: mobs are thus often 
 defeated in a few moments. The silence lasted. 
 
 Two more discharges of cannon might have been and 
 were perhaps thought to be in the anxious house and by 
 the much more anxious group that strained their ears in the 
 reporters' box the last volley against a flying crowd. 
 It was not so : these cannon were the two pieces of Marseilles 
 leading a return of the mob, and thenceforward, with every 
 moment for a quarter of an hour, for twenty minutes, the 
 fusillade and the roar of approaching thousands swelled like 
 the calculated swell of an orchestra. The Queen heard, 
 where she sat in the corner of the tiny lodge, the whistle of 
 grape, the thud of solid shot against the walls, the crash 
 of glass and all that increasing roar which told her that the 
 
 
438 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 populace had returned like a tide, flooding the courts of 
 the palace and invading its very doors. For some very 
 few moments they heard that struggle maintained. 
 
 Then it was that Roederer, rightly or wrongly, a lawyer, 
 not a soldier, determined that the day was lost. In the 
 spirit which had made him, in his capacity as a high official 
 of the Local Government, twice advise the King to retire, 
 and the second time succeed in that advice, in that same 
 spirit he now a^visei^ca^itulation. Perhaps he hoped 
 by such a compromise (could it arrive in time) to save the 
 Monarchy. More probably he deemed the Monarchy 
 secure, and thought only by this capitulation to save the 
 House in which the Parliament sat and in which the Crown 
 had taken refuge from direct assault by the mob. At any 
 rate there was written, and presumably in the King's pres- 
 ence, the hurried word or two which ordered the Guard to 
 cease firing, and that scrap of paper Louis signed. 1 It 
 was the l^sLadLof tho FrencbJVIonarchy. 
 
 This order was conveyed to the upright and soldierly 
 D'Herville: it filled him with contempt and anger. He 
 took the paper, pocketed it, forced his way round with dif- 
 ficulty to the further side of the Tuileries, saw that the de- 
 fence, though now beaten back to the very doors, was still 
 maintained, and so far from communicating the King's com- 
 mand, determined, as many a soldier before has done in 
 such a fix, to disobey. He continued to direct the battle. 
 
 Though the populace had rushed the doors and in part 
 the river wing of the palace, a furious hand-to-hand still 
 raged. The staircase was not yet carried; that wing of the 
 populace which had leapt the gap in the flooring and had 
 boarded the Pavilion de Flore from the Long Gallery had 
 
 1 The authenticity of this document is discussed, or rather alluded to, in the reproduction of it which 
 appears as a frontispiece. 
 
THE TEMPLE 439 
 
 not yet fought its way into the Tuileries. The great body 
 of the insurgents was still massed outside in the square; 
 a steady fire was still maintained upon them from the 
 windows of the palace. It was not until the rooms were at 
 last flooded by the advancing mob and the staircase was held, 
 that D'Herville faltered. He was turned. The assault had 
 begun to verge upon a massacre. Of one-half company of the 
 popular Militia, all but five had been hit at one door alone in 
 the upper rooms. Before the main door within a few yards 
 of it, 400 men if we may trust those who most desired to 
 hide the full numbers 400 men at least lay heaped. 
 Within, the mob was taking its revenge and the sacking 
 had begun before D'Herville showed that scrap of 
 paper to the Guard. This second command, also, the Swiss 
 obeyed, as they had obeyed the first command to die. ^ 
 
 They fell back out of the palace in order, this remnant of 
 a high discipline; they passed down the main broad avenue 
 of the Gardens steadily : the covering volleys of their retreat 
 came very sharp and clear just outside the windows of the 
 Parliament. Those within heard their steady tramp, until 
 at last that tramp turned to a scuffle ; there were crunchings 
 upon the gravel, confused scrambles upon the lawns, choked 
 cries and fugitive running; they had broken by the round 
 pond. 
 
 Far off along the riverside one could still hear a rhythm 
 and a tramp of men. It was the marching of the Mar- 
 seillese with their prisoners: for they had made prisoners 
 and disdained to massacre. They had saved somewhat 
 more than a company of the Guard and bore them escort. 
 The fight was done. 
 
 It was just after ten o'clock. In those two hours, or 
 little more, of doubt, in that one hour of combat, there 
 
440 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 had perished many thousands of men and the tradition of 
 nine hundred years. 
 
 The day passed without wind or air, a day of increasing 
 clamour. The conquering populace entered by deputations, 
 and with the rhetoric of the poor and of their leaders before 
 the bar of the manege. They demanded and obtained the 
 suspension of Louis "till the National Convention should 
 be called." They brought spoils religiously to that bar, 
 " lest they should be thought thieves." They harangued and 
 they declaimed by the mouth of leaders. 
 
 Far off in the chapel of the palace a young man at the 
 organ played the "Dies Irse" for his whim. Those who 
 had so lately been the masters sat huddled in the box of 
 the Logographe. 
 
 If the modern reader would have some conception of 
 it, this "loge" of the shorthand reporter, let him think if he 
 is rich, of a box at the opera, or, if he is poor, of a cabin upon 
 a steamer, such was its size. 
 
 Louis XVI. and one or two of his armed gentlemen, the 
 Queen, the little children and their governess, sat packed 
 hour after hour in that little den; through the torn grating 
 of it they could see the vast oval of the riding-school, its 
 sweep of benches under the candle-light. It was a huge pit 
 from whence in a confusion of speech and clamour rose the 
 smoke of their fate. 
 
 The summer night had been so tedious and so burning 
 that in their ten-foot square of a hutch the refugees had 
 hardly endured it. The little child had fallen into a stupid 
 sleep upon his mother's knees, and a sweat unnatural to 
 childhood so bathed his exhausted face that the Queen would 
 
THE TEMPLE 441 
 
 not let it remain. She turned for a handkerchief to a gentle- 
 man of theirs: he gave her his but there was the blood of 
 a wound upon it. 
 
 Midnight had passed, and they still sat thus packed and 
 buried ; before them still rose the sonorous cries of the invad- 
 ing mob, the interjections of the Parliament, the rhetoric 
 of the last speeches. The hundreds of lights still flamed in 
 the double chandeliers of the enormous hall; the roof and 
 the planks of the half-empty benches around the arena still 
 sent back echoes. 
 
 It was two in the morning before the doors could open on 
 them, and with the sweep of cooler air came the roar of the 
 populace still on guard after all these eighteen hours. The 
 crowd pressed against the railings as a strong escort hurried 
 the King and Queen across a little corner of the gardens to 
 the deserted monastery next door. There were large candles 
 thrust into the barrels of chance muskets: the night was 
 calm and they could burn. By that faint and smoky light, 
 which but just caught the faces of the crowd beyond, they 
 hurried in to the door of the Feuillants. 
 
 For many months no one had trodden the corridor of 
 the place; the bricks of the flooring beneath their feet lay 
 unevenly. The blank and whitewashed walls, cracked and 
 neglected, were pierced by four such similar little doors as 
 monasteries use for an entrance to their cells, and in those 
 four bare cells the Parliament had hurriedly provided what 
 furniture the old house afforded. 
 
 The Dauphin had awakened for a moment in the fresh 
 air, and had smiled; he had said, so that those near could 
 hear him: "I am to sleep in mamma's room to-night!" 
 His mother had promised it him as a reward during 
 the dreadful day; he slept when the doors closed on 
 
442 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 them, and his sister slept too. The Queen was too 
 angry for repose. 
 
 She saw the monk's bed of the cell, little and hard; she 
 saw the mouldy green paper on the wall; she stamped for 
 one last futile time into the King's presence beyond the 
 partition to cry that things should surely have turned 
 differently. 
 
 "The Marseillese should have been driven back!" 
 
 Louis had never failed to meet her anger when it rose, by 
 a stolid truth. "Who was to drive them back ?" he said. 
 
 Then she, who had not understood the armed nature of 
 the struggle, but only her own fierce desire, turned back and 
 threw herself upon the narrow bed of her refuge. 
 
 The day already glimmered. One could see the trees of 
 what had been but yesterday her royal garden, and one could 
 see the palace beyond through the dirty windows of the little 
 room. The sun rose and showed her her misery more 
 clearly. She could not sleep. It was not till the light in 
 the east had risen above the many roofs of the Tuileries 
 and had already thrown a slit of bright shining aslant into 
 the room, that there fell upon her less a slumber than an 
 unhappy trance of exhaustion. 
 
 There was silence while she slept. The mob had gone 
 home exhausted. The carts, which had worked all night 
 round the palace and in the gardens picking up the 
 wounded and the dead, lumbered no more, and their crunch- 
 ing upon the gravel of the alleys had ceased. No wheels 
 rattled in the Rue St. Honore as yet, and the few that still 
 maintained the sitting in the Parliament were attended by 
 no more in the Tribunes than a few sleepy beings watching to 
 the end. Outside in the still air all that could be heard 
 was the early piping of birds. 
 
THE TEMPLE 443 
 
 For that little space Marie Antoinette lay broken but 
 forgetful of the dreadful day. 
 
 Her sister-in-law, in whom self-sacrifice was permanent, 
 watched her pitifully so lying for one hour and another. 
 Then she woke the children and dressed them for the new 
 day, silently, so as to spare their mother's sleep, but that sleep 
 did not endure. The Queen raised herself unrefreshed, and, 
 when she saw the children, remembered their promise and 
 their fall and said: "It will all end with us! . . . 
 
 With the morning some succour began to arrive from 
 their own class, who pitied them, especially from foreigners. 
 Lady Gower's little son, younger than the Dauphin, was yet 
 of the same measure. The child could therefore wear the 
 change that was sent him from the English Embassy. The 
 King was supplied by a captain of his Swiss, a man as cor- 
 pulent as himself. The Queen could get linen at least from 
 the Duchesse de Gramont. Her watch and purse were stolen , 
 left behind or lost, but there was plenty of money; one of 
 her women had no less than twenty pounds upon her: there 
 was no need to look further. 
 
 At ten an escort brought that broken family back to the 
 reporters' box. And so daily the long fatigue was endured 
 and the mean lodging of the night. All the Saturday, all the 
 Sunday, the debates continued in their presence. They saw, 
 they half-understood the gn^rrpl W^^g^jl^jrMty which 
 had determined to be master of their persons, and the 
 Parliament, which refused to forego its sovereignty. They 
 hearcfthe decree passed that overthrew the statues of the 
 Kings throughout Paris. They heard that the palace of 
 the Luxembourg was to be their sumptuous prison; then 
 the long argument against that building, the perpetual 
 demand of the city for their custody; the suggestion 
 
444 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 of this place and that: the Archbishop's palace at 
 last the Temple. 
 
 They saw the deputation of the city, with the Mayor at 
 its head, insisting; they heard the Parliament give way, and 
 knew by Sunday evening, tnat Paris would hold them 
 hostages. 
 
 On the morrow a fatal 13th their Court was removed 
 from them: a few friends only were allowed to remain. 
 Under the wan light of evening two great carriages still 
 royal, but their drivers' livery gone and a dull grey replacing 
 it stood before the door of the Feuillants. The act of 
 imprisonment had begun. 
 
 The heavy coaches rolled along the paving. The scene 
 was that of a crowd freed from labour at such an hour, 
 thousands on either side, and a dense escort pushing its 
 armed column through. The sunset and the long twilight 
 were full of halts and summonses; Petion, with his head 
 thrust through the window, was insisting on a way for 
 Authority : there was a noise of men struggling, sometimes 
 to see, sometimes to save their feet, snatches of songs, 
 cries. 
 
 The distance was not quite a mile and a half. For over 
 two hours the coaches pushed and fought their passage up to 
 the Place Vendome, where the statue of Louis XIV. lay 
 fallen: past the wide boulevards whose width did nothing 
 to disperse the crowd : down at last along the narrow lane of 
 the Temple, till they came to the great pillars of the porch. 
 
 All this while the Queen sat silent. Her husband and 
 she and her royal children were still given honour sat on 
 the front seat of the great carriage ; but the ladies who yet 
 followed the Court, the governess of the Children of France, 
 were indignant that Authority should have passed to the 
 
THE TOWER OF THE TEMPLE AT THE TIME OF THE 
 ROYAL FAMILY'S IMPRISONMENT 
 
THE TEMPLE 445 
 
 officials, and that these should sit wearing their hats of office 
 before France-in -Person. So also when the Royal Family 
 walked across the courtyard to the steps of what had once 
 been Artois' Palace of the Temple, the deputation of the 
 Commune there present to receive them kept their heads 
 covered and insisted upon their new authority, calling Louis 
 "Sir," not "Sire," and preserving in his sight that austere 
 carriage which he had thought the peculiar appanage of 
 kings. 
 
 They went up the great staircase, lit splendidly as for a 
 feast, lit as it had been for Artois in the days she so well 
 remembered: the doors shut as upon guests assembled. 
 They followed their warders down a short, walled way 
 through the open night, and saw before them at last, with 
 lamps in every old crochet of the corners, and every window 
 ablaze, the enormous mass of the Tower. 
 
 To the north of the square keep which was the main out- 
 line of the Tower, a second building, an afterthought of the 
 latter Middle Ages, had been added. It leant up against its 
 larger neighbour, forming a kind of pent-house ; its four storeys 
 were far lower than those of the stronghold the rooms into 
 which each storey was partitioned were necessarily smaller 
 and less convenient than those which they were to occupy 
 later in the main tower: it was nevertheless necessary to 
 lodge them here for the first few weeks, because this annex 
 alone was furnished. It had been the residence of the Archi- 
 vist in charge; its main room had been his drawing-room; 
 the whole was ready for an immediate occupation. 
 
 To these Princesses and their train there was a portentous 
 novelty in such a place. The King, a man, and one fond of 
 
446 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 hunting in all weathers, self-centred, negligent of his person, 
 careless of any luxury save that of the table, saw nothing 
 sharp in these surroundings : indeed, his sex, especially when 
 it is leisured, can take what it finds in a campaign or 
 accident with no great shock. But the women, who had in 
 every moment of their lives been moulded by magnificence 
 and ease, could not understand the place at all. Varennes 
 had been a hurly-burly; the wretched three days just ended 
 at the Feuillants a violent interlude ; for the rest their pains 
 and terrors of the past three years had been played upon a 
 gorgeous scene. They had slept for a thousand nights of 
 peril in very soft and bulging beds whose frames were thick 
 with gilding, beds whose canopies were splendidly high and 
 curtained like thrones. They had been surrounded for a 
 thousand days of peril by silent servants trained and dressed 
 in gorgeous livery for their work. They had looked out on 
 great ordered gardens, and had walked over the shining 
 floors of the palace. That was their protection: a habit 
 of grand circumstance and continuous exalted experience 
 against which the occasional horror and the strain of their 
 lives could make no impression. 
 
 To-night, in the unaccustomed stillness of the Temple 
 enclosure, they sat silent in the knowledge that these low 
 roofs and common walls must be a kind of home for them. 
 All was at first insupportable; the King's sister, sleeping 
 on a ground floor, in a room which once the cooks of the 
 house inhabited: next to her through the wall, the Guard 
 Room ; the Queen, the royal children and their governess, 
 cooped up in a couple of small bedrooms fifteen feet square 
 or less, preparing their own beds and the Dauphin's, were in 
 a new, worse world. The poor Princesse de Lamballe, 
 with her own great virtue of fidelity surviving all her inani- 
 
THE TEMPLE 447 
 
 ties, put a truckle bed for herself in the dark little passage 
 between the two rooms and slept there, as a dog sleeps at 
 the door of its mistress. Nor did even this society endure. 
 A week had not passed when the officers came by night to 
 read a new decree, and to separate the Duchesse de Tourzel 
 and the Princesse de Lamballe from their masters, saying: 
 "There must be no one here but Capetians." Then the 
 complete isolation of their lives, a new habit, of settled hours 
 and monotonous exactitude, began. 
 
 This life reflected as in a quiet mirror the chaos of the 
 enormous struggle which was being fought out beyond the 
 walls of the Temple. They were prisoners and yet unre- 
 stricted ; confined by public authority and yet permitted the 
 refinements of their rank. Surrounded by guardians, but 
 by guardians none of whom as yet insulted them, many of 
 whom were secretly their friends, some few their devoted 
 servants, traitors to the State in the crisis of a great war but 
 traitors through devotion to a national tradition. 
 
 Twenty courses at a meal were not thought too many; 
 a dozen servants, paid fantastic salaries, did not suffice 
 them; their expenditure, if not the half-million voted, was 
 yet at the rate of many thousands a year ; the doctor and the 
 drawing master may visit them, and the Duchesse de Gramont 
 may send them books. Their wine, though the King alone 
 drank it, was of the best, commonly champagne (at that 
 time not the fashionable wine of the rich, but rather the 
 ritual of feast days) ; they had good furniture at their 
 demand, an ample library of many hundred volumes; and 
 in general such comfort as such a situation could afford. 
 But a violent contrast marked their lives, the contrast 
 between this luxury and the anarchy of manners around 
 them. Their guards, often gentlemen, were now courteous, 
 
448 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 now obsequious, now offensive, according as chance sent 
 men of varying politics or character by turn to be on duty 
 at the Tower. 
 
 The alternate fears and expectations of the Revolution, 
 the doubtful chances of the frontier battles, the unsettled 
 quarrel of the political parties among the conquerors all 
 these permit the inconsistencies of that moment upon the 
 part of the Commune and the Parliament. They permit 
 within the Tower that mixture of the prison and the home 
 whereby an increasing severity of rule and an increasing 
 vexation did not forbid the costly furniture, the very com- 
 plete library, the exquisite cooking which make up the curi- 
 ous contrast of their lives. 
 
 The order of their day was simple and unchangeable. 
 The King would rise at six, shave, dress, and read till nine. 
 The Queen and the Dauphin were up by eight, at which 
 hour the servants and the guard came into the rooms. At 
 nine they breakfasted. During the morning great care was 
 taken by Louis himself with the lessons of the boy. The 
 Queen and her sister-in-law dressed for the day. They 
 walked in the large gardens where the mob from far off 
 could watch them from behind the railings of the Square; 
 dined at two o'clock, played cards. The King would sleep 
 in the afternoon, would sup again at nine, and read till 
 midnight. 
 
 A week after the Princesse de Lamballe and the Duchesse 
 de Tourzel had left them, before the end of August, the first 
 of the indignities offered to the person of the Monarch came 
 to him thus: They took away his sword. It was but an 
 ornament, yet in all that long line of ancestry no other had 
 had his sword unclasped. And this man, who could never 
 have used a true sword, let alone that toy, felt the loss like 
 
THE TEMPLE 449 
 
 a wound. Much at the same time, that is before the end 
 of August, entered three new people into the prison Tison 
 and his wife, new gaolers who had to act as spies upon them ; 
 and Clery, who was to act as the valet of Louis, who was 
 devoted to him, and who has left us what is certainly the 
 clearest and probably the most accurate account of theprison 
 life of the family. 
 
 In those same days they heard whispered to them by one 
 of the guards, Hue, the first news they had had upon the 
 matter that never left their thoughts. The invasion was 
 successful. Brunswick was well on his way it was impos- 
 sible that he should be opposed. 
 
 For yet another week no incident disturbed the common 
 run of their quiet; the physical impressions which build 
 up most of life were neighbouring and small; the daily noise 
 of hammering in the great tower next door where their per- 
 manent apartments were preparing; and the daily reading, 
 the daily games of backgammon, and, daily, the sumptuous 
 meals; the modest dresses, changed (as is the custom of the 
 gentry) for the evening; the daily intercourse with such two 
 commissioners from the City Council as happened to be 
 on guard. From their windows they could see the rapid 
 demolition of the small huddled buildings round the Tower, 
 and Palloy's great encircling wall rising between them and 
 liberty on every side. 
 
 But beyond these exterior things their minds dwelt con- 
 tinually upon the matter which had held all their thoughts 
 for a year. They remembered, in their isolation, the fron- 
 tier, the Argonne (which is a wall), and beyond it the bare 
 plains of the East: moving densely over these the convoys, 
 the guns, and the packed columns of the invasion. They 
 had failed to hold their Parisian fortress till the advent of 
 
450 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 that slow machine, but they could still hope serenely: they 
 had known regulars since their childhood: they saw in the 
 advance of Brunswick something inevitable; they were 
 certain of this success, and they waited. 
 
 How truly the history of the Revolution is the history 
 of war can never sufficiently be stamped upon the mind 
 of the student. The Terror when it came was, as I 
 shall call it, nothing but martial law established during a 
 reign: the steps by which the fury of the time advanced 
 towards it corresponded, exactly to the fortune of the 
 TVpTTfjx armies . 
 
 Upon the 2nd of September, as the prisoners walked 
 in the garden, they heard a roar throughout the city. The 
 populace beyond the railings threw stones: they were hur- 
 ried back into their prison. For a moment before dusk 
 they saw the wild and fanatical face of Mathieu, once a 
 monk, who shouted at them: "The Emigres have taken 
 Verdun, but if we perish you shall perish with us." In 
 the increasing hubbub all around, the little Dauphin 
 cried and was disturbed; and all night the Queen 
 could not sleep. She could not sleep as the noise rose 
 and roared throughout Paris. ... It had almost 
 come. The armies were almost here, and once again the 
 dice were being shaken for the murder of the prisoners, or 
 for their deliverance. 
 
 It was on that day, and pricked by the spur of such news, 
 that Marat's frenzied committee gathered a band, and 
 began the massacre of those caught in the public prisons- 
 all those suspect of complicity with the invasion and of the 
 desire to help the foreigner in destroying the new liberties 
 
THE PRINCESSE DE LAMBALLE 
 
 A rough miniature preserved at the Carnavalet 
 

THE TEMPLE 451 
 
 i of the nation. Among these hundreds, roped in suddenly 
 upon suspicion from among the rich or the reactionary of 
 the older world, was the foolish, tender and loyal woman 
 who had determined to share the fortunes of the Queen - 
 the Princesse de Lamballe. When they had taken her a 
 fortnight before from the side of her friend she had but been 
 thrust into another prison to await these days. 
 
 The 3rd of September broke upon the captives, a dull 
 uneasy morning in which the clamour of distant disturbance 
 still occasionally reached them from the centre of the city 
 i southward, then came nearer. 
 
 They were told that on that day there would be no walk 
 
 in the garden. They sat therefore all the morning in their 
 
 rooms. They dined as was their custom; their dinner was 
 
 over, it was not quite three o'clock, and the King and 
 
 the guard for the day stood together at one of the great 
 
 tunnel-like windows of the first floor, for the windows were 
 
 not yet blinded as they later were. The guard by his side 
 
 was one Danjou, a young man of thirty-two, very eager upon 
 
 the new world which he believed to be then arising; full of 
 
 a vision of freedom ; a good sculptor for that was his 
 
 business intense in action, he was, above all, brave. 
 
 Energy bubbled out of him, and he had, what goes with 
 
 i energy, a clear head and rapid decision. The King and this 
 
 man stood together exchanging that kind of easy conversa- 
 
 I tiori which Louis had by this time learnt to hold with men 
 
 i of every rank. They were watching the workmen pull down 
 
 ; the houses near by, and the rising of the wall which was built 
 
 \ to enclose the gardens of the Temple. Now and then, as a 
 
 great beam fell with its great clouds of dust, the honest and 
 
 i slow King would laugh and say: "There goes another!" 
 
 Their conversation was on this level when they heard an 
 
452 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 increasing noise outside the gates. To the Royal Family 
 it meant but one more mob rolling by. Danjou, who 
 was a free man fresh from outside and knew better, 
 was silent and anxious: he was aware that the massacres 
 had begun. 
 
 At first it was a set of drunken songs far off, and then a 
 clamour in the streets. At last, quite close, separate cries 
 and loud demands, and hammering at the gates; and next 
 a nasty crowd burst in. They were not very numerous, 
 but they were drunk and mad with blood ; and they dragged 
 with them the body of the only woman killed during all 
 those horrors, a corpse stripped, perhaps mutilated, and 
 separate from it a head w r ith powder on the hair. This 
 head, thrust upon a pike, some of the foremost raised before 
 the window; and Louis, slow of vision though he was, 
 recognised it for the Princesse de Lamballe. His wife was 
 at the table behind him. The window was high, deep and 
 distant. Louis cried suddenly, "Prevent the Queen 
 . . . !" But, whether she had seen or had not seen 
 that dreadful thing, the Queen had fainted. 
 
 Without, Danjou, acting as promptly as a soldier, was 
 standing on the steps, giving the mob all the words that 
 came to him of flattery, rhetoric, or menace; and getting 
 them at last to scramble down from the heaps of broken 
 brick and rubble they occupied, and to go, taking their 
 trophy with them. Within, her sister and her husband 
 attended the Queen. 
 
 She was quite broken down. The night fell, but again 
 she could not sleep. She passed the dark hours sobbing 
 with pain, until yet another day had dawned upon her. 
 And still a long way off in Paris the massacres continued. 
 Still, through the first week of September and the second, 
 
THE TEMPLE 453 
 
 advanced the army of the invaders which was to save them 
 as it came victorious; or at the worst it came at least to 
 destroy their enemies and the city which had dared to 
 imprison them. 
 
 News did not reach the prisoners save at such intervals, 
 or in such broken whispers, or by such doubtful signs that 
 they could make little of it : but whether they knew much of 
 that news or little, the army was irresistibly advancing: 
 the French troops which were to oppose it were increasingly 
 falling in value : the passes of Argonne were forced all 
 but one. Dumouriez was turned; and by the 20th of 
 September Prussia and Austria were present, armed, 
 four days' march from the gates; and there was no 
 force at all between them and Paris. That same day 
 the Parliament in Paris met the menace by declaring 
 the Republic. 
 
 Upon the morrow the most extreme of the extremists, 
 Hebert, the cleanly and insane, looked in to mock them 
 coldly; while outside the booming voice of Lubin pro- 
 claimed in a most distinct proclamation, phrase by phrase, 
 that the French Monarchy was no more. The King went 
 on reading, the Queen went on sewing; for such was the 
 occupation of either as they heard those words. The slow 
 hours of the equinox passed without news or disturbance 
 in the city; but meanwhile, out where the armies were, a 
 prodigious and as yet unexplained thing had happened. 
 Austria and Prussia and the Emigrants had failed. The 
 strong cities which they had easily taken, the passes of 
 Argonne which they had almost as easily forced, the con- 
 temptuous and just strategy by which they had marched 
 round the worthless forces of the National Defence and now 
 stood between it and Paris all these by some miracle of 
 
454 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 war had availed them nothing : and in a muddy dip before 
 the windmill of Valmy the whole campaign had failed. 
 
 I wish I had the space here to digress into some account 
 of that inexplicable day. I know the place, and I have well 
 comprehended the conditions of soil and of gunnery under 
 which the Prussian charge failed even before its onset. 
 Nor could any study more engross, nor any examination 
 prove more conclusive, than an analysis of the few hours in 
 which this accident of European history was decided upon 
 the ground which, centuries before, had seen Gaul, and there- 
 fore Europe, saved from Attila. But neither the limits nor 
 the nature of my subject permit me; and it must be enough 
 to say that on the 21st of September at Valmy, a few yards 
 from the road whereby the King had fled to Varennes, by 
 the failure of one charge the invasion failed. In a few 
 days the retreaLof the army that was to rescue or to avenge 
 the King and the Queen had begun; and from that 
 moment the nature of their imprisonment changed. 
 
 Upon the 29th of September pens, ink and paper were 
 taken away from the prisoners, and on the evening of the 
 same day there once more entered the cleanly and insane 
 Hebert, who read to them the order that Louis XVI. should 
 be separated from his family and imprisoned in another set 
 of rooms in the Tower. 
 
 Those relations which had been at first ridiculous, later 
 tolerated, and though affectionate not deep, between the 
 Queen and her husband, her dislike of his advances towards 
 the Liberal movement, her angry amazement at his patriot-*- 
 
THE TEMPLE 455 
 
 ism in the early days of the revolt all these which are too 
 often read into her last emotions in his regard, must be 
 in part forgotten when we consider how they all lived 
 together behind those thick walls. Every human soul that 
 left the group was something lost to them forever. Of the 
 two that had last left them, the head of one, shown mur- 
 dered, had been seen at the window. And moreover, this 
 order to separate the King meant almost certainly some form 
 of approaching disaster. The children also were a bond. 
 For they knew nothing of whatever early phantasies, what- 
 ever recent disagreements there had been between the wife 
 and the husband, and they must now have their father hidden 
 from them. 
 
 He was taken away. Upon the next day, the 30th, as 
 once before during their imprisonment, the Queen refused 
 to eat and sat silent. To that silence there succeeded a fit 
 of violent anger in which she screamed at the guards. It 
 was when Clery came to get some books for his master. 
 
 It is reported that Simon, one of the Municipals who was 
 later to be the gaoler of her child, said as he saw the distress 
 of the women, that it nearly moved him to tears, and that 
 turning to the Queen he told her that she had had no tears 
 when the palace fought the people upon the 10th of August. 
 It is said that the Queen answered: 'You do not under- 
 stand." And when he added: :< You should be glad at 
 least that the traitors are caught " by which phrase he 
 meant the popular vengeance and the massacres in the 
 prisons, the repulsion of the invasion and the rest of it 
 the Queen would not answer a word. 
 
 Upon the 1st of November, the day before her thirty- 
 seventh birthday, she saw again a visitor to her prison, a dark 
 face which it appalled her to see: it was a face stamped 
 
456 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 with all the associations of Varennes. It was the face of 
 Drouet. 
 
 He spoke to her as a deputy from the Municipality (to 
 which he now belonged) , to ask whether she had anything to 
 complain of. She resolutely maintained her sullen silence; 
 she turned her face away and treated him as though he were 
 not there, and he on his part threw his arms up in a gesture 
 of resignation, then bowed to her and went out. 
 
 The royal people had colds in November and waited 
 through a shivering month what could not but be the 
 approach of some very evil thing. Upon the 6th, one of those 
 scraps of news positive news and ill which reached 
 them like patches of clear light in the midst of murky fears 
 and rumours, was granted to the prisoners. The Com- 
 mittee of Parliament had reported upon Louis' case: an 
 indictment was framed; he would certainly be tried. 
 
 To such an advance of misfortune they could only oppose 
 the fixed hope that in some way or other the regular armies of 
 the Old World must break through. They had been checked 
 at Valmy, nay, they had retreated. But surely they could 
 not but return, and brush aside at last the raw and formless 
 rags of the French volunteers. They could not but. The 
 old regulated armies, the peace of mind, the brilliant uni- 
 forms, the vast prestige of German arms, the leadership of 
 gentlemen sanity, cleanliness, and the approval of 
 educated men these must at last destroy those mere 
 composite mobs, half regulars, half levies, half sodden, half 
 mutinous, ill-fed, ill-clothed, officered as best might be, 
 untutored and untutorable, which their gaolers had flung 
 together in a sort of delirium, hotch-potch, to make a con- 
 fused covering against the governing classes of Europe who 
 were advancing in defence of all the decencies of this world. 
 

 THE TEMPLE 457 
 
 As the Royal Family so hoped against hope, that ill- 
 conditioned crowd old soldiers relaxed in discipline, 
 young enthusiasts who drank, sickly and grumbling vol- 
 unteers, veterans hoping for revenge against the harsh 
 experience of years (a dangerous type), company-officers 
 of a week's standing, put side by side with others of twenty 
 years, captains in boyhood and lieutenants at forty 
 this w r elter was jumbled all together under the anxious eye 
 of Dumouriez, along a valley of the frontier, on the muddy 
 banks of the river called Hate La Haine. 
 
 I know the place : low banks that rise in the distance into 
 hills are overlooked far up stream and down by the fantastic 
 belfry of Mons and its huge church dominating the plain. 
 Dumouriez, deeply doubting his rabble but knowing the 
 temper of his own people, poured the young men and the 
 old across the line of the river, leading them with the Mar- 
 seillaise. Among the villages of the assaulted line Jemappes 
 has given its name to the charge. By the evening of that 
 same day, the 6th of November, the Austrian force was 
 destroyed, a third of its men lay upon the field or had 
 deserted, the rest were beating off in a pressed retreat, 
 eastward and away. The rabble should have failed and 
 had succeeded. 
 
 I have said that for Valmy no explanation has as yet been 
 given. For Jemappes there are many explanations: that 
 the Austrians had attempted to hold too long a strategic line 
 and were outnumbered at the chief tactical point of the battle : 
 that their excellent cavalry (the French in this arm were 
 deplorable) had not been allowed to hold their left long 
 enough: that one passage of the river was accidental and 
 could not have been foreseen (a bad commentary on any 
 action!). But the true cause of that temporary yet decisive 
 
458 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 achievement was to be found in two forms of energy : rapid- 
 ity in marching and in the handling of guns but such 
 criticisms do not concern this book. 1 
 
 Of this victory, coincident with the beginning of the 
 King's agony, Marie Antoinette for days could know noth- 
 ing, and even when the rumour reached her it was but the 
 victorious shouting in the streets and a name or two whis- 
 pered by a servant that gave her a passing impression that 
 her champions had suffered a further check no more. 
 Yet before that tide should flow back and finally swamp 
 the French packed in Leipsic, twenty years must pass, and 
 not till then should the Kings and the lords at last see Paris 
 from a hill. 
 
 There is one detail in connection with Jemappes which 
 the reader must know because it does so illustrate the myriad 
 coincidences of the Queen's life. 
 
 That child whom she had seen and adopted during her 
 early childless years, when her fever of youth and exas- 
 peration was upon her, that child which for a moment had 
 supplied to the girl something of maternity, had now 
 grown to manhood. The birth of her own daughter had 
 long ago driven out any recollection of the whim: the peas- 
 ant boy of St. Michel was forgotten. He had grown into 
 his teens full of the bitterness which irresponsible and spas- 
 modic patronage can so vigorously breed. During the days 
 of October he had been recognised among the wildest of 
 those who attacked the palace in Versailles ; he had shouted 
 for the Nation ; he had enlisted and was there at Jemappes, 
 an obscure volunteer among the thousands whom Du- 
 mouriez forced forward upon the frontier. He was present 
 upon the 6th of November upon the bank of the Haine 
 
 1 These two military qualities are present to-day capitally among the French, and may at any moment 
 reappear in the discussions of modern Europe. 
 
T 
 
 
 ^ff-u^^ , 
 
 I "^ 
 
 t 
 
 0*2 
 
 
 
 /A 
 
 v 
 
 
 ' " U- 
 
 
 SANSON'S LETTER 
 
 Asking the authorities what steps he is to take for the execution of the King 
 
THE TEMPLE 459 
 
 when the mixed battalions charged, singing: a bullet 
 struck him and he fell down dead. She, the Queen, was 
 there a prisoner in her dimly lit room at night separated 
 from the father of the children who slept near by : her mind 
 was big with the new doom of his Indictment and Trial 
 which the dull day had brought her. Eighteen years before 
 she had caught up that peasant baby in the Louveciennes 
 road and kissed it, her eyes full of tears, and in her heart 
 a violent yearning half -virginal, half -maternal : he, however, 
 lay dead that same night in the Hainault mud with the 
 autumn rain upon his body: his name was Jacques Amand. 
 
 With December there was some little respite, for a new 
 Municipality had been elected that was a trifle more 
 moderate than the old, but in general this life of hers with 
 its calm, its dread and its monotony, continued. Now it 
 contained some act of humiliation, as when all razors and 
 sharp-edged things were taken from the King (upon the 
 7th) , now some indulgence, as when (upon the 9th) a clavecin 
 was allowed the Queen and it is said that from curiosity 
 she played upon this, later, the new notes of the Marseillaise. 
 
 For a few hours the Dauphin was taken from her. It 
 was her turn to ask questions of the guards, and theirs to be 
 silent; she asked distractedly: they did not reply: but the 
 child returned. 
 
 The affair of the trial proceeded rapidly. The briefs 
 were gathered, the Kings' counsel met the King day after 
 day in the apartment below, and she stayed above there 
 alone with her children and was still. She had no com- 
 munications with him at all save when at Christmas, after 
 he had drafted his will, he wrote to the Convention and 
 
460 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 caused a short message to be conveyed to the Queen. It was 
 perhaps during these days that she wrote upon a fly-leaf 
 which is still preserved in St. Germain, "Oportet unum mori 
 pro populo." 
 
 Louis, as the new year broke, saluted it sadly. Within 
 a fortnight he had been pronounced guilty at the bar of the 
 Parliament before which he was arraigned guilty, that is, 
 of intrigue with the foreigner and of abetting the invasion. 
 Upon the 17th of January, 1793, it was known in his prison 
 that the penalty would be death. Again did Marie Antoinette 
 hear in the room below the step of Malesherbes, her hus- 
 band's counsel, coming upon that day to confer with the King, 
 but this time he came to speak not of defence but of death. 
 A respite was denied to Louis. Upon the 20th his prayer 
 for three days in which he might prepare to meet God was 
 again refused, and his execution was fixed for the morrow. 
 His sentence was read to him in his prison: he heard it 
 quietly: and thus upon that 20th of January (a Sunday), 
 a murky evening and cold, when it was quite dark the 
 princesses heard in the street a newspaper-seller crying the 
 news that the King must die; the hollow word "Za mort" 
 very deep and lugubrious, repeated and repeated in the 
 chanting tones of that trade, floated up from the winter 
 streets. 
 
 It was eight o'clock when they were told that they might go 
 down with the children and see the King. 
 
 The family met together and for a little time were silent. 
 
 The spell was on them which we never mention one 
 
 which the inmost mind refuses I mean that fear . . . 
 
 During this long isolation of theirs they had become 
 
n \ 
 
 /4-1V n*,. 7 
 
 / 
 
 AUTOGRAPH DEMAND OF LOUIS XVI. FOR A RESPITE OF 
 THREE DAYS 
 
THE TEMPLE 461 
 
 very fixed upon the matter of the Catholic Faith, but that 
 fear pervaded them as the Church has said that it must 
 always pervade the last hours. This human curse, too 
 sacred for rhetoric and too bewildering to occupy a just and 
 reasonable prose, I will abandon, content only to have 
 written it down for it was the air and the horror of 
 that night. 
 
 For not quite two hours they sat together, not speaking 
 much, for all understood, except the little boy: he was sad 
 as children are, up to the usual pitch of sadness, for any loss 
 great or small which they do not understand: he saw his 
 own sister, a child older than he, and all his grown-up elders 
 thus crushed, and he also was full of his little sorrow. He 
 knew at least that his father was going away. 
 
 The King, seated with his wife on his left and 'his sister 
 at his right hand, drew the boy towards him and made him 
 stand between his knees. He recited to him, as it is proper 
 to recite to children, words whose simplicity they retain but 
 whose full purport they cannot for the moment understand. 
 He told the child never to avenge his death, and, since oaths 
 are more sacred than repeated words, he took and lifted up 
 his small right hand. Then, knowing that the will of the 
 sufferer alone can put a due term to such scenes, he rose. 
 His wife he pressed to his shoulder. She caught and grasped 
 to her body her little children to hold so much at least firm 
 in this world that was breaking from around her. She knew 
 that Louis desired them to leave, and she said, after she had 
 wildly sworn that she would stay all night and the children 
 with her (which he would not have) : 
 
 "Promise that you will see us again?" 
 
 "I will see you in the morning," he answered, "before 
 
 ... I go. At eight." 
 
462 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 "It must be earlier," she said, not yet releasing him. 
 
 "It shall be earlier, by half an hour." 
 
 "Promise me." 
 
 He repeated his promise, and the two women turned to 
 the great oaken, nail-studded door; helping the fainting 
 girl, and taking the child by the hand they went out to 
 the winding stair of stone. It was a little after ten. 
 
 When the iron outer door had shut and he knew the 
 women and the children to be above, out of hearing, Louis 
 turned to his guards and gave this order, that in spite of what 
 he had said, the women should not be told in the morning 
 of his departure, for that neither he nor they could suffer it. 
 
 Then he went into the turret chamber where the priest 
 was, and said: "Let me address myself to the unique 
 affair." 
 
 But above, from the room whose misery could just be 
 heard, the Queen, when she had put her boy to bed and kissed 
 him bitterly, threw herself upon her own bed all dressed, 
 and throughout the darkness of the whole night long her 
 daughter could hear her shuddering with cold and anguish. 
 
 That night there was a murmur all around the Tower, 
 for very many in Paris were watching, and through the 
 drizzling mist there came, hour by hour, the distant rumble 
 of cannon, and the sharp cries of command, and men march- 
 ing by companies up the narrow Temple lane. 
 
 It was the very January dark, barely six of the morning, 
 when a guard from the King's room came up the stair. 
 The Queen from above heard him coming. Her candle was 
 lit her fixed gaze expected him. ... He entered, 
 but as he spoke her heart failed her: he had not come for 
 the summons, he had but come for the King's book 
 of prayers. She waited the full hour until seven struck in 
 

 I/ 
 
 ' vx 
 
 _ sfM*vrwt_4iu^4ej 
 
 r v ^ 
 
 9. 
 
 -{fa*frtX-&ft#s 
 
 WWA dr**** 
 
 d 
 
 t^^ 
 
 f 
 
 1 > ' 
 
 * VI. 
 
 
 t^ MWL - (' 
 
 f 
 
 U. ^ 
 
 
 
 REPORT OF THE COMMISSIONERS 
 
 That all is duly arranged for the burial of Louis Capet 
 after his execution 
 
THE TEMPLE 4C3 
 
 the steeples of the town, and the pale light began to grow: 
 she waited past the moment of her husband's promise, till 
 eight, till the full day but no one came. Still she sat on, 
 not knowing what might not have come between to delay 
 their meeting : doors opening below, steps coming and going 
 on the stairs, held all her mind. But no one sent for her, no 
 one called her. It was nine when a more general movement 
 made her half hope, half fear. The sound of that movement, 
 which was the movement of many men, passed downward 
 to the first stories, to the ground, and was lost. An emp- 
 tiness fell upon the Tower. Then she knew that her hope 
 had departed. 
 
 For a moment there were voices in the courtyard, the 
 tramp of many men upon the damp gravel, the creaking of 
 the door, more distant steps in the garden, and the wheels 
 of the coach far away at the outer porch. Then the confused 
 noise of a following crowd dwindling westward till nothing 
 remained but a complete silence in those populous streets, 
 now deserted upon so great a public occasion. 
 
 For yet another hour the silence endured unbroken : ten 
 o'clock struck amid that silence, and the quarter. . . . 
 The Queen heard through the shuttered window the cu- 
 rious and dreadful sound of a crowd that roars far off, and 
 she knew that the thing had been done. 
 
 Life returned into the streets beneath, the loud shrill call 
 of the news-men, crying the news accursedly, came much 
 too shrill and too distinct against the walls. All day long, on 
 to the early closing of the darkness, the mists gathered and 
 lay thick over Paris and around her high abandoned place. 
 
XVIII 
 THE HOSTAGE 
 
 FROM THE 21sT OF JANUARY, 1793, TO THREE IN THE MORNING OF 
 THE 2ND OF AUGUST, 1793 
 
 THAT night the prisoners in the Tower did not sleep, 
 saving the little Dauphin : he slept soundly ; and it 
 is said of his mother, that, watching him, she mur- 
 mured that he was of the age at which his brother had died, 
 at Meudon, and that those of her family who died earliest 
 were the most blessed. In the last silences of the January 
 night, till past two in the morning, the woman Tison, who 
 was in part their gaoleress and in part a spy upon them, 
 heard them talking still, and when she came to them Madame 
 Elizabeth said: "For God's sake leave us." 
 
 Clery, the dead master's valet, was taken away, still noting 
 as he went the new look in the Queen's eyes. And in this 
 same week there came the mourning clothes which they had 
 asked of the authorities and which had been granted them. 
 The Princess Royal fell ill. The Queen would no longer walk 
 in the garden now, and the child, lacking exercise and 
 with bad blood suffered. Her legs swelled badly. The 
 authorities allowed the man who had been the family doctor 
 of the children in the old days to come and visit them now. 
 Brunier was his name, and in the old days Marie Antoinette 
 had affected to ridicule his middle-class energy : she thought 
 he lacked respect to the clay of which she and her children 
 were made. She was glad enough to see him now, and he 
 
 464 
 
tJ'C. Jt fibuLtt* *& tv*4 tmti. ttftt* n&AVt-rtd Jt*< 
 rn*u* ji'l tie M*i f tt*vty.J&*+'(tA A tl ^*'"^ 14 I* H^ 
 
 FIRST PAGE OF LOUIS XVI.'S WILL 
 
 . 
 
THE HOSTAGE 465 
 
 was devoted. He was allowed to call in a surgeon and to 
 bring in linen. Nor was he their only communication with 
 the external world, for though the sound and the news of it 
 did not reach them, yet they were not, as modern prisoners 
 are, denied companionship. Upon the pretext or with the 
 real excuse that the mourning clothes did not fit, a dress- 
 maker whom they had known was allowed in; and in general, 
 as will be seen in a moment, there were methods of com- 
 munication between them and those who desired to know 
 every moment of their captivity and every accident of their 
 fate. From the close of January onward into the summer, 
 five months, it is possible to establish no precise chronology 
 of their actions, but it is possible to decide the general tenor 
 of their lives : save in one particular, which is that we can- 
 not determine to-day what exactly were the relations 
 between the Queen and those who would rescue her or 
 who could give her news of the outer world especially 
 Fersen. 
 
 We have of course several accounts furnished by eye- 
 witnesses, notably the account of Turgy, who was their sole 
 servant in their prison ; but these accounts, and that account 
 especially, are tinged with the quite obvious atmosphere of 
 the Restoration. Quite poor people, writing at the sug- 
 gestion of a powerful government at a time when every 
 laudatory or jjluminating detail upon the imprisonment of 
 the royal family had its high money value, must, however 
 honest, be somewhat suspect. For the most honest man or 
 woman the conditions of the Restoration were such that 
 there would be an inevitable tendency to exaggeration; and 
 we have no evidence available of the exact characters of 
 the witnesses. Still the witnesses are witnesses, and though 
 an elaborate code of signals (which some of them pretend) 
 
466 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 probably did not exist, yet we know both from Fersen him- 
 self and from the way in which affairs were conducted on 
 either side, that not a little communication was established 
 between the widowed Queen and the Royalists outside. To 
 more than that general statement no historian can commit 
 himself, unless he be one of those belated university types 
 w r ho will trust a printed or a written document beyond their 
 common sense. 
 
 It must be remembered that during the first two months 
 after the death of the King, that is, during all February and 
 March, 1793, the exalted and the noble minds of the Gironde 
 were still at the head of that executive power which is in 
 France (since the French have no aristocracy) the whole of 
 government. Nay, they remained technically the heads of 
 the Executive until the end of May, 1793, though their 
 power was touched by the establishment of the Revolution- 
 ary Tribunal on the proposal of the Radicals in March, and 
 undermined by the establishment of the Committee of Public 
 Safety on the proposal of Danton in early April. 
 
 The Giiondins and the Municipality of Paris were at 
 odds. The Municipality itself was not homogeneous. 
 
 The guarding of the Queen, which was the business 
 of the Municipality, was not uniform. The Municipality 
 had to choose many men to relieve each other in relays ; and 
 of these, two, Toulan and Lepitre, tended, at least after a 
 little experience of their prisoners, to show them sympathy. 
 One of their officers, Michonis, did more, and would have 
 saved her. 
 
 From time to time a newspaper would be smuggled in to 
 these princesses; it is said that music played from a window 
 whence they could hear it, conveyed signals, and at any rate 
 it is certain that Fersen had some news of them. 
 
THE HOSTAGE 467 
 
 Now Fersen at this moment, in early February that is, 
 bad as his judgment of French affairs was, appreciated their 
 situation in a phrase. He called the Queen "a hostage," 
 and this describes very accurately the meaning of her 
 captivity. 
 
 I repeat, no one can understand the Revolution who does 
 not treat it as a military thing, and no one can understand 
 military affairs who imagines them to be an anarchy. Of 
 necessity a brain directs them, for if in military affairs a 
 plan be lacking, the weakest opposing plan can always 
 conquer. It was not cruelty nor love of vengeance that 
 dominated the position of the prisoners. They were an 
 asset. 
 
 But though their value was recognised and their imprison- 
 ment was part of a diplomatic arrangement, yet there were 
 different policies regarded them. The Radicals, the 
 Mountain, were at once the most enthusiastic and the most 
 practical of the Revolutionary groups. They were not in 
 power, they had not a permanent majority in the Parliament 
 though they had Paris behind them; but they saw clearly 
 that France was in to win : they saw clearly (first Danton, 
 then in succession to him Carnot) that every general action 
 lost, every fortress in a chain surrendered, was the approach 
 not of some neutral or balancing arrangement, but of a full, 
 complete and ruthless reaction in Europe without and in 
 France within. It had come to winning all or losing all. 
 The nohkrJjinHidin blood that still controlled the Republic, 
 knew too little of the vices of men to follow that calculation. 
 The Girondins still believed that in some mystic way the 
 steady adherence to the Hfpnhli n fl^ I^Q! the volunteer 
 soldier as against the conscript, the citizen controlling the 
 soldier, the locality governing itself man absolute was 
 
468 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 a thing so high that no human circumstance could wound it. 
 They thought it bound to survive through some force 
 inherent in justice. 
 
 Within three weeks of the execution of Louis all Europe 
 was banded against the Republic, and one may say, morally, 
 all the Christian w r orld, for even the distant and ill-informed 
 Colonials of Philadelphia and Virginia had recoiled ner- 
 vously at the news of a king's execution. The pressure of 
 that general war againstJIi&Jipublic was to give, by what 
 fools call the logic of events, a most powerful aid to the 
 practical and savage determination of the Mountain : it was 
 to squeeze to death the idealism ofthe Girondins. 
 
 While yet these last were in power there were plots for 
 the escape of the prisoners, plots which failed; and their 
 treatment, even in minor details (as the allowing them to 
 take their own form of exercise and the leaving of them as 
 much as possible alone) was easy. Little objects left by 
 the King were conveyed to the Queen from the upper room, 
 and Jar jay es, a friend, saw that they reached the King's 
 brothers. Had the impossible attempt of the Girondins 
 performed the miracle which they who had called on this 
 miraculous war demanded, had the patchy volunteer forces 
 of the French found it possible to conquer in those early 
 months of '93, the treatment of the prisoners would have 
 gone from better to better; their release by negotiation 
 would soon have arrived, if not by negotiation then from 
 mere mercy. This same Jarjayes, who had been Marshal 
 of the camp and was husband to one of the Queen's 
 women, found things so easy that he could weave a definite 
 plot for the escape of the royal prisoners. WTiy it failed we 
 do not know, though of course the Royalist evidence we 
 have ascribes it to a special virtue in the Queen, who refused 
 
THE HOSTAGE 469 
 
 to be separated from her children. In the first week of 
 March the first plan failed, on account of a violent reaction 
 towards severity on the part of the authorities following 
 the first military reverses in the Netherlands. The 
 second is better attested, and there is here a sufficient con- 
 currence of witnesses to believe that some hesitation of the 
 Queen's did cause its final failure. She would have had to 
 flee alone, and it is on the whole just to decide that she 
 refused; for we have it on the authority of a fairly honest 
 man that the Princess Royal had some memory of this 
 incident of her childhood and had spoken to him on it, 
 while Chauveau-Lagarde (who was later the Queen's coun- 
 sel during her trial) has left a copy of a note of hers saying 
 that she would not fly alone without her children. Of other 
 supposed communications between her and Jarjayes we have 
 only his copy of her writing. 1 At any rate, with the last 
 days of March all this early phase of the Queen's widowed 
 captivity comes to an end. Dumouriez and the French 
 armies lost the great and decisive action of Neerwinden 
 upon the 18th of the month, and in the last week of it, 
 though the Committee of Public Safety was not yet formed 
 to establish martial law throughout the Republic and to 
 save the State, yet new 
 
 The woman Tison and her husband half the gaolers, 
 half the spies of the family, as I have said were not 
 permitted to leave the Tower of the Temple. Pencils were 
 forbidden. Upon the 25th of March a chimney fire was 
 
 * I can but pay little attention to evidence of that kind. In the case of Fersen there are reasons for his 
 destroying the originals : he was the recipient of her passionate affections. Moreover, we know his nature well: 
 he had all the Northern simplicity, and with that intense passion of his, he would have thought it sacrilege to 
 ascribe a single word to her that she had not written, or to make fiction out of her beloved soul. Moreover, 
 he cared little whether posterity knew or did not know the things he chose to bequeath to his heirs. In the 
 case of inferior men with an obvious axe to grind, and proud, whatever their loyalty, to be intermediaries 
 between the Hostage and her rescuers, the evidence of mere copies which they alone can certify is of very 
 little value. 
 
470 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 a pretext for the appearance of Chaumett coming from the 
 Commune of Paris. He returned the next day with the 
 Mayor Pache, and with Santerre, the man of the fall of the 
 Bastille, the rich leader of the popular militia; in those same 
 hours Dumouriez at the head of the defeated French Army 
 was receiving the general of the Austrian forces and nego- 
 tiating treason. He was about to join hands with the 
 enemy and to propose a march on Paris. The first demand 
 for the Queen's trial was made by Robespierre: a week 
 and Dumouriez' treason was accomplished: the chief 
 general of the Republic had despaired of France and had 
 gone over to the Austrian camp with the design of marching 
 on Paris, and at least restoring order; his army had refused 
 to follow him, but the shock was enormous. Paris won ; 
 the Gjrondjris lost. The Committee of Public Safety was 
 established. The Terror was born; and the Revolution, 
 acting under martial law, went forward to loose everything 
 at once or to survive by despotism and 'by arms. 
 
 Thence onward Marie Antoinette's imprisonment becomes 
 another matter. On the 20th of April there came into her 
 prison men whose tone and manner would never have been 
 allowed before: the chief of the " Madmen," as the populace 
 called them, the intense Republicans who would believe any- 
 thing of a Bourbon, Hebert, came into the prison. He came 
 at night. By coincidence or by design her terrors for the 
 future were to be terrors of the night. It was near eleven 
 when his dandy r meagre figure and thin, pointed face 
 appeared to terrify her, and for five hours the whole place 
 was searched and ransacked. Her little son, already ailing, 
 she had to lift from his bed while they felt the mattress and 
 
THE HOSTAGE 471 
 
 the very walls to see what might be hidden. They took 
 from Madame Elizabeth her stick of sealing-wax, her pencil 
 
 which had no. lead to it and they took with them a 
 little scapular of the Sacred Heart and a prayer for France 
 
 but the France for which the princesses had this written 
 prayer was not the nation. 
 
 On the 23rd they came again and found nothing 
 but an old hat of the King's, which his sister kept as a sort 
 of relic and had put under her bed. It was taken for 
 granted (and justly) that communication had been estab- 
 lished between the prisoners and the kings outside. A 
 denunciation of Lepitre, Toulan and the rest, failed, but 
 Toulan and Lepitre were struck off the list of guards. 
 
 With the end of May the populace, supported and per- 
 mitted by the new Committee of Public Safety, conquered 
 the Moderate majority, and the Committee of Public 
 Safety was left without rivals; it began from that 
 moment to direct the war with the leonine courage and 
 ferocity, the new and transcendent intelligence, the ruth- 
 less French lucidity which ultimately at Wattignies saved 
 the State. 
 
 Upon the victory of Paris and the Mountain the destruct- 
 ion of the Moderates, the establishment of martial law, the 
 despotism of the Committee of Public Safety, came the last 
 phase of the Queen's imprisonment and with it, by a 
 most evil coincidence or portent, the growing illness of the 
 little heir, her son. Sharp pains in his side, convulsions, the 
 doctor sent for in the early part of May, and again toward 
 its end, and again in June, things going from bad to worse 
 with him. 
 
 To these prisoners, shut away from men, the movement 
 of that world was unknown. They only knew that some- 
 
472 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 thing was surging all round the thick, obliterating, impene- 
 trable walls of their tower. 1 On the day when the populace 
 conquered the Girondins, all they knew was that they were 
 not allowed even upon the roor, from which, upon most days 
 for some hour or so, they might take the air and look down 
 upon the slates of revolutionary Paris far below, and dur- 
 ing June when the new power of the Committee and of 
 martial law, of the Terror, of the determination of the Rev- 
 olution, of the city, was fixing itself firmly in the saddle, 
 they knew nothing of what was passing, save perhaps from 
 a growing insolence in their guards. 
 
 In that same month yet another plot for their escape 
 failed. It depended upon two men; the one a certain Batz, 
 on whom our information is most confused and our evidence 
 most doubtful, as indeed his own character and his own 
 memories were doubtful and confused (he was a sort of 
 enthusiast who had already attempted many impossible 
 things) ; the other, a character quite clearly comprehended, 
 one Michonis. Batz was a kind of baron; Michonis was, 
 like Toulan and Lepitre, of the Municipality and had regu- 
 lar authority. He will be seen again in the last plot to 
 save the Queen. Of whatever nature was this uncertain 
 attempt, it also failed. Shortly after the woman Tison 
 diversified their lives by going mad with great suddenness 
 and suffering a fit. She was removed, and the incident 
 is only of note because certain pamphleteers have called 
 it a judgment of God. Yet her wage was small. 
 
 Upon the day after that unusual accident, the growing 
 suspicion of the popular party against what was left of 
 Moderate administration in Government broke out in a 
 furious denunciation of actual and supposed conspiracies. 
 
 1 The w^lls, to be accurate, were nine feet thick, and the windows were like tunnels. 
 
THE HOSTAGE 473 
 
 It was feared that the great mass of suspects now gathered 
 into the prisons possessed some engine for revolt. An 
 extreme policy in diplomacy and in arms, as in internal 
 government, finally prevailed, and with the 1st of July 
 this ardent severity took the form of a decree, passed in the 
 now enfeebled and captured Parliament, that the Dauphin 
 the greatest asset of all should be separated from his 
 mother and put, though in the same building, under a 
 different guard. 
 
 It is not to be imagined that so large a transformation 
 of policy between the execution of the King and the decree 
 for the separation of the Dauphin had, in any part of it, a 
 mainspring other than the war. I have said that the steps 
 of the spring, the destruction of the Gironde by the 
 Mountain, the capture by Paris of the Pa.rlia.ment. were 
 but the efiWts of the collapse of the volnntppr mah at 
 Neerwinden, the treason of Dumouriez and the new 
 and necessary martial law that henceforward bound 
 the Republic. All the last rigours of the imprisonment 
 depended upon the same catastrophe. 
 
 The enemy that had been .checked at Valmy, had been 
 attacked in the winter but half -prepared, the enemy that 
 had suffered the French gallop to overwhelm the Nether- 
 lands and to occupy Mayence was returning. The 
 Republicans were out of Belgium, the armies of the Kings 
 were flooding back upon the Rhine. The Rhine and Alsace 
 depended upon two things, Mayence and, behind it, shield- 
 . ing Alsace, the lines of Weissembourg that stretched from 
 the river to the Mountains. Mayence was to fall, the lines 
 of Weissembourg were to be pierced. As for the Belgic 
 
 
474 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 frontier, there a line of fortresses could check for a moment 
 the advance of the Allies for the French fortify : they are 
 in this the heirs of Rome; and whenever they suffer defeat 
 the theory of fortification is belittled; in their resurrection 
 of military power the spade goes forward, borne upon the 
 shoulders of Gaul. 
 
 In this July of 1793 the Belgic frontier only perillously 
 held. The sieges were at hand and the fall of the frontier 
 strongholds was at hand. These once conquered, it was 
 proposed by Austria, Prussia and England to dismember 
 the territory of the Republic. To all this I will return. 
 
 It was upon the 1st of July, with the enemy advanc- 
 ing, that it was proposed to take the Dauphin from 
 the Queen. 
 
 Upon the evening of the 3rd the order was executed. 
 
 It was but just dark when the guard challenged a patrol 
 at the gate of the Tower; the patrol was the escort of 
 six Municipals who had come from the authorities of the 
 city to take the person of the child. 
 
 The women within the prison had had no warning. 
 The same fate which had been kind to them in making 
 a silence all around their lives during these dreadful months 
 and in hiding from them the dangers that rose around was 
 cruel to them now, leaving them unprepared for this sud- 
 den and tearing wound. There was a candle in the room 
 and by its light the little girl, the Princess Royal, read out 
 aloud from a book of Prayers it is said to her aunt 
 and her mother, the Queen. These two women sewed as 
 they listened; they were mending the clothes of the children. 
 The little boy slept in his bed in the same room : his mother 
 had hung a shawl to hide the light from his eyes. Save for 
 
. ,, 
 
 ^j^ 
 
 ~ 
 
 J 
 
 ORDER OF THE COMMITTEE OF PUBLIC SAFETY 
 
 In Cambon's handwriting, directing the Dauphin to be separated from his mother 
 
THE HOSTAGE 475 
 
 his regular breathing there was no sound to interrupt the 
 high monotonous voice of the little girl as she read on, when 
 suddenly her elders heard upon the floors below the advent 
 of new authorities and of a message. The steps of six men 
 came louder up the stone stairs, the doors opened as though 
 to a military command, and the princesses saw, crowding 
 in the corner of the small room, a group whose presence they 
 did not understand, though among them the Queen recog- 
 nised Michonis. The reading stopped, the women turned 
 round but did not rise, the child stirred in his sleep, One 
 of that group spoke first before the Queen could question 
 them. "We have come," he said, "by order of the House, 
 to tell you that the separation of Capet's son from his mother 
 has been voted." 
 
 Then the Queen rose. Never until now had she aban- 
 doned before any but her hushand, or perhaps in the very 
 intimacy of the Council, the restraint which she believed 
 her rank to demand. The violence of her blood had been 
 apparent in many a petulant and many an undignified 
 gesture; she had raised her voice against many a Deputa- 
 tion; she had sneered more than once against women of a 
 poorer kind ; she had thrown at La Fayette the keys which 
 he demanded on their return to the palace after the flight 
 to Varennes. But she had never yet lost command of 
 herself. Upon this terrible night for the only time in 
 her life she did completely lose all her self-command. 
 Something confused her like a madness and all the 
 intensity of her spirit came out nakedly in defence of 
 the child. 
 
 She stood up by the little bed; all her complexity of pride 
 and all her training in intrigue deserted her; she cried out; 
 she took refuge in such weapons as the women of the poor, 
 
476 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 whom no law protects, use to defend their sanctities. Her 
 voice rang, became shrill and shrieked in the little room, 
 violent and rising; she threatened death; next moment 
 she implored. Her little daughter and her sister-in-law 
 caught her methods. They joined in the imprecations and 
 in the prayers. The child was awakened by the noise, by 
 the shuffling of so many awkward and heavy feet in the door- 
 way, by the passionate outcries around him; he awoke 
 and gazed; then when he saw his mother he clung to her, 
 and she kissed him repeatedly and held him as though he 
 were again part of herself and as though none could take 
 him from her without taking her life also, and all the while 
 her prayers and execrations showered upon the armed men 
 as they stood hesitating apart and waiting. 
 
 How long this scene continued we cannot tell. It may 
 have been the best part of an hour. 1 At last some one of 
 the deputation found decision and cried, "Why will 
 you make this scene? No one wants to kill your son! 
 Let him go freely; we could take him if you force 
 us to that!" 
 
 She lifted the little boy up and dressed him, his eyes still 
 dazed with sleep. She lingered over him with conventional 
 benedictions, repeated and prolonged. Her hands could 
 not let him go. Fearing some further violence, a member 
 of the deputation muttered a suggestion for the Guard, 
 but the Queen's active passion was exhausted, she would 
 be violent no more. She herself, perhaps, loosened his little 
 hands from her dress and said, "Come, you must obey. 
 . . . Then they took him away; the great door was 
 
 shut upon him; the women within, trembling beside the 
 cot, could still hear the child pleading with a lessening voice 
 
 1 The Duchesse d'Angouleme, the little girl then present, said, years after, that it lasted a full hour, but 
 such memories are untrustworthy. 
 
THE HOSTAGE 477 
 
 in the distance until another door clanged below and the 
 rest of the night was silent. 
 
 God has made a law whereby women are moved by 
 strength and by weakness, but in different ways: by strength 
 as a necessity for their protection, so that they demand it 
 in men and in things and yet perpetually rebel against it; 
 and by weakness as an opportunity for the exercise of all 
 their nature, so that suffering (if it is sudden) or disaster 
 calls out in women all of themselves: and this is especially 
 true of mothers and sons. 
 
 That child, that boy, had seemed at first so rosy and 
 so well in the old days at Versailles; his health had so con- 
 trasted with the sickly advance of Death upon his elder 
 brother. He had been the hope of the Throne. Then 
 there had come upon him the curse of the men of his family, 
 he had grown weaker and more weak, he had had nervous 
 fits of rage, a nervous fear of noise unnatural to his age. 
 Some had thought him deficient; all had noted with anxiety 
 or with malice his increasing weakness during the period 
 of the Royal Family's imprisonment. Fits had seized 
 him. But a few weeks before he had had convulsions; and 
 all June during the relief of which I have spoken, fears 
 for him had already arisen: it was a rapid tragedy of child- 
 hood that was soon to end in death. 1 His mother's devo- 
 tion having him now only for its object in the isolation 
 of those stone walls had become the whole of her being. 
 That he had grown so dull, so failing, so more than com- 
 mon sickly, so odd, did but heighten in some way the 
 
 1 I take for granted the death of Louis XVII. in prison: it is certified, it is clear, and even were it not so, the 
 progress of his disease compels such a conclusion: but this book is not the place for a discussion upon the 
 question, nor could so considerable a debate be discussed even in an Appendix. 
 
478 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 mystic feeling in her. He was the KING. . . . She 
 was observed to pay him a certain reverence, and she 
 served him at table (as spies thought at least) with the 
 gravity of a ceremonial. All this at one abominable stroke 
 she lost. 
 
 She would watch him oh, unhappy woman! through 
 chinks and chance places when the little chap was taken 
 out to get the air, with gaolers, upon the roof for some few 
 minutes of the day. He, of course, easily and at once forgot. 
 He soon learnt to repeat the phrases he heard around 
 him, laughed when his guardians laughed, and even asked, 
 as he heard them ask, "whether the women still lived?" 
 He played at ball a little with his gaolers; but he weakened 
 still and he decayed. That child was the head of an auth- 
 ority older than Islam, and the heir to a family name older 
 than the Sagas, and in his little drooping body were all the 
 rights of the Capetians. 
 
 The Queen saw him, I say, for a few moments now 
 upon one day now upon another by chance, as he took 
 the air with his gaolers. She had nothing more to lose 
 and her soul was broken. 
 
 ; Those who were to destroy the new society of the French, 
 to rescue or to avenge the Queen, were now once more at 
 hand and now almost arrived. 
 
 Their way to Paris lay open but for two last perilous and 
 endangered defences; to the right the lines of Weissembourg, 
 to the left Maubeuge. 
 
 There are two avenues of approach westward into the 
 heart of Gaul and two only. The great marches of the 
 French eastward, which are the recurrent flood-tides of 
 
THE HOSTAGE 479 
 
 European history, pour up by every channel, cross the Alps 
 at every pass, utilise the narrow gate of Belfort, the narrower 
 gate of the Rhone, the gorge of the Meuse, the Cerdagne, the 
 Samport, Roncesvalles. But in the ebb, when the outer 
 peoples of Europe attempt invasion, two large ways alone 
 satisfy that necessity at once for concentration and for a 
 wide front which is essential to any attack upon a people 
 permanently warlike. J These two ways pass, the one 
 between the Vosges and the Ardennes, the other between 
 the Ardennes and the sea. By the first of these have come 
 hosts from Attila's to those of 1870; by the second, hosts from 
 the little war band of Clovis to the Allies of 1815. Both ave- 
 nues were involved in this balancing moment of '93 : the first, 
 the passage by Lorraine was still blocked by the defence of 
 Mayence and the lines of Weissembourg, 2 the second, 
 the passage by the Low Countries was all but won. Of 
 the string of fortresses defending that passage Maubeuge was 
 now almost the last, would soon be the very last to stand. 
 
 It was not upon Mayence and the lines of Weissembourg 
 (though these to soldiers seemed of equal importance), 
 it was upon the bare plains of the north that Paris strained 
 its eyes in these perilous hot days the long flat frontier 
 of Hainault and of Flanders and it is here that the reader 
 must look for his background to the last agony of the 
 Queen. 
 
 The line of defence, stretched like a chain across 
 that long flat frontier, was breaking down, had almost 
 disappeared. Point after point upon the line had gone; it 
 held now by one point remaining, and the ruin of that was 
 
 1 These words " concentration " and "a wide front " may seem self-contradictory. I mean by concentration 
 'a massed invasion, if you are to succeed against a military people ; and by "a wide front" the necessity for 
 
 attacking such a people in several places at once, if you are to succeed. For a force marching by a single 
 narrow gate (such as is the valley of the Meuse) is in peril of destruction if its opponents are used to war. 
 
 2 The lines of Weissembourg did not, of course, physically block the entry; they lay on the flank of it: but 
 until the army behind them could be dislodged it made impossible an advance by that way into Lorraine. 
 
480 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 imminent: the Republicans were attentive, in a fever for the 
 final crash, when the last pin-point upon which the defence 
 was stretched should give way and the weight of the invaders 
 should pour unresisted upon Paris. When that march 
 began there would be nothing for those who had challenged 
 the world but "to cover their faces and to die." 
 
 Of what character is that northeastern frontier of France 
 and what in military terms was the nature of the blow 
 which was about to fall ? 
 
 It is a frontier drawn irregularly due southeast for a 
 hundred miles, from the sea to the difficult highlands of 
 Ardennes and the waste Fagne Land. As it runs thus 
 irregularly, it cuts arbitrarily through a belt of population 
 which is one in creed, speech, and tradition: there is there- 
 fore no moral obstacle present to the crossing of it, and to 
 this moral facility of passage is added the material facility 
 that no evident gates or narrows constrain an invading army 
 to particular entries. From the dead flat of the sea-coast 
 the country rises slowly into little easy hills and slopes of 
 some confusion, but not till that frontier reaches and abuts 
 against the Ardennes does any obstacle mark it. It is 
 traversed by a score of main roads suitable for a parallel 
 advance, all excellent in surface and in bridges and other 
 artifice; it is thickly set with towns and villages to afford 
 repose and supply. Lastly, it is the nearest point of attack 
 to Paris. Once forced, a week's rapid marching from that 
 frontier brings the invader to the capital, and there is nothing 
 between. 
 
 Such advantages which, it is said, tempt unstable 
 brains in Berlin to-day have rendered this line, whenever 
 some powerful enemy held its further side, of supreme 
 defensive importance to the French. Until the formation 
 
THE HOSTAGE 481 
 
 of the Belgian State it had been for centuries from the 
 battle of Bouvines at least the front of national defence; 
 here the tradition of the seventeenth century and the genius 
 of Vauban and his successors had established a network 
 of strongholds, which formed the barrier now so nearly 
 destroyed in this summer of '93. 
 
 These fortresses ran along that frontier closely inter- 
 dependent, every one a support to its neighbours, forming 
 a narrowing wedge of strongholds, from where Dunkirk 
 upon the sea was supported by Gravelines to where the 
 whole system came to a point in the last fortress and camp 
 of Maubeuge, close up against the impassable Ardennes. 
 
 Maubeuge was the pivot of that door. Upon Maubeuge 
 the last effort of the invaders would be made. The rolling 
 up of the defending line of strongholds would proceed until 
 Maubeuge alone should be left to menace the advance 
 of the invasion. Maubeuge once fallen, all the Revolution 
 also fell. 
 
 So much has been written to explain the failure of the 
 Allies and the ultimate triumph of France in that struggle, 
 that this prime truth the all-importance of Maubeuge - 
 clear enough to the people of the time, has grown obscured. 1 
 The long debates of the Allies, the policy of the Cabinet 
 in London, the diversion upon Dunkirk, all these and 
 many other matters are given a weight far beyond their 
 due in the military problem of '93. The road from the 
 base of the Allies to their objective in Paris lay right through 
 the quadrilateral of fortresses, Mons, Conde, Valenciennes, 
 Maubeuge. Mons was theirs; Conde, Valenciennes and 
 
 1 The great authority of Joraini laid the foundation of this misconception, one which the reader might (per- 
 haps erroneously") find implied in Mr. Fortescue's admirable account of this campaign ; but the truth is that 
 it is impossible to accumulate detail as a military historian is bound to do especially where long cordons arc 
 opposed to each other, without losing sight of the vital points of the line. 
 
482 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 Maubeuge blocked their advance at its outset. A deflection 
 to the left was rendered impossible by the Ardennes. A 
 deflection to the right, possible enough, added, for every 
 degree of such deflection, an added peril to the communica- 
 tion of the advance, laying the flank of the communications 
 open to attack from whatever French garrison might have 
 been left uncaptured. All these garrisons must be accounted 
 for before Coburg could march on Paris. Mons, as I have 
 said, was in Austrian hands. and in Austrian territory; Conde, 
 nay, Valenciennes, might fall successively to the invader; but 
 so long as Maubeuge remained untaken the march upon 
 Paris was blocked. 
 
 There were not wanting at that moment critics who 
 demanded an immediate march on the capital, especially 
 as the summer waxed, as the peril of the Queen increased, 
 and as the immobility of the allies gave time for the martial 
 law of the Terror to do its work, and to raise its swarms of 
 recruits from all the countrysides: these critics were in 
 error; Coburg at the head of the Austrian army was right. 
 Poor as was the quality of the French troops opposed to 
 him, and anarchic as was their constantly changing command, 
 to have left a place of refuge whither they could concentrate 
 and whence they could operate in a body upon his lengthen- 
 ing communications, as he pressed on to Paris through hostile 
 country, would have been mad cavalry work, not general- 
 ship. Maubeuge with its entrenched camp, Maubeuge 
 open to continual reinforcement from all the French 
 country that lay south and west of it, was essential to his 
 final advance. That Maubeuge stood untaken transformed 
 the war, and, in spite of every disturbing factor in the 
 complex problem, it should be a fixed datum in history that 
 the resistance of Maubeuge and the consequent charge at 
 
THE HOSTAGE 483 
 
 Wattignies decided '93 as surely as the German artillery at 
 St. Privat decided 1870. Maubeuge was the hinge of all 
 the campaign. 
 
 Coburg, as the summer heightened, set out to pocket one 
 by one the supports of that last position; he easily succeeded. 
 
 In Paris a vague sense of doom filled all the leaders, but a 
 fever of violent struggle as well. . . . The Queen in her 
 prison saw once again (and shuddered at it) the dark face 
 of Drouet and heard his threatening voice. 
 
 All France had risen. There was civil war in the west 
 and in the north. A Norman woman had murdered Marat. 
 Mayence was strictly held all round about with the 
 Marseillese raging within; and as for the Barrier of 
 Fortresses to the north, Coburg now held them in the 
 hollow of his hand. 
 
 A fortnight after the Dauphin had been taken from the 
 Queen, the fortress of Conde fell; it had fallen from lack 
 of food. The Council of Maubeuge heard that news. 
 Valenciennes would come next along the line then, 
 they! They wrote to the Committee of Public Safety a 
 letter, which may still be read in the archives of the town, 
 demanding provisions. None came. 
 
 It is difficult to conceive the welter of the time: dis- 
 tracted orders flying here and there along the hundred 
 miles of cordon that stretched from Ardennes to the channel : 
 orders contradictory, unobeyed, or, if obeyed, fatal. Com- 
 mands shifted and reshifted; civilians from the Parlia- 
 ment carrying the power of life and death and muddling 
 half they did; levies caught up at random, bewildered, 
 
484 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 surrendering, deserting ; recruits too numerous for the army to 
 digest, a lack of all things. No provisions entered Maubeuge. 
 
 July dragged on, and Maubeuge could hear down the 
 west wind the ceaseless booming of the guns round Valen- 
 ciennes. Upon July 26th, Dubay, the Representative on 
 mission for the Parliament, sent to and established in 
 Maubeuge, heard an unusual silence. As the day drew on 
 a dread rose in him. The guns round Valenciennes no 
 longer boomed. Only rare shots from this point and from 
 that were heard: perhaps it was the weather deceived him. 
 But all next day the same damnable silence hung over the 
 west. On the 30th he wrote to the Parliament, "We 
 hear no firing from Valenciennes but we are sure they 
 cannot have surrendered." They had surrendered. 
 
 So Valenciennes was gone! . . . Conde was gone. 
 . . . Maubeuge alone remained, with the little out- 
 post of Le Quesnoy to delay a moment its necessary invest- 
 ment and sure doom. 
 
 The officer in command of Maubeuge awaited his orders. 
 They came from Paris in two days. Their rhetoric was of 
 a different kind from that in which Ministers who are 
 gentlemen of breeding address the General Officers of their 
 own society to-day. The Committee of Public Safety had 
 written thus: "Valenciennes has fallen: you answer on 
 your head for Maubeuge." 
 
 Far off in Germany, where that other second avenue 
 of invasion was in dispute, the French in Mayence had 
 surrendered. 
 
 So July ended, and immediately upon the 1st of August 
 the defiant decree was thrown at Europe that the Queen 
 
OF 
 
 THE HOSTAGE 485 
 
 herself should be tried. So closely did that decision mix 
 with the military moment that it was almost a military 
 thing and at half -past two on the morning of the 2nd, 
 the order reached her: she in turn was to go down the way 
 so many had begun to tread. 
 
 She showed no movement of the body or of the mind. 
 Night had already brought her too many terrors. The 
 two women were awakened. The decree of the Con- 
 vention which ordered the transference of the Queen to the 
 Conciergerie for her trial was read. She answered not a 
 word, but dressed herself and made a little package of her 
 clothes ; she embraced her daughter gently, and bade her 
 regard Madame Elizabeth as her second mother; then stood 
 for a moment or two in the arms of that sister-in-law who "^ 
 answered her in whispers. She turned to go and did not 
 look backward, but as she went out to get into the carriage 
 which was to carry her across the City, she struck her 
 head violently against the low lintel of the door. They 
 asked her if she was hurt, and she answered in the first and 
 only words that she addressed to her captors that nothing 
 more on earth could give her pain. The carriage travelled 
 rapidly through the deserted streets of the- night, the clatter- 
 ing of the mounted guard on either side of it. It was her 
 one brief glimpse of the world between a prison and a 
 prison. 
 
 As the Queen drove through the night, silent as it was, 
 there reached her those noises of a city which never cease, 
 and which to prisoners in transition (to our gagged victims 
 to-day as they cross London from one Hell to another) 
 are a sort of gaiety or at least a whiff of other men's living. 
 These noises were the more alive and the more perpetual 
 in this horrid August dark of '93 because a last agony was 
 
486 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 now risen high upon the Revolution; then news had been 
 of defeats, of cities fallen, of Valenciennes itself surrendered: 
 so that the next news might be the last. All night long men 
 sat up in the wine-shops quarrelling on it; even as her gaolers 
 drove her by, she saw lights in dirty ground-floor windows 
 and she heard from time to time snatches of marching 
 songs. It was the invasion. 
 
XIX 
 THE HUNGER OF MAUBEUGE 
 
 FROM THE MORNING OF AUGUST 2, 1793, TO MIDNIGHT OF 
 SUNDAY, OCTOBER 13, 1793 
 
 THE Queen descended from her carriage. She was 
 weak, but erect. The close heat of the night and 
 her sleeplessness and her fatigue had caused great 
 beads of sweat to stand upon her forehead. Up river along 
 the quays there had already showed, as she crossed the 
 bridge on to the Island of the Cite, a faint glimmer of dawn, 
 but here in the courtyard all was still thick night. The 
 gates of the Conciergerie opened rapidly and shut behind her. 
 
 Her gaolers led the way down a long, low, and dark 
 corridor, stiflingly close and warm, lit here and there with 
 smoky candles. She heard the murmur of voices, and saw 
 at the end of the passage a group of the police and of magis- 
 trates at the door of the little room that was to be her cell. 
 She entered through the throng, saw the official papers 
 signed at the miserable little table, and heard the formal 
 delivery of her person to the authorities of the prison; then 
 they left her, and in their place came in a kindly woman, the 
 wife of the porter, and with her a young girl, whose name 
 she heard was Rosalie. The Queen sat down on the straw- 
 bottomed chair and glanced round by the light of the candle 
 beside her. 
 
 It was a little low room, quite bare: damp walls, the 
 paper of which, stamped with the royal fleur de lys, hung 
 
 487 
 
488 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 mildewed, rose from a yet damper floor of brick set herring- 
 bone-wise; a small camp-bed covered with the finest linen 
 alone relieved it, and a screen some four feet high, between 
 her and the door, afforded some little shelter. Above her 
 a small barred window gave upon the paving of the prison 
 yard, for the cell was half underground. Here Custine 
 - who had lost the North and was to be executed for the fall 
 of Valenciennes - - had been confined till his removal but a 
 few hours before to make way for the Queen. Here is 
 now the canteen of the prison. 
 
 It was very late. The new day was quite broad and 
 full, showing the extreme paleness of her face and her 
 weary eyes. She stood upon a little stuff -covered hassock, 
 hung her watch upon a nail, and began to undress, to 
 sleep if she might sleep for a few hours. A servant of 
 the turnkey's, a girl called Rosalie, timidly offered her 
 help; the Queen put her gently aside, saying: "Since I 
 have no maid I have learnt to do all myself." They blew 
 their candles out and left her to repose. 
 
 On the fourth day, the 6th of August, they came again 
 and took from her further things which a prisoner might 
 not enjoy; among them that little watch of hers in gold. 
 She gave it to them. It was the little watch which she had 
 worn when she had come in as a child to Compiegne on 
 her way to the great marriage and to the throne. It was 
 the last of her ornaments. 
 
 A routine began and lasted unbroken almost till August 
 ended. In that little low cell, more than half underground, 
 dimly lit by the barred window that stood level with the 
 flags outside, day succeeded day without insult, but with- 
 out relief, and here at last her strait captivity began what 
 the Temple hitherto could never do. Her spirit did not 
 
LAST PORTRAIT OF MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 Presumably sketched in the Temple ; now at Versailles 
 
THE HUNGER OF MAUBEUGE 489 
 
 fail, but her body began to weaken, and in her attitude and 
 gesture there had entered the appearance of despair. . . . 
 Outside the Committee wondered whether their daring 
 might not bear fruit, and whether, to save the Queen, the 
 frontier might not be relieved. But no offer came from the 
 Kings, and the hostage of the Republicans remained useless 
 on their anxious hands. ... In Brussels Fersen heard 
 and went wild, talked folly of an immediate march on Paris, 
 cursed Coburg and all rules of war; but Coburg was not to 
 be moved he knew his trade, and still prepared the sieges. 
 She had no privacy. All day long a corporal of police 
 and his man sat on guard in a corner of the room. All 
 night her door, in spite of its two great bolts, was guarded. 
 For the rest her wants were served. She asked for a special 
 water from the neighbourhood of what had been Ver- 
 sailles, and she obtained it. They hired books for her. They 
 permitted her good food and the daily expense upon it of a 
 very wealthy woman. 1 The porter's wife and the maid 
 were very tender to her. They put flowers on her small 
 oak table and they marketed at her desire. Her other 
 service wounded her; first an old woman who was useless, 
 the turnkey's mother ; next a young virago, Havel by name, 
 whose rudeness disturbed her. They would let her have 
 no steel not even the needles with which she was knitting 
 for her little son, nor a knife to cut her food; but more than 
 all there sank into her the intolerable monotony, the fixed 
 doubt, the utter isolation which made the place a tomb. 
 The smallest incident moved her. She would watch her 
 gaolers at their picquet and note the game, she would 
 listen to distant music, she would greet with a dreadful 
 reminiscence of her own the porter's little son, and cry over 
 
 1 What would come to a pound a day in our money, and at our scale of living for the uncooked food alone. 
 
490 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 him a little and speak of the Dauphin but this last scene 
 was so vivid that at last they dared no longer bring the 
 child. She kept for consolation all this while, hidden in 
 her bosom, a little yellow glove of her boy's, and in it a 
 miniature of him and a lock of his hair. 
 
 Meanwhile Maubeuge: 
 
 On the day which had seen the Queen enter the Con- 
 ciergerie the Commander of Maubeuge issued the first 
 warning of danger. The aged, the women and the children 
 were invited to leave the shelter of the fortress and to betake 
 themselves to the open country. That order was but 
 partially obeyed and still no provisions reached the 
 town. 
 
 Now that strong Valenciennes had fallen, the Allies 
 had their business so thoroughly in hand that some debate 
 arose among them whether the main garrison of Maubeuge 
 should be assailed at once or whether the little outlying posts 
 should be picked up first: the large and the small were 
 equally certain to capitulate: there was ample leisure to 
 choose. 
 
 Coburg was for the main attack on Maubeuge but 
 he was not keen the wretched little force at Cambrai 
 would do to begin with or even the handful in Le 
 Quesnoy. It was simply a question of the order in which 
 they should be plucked. 
 
 The young Duke of York, acting as he was bidden to 
 act from Westminster, proposed to divert some 40,000 
 men to the capture of Dunkirk; for it must be remembered 
 that all this war was a war of Conquest, that the frontier 
 towns taken were to compensate the Allies after the Revolu- 
 
THE HUNGER OF MAUBEUGE 491 
 
 tion had been destroyed, and that Dunkirk was historically 
 a bastion of importance to England, and that all the advance 
 was to end in the annexation of French land. 
 
 This march upon Dunkirk has been condemned by 
 most historians because it failed; had it succeeded none 
 could have praised it too highly. Politically it was just in 
 conception (for it gave Britain some balancing advantage 
 against the Austrians their allies) , and as a military project 
 it was neither rash nor ill-planned. The force left with 
 Coburg was ample for his task, and nothing could be 
 easier than for the Austrian army alone to reduce (as 
 it did reduce) the worthless garrisons opposed to it, 
 while the English commander was doing English work 
 upon the right. 1 
 
 The combined forces spent the close of the week after 
 Valenciennes had fallen in driving off such of the French 
 as were still in the open under Kilmain. A few days later 
 forty-seven battalions, of whom a full seventh were English 
 and Irish men, marched off under York for Dunkirk, 
 while Coburg at his ease sat down before the little town of 
 Le Quesnoy, the last fortified support of Maubeuge upon 
 the west. Upon the same day he brushed the French out 
 of the wood of Mormal, the last natural obstacle which 
 could protect Maubeuge when Le Quesnoy should have 
 fallen. It was the 17th of August but already in 
 Paris there had passed one of the chief accidents of 
 history : an accident from which were to flow all the tactics 
 of the Great War, ultimately the successes of Napoleon, and 
 
 1 Even as it was and in spite of his failure before Dunkirk, the Duke of York had plenty of time to come 
 . back and help Coburg after that failure, and to have joined him in front of Maubeuge {before the French at- 
 tempted the relief of that town. The English commander could easily have been present at Wattignies, and 
 would probably or certainly have prevented that miracle. But no one foresaw the miracle. Coburg did not 
 ask York to come till the 7th of October. York did not march till the loth, and even then he thought he had 
 the leisure to while a week upon forty miles 1 
 
 
492 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 immediately the salvation of the Revolution : Lazare Ca 
 had been admitted to the Committee of Public Safety. 
 
 In Paris the Queen endured that August: and, isolated 
 from the world, she did not know what chances of war might 
 imperil her through the fury of a defeated nation or might 
 save her by the failure of the Terror and its martial law. 
 
 As she thus waited alone and in silence the pressure 
 upon the Republic grew. Lyons had risen when Marat 
 died. Vendee was not defeated: before the month ended 
 the English were in Toulon. 
 
 As the hot days followed each other in their awful same- 
 ness she still declined; her loss of blood never ceased, her 
 vigour dwindled. A doctor of great position, the surgeon 
 Souberbielle, 1 visited the cell and denounced its dampness 
 for a danger: nothing was done. She lived on, knowing 
 nothing of the world beyond and above those dirty walls, 
 but vaguely she hoped or imagined an exchange and to 
 be reunited with her children to survive this unreal time 
 and to find herself abroad again with living men. No 
 change or interruption touched the long watch of her soul 
 until, when she had already jpassed three weeks and more 
 in nothingness, that inspector of police who had already 
 befriended her in the Temple, Michonis, entered; and a 
 certain companion, spare and wild-eyed was with him. 
 It was a Wednesday; the last Wednesday in August; the 
 month had yet three days to run. 
 
 1 He was famous for his operations for the stone; sat upon the jury that condemned the Queen, was sum- 
 moned for his art to Westminster Hospital, wondered in old age why the Restoration would not give his Euro- 
 pean fame a salaried post; thought it might be a fear of his infirmities of>ge; danced high vigourously before 
 the Committee of medical patronage to prove, at ninety, his unimpaired vivacity, was refused any public 
 salary, and died some years later a still active but disappointed man," fearing that his politics had had 
 some secret effect in prejudicing the royal family against him." 
 
THE HUNGER OF MAUBEUGE 493 
 
 These two were in league, and fantastic fortune had 
 put an official of the city at her disposal for escape. 
 
 The whole scene was rapid she had barely time to 
 understand the prodigious opportunity. She noticed in 
 the hand of Michonis' companion a bunch of pinks 
 perhaps she half recognised his face (indeed, he had fought 
 in defence of the palace), she failed to take the flowers and 
 he let them fall behind the stove and the while Michonis 
 was covering all by some official question or other. It was 
 not a minute's work and they were gone: but in the flowers, 
 when, after her bewilderment, she sought them, she found 
 a note. Its contents offered her safety. Michonis (it ran) 
 trusted as an official, would produce an order to transfer 
 her person to some other prison; in the passage he would 
 permit her to fly. The note asked for a reply. 
 
 She had no pen or pencil, but she found a plan for answer- 
 ing, for she took a pin and pricked out painfully these words 
 on a slip of paper: "I am watched; I neither write nor speak; 
 I count on you; I will come." The policeman of her guard 
 not the corporal had been bought. He took the slip of 
 paper from her and gave it to the porter's wife, her friend. 
 Next day Michonis called for it, knew that the Queen was 
 ready, laid all his plans, and on the Monday, by night, 
 appeared at the door of the Conciergerie with his official 
 order for the removal of the Queen. 
 
 Even in these few hours there had been time for treason. 
 The policeman had revealed the message to the authorities. 
 The faces Michonis saw at the gate of the prison by the 
 sentry's lamp when he came up that Monday night, 
 were not those he expected or knew. His plot was already 
 in the hands of the Government and he was lost. 
 
 Within, the Queen waited in an agony of silence for 
 
494 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 the sound of her deliverers; the hours of the morning drew 
 on and the summer dawn of the Tuesday broadened; no 
 steps had sounded on the stones of the passage : everything 
 had failed. 
 
 Her deliverer suffered. She herself was closely examined 
 and transferred to another cell where she must wait, in a 
 more rigid compulsion, for the end. 
 
 No other human fortune 1 came to Marie Antoinette 
 from that day until, seven weeks later, she died. 
 
 West and a little north of Maubeuge, but twenty miles 
 away, the watchers a month and more before had heard 
 the ceaseless guns round Valenciennes. Then had come 
 the silence of the surrender. Now they heard much nearer, 
 west and a little to the south, the loud fury of a new and 
 neighbouring bombardment as the shot poured into Le 
 Quesnoy. Soon, as they knew, those guns would be trained 
 on their own walls. Little Le Quesnoy was the last of the 
 line but one, and they, in Maubeuge, the last of all. The 
 Monday, the first Monday in September, the Tuesday, the 
 Wednesday, the Thursday, the Friday, all that week the 
 garrison at Maubeuge listened to the endless sound which 
 never faltered by day or by night, and they still wondered 
 how long it might endure: there were but 6,000 in the little 
 place and their doom was so certain that their endurance 
 seemed quite vain. Sunday, and the guns never paused or 
 weakened ; the second Monday came and they still raged 
 but on the ninth day when the marvel seemed to have 
 grown permanent, on the Tuesday (it was the day that 
 the Queen was thrust into her second and more vigorous 
 
 1 1 reject the story of her communion. 
 
THE HUNGER OF MAUBEUGE 495 
 
 imprisonment) again as with Valenciennes the omin- 
 ous silence came: Le Quesnoy was treating, and Maubeuge 
 now made ready for its end. 
 
 The free troops to the south and east (two poor divisions) 
 moved doubtfully toward the entrenched camp of the 
 fortress knowing well that they must in a few days be 
 contained: there was no food: there were not even muskets 
 for them all. 
 
 Around them by detachments the French forces were 
 being eaten up. The little garrison of Cambray had 
 marched out to relieve its neighbour 6,000 men, three- 
 quarters of the infantry regulars, three squadrons, and a 
 battery of guns. The Hungarians rode through that 
 battery before it could unlimber, refused to accept surrender, 
 broke the line, and hacked and killed until a remnant got 
 off at a run under the guns of Bouchain. D eel aye, their 
 general, survived; he was in Paris within forty -eight hours, 
 tried within another forty -eight and on the morrow beheaded. 
 
 For a fortnight these contemptuous successes on the 
 fringe of Coburg's army continued, and the main force 
 meanwhile was gathering supplies, calling in detachments, 
 organising train, and making all ready for the last and 
 decisive blow that should shatter Maubeuge. In Maubeuge 
 they hurriedly and confusedly prepared. Such grain as 
 they could gather from neighbouring farms was seized, 
 many of "the useless and the suspect" w r ere expelled, the 
 able-bodied civilians were set to dig, to entrench, and to com- 
 plain, and over all this work was a man worthy of the place 
 and the occasion for, on a high morning, the 15th of 
 September, but a day or two after the surrender of Le 
 Quesnoy, there had gallopped into Maubeuge a repre- 
 sentative of the Parliament well chosen by the Terror to 
 
496 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 superintend such an issue: he rode straight in the long 
 stirrups of the cavalry with harsh, eccentric, and powerful, 
 clean face ; a young man, dark and short and square : it was 
 Drouet. 
 
 The two divisions hung nervously, the one east, the other 
 west of the fortress, making a show to dispute the passage 
 of the river against forces three times their own in number 
 and indefinitely their superiors in training and every quality 
 of arms; on the 28th 1 of September, at dawn, Coburg 
 crossed where he chose both above or below the town; 
 of the French divisions one -was swept, the other hunted 
 into the fortress before noon the thing was done, and 
 the French force happy to have escaped with but a partial 
 panic was blocked and held. With the next day the 
 strain began, for the Austrians drove the surrounding 
 peasantry within the walls and in the same hour burnt the 
 stores accumulated outside the walls. On the third day the 
 first of the horses within Maubeuge was killed for food. 
 "Drouet, for all his high heart, doubted if the Republic 
 could deliver them and knew the sudden extremity of the 
 town. He imagined a bold thing. On the 2nd of Octo- 
 ber, the fourth day of the siege, he took a hundred dragoons 
 men of his own old arm and set out cross the Austrian 
 lines by night: he designed a long ride to the Meuse itself 
 and the sending of immediate news to the Committee of the 
 danger of Maubeuge; he feared lest those civilians in 
 Paris should imagine that a week, ten days, a fortnight 
 were all one to the beleaguered town and lest they should 
 frame their plan of relief upon the false hope of a long siege. 
 So he rode out and the enemy heard the hoof -beats and 
 j caught him. They put that tall man in chains; they caged 
 
 l Not as Gomini says, the 29th. i 
 
THE HUNGER OF MAUBEUGE 497 
 
 him also and made him a show. In Brussels, Fersen, with 
 a dreadful curiosity went to peep at his face behind the 
 iron bars; in Paris the woman whose chance of flight he 
 had destroyed at Varennes sat and awaited her judges. 
 
 Three days passed in Maubeuge and all the meat, salted 
 and fresh, was sequestrated. The manuscripts in the 
 monastery were torn up for cartridges; everything was 
 needed. On the next day, the 6th of October, hay and straw 
 were commandeered. On the next, the 7th, a census of the 
 food remaining showed, for over 30,000 adult men and all 
 the women and children besides, barely 400 head, and of 
 these more than three-quarters small sheep in poor condi- 
 tion. Upon the 10th such little grain as the town contained 
 was seized by the Commandant. The next day the whole 
 population was upon half-rations and the townsmen were 
 struggling with the soldiery. Upon the morrow again, the 
 12th, counsel was taken of the desperate need to advise the 
 Government that the place was all but gone, and it was 
 designed that by night such as might volunteer should bear 
 the news or perish in crossing the lines. 
 
 That evening, the evening of the 12th, after dark, 
 Marie Antoinette was led out from her cell for that pre- 
 liminary Interrogation which, in French procedure, pre- 
 ceeds the public trial. They led her from her little cell, 
 through the narrow passages, into a great empty hall. Two 
 - candles, the only lights in that echoing darkness, stood upon 
 the table. 
 
 She was in a deep ignorance of her position and of Europe. 
 
498 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 The silence of the room corresponded to the silence within 
 her: its darkness to the complete loneliness of her heart. 
 She did not know what were the fortunes of the French 
 army, what advance, if any, had been made by their en- 
 emies whom she still regarded as her rescuers. She knew 
 nothing of the last desperate risk upon the frontier which 
 the Republic ran; she knew nothing of the steps by which 
 she had been brought to this position, the demand in 
 Parliament for her execution as the news from the front 
 got worse and worse: the summoning of the Court: the 
 formation of the Bench that was to try her. Least of all 
 did she know that the extreme mad group whom Hebert 
 led had gone to her little sickly son suggesting to him 
 (probably believing what they suggested) nameless cor- 
 ruptions from her hand : to these they believed he had been 
 witness, nay, himself a victim ; she did not know that to these 
 horrors that group had caused the child's trembling signa- 
 ture to be affixed. . . . He had sat there swinging his 
 legs in the air from the high chair in which they had placed 
 him to question him: he had answered "Yes" to all they 
 suggested. . . he was her little son! She, imprisoned 
 far off from him, knew nothing of that hellish moment. 
 She was utterly deserted. She saw nothing but the dark 
 empty room and the two pale candles that shone upon 
 the faces of the men who were soon to try her: they 
 marked in relief the aquiline face of the chief Judge, 
 Herman. The other faces were in darkness. 
 
 Certain questions privately put to her were few and 
 simple, a mere preliminary to the trial; she answered them 
 as simply in her own favour. Her dress was dark and poor. 
 She sat between two policemen upon a bench in the vast 
 black void of the unfurnished hall and answered, and, 
 
THE HUNGER OF MAUBEUGE 499 
 
 when she had answered, signed. She answered con- 
 ventionally that she wished the country well, that she had 
 never wished it ill, she signed (as they told her to sign) under 
 the title of the "widow of Capet." They named two 
 barristers to defend her, Chauveau Lagarde and Tronon 
 Ducourdray, and she was led back to her cell and to her 
 silence. Next day the 13th, these lawyers were informed 
 and came to consult with her. 
 
 Upon the 13th by night, twelve dragoons volunteered 
 to take news out of Maubeuge, a sergeant leading them. 
 They swam the Sambre and got clean away. They rode 
 all night, they rode by morning into Philippeville and begged 
 that three cannon shots might be fired, for that was the 
 signal by which Maubeuge was to know that they had 
 brought news of the hard straits of the city beyond the 
 Austrian lines. They rode on without sleep to Givet, and 
 there at last they heard that an army was on the march, 
 straight for the relief of the siege. 
 
 Carnot had gathered that army, bringing in the scattered 
 and broken detachments from the right and the left, con- 
 centrating them upon Avesnes, until at last he had there to 
 his hand 45,000 men. Carnot was there in Avesnes and 
 we have records of the ragged army, some of them fresh 
 from defeats, most of them worthless, pouring in. There 
 were those who had one shoe, there were those who had 
 none; they were armed in varying fashion; they were wholly 
 under-gunned. The boys straggled, marched, or drooped 
 in, the gayer of them roaring marching songs, but the 
 greater part disconsolate. With such material, in one 
 way or another, Carnot designed to conquer. Maubeuge 
 
500 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 had been upon half-rations since the beginning of the week, 
 it might ask for terms in any hour, and between him and it 
 stretched the long high line of wood wherein Coburg lay 
 entrenched impregnably. 
 
 The nominal command of the hosts so gathered was in 
 the hands of Jourdan, a travelling draper who had volun- 
 teered in the American War, whom the Committee of 
 Public Safety had discovered, once more a draper, and to 
 whom it had given first the army of the Ardennes, then this 
 high post before Maubeuge. He was a man of simple 
 round features and of easy mind; he had but just been set 
 at the head of the Army of the North: left to himself he 
 would have lost it and his head. But the true com- 
 mander was not Jourdan, it was Carnot. Carnot came to 
 represent only the force of the Parliament of which he was 
 a member and the force of the Committee of Public Safety 
 of which he was the brain ; but once on the field he exceeded 
 both these capacities and became, what he had always been, 
 a soldier. His big and ugly, bulging forehead with its lean 
 whisp of black hair hid the best brain and overhung the 
 best eye for tactics of all those that preceded, and formed 
 the final effect of, Napoleon's armies. 
 
 The great Carnot in Avesnes that night stood like a 
 wrestler erect and ready, his arms free, his hands unclenched, 
 balancing to clutch the invader and to try the throw. He, 
 with that inward vision of his, saw the whole plan of the 
 struggle from south to north, and overlooked the territory 
 of the French people as a mountain bird overlooks the Plain. 
 He knew the moment. He knew it not as a vague, intense, 
 political fear, nor even as a thesis for the learned arms and 
 
THE HUNGER OF MAUBEUGE 501 
 
 for the staff, but as a visible and a real world : he saw the 
 mountains and the rivers, the white threads of roads radia- 
 ting from Paris to all the points of peril, of rebellion or of 
 disaster ; he saw the armies in column upon them, the massed 
 fronts, the guns. He saw the royal flag over Toulon and 
 the English fleet in harbour there, he saw the bush and 
 the marsh of Vendee still unconquered, he saw the resistance 
 of Lyons (for he had no news of its surrender) ; above all 
 he saw those two doors against which the invader leaned, 
 which were now pushed so far ajar and which at any moment 
 might burst open the lines of Weissembourg; and here, 
 right to his hand, the entrenchments that covered the last 
 siege of the northern frontier. He saw reeling and nearly 
 falling, the body of the Republic that was his religion, and 
 he saw that all the future, death or life, lay in Maubeuge. 
 
 The Sunday night fell over Paris and over those long 
 Flemish hills. The morrow was to see the beginning of I 
 two things : the trial of the Queen and the opening of a battle I 
 which was to decide the fate of the French people. 
 
XX 
 
 WATTIGNIES 
 
 MONDAY, the 14th of October: 
 
 Oct. 14, 1793. The fate of the Queen and of the Republic 
 6 a. m. k a( j each come to a final and critical issue when 
 
 the light broke, dully in either place, over Paris and over 
 the pastures of the frontier. There the army lay to arms 
 in the valley, with Coburg entrenched upon the ridge above 
 them, and beyond him the last famine of Maubeuge; from 
 dawn the French lines could hear, half a day's march to the 
 northward, the regular boom of the bombardment. But 
 Carnot was now come. 
 
 Oct. 14, 1793. I* 1 Paris* when it was broad day, the chief 
 in Pans, 8 a. m. court above the prison was prepared. 
 
 The populace had crammed the side galleries of the great 
 room and were forming a further throng, standing in the 
 space between the doors and the bar. The five Judges, 
 Herman the chief, filed on to the Bench; a little below 
 them, and on their right, a jury of fifteen men was empan- 
 elled. It was on the courage, the conviction, or the fan- 
 aticism of these that the result would turn. 
 
 They presented, as they sat there awaiting the prisoner, 
 a little model of the violent egalitarian mood which had 
 now for a year and more driven the military fury of the 
 Republic. Among them would be seen the refined and 
 somewhat degraded face of a noble who had sat in the 
 
 502 
 
WATTIGNIES 503 
 
 earlier Parliaments, and who had drifted as Orleans had 
 drifted but further than had Orleans. There also were 
 the unmistakable eyes of precision which were those of an 
 
 Battle of 
 
 WATTIGNIES 
 
 OCT. is^ue^i/sa 
 
 AND m 
 RELIEF or MAUBEUGE 
 
 MAUBEUGE 
 
 REFERENCE 
 
 A. Point where Fromentin wns cheeked on first day Oct. 15th 
 
 B. Approximate point at which the Austrian rally broke and the action was 
 
 decided on second day Oct. 16th 
 1.2.34.5. Passages of the Sambre 
 
 - Crest of plateau covering Miuibciijre defended by Anstrlans 
 BsBn Anstrians round JIauhoimv and on crest of plateau on Oct. loth 
 ( 1 French line just before assault on Oct. loth, also garrison of Haubengn 
 
 -* Reinforcements arrived from French centre and left in the night and lines 
 
 of their assault 
 
 - . Austrian retirement on Bridges of Hambrc after their line had been 
 turned at Wattignies Oct. 16th 
 
 optician, a maker of instruments. There were, resting on 
 the rail of the box, the firm hands of a great surgeon 
 (Souberbielle). A few of the common people were mingled 
 
504 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 with these: contractors also, prosperous men, and master- 
 carpenters. There was a hatter there, and a barber, a 
 man who had made violins, and another who painted pic- 
 tures for the rich. Of such elements was the body com- 
 prised which had now to determine so much in the history 
 of Europe. Above them a presiding figure, Herman the 
 Judge, with his dark aquiline face, controlled them all. 
 They looked all of them towards the door that led from the 
 cells below, where two warders came upward through it, 
 leading between them the Queen. 
 
 She also as she entered saw new things. The silence 
 and the darkness of her long imprisonment fell from her: 
 the noise of the streets came in from the windows before 
 her; she heard the rumour and she saw the movement of 
 the populace which save for that brief midnight drive 
 two months ago had been quite cut off from her since 
 last she had shrunk from the mob on the evening when she 
 had heard the gate of the Temple bolted behind her car- 
 riage. After that hush, which had been so dreadfully 
 divided by evil upon evil, she came out suddenly into the 
 sound of the city and into the general air. In that inter- 
 val the names of months and of days, the mutual saluta- 
 tions of men, religion and the very habit of life had changed. 
 In that interval also the nation had passed from the shock 
 of arms to unimagined crimes, to a most unstable victory, 
 to a vision of defeat and perhaps of annihilation. France 
 was astrain upon the edge of a final deliverance or of a 
 final and irretrievable disaster, Its last fortress was all 
 but fallen, all its resources were called out, all its men 
 were under arms, over the fate of the frontier hung a 
 dreadful, still silence. In the very crisis of this final 
 doubt and terror the Queen stood arraigned. 
 
WATTIGNIES 505 
 
 The women lowered their knitting-needles and kept them 
 still. The little knot of Commissioners sitting with Counsel 
 for the State, the angry boys in the crowd who could remem- 
 ber wounds or the death of comrades, stretched forward 
 to catch sight of her as she came up the stairs between her 
 guards : they were eager to note if there had been any change. 
 
 She had preserved her carriage, which all who knew her 
 had regarded since her childhood as the chief expression 
 of her soul. She still moved with solemnity and with that 
 exaggerated but unflinching poise of the head which, in 
 the surroundings of Versailles, had seemed to some so 
 queenly, to others so affected; which here, in her last hours, 
 seemed to all, as she still preserved it, so defiant. For 
 the rest she was not the same. Her glance seemed dull 
 and full of weariness; the constant loss of blood which 
 she had suffered during those many weeks spent below 
 ground had paled her so that the artificial, painted red 
 of her cheeks was awful in that grey morning, and her 
 still ample hair was ashen and touched with white, save 
 where some traces of its old auburn could be, perhaps, 
 distinguished. 
 
 She was in black. A little scarf of lace was laid with 
 exactitude about her shoulders and her breast, and on her 
 head she wore a great cap which a woman who loved her, 
 the same who had served her in her cell, put on her as she 
 went to her passion. The pure white of this ornament 
 hung in great strings of lawn on either side, and round it 
 and beneath it she had wound the crape of her widowhood. 
 So dressed, and so standing at the bar, so watched in silence 
 by so many eyes, she heard once more the new sound which 
 yesterday she had first learned to hate: the hard and nasal 
 voice of Herman. He asked her formally her name. 
 
.><)<; MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 Sin* answered in a voice which was no longer strong, but 
 which was still clear and well heard in that complete silence: 
 
 "Marie Antoinette of Austria, some thirty-eight years 
 old, willow to Louis Capet, the King of France." 
 
 To the second formal question on the place ot her first 
 arrest, that : 
 
 "It was in the place where the sittings of the National 
 Assembly were held." 
 
 The clerk, a man of no great learning, wrote his heading: 
 "The 23rd day of the lirst month of the fourth year of Free- 
 dom," and when he had done this he noted her replies, and 
 Herman's short, questions also: his bidding to the jury that 
 they must be linn, to the prisoner that she must be attentive. 
 
 Into the clerk's writing there crept, as there will into that 
 of poor men, certain grievous errors of grammar which in an 
 earlier (and a later) time would not have appeared in the 
 record of the meanest court trying a tramp for hunger; 
 but it was the Revolution and they were trying a Queen, so 
 everything was strange; and this clerk called himself Fabri- 
 cius, which had a noble sound but it was not his name. 
 
 This clerk read the list of witnesses and the indictment 
 out loud. 
 
 When these formalities were over they brought a chair. 
 The Queen sat down by leave of the court and the trial 
 began. She saw rising upon her right a new figure of a 
 kind which she had not known in all her life up to the day 
 when the door of the prison had shut her out from the noise 
 and change of the world. It was a tigure of the Terror, 
 Fouquier Tinville. His eyes were steadfast, the skin of 
 his face was brown, hard and strong; he was a hired poli- 
 tician, covered with the politician's outer mask of firmness. 
 Within he was full of the politician's hesitation and ner- 
 
WATTIGNIES 507 
 
 vous inconstancy. A genuine poverty and a politician's 
 hunger for a salary had been satisfied by the post of Pub- 
 lic Prosecutor. He earned that salary with zeal and with 
 little discernment, and therefore, when the time came, 
 he also was condemned to die. It was he now in this fore- 
 noon who opened against the Queen. 
 
 His voice was harsh and mechanical : his speech was long, 
 dull, and violent: rhetorical with that scenic and cardboard 
 rhetoric which is the official commonplace of all tribunals. 
 The Widow Capet was Messalina; she was a leech; she was 
 a Merovingian Tyrant; she was a Medicis. She had held 
 relations with the "Man called King" of Bohemia and 
 Hungary; she had urged Capet on to all his crimes. She 
 had sent millions to aid her family in their war against 
 the French people. She had woven the horrid plot of the 
 10th of August, which nothing but incredible valour had 
 defeated. She was the main enemy which the new and angry 
 Freedom for which he spoke had had to meet and to conquer. 
 
 Apart from its wearisome declamation the accusation 
 was true; save that through no fault of her own, poor 
 woman ! she had not aided the foreign cause with gold, 
 all the story was evident and publicly known. She sat as 
 near this orator as is a nurse to a bedside. She heard him 
 with her suffering and disdainful face quite fixed and 
 unmoved, save at one point: the mention of her son. 
 
 Fouquier Tinville was sane: he saw the crass absurdity 
 of Hebert's horrors, he barely touched upon them very 
 hurriedly (and as the rapid and confused words escaped 
 him, her lips twitched with pain), but even as he did so, he 
 knew he had given the defence a hold. 
 
 It is held on principle in French Courts that an impar- \ 
 tial presentation of the truth cannot be obtained unless J 
 
 
508 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 witnesses are heard in a chance sequence, not divided into 
 friends and foes, as with us, but each (such is the 
 theory) telling what he believes to be the truth. Even in 
 these political trials of the Terror (which were rather 
 Courts -martial or condemnations than trials) the rule was 
 observed, and when Fouquier sat down the file of wit- 
 nesses began. 
 
 The parade was futile. For plain political facts known 
 to the whole world no list of witnesses was needed, nor 
 could their evidence be of the least avail. Moreover, 
 that evidence was lacking. The witnesses defiled one 
 after the other, each vaguer than the last, to prove (and 
 failing to prove) things that were commonplaces to all 
 Europe. Long past midday the empty procession contin- 
 ued through the drowsy hours past one o'clock and two; 
 remembering trifles of her conduct true and false. To every 
 assertion as the Judge repeated it (true or false), she! 
 answered quietly by a denial; that denial was now false,] 
 now true. 
 
 Even if the Revolutionary Tribunal could have subpoenaed 
 Mallet or the Emperor or Fersen, it would have meant 
 little to the result. Her guilt, if it was guilt so to scheme 
 against the nation, was certain; what yet remained in doubt 
 was the political necessity of such a trial at such a mo- 
 ment, the limit of hardihood in her Judges and the possible 
 effect in a democracy of public sympathy at some critical 
 phase of the pleadings and much more potent than any 
 of these three, because it included them all, was the news 
 that might come at any moment from the frontier and from 
 the hunger of Maubeuge no news came. 
 
 Last of these witnesses Hebert, all neat and powdered, 
 presented his documents and put forward his abomina- 
 
WATTIGNIES 509 
 
 tions, his fixed idea of incest. The public disgust might I 
 here have turned the trial. There was a stir all round: 
 her friends began to hope. As for the officials, they could 
 not stop Hebert's mouth, but Herman was careful to omit 
 the customary repetition: he was hurrying on to the next 
 witness when a juryman of less wit than his fellows and filled 
 with the enormous aberrations of hate, pressed the charge. 
 
 The Queen would not reply. She half rose from her 
 chair and cried in a high voice: "I appeal to every mother 
 here," and then sank back again. 
 
 The crowd in the galleries began to move and murmur, 
 the women raised their voices against the angry orders of 
 the ushers and of the Bench demanding silence. Away, 
 dining beyond the Seine, Robespierre, hearing of it, broke 
 a plate at table in his anger, and thought Hebert's lunacy 
 had saved her. A further witness, though he spoke of the 
 flight to Varennes, could hardly be heard, and spoke quite 
 unheeded; and when he had concluded, the Court abruptly 
 rose in the midst of the commotion, hubbub and change. 
 
 The Queen was led to her cell, keeping, as she left her 
 place, in spite of her hopeless fatigue, the steady step where- 
 with she had entered; and as she passed she heard one woman 
 in the press sneering at her pride. 
 
 It was three o'clock. The first act in that long agony 
 had lasted, without food or breathing time, for seven hours. 
 
 While the Republic thus held the old world prisoner in 
 Paris, and tortured it in the person of the Queen, 
 out on the frontier in the water-meadows of Before ' Mau- 
 Avesnes, the Republic lay in its chief peril from 
 the old world free and armed. Coburg and every privilege 
 
510 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 held the crest of the hills invincibly, and Maubeuge was 
 caught fast, unreachable beyond the entrenchments of 
 that ridge. 
 
 Carnot, looking westward down the valley of the Helpe, 
 saw the deep orchards laden with October, nourished by 
 the small and very winding stream. He saw the last 
 French frontier hamlets and their mills. St. Hilaire, 
 Dompierre, Tenieres, dwindling away to where, far off 
 in its broad trench, ran the Sambre. 
 
 Before him also in this valley, as he looked westward 
 down it, he saw stretched for some ten miles the encamp- 
 ment of his army: bivouac after bivouac, one beyond the 
 other along the lines, and smoke rising from them. Tall 
 hedges, not yet bare, divided the floor of the valley and the 
 village grounds: here, also, Csesar had marched through 
 against the Nervii: for this corner of Europe is a pack 
 of battlefields. Malplaquet lay just before the army; 
 within a march, Fleurus; within sound of cannon, 
 Jemappes. 
 
 Up above them beyond that wood of Avesnes, the line 
 of the heights along the sky, was the enemy. It had loomed 
 so dark before the late, dull and rainy dawn, that they had 
 seen the notches in that line which were the emplacement 
 of guns. The early afternoon had shone upon the sides 
 of the hills, and the French outposts had seen the outposts 
 of the evening busy in the little villages that mark the foot 
 of the slopes: St. Vaast, Dourlers, Foursies. And all day 
 long boomed to the north behind the hills the sullen guns 
 before Maubeuge. At any hour that dull repeated sound 
 might cease, and it would mean that the last fortress had 
 fallen. 
 
 All that day Carnot passed in silence. The troops, 
 
WATTIGNIES 511 
 
 some last detachments of which had but just marched in, 
 lay dully in such repose as soldiers can steal: a jumble 
 of forty patchwork battalions, militia, regulars, loud vol- 
 unteers, old stark gunners; they listened to the distant and 
 regular thunder of the siege. In some stations the few 
 horses were grooming: in others, fewer still, the rare guns 
 were cleaned. 
 
 An hour before dusk the six generals were called to Car- 
 not's tent, and here and there the bugles roused 
 the troops called for reconnaissance. These few Before Mau- 
 detachments crossed the woods, pierced gaps in 
 the hedges, 1 to prepare the advance of the morrow, noted 
 and exchanged shots with the outposts of the evening, and 
 at evening they retired. As they retired Carnot gave orders 
 to the guns. Out of effective range, vague and careless of 
 a target, they fired and proclaimed the presence of a reliev- 
 ing army to the besieged. 
 
 Maubeuge, in that still evening, during a lull of the 
 siege-pieces, heard those French guns, and Ferrant and the 
 general officers with him counselled a sortie. Only 
 Chancel stood out, but Chancel was in command of the 
 camp of Maubeuge, and his authority was unassailable. 
 He did not distinguish the French fire, he thought it Aus- 
 trian; no instinct moved him. Therefore, all the next 
 day, while the battle was engaged, the garrison of Maubeuge 
 failed to move; and later, for this error, Chancel was tried 
 and killed. 3 
 
 The troops fell back again through the wood of 
 Avesnes and slept the last sleep before the battle. In 
 
 1 So on the same field had Caesar been compelled to clear the hedgerows. So little does the French peasantry 
 change in a thousand years, and so tenacious is each French province of its customs. 
 a And the other version is that Chancel was for moving but that Ferrant would not. Choose. 
 
512 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 Paris during that same evening, the long trial of the 
 Queen proceeded. 
 
 Oct. 17, 1793. At five, just at that hour when Carnot was 
 in Paris, 5 p. m. recalling his scouts and ordering that warning 
 cannon, the Court gathered and the prisoner was recalled. 
 
 In her cell she had not been silent. 
 
 As a great actress in an interval between her hardest 
 lines will refuse repose and will demand rather comment 
 or praise, so had she filled this little respite of two hours 
 with questions and with doubts professed. She had dwelt 
 upon the forms of the trial, she had begged her counsel to 
 reassure her. She had despised the evidence. She had 
 said she feared but one witness Manuel and indeed 
 all who could have spoken as eye-witnesses to a hundred 
 notorious truths were now over the frontier or dead. 
 
 With her entry the trial was resumed and the file of wit- 
 nesses continued. It was as monotonous and as vague 
 as before. Even Manuel, whom she had feared, was vague, 
 and the very servants of the prison (though they had been 
 witnesses to conspiracy) were uncertain and rambling. 
 And this fatuity of the witnesses, who were so solemnly 
 and so strictly examined, did not proceed from the tur- 
 moil of the time alone, nor even from the certitude which 
 all then had (and which history has now) upon the past 
 action of the Queen in cherishing the hope of foreign domi- 
 nation and in procuring it: rather did it proceed from the 
 fact that these dreadful days were filled not with a judicial 
 but with a political action, and that the Court was met, 
 not to establish truths at once unprovable and glaring, 
 but to see whether or no the Revolution could dare to con- 
 
WATTIGNIES 513 
 
 demn the prisoner. It was an act of War and a challenge 
 to What lay entrenched up there before Maubeuge, train- 
 ing its guns on the last hope, the ragged army in the valley 
 of Avesnes below. 
 
 If all the witnesses which history possesses to-day, if 
 Boville, Fersen, Mallet, could have been brought into that 
 Court and have had the Truth dragged from them, it would 
 have affected the issue very little. One thing could alone 
 affect that issue, the news of victory: and no news came. 
 All reports from the frontier had ceased. 
 
 The lights in the Court were lit, smoky and few. The 
 air, already foul from the large concourse, grew heavy 
 even for the free; for the sickened prisoner it became 
 intolerable as the night hours drew in six dark, inter- 
 minable hours. She heard the succeeding witnesses distantly, 
 more distantly. Her head was troubled, and her injured eye- 
 sight failed her. It was very late. The droning of the night 
 was in her ears. She vaguely knew at last that there was 
 a movement around her and that the Court was rising. 
 She asked faintly for water. Busne, the officer in guard 
 of her, brought it to her and she drank. As he supported 
 her with some respect down the short passage to her cell 
 he heard her murmuring: "I cannot see. ... I can- 
 not see. ... I have come to the end. . . ." 
 
 She lay down when her doors had received her, and just 
 before midnight she fell asleep. She slept deeply, and 
 for the last time. 
 
 Tuesday, October 15. 
 
 A little before dawn the French bugles upon the frontier 
 roused the troops of Avesnes; their calls ran down the line, 
 
514 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 they passed from the Diane to the Generale, the woods 
 before them sent back echoes, and soon the 
 
 UCtt 10, 17t)d. 
 
 Before Mau- army moved. Far off upon the left Fromentin, 
 upon the far right Duquesnoy, began marching 
 forwards and inwards converging, but the main body in the 
 centre took the high road, which, if it could force its pass- 
 age, would lead them straight to Maubeuge. 
 
 The sun was still level over the glinting wet fields when 
 Carnot came to the summit of the long swell whence could 
 be perceived, over an intervening hollow, the village .of 
 Dourlers, and above it the level fringe of trees which held 
 the Austrian cannon; an impregnable crest upon whose 
 security Coburg and the Allies founded the certitude of 
 victory. The guns began. 
 
 Among the batteries of the French (too few for their 
 task), two batteries, one of sixteen-pounders, the other of 
 twelve, were the gift of the city of Paris. By some acci- 
 dent these, though ill-manned, silenced the Austrian fire 
 at one critical and central point above Dourlers itself and 
 close to the highroad. Whether the French aptitude for 
 this arm had helped to train the volunteers of the city, or 
 whether these had such a leaven of trained men as suf- 
 ficed to turn the scale, or whether (as is more probable) 
 some error or difficulty upon the opposing slope or some 
 chance shot had put the invaders out of action, cannot 
 be known. Carnot seized upon the moment and ordered 
 the charge. As his columns advanced to carry Dourlers 
 he sent word at full speed to either wing that each 
 must time itself by the centre, arid forbade an advance 
 upon the left or right until the high road should be 
 forced and the centre of the Austrian position pierced 
 or confused. 
 

 WATTIGNIES 515 
 
 As he stood there, looking down from the height where 
 the road bifurcates, all the battle was plain to him, but his 
 sapper's eye for a plan watched the wings much more 
 anxiously than they watched the centre before him. The 
 stunted spire of Wattignies a long way off to the east, 
 the clump that hid St. Remy to the west, marked strong 
 bodies of the enemy, and, in the open plateau beyond, 
 their numerous cavalry could crush either extremity of his 
 line (which at either extremity was weak) should either be 
 tempted forward before the centre had succeeded. The 
 front was long over five miles he could not enforce 
 sagacity nor even be certain of intelligence, and as he 
 doubted and feared the action of his distant lieutenants, 
 he saw the centre advancing beneath his eyes. 
 
 The Austrian cannon had abandoned the duel. The 
 French line approached Dourlers, deployed, and began the 
 ascent. A sudden and heavy fire of musketry from the 
 hollow road and from the hedges met the sixteen thousand 
 as they charged; they did not waver, they reached the 
 garden walls, and closed until, to those watching from the 
 hill, the attempt was confused and hidden by a rolling 
 smoke and the clustered houses of the village. It was past 
 mid-morning. 
 
 In Paris they had wakened the Queen, tardily. 
 She wondered, perhaps, to see De Busne not there. He 
 had suffered arrest in the night, he was de- 
 
 Oct. 15, 1793. 
 
 tained to see if he could tell the Court or the in Pans, 
 Committee some secret gathered from his pris- 
 oner. It was under another guard that she left her cell. 
 It was nearly nine before the Court assembled in the 
 
516 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 dull light, and later before the futile drag of evidence was 
 renewed. 
 
 Whether sleep had revived her, or whether some rem- 
 nant of her old energy had returned to her for such an 
 occasion, no further weakness was perceived in the Queen. 
 She sat, as she had sat all the day before, until her faint- 
 ness had come upon her, very ill, pale, and restrained, 
 but erect and ready for every reply. Moreover, in that 
 morning the weary monotony of such hours was broken 
 by an incident which illuminated, though it made more 
 bitter, the last of her sad days; for after D'Estaing, the 
 Admiral, had been heard to no purpose, another noble, 
 also a prisoner, was called; and as she saw his face she 
 remembered better times, when the struggle was keen and 
 not hopeless, and when this bewildering Beast, that called 
 itself now "Freedom," now "The Nation," had been 
 tamed by the class which still governed Europe outside 
 and which in that day controlled her kingdom also. It 
 was Latour du Pin, the soldier who had been responsible 
 for the repression of the mutiny at Nancy, three years 
 three centuries before. 
 
 He still lived. Against no man had '93 a better ground 
 for hate, and indeed the time came when the Revolution 
 sent him down also to meet his victims under the earth; 
 but so far his commanding head was firm upon his shoul- 
 ders. He enjoyed, as did all the prisoners of that time, 
 the full use of his wealth. He was clothed, and fed in the 
 manner of his rank. He entered, therefore, with pride, 
 and with that mixture of gaiety and courage, upon which, 
 since the wars of religion, all his kind had justly plumed 
 themselves; and as he entered he bowed with an exces- 
 sive ceremony to the Queen. 
 
WATTIGNIES 517 
 
 The Judge asked him the formal question: Whether 
 he recognised the prisoner? He bowed again and 
 answered: "Indeed I know this Lady very well"; and in a 
 few moments of his examination he defended himself and 
 her with a disdainful ease that brought Versailles back 
 vividly out of its tomb. 
 
 Revived or stung by such a memory, the Queen replied 
 to question after question exactly and even with some 
 power: upon her frivolities, her expenses, her Trianon 
 all the legends of debauch which were based upon that 
 very real and very violent fugue of pleasure in which she had 
 wasted her brilliant years. The close of that dialogue alone 
 has a strict interest for history, when Herman came at last 
 to the necklace. Trianon had been on his lips a dozen 
 times, and as he spoke the word he remembered that other 
 fatal thing: 
 
 "Was it not in Trianon that you first came to know the 
 woman La Motte ?" 
 
 "I never saw her!" 
 
 "Was she not your victim in the affair of the necklace ?" 
 
 "She could not be, for I had never known her!" 
 
 "You still deny it?" 
 
 "I have no plan to deny. It is the truth, and I shall 
 always say the same." 
 
 It is a passage of great moment, for here indeed the pris- 
 oner said precisely what was true and precisely what all, 
 even those who would befriend her, least believed to be true. 
 She would pretend a love for the French and a keen regard 
 for their glory even for the success of their armies. 
 She would pretend to have obeyed the King and not to 
 have led him; to have desired nothing for her son but only 
 the welfare of the people. Trapped and abandoned, 
 
 
518 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 she thought every answer, however false, legitimate; but 
 in that one thing in which her very friends had doubted 
 her, another spirit possessed her and her words were 
 alive with truth. 
 
 After that episode no further movement followed. There 
 was opened before the Court (as the law compelled) her 
 little pocket and the trinkets taken from her on the day 
 of her imprisonment : the poor relics of her affection the 
 lock of hair, the miniature were laid before the Judges. 
 They heard Simon, the cobbler, in whose house her son 
 was lodged perhaps she looked more curiously at his 
 face than at others --but he had nothing to say. They 
 heard the porter of the Temple and sundry others who had 
 seen, or pretended to have seen, her orders for the pay- 
 ments of sundry thousands but all that business was 
 empty and all those hours were wasted: it was not upon 
 such vanities that the mind of Paris and of the crowded 
 Court was turned, but upon the line of Flemish hills a long 
 way off and upon the young men climbing up against 
 the guns. 
 
 Paris and the mob in the street outside that Court of Jus- 
 tice and the hundreds crammed within it strained to 
 hear, not Valaze, nor Tiset, nor any other useless witness 
 but some first breath of victory that might lift off them the 
 oppression of those days; nay, some roaring news of defeat, 
 and of Coburg marching upon them: then, at least, 
 before their vision was scattered by the invader, they 
 could tear this Austrian woman from her too lenient Judges 
 for a full vengeance before they themselves and that which 
 they had achieved should die. At the best or at the worst, 
 they panted for a clear knowledge of their fortune; but on 
 through the day and well into the afternoon, when the/ 
 

 WATTIGNIES 519 
 
 Court rose for its brief interval, no hint or rumour even had 
 come to Paris from before Maubeuge. 
 
 Carnot had come down the hill from the fork of the 
 roads; he, and Jourdon beside him, followed 
 
 .... Oct. 15, 1793. 
 
 behind the assault, bringing the headquarters Before Maubeuge, 
 of that general plan some half-mile forward. 
 So they knew that the village of Dourlers was held. It was 
 noon before the place was secured, and now all depended 
 upon the action of the extreme wings. 
 
 It was certain that the struggle for this central village 
 would be desperate: all depended upon the extreme wings. 
 If these (and both of them) could hold hard and neither 
 advance too far up the slope nor suffer (either of them) 
 a beating-in, then the work at Dourlers would be decisive. 
 And, indeed, the village was won, lost, and won, and lost 
 again: all the hard work was there. The French carried it, 
 they went beyond, they were almost upon the ridge above 
 it. In the upland field below the crest of wood the Aus- 
 trian cavalry under Muffling struck them in flank, and 
 they were disordered. They were back in the village of 
 Dourlers, and the fight for it was from house to house and 
 from window to window. Twice it was cleared, twice lost. 
 The French carry to an immortal memory a lad of four- 
 teen who slipped forward in those attacks, got in behind 
 the lines of the Hungarian Grenadiers who held the market 
 place, and, in lanes beyond, drummed the charge to make 
 his comrades think that some were already so far for- 
 ward, and thus to urge them on. Many years after, in 
 digging up that ground, his little bones were found buried 
 sidelong with the bones of the tall Hungarian men; and 
 
520 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 he has now his statue beating the charge and looking out 
 towards the frontier from the gateways of Avesnes. 
 
 I have said that the horns of that crescent, the extreme 
 wings, were ordered to be cautious, and warned that their 
 caution alone could save the fight; for if they went too far 
 while Dourlers in the centre was still doubtful, that centre 
 would certainly be thrown back by such a general as 
 Coburg, who knew very well the breaking-point of a con- 
 cave line. The fourth attack upon Dourlers was prepared 
 and would have succeeded when Carnot heard that Fro- 
 mentin, upon the far left, upon the extreme tip of the horn 
 of that crescent, had carried his point of the ridge, and, 
 having carried it, had had the folly to pursue ; he had found 
 himself upon the plateau above (an open plateau bare of 
 trees and absolutely bare of cover), with his irregulars all 
 boiling, and his regulars imagining success. Weak in cavalry, 
 commanding men untrained to any defensive, he found 
 opposed to him the cavalry reserve of the enemy a vast 
 front of horse suddenly charging. That cavalry smashed 
 him all to pieces. His regulars here and there formed 
 squares, his irregulars tried to, they were sabred and gal- 
 loped down. They lost but four guns (though four counted 
 in so undergunned an army), but, much worse, they lost 
 their confidence altogether. They got bunched into the 
 combes and hollows, the plateau was cleared. They in 
 their turn were pursued, and it would have been a rout but 
 for two accidents: the first accident was the presence of a 
 fresh reserve of French cavalry ; small indeed, but very well 
 disciplined, strict and ready, certain Hussars who in 
 a red flash (their uniform was red) charged on their 
 little horses and for a moment stopped the flood of the 
 enemy. The check so given saved the lives though not 
 
WATTIGNIES 521 
 
 the position of the French left wing. It was beaten. It 
 was caved in. 
 
 The second accident was the early close of an October 
 day. The drizzling weather, the pall of clouds, curtained 
 in an early night, and the left thus failing were not wholly 
 destroyed: but their failure had ruined the value of the 
 central charge upon Dourlours. The final attack upon 
 that central village was countermanded; the Austrians 
 did not, indeed, pursue the retreat of the French centre 
 from its walls and lanes, but the conception of the battle 
 had failed. 
 
 In the Court-room, in Paris, during those hours, while 
 the Judges raised the sitting, the Queen sat Oct. is, 1793. 
 waiting for their return ; they brought her In Pan8f 6 p * m * 
 soup which she drank; the evening darkened, the Judges 
 reappeared, and the trial began anew. 
 
 The witnesses called upon that last evening, when the 
 lights were lit and the long night had begun, were for the 
 most part those who had come personally into the pres- 
 ence or into the service of the Queen. Michonis especially, 
 who was rightly under arrest for attempting her rescue, 
 appeared; Bruiner appeared; the doctor who had attended 
 to the children in the Temple. The farce went on. The 
 night grew deeper, the witnesses succeeded each other. 
 All that they had to say was true. Nothing they said could 
 be proved. One put forward that she had written some 
 note asking if the Swiss could be relied upon to shoot down 
 the people. She had said and written one hundred of such 
 things. Her counsel, who were mere lawyers, worried about 
 the presentation of the document meanwhile night 
 
 \ 
 
522 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 hastened onwards, and the stars behind their veil of an 
 October cloud continually turned. 
 
 
 
 Upon the frontier the damp evening and the closed night 
 had succeeded one the other, and all along the 
 
 Oct. 15, 1793. 
 
 Before Maubeuge, valley of the little river it was foggy and dark. 
 The dead lay twisted where they had fallen 
 during that unwrought fight, and a tent pitched just 
 behind the lines held the staff and Carnot. He did 
 not sleep. There was brought to him in those mid- 
 night hours a little note, galloped in from the far south; 
 he read it and crumpled it away. It is said to have been the 
 news that the lines of Weissembourg were forced and so 
 they were. The Prussians were free to pass those gates 
 between the Ardennes and the Vosges. Then Mau- 
 beuge was the last hold remaining : the very last of all. 
 
 Jourdan proposed, in that decisive Council of a few 
 moments, held under that tent by lantern light in the foggy 
 darkness while the day of their defeat was turning into the 
 morrow, some plan for reinforcing the defeated left and of 
 playing some stalemate of check and countercheck against 
 the enemy; but Carnot was big with new things. He 
 conceived an adventure possible only from his knowledge 
 of what he commanded; he dismissed the mere written tradi- 
 tions of war which Jourdan quoted because he knew that 
 now and within twelve hours all must certainly be lost or 
 won. He took counsel with his own great soul, and called, 
 from within his knowledge of the French, upon the savagery 
 and the laughter of the French service. He knew what 
 abominable pain his scheme must determine. He knew by 
 what wrench of discipline or rather of cruelty the thing must 
 
WATTIGNIES 523 
 
 be done, but more profoundly did he know the temper of 
 young French people under arms to whom the brutality of 
 superiors is native and who meet it by some miraculous 
 reserve of energy and of rebellious smiles. 
 
 Those young French people, many half -mutinous, most 
 of them ill-clothed, so many wounded, so many more palsied 
 by the ap^)ach of death all drenched under the October 
 drizzle, all by this time weary of any struggle whatsoever, were 
 roused in that night before their sleep was deep upon them. 
 
 Carnot had determined to choose 7,000, to forbid them 
 rest, to march them right along his positions and add them 
 to the 8,000 on his right extreme wing, and then at morning, 
 if men so treated could still charge, to charge with such 
 overwhelming and unexpected forces on the right, where no 
 such effort was imagined, and so turn the Austrian line. 
 
 There were no bugle-calls, no loud voice was permitted ; 
 but all the way down the valley for five miles orders were 
 given by patrols whose men had not slept for thirty hours. 
 They roused the volunteers and the cursing regulars from 
 the first beginnings of their sleep ; they broke into the paltry 
 comfort of chance bivouac fires ; they routed men out of the 
 straw in barns and stables; they kicked up the half-dead, 
 half-sleeping boys who lay in the wet grass marshes of the 
 Tarsy; and during all that night by the strength which only 
 this service has found it possible to conceive (I mean a 
 mixture of the degrading and the exalted, of servitude and of 
 vision), from the centre and from the left from the men 
 who were shot down before Dourlers and from the men who 
 had fled before the Austrian cavalry when Fromentin had 
 failed a corps was gathered together, under the thick night, 
 drawn up in column and bidden march through the dark- 
 ness by the lane that led towards the right of the position. 
 
524 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 With what deep-rooted hatred of commandment simmer- 
 ing in them, those fellows went after thirty hours of use- 
 less struggle to yet another unknown blind attempt, 
 not historians but only men who have suffered such 
 orders know. They were 7,000; the thick night, I 
 say, was upon them; the mist lay heavy all over the wet 
 land; and as they went through the brushwood tod chance 
 trees that separated the centre from the right of the French 
 position, they heard the drip of water from the dead, hanging 
 leaves. Their agony seemed to them quite wanton and 
 purposeless. They were halted at last mechanically, like 
 sheep, at various points under various sleeping farms in 
 various deserted tiny, lightless villages. The night was far 
 spent; they could but squat, despairing, each company at 
 its halting-place waiting for the dawn and for new shambles. 
 Meanwhile it was thick night. 
 
 It was nearing midnight in Paris, but none yet felt fatigue, 
 neither the Judges nor their prisoner; nor did 
 
 Oct. 15,1793. 
 
 in Pans, any in the straining audience that watched the 
 
 11.30p.m. s low determination of this business suffer the 
 approach of sleep. The list of the witnesses was done and 
 their tale was ended. 
 
 Herman leant forward, hawk-faced, and asked the 
 
 Queen in the level judicial manner if she had anything to 
 
 add to her defence before her advocates should plead. She 
 
 answered complaining of the little time that had been 
 
 [ afforded her to defend and the last words she spoke to 
 
 I her Judges were still a vain repetition that she had acted only 
 
 I as the wife of the King and that she had but obeyed his will. 
 
 The Bench declared the examination of the witnesses 
 
WATTIGNIES 525 
 
 closed. For something like an hour that bronzed and 
 hollow-faced man next by her, Fouquier Tinville, put for- 
 ward the case for the Government; he was careful to avoid 
 the mad evidence Hebert had supplied. When he sat down, 
 the Defence spoke last as had since Rome been the 
 custom or rather the obvious justice of French procedure; 
 so that the last words a jury may hear shall be words for the i 
 prisoner at the bar but this was not a trial, though all \ 
 the forms of trial were observed. Chauveau-Lagarde spoke 
 first, his colleague next. When they had ceased they were 
 arrested and forbidden to leave the building, lest certain 
 words the Queen had whispered should mean some com- 
 munication with the invader. 
 
 The summing up (for summing up was still permitted, 
 and it would be a century of Revolutionary effort before the 
 pressure of the Bench upon the Jury should be gradually 
 raised) was what the angers of that night expected and 
 received. It was three o'clock in the morning before the 
 four questions were put to the jury. Four questions drawn 
 indeed from the Indictment but avoiding its least proved 
 or least provable clauses. Had there been relations between 
 the Executive and the foreign enemies of the State, and 
 promises of aid to facilitate the advance of their armies ? 
 If so, was Marie Antoinette of Austria proved to have been \ 
 privy to that plan ? 
 
 The Jury left the hall. A murmur of tongues loosened 
 rose all around. The prisoner was led out beyond the doors 
 of the chamber. For one long unexpected hour she was so 
 detained while the Jury were still absent; then a signal was 
 given to her guards and they led her in. 
 
 The cold violence of formal law still dominated the 
 lawyers. Herman put forth the common exhortation of 
 
526 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 judges against applause or blame. He read to her the 
 
 Oct. 16, 1793. conclusions of the Jury : they were affirm- 
 in Paris, 4 a. m. at j ve upon every po j nt Q f ^ f()ur jj e 
 
 asked her with that same cold violence of formality, 
 after the Public Prosecutor had demanded the penalty 
 of death set down for such actions as hers in the new Penal 
 Code, whether she had anything to say against her sen- 
 tence. She shook her head. 
 
 She was at the end of human things. She stood and saw 
 the Judges upon the Bench conferring for a moment, she 
 stood to hear her sentence read to her, and as she heard it 
 she watched them in their strange new head-dress, all 
 plumes, and she fingered upon the rail before her with the 
 gesture ladies learn in fingering the keys: she swept her 
 fingers gently as though over the keys of an instrument, and 
 soon the reading of the sentence was done and they led her 
 away. It was past four o'clock in the morning. 
 
 On the terrace of his castle in Germany that night George 
 of Hesse saw the White Lady pass, the Ghost without a face 
 that is the warning of the Hapsburgs, and the hair of his 
 head stood up. 
 
 The long dark hours of the morning still held the troops 
 that had marched over from the left to the right 
 
 Oct. Ib, 17oo. 
 
 Before Man- of the French position before Maubeuge. The 
 first arrivals had some moments in which to fall 
 at full length on the damp earth in the extremity of their 
 fatigue, but all the while the later contingents came marching 
 in until, before it was yet day but when already the farms 
 about knew that it was morning, and when the cocks had 
 begun to crow in the steadings, all rose and stood to arms. 
 
;,; * 
 <, ,^ f . X - \ *-&* 7 
 
 *' &' ' 
 
 
 
 ntfuftt if ' /fa, 
 )f 
 
 cirn-jritr e( ff&t' /an ft A s f / f.-', *'*~-vll-, >*/// >-> 
 
 "'" /?< ^&9^2/C* ': '': *.. , J^ 
 
 ^^^^^^^^ 
 
 S5fcS7^S4S 
 
 /^'^^;;^^^c.^^ <WJ^r/^!^ ^^'"v^ij&WHijf* ''; 
 
 SSsSSf^sS^ 
 
 FIRST PAGE OF MARIE ANTOINETTE'S LAST LETTER 
 
WATTIGNIES 527 
 
 The mist was deepening upon them, a complete silence 
 interpenetrated the damp veil of it, nor through such weather 
 were any lights perceptible upon the heights above which 
 marked the end of the Austrian line. 
 
 The Queen went down the stone steps of the passage: 
 she entered regally into the cell made ready. 
 
 Ort 16 1793 
 
 She called without interval for pen and paper, Jn Paris', a little 
 
 and she sat down to write. She felt, after that 
 transition from the populous court to the silence 
 of these walls, an energy that was not natural and that could 
 not endure, but that served her for an inspiration. She 
 had tasted but a bowl of soup since the morning nay, 
 since the evening before, thirty hours soon she must 
 fail. Therefore she wrote quickly while her mood was 
 still upon her. 
 
 She sat and wrote to her dead husband's sister the letter] 
 which, alone of all her acts, lends something permanently 
 noble to her name. It is a run of words exalted, dignified, 
 and yet tremendous, nor does any quality about that four- 
 fold sheet of writing, yellow with years, more astound the 
 reader than the quality of revelation: for here something 
 strong and level in her soul, something hitherto quite undis- 
 covered, the deepest part of all, stands and shines. The sheet 
 is blurred perhaps with tears : we do not know whether 
 ever it was signed or ended, but before the morning came she 
 laid herself upon her bed in her poor black dress, her head 
 was raised somewhat upon her right hand, and so lying she 
 began very bitterly to weep. 
 
 The priest of St. Landry, the parish church of the prison, 
 entered to minister to her: she spoke just such few words to 
 
528 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 him as might assure her that he had sworn the civic oath 
 and was not in communion. When she knew this she would 
 not hear him. But he heard her murmuring against the 
 bitter cold, and bade her put a pillow upon her feet. She 
 did so and was again silent. 
 
 The hours wore on, the scent of newly lighted fires came 
 from the prison yard and the noise of men awakening. 
 The drip of the fussy weather sounded less in the increase of 
 movement, and on the pavement of the quays without began 
 the tramp of marching and the chink of arms; from further 
 off came the rumble of the drums : 30,000 were assembling 
 to line her Way. The two candles showed paler in the 
 wretched room. It was dawn. 
 
 The 16th of October broke upon the Flemish Hills: the 
 
 Oct. 16, 1793. i men wno bad endured that night-march along 
 " 
 
 Before au- ^ f ront o f j-^ battle-field, the men who had 
 
 beuge, hali- 
 
 past six in the received them among the positions of the extreme 
 right, still drooped under the growing light and 
 were invigorated by no sun. The mist of the evening and 
 of the night from dripping and thin had grown dense and 
 whitened with the morning, so that to every soldier a ne\v 
 despair and a new bewilderment were added from the very 
 air, and the blind fog seemed to make yet more obscure 
 the obscure designs of their commanders. The day of their 
 unnatural vigil had dawned and yet there came no orders 
 nor any stirring of men. Before them slow schistous slopes 
 went upward and disappeared into the impenetrable weather 
 which hid clogged ploughland and drenched brushwood of 
 the rounded hill; hollow lanes led up through such a 
 land to the summit of the little rise and the hamlet of 
 
 
WATTIGNIES 529 
 
 WATTIGNIES; this most humble and least of villages was 
 waiting its turn for glory. 
 
 The downward slope, which formed the eastern end of 
 the Austrian line, the low rounded slope whose apex was 
 the spire of the village, was but slightly defended, for it 
 was but the extreme end of a position, and who could 
 imagine then or who noiv that march through the 
 sleepless night, or that men so worn should yet be ready 
 for new action with the morning? No reinforcement, 
 Coburg knew, could come from behind that army: and 
 how should he dream that Carnot had found the power to 
 feed the fortunes of the French from their own vitals 
 and to drag these shambling 7,000, wrenched from west 
 to east during the darkness: or how, if such a thing 
 had been done, could any man believe that, such a torture 
 suffered, the 7,000 could still charge ? 
 
 Yet, had Coburg known the desperate attempt he would 
 have met it, he would have covered that ultimate flank of 
 his long ridge and reinforced it from his large reserve. But 
 the deep mist and the dead silence harshly enforced during 
 the night-march had hidden all the game, and in front of 
 Wattignies, holding that round of sloping fields and the low- 
 semicircular end of the ridge before the village, there were 
 but 3,000; the infantry of Klebek, of Hohenlohe, and of 
 Stern; for their cavalry they had behind them and along- 
 side of the village farms a few dragoons; certain Croatian 
 battalions stood in a second line. These, in that morn- 
 ing, expecting nothing but perhaps the few troops as 
 they had met easily the day before, waited under the 
 mist in formation and heard no sound. The morning 
 broadened ; the white vapour seemed lighter all 
 around, but no voices could be heard, nor did there 
 
530 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 come up through its curtain any rumble of limber from 
 the roads below. 
 
 As the Queen so lay disconsolate and weeping bitterly, 
 Oct. is, 1793. stretched in her black gown upon the wretched 
 seven'in the"* ^ed an( * supporting her head upon her hand, 
 moming. there came in the humble girl who had served 
 her faithfully and who was now almost distraught for what 
 was to come. This child said: 
 
 "You have not eaten all these hours. . . . What 
 will you take now that it is morning?" 
 
 The Queen answered, still crying: "My child, I need 
 nothing more: all is over now." But the girl added: 
 "Madam, I have kept warm upon the hob some soup and 
 vermicelli. Let me bring it you." The Queen, weeping 
 yet more, assented. 
 
 She sat up a moment (but feebly her mortal fatigue had 
 come upon her her loss of blood increased and was con- 
 tinued) , she took one spoonful and another ; soon she laid the 
 nourishment aside, and the morning drew on to her death. 
 
 She must change for her last exit. So much did the Revo- 
 lution fear to be cheated of its defiance to the Kings that the 
 warders had orders not to lose sight of her for one moment : 
 but she would change. She would go in white to her end. 
 
 The girl who had served her screened her a little, and in the 
 space between the bed and the wall she crouched and put on 
 fresh linen, and in place of her faded black a loose white mus- 
 lin gown. Her widow's head-dress also, in which she had 
 stood proudly before her Judges, she stripped of its weeds, 
 and kept her hair covered by no more than the linen cap. 
 
 The Judges came in and read to her her sentence. 
 
AU NOM DE LA REPUBLIQUE. 
 
 au Commandant - gf- 
 ntral de lajbrce arrnte 
 parisirnnt, ' ^*^MMB^^"*^ 
 
 J-j'ACCUSATEUR PUBLIC, pres le Tribunal criminel- 
 reVolutionnairc, e"tabli a Paris par la loi du 10 mars 1793, 
 du jugeraent du Tribunal </ Cj<rtvM//)+tp 
 requiert le citoycn commandant- 
 de la force arme*e parisienne , de prcter uiain- 
 forte et mettre sur pied la force publiquc , necessaire a 
 1'ex^cution dudit jugement rendu contre 
 /fMaKt'^. atUncj t ^ 9*.*" '*. c/jlH. 
 
 condamne a la peinc de ^f^LO t^ laquellc 
 
 /? 
 
 execution aura lieu CLuJFltsi*) ^^/ **~ 
 
 sur la ptace publiquc de o/L. 
 
 . - dc cctte villo. Le citoycn 
 
 commandanl-gc'neral cst rcquis dVnvoyer ladile force 
 publiquc, cour du Palais, ledit jour, a /Uu^ heures 
 precises du 4W4+*. 
 
 FAIT a Paris, IcSf^"*"" **^-^ H*?- 
 
 1'au l**-*3 dc la Rc'publiquc f^anraise , uiu- et indi- 
 visible, fntt^aii 'Wtt*c.<uDy jtft'&Hj A*e^ du^TTHs 
 
 A CCUS ATE UR PUBLIC. 
 
 FACSIMILE OF THE DEATH ^ARR'ANT OF 
 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
WATTIGNIES 531 
 
 The executioner, awkward and tall, came in. He must 
 bind her hand. "Why must you bind my hands? The 
 King's hands were not bound." Yet were her hands bound 
 and the end of the rope left loose that her gaoler might 
 hold it: but she, perhaps, herself, before they bound her, 
 cut off the poor locks of her hair. 
 
 They led her out past the door of the prison: she was 
 "delivered" and signed for; on the steps be- 
 
 Oct. 16, 1793. 
 
 fore the archway she went up into the cart, in Paris, at 
 
 hearing the crowd howling beyond the great 
 
 iron gates of the Law Courts, and seeing 
 
 seated beside her that foresworn priest to whom she would 
 
 not turn. . . . Nor were these the last humiliations: 
 
 but I will not write them here. 
 
 Up and down the passages of the prison a little dog whom 
 she had cherished in her loneliness ran whining and 
 disconsolate. 
 
 The cart went lumbering on, past the quay, over 
 the bridge under the murky drizzle. The windows beyond 
 the river were full of heads and faces ; the edges of the quays 
 were black with the crowd. The river Seine ran swollen 
 with the rains; its tide and rolling made no mark upon 
 the drenched water-walls of stone. The cart went lumber- 
 ing on over the rough wet paving of the northern bank. 
 It turned into the Rue St. Honore, where the narrow depth 
 was full of noise. The long line of troops stood erect 
 and close upon either side. The dense crowd still roared 
 behind them: their prey sat upon the plank, diminished, 
 as erect as the constraint of her bonds and her failing 
 strength would allow. Her lips, for all their bent of agony, 
 were still proud; her vesture was new: her delicate high 
 shoes had been chosen with care for that journey --but 
 
532 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 her face might have satisfied them all. The painted red 
 upon her cheeks was dreadful against her utter paleness: 
 from beneath the linen of her cap a few whitened wisps of 
 hair, hung dank upon her hollowed temples: a Victim. 
 Her eyes were sunken, and of these one dully watched 
 her foes, one had lost its function in the damp half- 
 darkness of the cells: it turned blank and blind upon the 
 rabble that still followed the walking jolt of the two cart- 
 horses and the broad wheels. At the head of those 
 so following, an actor-fellow pranced upon a horse, 
 thrusting at her by way of index a sword, and shouting 
 to the people that they held the tigress here, the Austrian. 
 In the midst of those so following, an American, eager to 
 see, elbowed his way and would not lose his vantage. From 
 the windows of the narrow gulf the continued noise of won- 
 der, of jeers, and of imprecations reached her. She still sat 
 motionless and without speech : the executioner standing be- 
 hind her holding the loose end of the cord, the forsworn priest 
 sitting on the plank beside her but hearing no words of hers. 
 
 It is said that as the tumbril passed certain rnasts whence r 
 limp tricoloured pennants hung she glanced at them and mur- 
 mured a word; it is to be believed that, a few yards further, 
 at the turn into the Rue Royale, she gave way at the new sight 
 of the Machine set up for her before the palace gardens. 
 
 This is known, that she went up the steps of the scaffold 
 at liberty and stood for a bare moment seen by 
 
 Oct. 16, 1793. . 
 
 in Paris, at the great gathering in the square, a figure 
 
 a g ams * tne trees of wna t had t> een her gardens and 
 the place where her child had played. It was 
 but a moment, she was bound and thrown and the steel fell, 
 
WATTIGNIES 533 
 
 On the low mud and slope of Wattignies the mist began 
 to wreathe and thin as the hours approached 
 high noon. Through gaps of it the three 
 
 Austrian regiments could see trees now and about ele y e n in 
 then in the mid-distance, showing huge, and . 
 in a moment covered again by new whorls of vapour. But 
 still there was no sound. In front of them toward Dimont, 
 to their left round the corner of the slope in the valley 
 of Glarges, with every lift of vapour the landscape became 
 apparent, when suddenly, as the mist finally lifted, the wide 
 plain showed below them rolling southwards, a vast space 
 of wind and air, and at the same moment they heard first 
 bugles, then the shouts of command, and lastly the rising 
 of the Marseillaise: Gaul was upon them. 
 
 The sleepless men had been launched at last, the hollow 
 lanes were full of them swarming upward : the fields were 
 ribbed with their open lines, and as they charged they sang. 
 
 Immortal song! The pen has no power over colour or 
 over music, but though I cannot paint their lively fury or 
 make heard their notes of triumph yet I have heard them 
 singing: I have seen their faces as they cleared the last 
 hedges of the rise and struck the 3,000 upon every side. 
 
 These stood, wavered, fell back to re-form: then saw 
 new masses of the Republicans, roaring up from Glarges 
 behind their flank, broke and were scattered by the 
 storm. The few heavy guns of the Austrians there em- 
 placed were trained too late to check the onrush. The little 
 pieces of the climbing and the surging men were dragged 
 by laniards, unmasked behind gaps in the hurrying advance, 
 crashed grape and were covered again for a moment by 
 the living cover of the charge. The green at the hill- 
 top was held, the poor yards and byres of Wattignies 
 
534 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 were scoured and thundered through, and Carnot, his hat 
 upon his sword, and Duquesnoy his face half blood, and 
 all the host gloried to find before them in their halting 
 midday sweat when the great thrust was over, the level 
 fields of the summit, the Austrian line turned, and an open 
 way between them and Maubeuge. 
 
 Two charges disputed their certain victory. First the 
 Oct. 16, 1793. Hungarian cavalry galloped and swerved and 
 betge! Tit" broke against the dense and ever denser bodies 
 past noon. thai still swarmed up three ways at once and 
 converged upon the crested edge of the upland plain; then 
 the Royal Bourbon, emigrants, nobles, swept upon the 
 French, heads down, ready to spend themselves largely into 
 death. They streamed with the huge white flag of the old 
 Monarchy above them, the faint silver lilies were upon it, 
 and from either rank the cries that were shouted in defiance 
 were of the same tongue which since Christendom began 
 has so perpetually been heard along all the battle fronts of 
 Christendom. 
 
 These also failed: a symbol im name a*nd in flag and in 
 valour of that great, once good, and very ancient thing 
 which God now disapproved. 
 
 The strong line of Coburg was turned. It was turned 
 and must roll back upon itself. Its strict discipline pre- 
 served it, as did the loose order of the Republican advance 
 and the maddened fatigue of the young men who had just 
 conquered: for these could work a miracle but not yet 
 achieve a plan. The enemy fell back in order, sombre, 
 massed and regular, unharassed, towards the Sambre. 
 The straggling French soldiery, wondering that the fighting 
 
WATTIGNIES 535 
 
 had ceased (but wisely judged incapable of pursuit), pos- 
 sessed the main road unhindered; and that evening dra/.k 
 with their comrades in Maubeuge. 
 
 In this way was accomplished what a principal critic of i 
 the art of war 1 has called "The chief feat of arms of the | 
 Republic." 
 
 It was somewhat past noon. 
 
 Upon that scaffold before the gardens which had been 
 the gardens of her home and in which her child 
 
 Oct. ID, 1793. 
 
 had played, the Executioner showed at deliber- in Paris, just 
 
 ation and great length, this way and that on pas 
 every side, the Queen's head to the people. 
 
 1 Napoleon Buonaparte. 
 
APPENDICES 
 
APPENDIX A 
 
 THE OPERATION ON LOUIS THE SIXTEENTH OF FRANCE 
 
 THE somewhat lengthy attempt to determine the exact 
 date which changed the course of Louis XVI.'s life, 
 to which I have been compelled in the text, would 
 have been unnecessary had the document which proves both 
 the operation itself and the moment of it been published. 
 
 It is certain that Maria Theresa knew in the last year 
 of the old King's reign the nature of the trouble. 1 
 
 Louis XVI.'s hesitation in the matter endured through 
 the month immediately succeeding his accession; though 
 in the December 2 of that year he seems to have come very 
 near to a decision. It is certain that the Emperor was to 
 act with authority in the matter; and it is probable that 
 Louis XVI's long and disastrous hesitation was in part 
 occasioned by his brother-in-law's delay and postpone- 
 ment of his voyage to Versailles. 
 
 Mercy was informed thoroughly of the main object of the 
 Emperor's visit just before it took place,' and Maria Theresa 
 at the same time specially emphasised to her Ambassador 
 this capital business which her son had undertaken. 4 
 
 1 MARIA THERESA to MERCY, yd January, 1774. " Je ne compte presque plus que sur 1'entremise de 
 empereur, qui a son arrivee a Versailles, trouvera peut-etre le moyen." 
 
 3 MARIE ANTOINETTE to MARIA THERESA, ijth December, 1774. " Le roi a eu il y a huit jours une grande 
 conversation avec mon m61ecin; je suis fort contente de ses dispositions et j'ai bonne espeVance de suivre bien- 
 tdt 1'example de ma soeur." 
 
 MERCY to MARIA THERESA, iSth March, 1777. " Relativement au se"jour que fera ici S. M. 1'emper- 
 eur, et a toutes les circonstances qui pourront en resulter, il ne me reste pas la moindre incertitude sur les 
 hautes intentions de V. M., et ses ordres seront remplis avec tout le scrupule et le soin qu'exige 1'impor- 
 tance d'une pareille conjuncture dont il peut resulter tant de differents effets." 
 
 4 MARIA THERESA to MERCY, 3ist March, 1777. " Vous pouvez bien croire que ce point est un des plus 
 importants a eclaircir, s'il y a esperer de la succession ou point, et vous tacherez de mettre au clair cela avec 
 1'empereur." 
 
 539 
 
540 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 We know that the operation was performed by the 
 King's surgeon, Lassone, and the point is to determine, 
 in the absence of direct evidence, the date upon which 
 Lassone operated. 
 
 I say "in the absence of direct evidence," for, though 
 that evidence exists, it is not available. All papers left 
 by Lassone, including the proces verbal of the operation 
 on the King, were ultimately brought into the collection 
 of Feuillet de Conches. This collector has been dead 
 twenty years, and Dr. Des, among others, asked, just 
 after his death, for the production of this all-important 
 document; but it was refused, and I believe it is still refused. 
 
 It is a great loss to history. Moreover, one does not see 
 what purpose can be served by such reticence, if, as I believe, 
 it is still maintained. 
 
 As it is, we must depend upon a few veiled and discreet 
 allusions in the contemporary correspondence of Mercy, 
 the Queen, and the Empress. The principal of these con- 
 sist in nine passages, the first of which is as follows: - 
 
 " Le 27 je me rendis de grand matin a Versailles, ou, apres avoir parle 
 d'affaires avec le comt de Vergennes, j'allai a Photel garni qu'occupait 1'em- 
 pereur. Le premier medecin Lassone avail etc pendant une heure chez S. 
 M., et elle etait alors dans son cabinet avec 1'abbe de Vermond." 
 
 This letter was written on 15th June, 1777. Mercy, 
 who had been in very bad health, sends to Maria Theresa 
 his account of the Emperor's visit. In this letter he men- 
 tions, under the date Tuesday, 27th May, a long interview 
 which the Emperor had with Lassone, he himself, Mercy, 
 being present, and also Vermond, the Queen's former 
 tutor. Later in the day the Emperor spent two hours alone 
 with his brother-in-law, discussing, in Mercy's phrase, "con- 
 fidential details." It was at this momennt, presumably, that 
 
APPENDICES 541 
 
 the Emperor persuaded the King. It will be seen, therefore, 
 that he put off mention of the matter until late in his visit, 
 at the end of the month of May. Maria Theresa, having 
 by that time had opportunity of hearing by word of mouth 
 things that could hardly be written, writes that she is con- 
 tent so far as things have gone, but is waiting to hear about 
 everything from her son on his return. 
 
 She also writes to Marie Antoinette on the 29th June, 
 1777, as follows: 
 
 " J'en attends les plus heureuses suites, et meme pour votre etat de manage, 
 sur lequel on me laisse esperance: mais on remet le tout au retour, 1 ou on 
 pourra me parler." 
 
 It is evident that nothing was done during the Emper- 
 or's actual stay, or in his presence. On the 29th of August, 
 Maria Theresa, having seen her son, is still by no means 
 certain. 1 One must allow a fortnight (more or less) for news 
 to reach her from Versailles. We may be confident, there- 
 fore, that whatever was written to about her the middle of 
 the month of August was not yet wholly reassuring, though 
 lk : s may not prove that no operation had taken place; it 
 may only go to show that success was not yet certain. 
 
 It is on the 10th of September, in a letter from Marie 
 Antoinette to Maria Theresa that the first note of confidence 
 on the part of the Queen appears. It was premature, but 
 matters were now certain. 1 
 
 We may, therefore, take it for certain that things were 
 settled not earlier than the middle of August, nor later than 
 the end of the first week of September; and it may be pre- 
 dicted that when Lassone's paper sees the light it will bear 
 a date within those three weeks. 
 
 i " The return," of the Emperor, that is. 
 
 *MAHIA THERESA to MERCY, 2gth August, 1777. "Je le souhaite k 1'egard du roi, mais je n'en suis 
 pas rassuree." 
 
 |U Ce nouveau-ne"" she writes of her sister-in-law's child "me fait encore plus de plaisir par 1'esper- 
 ance que j'ai d'avoir bientdt le mgmc bonheur." 
 
542 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 Mercy sees by January 4 that everything is long settled. 
 The Queen knew herself to be with child in the first week 
 in April, and news was sent to her mother on the date 
 which I have given in the text. 
 
 4 " Je dois aussi ajouter la remarque trfcs essentielle que la reine continue a se conduire tres-bien avcc le 
 roi, qui de son c6t6 persiste a vivre maritalement dans le sens le plus exact et le plus reel." 
 
APPENDIX B 
 
 ON THE EXACT TIME AND PLACE OF DROUET's RIDE 
 
 A AHE reader or student acquainted with various 
 records of the French Revolution may be tempted 
 to regard the account of Drouet's Ride in my text 
 as containing too much detail for accurate history; espec- 
 ially as no historian has hitherto done more than vaguely al- 
 lude to it. I will therefore in this Appendix show the way in 
 which I found it possible to reproduce every circumstance 
 of Drouet's movements from the time when he left Ste. 
 Menehould until the time of his arrival at Varennes. 
 
 The berline left Ste. Menehould shortly after eight. It 
 had to climb to Germeries Wood 1 on the crest of the forest, 
 four hundred feet in four miles. It could not possibly, there- 
 fore, have reached the summit till after nine, and however 
 fast was the run down on to Islettes (just over five miles 
 from Ste. Menehould) that village cannot have been 
 reached before 9.15. From Islettes to Clermont is just four 
 miles, and mostly slightly rising. The best going could not 
 cover the distance in twenty minutes, which puts the earliest 
 possible entry into Clermont at twenty-five or twenty to ten. 
 The change of horses took from ten minutes to a quarter of 
 an hour. Put it at the lowest, and one has for the earliest 
 possible time the berline can have left Clermont that it 
 must have been within ten minutes of ten o'clock. 
 
 From Clermont to Varennes is nine miles: a straight 
 road, descending slightly on the whole, but not quite flat. 
 
 The summit is 860 feet above the sea; the town about 460 feet. 
 
 543 
 
544 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 Under the best conditions that day the berline had not 
 covered ten miles in the hour; let it gallop at twelve (a pace 
 it was quite incapable of, save in short spells) and Varennes 
 would still be three-quarters of an hour off. 
 
 Now Varennes was entered just on a quarter to eleven. 
 The berline cannot, therefore, have left Clermont later than 
 ten; and cannot harve arrived earlier than ten minutes to ten; 
 so this departure of the Royal Family from Clermont for 
 Varennes, of Drouet's postilions back from Clermont for Ste. 
 Menehould, took place sometime in those ten minutes. 
 
 Now Drouet reached Varennes before eleven. He 
 reached it round about by the forest not by the main 
 road and he reached it by a gallop through a pitch- 
 dark night in dense wood without a moon. 1 The shortest 
 line as the crow flies from the last bend of the road before 
 Clermont to Varennes Bridge is ten miles; any deviation 
 through the wood, even in a straight line, would make it 
 nearly twelve. It is very difficult to cover twelve miles 
 in an hour under such conditions, but even if you allow 
 Drouet that pace he must leave the high roadabout ten. 
 
 All this synchronises to within a very few minutes. The 
 postilions leave Clermont to turn back home in the ten 
 minutes before ten; they go fast, for they are riding light; 
 a mile or so up the road they meet their master. It is just 
 here that the forest on the northern side of the ravine 
 touches the modern railway and comes nearest to the road. 
 Drouet takes to the forest certainly not before ten and 
 equally certainly not ten minutes after. 
 
 So much for the hour at which he took to the wood. 
 
 Now what road did he pursue in the forest? Only one 
 is possible. The forest here covers a high ridge, some 
 
 !The sky was overcast. 
 
APPENDICES 545 
 
 three hundred feet above the open plain. Down in the 
 plain, parallel to this ridge and at its base, runs the high 
 road from Clermont to Varennes, with a row of farms 
 and wide fields between it and the edge of the wood. Had 
 Drouet gone anywhere but along the ridge he would have 
 had to cross some twenty streams, to climb and fall over 
 as many ravines (all of clay), to flank a dozen clay ponds 
 and marshes, and with all this there was no continuous 
 path. He could not have done it in two hours, let alone 
 one. He was compelled to follow the ridge. It so hap- 
 pens that there runs all along the ridge a green ride called 
 "the High Ride." It is a Gaulish track of great antiquity, 
 known to the peasantry as "the Roman Way." It does 
 not come down as far as Clermont, it leaves the forest at the 
 farm and huts of Locheres. To this farm Drouet must 
 have made his way by the lanes and gates of Jacques and 
 Haute Prise once at Locheres, a hard gallop along the 
 High Ride brought him in six or seven miles to the Crossed 
 Stone (called also the Dead Girl); here another green ride 
 crosses the main ride of the ridge. He took this cross ride to 
 the right hand : it leads down and out of the forest; one comes 
 out of the wood a mile or so from Varennes with the town 
 right below one and what was then a lane (now it is a county 
 road) through the open valley fields. Just before entering 
 the town a detour (by where the tile-works are now) would get 
 him into the Rue de Mont Blainville, and so to the Bridge: a 
 detour serving the double purpose of avoiding possible troops 
 at the entry to the town and of getting ahead of any carriage 
 coming in from Clermont. He cannot but have taken this 
 detour, have noted the waggon by the bridge as he passed 
 it (he later used it to block the bridge) and then have come 
 up the main street from the river. 
 
APPENDIX C 
 
 THE ORDER TO CEASE FIRE 
 
 THE order to cease fire, which forms the frontis- 
 piece of this book, and which is the last executive 
 document of the French monarchy, has been 
 misunderstood by not a few critics, and its value thereby 
 lessened. 
 
 It is, as I shall presently show, authentic, and therefore 
 of the highest possible interest to every student of history. 
 The traveller will find it to-day in the central glass case 
 of the square Revolutionary Room in the Carnavalet 
 Museum. The body of the writing is not in the hand of 
 Louis himself, but the signature is undoubtedly his. The 
 lines were scribbled in haste by some one attendant upon 
 the King, signed by him, and sent to the palace. 
 
 Now no event of such importance and so recent has 
 been more variously described by eye-witnesses than the 
 fall of the palace in 1792; and the particular incident of 
 the order to cease fire suffers, like every other detail of 
 those famous hours, from a plethora, and therefore a con- 
 flict, of evidence. 
 
 It may be remarked in passing, and by way of digression, 
 that such difficulty cannot but attach to any episode of 
 hard fighting, on account of the mental condition which 
 that exercise produces. There is exactly the same trouble, 
 for instance, in determining with exactitude the all-impor- 
 tant moment of the evening in which the Guard failed at 
 Waterloo. 
 
 546 
 
APPENDICES 547 
 
 We may confidently say, however, that two separate mes- 
 sages were sent to the palace. The first was a verbal 
 message to cease fire, which reached Herville, who was 
 directing the whole operation. Herville, as we know, 
 refused to obey, having the action well in hand, and being 
 yet confident of success. Either after the southern end of 
 the Tuileries had been forced by the populace (who, as 
 we know now, turned the flank of the defence by fighting 
 their way through from the Long Gallery), or while that 
 capital incident was in progress, Durler, a captain of the 
 Swiss Guards, commanding no more than a company, 
 but probably the company which had the best chance of 
 retreating, asked for orders. It is difficult to believe that 
 he would have done so unless the position was already 
 desperate. The order which reached him was a repetition 
 of the former one, but it was written, not verbal, and it is 
 this second written order the facsimile of which forms the 
 frontispiece to this volume. Durler did not see it 
 written. He had gone in person to learn what he should 
 do, but he was back again with his men before the 
 note was handed to him. He was a perfectly honest and 
 trustworthy man and his testimony remains. It is 
 evident from this testimony that, by the time the note 
 came, all was over. 
 
 As to the pedigree of the document: 
 
 Durler rose to the rank of general before his death. He 
 naturally regarded this piece of historic writing as among 
 the most precious of his possessions, and left it to his family 
 who were resident in Lucerne. Chateaubriand, visiting 
 Lucerne on the 15th of May, 1832, saw it in that town. 
 From General Durler's daughter and heiress it descended 
 to his grandchildren, Schimacher by name, and was in the 
 
548 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 early eighties the property of M. Felix Schimacher of 
 Lucerne, whose agent in Paris was a banker, Mr. de Trooz. 
 M. Cousin, the curator of the Municipal Museum of 
 Paris (the Carnavalet), hearing of it, approached Mr. 
 de Trooz, and offered a large sum on behalf of the city. 
 The offer was accepted. The pedigree of the document 
 was drawn up by M. Dagobert Schimacher, lawyer in 
 Lucerne, and the whole despatched to Paris, where the 
 purchase was completed on the 27th of July, 1886, and 
 the document deposited in the Museum, where it now lies. 
 
APPENDIX D 
 
 ON THE LOGE OF THE " LOGOTACHYGRAPHE " 
 
 THE Manege was pulled down after the consular 
 decree of year XI., which originated the Rue de 
 Rivoli; the historical reconstruction of its arrange- 
 ments on the 10th of August, 1792, is the more difficult 
 from the fact that the only accurate plan of it which has 
 come down to us 1 dates from a period earlier than Decem- 
 ber, 1791, in which month (on the 27th) the order was 
 given to change nearly the whole of its dispositions. The 
 box of the Logographe can be fixed in this plan (though 
 not in the new place it occupied after the 5th of Janu- 
 ary, 1792). 
 
 We know 1 that it was near the President's Chair, and 
 this was on the south side of the Manege, in the middle. 
 It was in this box that the Queen had appeared when her 
 husband had accepted the Constitution on the return from 
 Varennes; and it was in this box that the Royal Family were 
 supposed, until lately, to have stayed in the three days 
 after the fall of the palace. 
 
 There were many such grated boxes for reporters up 
 and down the Hall: the proximity of the Logographes to 
 the Chair being due to the desire for accurate verbatim 
 reports to be recorded from the best acoustic position of 
 the Hall. 
 
 But our establishment of the Logographe's box is of 
 
 1 In the Histoire des Edifices, &c., by Paris. 
 
 "The work was finished by the 26th of January, 1792. 
 
 By the 7th clause of the order cited. 
 
 549 
 
550 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 little value to the history of the 10th of August, because, 
 though a confusion was till recently made between the two, 
 the box in which the Royal Family were put was that of 
 the Logotachygraphe, a journal not yet published, but 
 in preparation, and one which had already obtained leave 
 to have its reporting place in the Hall. Its exact situation 
 we cannot determine, but it was certainly not far from the 
 Chair on the south wall, and presumably in the eastern 
 half of it. 
 
APPENDIX E 
 
 UPON THE "LAST PORTRAIT OP THE QUEEN" BY KUCHARSKI 
 
 THREE "last" portraits of Marie Antoinette, each 
 very similar to the two others, though not replicas, 
 are known to exist : each is ascribed to the painter 
 Kucharski, who appears for a moment at the Queen's 
 trial, and who is known to have painted her at Court. 
 
 These portraits are, one in Arenberg Gallery at Brussels, 
 another in the Carnavalet, and the third in the new Revo- 
 lutionary Room on the third floor at Versailles. This last 
 is the one which is reproduced here, because M. de Nolhac, 
 by far the best authority, has assured me of its authenticity. 
 On the other hand, it must be mentioned that the Belgian 
 one was vouched for by Auguste d' Arenberg 1 who bought 
 it in 1805, and who quotes the testimony of the painter 2 
 himself, who was then alive. 
 
 1 See " Notes sur quelques Portraits de la Galerie d' Arenberg," in the Annales de I' Academic Royale d'Arch- 
 eologie de Belgique, 4th series, vol. x., 1897. 
 
 2 On this painter there exists a monograph by Mycielski (Paris, 1894), and an article published in the Decem- 
 ber number, 1905, of the Revue d'Art, Ancien et Moderne. 
 
 He appears to have affirmed that he saw the Queen in the Temple when he was on guard, took the sketch, 
 noting the details of dress, &c., and completing the work at home. 
 
APPENDIX P 
 
 ON THE AUTHENTICITY OF THE QUEEN'S LAST LETTER 
 
 THE few doubts that some have put forward against 
 the authenticity of this famous document will 
 unless history abandons its modern vices, increase 
 with time, for it is a document exactly suited to the type 
 of minute, internal, literal, and documentary criticism 
 by which tradition is, to-day, commonly assailed. It will 
 be pointed out that the psychology of this letter differs 
 altogether from that of the mass of Marie Antoinette's little 
 scribbled notes, and equally from her serious political drafts 
 and despatches. Critics will very probably be found to 
 dispute the possibility of such a woman at such a time 
 producing such a document. The style fits ill with what 
 she was in Court just before it purports to have been written, 
 and also with what she was on her way to the scaffold just 
 after. Most important of all, perhaps, the sentences are 
 composed in a manner quite different from that of any 
 other letter of hers we possess; they have a rhythm and a 
 composition in them: the very opening words are in a 
 manner wholly more exalted and more rhetorical than ever 
 was her own. 
 
 It will be further and especially pointed out that the 
 moment when it was discovered was the very moment 
 for forgery, and this point is of such importance to the dis- 
 cussion that I must elaborate it. 
 
 By nightfall of June 18th, 1815, the experiment of found- 
 ing democracy in Europe was imagined to be at an end: 
 
 Hi 
 
APPENDICES 553 
 
 Napoleon was definitely defeated. On the 7th of July the 
 first forces of the Allies entered Paris, and on the 20th of 
 November was signed the second Treaty of Paris, whereby 
 the reinstatement of the old regime in France was accom- 
 plished at a price to the nation of 700,000,000 francs and 
 all of its conquests. All the power of a highly centralised 
 Government was now in the hands of Louis XVIII., and it 
 was in the highest degree profitable to prove oneself a friend 
 to what had but a few months before seemed a lost cause. 
 Document after document appeared professing a special 
 knowledge of the woes of the Royal Family, petition after pe- 
 tition was presented in which the petitioners (nearly always in 
 the same conventional and hagiographical style) spoke of the 
 Royal "martyrs" in the Temple and in the Conciergerie. 
 
 In the light of such a character attaching to this particular 
 moment, note the following sequence of dates in connec- 
 tion with the production of the document we are discussing. 
 
 Not two months after the signing of the Treaty of Paris 
 the French Chamber voted the Law of Amnesty. The 
 seventh clause of this Act banished the regicides who had 
 sat in the Convention. Among these was a certain Courtois, 
 a man now over seventy years of age, who had bought a large 
 country house and estate near the frontier. Note, further, 
 that Courtois had started as a small bootmaker and was one 
 of the very few politicians of the Revolution who had fol- 
 lowed our modern practice of making money out of politics. 
 His honesty, therefore, was doubtful: a thing which we 
 cannot say of the enthusiasts of the time. Of those we 
 can say that their imaginations or their passions may warp 
 their evidence, but in the case of Courtois we know that he 
 was a professional politician of the modern type, and would 
 do a dishonest thing for money. 
 
554 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 Now this Courtois had been one of a Commission named 
 by the Convention to examine Robespierre's papers after the 
 fall of Robespierre on the 28th of July, 1794. He was what 
 the French call the Reporter of the Commission that 
 is, the director of it and it was called the "Courtois 
 Commission." The Commission published their report 
 of what they had found in Robespierre's house. It was a 
 report two volumes in length for which Courtois was 
 responsible, and of which he was practically the author. 
 
 This minute and voluminous report made no mention of 
 the Queen's letter. Not a word is heard of it during all 
 those twenty-two years until the aforesaid Bill of Amnesty 
 is before the French Parliament of the Restoration and 
 the regicides, including old Courtois, passing his last days 
 on his comfortable estate, are to suffer exile. Then for 
 the first time the Queen's letter appears. On the 25th 
 of January, 1816, Courtois writes to a prominent lawyer, 
 an acquaintance of his wife's, a Royalist, and in touch 
 with the Court, telling him that he had kept back ten pieces 
 among the mass of things found in Robespierre's house, 
 three of them trinkets, a lock of hair, etc., one or two 
 letters of no importance and the capital point of all, 
 this letter of Marie Antoinette's to her sister-in-law. He 
 offers to exchange these against a special amnesty to him- 
 self, or at least of a year's delay before he is exiled, in 
 order, presumably, to allow him to realise his fortune. 
 
 This is not all : the letter was not written until Courtois' 
 wife was dead; and it was written on the very day of her 
 death and the moment after it the moment, that is, after 
 the death of the only person who would presumably know 
 if he allowed anyone to know whether he had or had not 
 carefully concealed these documents for so many years. 
 
APPENDICES 555 
 
 The Government of Louis XVIII. offered money for the 
 letter, and, having so lulled the suspicions of Courtois, sent 
 one of its officials without warning into his house and 
 seized his effects. Some days afterwards the letter (which 
 no one had yet seen or heard of) is produced by Royal order 
 and shown to Madame d'Angouleme (who is said to have 
 fainted when she saw it), and ordered to be read from 
 every pulpit during Mass on the 16th of October of every 
 year; a vast edition of it is brought out in facsimile and 
 distributed broadcast, and the letter itself is enshrined 
 among the public exhibits at the Archives. 
 
 A lengthy analysis of the sort just concluded is neces- 
 sary to make the reader understand how and why a strong 
 attack upon the authenticity of the letter will sooner or 
 later certainly be made. I owe it to my readers to say 
 why the apparently strong presumption against this letter 
 does not in my opinion hold. 
 
 First let me recapitulate what is to be said against it: 
 
 (1) There is no contemporary trace of it. 1 
 
 (2) It appears at a moment when forged documents of 
 that sort were of the highest value both to a despotic Gov- 
 ernment and to the vendors or producers of them. 
 
 (3) That moment is no less than twenty-two years pos- 
 terior to the supposed writing of the letter, and, during all 
 those twenty-two years, of the many who should have 
 seen it, of the three public men (all enemies) through whose 
 hands it must have passed, no one has heard of its exist- 
 ence nor mentioned it in a private correspondence, nor 
 
 1 The woman Bault, who was wardress of the Conciergerie, says that her husband told her of such a 
 letter, but her evidence is given after Louis XVIII. had published it, and for all those twenty-two years 
 she had said nothing about it. Moreover she talked of its discovery with the usual clap-trap phrases of " The 
 Omnipotence of Heaven showing its ineffable goodness by restoring us this monument in its most admir- 
 able way, &c." And the only contemporary account, while it does mention the lock of hair which the Queen 
 desired given to a friend, says nothing of the letter. 
 
556 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 apparently so much as spoken of it in a conversation to a 
 friend. 
 
 (4) It is heard of from a man who would have every 
 interest in forging it and who is known to have been very 
 unscrupulous in political dealings for money. 
 
 (5) He makes his offer on the very day when the last 
 witness there could be against him dies. 
 
 (6) The document, when it does appear, appears with- 
 out any pedigree, or chain of witnesses to vouch for it, nor 
 even any tradition. It is vouched for only by the people 
 who had most interest in creating such a relic and is forced 
 upon the public with every apparatus at the command of 
 a despotic Government. 
 
 (7) Most important of all, the letter is written in a high 
 and affecting style wholly different from all that we know 
 of Marie Antoinette's writing, and quite inconsistent with 
 her demeanour at the moment, consonant only with the 
 sanctity which it was at that moment desired to give to the 
 Royal Family. 
 
 Nevertheless I believe the document to be without the 
 slightest doubt authentic, and I will give my reasons for 
 this certitude : 
 
 (1) To forge a letter of Marie Antoinette's is peculiarly 
 difficult. There have been many such attempts. They 
 have been discovered with an ease familiar to all students 
 of her life. 
 
 This difficulty lies in the great irregularity of her method 
 of writing, coupled with the exact persistence of certain 
 types of letter. She never in her life could write a line 
 straight across a page. She never made two "d's" exactly 
 the same, and yet you never can mistake one of her "d's." 
 She never crossed a "t" quite in the same manner twice, 
 
APPENDICES 557 
 
 and yet you can always tell her way of crossing it. The 
 absence of capitals after a full stop is a minor point but 
 a considerable one. She always brought the lower loop of 
 the "b" up to the up stroke, so that it looks like an "f "; 
 she always separated her "Ps" from the succeeding letter. 
 
 Let the reader compare the document of which I am 
 speaking, reproduced in facsimile opposite page 526, 
 and her letter of the 3rd of September, 1791, to Joseph II. 
 (opposite page 400), and he will see what I mean. The 
 first is reproduced on a four-fifths scale, the second in fac- 
 simile, but the points I make can easily be followed upon 
 them. Note the first "d" in the first line of the letter writ- 
 ten in prison, the second "d" and the third "d" all in the 
 same line. Next look down to the seventh line and note 
 the "d" in "tendre," and see how the first three "d's" 
 though irregular are of the same type, and how the fourth, 
 though much less hooked, is obviously written by the 
 same hand. Look down two lines lower to the "d" in 
 "plaidoyer"; it has a complete hook and is quite different 
 from the other letters, and three lines lower, in the word 
 "deux," the hook has a sharp angle apparent nowhere 
 else on the page. Now if you turn to the "d's" in her letter 
 to her brother of the 3rd of September, 1791, you will 
 find exactly the same characteristics. Not one "d" like 
 another, yet all obviously from the same hand; the "d" 
 in the second line with a full hook to it, the two "d's" in 
 the twelfth line much vaguer. 
 
 So with the "t's," they are crossed in every kind of way 
 with a short straight line, a long curved one, a little jab 
 followed by a straight, now with a slope downward, now 
 with a slope upward, but all evidently from the same hand, 
 and their very variety makes it impossible for them to be 
 
558 MARIE ANTOINETTE 
 
 a forgery. The "1's" written separately from the letter 
 following each, are obvious everywhere, so is that irregular- 
 ity of line of which I have spoken. Let the reader look at 
 the third line of the letter of the 3rd of September, 1791 
 (opposite page 400), and at the seventh line of the letter 
 written in prison, and ask himself whether it would have 
 been possible to copy such native irregularity. 
 
 The identity of handwriting is apparent even from 
 these two documents. It is absolutely convincing to any 
 one who has seen much of her penmanship. 
 
 (2) To the faults in grammar and in spelling I should 
 pay little attention those things are easily copied ; but 
 it is worth remarking that on the third line of the letter 
 written in prison she spells the infinitive of "montrer" with- 
 out the final "r" as though it were a participle, while in 
 the letter written to her brother in 1791 she makes no such 
 error. She puts an "e" in "Jouis," and so forth. All 
 these discrepancies are a proof of the authenticity of the 
 letter. She spelt at random, and her grammar was at 
 random, though she got a little more accurate as she grew 
 older. It would, on the contrary, be an argument against 
 the authenticity of the letter if particular mistakes, dis- 
 covered in a particular document of hers, were repeated 
 in this last letter from the Conciergerie. 
 
 (3) The letter was immediately exposed to public view; 
 the paper was grown yellow, the writing was apparently old, 
 the ink in places faded, the creases deep and worn. Now 
 all these accidental features could no doubt be reproduced 
 by a modern forger with the advantage of modern methods, 
 modern mechanical appliances, modern chemical science 
 and photography. They could not have been achieved 
 by a forger of 1816. 
 
APPENDICES 559 
 
 It seems to me, therefore, a document absolutely unassail- 
 able. The arguments against it are of the same sort which 
 modern scepticism perpetually brings against every form 
 of historical evidence that does not fit in with some favour- 
 ite modern theory. I must believe the evidence of my 
 senses, and I am compelled to admit that a woman, every 
 expression of whose soul was different from this, and whose 
 whole demeanour before and after writing the letter betrayed 
 a mental condition quite inconsistent with the writing of it, 
 was granted for perhaps an hour (in spite of a full day's 
 fast, the fear of imminent death and the breakdown of her 
 health and of all her power), an exaltation sufficient to pro- 
 duce this wonderful piece of prose, and a steadfast control 
 of language and a discovery of language miraculously 
 exceptional to her character and experience. 
 
 No other conclusion is possible to a student unless, like 
 any Don, he prefers a sceptical hypothesis to the testimony 
 of his eyes and the judgment of his common sense. 
 
 OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 

RETURN CIRCULATION DEPARTMENT 
 
 TO -^ 202 Main Library 
 
 LOAN PERIOD 1 
 HOME USE 
 
 2 
 
 3 
 
 4 
 
 5 
 
 6 
 
 ALL BOOKS MAY BE RECALLED AFTER 7 DAYS 
 
 1 -month loans may be renewed by calling 642-3405 
 
 6-month loans may be recharged by bringing books to Circulation Desk 
 
 Renewals and recharges may be made 4 days prior to due date 
 
 DUE AS STAMPED BELOW 
 
 RECEIVFH 
 
 BY 
 
 
 ULi v < 'iuc 
 
 n 
 
 
 fj i (JC 
 .fmr-i || ATf/^Ki r 
 
 u 
 
 
 dKL-ULAIIUN L 
 
 EPT. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY 
 "FORM NO. DD6, 60m, 3/80 BERKELEY, CA 94720 
 
YL